What is the secret of this
project’s longevity?
DDH: The main se-
cret is rather simple: Kybe-
ria is one amongst the most
ancients, it emerged before
cyberspace was partitioned
by the big corporate players.
It attracted particular us-
ers (Slovak and Czech hackers,
artists, scientists) before
Facebook, Twitter or G+ even
existed: for many among these
users, Kyberia was first digital
community/social network into
which they were ever integrat-
ed. I suppose that such a loss
of “virtual virginity" could,
in minds of such users, cre-
ate a non-negligeable trace,
a sort of habitus which makes
this “community kernel" to ap-
pear and reappear, either on a
regular basis, or after short-
er or longer pause.
In current era, when cyber-
space is already partitioned
and habits of its participants
fixed, it is almost impossible
to create such an intimate
relation between the user and
a new “start up" project: for
today, any project is just one
among thousands of other pro-
jects, any domain is only a
point-without-interest in the
space which is practically in-
finite.
But there are other reasons as
well: Kyberia does not harass
its users with advertisements,
implicit business models, le-
gal licences and other corpo-
rate mess. It is not a megap-
olis like Facebook, but rather
a kind of a cybernetic vil-
lage. This does not mean that
it would be less memevirally
insane than Facebook, it just
means that in its “virtual
insanity", it is nonetheless
still more intimate, more per-
sonal and more human. The fact
that a new user has to pass
through the registration pro-
cedure makes it more difficult
for toxic egos and propaganda
bots to get in, whole communi-
ty thus seems to be somewhat
more resilient to no matter
what perturbation can come
from the external world. Thus,
Kyberia for almost 10 years
already, Kyberia is in a state
of slowly unfolding a homeo-
stasis which is neither pure
progress nor pure decay but
something in the middle: Life,
perhaps.
At last but not least, the
community seems to be able to
reproduce: in a sort of vir-
tual-endogamy, non-negligeable
amounts of Kyberia members who
have kids with other Kyberia
members and it can be expected
that the old IDs shall, soon-
er or later, transfer their
IDs to their progenies. Given
that Kyberia exists already
almost 15 years, we need 10
more years to go to attain
the 25years considered to be
“one human generation". Only
if we succeed to surpass this
threshold could we, I believe,
start speaking about “secret
of longevity".
You say it is a “social body
with a collective identity” –
what are the implications of
such an approach for the com-
munity / members?
DDH: It is about
bi-directional flow of infor-
mation between the whole (i.e.
community) and its parts (i.e.
members). The more feedback
loops You have in the System,
more complexity will emerge
out of it: I have somehow in-
tuitively implemented this
principle into the very archi-
tecture of the system long be-
fore I knew anything about the
theory of graphs, complexity
or A.I. Later, there has been
a tendency to make this intu-
ition operational in scripts
implementing the Parallel De-
mocracy Model (PDM): ideal-
ly, PDM could make it possible
for the users of the communi-
ty to directly influence many
parameters of Kyberia's global
functioning (related to imi-
gration rate, amount of new
Ks generated and distributed,
ostracization thresholds etc.)
with simple act of vote-giv-
ing aggregated in a quite in-
novative way. The goal is to
make system able to adapt more
swiftly to any possible chal-
lenge which may emerge in the
future, but to do so princip-
ially in a bottom-top fashion:
netizens should decide, not
the caste of administrators.
Unfortunately not many mem-
bers are in fact willing and
ready to constructively par-
ticipate on the construction
of a common cathedral: it is
much easier to criticize those
“up there" than to accept that
those “up there" are in fact
“we here" and subsequent-
ly execute responsible deci-
sions and perform courageous
actions.
Which are your visions for the
project?
DDH: 0) To protect
its existence and to protect
the raison d'etre of its ex-
istence which is “protect the
diversity in the cyberspace".
1) To endow it with our own,
state-of-the-art natural lan-
guage processing semantic
search engine.
2) To get more distributed and
more decentralized and to rep-
licate into czech, german and
potentially other regions of
European cyberspace.
3) To use Kyberia's database,
or its specific subset, to
train the collective artificial
intelligence representing the
mind of Slovak intelligentsia
during the first decades of the
third millenium.
