Centralization Strikes Again - March 2021 Edition
“The argument for liberty is not an argument against organization, which is one of the most powerful tools human reason can employ, but an argument against all exclusive, privileged, monopolistic organization, against the use of coercion to prevent others from doing better.” — Friedrich A. Hayek
Where have centralized technologies, including those who limit our access to it, failed us this month? Let’s take a look at our March month in review:
Timeline
Mar 2 - Amazon AWS announces support for Ethereum nodes while coming out initially to criticize open source software as brittle. Statement since retracted. Source
Mar 3 - PayPal makes an "unappealable back office" decision to close an account. Twitter gets up in arms. Source
Mar 5 - China’s bitcoin miners flee Inner Mongolia ahead of crypto mining ban. Source
Mar 11 - In protest of EIP-1559, miners threaten Ethereum with an orchestrated 51% attack. Vitalik responds. Source
Mar 12 - Binance probed by CFTC over whether US residents made trades with the cryptocurrency exchange. Binance said that it never comments on its communications with regulators, while adding that the company is committed to complying with rules. Source
“We take a collaborative approach in working with regulators around the world and we take our compliance obligations very seriously.”
Mar 15 - PancakeSwap and Cream Finance both suffer DNS hijacks. Users reported the hacked DNS sites requesting seed phrases and private keys in order to connect to their Web 3.0 wallets. Source
Mar 18 - Medium (and ChainSafe's primary blogging platform!) goes down. Source
Mar 19 - Users on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp experience global outages. Source
Mar 19 - Home workout app Jefit publicly apologizes for a data breach incident where users' account names, email addresses, encrypted passwords, and IP addresses were leaked. Source
Mar 19 - Israel vaccine roll-out was revealed to be accelerated because Israel agreed to give up citizens' confidential personal and medical data. Source
Mar 23 - Google halts plans for introducing FLoC, or Federated Learning of Cohorts, in Europe as it may not be GDPR compliant. Although FLoC was intended as a "privacy-preserving" replacement of third party cookies by bringing targeted ads to "cohorts" of consumer profiles, it unsurprisingly introduces new privacy risks. Source
"… that framing [ed: a world with FLoC will be better than today's world] is based on a false premise that we have to choose between “old tracking” and “new tracking.” It’s not either-or. Instead of re-inventing the tracking wheel, we should imagine a better world without the myriad problems of targeted ads."
Mar 23 - Amazon revealed to subject its drivers to invasive biometric surveillance, including always-on cameras and real-time AI analysis of driving behaviour. Source Source
Mar 24 - Facebook, Twitter, and Google CEO's come under fire in front of US House Committee over potential reforms for Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Congress expresses anger at social media platforms' failure to stop spread of misinformation, including COVID-19 content as well as content leading up to the attack on Capitol Hill. Mark Zuckerberg advocates for "platforms to have systems in place for identifying unlawful content and removing it". Sundar Pichai takes a position against any reforms, while Jack Dorsey touts Twitter's experimentation with crowd-sourcing moderation of online content. Source
Mar 24 - Facebook kicks punk rock band Adrenochrome off of its platform for the third time due to the name “Adrenochrome” and its ties to QAnon ideologies. The band denis ever having any affiliations with QAnon. Source
Mar 25 - H&M outlets disappear from Apple Maps and Baidu Maps searches in China over Xinjiang cotton boycott. Source
Mar 29 - Nearly 110 million users’ data are allegedly leaked in world’s largest KYC leak ever by Indian mobile wallet and payments app MobiKwik. Source
Op-Ed
The Hyperspace Commons
I’ve been a software developer for a while. In the past, I worked in internal IT departments, building and modifying systems tailored to meet a business’ specific requirements. Currently, I’m working on a team building tools for blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies. Like most developers, I’m curious about how things work, so when the documentary “The Social Dilemma” hit my radar, I was eager to learn the details about how social media networks are designed. It was eye opening to say the least. Since I’ve spent my career focused on building tools that benefit users, I hadn’t fully considered the ramifications of software built for extracting attention from the user. So, of course, as a software developer I naturally start thinking about how to solve the problems outlined in the Social Dilemma. How do we keep these technologies in check, especially when they are already so pervasive in our lives?
Social media companies rely on attention extraction models to harvest user’s attention to sell to advertisers. Not only that, they compete with each other for your attention, so they’ve become really good at it. The problem becomes apparent when we are not aware that a company is competing for our attention. At the root, - we’re simply being human, interacting with one another. It just so happens we have an app helping us now. The problem we should be considering is how we experience the benefit of social interaction online while avoiding being ensnared in a system that views your attention as a source for profit?
We could simply avoid it: just uninstall all the social media apps from our devices. But that doesn’t address our desire to interact with other people… so we’ll keep the apps but turn off notifications. That way we’re in control. However, when I look through my feeds, I know they are curated in a curious way that keeps me wanting more. That superficial happiness I feel when someone I haven't considered in two decades likes something I’ve said. Or the genuine feeling of rage invoked by some asshole who clearly doesn’t understand the world. How could I live without this?
The solution requires an alternative. An idea that doesn’t consider profit, nor require advanced AI, or a critical mass of users. An idea if only to even foster healthy discord for the problem of the need for human interaction without parasitic extraction.
The solution is an online experience where the people interact with each other in an uncensored environment. There are no attention focusing mechanisms to censor our attention, nor is there any AI to learn our behavior or censor our communication. A place where humans are no longer thought of as users, but as citizens.
A citizen in this hypothetical space is represented by name, and an image icon. A human has the opportunity to create one single citizen in this place. Citizens can only be created by humans, so there can be no fake citizens created. This is done so that all citizens have an equal voice, and no fake accounts give anyone individual particularly more say. Once a citizen is created in the system, the human can control access with digital keys that enable encryption of content they’ve created. The human will have sole control of their keys so they have confidence that no one else can act on their behalf.
The concept of having an equal voice is further enhanced by enforcing strict limits to the amount of content each user can post. Each citizen will have a fixed amount of content they can post (measured in kB/citizen). They could add posts daily, and remove older posts as needed to stay within limit, or they may simply keep one large post. It’s up to each citizen to decide how they want to manage their limit. The citizens are also limited to the number of times per day they can edit their content, as well as leave comments on posts. These limits ensure an equitable voice for each citizen as well as controlling the overall amount of data that is generated and managed.
Each citizen has control over who can see their posts - they can be public, or private to one, some, or selected groups.
The presentation of posts is simple: they would be sorted by the date they were created, or ranked by hash tag or quantity of comments. The citizen decides how they want to consume this information, not some outside algorithm that determines for the reader what they decide is most relevant. The way information is presented has tremendous ramifications regarding the way people perceive that information. Traditional social media experiences exploit this phenomena to invoke emotional responses from the readers. We aim to curtail this exploitation by empowering the reader with full control over how information is consumed from the system. The citizens should know they are reading content created by people, and the system they are using to view this content simply enables them to view it.
Considering the wide variety of tools and frameworks available to developers interested in building distributed systems, there are a lot of different ways that this could be built.
At this point it is enough to simply ruminate for a while about this proposed solution. Let us try to address concerns and gaps in details, imagine use cases, and envision the experience. Let us discuss the vision with others, see what they are confused by, and try to create clarity. Let us learn where they disagree with the vision, and determine how addressing them will shape the idea and vision. Because if there’s anything we’ve learned from the status quo, it is that what we have now must be iterated on in an intentional, inclusive, and participatory way. I’ve completed the first round of ruminating, formed the idea to a point where I’m willing to share my thoughts with the world. Now I need your help, please share your thoughts, and any comments are welcome. Let’s kick this thing around a little and see if there is anything worth pursuing.
At the center of communities there is a place shared equally by all in that community, a place to gather and exchange ideas. People refer to it as the commons. Let’s work together to create this place; our own hyperspace commons.
Thank you to Ed Mack (developer at ChainSafe working on Gossamer for Polkadot) for his contribution to this month’s edition of our newsletter
If you would like to contribute to the Op-Ed in next month's edition of Centralization Strikes Again, then please email tim.ho@chainsafe.io. We would love to hear your thoughts on how we can leverage decentralized technologies as a solution to the many problems centralized systems present for humanity!
Like all great things, our newsletter starts humble and, well... unpolished. If you have any feedback, please don't hesitate to send them my way.
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