Collective Intelligences are real.
They're acknowledged across an extremely wide set of ideologies, cultures, and belief systems. Communities, demons and angels, spirits, egregores, gods, these are just a few names that people call the same idea.
Today, social media focuses on the individual self (or individual selves).
Algorithms are fostered to keep you echo chambered, allow you to float untethered within the Tee (cognitive space)
Virts = group identity + social feed + coordination
Virts is the first platform that focuses on the collective as the Primary Agent in the social realm, forcing higher quality interactions and signals to emerge.
We are enabling communities to be a productive force, instead of endless discourse
Human socialization in physical reality works like this:
We buzz on one another, sometimes 1:1 and sometimes in larger groups. We agree on some things, and disagree on others.
Sometimes this leads to new groups forming, sometimes this leads to old groups breaking, and sometimes this leads to both at the same time. The groups themselves drive influence, and also change the way that the people buzz IN the group, and also OUTSIDE of the group.
Virts brings this style of socialization to the modern front of culture and social activity: Social Media
We are giving the collective Virts the ability to adapt themselves and act as a single unit. We anticipate this will do a few things:
1) RE INTRODUCES COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY
Individualistic social media scrolling and enjoying is great for learning, and development. But the knowledge that creators make and the knowledge that consumers take don't exist in a vacuum.
Allowing the Collective to intentionally "culture" information and together changes the way we view ourselves and one another.
When we act together as the group, we feel the weight of the group Identity within us
2) TRANSLATES TO MANY DOMAINS
Individual Focused social media is kind of a one track pony. It's good for broadcasting and sharing, but bad for development of ideas. Trends come and go, and then a few months later they come and go again.
Collective Focused social media allows for people across all domains to connect, grow, and learn from one another over time.
In government, in volunteering, in activism, in content creation, or just in managing your friend group, Collective Focused social media solves issues that most people don't even realize they're having as a result of information overload
3) HELP EVERY-DAY PEOPLE PROCESS MORE INFORMATION IN AN INCREASINGLY DENSE WORLD
Collectives grow, develop their lines of thoughts, and birth new Collectives.
Collective Focused social media allows for the full Circle of Life to occur in the digital realm, bringing increased information processing capacity to each and every person using it, simply through changing the medium that they receive their information in.
Engaging in Collective Communications and Collective Information Ecosystems in the Virtual is the natural progression of sociality and development, it's only fair that *everyone* gets access to this useful tool that currently only the *powerful* have access to
Today, most people turn to Fox News, CNN, X, Reddit, or Discord to get your information about the world. Isolated feeds, algorithm delivered, extremely biased, and not very information dense. Modern "philosophical" and "intellectual" institutions are in the connections between one another, not the old brick and mortar locations that served previous generations.
They provide a flood of noise, and Virts is the future-proof way of helping people process that noise into high quality signals
How Does It WORK ?
For any given social context, there is the "ingroup" and the "outgroup"
Virts serves this principle by fostering an internal community space, designed to collectively process and respond to stimuli
It also fosters a global community and "wild west", designed to create stimulus through the interaction of collectives.
While most social media prefers to keep you siloed and isolated, Virts believes in growth through friction and synthesis as a core part social interaction.
Society doesn't run because everyone agrees, it runs because everyone is willing to *work together*
Old models of social media break this consensus of mutual effort, and our model restores this mutual understanding.
Internal spaces of Virts are flexible depending on what a community desires.
Pre-loaded options of "internal spaces" are:
-Community Forum
-Chat Server
-Polling and Data Gathering
and pre-loaded options of "decision making and governance" are:
-dictatorship of the Virt (an individual or collective rules the space, and can empower others with varying permissions; designed for a specific purpose)
-democracy of the Virt ('first past the poll' style decision-making; designed for friends and family)
Virts are highly customizable by their lived-in communities, and new internal spaces and governance options are able to be DIY'd
The Business Model
- Tiered Access: Free tier for basic use, and a Paid SaaS tier offering advanced community analytics for server owners and research institutes.
- Direct-to-Virt Affiliate Marketing: Instead of the platform stealing 100% of ad revenue, Virts allows highly targeted affiliate marketing where the platform and the collective split the revenue. This incentivizes communities to grow, self-moderate, and engage with advertising presented to them
What We Need:
Building a new social medium is a large undertaking, and we can’t do it alone.
Virts is meant to be a platform built with collectives, not just for them.
We have multiple existing communities ready to plug in on day one, but we are actively looking for more people who want to help shape the future of collective intelligence online.
There are several ways to get involved:
$upporters and Investors:
If you believe that the future of the internet should move beyond algorithmic feeds and toward collective intelligence, we welcome conversations about funding, partnerships, and long-term support.
We are currently seeking an initial $56k to support the R&D period that it will take to:
• Complete core platform development
• Experiment with collective interaction models
• Onboard and support early communities
• Conduct research on collective intelligence systems
• Establish Virts as the first dedicated Collective Intelligence Social Platform
(phase 1 - 56k) This is how the initial funding will be allocated in the initial months:
25k + equity will go towards onboarding a specialized technical co-founder
15k for addressing research costs + finalizing the MVP
10k for me + living expenses
4k for a renegade marketing strategy to content creators, political parties, and other cutting-edge community groups
This leaves a $2k cushion to be allocated as needed when circumstances arise
Our goal during this phase is to prove that collective-first social systems can outperform individual-first platforms in knowledge development and community organization.
Builders & Designers
We are always looking for bright engineers, designers, and system thinkers who are excited by:
-Collective Intelligence
-Social System
-Memetics / Agentic Information Transfer / entropology
-Emergence in communities
-Alternative Social Media platforms
-Building a better future
This platform will require new interface ideas, new interaction models, and new ways of visualizing collective thought. If this is exciting to you, we'd love to chat :D
Researchers & Philosophers
The ideas behind Virts touch many fields:
-Sociology
-Memetics
-Philosophy
-Social Systems and Political Systems
-Psychology
-Network Science
-many more
If you are fascinated by thinking or studying how groups behave, organize, evolve, then your perspective may be useful either with internal studies, or in your observations on Virts' public chain of relationship actions, allowing you to have direct feedback and data from real world movements and collective influences
Early Users and Communities
We are looking for people willing to experiment with a new way of social media.
If you are interested in how ideas grow, how communities can better organize knowledge, or how groups and cultures can emerge in the age of mass communications and information, then we want you involved early.
Your participation will help shape how collectives form, evolve, and communicate on the platform. Our goal is to make YOUR lives better, not the other way around.
We are especially interested in communities that want to experiment with collective identity and decision-making. Whether you're:
-
a research group
an online community
-
an activist organization
-
a creative collective
-
or simply a group of friends
Virts is designed for groups that want to think and act together online.
*about the author*
Kat the Vat is a modern content creator and the initial thinker of Virtualism: A Philosophy for Social Interaction in the Virtual Age. Her unique positioning as a content creator enables a large reach for any budding social media platforms, and she is well networked among many up-and-coming gen z movements and communities. Her unique experiences as a curator of attention and also a community manager led to research into varying governance styles, and a desire to modernize social engagement for the future. She believes that online communities, typically viewed as a "leader" and "followers", is much better imagined as a 'Yin and Yang', two forces contributing to one larger mass.