Jawbone founder: the web hasn’t really empowered average people the way it promised to

Opinions are everywhere, pretty much everyone in the world has them. These opinions have a right to be aired irrespective of who you are, where you live and what you do. This what Jawbone founder Alex Asseily believes.

It’s this belief, more than anything else, which inspired the launch of State, a new global opinion network that links individuals based on their point of view. The London-based company was founded by Asseily and his brother Mark.

The opinion platform recently made a move into Africa through South Africa and has been targeting emerging market countries in the last few months. The company has taken a very unique approach to its product by launching its global brand in specific regions to better localise content. Most media or social networks like this launch a product and watch it grow organically to a global audience.

In an interview with Memeburn, Asseily spoke about the need to create specific topics and hone in on specific regions. He also explains the need for a platform like this and why it is time for the web to begin to empower the average person.

Memeburn: Tell us a bit bit about State. How different it is from Medium, which is also a thought-sharing platform.

Alex Asseily: Good question. What we’re trying to do is to create an opinion network. So the idea is that Medium is, in a sense, trying to create a system for commentary, a new type of medium. We’re really trying to usher in the advantage of a semantic life and what we are basically saying is that people have opinions about different things and that those opinions are not captured, and we only really hear from a small number of people.

One thing we are focused on, and something that Medium doesn’t really solve, is if you make it very easy for people to express their opinions and you automatically count those opinions, you are going to get way more people wanting to share their opinions. It’s intrinsically a more accessible approach. We think that’s a good business position, because the vast majority of people are not participating, and Medium is really not going to solve that.

Medium is what people are doing already it’s just like more. Twitter didn’t really solve that either, the reason being that you are only going to write something that is 140 characters or 600 characters if you have an audience and if you are comfortable expressing yourself.

What we focus on is how to make it very simple for average people to express their views quickly in an unintimidating way, and not require them to have followers.

MB: Would you say that the idea behind State is to make sure everyone gets chance to be heard?

AA: Yes, so that their opinions get counted and get relayed to the people that most need to hear them. It’s a completely new kind of system, and the idea is that your opinions not only get counted but they connect you to people you know, people you don’t know around the world who not only have similar views, but also diverging views. And so, in a sense, your opinion network stands to be much greater than any other network you already have.

MB: Do you think currently the mass of opinions are lost in the noise?

AA: The reality of today is that 99% of those opinions are not heard. There are a lot more articles coming out recently about how we specifically think about Twitter, the amount of writing, the amount of publishing that is now being tweeted is really restricted.

It’s a really small proportion of the population. The reason is the motivation for expressing opinions has a lot to do with having your loudspeakers, and there just aren’t that many people who have a lot of followers.

The reason why like I participate online today is largely to make comments. And that’s unsatisfying for many reasons, including the fact that you’re just not heard, and then why would you even bother? The job of an opinion network is actually to deliver your opinion to the people that most need to hear them, irrespective of who you are.

MB: Medium for me is about the content, it’s about publishing content, it’s a publishing content platform. So my impression here, and you can correct me, is that State’s not actually about publishing content, but about sharing thoughts.

AA: That’s right, and it’s intended to capture thoughts going from the simplest thoughts like “Johannesburg is exciting and gritty” to much more elaborate thoughts like writing a blog. The point is that those thoughts are networked. And it’s just like a completely new technology platform.

The moment you state something or state a view, for example you might state something in the form of a tweet, a view, that statement that you made gets networked and becomes discoverable based on the meaning of it rather than the audience you have. So for example, when someone wants to learn about Johannesburg, they might discover your thought because they want to see what the best point of views are for Johannesburg being exciting.

M: That’s great. What I’m interested in is some of the feedback, or the response that you’ve seen since launching this. What are the most pertinent thoughts? How are people using the platform?

AA: I think the place where we are succeeding is when people see the vision and are really supporting it. There’s hardly anyone who doesn’t go “like wow”!. Everyone we meet is like “this is needed and it’s transformative”.

In the larger scheme of things, we have about 10 times the number of people writing as a proportion of the total number of people, as other social platform paths. I mean usually people are just reading. In our case, we have people engaging, because they just feel comfortable doing so. I think we have about 30 opinions per user, which is a huge number. Of course, we have some users who have only expressed a few opinions and some users who haven’t expressed any.

M: That’s actually quite interesting but how will the experience evolve?

AA: I think that what we’re looking for now, is that we are continually refining things. If you have an iPhone, then you’ll be able to use the iPhone app, it’s the most advanced, it’s the most streamlined, and the sexiest.

We are constantly trying to refine the experience towards one where people feel their opinions are not just counted, but that they matter. The iPhone version is connected to a world map, so the moment you state, you are connected to people on that point of view and you can see what they are sharing. And of course when you go to a topic you are able to drill down and navigate on that topic in a way that is much more intuitive.

We also have users from 95 different countries so we have a lot of appeal from different places. One noticeable trend is that we tend to see a lot of engagement from emerging markets such as Turkey, South Africa, Brazil and Hong Kong.

In Turkey, for example, we have a lot of attention in terms of what is going on because of the political turmoil. There have also been a lot of discussions around Twitter being banned. In South Africa, there are lots of opinions around it just being a new form of democracy where people can express their views and see them being counted, not in a theoretical kind of way, but in a very real-time kind of way.

MB: You mentioned emerging markets and there being a lot of activity there. And I feel like right now for emerging markets, that is the best place for activism and the best place to state an opinion and almost fight back. Why was it important for you to have a country specific launch, especially for emerging markets? Most social media networks don’t do that.

AA: I’ve never been asked that question and it’s a really, really, good one. The benefit and the implied requirements of building a network like we have. So Facebook is a social network, it’s build around social connections and sharing things with friends. Twitter is also a social network, still people, they might be friends they might be strangers, but it’s still built around people — it’s a media organisation. Twitter, on the other hand is a distribution network, it’s a publishing network.

The difference with State is that we are a new type of animal. It is a social network, because it’s people interacting with each other, but the difference is those interactions generate content. We are also like a media platform, because the people’s opinions, either individually or an aggregate, become content. So then when we go to a specific country like Brazil, it’s important for us to have a mechanism for attracting engagement.

In Brazil for example, if you talk about the mayor of London, or banks of London, it’s kind of like you might get it, but they probably won’t. You have look for the theme.

To use Brazil as an example again, it’s much more about like preparing for the World Cup, or the mayoral elections in Rio, or corruption in the transit system, because those are the things that are on people’s minds in Brazil.

That’s not to say that they’re not expressing their views on Edward Snowden, which tends to be like a global topic, but just that like news there tends to be localised in a way that platforms like Facebook don’t need to be.

The only localisation Facebook really needs to do is localise the actual copy on the sites. The South African election is another example: if you think people are participating, if you are thinking about civic engagement if you think about democracy, about people engaging, which is what State does, presumably it will be interesting for South Africa.

We have to address that the country has an election coming up, which might create opinions around how the country is dealing with HIV or whatever the big issues are.

MB: That makes perfect sense. There seems to be a move towards localised content and making the content relevant to the people in that region. Do you think something like State would contribute to the idea of a hive mind?

AA: Again, great question, I have never been asked that before. No one has ever brought up the idea of the hive mind in any kind of discussion that I’ve had, let alone in an interview, I actually really appreciate it. I always think about this stuff, but I never really get to talk about it. Another way of putting it is that, if you think of people as being nodes, and you think of a hive mind being the efficiency of connecting those nodes, then State is trying to make the efficiency much, much, greater.

People are connecting today, social media creates connections. It always has, but it just happens too slowly. So as a result, you have to wait for things to get very, very, serious before people will go through the effort of coordinate action. What State does is specifically designed to aggregate like-minded people, so coordinated collective action becomes like automatic.

Think about the way sharing on Facebook is really easy. People could share before Facebook, they could use email, which is like a social network, it’s just not current and efficient. When Facebook came along, it made sharing stuff easier and connected you to people that you might have emailed before.

We are taking interactions that happen in real life, that happen online today, and we are facilitating them to such an extent where things that previously happened very rarely, or didn’t happen at all, are suddenly able to happen a lot. We’ve already revealed, for instance, that capitalists and socialists agree on a whole bunch of things that they didn’t realise they agreed on before.

MB: That’s quite cool.

AA: And actually they all define, they all think that the root of all evil is cronyism. So it’s actually cronyism that everyone is upset about, not the state of the market economy. And so back to the hive mind thing, one of the things that the Deepak Choprah was really keen on, was this idea of global consciousness.

We think we’re getting close tho that by asking if you can create a system in which everyone participates. What we think will happen is that if everyone participates, what you end up having is a world that is self aware in real time.

That means that at any given time, you can get an accurate view of what people are thinking, why they are thinking it, and our organisations and governments anywhere can make smarter decisions based on the facts of what people are thinking and feeling and wanting rather than inference and guesswork and limited data, which is what happens today.

MB: That makes perfect sense. Although, I must ask this, it’s quite a step from Jawbone. It’s quite the move from that product, from hardware and wearable tech, to some sort of a social network.

AA: Yeah, well it is a step, it is a step away. Jawbone is a hardware company first and foremost, a hardware and mobile lifestyle company, while State is consumer aware. They are both consumer thinking products, they both need the right kind of product thinking, and they both deal with consumers in different ways. Certainly our headsets were designed to make people hear each other more clearly, and you can think of State being a little bit like that. I think that’s about the extent of the parallels.

Personally, I get motivated by challenges worth solving, and if I think I have I have a shot at solving them, possibly better than other people could, then I try and do it myself. And you know State for me, is solving a problem, that if solved, is much more transformational than products which I love and support and admire.

What we are doing at State, and I mean it could go wrong, if it works even a tenth of the degree that we hope it will, it’s truly transformational. What it will do, is neutralise a bunch of the problems with communication in the world that are just not being solved.

MB: Would you say then what you are doing would be to strip down the idea that freedom of expression and freedom of speech to not be whoever shouts the loudest gets heard, but every voice gets heard?

AA:

I think that the web has not yet empowered average people to be counted and participate, stand up for what they believe, in the way that democracy promises. And the biggest reason why democracy hasn’t been able to really transfer into the web is largely because it’s hard to aggregate opinions, it’s hard to aggregate points of view.

Voting, what is voting, but just aggregating points of view, very basically? We do it every four years, why? Why don’t we do it every two weeks, because it would consume our entire society.

The spirit of democracy is that you listen to the people in the way in which everyone has the same equal voice. Unfortunately, because of concentrations of money and power, as you say, the biggest loud speaker, there is a perpetuation of asymmetry, and I think State can play a role in levelling the playing field.