Introducing Betalab, lets fix things …
The internet is broken. And yes, we tried turning it off and back on, but that didn’t work.
Rather we are launching a new program at Betaworks starting today called Betalab, where, in collaboration with Lupa Systems, we will fund early stage startups that aim to Fix The Internet.
We’re doing this because there is a growing sense now that technology is creating more problems than it’s solving. This wasn’t always the case. There was a time when we shared an overriding optimism in tech’s capacity to make the world a better place.
For me that sense of unbridled optimism began the first time I saw the World Wide Web. It was 1993; I had been exploring the internet and heard about Mosaic, a browser for the Web. I drove from school in Philadelphia to the AI lab at MIT — weird to say today that I drove 4 hrs to use a browser. I sat there at the lab, in a corner, on an SGI machine, surfing the Web. I remember watching the site “Web Louvre” slowly unfurl on the screen, line by line — it was mesmerizing and brilliant. I drove back to Philly with my palms sweaty as I grasped the steering wheel. The future was here. I couldn’t dive fast enough into it.
Since that day in Boston, technology has changed the world beyond what I could have imagined, much of it good. In those early years of the Web many of us working in technology believed that connecting people together and putting the entirety of the world’s collective knowledge just a click away would surely lead us to a better place. But while migrating our social lives to the internet allowed us to share our lives and interact with people we never could have before, we are also fragmenting our experiences and relationships as data-driven businesses and governments are tracking almost every inch of our existence. And these same technologies which connect us are also now being weaponized to target, fragment, tribalize and disenfranchise citizens, to overwhelm us and our society with disinformation. We even struggle now as a society to come to a shared consensus on what is true and what is not.
How about we Fix things …
Betalab is an early-stage cohort-based investment program combined with a year-long series of workshops and events at Betaworks — with the singular goal of catalyzing startup activity around Fixing The Internet.
This is a big scope. To start with we are going to focus on five areas:
- Software that builds trustworthiness into AI, protecting, detecting, or authenticating synthetic media or data
- Platforms and tools that address the negative outcomes (abuse, spam, disinformation, etc.) that plague existing social networks
- Better products for people to manage their personal data and privacy
- New tools, platforms, and business models that foster a more sustainable news ecosystem and a better informed citizenry
- Identity and authentication tools
Betalab will find and fund a select group of entrepreneurs who are building software and services that work for humans first, and finding ways to fix the things that are fraying today.
How will it work?
With Betalab we aim to gather and jump-start startup activity around this new emerging category of trustworthy, humane technology — tech that we don’t later regret installing, tech that fixes and inoculates us against information collapse, tech that is designed first and foremost for our species… tech that starts building towards a future we want, tech that fixes the internet. We recognize that disinformation is a problem that is simultaneously technical, social, political, and economic in nature. Technical solutions alone will not save us. We will therefore:
Invest: Betaworks Ventures and Lupa Systems will provide initial funding for very early stage companies focussed on this emerging area of technology. This program will run for the next year, the cohorts will be in residence at Betaworks for 3-month cycles, and we will put out requests for startups around the major categories. Here is the first draft of that list to give a sense of what we are thinking.
Convene: We will host a series of conferences, workshops and events at Betaworks Studios this year to gather participants in this new ecosystem — from media to technology, to AI to security, to insurance to defense to fashion to government. This series aims to build an interdisciplinary community that can increase our collective understanding of how to effectively address disinformation, trustworthiness and regain a shared view of reality.
Produce: We will be producing podcasts and research associated with this area. Having startups building in this space will give us the opportunity to conduct original research, meta-analysis in the category, and when we can, help frame and create policy recommendations.
In Conclusion
Betalab seeks to accelerate early company development — to bootstrap innovation that fixes the internet. Betaworks has been working around this space for years, beginning in 2014 with research on the weaponization of social networks. In 2018 we started explicitly identifying and exploring synthetic media and deepfakes. Last year we ran a Camp on synthetic media. And last summer we brought together 200 people to talk about humane tech. Startups are emerging in this space — however it’s following a predictable evolution.
With Betalab we want to crank up the speed of innovation around this broad area of humane tech and specifically around nefarious uses of synthetic media, AI and computer vision. It’s time to get real about reality and fix things. Fare forward.
Join us. If you are a builder, founder or someone working in a lab or a big technology company and you want to make something, get thinking on ideas. The formal application will go up in a few weeks at betalab.com.
☑ This Medium post was written by a human (unlike this which wasn't!)
ps: a startup we want to seed is a text verification system, to confirm that a human wrote an article, a captcha for text, want to build it?
