Securing Free Speech in a Permissionless Future with Ben Rubin

Um my name is my name is uh Ben Rubin. I am uh CEO CEO and co-founder of Hinadair Labs. Um we're going to talk today about securing free speech in a permissionless uh future which is a big fraud topic. So uh I want to share my personal bias in free speech is that I believe that everyone is terribly flawed and uh also great at the same time and there are no exceptions. So um we're going to cover principles of design of uh decentralized communication network and we're going to cover um key opportunities that it opens up.

Um so I'm going to um I'm going to talk a little bit about why I'm here and then we're going to think about a new way to think about uh the attention markets the platforms and then we're going to talk about uh problems that arise from this new ideas and how it might work. So why am I here? Um I worked in communication my entire career. So 10 years ago I founded a company for consumer communication. Uh we built couple of interesting products.

Um one of them uh called Mircat died in 2016. Um was a live streaming project that got killed by Twitter. The other one was House Party which was uh had a good run from 2016 to 2021. uh had 100 million users and uh um died. Um and the reason I bring them up because they both died from interesting uh reasons.

One is because of an outside leverage uh and the other one from an inside leverage uh where we didn't the network kind of didn't control its destiny and got pulled down and essentially effectively died because of a of a leverage that did not exist. uh that did that was not from the constituents. Um so we're going to talk about how to secure the ability of humans to coordinate and collaborate and how to do it with networks that resist internal leverage and external leverage. So um I want to talk about the platforms um that we know today the Facebooks and the Twitters and give a new framework to think about them and I want us to think think about Facebook as an exchange like Coinbase or like NASDAQ and it's an exchange of the attention market and with that framework like think about if every post is a sale every interaction is a sale and every time somebody read the content is a buy order. And what it means it really help us kind of break down what is social network without all the fluff of the social and think about where are the dynamics of this exchange exist in this mar in this market which is essentially to take attention and move it around and profit from the volume.

So when we think about platforms in the current social network uh web two um there are a couple there are a couple factors that once you look at it as an exchange of an attention market uh influence uh how um bad actors and good actors behave in this setting. So the first thing is dishonest actors in are in these platforms are in an advantage uh advantageous position meaning they get to start over while honest actors lose their reputation. Um exchanges profit from volume. Dishonest versus honest attention is something that is really hard to prove. As I said we are all terrible and all great and we still don't know like what is good and what's bad.

um on on social networks. And um the problem with that is that dishonest actors tend to create volume and that works with the exchanges interest because they profit from volume. And the last part is that all participant must uh in in the social networks, web two social networks, you have to stake your attention in order to participate. And the reason that's a problem is because the old price is not the new price. When social networks started, um the internet was free and people looked at it as some sort of a toy.

And they thought, all right, nobody's going to pay for social networks, so we might as well charge them for attention. And they took the attention and they wrapped it out and sold it as a derivative to another parties to bid. But as the market matured over the past 15 years, it it becomes clear that it has real world implication. But it still have a this weird price of attention inside of it. That means that people have, you know, they get they get job, they lose job, they get cancelled, they might you might elect the president, you might start a riot.

All this real world implication of social network, but the price inside is still attention. So we have these massive platforms that have real world implication. We have bad actors that are in a better position than the good actors and we don't really know what's good and what's bad. So if we want to think about okay how are we going to use how we going to secure free speech in web3 social in a decentralized communication network. So first we need to protect the system from inside leverage.

It means that we need to do better definition of what is a understanding of what is a dishonest actor inside of the system and then we need to have better leverage over the dishonest actor of in the system. And we need to protect the system from outside leverage meaning it needs to be end to end encrypted and it needs to be fully decentralized. And in the core of it all, we need to move away from attention as the medium of exchange to value as the medium of exchange because otherwise we don't have leverage over the bad actors. The right side of it which is protecting system from outside leverage because of the context of this uh conference I assume that everybody here agrees that a network to protect a network from outside leverage we need it to be uh uh encrypted and fully decentralized. So I'm only going to focus on how to create a better definition of a dishonest actor in a commun decentralized communication platform.

Uh how to create a better leverage and how those things actually set the scene to move away from attention as the medium of exchange to actually uh look at attention at value as the medium of exchange. So how how we might go about it. So right now what is the definition of a dishonest actor? It's kind of what the platform decides is dishonest. And if you look at this purple dot, let's say it's a user post something really funny on social network and then bunch of people like it, bunch of people don't like it.

A lot of people from the people who don't like it really didn't like it. And in that case that content gets deplatformed. either the content get the platform or the user get sits on the bench for a little bit. Um what I would like to suggest and the opportunity that I think happens in a per permission per permissionless uh uh environment is that the actor is actually viewed a dishonest actor is actually viewed dishonest by the audience they address versus by the platform. And that can work in effectively creating sets of town squares where groups came together and decided of what are the terms that they are willing to be addressed, how people can address them and what would be the collateral if somebody behaves badly.

What this allows us to do is effectively allow the purple dot to have happy relationship in some of the groups and have a better conversation with the groups that it upsets about why uh they thought the content was upsetting. So moving from a centralized audience to decentralized audience actually helps us create better definition of what is honest and dishonest because it's just by the audience they address. Now, we need to create leverage on a dishonest actor. in. And what's really cool is once you have a set of groups that have defined um rules of how you can interact with them, they can actually say things like, "Hey, in our town square, if you want to address us, you need to put some collateral because if you behave in a dishonest way, we'll be able to uh uh um slash you effectively."

So looking at users actually as nodes who participate in the network uh and they're going to be penalized for bad bad work. That's also something that is really important to guarantee some sort of a discourse and a permissionless nature. Um and effectively how it can look like is a set of smart contracts that represent ownership, moderation, reputation, privacy and are all secured onchain. And when people execute read and write entitlements into the town square, they are able to then make a judgment and decide if something is honest or dishonest and then basically uh if they need to uh penalize, they penalize. So protecting going back to how we secure free speech.

We need uh we need to protect the system from inside leverage. Um that means that we want to create local governance secured via smart contract and uh understand that users are actually nodes that can get penalized on bad behavior. And what this is basically once we start thinking about those time squares as something that is programmable, you can lay the foundation of oh how can we then take those read and write entitlement and create stepping stones to move away from uh attention as a medium of exchange to value as a medium of exchange. Um so how might this um might work? Uh effectively once you have those set of groups that have their definition of how to address them and what are the terms and you can actually work against that in a permissionless nature and have right or read entitlement that group can decide oh I might create some uh um um read and write entitlements that are paid for meaning they can solicit contribution they can charge charge people for access and they can also facilitate some economic activity that is based on the trust that is by the reputation between them and that value essentially flows uh could flow back to what handles moderation, ownership, reputation um and and the network itself that facilitate that.

Um so yeah, I guess uh we're we're good. Um, so I mean we're talking about securing free speech uh in 15 minutes. So and it's kind of tough but on a high level um we want to protect the system that we build any decentralized communication network. We want to protect it from inside leverage meaning that bad actors that put content have some sort of accountability for their actions. So if if you want it to be permissionless, they there got to be some accountability.

So we're talking about local governance secured by smart contracts per group and we want to treat users as node that participate in some work in the network um that can get penalized. Then we didn't dive into this but we want to protect the system from outside leverage and in the bottom uh in in in the in the middle of all of this I guess is is we need to move away from attention as the medium of exchange and we need to focus on value as the medium of exchange and uh yeah great question uh questions and answers. All right, cool. Thanks. Um, if uh you're interested in learning about how something like this uh might uh look like as a product, we're building a product called Towns.

Uh it's a group chat protocol and an app. Um and this is kind of a fast way to get an access. So, thank you very much. [Music]