Web3 Takes On Authoritarian Media

well thank you friends we appreciate you joining us today i hope everyone's having a good time at east denver we wanted to have a conversation today uh i brought up these brilliant minds here because what we saw in the last couple of years has been a really to me startling move you know we've seen a progression in the way that media is treating the truth in the world and we've seen some really interesting things happening in terms of where the the source of truth comes from and what that means for control and openness and obviously this community cares a lot about trust and transparency so each of these people are doing something really interesting to make sure that the world is a freer place and we're going to start conversation with daniel who is talking about um like has been focusing on some technology that could actually support more uh more trust and opened um open the world from censorship so dan you want to talk a high level about some of those ideas yeah yeah when you think about censorship and community what's happening is everything we're doing is becoming more centralized so you have to agree a lot more and more so the amount that we agree upon is uh is very little and we're not allowed to have uh private conversations anymore everything is like a global national you know kind of conversation so i think the the key is building a communications protocol that really just acknowledges that i'm okay and you're okay we don't really have to acknowledge much beyond that and i think what's really interesting about bitcoin is there's more agreements on that than i think any other any other uh single concept out there i think it probably has the largest mind share of just agreements like we can calculate that these coins are where they are so i think a communication layer apart from uh the web 2 world the fangs right facebook apple amazon netflix google and microsoft if you can't work with microsoft or google you don't get email and you know so web3 yeah doesn't really have that communication layer but i think when that's designed that will unlink you know all of the discord servers they can just turn you off all of the email providers can turn you off you know it's and then telegram still very signals still very bound to the phone number as well so i know they're making advances but yeah very cool john you are part of a project that is doing some interesting things uh in terms of giving people a town square in a way that has never been decentralized before all right thank you yeah so um i got you know i was involved in the internet in the early days and the promise of the internet was open and free information and over the last couple years i've been kind of concerned as i see more it's actually being used as a tool against us uh with algorithms and and um uh you know these bubbles the you know we're kind of putting everybody into the same into the same filter bubble and so i started getting involved in in some a program called uh free routes i was brought on as an advisor to this company it was about grassroots movement to get civic action to bring about changes so it wasn't all based on twitter it wasn't all based on email it was basically a way that you could go on you could notify your senators your congressman you could sign a petition you could put it on facebook twitter and basically these things so they're running these campaigns they did one last week and it was 25 million actions in one week so it shows that people really tapped in now some of these campaigns if it was running on twitter it would have been shadow banned nobody would have seen it it would have been invisible so this is a way to kind of break the the sensor um the censorship but this is on a web 2 platform so they kind of you know as they contacted me and said hey we're getting hacked you know when we when something comes out that really gets somebody's attention you know we're getting hacked we had to bring in people to fortify their system because they're they're pissing off the wrong people so he said we really need to port this to a web 3. so right now we're working on taking that architecture taking taking all that success that they have and moving it to a web 3 environment where nobody can take it down which is awesome and max is right has just completed a book that is really beautifully talking about how web 3 goes so far beyond the technology itself and is an ethos that's really a message that needs to be shared more broadly yeah yeah and if um if you were in my talk earlier i went into some depth about it um i want to i want i want to acknowledge though that um so i get i guess the way i've been thinking about this this particular problem is is the idea of truth claim and we can go to philosophical depths very quickly but the point is that no one can stand outside of him or herself or themselves to be able to uh limb the ultimate nature of reality that is a philosophical problem that has been with us for a very long time so what we have to do is communicate through a rational discourse using our rationality and provide some evidentiary means for a truth claim what's great about the geeks here the the people who are really into this stuff is that you can figure out on-chain mechanisms for adjudicating truth claims using evidence and providence associated with that evidence so what's so promising about what you guys are doing is not just censorship resistance which is which is kind of baked into baked into digital ledgers and that sort of stuff and that's a good thing but also the idea that you can start to create incentives one of the reasons we have so much pollution in the in the in the landscape out there for information is because there's not very much of a high cost for being wrong so if you can create systems where people can introduce evidence and support their claims and that there's a higher cost of being wrong that would be wonderful however you have to acknowledge the game stop problem what i call the game stop problem and i think you all know what i mean which is that you can just you can get hordes or people you can get a hive mind that's betting on something that's not true and of course i'm not assuming that i have limb the ultimate nature of reality through my brain it's just that there is never a way to stand out outside of the matrix of intersubjectivity and by subjectivity i mean the way i perceive something the way you perceive something can be different but we're trying to find intersubjective agreement about some truth claim the extent to which we can develop markets of doing this sort of like prediction markets sort of like futarki how many of you have ever heard of futarki sort of like that if you've never heard of it uh follow up with me i'm happy to send you some stuff um but there's really it's really hard to stop the game stop problem the idea that you can just you know to get a bunch of people together and will some truth claim so at the end of some time horizon so i'm seeing this as a big problem i don't want to get too weird and technical but i think um if anybody can solve for that problem or at least get us halfway there with with evidence that makes it sting to be wrong right where you're putting your money where your truth claim is and that might involve staking or whatever that we can at least get closer to tracking truth because a lot of these claims that are trying that we are adjudicating are just as as john put it as a war of filter bubbles right and we come with our predetermined biases and we have to learn so we have to discipline ourselves to become more rational engage in better rational discourse learn to evaluate data and inputs from reality such as they are and do that we've got to discipline ourselves in that way there's no there's technology that can help us level up in that regard but otherwise we just got to learn to do that better as individuals after that going to the systems level you guys are going to create that future and i can't wait to see it i know you have something to say daniel i'm sure you have a wonderful follow-up because thank you max that was amazing yeah i i think about the the quest for absolute truth and that's an interesting way to go but what i think is happening is we're introducing markets more and more into our interactions with each other and by introducing markets you're going to come up with this this ability to do a gamestop style play and so markets are also a strategy game and because the hedge fund strategy was well understood the gamestop strategy was able to work at some point that strategy will have a counter and a counter but now we have market dynamics regulating our interactions with each other as opposed to um and the problem with the market dynamics is you know when you're in smaller communities you have a range and we calibrate all of our thinking based on range you know kahneman and thinking fast and slow they talk about how when you would show people higher numbers they'd be willing to pay more and you show them lower numbers and then they pay less so i've thought about the news thing and i think there should be an i think one of the most amazing tech is erc20 because there's over half a million just on the ethereum chain alone and they all work with all the wallets and some of these do wildly different things and others keep it very simple just by following the key methods so um i think about kovid and um i think about how when kovitz started it was it was deaths and then it became hospitalizations and then it became case count and and we just kept moving and it was you could never comprehend the scale of the numbers so what if we had an erc20 standard for especially public policy public health kind of things that the author could put in the bottom to normalize this so that you don't come and feel like you know because we've all done again when you zoom in on markets too think about your view as a trader on the six hour versus the lifetime and you we've lost that we don't have that zoom so we can't understand the market that we're dealing with um i hope that that makes sense no that's great and and the what we saw during covet was one of the reasons that i think this conversation is so important you know without even being woo we were watching people get taken off of youtube for recommending taking vitamin d you know like very simple things we were watching get censored and i think it's really important that this community starts pioneering some of the things that are going to be solutions to this to making sure that we are able to share information with each other and it's not decided for us and john you're doing some really interesting things with global leaders to make sure that we promote those yeah sometimes i think they're the problems but no so you know when you look at you know like you're saying the game stop um issue where you have people banding together to to uh to change the truth to reality i think that's that's a problem but i'm more worried about the control structures that people have you know the point one percent of the population that has most of the wealth that wants to control us and control what we think and control what we see and you know when you look at what's happening they you know the financial interests in the media the media you know different people and different areas see different things depending what the media wants them to see or as we were talking about yesterday you know depending on who you are searching google you'll see different results so they're deciding what you see and that reflects how you debate and how you discuss things with people and i come from dc i have a lot of friends that are in the military some people in three letter agencies and there's something called a psyop if you went to school to get involved in in a warfare you know a lot of what we do now is psychological operations when you look at what they do and how they do it a lot of it is it's not about facts it's about emotions how you get people emotionally charged when people become emotionally charged on an issue the logic and the critical thinking goes out the door and you know it's a really vicious cycle and that causes people to go further and what happened now i mean most people have issues in families and friends where you're now divided over different issues and you know it's easy to think that's organic but it's not organic there's people that want that division that want to control you and for financial gain or control and a lot of that is planned out i mean there's textbooks that are written on how to do this and most of us didn't take those classes so we don't realize what's going on but i have had some discussions with some people that were involved in in those operations and you say well what's happening now doesn't that kind of seem like a psyop and they they kind of say yeah it kind of does i want to just riff on this because it's absolutely a good point um there if if you want to look it up there's a really good essay by a guy named jordan hall called understanding the blue church and the idea of the blue church is this is this control structure this hierarchy hierarchical apparatus has pretty much held its way since the medieval times when the church uh gave you all of the morality and it gave you all of the knowledge the scribes in the church were the same people who were you know meant to administer morality and this was hierarchical the medieval form right the medieval guilds were structured in very much this way well so now you have this this thing called the mainstream media and um the mainstream media used to be a bunch of reporters right and these reporters were that was it wasn't seen as it being a job that was any different from you know driving a truck or doing whatever it was like you're a reporter and you're a cub reporter or you're a beat reporter you do your thing you ask a bunch of questions you try to verify it two or three different ways but slowly with time the control structure of there was a this strange attractor control structure uh of of journalism got taken into the control structure of the blue church which is basically the idea that knowledge should be dis understood and disseminated by elites so right opinion came out of higher education right opinion came out of abc nbc and cbs right opinion good opinion came out of and so on and so you got this this this gravitational pull into this hierarchical control structure and i think the blue church apparatus is a really good description of it if you want to see understanding the blue church it's an article you can google or not google pre-search i prefer pre-search more on that later um and the interestingly what we're seeing now is that there is a status associated with that uh my new friend lisa uh reminded me of this in conversation just a little while ago that it's not just that they're losing money that the mainstream media organizations that are hierarchically arranged are losing resources to indie media folks so then they go over and say okay we're losing our asses to indie media who's got the indie media big tech so they have learning that they need to collude and moralize with big tech in order to maintain that power and now of course we're seeing stuff like jin saki come out and say so we're working with facebook to just snuff out disinformation you want to talk about an affront to the first amendment yes they're private companies but let me tell you um the the veiled threat of we're gonna we're gonna mess you up and your hierarchical organization up if you don't play ball is is just as good as censorship by proxy so it doesn't matter what team you play on red blue left right whatever that that old is the problem is it doesn't matter once someone commandeers the the wheels of authority at the very top their interests hold sway so the decentralization space is is going to to really give rise to a whole bunch of uh let's call them um i don't know a hive mind that wants to understand the world and share information and yes there's going to be a lot of garbage on youtube and on facebook and people are going to share stuff that's wrong and inaccurate and all that stuff but i say that is better than this blue church apparatus this hierarchical controlled structure that is somehow anointed as clean and fresh smelling and gives us the right and the good that is a terrible and dangerous idea the idea of a monopoly on truth is wrong and it's dangerous and you're absolutely right we've gotta we gotta fight back against that well and amen [Applause] one of the things that we talk a lot about in this space is the fact that you know we're getting rid of gatekeepers right we've done studies we've seen that there is a stereo like a dopamine cycle that happens when you have a little bit of power over people that then becomes reinforcing and so then people keep trying to find it and max you said in your talk this morning talking about when power you know when you have absolute power and it corrupts absolutely we keep ending up with these systems and something that i've you know i have taken from you is talking about how it's not the the person in the office that's the problem it's the office like what we have built is now enforcing these kinds of things and you know marshall mcluhan who you quote quite often talks about how we shape our tools but our tools shape us and thinking about how much the cell phone has changed the way that you communicate with people thinking about what peer-to-peer technology is going to do in terms of changing the way that we interact with each other and take some of that power back and daniel you've got some really interesting ideas in the way that different kinds of you know going back to the church and different kinds of authority are shifting now do you want to riff on any of that yeah i was just thinking about um really what's um we when you talk about the media everybody says oh they used to have all this power and and everything because we had uh you know geographical monopolies for every newspaper right so they they were local monopolies and um at the time they made more money by selling a center uh of the country opinion but what happened is as we move into personalization our individual ideas are allowed to go and that mass center disintegrates you can't have the the mass media style businesses and then the hyper personalization is coming in but we continue to have the ability to actually express ourselves more but they keep trying to shape us back into that better business model overall and um but but all of this you know knowledge and in the way that people report could be put into a graph and and once you have a graph i think about you know the knowledge stored in like the the the root structures of trees and mycelium they they have you know the the ages that it took to reach that agreement and and knowledge and since we're having to remap how we understand facts and how we understand things um because there is such a diversity of opinion and and and mental models working i i think that's that's going to be a really a hard step but the the thing that makes it harder is we're seeing an uncoupling of church and we saw church and state and that caused a revolution where now it's its money and state are being uncoupled as well and and they're not very comfortable with that and then uh really large corporate and uh federalism are merging together as well which is which is an unfortunate bond um because the the the the government has been kept from doing so many things but they're willing to trade power for influence into the private sector hey maybe you can delete these bank accounts maybe you can um censor these people you know we can't do it because we've got the first amendment and all these other things but you can because you're a private corporation so you know i think i think that was a threat model that wasn't modeled for in the constitution and we should we should update on that to to keep the power distributed so yeah our friend rick burton said something the other day he was talking about how uh we have open source technology but what if we had open state what if we had the community's eyes on some of the algorithms that they're using in the technology that's happening that's running most of our lives that we don't get to see yeah i think i think the key is um being able to bring your own whatever um so you know i would love to have if we had the if we had a common data standard for news articles then i would build myself because i'm a software developer a little bot that would would calibrate based on what what i know and it would help me to quickly uh collate and have a almost a color where where i would know coming into this article how much i trust this person and i think that um journalists can then build independent you know blockchain reputations if you will or or records where people can go back and you know you start putting predictions into a common format you can see how accurate they are in their prediction rate because you know nobody ever goes back and checks anything but by building by building the protocol hooks and there's a lot of builders here that's why i keep going to practical what we should build by putting this this data here you can create the knowledge graphs needed to help scale and help us to familiarize ourselves while allowing ourselves to individuate more if if that makes sense it does well and one of the things that i really love about decentralist conferences is that the people in the audience are just as smart as the people on stage so um if our friend joel wouldn't mind opening this up if people have questions i'm sorry to put you on the spot make you run around a bit but i would love to hear from you guys as well unless you guys want to keep riffing and we can keep this one hey hi shannon hi thanks for uh creating a space for this very important conversation that we're having here um so for me it all starts with the user i'm gonna actually start calling them humans to give them you know a face and a voice so two billion humans roughly show up every day to to get truth and to have a voice and and in over two decades they haven't had those things and you know they might be at the point where they don't think they even deserve those things right and so the question is before we start building a lot of things to sort of root ourselves you know the humans that our software serves how do we get people back in touch with the power of their voice and the power of truth well you know i can see with this platform that i was involved in when you can get 25 million actions and that's reach 25 million reaching out to a senator signing a petition and the thing spreads virally it shows that people out there want it and what's fascinating is that's even with when stuff gets posted on twitter it gets canceled it gets shadow banned so that could be even much higher if the shadow banning and that censorship wasn't occurring so i think people want to have a voice and i i do agree i think there's a lot of people that are demoralized um and there's also what's fascinating is some people don't even realize that their voice isn't being hurt because the shadow banning they put something out there nobody sees it and they don't even know that and that's that's a pretty scary thing and you said yesterday i mean they're they're controlling what we see what other people see and that's you know what their impressions are and so thank you okay so i really want to congratulate you not to abound and in that but there is three basic threats which are already upon us right now one of them is the fight f's recommendations the infrastructure bill and right now i just lost my train of thought with the other one cbdc is the upcoming announcement that the us is already working on at cbdc if any of those three things go through much of what everybody in this conference is working on much of what everybody else here believes in is going to go down the drain how do we fight that which is just like right around the corner yeah i mean that's and again this is this platform we're working on actually the code name for the for the web 3 version is victory and you know it's really about citizen engagement and so it's an action how can you actually let your senators know let your congressman know and it works i mean when these people start getting bombarded in phone calls they actually change their opinion but there's like we're seeing in canada right now i mean it's frightening right what's going on and that's you know you don't comply your way out of tyranny um so we have some really dangerous things going on and we have to i think we all have to get our voices heard and stand up and in these bills what's really scary is the infrastructure bill they slip in some very dangerous laws that take away more and more of our freedoms and people just don't realize that's going on i wanna i wanna i wanna turn this back on to you and everyone else in the room which is to say you guys tell us you're going to have to build a you guys are going to have to build our way out of this it's that an serious against the infrastructure deal yeah i know yeah i mean i because i actually i actually uh i would take it a step further we have to get more comfortable with the i with ideas that are more than just to to oblige to to oblige through phone calls and messages people in power whose power as far as i'm concerned is absolutely arbitrary i i don't want to play that game anymore and we need an army of people who are completely unwilling to play that game anymore because we are we're creating our own parallel institutions and it's going to get uncomfortable it's going to get hard but i think we have to do it we have to take risks doing it watching those truckers i'm sorry i know you might call me uh i don't know whatever that they're using to disparage those truckers right but what i'm what i'm arguing for is the foundations of human freedom and association and i think that that transcends appeals to these powerful bureaucrats who are the problem uh so we are we are engaged in a kind of an invisible war right now for those rights that must be built they can we cannot we cannot hope that they're just going to grant them to us by virtue of some abstract constitution or something we're just going to have to build it in parallel and i'm counting on you guys because i'm not the geek i'm the philosopher i can just stand by and go can you can you build this you know all right we have time for one last quick question so you're talking about the need for censorship-resistant media platforms but how would you address the problem with illegal content which would be likely prime you know point for shutting them down and just getting them out yeah yeah um you're you're always going to have illegal content and spam and and those kinds of things so you have to approach it from a two-prong approach one you have an application layer two you have the protocol layer um the protocols can defend that by creating spam taxes algorithms that figure out you know these are duplicates and stuff like that but by and large that that protocol should remain open and free because um without it it's why anybody here can go mint an nft there's no apple catalog to put your music in there's no you know google play store then on the application level you know i think most users would want to filter that out so the applications could then implement the kinds of filtering but i go back to the concept to bring your own where you should have a personal almost bot that gives your preferences you know on on how you want to see see the content because that's that's a personal thing but you can never stop uh copies and counterfeits from being made you know yeah um i would i would love to hear from from anyone here perhaps afterwards about the state of the art with respect to the decentralized uh web and mesh networking capabilities where we are with that getting away from sort of client server model as well as throughput with respect to these because they're going to have to be low low touch low bandwidth in these nascent networks whereas you know blockchains you know first layer stuff is really really heavy and difficult in these these nascent non-server-based networks as i understand it and correct me if i'm wrong techies i'm sure you can but they're i i'm the way i understand it is we need to be able to network with each other such that these centralized entities don't control the pipes and we got to get to that stage too all right that's all we have time for