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Talking about the forbidden: Slicht social network will untie the most silent language
Tonya Samsonova Senior Slon editor subscribe to the authorTalking about the forbidden: Slicht social network will untie the most silent language
English Dyslexik John Nash is building the future of social media. In his social networks, Slight can only communicate anonymously - and only with those who are not far from you
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Sometimes it is more important who you are, but where you are. The social network Slight allows you to leave anonymous notes, tied them to the exact place on the map. Dialogs can be tied around these points, but you do not know anything about the person who answers you, but he does not know who you are. “We do not authorize users, they do not leave any data about themselves in the system except geolocation,” the developers write. After all, you are interested to know what the people who were nearby think about?
“Once I was sitting at the DLD conference, the European Analogue Ted-Talk,” says John Nash, the creator of the service. -A couple with some kind of terrible report came to the stage, they endlessly quoted Nelson Mandelu and Martin Luther King. All this would be very dreary if it were not so funny. I wrote the SSMES to my friend: "What a Bullshit?!" Then he discovered the conference twitter, but there were no jokes or comments. People preferred to keep silent and wait. If we had the opportunity to leave anonymous comments in some situations, we could tell each other much more. ”
The Slight application appeared in the AppStore in March, the number of downloads is growing rapidly, but so far it is measured only by tens of thousands. But Slight is addictive: everyone who installed the application on their iPhone open it on average seven times a day. The creators believe that it will turn our idea of the capabilities of social networks. “You can talk to a person from China right now, but Stop, let's do it exactly the opposite,” Nash says. “We want people who are physically nearby to become closer to each other virtually.” He believes that the visitors to the cafe in Shordich is distinguished by something from those who are sitting in the City coffee shops.
In 2011, a very strange thing happened during London pogroms. The British asked the same question: why do young people smash their own area, a place where they live? The older generation did not understand that for the teenager the street on which his house stands is not the habitat in the social sense. Their social environment has become much more virtual, for them close people are those with whom they say online. So the physical environment of the stay of a modern person was separated from his social environment.
And, perhaps, the next stage in the development of social networks is attempts to bring people closely closely and so close. People are returning to the study of what surrounds them every day, and try to find a new value in this.
The dark side of anonymity
John Nash and Michael Petruzzo, the creators of Slight, are far from pioneers in anonymous social networks. At the time of the appearance of Slicht, the applications Whisper and Secret, where you can share uncomfortable thoughts, had more than a million active users. Anonymity has become a natural reaction to excessive publicity. People reached the limits of exhibitionism, having posted about themselves everything that could afford to post. And there was a need to talk on the Internet that it is impossible to say on your own behalf:
"Our boss picks in the nose during the meetings."
"Lucy has no appendicitis, she was raped, so she does not go to school."
"I love biology teachers, someone is aware of whether he is gay?"
Now social networks that do not require identification are about twenty. Their popularity, it seems, is a protective reaction of the body against services that have already collected more data about you than they are able to process. If users are anonymous, then the advertiser cannot target advertising and show a 35-year-old resident of Aidaho what should be of interest to her.
From the point of view of the theory of ostentatious consumption, as Pelevin sets out in “Empire V”, “the main idea that a person tries to convey to others is that he has access to much more prestigious consumption than he could think about him.” It is ridiculous to scroll at Instagram and Facebook tape, holding this thought in mind. And if you look at the Chekins in Foursquare for a long time, then it itself comes to mind, without the prompts of Veblen and Pelevin.
Anonymous social networks do not allow to realize a base need - to tell how cool you are. Does this mean that only altruistic motifs will be moved by their users?
John Nash believes that everyone who downloads Slight will be able to improve the world. So the creators of the close analogue of Slight - the Yikyak network. This is an incredibly popular American service aimed at students of large universities. Each user can publish a short record, and it will appear on the screens of five hundred users nearby. For an additional fee, you can increase the number of recording addressees to ten thousand people.
Yikyak fashion from students went to schoolchildren. And this ended badly: in mid -March, the developers had to block the work of the social network in the territory of 130 thousand American state and private schools. Over the month, the use of Yikyak led to a pair of suicides and massive violations of ethical charters of schools, a false anonymous message about the bomb appeared in it. CNN and ABC released reports on how dangerous weapons anonymous social networks in the hands of children can become. And the developers, without waiting for sanctions, themselves destroyed this weapon, while losing about a quarter of paid users.
Exemplary pitch
John Nash does not yet know how Slight will be monetized. He thinks that if the scenarios of using his social network are more successful than that of Yikyak, the idea of monetization will come by itself.
We agree with John to meet the next day in his office. I get on a bus in the center of London, climb onto the upper deck and food to the northeast, in Hakni. I look out the window and try to understand whether Nash is right when he says that people who are in the same area are binding something more than the geolocation of their iPhones.
On the way to the Nash office, I pass Old Street, where four loaded streets diverge in different directions from the crossroads with a circular movement. Skyscrapers lined up along the edge. Old, which in the two thousand years began to populate technological startups. With the light hand of one of the tenants, the name Silicon Roundabout, “Silicon Crossroads” glued to the new cluster. Today its development is one of the state priorities.
John Nash. Photo: © Zhanna Bobrakova, John's photo is provided to them by himself
But I'm going on. Now the bus is almost empty: local residents do not use transport - they sleep in the same place where they work, in large studios, converted from industrial premises and artists and musicians similar to squat. From the point of view of the Government of Great Britain, the future of London was five bus stops back. I think that in a shabby hackni there is more hope than it might seem at first glance.
At the entrance to the four-story panel building there are three calls: “Studio of silicone carnival masks”, “Design studio of Victoria Baekham”, “John Nash Studio”. John takes off the entire third floor. “I did the whole wiring myself, I also carried out ventilation in this room,” he explains. - I rented half at first, converted it, began to rent it out and took a loan for the proceeds to redo the second part. The most terrible moment was with the tax on real estate, the administration wanted to increase it to nine hundred pounds, but we agreed by seven hundred. Now this building brings me money, the offices are withdrawn by photographers, one editor of the Hi-Tech magazine, a couple of architects. I thought about myself as an artist for a long time, then I considered myself an anthropologist-photographer, but the work of the builder brought me a stable income. ”
Nash has a slight form of dyslexia, he says well, but he reads and writes with difficulty. The absence of basic abilities to receive and reproduce information is compensated by the unusual talent of the narrator. We are sitting at a large desktop in jackets, under the table there is a heater - so cheaper than to heat the entire room. John has a small cold, he first with difficulty, and then more and more easily answers questions about his life before Slight. I hear in this exciting story not a spontaneous stream of memories, but a well -thought -out and verified text of self -presentation.
Moroccan drift
A year ago, Nash left London to California to find investors. The guys who study at Stanford are quite easy to make an appointment with the business angel, they leave the university, pass two quarters and get into the office of the technological company. Many students are guys from good families, of course, smart and talented, otherwise they would not have studied there. But in California they are their own, and John has always been an outsider with an art education and a British accent. He needs to be damn well to tell about himself in order to go to a conversation about business. And this is how he does it:
“I studied poorly at school, I had a rather serious form of dyslexia, which did not allow you to perform standard tests and tasks. In high school, the teacher told me that no one would ever take me to work. It didn’t bother me very much, I was not going to work in a foreign company from nine to five. My parents are artists, they did not see the problem that I would engage in art.
To learn further, I had to invent my own way to gain new knowledge. I could not read big books and keep attention to the text, instead of one or two books, I read a hundred or two hundred PDF files. But I read them in my own way: I found a keyword, read two paragraphs up and two down, lost attention and switched to another. So I wrote the best graduation in my course. ”
John tells how after the institute he built a giant robot spreading the paint on the table. The robot symbolized something, probably the fact that the unique brush strokes can simulate a thoughtless machine. Nash learned to program, ordered sensors and microcircuits in China, gathered all this together. And then he realized that he was more interested in ideas than their physical implementation.
He took the camera and went to Morocco. Since the time, Byron, British boys have probably been supposed to leave for six months or a year in a distant country at twenty years - to catch butterflies, engage in anthropology, and make photo reports. In Morocco there is a rather ancient culture of horses. Now it is rather a show for tourists, earlier - a rather warlike dance, similar to jigitovka. The appearance of YouTube and the spread of mobile phones greatly transformed this culture among adolescents: they buy one white car for ten people and learn to deftly twist it around their axis. This is called Morocco Drift.
“I bought the 1997 Hyunde, painted it with white paint and decided to do an anthropological study, trying to become part of the Morocco Drift culture,” says Nash. - Moroccan children rode in my car, I shot a video about them. Very soon, I realized that such local subcultures arise not only in poor and underdeveloped societies. Keywords or hashtags become a new social public space. Instead of gathering on Trafalgar Square and shouting loudly about what is important, people post a video in YouTube. Local communities are now united not around certain places on the map, but around keywords. ”
The project in Morocco ended, Nash dispersed his white car to one hundred and eighty and let it down. He returned to London and wrote a couple of notes about his experiment, then he spoke at the prestigious DLD technological conference. “In the presentation, I talked about the fact that before the process of consumption of media was passive. But for the local subculture, the content created by users may be more important than professional content. I predicted that Facebook, which everyone goes, will replace a lot of small and local tapes that will talk about what is important specifically to you at this particular point on the map. But I did not understand how it will look. ”
You know the end of the story: Nash read reviews for his performance on Twitter, while the following speakers performed on the stage. Their story was terrible, but Twitter was silent. So, he claims, and the idea of Slight appeared.
The investor of the social network has not yet been needed, Nash put his own accumulations into the idea. In Los Angeles, he came with an idea that only vaguely reminiscent of what Slight is today. All functional elements and interface of the service were invented by John Michael Petruzzo's partner. “We were inspired by the gangs of Los Angeles, they mark their quarters with inscriptions and graffiti. The same can be done in Slight. You leave anonymous notes, they cannot be erased, but you can make them brighter. If users like what you write at their house, they can vote for a post - and the font will become larger. ”
Long tail Slight
Nash has a long tail book on the table, where the idea popular at one time is presented: the total sales of unpopular goods can be more than the sale of several hits. Amazon is not limited to a place on the shelves, unlike a real bookstore, which will upload only those books that are well and quickly sold. Therefore, the revenue of Amazon will rely not only on the sales of individual bestsellers, but also on the sales of millions of other items, even if these sales will be single.
Slicht Nash conceived the service precisely as the implementation of the idea of a long tail.
Instead of the only tape of posts, like on Facebook, you have millions of such tapes in every possible location where someone wants to say something.
Instead of one place with a million users - a million places with several users who get very relevant information and are much more involved in: it is important for them to know what people write in the place in which they are. The street you live on is one tape, your office is the other, the cafe in which you often work is the third. How and why use these ribbons, not developers decide.
Photo: © Zhanna BobrakovaTwitter was not conceived as a service, convenient for reporting about news, disasters, natural disasters and protests. This is only one way to use the platform. The same applies to Slight: perhaps we will see many new ways to use it. For example:
1. Officials will anonymously drain information from government buildings, and corporation employees from their offices. Geolocation will confirm that the information comes from an insider - otherwise he could not enter the building and leave a point on the map. The anonymity of the network will untie the tongue.
2. During protest shares, police officers sympathizing with the crowd can warn people about danger, and a crowd of protesters can be better organized: a push notification with a published message will come to the devices of everyone who is in a certain radius.
3. Anonymity built into the work of Slight can turn into its opposite. If you want the office employees to gather at the reception or guests of your party to go to the garden at the moment when the barbecue is ready, it’s enough to write about it. Push notifications will be notified by everyone in the building.
4. Anonymity not only unleats the language, but also destroys the social hierarchy. Slight can play the function of a democratizer for a large organization: employees will freely express their opinion on the work of the company and about those who are higher in the hierarchy without fear of sanctions.
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