5. Economy
5.3 Culturepoints
In Chapter 1, we established that the media (in the form of news, narratives, and social media) leads us to have too bleak a view of the future.20
Given that this causes so many problems, it's a good candidate for a futurity. So how could one do it differently?
The fundamental problem with news and social media is the incentive system: the attention economy. We won't be able to stop people from clicking on sensational headlines. Censoring the internet cannot solve this problem, and it would give the censor far too much power.
The attention economy works in such a way that every time a webpage is accessed, it generates advertising revenue. Radio and television only care about listener/viewer numbers because this means more consumers for advertising. And advertising accounts for the majority of revenue. So, attention equals revenue.
I'm certainly not the first to realize that advertising is the point where something would have to change.
There have been enough attempts to make people pay for news again, just like it used to be when buying newspapers (so that the majority of the revenue no longer comes from advertising, but from reader satisfaction). Many news websites have hidden some of their articles behind paywalls for that. However, few people are willing to pay for something like that when they can read many other news articles with advertising for free.
To break the equation “attention equals revenue”, the way news is financed would have to change.
In Germany in 2023, almost 50 billion euros were spent on advertising[26], about half of that (25 billion) for online advertising[27].21
On the one hand, that's a lot of money. On the other hand, it means that the advertising industry spends about €25 per citizen per month22 to bless us with advertisements on the internet... which is not a huge sum. If we can come up with a good system to replace advertising on the internet, it won't fail because of money.
The approach to fund media by the state already exists. In Germany, this happens in the form of public-service broadcasting. These media outlets compete with privately funded ones and aim to offer a calmer, more neutral alternative. That's better than nothing, but this approach has many problems:
• Ad-supported media still exists, of course. The public broadcasters must therefore compete with them for attention.
• Whether the public broadcasters actually report neutrally is always disputed. Ensuring that they are not influenced by the state and the parties currently in power is difficult.
• It must be decided again and again how much money they should receive from the state. And then it must be reviewed whether they are actually using it effectively.
A good new system would not run in parallel to private media, but would replace the incentive system of advertising with a state-funded one.
Since we don't want the state dictating what gets funded and what doesn't, it must be the citizens who make these decisions. However, it must not happen simply by visiting the website, but rather it must be an active decision. An upvote/downvote (approval/disapproval) mechanism, as is already used as a filter in many comment systems.
It would certainly be possible to build an infrastructure just for collecting this data. But the result would be very opaque and very inflexible, because it would be tailored exactly to that requirement.
I have an idea for a more general solution that fixes this problem as well:
We already distribute money to every citizen every month via universal basic income (Chapter 5.1, offset against income tax). Let's give every citizen additional digital money in a different currency! Pegged to the euro (or the respective national currency) at a fixed exchange rate, but with completely different usage characteristics. We will call that currency culturepoints. Each culturepoint is worth €1 at the beginning (due to inflation, the state may increase the euro value of a culturepoint in the future). Let's give each citizen a budget of 100 culturepoints per month. Culturepoints can only be spent via a special app, and they cannot be saved up – what isn't used expires.
Realistically, perhaps half of it will actually be used, which in Germany corresponds to an annual budget of 50 billion euros. Which is about the amount the advertising industry spends annually in that country.
Initially, that sounds like an enormous amount of money the state has to spend. But we will see that other government expenditures decrease in return and that additional revenue can be generated. A lot less money will be wasted uselessly than with advertising—the ratio of money to good content is far better. Furthermore, the impact of culturepoints will extend beyond just internet advertising (we are investing twice as much as the advertising industry currently spends on the internet after all). Despite the high sum, I am therefore certain that it is quite possible to finance this. A more detailed examination of the costs for the example of Germany can be found in Chapter 13.3.
Culturepoints should only be able to be usable to thank somebody anonymously. Without anonymity, even if we tried to forbid it, exchanges for culturepoints against euros would immediately pop up, making culturepoints nothing but an inefficient increase of the basic income.
Every citizen automatically receives a outgoing account and a incoming account for culturepoints.
Outgoing account: It is refilled to 100 culturepoints every month, regardless of how many were left in it. Every citizen can send one culturepoint from this account to another citizen's incoming account via the app (no other amount possible). However, these transactions don't happen immediately: they are collected throughout the month and then all executed at once before the outgoing account is replenished. People can freely review their own planned transactions and delete entries again until the end of the month. Which means such deleted transactions never actually happen!
The app on the citizen's computer or smartphone shows only the list of recipients, sorted alphabetically. But not when a transaction was added to the list. Each recipient can only be listed once. Transactions can be marked as recurring, in which case the entry will be carried over to the next month's list after execution.
These restrictions make the list very clear: The citizen sees only the list of all recipients in their app, and how many of their culturepoints are already reserved (length of the list). The amount is always one culturepoint (so it need not be displayed), and the time is not saved either.
Incoming account: It is denominated in Euros, not culturepoints. Incoming culturepoints are converted to euros at the fixed exchange rate.
Key pairs* can be created in the app for this account, and these can then be used to sign data.23
Legal entities can have their own incoming account.24
There's a saying in the advertising industry that there's no such thing as bad publicity. Anything that makes the brand known is good. So far, that's been the case with culturepoints as well. If I commit a sensational crime and millions know me because of it, I suddenly get thousands of culturepoints. Why? Because out of the millions, there are definitely a few thousand who like what I've done, for whatever reason. Or who are just clowning around. In contrast, if only my friends know me, I might only get a dozen culturepoints a month.
To correct this imbalance, we are introducing a second list in the outgoing account, for negative culturepoints. Each citizen receives 25 per month, and each entry on the list sends half a negative culturepoint to the recipient. The values (25 and 1/2) can be adjusted if necessary, but it's important that the negative culturepoints are significantly weaker than the positive ones.
In incoming accounts, these negative culturepoints are offset against the positive ones. The lower limit for the result is 0. If I receive more negative than positive culturepoints in a month, the balance of my incoming account stays the same. It is public how many positive and negative culturepoints an account has received in a month.
Therefore, negative culturepoints can be used to anonymously punish someone. Because each transaction is worth only half as much in negative culturepoints, controversies with roughly as many supporters as opponents should not result in an incoming account being left empty. However, if the number of opponents is much higher, as in the aforementioned example of a crime, the incoming account will remain empty. In this way we can break the maxim that all publicity is good publicity.
Within the last 48 hours of the month, the app behaves differently than usual. Positive culturepoints entered during this period look identical in the list, but instead of being executed, they are simply not deleted at the end of the month. This means that their execution is delayed by one month. Deleting entries, as well as adding or moving them to the negative list, is still possible as normal.25 In the new month, list entries deleted or moved during this period of the previous month can be restored with the push of a button.
With this behavior, we maximize the anonymity of culturepoints. No one knows who the money comes from that appears in their incoming account for culturepoints once a month. Even if someone shows you the app on their phone and you see you’re on the list: they can just delete the entry later. It doesn't even work at the turn of the month because the entries for the last two days look exactly the same, but aren't executed at the end of the month.
It's not worth the effort to try and cheat. Cheaters can gain no more than one euro per month for anybody they get to send them the culturepoint. In addition to a fine, the state can exclude cheaters from the culturepoint system for a time – meaning they can neither send nor receive them.
It is much, much easier to get culturepoints the way they're intended: by offering your audience something they thank you for by adding you, the artist or writer, to the list in their outgoing account. Without any attempt to control it, simply as an anonymous tip.
To amplify the positive effects of culturepoints, it should online be combined with a tagging system26. That doesn't have to be mandated by the state, but there should be a uniform standard. Websites use this to indicate that they or the destination of a link27 contain disturbing, violent, sexual, unsuitable for children, or otherwise problematic content. Or just spoilers, while we're at it.
Browsers will display such tags, and users will be able to configure links with specific tags to be unclickable, warn first, redact content, or whatever else. It is the user's choice how the browser behaves. Child safety systems, for example, can then make use of these tags.28
In extreme cases, if the standard is clear enough and certain tags are firmly defined, the state could even threaten penalties if content is not tagged correctly. The more common case, and the reason for suggesting it here, is that users can penalize websites with negative culturepoints if they haven't tagged their content correctly. Which leads to the tagging system becoming usefully good, with all the benefits that brings.
With this tagging system, we now have the last missing element to be able to stipulate that the state may not exercise any censorship with culturepoints. This should also be clearly stated in the law defining the culturepoint system.
Of course: What is forbidden is forbidden, and leads to fines or imprisonment. Which may include missing tags.
But the state should not be able to impose any restrictions on what culturepoints can and cannot be used for. It merely monitors to ensure no one circumvents the system, hacks culturepoint accounts, or deanonymizes users.
The fact that the state no longer has to play virtue guardian or neutrally represent all political views in public broadcasting is in fact one of the great advantages of culturepoints. In comparison, “no restrictions” is a much clearer rule and much easier for citizens to monitor. Which makes it impossible to gradually force media into line, and thus the state more resilient.
But we should definitely look at another possible form of censorship here: How can we prevent the state from cheating and paying out fewer culturepoints to opposition members? After all, we went to great lengths to ensure that it's not traceable which person is giving a culturepoint to whom!
No matter how likely that is, the mere fact that we don't know whether it happens or not would undermine confidence in the entire system.
This contradiction can be resolved, but the solution is somewhat complicated (like all explanatory text boxes, this one can be easily skipped).
Integrity of culturepoints: The most important tool to ensure that nothing has been manipulated is the app on citizens' smartphones. While it is not under an open-source license, its source code is viewable, and it can be guaranteed that the executable application was generated from exactly this source code.
This allows the application itself to check the culturepoints for correctness. This works as follows:
48 hours before the end of each month, the state publishes a combination of all recipient lists of culturepoints ("master list"). If the average outgoing account has 100 entries in its list, and if there are 85 million accounts, then this master list has 8.5 billion entries. If each entry is 6 bytes, this is 51GB of data. Third parties will save this list as soon as it is published. Therefore, the state cannot subsequently change it unnoticed.
The recipient entries in this master list appear to be randomly jumbled, the lists of individual accounts cannot be reconstructed from them. The last 2 bytes of each entry are the reference to the next element in an account's list (offset from the current master list index; references beyond the end of the master list count again from the beginning). However, changed by a specific number that is different for each account and each month. The app itself knows it (and displays it). It can thus verify whether each entry points to the next entry of its own list. If not, the state is cheating.
No matter what number you change these references by, you will always get a valid list (as long as you don't end up with a duplicate recipient). Therefore, no one can use these references to prove that they have included specific recipients in their recipient list.
You can specify in the app which source of the master list your own list (as of 48 hours before the end of the month) should be compared against. It costs only a few MB of data per month, and the app then shows whether the check was successful. Since for this the references at the end of each entry have to be correct, the state can no longer use entries multiple times to give fewer culturepoints to unwanted recipients.
With that, we've ensured that nothing is missing. To verify that no entries have been added (especially negative culturepoints), a reliable citizen register is needed, which the state publishes separately. Additionally, it must be published (via API/master list/...) which citizens are sending at least one culturepoint and which are not.
The master list also contains account entries, consisting of an encrypted account number and the number of recipients that account has (>=1). The app can check the number of recipients for its own account entry. Therefore, the state cannot omit any account entry, as that would be noticed. If the total number of active accounts is known, it also cannot invent an entry. By comparing the sum of all recipients according to the account entries with the entry count of the master list, it is then ensured that no additional entries have been made by the state.
Using the master list and the public information on how many positive and negative culturepoints each incoming account has received, it can be compared to see if both sides match.
No account can receive more positive culturepoints than calculated, as entries added in the last 48 hours are not transferred. Negative culturepoints may have been added and entries from the positive list may have been deleted again. But compared to the rest of the month, this proportion should not be large. If there are large losses for certain accounts here, especially repeatedly, then the state is probably cheating.
Even though this 48-hour window makes the evaluation somewhat more difficult: that individual transfers cannot be traced is important enough that the benefits of this time lag predominate.
If needed, further information can surely be found that the state can publish to demonstrate the integrity of the system without jeopardizing the anonymity of the culturepoints.
In summary, the listed checks already prevent manipulation on a larger scale. The more the state cheats, the higher its risk of getting caught.
Covert censorship using culturepoints is prevented by this structure. This is also a good example of how those parts of a system can be complicated, which users don't need to understand in order to use it.
With that, we've finished outlining the infrastructure. Now let's look at the implementation from the citizen's perspective.
There is only one central state app for smartphones and computers to access one's own culturepoints account. This app can be accessed from the browser (special link) with a suggested target account to add to the list. The user then only needs to confirm this in the app.
The design of this app determines how culturepoints are used and whether anonymity is maintained. If we were to allow any app to control the culturepoint account using an API, then such an app could easily send unused culturepoints to a specific account using the user's credentials. Since the state funds the culturepoint system, there is no reason to take this risk.
Nevertheless, there should be an API for other apps to interact with the culturepoint system. Firstly, for retrieving publicly available information, such as the number of positive and negative culturepoints a specific account received last month. Secondly, to allow specific incoming accounts to have text signed via the API.29 This is important so that such signatures can be generated automatically (to automatically sign social media posts, for example) instead of always being created manually in the app and the copied. And thirdly, so that authorized software can send recipient suggestions to a culturepoint account. These suggestions are displayed in the state app, sorted by source, and can easily be added to the list of culturepoint recipients.
In this way, the areas of application can extend far beyond what the government app supports, without enabling abuse.
Let's step through a use case of culturepoints.
The user reads a news article about the school system in Nigeria that he likes. At the end of the article, he then clicks on the “like” button (green thumbs up). This opens the culturepoint app. The user hadn't started it yet, so he unlocks it with his phone's fingerprint sensor. The app displays the name of the news portal as the recipient of the culturepoint (legal entity30), as well as the URL and profile picture to verify that it is the correct account31. Furthermore, it shows how many likes/dislikes the account received last month and how many spots are still available on the users list. It also offers an input field for a text note where one can enter the reason for giving the like/dislike. The link sends a text suggestion for this input field: “Article about the school system in Nigeria”.
The user confirms and adds the entry to their list (=positive/like). Alternatively, he also had the option to cancel, or to add the entry to the list of negative culturepoints (=negative/dislike) instead. With his decision, the user automatically switches back to the browser to the news article. The website will certainly track how many readers have clicked the like button. But whether the entry was actually added to the positive list, instead disliked, or deleted again before the end of the month, that the website doesn’t learn.
Like here for news, this works just as well on all other websites: on Facebook, YouTube, Soundcloud, for indie games, wherever. Perhaps a social network requires authorization to sign posts with the user's culturepoint account, then adds a corresponding “like” button to each post. That would end anonymity, but also prevent bots and lead to a much friendlier discourse. After all, a social network, much like the brain, functions much better if it can not only amplify signals but also dampen them (negative culturepoints). So is this a real-name requirement through the back door? Yes and no. Yes, because it was implemented that way on this platform. No, because no law mandates it. The best solution can still prevail.
In particular, culturepoints can also be used to support websites on the internet that offer services in exchange for this anonymous thank you, instead of their own creative content. That makes it significantly more attractive than before to design websites that are sometimes very useful to many people, but not often enough to generate high advertising revenue. From Wikipedia to translators, link collections and review sites. They don't get paid for being frequently visited, but for actually being helpful. Just as with news, that should lead to a much higher quality.
Or charities: One euro a month may not be much, but if many people set it up because it doesn't cost them any of their own money, it still adds up. In this way, all citizens vote together on which aid organizations should be supported by the state in the form of culturepoint money.
If you have someone you want to support permanently, check the corresponding box for that list entry. This sends a culturepoint every month, and the entry remains in the list until you change your mind again.
When you hear street music outside that you like, there will be a small sign with a QR code in addition to the hat for donations. This provides another way to access the culturepoints app. Scan it with your phone’s camera, and the culturepoints app will open, allowing you to decide whether to add the entry to your like or dislike list. The entire culturepoints system is therefore not only useful for websites, it works quite nicely for offline culture as well.
Just as one can support websites that offer services with culturepoints, one can of course do the same offline: if someone provides a service to a large group of people (at a fair, a demonstration, etc...) at very low cost, it may now be the best decision not to charge for that, but instead to trust that enough people will thank them for it with a culturepoint. A business model that didn't exist before!
This is also something where there's a fluid transition from commercial to normal social interaction, by behaving in a way that makes you perceived as helpful by others. For this reason, the app will also include the option to search for a destination account using the account holder's name (the profile picture will prevent confusion). That's useful if you want to like/dislike someone without having a corresponding link (because it was, for example, a normal social interaction).
By the way, if the futurity of a UBI has been implemented as well, there is no reason to support a beggar with culturepoints: anyone who has a culturepoint account is registered as a citizen of the state and consequently receives an universal basic income. The only reason I can think of why someone would still beg despite receiving the UBI is drug addiction. But more money won't help such a person.
While you can't click on a link in radio and television, radio can announce which target account to search for in order to send the station a culturepoint, and television can display a QR code.
Televisions and smart speakers are also able to get their content from the internet these days. Once content is largely consumed via web browsers, making playback via television or speakers only a secondary use, the majority of viewers and listeners can once again simply click a link to support the broadcaster.
Culturepoints can therefore largely replace public broadcasters (although a state-run cultural channel for radio and television, with news broadcasts, is a tradition worth preserving).
How robust is this culturepoint system against abuse? In the last two days before the end of each month, you should take a few minutes to review both lists. Have you changed your mind about any entry? Likes can be converted to dislikes and vice versa at any time. Of course, you can also just delete them. Does anything look strange? The 48-hour rule also serves as an additional layer of protection against hackers: if someone has hacked an account, the hacker must add entries more than 48 hours before the end of the month, otherwise they will not be executed until the end of the following month.
Of course, you will also add friends and family members to your own list, even though they haven't created culture or provided a service. This isn't a problem, but rather a positive effect: For one thing, it motivates you to make the effort to set up the app. Who wants to feel guilty for not sending their friends and relatives every month the euro that costs you absolutely nothing? Once you've set up the app, it is easy to click a “like” button online, since the setup work is already done anyway. That's also why the number of culturepoints is set so high: most people will probably have a total of around 20 friends and family members they want to have on their list. Leaving the rest free for genuine creators of culture, news writers, service websites, and aid organizations.32
The introduction of this system of course also includes an explanation for citizens of what it is, how it works, and how it should be used (children learn this in school). Conveyed information:
• If you found something informative, funny, beautiful, thoughtful, creative, worth supporting, and if it was presented to you in an ad-free environment, then send the like (in the form of a culturepoint).
• If you see ads around it: Don't send the like, the artist or writer is already getting money for attention, instead of for quality.
• If the article is manipulative, the title was sensational or misleading, or if you are repulsed by something, then send a dislike (in the form of a negative culturepoint).
• If you have to decide whom to give the money because your culturepoints are exhausted, look at how many the recipient gets. A YouTube channel that gets hundreds of thousands per month definitely needs your point less than a niche artist only getting a few hundred.
In contrast to the UBI, the success of the culturepoint system depends heavily on its acceptance and understanding by the population. Culturepoints can be used to reward good behavior and reprimand bad behavior. The more the population agrees on what constitutes good behavior (e.g. well-researched articles), what constitutes bad behavior (e.g. advertising and fake news), and the clearer it is to people that the vote they cast this way really counts, the stronger the positive effect of the culturepoints will be. This also means that in the long term that effect benefits greatly from a good education system (which we will discuss in Chapter 7).
We will not be able to completely banish advertising from the English-speaking internet with this system. But with a good explanation of how to use likes and dislikes, we can create a very strong incentive for many websites to forgo advertising. Because advertising leads to significantly fewer likes. In the medium term, this makes advertising on websites suspect, perceived by citizens as a strong negative indicator of the website's quality. Which in turn reduces the use of advertising and strengthens the indicator effect. Eventually, websites that use advertising would have a sleazy image, like sites that open sex ads in new browser windows do today.
Users continue to have the option to use an ad blocker in their browser. This is always legal. If all visitors use ad blockers, the website operator receives no advertising revenue. The effect would then be the same as if the website had no advertising. In the first step, it would make it counterproductive for websites to implement ad blocker detection: it would prevent visitors from being able to click the like button.
The combination of both variants is also okay: If some of the visitors use an ad blocker and click the like button (because they don't see the ads), while the rest don't click the like button because of the ads, then the advertising is a combination of useless and harmful and will be used less and less over time.
What does all of this look like from the perspective of companies? They are finding ever fewer opportunities to cheaply advertise, after all.
Firstly, the remaining opportunities will be better paid: the price to place advertising on a advertising pillar, for example, or in a cinema. This should ultimately lead to the respective advertising-financed services becoming cheaper or better. If advertising pillars are operated by the state, it simply increases state revenue.
For the most part, however, simply less will be spent on advertising, as it provides much less benefit for the same investment. As competition continues in the market, efforts would necessarily shift more towards price and product quality. A very positive effect!
To further amplify this effect and help finance culturepoints, it seems sensible to tax advertising costs and revenue at a higher rate. This generates additional income for the state, reduces the amount of advertising (less attractive, therefore competition by price and product quality instead), and it encourages more websites to focus on culturepoints rather than advertising.
Let's take a specific media company as an example now. Are the numbers realistic, and could it survive on revenue from culturepoints?
In 2019, Spiegel Online (a German news website) had 55 million euros in online advertising revenue. In addition, there are approximately 250,000 Spiegel+ readers who pay €20 per month each, resulting in a total of approximately 60 million euros in subscription revenue per year.
According to their own statements, the Spiegel group has a total reach of 16 million readers, while the access statistics for Spiegel Online show approximately 25 million users.
So far, Spiegel Online takes in approximately 115 million euros per year (revenue from advertising + subscriptions). To achieve the same income through likes, 9.6 million readers would need to have Spiegel Online on their list of culturepoint recipients33. That sounds like an achievable goal.
Switching from advertising+subscriptions to culturepoints would have two major advantages:
• No one would have to see advertising on the website anymore.
• Everyone could read all the articles, instead of the majority of articles being accessible only to a few hundred thousand subscribers.
Patreon (https://www.patreon) is already roughly based on the same principle as culturepoints: you support artists you like with small monthly contributions. The artists can make a living from it this way. They make most of their work available for free in order to gain as many fans as possible (and those who support the artist via Patreon receive some bonuses, such as early access to new works). This principle is enormously successful and has already significantly increased the quality of freely available works on the internet today.
The effect of the culturepoints would be the same. They would become the main source of income for many people. Just with the difference, that here much larger amounts of money are distributed, with a correspondingly stronger effect. The barrier to support someone would be much lower than with Patreon, and the money would be spread much more widely. This allows the system to work for funding individual news articles, without having to become a fan of the artist over time before being willing to donate money. Because you're not spending your own money, but drawing from the pool of your likes, which cannot be converted into money for yourself. Compared to the current attention economy, the average quality of works and texts rewarded with money would be far higher. As the works are always competing with each other for the limited likes, this quality would continue to increase over time. Instead of competing for attention with sensational headlines, the main goal would instead be to make such a positive impression that users actively choose to provide support.
Thanks to the freely available information on which account received how much support in the previous month, the culturepoint money gets spread at least a little more widely than would otherwise be the case. Since it is obvious that a celebrity does not need the point as much as a niche artist, and since the celebrity cannot demand the point (thanks to anonymity) without choosing completely different funding than through culturepoints. Which should ultimately mean that more people can live off the income from their culturepoints as media professionals or service providers.
Based on this information (collected over months), third parties should also be able to calculate and publish trust scores for all culturepoint accounts. These ratings can then help assess whether a photo or video is likely authentic or a fake. The ability to express disapproval through negative culturepoints should also help to make fakes financially unattractive.
Works funded with culturepoints will be publicly and freely available, as this is the only way they can receive a “like” from as many citizens as possible (and because there is intentionally no way to control payment). Which allows us as a society to best exploit that digital works can be freely copied, and derive much greater benefit from them than we do today.
Something that doesn't play a role yet, but could play a major role in the culturepoint system in the future, is facial recognition and AI assistance. If we one day walk around with camera glasses that record our entire lives, and if an AI assistant tracks everything to support us, then that assistant could also generate automated suggestions for positive and negative culturepoints, depending on who has helped or harmed us. Which would likely lead to a more amicable society in the long run. But that is speculation about the distant future, it doesn't need to influence the implementation of this futurity (since it's not a problem if it comes to that).
What about AI-generated art? Culturepoints make quality the decisive criterion for success (rather than attention or price). As long as humans, on their own or in collaboration with AIs, create better works than AIs alone, and websites help surface the best ones, artists will be able to earn good money through culturepoints. And we get to see these high-quality works, instead of being flooded with mass-produced content churned out by AI at rock-bottom cost.