WinPrivacy / EthSwarm | Decentralized Media as Infrastructure for Resistance - Migle Rakitaite

[music] All right, I'll try to be brief and I'll try to bring a different perspective on blockchain and privacy and go a bit beyond traditional finances and hopefully get you a bit more inspired to look beyond cryptocurrencies when we're talking about privacy, self-s sovereignty, and look at the different technologies that companies are currently building for resilience and media to me is a very close topic because quite unexpectingly I ended up studying for my alma matter in Amsterdam University media and the title of the bachelor's was media and culture and I was incredibly passionate about journalism documentaries and capturing emotions and telling the stories and one of the first years classes that I had to attend was cyber warfare and our professor was a lieutenant of a high rank of a Dutch military. He would come to every class dressed in his attire of the military. And to connect the two dots for me, it didn't take too long because originally I'm from Lithuania and for my country, Brazilians through media comes incredibly close due to the occupation and decades of not being allowed to say what we wanted to say. So media studies and media overall has this soft reputation. And a lot of the times these days also being pushed to the algorithmic touches of what do we get to see?

But to me I really want to claim that it is a tool. It is a territory and it is also a weapon. The media itself and the way we choose to convey media is medium is the message. So if we choose to continue even promoting all of the beautiful privacy things that the rest of the speakers are sharing in the other rooms, if we continue making those communications through Twitter and live streaming our podcasts through Twitter, we defeat the whole purpose of all of the technical things that the folks are building because at any time that one platform holds all of the ability to be shut down. So I really wanted to answer a question of who gets to delete the record because in this very case if we continue with having centralized networks all of those platforms has the power to delete it and in the future also change it.

So I want to answer it and before I get into the blockchain and how it connects to streaming and media and how and what you can do today already uh I want to take a bit back to the history of media overall. So a lot of the people imagine media indeed as maybe one platform like Twitter or they even imagine media as a newspaper. But media at the core of it is all of the technologies. It's also the institutions and the practices through which information and culture is created, distributed and interpreted. So the media has the power to shape who can speak, what becomes visible and how meaning is understood and what society chooses to remain that information for.

And Lisa Galman is a theorist of the media and she wrote a wonderful paper in 2006 kind of describing what the different particles the media uh has given you access. So the carrier is you can imagine like a paper that's where the media travels from. And a lot of people surprise when I say this uh example but the first form of media was fire. This is how tribes were communicating to each other through viewing on the hill and seeing the smoke. So let's assume for this analogy that the carrier was the fire and the smoke and the light coming from it.

Then there are protocols around the media. In this very case with the fire, the protocol is what does the smoke mean? Is it coming in a circular motion? Is the fire bigger than usually? And that is what the community agrees upon.

So that is the community part who shares the code and they choose how the information circulates within one each other. Then you have the power who sets those terms. Is it the leaders of the tribe? Is it the community that gathers together and understands? Funny enough, running down centuries and centuries back, there are already written proof that scammers existed even in that form of media when they're communicating the wrong information to the different tribes about who is coming for them in terms of the animals perhaps that they are being a friendly tribe and in reality wanting to take over their corpse.

So it is interesting to note that media and scams have always had a broken access to it when it comes to the protocol the people who create the rules and people who have the ability to change those rules as well. Now if the signal of at its core is what travels and then the code itself becomes what it means then the receiver needs to understand what it retrieves. So in some sense the media is also about time and distance. So if the fire solves the distance but not a memory because the smoke disappears in the thin air and it takes not a long time for it not to be recorded. But then incription it solves the memory but not the distance per se.

So every medium makes a default with the time and again at the university we went through the time and space and that was for one whole year we studied about how media travels through the spaces and this is where we started to unravel what the platforms mean and what power they hold within each other. You can see that the durability and momentary and again using the smoke the momentary would be somewhere around here in the p in the power of what smoke can stay and it was incredibly local. So the form of communication of media through power would be momentary and local. Meanwhile, the encryptions on the stone have the ability to stay for a distant future because they were recorded on a stone and they have the ability to be durable to stay for centuries that even till this day scientists continue recovering the information. So the inscription it is local and durable.

The distribution archive it is far durable shared and has the custody. The platform is far but it's persistent and it has a private rules. The broadcast is far and fleeting. Meanwhile, beon it is far and brief. Something like the fire that you could claim.

So if a picture warning fire on a hill, it crosses a valley in seconds. It may solve the town's issues for the night, but by the morning the flame will be gone and there will be no witnesses. So now the carve of the message into the stone is something the only thing that keeps the me message A beacon, it defeats its distance and encryption defeats the time. So fire coordinates the presence, but the stone speaks to the future. And I'll connect all of these dots in a moment, and it will make sense why this is so relevant to the blockchain industry as well.

So if the media shape how societies coordinates across the territory and preserve memory across the generations, digital platform seems to kind of end that bargain and that offer because one can post and reach millions instantaneously and remain searchable for years. But again, a company became both the keeper and the reacher of the memory. So we're giving the platforms the fire, the power to be the time and the space. And it ranks itself what travels and it decides what remains visible through obvious algorithmic changes in our technology. So blockchain culture already understands the danger.

Um that's why we're here in a privacy conference. And then blockchains do protect the shared state from the unilateral revision. And in my opinion, decentralized media protects shared memory from an lateral erasure because it holds in the power of the community rather than one of the individuals that make the rules. If the node operators can continue sharing the power of the knowledge, it depends on the community what they continuously decide to share with one another. So if the platforms now has the ability to delete our information to also feed the information that we would want to see based on our algorithmic or political intentions of the platforms who controls the public memory and how can we assure that it's not going to be deleted for the futures I claim that the platforms are acting like six institutions because they are respons responsible for all of those different matters of the media discovery, identity, application, naming, hosting, payments, and appeal.

And this is from the ethnography of the infrastructure. And Susan Lane, she was a research study on specifically time and space and how media and sociology affects that. And in her essay she claims that the infrastructure goes through the daily use of the failure and repair. So infrastructure is rational and it exists through who people are trying to do and who they're trying to communicate. So when it works and people don't see the issues, they don't they don't really they take it for granted of what information can reach each other.

It gathers into your routine and you don't think that any media that we share or want to preserve goes through all of these steps and the platforms that we are deciding to share them through the medium that we choose to communicate the media through gathers all of the power to all of the six um infrastructural points. So you click play and you see a video and you don't really see the seven layers of dependency on that one platform and failure. It makes each of the layers dependent. If your Twitter account gets hacked or if your Twitter account gets taken down by the platform itself, you might be starting to think on which layer of this they decided to punish you and for what reasons and what power they had to make that decision. So the infrastructure works, but the addresses do not resolve the naming.

And a decision blocks access with no route to change it or appeal it. Each question asks whether a record still has a route into the public life. And one break can hind the whole record without deleting it. And this method truly reveals and asks the question that once the hidden layer appears when the platform has the power of the media, we can ask who owns them and why we keep on giving the platforms all of the hats to be the leaders in those six aspects. So obviously the convenience the UX and the infrastructure that we have because we do have alternatives even places like blue ski in regards to the Twitter but the convenience that's what becomes the control when every dependency has the exact same owner.

And I wanted to show how power enters the record before anyone even deletes it because deleting the power of the records or failing into one of those six infrastructures is a completely different story as well. So this is from a Michael Trrollout who is another media theorist and he studies how history acquires silence and silence begins long before anyone burns or deletes an archive in enters at four moments. The points to create um point to assemble and point to retrieve and to signify and to create. Creation is what even is recorded. What do we input into the media?

What speaker is allowed to publish. Again, we hold the media platform through which we communicate the platform who makes the decision what is allowed to be published. Then when we talk about the assemble, what is store, what is indexed, what information, metadata they also received while taking our input of the media. And I'm trying to be incredibly careful with this talk and very theoretical not to include my own political beliefs. But clearly a lot of this and I do encourage you to philosophize or think about certain ideologies, political beliefs, and how platforms are shaping what decisions you're making.

Even within our own industry and the tools, the different ledgers, the different wallets that you choose to use, you're also being influenced by one platform, not even the company behind it. Because even the retrieval, the third part is raises a question. Can a journalist, a researcher or machine find that information again? it if it was taken down and who it was taken down by. Then you can point to the signify the fourth the public meeting.

Does it become part of history that people actually remember? Did it retain it of how it was showed? Did it have a bolded letters of typography due to the bot ad space or was it briefly showed to a very few people due to the algorithmic choices of how rankable your personal profile is on that specific media? So I reckon can potentially survive first and the third of the stages but it can fail at the fourth of how the people retain the information because of how it was also communicated. So a permanent storage cannot recover an event that was never even recorded by the platform itself not by the humans that might have attempted especially in the digital age.

So a content hash cannot give the cultural missing context. An accessible file cannot force society to care. Resilience means protecting routes across each stage and far beyond keeping the bites. And I wanted to give an example of 2010 week leaks that showed the pressure across those routes and how it worked in practice. So the case of the infrastructure analysis is not the endorsement of Wikileaks per se but the pressure arised across the whole stack.

So Amazon withdrew the hosting every DNS withdrew the naming. PayPal blocked the payments. Visa and Mastercard blocked the card rails and mirrors kept the copies alive. The file survived yet the original routes of how it was published did not and no single deletion order was ever even needed for this to happen. So censorship worked by closing services around the record.

Poppies protected one layer of the information but they could not restore the naming, the payments or the distribution. So Wikileaks made the stack of how media infrastructure is made very very visible under the pressure and I wanted to discuss how most silency look looks like in friction and not even deletion that at the end of the day it's not even about that the platforms will also delete your information but again medium is the message how we choose to communicate is incredibly important. So deletion deletion makes the headlines. Everyone talks about when your content is being deleted, but the fricture friction on a daily basis is much deeper because when you watch the record lose reach one gate at a time, recorded, accepted or indexed or recommended or monetized or remembered again. Recorded means that the evidence exists and the accepted means that the platform permits it.

Indexed means search can resurfaced can be resurfaced. Recommended means distribution. Monetized means that creator can continue and remembered means that the record enters the culture that society retained that piece of information and the culture. And Lee and Kim examined the algorithmics and how we perceive culturally in a society the information and creators talk about the hidden rules of the platforms again using the Twitter as an example of if you post at this time if you follow these specific rules or formatting if you don't add the links X Y and Zed will happen right we all heard about those the timing the wording the topic All of those things we keep in mind and subconsciously we start altering our mind and our information because what rules were dictated by the platform even before we uploaded that piece of information. So resistance has always buil been built um to have another route and digital memory can survive being renewed as well.

To me digital memory is not a stone that will be remembered especially in the platforms the way that they are shamed and the digital memory can be described as enduring through repeated renewal. So upload creates a reference and unfinding buys availability repair recovers gaps and migration follows changing the tools. So rediscovery carries the context to a new audience and formats change links decay. So who repairs the context and who continues to carry that specific context? If keeping a record alive creates duties towards the people inside of it and whether we will be able to retrieve the information that is truthful about it and very quickly that it does change how we moderate the information and point to the evidence to the consent and source safety because the permanent does not need to make to be mean, to be public for everyone.

But what good is an uncensorable video if publication exposes the person inside of it and by the means that they were done because the platform has already collected their metadata way before they decided to share X or YZ opinion. And I want to claim that the decentralized storage is one of the only layer of the media that needs to be retained of how we perceive it. It's a decentralized hard drive is not decentralized media itself. So just if we would upload the information to decentralized storage, I do not claim that it immediately becomes decentralized media of itself. Right?

because I'm trying to explain here the theory behind of what happens before we even upload that specific media. So capture, encode, store, update, discover, access, and sustain. Every step has a distinct dependency and decentralized storage already changes how you're updating, how you're accessing, and how you're creating the sustainability around that content. and the content address chunks they can protect the integrity of the person who made the decision prior to the uploading the information. So I I say that using the record is like a resilience test and this is created by the journalists and activists of what creates the proper way of independent media and I do claim that the pathways of decentralized media hits almost all of the points of how to test if your media is being resilient.

So I wanted to give some examples of very practical solutions and what has already been done through Swarm Foundation because they've been working to figure out the ways to create the feeds for decentralized media not only to be uploaded but also to be streamed and on a very high technical level I'll invite you to watch a workshop of how today you can stream any content live content already on decentralized networks. But my main goal of this talk to explain why it is important for you to care as well. So these different projects that are already part of the swarm universe, there was a performance of live coding music that happened from five different DJs across the globe that connected through a decentralized network and performed one musical piece. Meanwhile, they were in completely different parts of the globe. Together, they created media piece of the music that was performed during Berlin blockchain week.

Then there is Ethera which is the decentralized video streaming service that you can go and create it for yourself. There is Wikipedia that is uploaded to the decentralized networks. And even one of the last community calls that the organization did, they did it through decentralized networks. They allowed the audience to make the choice through which medium they can consume the media and who carries it as a node operators the ability to continue to process the chunks. I wanted everyone to leave this talk with one key of the advice for the journalists and activists and developers and the creators that in order to enter the resilience and understand the privacy we need to start thinking way before we start uploading and what information we allowed to be fed into the platforms.

So the creators they own the reference to their own work and that is incredibly important to attach your own self when you're creating the piece of media and understand what is your tech stack in terms of the privacy and dependency of the platforms. Am I sure that my information and my shared opinion is already not being forced to be X Y or Z because of the platform that I'm choosing to publish this information on? As a journalist, you need to separate the source from the record. And the source can be the cultural context that matters that cannot be seen in the hashes. This is something peculiarly interesting for the blockchain because more often than not we will say a line of code, a hash, an address, but the context and the analysis behind it is that what gives us more information.

However, we need to understand how to receive the media in order to read that cultural context. Now for the activists, they need to think about how to multiply the roots to the audience, how to diversif rem remaining dependency because the Swarm Foundation does not claim that they figured out the answer of the centralized streaming. they understand that there's still dependencies in that seven layers that I tried to explain of how media actually and platforms function and what responsibilities they have. However, I do invite the developers to keep on reviewing when they're sharing media, especially on decentralized networks or using decentralized storage at what pi point of those seven layers they're still vulnerable being influenced by the platforms by the algorithmic behaviors and by that one someone on the top of the umbrella that might be deleting this information for the from the future generations. So in my opinion, a resilient record has no single point that can erase its existence, its route or its meaning.

It's just that we're quite far away from the complete completion of it. Um there are more than few different workshops where you can learn from for example decentralize your front end of your website. If you're here today hosting any website, you can already decentralize the front end of it. You can also stream your podcasts, any of the media that you can communicate through decentralized network. So I invite you to go and learn.

I invite you to go and follow. Swan Foundation is a nonprofit organization. Again, the type of platforms that are being given to you are incredibly important. So it's important to mention that. And if you want to contribute, if you are interested about this topic more, I do invite you to talk to me here or later when you have a moment because only together when we understand the theoretical truth why we need to go beyond understanding of financial markets and the cryptocurrencies, we as a cipher punks have the right and the duty to also understand that it's not only the financial markets, it's also the media and how we communicate it.

And only when we truly understand that and start implementing that ourselves, we will be able to move forward and on board many, many more people into our niche industry that we're here today. I hope you learned something and if not, you'll definitely learn more from these workshops. Thank you so much uh everyone. [applause]