Web3 and the Gay Agenda: Why the next web will be built by queer people and our allies with Val

All right. So, we have Val. Here we go. Yep. Go ahead.

All right. Thanks so much. Um, thanks for being patient. All right. We got the slides, so we're ready to go.

Um, so I'm going to be talking about web 3 and the gay agenda. Um, I have less than 20 minutes now, so I'm going to try to go pretty fast, but uh, you know, come along for the ride with me. It's going to be fun. Um, so yeah, I'm up here speaking um because I basically have this belief that there are only two possible futures for the next version of the web. And so the first web is the one that includes a lot of the technologies that are being talked about and used and hacked on at this conference.

And it's a web in which users have more control, apps are more transparent, and economic opportunities are distributed to more of the web's users. So this is the web of greener grass. It's not really like a radical departure from the web that we have today, but it is different. It's new. Um it uses crypto.

Um and it rewards a new generation of tech entrepreneurs. The second possible future for the web is something that is almost impossible to imagine or describe. And that's because we've never seen anything like it before. It's a web that includes many technologies, most of which are yet to be built. many have not even been conceived of yet.

Um, and I think that's like pretty exhilarating. So, based on the way that both of these versions of the web are portrayed, they actually have uh ideological similarities, but their practical implementation is necessarily diversion. And so, the second version of the web is far more radical than just grass that's a deeper shade of green. It's one that will actually increase the quality of human life and have a positive impact on billions of people across the world. Um, and that's because it is the collective vision of most uh the most underestimated communities in our society today.

And this is the web that is built by queer and trans communities of color and our allies. So, now that we've kicked off the context of what I'm talking about today, um, who am I? I'm Val. I am one of these queers. Um, I'm a core developer for Ceramic.

Um, and in my free time, I run a D web education program called Future Proof. I've been doing that for the past couple years. And during that time, I've seen a lot of examples of how my trans friends of color get the why of web 3 much faster than other people that I'm teaching. Um so this talk uh I wrote this to kind of explore like the reason behind that um and also what it means for the future of the web. So I want to start with um just some terminology.

So I'm going to be referring a lot to QT bipo communities. So this stands for communities made up of queer, trans, black, indigenous folks um and other people of color. And then for the sake of the talk um I'm also including like allied communities. So that could be communities that share some of the these identities, not necessarily all of them. And then also people um who are in some way marginalized, facing crisis, uh mistreatment, uh oppressive rule, etc.

Um so that's that definition. And then I'm going to be talking a lot about uh the type one web. So I'll use this to describe um a combination of both the web 3 and the dweb. Even though I acknowledge that web 3 and the dweb are not the same thing, but for the purposes of this talk, they're like pretty much synonymous. So, I'll use them interchangeably.

Um, and I'll refer to them as the type one web. And my definition here for the type one web is really uh any variation of the web that is not created by the aforementioned identity groups. All right. So, now we also have the type two web. So, this is what I consider to be the radical web.

And the only web that's truly different from our existing social paradigms and one that's truly radical is a web that's built and driven by black trans people. Um, this phenomenon is enough of a departure from like this current trajectory that we're on to like knock us kind of out of the orbit of where we're going in the web today. And even without knowing much about the details of what the type 2 web would look like, we can already get a sense of the impacts that it's going to have. The impacts are clear because their values and strategies of QT bipo communities um are already in practice today and they exist to solve the problems that we're facing today. So one of the core values is to make it possible for the most underestimated and marginalized people in society to thrive.

And that means that everyone can thrive. And that's the gay agenda. So that clears up the title for you. Um, today web technologies are already used towards these aims. Um, so we're already using them as tools and resources to support QT bipok folks.

Um, and it's important to recognize that the strategies that are being practiced have been developed and learned out of necessity. So the community is thriving and that is essential to the community surviving. All right. So based on the way that the type one web and the type two web are portrayed, they have similar ideological uh philosophies. So uh here are the D web principles.

the D web movement um has this set of kind of guiding principles and these principles are very much related to other principles that you'll see um across other marginalized groups of people. So, uh, the indigenous data governance principles, um, the Detroit digital justice coalition and the principles that they have, feminist principles of the internet. There's a lot of similarities here, but in the deep web, they kind of break it down into these five categories. So, technology for human agency, distributed benefits, mutual respect, humanity, ecological awareness, and uh, I recently was talking to a friend who actually went to DEB camp uh, this past summer. Maybe some of you also attended.

um she happens to be a black woman and she was talking about her experience there and saying how weird it was that they kept having these conversations about people who were just not at present at DW webcam. So this is really indicative of one of the major problems that we have in the space today. This is from the web 3 foundation's website. Um it's striving towards similar aims to the db, but of course there are some differences. Um but on their website they're saying you know the passion is to bring this decentralized and fair internet where users control their data identity and their destiny.

So uh five years ago Gavin Wood gave this talk I think it was in Switzerland um where he actually said we are by nature centralized beings and we see the world in a centralized way. So this statement by Gavin Wood is extremely euroentric. It's not a fact. It's just a reference to a culture that is shared by roughly 20% of the world. So no shade to Gavin, but this is also a great example of the problem that we have in the space.

So the problem is that you know while we have uh these ideologies in the type one web that draw heavily from uh the QT bipo movements, the people who are actually trying to build based upon these ideologies have comparatively no experience living them. Right? So for this reason, QT BIPO communities are actually the only group of people who are suited to create a web that actually puts the ideologies into practice. Our communities have laid the groundwork for what the type one web so often claims to be striving for. So the work of civil rights movements, gay rights movements, trans rights movements, they've all firmly placed our community in a position to make this type two web a reality.

All right. So, now I've talked a lot about like ideologies and the overlaps between type one web and type two web and I want to go further and talk about the practical overlaps um the areas of divergence and then also things we might be able to expect to see in the type two web that lack technical precedence today. First is community. Communities are our source of resilience. They enable us to survive.

uh there are sources of joy enable us to thrive and when we're in a community of people who can empathize with us um we have that feeling of support that helps us in the face of adversity. So we go out and we seek media and experiences that validate and reflect our own experience and then we can gain this sense of belonging and connection. Strong communities are made up of people who develop mastery over the interface by which they communicate. And so this means that uh they're learning how to communicate most effectively and that's collaborating, making decisions together, settling disagreements, um adapting to the unexpected together. And they're doing this with consideration for individual differences in that communication style.

So that means in language, in tone, in speed, in medium, right? This only works if you consider each person in your community to be worthy of this type of attention. So strong communities care for each person inside of them equally and they also acknowledge that treating everyone the same is actually not bene the most beneficial thing for the collective group. Now in the context of the decentralized web mastery over our interface means developing a protocol by which peering nodes can communicate that accommodates both the expected and the unexpected. So this is already present in a lot of our peerto-pe systems.

um they're designed for fault tolerance. So by using redundant forms of communication, we ensure that peers have a way to coordinate in the fast in the face of like a node going down as an example. But what's missing is the sense of equality between peers. So in web 3 today, we tend to treat all of our peers the same even though we don't see them equally valuable, right? So that results in these like explicit and implicit hierarchies.

And so our expectations for how peers operate is super static. And then when peers don't meet that expectation, we either just like ignore them or we replace them. So the nature of peer-to-peer in web 3 today is really just like this competitive game where nodes are forced to cooperate with each other, but only so that they can be the winner of the game. And that's effectively what a blockchain is. But we have a way to like reframe uh the way that we think about peering relationships and we actually have a set of tools that we can employ right now to do this.

So this is the first place where I see a gap between the type one web today and what queer and trans bipo communities are actually doing to stay strong. both type one and type two web they can use these mechanisms to distinguish between peers in order to increase good behavior and minimize like disruption or bad behavior. So that would be like localized reputation systems, fraud proofs to detect if there's bad actors, random sampling as form of accountability, um or just like designing your system so that there's little to no reward for actually acting dishonestly. And with these techniques, the web two web can actually uh the type two web can actually maintain structure where each peer is of equal value. Um and that means that we have this system where as long as people coordinate and agree upon a protocol and act with some honesty and integrity, we can actually keep that system very flat.

All right. So the next thing I want to talk about is sharing. Sharing is another one of these like very common practices in queer communities. Um, and a lot of us here, I'm sure, like grew up hearing the phrase sharing is caring as we were children. But somehow in modern uh, American society, it's not really something that we see often.

So instead of sharing, we expect people to earn so that we can exchange with them. And instead of sharing, we expect people to beg so that we can then donate to them. So I want to like define what sharing really means. This is the way I think of it. I think of sharing as a practice to give people useful things.

And this can come in many forms. It can be uh an act of aid during a time of crisis. It can be an act of giving. Um it can be an act of resiliency to prevent a single point of failure. So QT BIPO communities again share because of mutual understanding of their experiences because of empathy and compassion.

In 1969, the Black Panther Party started the free breakfast program and that resulted in them sharing food freely with 20,000 kids that year. That was in Oakland, California. That same year was the Stonewall riots in East uh Greenwich Village of New York City. And that was where trans women of color fought against police brutality. And then they went on the black trans women started sharing their houses in New York City.

And they were doing that in the 1970s um during the like kind of development of the ballroom scene. And they were doing this work to help keep each other out of homelessness, right? So they're just sharing freely. These are the examples of what sharing looks like. Um and today these communities uh are still doing this, right?

because they're still faced with these adversities. Um, so they still use means like sharing home-cooked meals with each other, sharing clothes, sharing skills, uh, helpful information. So, the concept of sharing is actually something that's heavily vocalized in web 3 and the D web, but it's still considered under this framework of exchange whenever we talk about sharing compute or sharing storage. And it's still considered under this framework of charity. Whenever we talk about grants or public goods funding as a ways to get communities what they need in the type two web, we can expect that peers will share storage and compute freely because decentralizing these resources leads to greater redundancy and resiliency of their systems.

We can also expect to see peers sharing responsibilities and that's because we already know that it's an effective practice for marginalized communities. In the type one web um nodes are hyper specialized and that's really limiting in terms of their peering relationships. It also constrains the set of total actors then that can participate in decentralization. But in contrast, if we have a network of a fluid topology in which roles can rotate between peers, then skills can be distributed and so can accountability. And this prevents concentrations of power and knowledge which keeps the group structure flat.

Um it keeps peers engaged in meaningful ways rather than just like doing trivial participation. And all of this results in a network that is more resilient to external forces and internal conflict. All right. So now let's talk about governance. Once we have our community formed, governance is the practices that we use to determine how we're going to work together and collaborate.

So QT BIOP BIPO communities determine their form of governance and they do this very intentionally through agreed upon norms, expectations um and decision-making frameworks that are supporting their goals. And then from there trust is established as the community members uh engage in these practices and learn how to use their governance structure to make progress. Cryptography is this awesome thing because it happens to be super useful for de developing uh a digital form of trust and of course digital identity. So both of these things are um extremely essential for effective collaboration. So we can have these digital applications in which community members can identify each other with a high degree of confidence about who they are and we already have that in web 2 and we also have this in the type one web.

Um and then from there members can collaborate online and those collaborations can translate into actionable outcomes offline as well. So what I'm describing here is something that you're familiar with. It's like signal or element um these chat applications and then also in the type one web it's like DIDs that we use as identifiers for each other. So given that cryptography is this really effective collaboration tool, what does governance then look like? All right.

So all of us are familiar with the concept of consensus. Um but we really think about consensus in terms of you know what it technically means for the nodes that we run and very few of us actually practice consensus based decision-m in our daily lives. So what is consensus really? Consensus is where everyone agrees. There is an author and activist named uh Dean Spade and this is a quote from his book.

um he describes consensus as a radical practice for building a new world not based on domination and coercion. So while the standards groups and the Dows that we participate in today uh have governance mechanisms to like create proposals, iterate on them, turn them into actions. These groups overwhelmingly operate based on majority rule. On the other hand, we have mutual aid groups that support people in the most vulnerable times of crisis and they intimately understand consensus. That's because they practice it in order to keep their organizations alive.

So consensus takes into account all views um of all the participants in the community in order to sufficiently meet the needs of the collective. The practice of consensus is difficult. We know this and it's time consuming. We know that too. But it's also essential work in order to keep the community strong.

And it works when everyone in the group is committed to the same cause and value system. So without consensus, we have groups that stop treating each other equally inside of it. And that results in churn, power imbalances, which leads to dissolution. So the type one web is at a point of acknowledging the power of consensus both globally and locally in decentralized systems. However, in the case of governance, I think we're going to find that majority rule just isn't enough to build applications that are truly in service of the users and the Dow members who are contributing to their development.

In the type two web, uh the use of consensus and governance will lead to all those constituents just having higher levels of education about the systems that they are using so that they can make informed decisions in the process. So this is just because when people know that their opinions actually matter and that they have the power to directly impact outcomes, they have a stronger incentive to engage in that decision-making process deeply. All right, so moving on to self-determination. Self-determination is the ability to have control and agency over your life. Oh, I am way over time.

Okay. Um, so I'm going to skim through this really fast, but basically self-determination is another important practice in QT BIPO communities. Um, and what it allows us to do when we kind of apply that to the online sense is prevent uh vendor lockin, right? So we have the ability to kind of like move over to different applications or services and this is threatened by high switching costs. So in summary, we have ways to prevent um high switching costs.

We have things like interoperable data models uh that allow us to do exiting from a given protocol or migration to a new protocol. Um but the biggest threat really is the switching cost when it comes to self-determination and autonomy. So, one solution we might expect to see in the type 2 web is self-replicating services that actually, you know, continue to progress a given service even if you need to kind of diverge from an existing one. All right. And since I'm way over time, I'm going to skip to activism even though it's my favorite part of this talk.

Um, but what I'll do is uh connect with all of you and and share uh the notes later so that if you're interested, you can read it. um and they can always come over here uh stage right and answer you your question or they can ask you questions and you can connect with them there. We need to let the next perfect. Okay. So the last thing that I want to say is that there's a lot of work to be done um in the D web and web 3 in order to actually live these principles.

Um but a lot of that work is already happening. The reason I'm in the space today is because I saw black people in 2017 doing this work. I saw trans people in 2017 doing this work. So that's only going to continue. I still have a lot more questions and a lot to learn.

If you're interested in this as well, please connect with me. So QR code is there. VS sticky is my handle on Telegram. Thank you. I'm sorry I went over time, but thank you so much for listening.

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