At the 2025 Something Digital conference in Brisbane, Nathaniel (Nate) Lubin — founder of the Better Internet Initiative — will explore Social Media 3.0: Reclaiming Authentic Community in an Algorithmic World. I’ll be there in person, listening for ideas that might reshape how we think about online connection, trust, and the civic role of our digital spaces.
Lubin’s career spans the highest levels of digital strategy:
- Director of the Office of Digital Strategy at the White House under President Obama
- Director of Digital Marketing for Obama for America, overseeing a $112 million budget
- Strategic advisor to corporations, startups, and nonprofits on technology and governance
Today, his focus is on building an internet that works for people — not just for platforms. For those of us in Communication Generation, where our mission is to rethink communication in service of culture, ethics, and the common good, his work cuts to the heart of what’s broken in our digital commons — and how we might repair it.
Table 1: Rethinking Value in Social Media
| Current Attention Economy | Civic Health Internet |
|---|---|
| Optimises for time on site, clicks, and engagement. | Optimises for quality of interaction and informed participation. |
| Rewards outrage, polarisation, and sensationalism. | Rewards trust, empathy, and constructive dialogue. |
| Measures success in ad revenue and user growth. | Measures success in civic literacy, social cohesion, and problem-solving capacity. |
| Users treated as data points and ad targets. | Users treated as citizens and co-stewards of digital space. |
| Short-term growth mindset (“go viral”). | Long-term resilience mindset (“grow community health”). |
| Generative AI | Agentic AI |
|---|---|
| Creates new content from existing data (e.g. text, images, audio). | Acts autonomously toward a goal, combining reasoning, decision-making, and execution. |
| Often reactive — responds to prompts or queries. | Proactive — anticipates needs and initiates action without direct prompting. |
| Focused on producing outputs quickly. | Focused on achieving outcomes effectively. |
| Quality depends heavily on training data and prompt design. | Quality depends on context-awareness, feedback loops, and adapting over time. |
| Risk: flooding the world with more content, not necessarily more value. | Risk: making decisions without sufficient human oversight or ethical guardrails. |
Table 2: Agentic AI vs Generative AI
At Communication Generation, we explore how human intelligence — rooted in connection, trust, and shared meaning — can guide the design of our digital future.
Our lens is regenerative: communication is not just information transfer, but a living process that shapes culture, community, and the health of our public sphere. Every story we cover is chosen for its potential to deepen human connection in an age dominated by automation and algorithm.
Reclaiming authentic community in the digital age isn’t just about better features or friendlier algorithms — it’s about shifting the very power structures that shape how we connect. Platforms built for profit will always optimise for extraction, not human flourishing, unless we rethink who owns and governs them. True community isn’t found in endless feeds or vanity metrics, but in the slower, smaller-scale networks where trust and reciprocity can grow. Real intelligence doesn’t live in isolated individuals; it emerges in the living web of relationships between us and our environment. Any future worth building must treat connection not as a commodity to monetise, but as a shared resource to nurture — with the same care we’d give to a watershed or a forest.
From Metrics to Meaning
The dominant metric of the attention economy — time on site — rewards addiction, outrage, and polarisation. Engagement is king, and the system rewards whatever keeps us scrolling, even if it corrodes public discourse.
Lubin challenges this at the root: What if platforms were judged not by attention captured, but by civic health improved?
Civic health means:
- People are more informed, not more misled
- Communities can act collectively to solve problems
- Trust between people and institutions grows rather than erodes
For Communication Generation, this isn’t just an ideal — it’s a design choice. The metrics we measure for will become the culture we get. We could build systems where meaning is the KPI, not manipulation.
📊 Call-out: Metrics to Meaning
| Current System | Social Media 3.0 Vision |
|---|---|
| KPI: Time on site | KPI: Civic health |
| Optimises for clicks & outrage | Optimises for trust & problem-solving |
| Addictive feedback loops | Healthy participation loops |
| Shallow, rapid spread | Deep, meaningful connection |
Platforms as Public Infrastructure
The Better Internet Initiative reframes social platforms as a kind of public infrastructure. Just as we expect roads to be safe and water to be clean, we should expect our online spaces to meet basic civic standards: transparency, fairness, and safety.
This is a radical but necessary shift. It reframes governance at scale as a civic challenge, not just a technical one. Responsibility is shared:
- Tech companies must design for public good
- Governments must set and enforce civic standards
- Communities and users must hold these systems to account
If we wouldn’t tolerate a bridge that collapses under heavy use, why do we accept platforms that collapse trust under heavy engagement?
💡 What We’ve Done Before
Public libraries, national parks, clean water systems, the postal service — all were deliberate choices to make something essential freely accessible, safe, and in service of the public. The same could be true for digital spaces if we treated them as public infrastructure rather than private profit engines.
Trust as the Algorithm
In the current attention economy, outrage is currency. The most incendiary content spreads the fastest, not because it’s the most important, but because it’s the most profitable.
Lubin flips this logic: design algorithms to optimise for trust, even at the expense of clicks. That means:
- Making transparent why content is shown to you
- Showing the sources and evidence behind claims
- Allowing users to understand — and challenge — the forces shaping their feed
Trust is not a “nice-to-have.” It’s the foundation of any functioning public sphere. Without it, democracy itself becomes fragile.
The Creator as Civic Actor
One of Lubin’s most resonant ideas for our audience is this: online creators are the new civic leaders.
Through the Better Internet Initiative’s fellowship model, large-scale creators are supported to use their reach for prosocial influence — resisting the gravitational pull of controversy-for-clicks and building communities around shared values instead.
This reframes the creator economy as a civic economy, where influence carries responsibility.
Public Health for the Digital Age
Lubin approaches online harm — misinformation, abuse, radicalisation — with the mindset of a public health strategist:
- Identify harmful patterns early
- Build monitoring and early-warning systems
- Design prevention into the environment itself
In this framework, virality is treated like contagion: not all growth is healthy. Just as we wouldn’t celebrate the rapid spread of a disease, we shouldn’t celebrate the rapid spread of harmful ideas simply because they “perform well.”
From Mass Media to Community Media
Social media’s original promise was connection; its reality has been an illusion of intimacy with thousands or millions.
Lubin’s vision is smaller, richer, more human-scale — built around the natural social limit of roughly 150 meaningful relationships that humans actually thrive in. This is not nostalgia; it’s neuroscience and anthropology. Our tools could be built to amplify depth over reach — to help people cultivate real relationships instead of infinite, shallow exposure.
Why It Matters to Communication Generation
At its core, Communication Generation is about regenerating trust, connection, and meaning in a fractured world.
Lubin offers not just critique but a practical blueprint for what might replace the current system:
- New success metrics rooted in civic health
- Platforms treated as public infrastructure
- Algorithms that optimise for trust, not outrage
- Creators supported as civic leaders
- Virality understood as a public health risk when it harms the common good
If we want Social Media 3.0 to be truly social, we need to stop optimising for addiction and start designing for democracy.
I’ll be listening closely at Something Digital — not just for the challenges he lays out, but for the seeds of solutions that could grow into a better digital common
