Decentralization Across Borders | Adetola Ogunsanya @Web3LagosCon

Um, hello everybody. Good day. My name is Adetola Owosho and I am a content ambassador for Ethereum Swarm. And I'm here to present to you guys today the topic decentralization across borders. You might be wondering, um, basically I personally think as Africans, we really do not emphasize on the topic of decentralization and privacy.

So, um, because of ideology and the philosophy that Ethereum Swarm stands for, that's what I'm trying to establish here today in the African mind. Hence, I tied to the topic decentralization across borders. Are we together? Please, let's go. So, I have a question.

So, I'm going to start with this question. When you hear the word the internet, like what comes to your mind? And I know for many persons, when you hear the word internet, you're thinking social media or your applications, your YouTube, Google, and basically everything else that you use online. And I think there's an idea most people have. We think the internet is open, free, and it's just ease of access for everybody, right?

That's is what is being sold to us. But, it doesn't necessarily mean the fact that you're on the internet, you're actually free. And I am going to open our eyes to that ideology today. Okay, so, today I want to make a case for decentralization to the African mind. I hope you all follow me closely.

Okay, so, now, when you hear decentralization, mostly is something that we think like it's a technical ideology that we feel that developers are the only person that should care about what decentralization mean, but that is not true. We should not think that oh, it's only people that are technical that should care about using a decentralized infra, but we as users, we like as everyday persons, we should actually care about what happened or how our use of internet is being determined. So, um So, to understand why that matters, we need to go back. To make the case, I said here, being online does not mean being free. The internet was built to be open and somewhere along the way, access became a permission.

And you might be thinking, how is your access to the internet requiring a permission? I mean, you just need to log in and then you're like in already, but that's not true. Because behind the infra, like you having to like be on the internet and everything, there is there is a gated control that we might not see, but we might notice it until there is a red flag. For instance, if your social media is banned, for instance, now you get to know that oh, your access to the internet is not free or you try to put up a content and then it's taken down, then you realize that oh my god, the your access to the internet is not free. Are we together?

So, the intent for the internet it's supposed to be oh, you you are the user here and then everything that you use, media, applications, data, and everything that's just connects you to your life on the net is connected to a host. And that host, initially, we all think that oh, it's supposed to be decentralized. Now, what we have currently with the internet of today is you as a user, your interface to the internet is all connected to a centralized host. So, centralized in the sense when you think when you think most of the social media, you think meta. When you think um your YouTube, Google, and all those things, you think like the Google company, right?

So, are we together? Please, I'm trying to drive somewhere and I really want you guys to pay good attention. Now, I have three questions. Do you think you're free? Can you speak without an account?

How many of you here have experienced an unjust ban? Can I see your hands up? At any point in time, maybe, you know, your social media account got suspended, taken down? Okay, I see a hand. Okay, I see a few hands.

How did you feel? You feel You felt terrible, right? I remember sometime back in 2020, so my business account was taken down and I was livid because why? That was my means of livelihood. So, now, I want you all to remember Always remember, freedom is not only the right to speak.

It is the ability to keep speaking when the convenient gate closes. If your social media account is taken down today, you don't have a voice to speak to the audience you used to have. Your voice is being taken down because that gate has closed. So, I want to make a case study here because I am speaking to Africans and mostly Nigerians here. If you all remember the case of the Twitter ban in 2021, whereby the federal government banned Twitter for about 7 months and users across the country were forced to use VPNs to access their accounts.

This is a prime example of why a truly decentralized internet needs to work. We were all there, right? 2021, 7 months no access to Twitter. You all had to use VPN. It was sad.

Business owners, they couldn't just It was really hard. It was a hard period for us then as Nigerians because our government were able to bend X to give in to the fact that they were closing the gates of that social media to we as Nigerians. Why should we decentralize all? Why do we need decentralization? I've been trying to make a point and I've emphasized and I've made the point about how we are all in a way gated, even though we think we're free.

So, why do we need to decentralize? It's because the internet has become a series of permissions. Whether you like it or not, you are under that permission. And we need to decentralize not just the internet, but the ways we interact with it as well. And next, I would like to make a case for Ethereum Swarm.

Okay, Ethereum Swarm is pushing for solutions across decentralized media, storage, streaming, AI, and across many other solutions. Permit me to give you an explain of what Ethereum Swarm is. Ethereum Swarm at its core is a decentralized storage solution built on Ethereum, right? Do we get that? Okay, moving on to the next slide.

Now, we want to build differently with Swarm. So, what can Swarm do? Swarm here can power the following infra: e-media, AI, decentralized front end storage, and streaming. Um I don't know if anyone here was at the workshop we had yesterday at Web3 Bridge, whereby the developers tried their hands out on the decentralized front-end feature. Can I see your hands up?

I see a few faces here, and it was a really good time. We were able to get hands-on, and a lot of developers here developed a thing deployed their website to a truly decentralized infrastructure. And to me, that was really, really cool. Like, that was amazing. This brings me down to a position I want to take.

So, I established before we as Africans, we do not really take credence to the topic of decentralization and privacy. Why? Because I want convenience, right? Because our country, our continent is as hard as it can get. So, any form of convenience that we have, we are going to lean into it.

And yes, yes, it's true, decentralization is not as convenient as we think. So, you know, when you have your phone, you have Google Drive, and then you can just click files, like everything is just made easy. With a decentralized infra, it's not there yet, but we are trying to get there, right? Are we together? Now, I want to put this on our mind.

It's a quote that I saw and I like. It says, "Privacy is a path to selectively reveal oneself to the world." It's in the Cypherpunk Manifesto by Eric Hughes. I don't know if you noticed for the past, let's say, a year or two, the Web3 the Web3 space has been leaning towards privacy. Why?

Because yeah, we are starting to see the importance of privacy now. Like before, we didn't care, but now it's very very important. So, I want to leave you guys with this. So, privacy is how decentralization becomes human. The UN describes privacy as a gateway to opinion and expression.

That is why we access and routing That's why access and routing are not just engineering details. They shape who can participate. I'm leaving you with a parting statement that we as Africans, we should actually take interest on the topic of decentralization and privacy. I know it's more prominent in the West, but we can adopt it because there is so much advantage to uh freedom than we think. Thank you, everybody.