Does America need a Reality Czar?
That was New York Times tech columnist,
Kevin Roose's suggestion
for how the Biden administration could help solve
the so-called reality crisis facing the country.
The chaotic events of January 6th,
marked the beginning of a new era
of online content moderation.
Not only did every major social media company kick Trump
off their platforms,
but Amazon Web Services,
which owns about a third
of the global cloud storage market,
evicted the Twitter competitor, Parlor,
and Apple and Google removed it from their app stores.
Parlor, which had signed
on more than 13 million users at its peak,
announced its relaunch on February 16th.
Both Democrats and Republicans want Washington
to have more influence over how big tech companies operate.
And there's a bipartisan push to repeal Section 230
of the Communications Decency Act,
known as the internet's First Amendment.
That's a pretty foundational law
of the modern,
platform-based internet. That's right.
Exactly right, and it should be revoked.
Which would give the government more power
to hold social media companies liable
for the content that appears on their platforms.
But the great deplatforming of 2021 has
also energized the movement to bring a new radically
decentralized internet that would allow users to escape
whatever form the Reality Czar takes.
Many of the projects in this space are trying
different approaches to solving the same set of problems,
such as how to give individuals control
over their own digital identities
and how to store data in the cloud
so that it can't be controlled
or accessed by a large company subject
to political pressure from the state.
Regardless of which side of the debate you are on,
with certain political figures getting banned
on social media platforms.
That is not the point.
The point is no one should have that type of power.
Muneeb Ali is the CEO of Stacks,
which has garnered some major backing
for its effort to build a new computing platform
that could become the foundation
for a new decentralized internet.
Stacks is one of several startups in this space
that has come up with a way for internet users
to own their own digital identities.
Today, Twitter, Facebook, and Google own
and control user accounts on their platforms,
which as the tech giants have demonstrated,
they can suspend or revoke at any time.
With Stacks, Ali and his team are hoping to make it possible
for users to take control
of their own identities by storing them
not on the proprietary computing platforms of big tech,
but on a public database that's shared
and maintained by people all over the world.
The same one that's used by the cryptocurrency, Bitcoin,
known as the blockchain.
The idea grew out of Ali's computer science dissertation
at Princeton.
Just as no central entity can stop a Bitcoin transaction,
no central entity can revoke a participant's account
or change the rules of the game.
People feel really frustrated when Facebook changes
the privacy terms or things like that.
Or recently, we saw Robinhood halted trading
for certain stocks.
It's really a battle for making sure
that the rules are the same for everyone
and they cannot be changed by a handful of people.
Google's motto was once "Don't be evil,"
which it later dropped.
Ali says the idea behind Stacks is to make it so
that we don't have to trust the good intentions
of fallible humans.
Instead, we can trust the same mathematical tools
that undergird Bitcoin.
Google has the saying "Don't be evil,"
maybe a company shouldn't be powerful enough
that they're sitting there thinking,
should I be evil or not?
What we mean by, "can't be evil," is,
no one should have that kind of power
and instead you can replace that with mathematics
and mathematical guarantees on certain things.
Google and Facebook earn most
of their revenue through advertising,
which is so lucrative in part because they collect personal
data about their users, allowing for direct targeting.
A key component of the decentralized internet is replacing
advertising and data harvesting with a new set
of monetary incentives.
Participants in the Stacks network stand to earn Bitcoin.
Other decentralized web projects are taking a
similar approach
but using different cryptocurrencies,
including Ethereum,
And on Lokinet,
users earn a cryptocurrency called Oxen by running nodes
on a private network to make all web activity anonymous,
creating a kind of decentralized VPN.
Bouncing your connection through service nodes
like this allows you to interact
with other users and the internet without leaving a trace.
Another problem that Stacks
and other decentralized internet projects are trying
to solve is to give internet users a place
to store their websites, documents, photos, videos, and more.
The type of information that currently lives
in the giant data centers owned
and operated by Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and others.
A project called Filecoin is building
a decentralized cloud storage system
that allows computers all over the world
to contribute space on their hard drives
which can be accessed through
the interplanetary file system,
an alternative protocol
to the HTTP that undergirds today's web.
In exchange, they get paid with a digital token.
If Parlor ran on IPFS and Filecoin,
it would be difficult for a government
or any third party actor to shut down their service.
So in a world in which you can truly take
your data with you
and take the app with you and everything,
you have so much more control.
Molly MacKinlay is a project lead for IPFS.
This is, you know, a much better model
that's gonna reduce a lot of the angst
and problems we've seen with centralized
and monetized and manipulated social networking.
Welcome to Urbit.
We just addressed the problem at its root,
it's like alright, well, may as well just rewrite it.
Galen Wolfe-Pauly is a cofounder of Urbit,
which isn't just a new network,
but an entirely new operating system
that Wolfe-Pauly envisions becoming
as all-purpose as WeChat is in China,
which allows users to make social media posts,
send direct messages, make calls, play games,
hail taxis, and pay bills online and inperson.
Except with Urbit,
the user owns all the data,
as opposed to a Chinese company that shares it
with the government to monitor the activities
of its citizens.
WeChat is this sort of like single, unified interface
where I can do all the things that, in the West,
we do with all these different apps.
And what you really need for that is you have
to address this like industrial scale software stack
and get people a human scale software stack
where they can, you know, actually control their computing again.
Users purchase an identity, called a planet,
in Urbit's cosmic nomenclature,
which is issued by a star, a more expensive ID,
usually owned by a developer,
which are in turn issued by galaxies,
the top of the identity hierarchy.
You'd be trying to compete with the big players,
the Apples and Googles of the world.
Why would someone switch over
to this new kind of experimental software stack?
I find using centralized communication tools
to just generally not feel good.
It's very clear where you're being manipulated
or forced to see and engage with stuff
that is gonna keep you around basically.
And, you know,
the crazier it makes you,
the longer you stay.
The feeling of using something that you own
and control and can do whatever you want with,
is like a wonderful feeling
that far outstrips anything that a
sort of centralized and ad-funded provider can give to you.
Decentralization projects face daunting challenges.
They're going up against the world's wealthiest companies.
The engineering challenges of building a decentralized
platform are far greater than building a centralized one
and consumers almost always choose the most
convenient option,
even if it means handing control
of their data and identities over to a third party.
But the great deplatforming
of 2021 may be waking some Americans
up to the risk of trusting big tech
with their digital property and identities.
Signal and Telegram, which have iron-clad
end-to-end encryption,
became two of the world's most downloaded apps
in early January with encouragement
from Tesla's Elon Musk.
Decentralized systems are hard to build,
but certainly like historically—longterm historically—like most of the systems
that run the world are just naturally decentralized.
The sort of arc of history
just generally bends towards decentralization.
You know, people sort of want to be free.
They want to be in control of their environments,
their communities.
The centralization of the internet's just not,
it's just totally unnatural.
It's not gonna last.
Kevin Roose, the New York Times reporter,
suggesting the need for a Reality Czar,
fears that encrypted apps could become
huge shadow social networks,
which can't be adequately monitored for misinformation
and dangerous speech.
Urbit, for instance, was created by the programmer
Curtis Yarvin, a controversial thinker
whose ideas largely formed the basis
of the right wing philosophy known as neoreaction.
Yarvin, who is no longer affiliated with the project,
is just the type of thinker researchers
and journalists worried about extremism point to
when arguing for stronger social media guardrails.
What do you say to people who think it's actually
good to have some corporate gatekeepers
because of the problems that online hate speech
and radicalization can legitimately cause.
The benefits of basically people having control
over their tools just far outweighs the risks
of somehow having to figure
out how to moderate or enforce a singular ruleset.
Do we wanna live under
a almost like a quote, unquote, dictatorship, right,
where one percent has a lot of control and power?
In this case, like that would be Mark Zuckerberg
or Jack Dorsey.
Different people can then make different choices,
which is what free society is about.
The cat's out of the bag.
I mean, the world has been networked,
like the internet is kind of its own,
it's its own state in some ways
and, you know, you kind of have this one world
which is the, you know, very managed, centralized world
or you give people their own tools
and let them run the network.
I'll definitely take the latter.