What Medium is Our Message?: Best Practices for Decentralized Social Networking with Nick Reynolds

a bit about how to apply media thinking to web3 just a bit about myself my name is Nick I'm a researcher and engineer at the identity team at consensus mesh r d and the specific project I primarily work on is called veramo talk about that a little bit later um so in the 1960s Marshall mcluhan developed a post-modernist school of thought concerning the role of media in society and he summarized it with the pithy phrase the medium is the message essentially this just means that the structure of media can be as important as the content it contains now to a degree this is sort of intuitively true when you read a poem you're not just reading the words of the poem you're seeing it in a specific structure and that has an effect on you in addition to the actual words um but mcluhan took this a little bit further and talked about how the structure of media reflects and affects the society that produces it as much as the content does he said that the medium or process of our time again this is the 60s electric technology is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life uh mcluhan believed that it was the invention of type that actually created linear or sequential thought at least on a societal level and then the invention of electronic communication ushered in a world of simultaneous happening so now people are you know viewing television broadcast listening to radio broadcast all at the same time all across the world and that that actually affected the way that society as a whole thinks um decades later the web and particularly social networks uh modulated that sort of asynchronicity of electric communication and added a new dimension of multi-directionality so now it's not just broadcast listen but both sides both parties are broadcasters and listeners so I want to think about if web3 sort of adds a new dimension to Collective thought and how do we use media thinking to evaluate and discover web 3. mcluhan had this diagram that he would work with called the tetrad of media effects it was a tool for generating questions you would consider a medium and then consider these four questions and how the medium relates to these questions um it's a tool for examining the structure of media it's also a medium itself um but the tetrat is meant to help the Thinker consider medium in relation to multiple processes simultaneously to inhabit what he called the all at once-ness inherent to electronic media so if we think that web 3 Maybe adds a new dimension to Collective thought we might need a thinking tool with New Dimensions and a tool I like to do this is sort of a visual 2D representation of a thought process um but it's to identify dualities or non-dualities or spectrums of concern consider those spectrums in relation to each other and then consider the medium in relation to those spectrums so I'd like to start off by kind of identifying talking about some of these spectrums or Dimensions or fields of concern uh the first is a concept called hyper reality this is uh term first described by philosopher Jean beaujard in simulacra and simulation it describes the inability to distinguish what is real from what is unreal and we see today that the maturation of fields like artificial intelligence and augmented reality are you know the they each demonstrate an ability to induce hyper reality maybe you've played a virtual game and even just for a fraction of a second forgot it was a game um or you've gotten into an argument with a uh account on Twitter that was just trying to steal your credit card because it's just software so hyper reality can be kind of beautiful it can be used to create new experiences that blend realities um but it can also be really dangerous um at the extreme hyper reality is essentially the same thing as psychosis it's like the definition of psychosis is the inability to tell what is real from what is unreal so we might think about how hyper reality affects these other spectrums uh another one of these would be cyborg identity this is a concept invented by Donna haraway in the late 70s in her work a cyborg Manifesto in which she rejected the rigid boundaries between human and machine between Hardware wet wear and software and contemporary disability activist Alice Wong she's a woman with muscular dystrophy and her daily survival is dependent on certain Technologies like a ventilator and a feeding tube to stay alive and she calls herself an Asian-American disabled cyborg she understands her own identity as part of the cyborg identity uh Spectrum so what are the types of questions that laying cyborg identity across these other spectrums might generate for us well what does it mean to Define human identity and what is civil resistance for cyborg communities um tools for civil resistance like captcha often don't consider people who have certain accessibility needs people who use screen readers uh have to use different forms of that you know civil resistance um Bitcoin passport similarly is a civil resistance tool that needs to consider cyborg identity so how do we provide access for cyborgs of different abilities and we should consider that while a human identity May evolve over the course of a lifetime human identity as a concept evolves over the course of all of our lifetimes uh lastly I'd like to talk about this concept of weapons and containers um in the uh I think it was the late 70s it might be the early 80s uh Anthropologist Elizabeth Fisher um wrote the carrier back theory of evolution and this is uh where it was suggested that it was the container rather than the arrow or the spear that was the most important tool for human development and that the you know sort of prioritization we give collectively to weapons um you know is probably a reflection of the dominance of patriarch in society rather than what was actually happening in early human development uh famous science fiction author Ursula K Le Guin then took this concept applied this mode of thinking to the structure of fiction suggesting that there was an alternative to the typical hero's journey that other structures ones that maybe resemble uh container could open up possibilities for narrative uh so what if we applied this mode of thinking to Media more generally or media and Technology more generally well you get to do some fun stuff like this uh you might consider the video game death stranding by hideo Kojima against this sort of three-dimensional space uh in desk training the character of Sam Bridges is a male surrogate mother for an unreal human baby weapon uh there's a researcher out of Spain named Carla Baris who's written a lot on the subject of um gender in the home assistant so you might consider whether companies like Alexa weaponized female identity to make their form of surveillance uh capitalism more palatable to people so how do we consider our New Media or web 3 against these spectrums real quick what is web3 uh Jay Graber defines web 3 as user-denerated Authority enabled by self-certifying web protocols I think that the definition you may be able to add the word composable I think that's you know important enough to put in the actual definition of it um what is user generate Authority decentralized identity allows users to map their identifier to public identification pieces they control their identity and their discoverable publicity what a self-certifying mean that means that cryptography is able to prove the correctness of State without a trusted intermediary it requires self-serve self-custody requires open source has to be decentralized and has to be accessible and composable web protocols well we know that permissionless composability enables the rapid iterative preservative production of New Media we've seen this with defy with money Legos and we want to consider this as web 3 more broadly besides modular protocols so how do we discover a web that's able to handle cyborg identity that's able to build a room for safe exploration of hyper reality well maybe we build it as a composable container we err on the side of composability to build protocols equipped for knowns and unknowns so what might the composable web stack look like well the Social Web stock requires identity requires data and requires communication so these are all just a subset but what my identity looked like well it could be an email account phone number blockchain address ens name or it could be the did the did is a standard for composable identity what my data look like well in web 2 it's plain text or its database entries um or web3 world it's maybe a blockchain state or signed messages of certain types the verifiable credential is the composable container for data and um in terms of private or semi-private communication we have a lot of different protocols from regular mail email Twitter and Instagram DMS signal something like xmtp and then we get to didcom which is an open standard a composable container for communication so the composable web stack at least for 75 percent of the web could look like something something like this the did plus the verifiable credential plus did come the did handles our identity it allows us to extend identity to handle all types of identity that currently exist types of identity that might exist in the future the verifiable credential is an extensible container for trust blocks um allowing you to you know cryptographically prove things an extensible way and did com is an extensible container for end-to-end encrypted communication what do these all have in common well they're all public goods they're all Open Standards and they're all developed and maintained through cooperation of many different parties but they allow for competition Within These Frameworks uh to talk a little bit about didcom as an example of that did come as a composable framework for magic secure communication it's transport agnostic it handles the end-to-end encryption part and allows users to determine how they want those messages to actually be passed that might be HTTP or libp or waku or xmtp it could be through a Bluetooth mesh Network it could be through the traditional Postal Service it works over normal internet through decentralized networks when the internet is down and it has programmable actions that you can take on it so-called didcom sub protocols it enables Unstoppable end-to-end encrypted communication with it you can do things like say I'm spending 30 days at a remote cabin with no internet access I can be if in an emergency I can be contacted via messenger pigeon it also has transport failover which means that you can use https when everything is great and when things stop working great when you're when you're maybe protesting against an authoritarian government and that government shuts down the cell towers shuts down the internet you're able to fail over to the Bluetooth mesh Network that's maintained that your same all the rest of the communication stack is the same your messages are the same your identity is the same everyone still knows who you are it's not a different application it's just a different transport Within vidcom uh again I uh I work on a team called veramo it's a free and open source composable framework for web3 identity data and communication so as much as I think that web 3 should be built as a composable container the project I work on called varama we build it as a composable container you can bring any did type you want um any any did method any type of verifiable credential from Erp 712 Json LD all different key types you can bring any storage mechanism you want whether it's a local on a database in a metamask snap on something like ceramic you get to choose because it's fully composable so what's missing here the only thing that's missing is the composable container for social we have a lot of really great web 3 social products out there um and there needs to be an open standard for how you can compose all of these social protocols into one thing that we can understand uh I would say actually the team at Blue Sky is the closest to building this uh they have something called the at protocol um so something like that but even more generalizable and more composable what will it look like it will look something like an RSS feed discovered via a did document it won't have a brand name managed by a company it will be an open standard you'll be able to discover people's posts through their did document um yeah so that's that's the end of my talk um thank you all for listening foreign