So let's start. All right. Welcome, everybody. My name is Tim Lordan. And I'm the executive director of the internet Education Foundation. This is trust and safety on the decentralized web hosted in conjunction with the Trust and Safety Foundation, and the newly formed decentralized Future Council. The Trust and Safety Foundation is brought to you by the same folks that that brought to the trust the safety professional association, the TSPA, it's about a year and a half old, I think two years old. So relatively new in the span of internet time. The Decentralized Future Council is a little bit newer, it was launched last week, by my organization with the help of the sport of the popcorn foundation for the decentralized web. The idea was that we wanted to have an organization for the decentralized web that kind of looked at internet policy here in DC, with a sharper focus on decentralized web, a web three technologies. So we will continue to do other programming for general internet policy stuff that we've been doing since like 1996. But this is more of a focus for us. And together, we decided to explore trust and safety on the decentralized web, because it's pretty obvious in a decentralized environment that trust and safety would be kind of challenging. But we also think it has a lot of interesting possibilities. And the last three months I've been I've been hit up by friends, family randos, on Twitter, about their report, their immediate repulsion to web three. And because they've learned something about it, and they decided they hate it. That is not our job today to talk about all the things we hate about web three, but to discuss trust and safety on the decentralized web, and looking at the pros and cons and start to put out together a framework for how we can start looking at that from a trust and safety perspective. It's all very, very new. These technologies are just starting to come online. In kind of, for us, it reminds us how we started this work back in 1996, looking at internet policy at the dawn of kind of internet policy. So we feel we're in kind of the same place with the decentralized web. And we're very excited about working on these issues. Last week at South by Southwest, I saw the great Brewster Kahle from the Internet Archive, imploring the audience that he was speaking to, to start talking about content moderation now, because you don't want to wait a decade when things are all messed up. You know, like the privacy folks talk about privacy by design, where you kind of big privacy, and in the beginning, that probably should be done with trust, trust and safety on the decentralized web. And that's kind of why, you know, we're here. I think, you know, some of you are DC policy, people trying to figure out what this what the decentralized web means in terms of trust and safety with the possibilities? Are there some of you a private trust and safety professionals from the TSPA, looking to figure out what the career path is? Or is it I'm gonna lose my job? Or do I have to move to another job? I think the answer the those are NO and NO, at this is very early, but we wanted to start having this conversation to start thinking about how you would approach some of these things. In terms of you know, we're in a world that has the blockchain, smart contracts, decentralized autonomous organizations, tokens, daps, you know, the whole the whole gamut. So I'm going to hand it over to Moderator, but just a little bit of housekeeping. We're going to be put sharing some resources as we talk that will be mentioned. So you can have a deeper dive into what we shared shared in the chat, but we'll also share it on Twitter, using our accounts. We're at @DFutureCouncil. And that @TSPAinfo, and we'll use the hashtag, #TSWeb three. So trust and safety web three, so t s web three. But let me introduce you to your moderator. Charlotte Willner. shall lead the discussion a Charlotte is the inaugural executive director of both the trust and safety professional association and the Trust and Safety Foundation should be given should be kept. She began her career at Facebook early on where she led the international user support, then build out the first safety operations team so she knows what she's talking about when it comes to trust and safety. She also went on to lead Pinterest trust and safety operations overseeing online safety, law enforcement response, intellectual property matters. And she tweets with a curious Twitter account at Hello youths. So let me just hit it over to Charlotte.
Thank you, Tim. And it is true. My Twitter handle is at Hello youths because I never thought I would use it for work. And I signed up as a joke. And now here we are. So thank you so much, everyone for being here today. Wonderful to see you all here. This is a very highly RSVP event and I thought I'd set the stage a little bit. Some of you may be here for answers on web three interest and safety. And if you were here for answers, I have bad news. There may not be a lot of answers. This is a questions session. And let me let me tell you a little bit about my MO. So as Tim mentioned, I lead the trusted safety professional Association. I am the Executive Director of the Trust and Safety Foundation as well. And with a resume like that, you often get people coming to you saying, Well, you must know something about trust and safety. Right. And in general, that is true. But I think when it comes to web three, we've been getting a lot of questions from folks about, okay, well, what do I do here? And the reality is like, I don't know, you know, trust and safety, a big part of that, as a professional is understanding, actually, you don't have a lot of information all the time, and you are constantly learning, you're constantly revisiting your priors. And so when I find myself in situations like that, which is frequent, I like to phone a friend. And so today's session, I have found a few friends whose work I respect very highly, who are wonderful to talk to generally. And the idea here is really just bring folks into conversation to ask some questions that we all have and just do a little scuttlebutt about okay, well, what do we think is going on here? And where do we think this can go? As Tim mentioned, we will be recommending some reading. And so this is a great chance to kind of get caught up. But first, I'd love to introduce our our participants. Today, we have Alex first and Janet Haven with us. And folks, I'd love to ask you to just talk a little bit about who you are, and the work that you do in your current job. Alex, let's start with you,
alphabetical. Sure. Thanks, charlatan. Great to be here. Um, so I've been working in Trust and Safety since about 2015. I was General Counsel and head of trust and safety medium for a bunch of years. And so during that period, both led a team and tried to figure out how to do that work as well as we could and then also got very interested in sort of the nascent sea of this profession as a profession, and what that meant for us in ways to, you know, increase things like rigor and conversations between practitioners and what what it was we're all doing, I helped co launch a thing called the Digital Trust and Safety partnership last year, which is similarly around sort of putting out best practices and other things for companies to invest. Think about how to structure you know, their efforts in this areas. And nowadays, I run a company I guess, called Murmuration Labs, which does trust and safety consulting for a bunch of different tech companies, but focuses on web three, and blockchain folks. And so I've kind of, I guess, the luxury of doing practical work with with Blockchain companies for a little over two years now. And so it's interesting, and I'm happy to report what little I've learned.
Janet, you want to go next? Sure. Charlotte, thank you so much, and Tim, and an Alex for inviting me to be here. So my name is Janet Haven, I'm the executive director of a nonprofit research institute called data and society. We study the social and cultural implications of data centric and automated technologies, we work through the lens of social science. So we are not data scientists, we are not crunching numbers to find out we are generally talking to people we use ethnographic methods for the most part across the social sciences, our work is heavily informed by the lens of Science and Technology Studies, which really brings the frame of technology not as a standalone object, but as a social entity, a socio technical entity, as we like to say. And so that's I think that's a critical part of how I approach this work. My my sort of longer ago, background before data and society is that I spent about 15 years at a philanthropic organization called the Open Society Foundations, where I, I had the the real privilege to work for a number of years on issues related to the intersection of new and emerging technologies, human rights, governance, accountability, and transparency. And so was able to work with organizations around the world on in some cases, the adoption of those technologies, and in some cases, taking a really critical look at those technologies and trying to understand whether they were whether they were really the right answer for the kinds of problems that that those organizations are trying to solve. So I'll leave it there.
Thank you. I'd love to just acknowledge the first trust and safety problem we're encountering and the chat, just you know, it goes with you everywhere. It's so it's so there. So I thought we could start first off, I think, iron there's probably some people here who are here because they realize they probably need to know something about the decentralized web and at this point are maybe a little afraid to ask. So I'd love to start with actually just real quick basics online. Alright, what is the decentralized Web? What does it mean for the Internet to be decentralized? Some people say, Oh, it's web three, like, hold up. What is that mean? There's a web two. Right? And this is something that I know in some circles people talk about, like, Yes, this is obvious. But I think for a lot of practitioners, who are obviously, like myself, are very firmly rooted in web to practice. Maybe we could take a second to just talk about like, what does it mean for this, for this, for the web to be decentralized? What does that mean to you?
Yeah, so I guess I'm short of providing a definition, I guess I would start with some like family resemblances and characteristics that you tend to see. So and, and I should mention that for some, to some skeptics, I think web three is seen as like a label for cryptocurrency, other folks to sort of, you know, yoke themselves to some larger movement. That is that is not simply about financial transformation. But I guess I would say there's a few themes that emerge. And one of them, of course, is always decentralization, and, you know, distributing power to more stakeholders, avoiding the concentration of different kinds of power in either, you know, large centralized companies, or governments or other power players who can then you know, who can then have an outsize effects on a platform or space or something like that. I think a second theme is sort of using tokens or some other instrument to share value back using technology to share value back to the participants, because one of the big critiques in sort of web two platform land was, I'm a user, I interact with people a lot, I increase the value of a Facebook or a Twitter as I use it, I provide content, I write it, or I share it, and I do many things, and I get a free service. And all the ad revenue sort of goes to the company and the shareholders and my getting my fair share. And so web three in a lot of different ways, there's a notion that if you're going to help build a community, and if we're going to use this very positive language of community, then we should be a community and other meaningful ways, including sharing some value your financial value back with the folks who were, who are contributing, and building. And I guess a related theme is governance, which is that, you know, usually, again, through tokens or some other technology, you're allowing a much broader group of people to vote or to have like other kinds of buying binding input into the shape of what's going to happen, as opposed to being able to write an email to a company and, you know, see what happens. So there's other things when maybe I'll stop there. And, you know, the, the projects vary a ton in their ambitions and in their sort of scope. But I would say it also is in distinction, I guess, two sort of pure cryptocurrency projects, which are about, you know, which are some sort of like theory about financial interactions and incentives and software, but are not necessarily about a broader web project of having a content application or building some sort of application that does other things, besides on the exchange value.
Yeah, I am I agree with all of that. I think that's, I think that those are those are good. Those are good pillars to start from, but I think also what it points to is the, you know, the the challenge that we're seeing in a space like this around language, that that it is a it is it is a very broad term web three, or the decentralized web. And I think people mean very different things when they say it. And so I feel like every time I talk with somebody about you know, somebody calls me up also, Charlotte says, What should we do about the decent? Are we doing? You know, I, my first question is what what do you mean about that, are you talking about, you know, the blockchain, are you talking about the trying to understand what do we mean by a decentralized ledger technology? Versus what do we mean by the, the, the idea of the community structures that, you know, that have come to inform that or do we mean, decentralized social networking protocols, which is another another kind of entrance point or, or financial markets based on digital assets? Or, or the one that I actually, you know, find most intriguing and kind of worthy of study, in a way is the, is the ideological frame of that, that seems to be, you know, grounded in, you know, close to ideas of round agency freedom and independence. And so I think that sort of untangling that is, is a huge issue. And I guess the the last thing that I would say before we move on from this is that I mean, I think that's Much of this conversation is about power. It is about the the pushback against the centralization of power in in individuals and companies and other kinds of entities. But I think that it doesn't translate directly by any means that, that decentralizing technology decentralizes power. And so I think that this sort of critical question and maybe challenge for the ambitions that have been articulated on all of these fronts around around the decentralized web around web three is, how do you make the social outcomes actually match the ambitions of the technology?
It's a great question. I see. Alex, you're on muting. And Tim, you are also now here with us again. So I want to be sure both of you have a chance to talk.
Yeah, I just wanted to add a quick thing in agreement with with Janet, but just that I think, I think it's very worthwhile to keep your sort of Skeptic hat on as you sort out the application of this sort of new theme, a new toy that everybody is currently very enthusiastic about, about, like applying decentralization, to lots of different schemes of, you know, governance, and political schemes and computing and all these things, you know, and so, and it's good for some things. And of course, it's not good for everything, and it's not going to solve all that ails us. I think the other just very functional thing about web three, whether one skeptical of it as a as a label or not, is that it is definitely a bucket into which a lot of people are starting to pour enthusiasm. And in some ways, it's like, in a very, like I say, in a very functional way, good or bad, or good or bad. The notion of like, we are giving up on some aspects of web do, we are not going to try to fix some of these things, you're you're trying to build a different architecture, to get another chance to build a fundamental architecture that has different values is exciting to a lot of people. That's not to say other things won't continue to exist. But I think, especially for younger folks, the notion of like ripping things up and starting a new is, is refreshing and exciting. And, and I think that gives rise to all sorts of other issues. But I think that at least is part of why web three is like sort of media profile has maybe outpaced its actual development, because people are so excited to put good faith energy into something that seems positive and affirmative and will have a different outcome.
Yeah, I'd say I'd say Alex, I have the reason one of the reasons why we started getting more into the space was several years ago, Mike Masnick from TechCrunch wrote this piece called protocols, not platforms. Not that he's against platforms. But he wrote this article talking about like, kind of decentralized technologies and protocols could be really have interesting applications in when it comes to content moderation, and trust and safety and kind of the evolving social media. While later, Jack Dorsey announced blue sky, which is entirely cryptic, we have no idea really what it is. We would love to have someone from BlueSky talk about what exactly it is. But you know, talking about kind of decentralizing, you know, the protocols and Twitter into something new. And so people that's really gonna get us going on on this project, and with a particular focus on trust and safety. And so we're really interested in that I'm going to share some of those resources in the chat and on Twitter. But there seems to be a lot of like, it's an interesting take. I'm not, you know, it's gonna take a lot of work. But it's an interesting take on, you know, how you could use decentralized technologies to create more discrete spaces to have your own type of content moderation.
That's great. And Alex, in revisiting one of the points you were making earlier, I feel this enthusiasm every time I read about it, in some sense, it is, it is tempting, in a lot of ways to say let's just scrap this and start over a little bit. And even beyond that impulse, right. I think there's there's, there's so much potential in rethinking this architecture, right, and sort of making this possible. But thank you for also saying like, I keep your skeptic hat on because I was like, born in a skeptic hat, and I'm gonna die the skeptic hat. And I think we're I really wonder about the web three applications, especially when it comes to trust and safety is like, it seems like a cool idea. And also, can we make it work? Right, and what steps would we need to take, especially as professionals in this field, to give it its best shot? You know, one of the questions I know we have from the audience already that maybe I'll ask at this juncture is like, there's definitely a lot of press, I think growing press about web three, but the decentralized web and sometimes it's not great, and there's probably a lot of reasons why. There are some cautionary tales, but this person is wondering, like, Are there any good stories and I think actually, there are some good stories. I was wondering If I could ask you, the three of you like, what's the most interesting or sort of most promising use case that you've seen for decentralization on the web? You know, what is it that sort of intrigues you? Or excites you about that use case?
You know, I think, I mean, I think that's right to, to kind of come at this set of questions with, you know, with both curiosity and skepticism. And so I, you know, I like, I like that frame a lot. I think, you know, one of the things that I'm really interested in have have been following is projects that are really about building new forms of governance, of of testing out different ways of governing communities in, in online spaces that are very values forward. And and I think that's fascinating, because that is not entirely but but but quite different. In most cases, then, you know, web one, or maybe in, you know, web one, there were there were a lot of values, I think that were implicit, not always explicit about, you know, freedom and agency, and, you know, kind of the ability to run your own server and etc, etc. And that was really powerful. And I think we're seeing other communities emerge in, you know, Dows, or in, you know, distributive cooperative organizations, you know, based on feminist economic principles, like one of them that I was looking at was, is called disco Co Op, which is one that I follow. And I really, you know, I really appreciate the incredible amount of work that that community has done to articulate its values and to build a governance structure around it. Another one is seeds, which is a global Dow that is focused on regenerative economic systems. And so I think like that, that is, those are the types of things that I see that I think are really interesting. I think that the flip side of that is that, you know, it is there's a long tradition of experimentation in governance, both online and offline. And, and I think, you know, I mean, the United States is, you know, has a has a has a very colorful history of utopian communities, you know, from hundreds of years back on to, you know, practices like deliberative polling, and, you know, the kinds of the kinds of participatory democracy experiments we saw sort of in the earlier 2000s that were, I think, really driven by open government movements around the world. And so I, there's a really interesting tradition here of, of bringing values forward and experimenting with government governance, I think is really interesting and exciting.
Um, yeah, so I guess I would plus one, this idea that that web three slash blockchain he things are purport to be like good for helping us govern ourselves, because it's new tools for making polling and voting possible in a transparent way and coordinating consensus in this stuff. And I think it's sort of like, it probably won't solve everything, but it may also allow us to coordinate in in new ways, and so it could, it could, I don't know that it will fundamentally transform human nature immediately. But it could allow us to coordinate in ways that weren't possible even 20 years ago, right. So I think that's like the exciting part. I'll talk about one project that I've been working on and I and with full disclaimer that you know, I work on it, but that's why, you know, I think it's good, that's why we're gonna but uh, but also that you know, their customer wishes the filecoin project. And to me part of like the the stage right now of building decentralized storage, and there's a whole bunch of decentralized storage projects, including file coin, which is based on this protocol called IPFS. But then also are we've in storage with J and Saya, which is a company called Skynet and a bunch of other projects, all of which are very cool in their own ways. The one or two things, I guess I would say better this one thing that I got after years of sort of the trust and safety business was realizing that a lot of disputes and we've really seen this in the last year, especially content moderation, and all the different disputes over human expression and conduct often escalate up in internet land escalate up to to infrastructure issues, storage and payments. In other words, like eventually somebody tries to go upstream to Amazon or Cloudflare or Azure or whoever to cut you off and take the take you down or GoDaddy or registrar maybe. And so that's thing, what are the payments layer right that eventually want to stop, you know, could be Visa MasterCard, it could be banks, it could be PayPal and Venmo and others to to stop you from having funds and resources, and so on. So at some level, the the terrain, the power terrain on which content moderation sits off also has a bunch of assumptions about how potential escalations will go to the storage or the payments layer. And so part of I think what interests me then with web three is, you would have to have a different set of storage and payment solutions. If you're going to undergird a new set of application layer thinking about about trust and safety, if that makes sense. Now, that doesn't mean that it should be immutable and intervene, double government should have no power. Like, I don't think it just means that you should rethink how where the bottlenecks are, and how powerful and centralize the bottlenecks are and how easy it should be. Before you can say we have consensus to cut off an organization, a person, a nation sometimes. And so So filecoin, I think starts with sort of that assumption from from my end, which is, you know, rather than having, I don't know, three or four cloud providers who will post a lot of the internet, you know, with data centers, and all the places that demand that they localize it, you have hundreds or 1000s, and a market where you can sort of cause things to be stored in different ways. And yes, and use a cryptocurrency to sort of incentivize that. And that just yields a bunch of interesting other questions around the ability to put to exercise leverage on companies or people to take something down it or make it inaccessible or cut them off from funds. It also means that if true consensus is reached among hundreds or 1000s of storage providers, you might have a similar outcome to a centralized world, where some person company group country is deprived of different resources. But you will have arrived there through consensus of hundreds or 1000s of actors who are providing storage instead of one, two or three. Yeah, right. And so that, to me is what's promising about it right is that you're having a basic underlying allocation of power as as sort of John, it was said that it has the potential to demand that more consensus and more independent actors we reach, we're located in a lot more places around the world, making decisions about what can and can't be done. And as it is very possible, we arrive at the same outcome. But as always, like the process is what makes the governance meaningful, and what makes this sort of exciting. And then the technologies you build on top of that, will also have potentially, like, different implications and power allocations, because of people's predictions of how the shadow of an escalation is going to have an outcome.
And this is where I really start to have, like my own just operations questions. So I am an operations professional by training. And I like to write policy, but really where I'm at is like, Okay, we need to make this work, right. And this has been reflected actually, in the audience q&a, as well. So folks are like, okay, but given that trust and safety, as a function, at least historically has relied on deep centralization. How can we perform this? And what is the proposal on performing this in a decentralized context? And part of me like you're answering that question already, and part of me gets it, I'm like, we already have a lot of unpaid moderation out there. Right? We already are in a world of community moderation, whether that is through something intentional, like Wikipedia, or Reddit, or through like Facebook groups, where like most of that happens are right there at the group admin level. So I could see how it would work. But I also know that a huge part of what makes Trust and Safety happen is consistency, right is having that uniformity, ideally, of decisions. So no matter sort of who is making the call, the same call is getting made based on sort of the principles or values that in that case, sort of a company has laid out, and then like a dowel model, or any of these other decentralized models, the community is coming together with those values. But like, even operationally, how do we ensure that that is then consistently applied? Does that make sense as a question?
It doesn't I know, and so I'll speak quickly, but I think so I think one of the things is I'm not sure. So there should be consistency at some layer of of what we're talking about. But also if there's more communities, if they're more communities, then potentially what we want is inconsistent things because you want different things to fly in different places, right, as long as like some coherent community is able to come together and pronounce something. And so I think that's, to me, that's the part of the promise is the segmentation of spaces into a greater number of spaces where decisions can be made. Now there's some things that are going to be so illegal or taboo, that they will be very consistently banned virtually Every place, and then there's other forms of conduct that, you know, can can be managed depending on the context. And that can be good, or it can be bad, it could allow some groups to organize that you don't, you know, that is going to be, you know, metastasizing, become problematic for other reasons. But nevertheless, I think like, the notion of like, this is our platform, and we must have consistency, like a nation state or some other entity that draws its legitimacy from due process and consistency. I think this, as often happens, I think in web three people sort of flip things on their head and say, like, Well, why why not proliferate the number of places. And that sort of inconsistency looks more like a marketplace. And as long as there's volition and options, and people are not being coerced, you know, through lack of choices, great, we can, we can make lots of different things fly in lots of different plays. And I think that's sort of the mass that on was one of the sort of like social protocol, that's sort of the vision of it, which is like you can have, instead of one giant Twitter for everybody, you can have lots of little communities where you can behave differently in different contexts. And by the way, so and this is sort of how subreddits work anyway. And so I don't want to say that this is a new thing under the sun, you know, but but just to tackle one of your points, Charlotte before I'll stop is like, part of the fascination of like, when you think of community moderation, like I think of Reddit and I think of Wikipedia, with Reddit, you have these folks who are volunteers, and we've talked about this, they sort of like they do incredible work for the feeling of the feeling of participating in the community and for social capital, and for kudos, and for all these things, but they don't generally do for money. And part of the whole point of web three is that if you were helping to garden and manage the community, you do share the value. Right. And existing securities law probably makes it very hard for Reddit, if they wanted to, to give stock to every mob. Right. But but with a token you possibly could, right. So I think that's part of the promise, which is like, community moderation looks in some ways more feasible, when you have other ways, additional mechanisms to give the community rewards for doing this work, which is work. And I think with Wikipedia, it's sort of different in the sense that like a lot of a lot of great people who have either leisure time or use their leisure time on this project, do that moderation. And that works to an extent, but I don't think we can potentially volunteer labor has limits. And web three unlocks the possibility of not having to have community moderation, also be volunteer labor, or if you are growing the value and the vibe of a community that you have as many ways as possible of benefiting from it. Yeah,
I think, just to come in on that. I mean, I think, you know, building on what Alex is saying about the, you know, in some ways, the the real deep decentralization and the technologies at the infrastructure layer. You know, I mean, I, I think we've seen lots of arguments already, you know, from different people in the field, Moxie Marlinspike. Amanda Walsh is a scholar of a legal scholar who's written extensively on cryptocurrency, that that there is, you know, that there is consistency that there is going to be there are going to be layers of centralization in different ways, whether that is the the user layers through which people actually interact with technologies, or whether it is through, you know, token delegation systems, or, or what Amanda Walsh actually calls the, the veil of decentralization, which is, which is pretty, pretty interesting argument. So, so I, you know, I think there's, there's, that's like a big question, right? It's like, what is actually going to happen here? What is actually going to be built on top of and around these structures? And how will people interact with them in reality? So I think that's, that would be the first thing I would ask and say, like, we don't really know yet actually, there's a lot of experimentation going on. I mean, I think the second thing in terms of where we start. I mean, first, I would say, you know, Rebecca MacKinnon wrote a great piece called, I think, where we start or what to get right first, which is kind of her experiences from, you know, web one, web two, and her work on on networked governance, to applying that to the anticipated web three and her, you know, position is really like no matter what community you're in, you're going to want to start from human rights principles, which is absolutely not where web two started from. And so that I mean, that is a as it's sort of, one way to approach it is what are the values and governing principles that are informing communities across this entire spectrum. And then I think the third thing that I would say is, you know, is again, I mean, Alex already mentioned this, and I mentioned it a little bit, but there's a lot of history here. And, you know, we have learned a lot from looking at places like Reddit, where there's been great research and on, you know, volunteer moderator labor and what the models are for that and what the pressures are, like, how you how, how it actually happens, how to do it. Nathan Mateus at cat lab has done amazing work on that. And also on Wikimedia on the the culture of moderation at Wikimedia. There is, you know, there is there's also a lot of research on that. And I think one of the things particularly to say about Wikimedia has is to you know, name, the fact that their consensus driven approach, and their moderator approach has meant that they have struggled over the years with inclusion and equity. And that that is a that is been a central concern for them across like, every category you can imagine, from, you know, you know, colonial practices of knowledge production to, you know, the fact that, like, moderators tend to be white guys. And, and so I think, you know, keeping that front and center is a big part of it. But what I would say in terms of like, what what do you know, how do trust and safety professionals think about preparing for this environment? I think there's many, many, many different answers to that. But one of the answer's is to to become fluent in the different experiments that have happened in community governance, the different models because there I completely agree with Alex, I don't think there is consistency in that. And, and there are a lot of things that we can learn from what has happened, what has happened already in those kinds of spaces and in you know, in other spaces, both offline and online.
I can tell we've got a lot of trust and safety professionals in the chat, because we're getting a lot of a lot of questions that I think mirror my own feelings around like this seems exciting. And also Yikes, a little right. One of the questions also merge a few of the questions together here, it's about monetization, or introducing this monetization angle to community governance. This person asks, Would monetizing moderation that has historically happened on a volunteer basis, create new concerns, such as people contributing for the ulterior motive of benefiting financially, while perhaps not providing real value? Another person asked just straight out like Wolf Mehta like What are the dangers of metta becoming a Dao, right? Is it just that people would use voting systems that end up weighing in favor of rich people like? So there's sort of these questions about like, either is a good idea to get people like money for the work that they do. And here at TSPA, in particular, we really believe in that. But we have noticed also as a society, that money, you know, it introduces a lot of other weird incentives. How should we be thinking about those incentives? Questions when it comes to money, and I think Genet to your earlier point about, just historically, there are inequities in our societies that stand to be, I think, perpetuated in this model in the way that they've been perpetuated, consciously or otherwise. In a lot of the other human experiments. We have tried. How, like, if we wanted to get it right, what are the kinds of things we should be thinking through? Can it be done? Right? I mean, here's the big question.
I mean, it is it is we're also the same humans right. We do not become different people, when the technology changes. I mean, I will say that I think one of the things that is that, in that is is fascinating to me in you know, being deeply embedded in, you know, discussions and, you know, policy work around equity and technology is in the web to space, I guess you would say around, you know, my organization does work on things like aI bias and algorithmic accountability and so on, is really the, the sort of gap in, in the conversation in the web three space around equity and inclusion in in really indirect ways. And I think, you know, one, you know, one resource I think there's there's a lot to talk about there and that's a there's a lot of self reflection about like Who's driving these conversations? Who's in this space right now? You know, what is the the early adopter advantage? And I would, I would certainly point to a book like Ruha, Benjamin's book race after technology as an excellent starting point to understand these these questions of, of inclusion and equity in the context of race and innovation. That's really her her focus. I think, you know, her her main point is that the the relationship between innovation and inequity is that, you know, the, the creators of new technologies historically build them in ways that reify societal power structures, even if the technologies themselves are new, what is informing them and the person to the people building them tend to be, you know, not thinking about that inclusion question. And so I think, agile
curves to like, maybe recent, just to interrupt it, it almost hurts to kind of re centralize. And I like, that kind of makes. I'm sorry, finish your point. And then I've got a question for Alex,
do. You know, I mean, I think this goes back to where I started, which is that to me there, the the the question of power is central to how we, you know, how we think about web three developing and I think that a lot of the impetus behind web three, and the excitement about it is about the decentralization of power from entities, you know, like, big companies and powerful individuals and you know, VCs, but then I think the question is, who is that power being devolved to? And, and that, that question seems to be less Central. So I'll stop there.
Central, no pun intended. Alex, the question I wanted to ask you is we were having a conversation the other day, about just humans like efficiency, right. And so there's this idea that, you know, in general, we've certainly seen this in the practice of trust and safety, where, you know, we are always striving to have the speed, faster, better, higher quality, more efficient, and more efficient, doesn't necessarily mean all those things. But that's the dream. And decentralization and a lot of ways is perhaps intentional inefficiency. And they're like, values driven reasons, we might set that up. But I was wondering if I can ask you a little. I was wondering if I could ask you to talk a little bit about that. Just sort of about that scenario, where, you know, yes, there are because I think the temptation, as I was saying is I think things could re centralize, and then we've just got like a Adele out there who's acting like, metal is just the dowel or whatever it is? How can people be thinking about setting themselves up to not just do that and have it work in a decentralized way? Yeah,
um, and thanks for the question. If I can go back for one second, to Janice one, I would recommend to folks, a book, Alex Gladstein, of the Human Rights Foundation, I think has a new book called Check your financial privilege, sort of about Bitcoiners and about among other things, like unbanked folks, and race and pointing out two points, including the fact that the number of people of color who own Bitcoin is a lot higher than one might think, partly because there's a tradition of skepticism of banks, and also that the mechanisms of determining credit and determining whose bank account worthy, you know, are racist and skewed in many other ways. And that for some folks Bitcoin, and cryptocurrency is a promise of getting beyond that. So I would say the data is not in yet, actually. And but it should, the question should be front and center and web three, absolutely should focus on power and race and all these other questions. But I think there's also promising parts of the tradition that comes out of that, that are, you know, that that could lead to good outcomes. I also totally accept the point that if a small number of VC firms, you know, as Jack said, in this channel said, like, control a lot of things, what are you know, what are you really distributing? And so I think that's that skepticism is super, super warranted and welcome. And the RE centralizing function, I guess, which is sort of similar theme is, I think, I mean, I'm not a natural scientist, so I can't I don't know if I'm prepared to say like, systems decentralized or, or humans decentralized, but I think at least, at least under the, under the capitalism we live now, like there's a strong impulse to create efficiency. And that often means centralizing a function or aggregating people aggregating resources, you know, consolidating companies and, and we've talked about two moves, the master switch that sort of has this like pendulum of like, you start out with a thing, there's lots of players that consolidate you have very few players. Everybody aspires to like being the person sitting at the master switch who controls everything, and you sort of like then you either have, you know, an antitrust moment where you break them up and then you start over again or an asteroid hits and the dinosaurs died or something happens. And then you re disaggregate the world and then it starts to decentralize. So I guess a couple things. I think that there, the reintroduction of centralizing forces is absolutely a thing that happens. And like in my, in my working, trying to help build trust and safety systems that are consistent with, you know, web three principles and values, it's just very hard. Because, you know, again, the, one of the examples I've been giving is that, you know, Nick mech, and you know, photo DNA tools, like, it's some level rely on trusted partners, and rely on the ability to have a small number of people access material that you don't want out there in the world. And you don't want to be open source, and you don't want to be part of a public facing insecure, transparent database, right. And so my law enforcement still, you know, centralizes power into bottlenecks. And so, as you interact with legacy or existing systems, or as you just try to do things, whether you try to do it the old way, or a new way, there's a re centralizing function where power efficacy, all these things we concentrate. So in that case, it's like for me, if I'm going to offer a ccm tool for distributed web companies. That is what I'm trying to do. And I think it'd be a good thing, the way that they achieve consensus and make decisions might be different. But the the fundamental database and tool might be the same. But if I'm the only person offering it, then we've just like re centralized a particular like moderation function in one person or one company. So I need to. And so this, to me, when you guys are working with three, you see this every day, which is like you see re centralizing Undertow as you try to fragment things in order to make them more fair and more distributed and allocate power more widely. And so I think there's a couple of things to say about it. It might just be that like, this is the thing to resist, at least sometimes, like sometimes some things are going to centralize, and you may just need to accept that at a certain level. But then other things, it's very important to the decentralized, and figuring out which one is which is hard.
We don't we're not sure yet. But but more things that are now I think a second function is that like realizing that, at least the way that I sort of learned in law school that like, efficiency is often intention with equity and fairness. So like you specifically make things inefficient on purpose sometimes, and build it that way, in order to distribute power. And so if that's, if we figure out which nodes must be built that way, or should be built that way, then we're having a worthwhile experiment. And making things intentionally inefficient. I think we, you know, we've talked about this with friction, because like, when you talk to product folks, it's always like, get rid of all the friction. And one of the like, things I usually say is like, friction is a condiment, and trust and safety. Like it should be sprinkled lightly in the right places to potentially get better outcomes. Right. And so I think this sort of has that style of thinking, which is like, there's some things which should be so that way. One other thing is that, again, with your skeptic hat on, like, Jack's, like spicy tweetstorm, I think if you recognize, if you observe a web three project, and you say, gee, this project, which is really about the decentralization of power, it's like a small town where the same person is like the mayor and the sheriff and the banker, and you know, and the defense attorney, and there's not a lot of catcher police dog, you know, the first deputy dog catcher, then, like, maybe things are not as meaningfully decentralized as you think they are. And that's like a very warranted skepticism. Right? And that and so, but I think that's, that's the thing to look for, which is like meaningful decentralization. It probably can't be done in all things, although it's seems some like folks are certainly trying. But I think we're gonna see this like dynamic tension between re centralizing efficiency, aggregation of capital resources and stuff and these other very strong impulses that D web folks have, which is very much swimming against the tide. But that's sort of what makes it fun.
I have a related question from the audience. Someone's asking a lot of DNS involves collecting confidential info about bad actors and unlawful data, IP addresses, hashes, etc. How do we share that info across multiple federated moderation services? And I think that the sort of related question is, given that web three identity like ties to the individual user, the user's wallet, like that could be that could make it easier in some ways that could make it harder in some ways to apply sort of these traditional or more like when to trust and safety frames. How should we be thinking about that? What are those opportunities and what are some of like, the no goes there?
So I'm not sure if this is exactly answers the question I think Alex would probably We're going to have a better direct answer. But I will say I think that what that gets at is the tension with data permanence. And the, in the the sort of underlying assumption in the in sort of the web three universe in the blockchain universe, that, that that is a, that is a net good. And that that is what we want. And and I think that we will, you know, there there are a lot of instances in which that is not what we want, or that that will not be a good thing. You know, one of one of the just somewhat related, one of the areas that we've been looking at, at my organization at data and society is digital identity, and the the sort of broad push in, in many countries in the Global South to put in place digital identity systems and, and increasingly to, you know, to look at at solutions that tie digital identity to the blockchain. That's also a question in refugee situations, there's a, you know, there is an effort to develop a, a blockchain based, it's called a self sovereign identity for for refugees to have a user controlled digital identity. And there's just been some been some very, you know, really, really interesting recent ethnographic research on sort of what does that actually mean for a refugee population, for instance, to to control their digital identity in a way that requires trust lessness, that just doesn't line up with the logic of both either humanitarian aid agencies or nation states that that may admit them. And that those two kind of conditions really coming into conflict with each other, and digital identity in in terms of the the, you know, a state run digital identity system isn't even even bigger. set of challenges. So I'm going to stop there, but I think, you know, that to me,
we're gonna see, and we're gonna invite you back to talk about that one.
Okay, Alex?
Yeah, so I think I guess I'll start with like, this is a really hard question. Like still a work in progress?
No. I'm like, is this really obvious? I've been doing this 15 years? I don't know. So thank you. Good, good place to start.
It's a hard question. And I think a lot of the assumptions underlying blockchain web three, like the current thinking, and the thinking underlying, say, like the drafting of the GDPR are very different worldviews, and in some ways, possibly inconsistent worldviews. And without taking aside, although you probably know which side I'm on. I think I guess I'd start with a couple of like, I try to start with like a couple of concepts. And one of them is that there's things that blockchains and web three things can do, because of the persistence and the public inspect ability of data that get us that leverages into a new place. And that is cool, right? You solve problems around like, trust or trust us like you, you have this public permanence function that does new things. But I also think not everything is on the blockchain. Right? Not everything is going to be permanent. So there will be things that I don't know that we want them to be arbitrarily defeatable. But or easy to leave. But I don't think that everything is going to be permanent and put on the blockchain. Like I think there's this this is just sort of like an in the weeds technical question. And I'm still learning which is that there's, there's metadata. There's things that are pointed to off the blockchain, like NF, where the NFT is not actually stored on the blockchain, but there's a set of things that are pointing to it from elsewhere. And so it's just an architecture where we need to figure some stuff out. And then I think another thing is, like, planning for obscurity is another question, right? Like, I think there's things where deleting it to me, if the goal was to achieve obscurity, or at least friction to to identifying a person or a thing. You don't necessarily need deletion. Sometimes you just need some layers of obscurity. And so I think this will also ask us questions of like, whether you need to delete some things, or whether you can just make them functionally obscure to 99% of people and difficult to get, does that accomplish the same goals? And I should throw in there and I feel like Janet knows infinitely more about this than I do. But just that the sort of property metaphors that undergird a lot of privacy thinking right now, are potentially limiting in the sense that you want people to have control over data that is related to them. But the notion of thinking of it as my data is helpful in some ways, and limiting in other ways because lots of data is shared or implicates many different things in the world. And so the my property metaphor for my purposes, is often limiting, especially when you're dealing with a blockchain where it's like it's really hard data, right? Like there are things that are personally identifying information about you under like, whatever laws exist now, the part of what we're trying to achieve is like a data set that has consistency and permanence and sustainability, while also protecting these these things about people's privacy that we want to protect. Working in like web two, actually, we had this problem, I don't know if you ever dealt with this, like Pinterest, and Facebook, which is like, you removing a thing from the database, an object or whatever, and it conceptually attaches to one person. But really, it's implicated by five different people. And so now you've like made Swiss cheese of a social graph, because of the sort of intersubjectivity of life in the universe, and so, so I don't know that, like, put it on the blockchain certainly solves us. But I think it forces us to rethink like, what are we trying to achieve in regulating data in terms of control and you know, in the boundaries of your personal control over it. And for that, I think web three has some cool stuff going on. Because again, there's these promising directions of allowing the user or a person to have more permissioning or more control over data related to them, as opposed to it being stored by a company where they don't have any insight or control over downstream transfers, right. One of the things you can do with a blockchain is sort of like give a person a lot more control over over how their data is stored, or how its permission. So. So I think that's that's like a, you know, very equivocal answer, but I think it's part of like the grand experiment. And, you know, people, people are working on it. And I think, I think it may even cause us to rethink the motivations that lead privacy law in one direction. If this if this technology winds up being promising and valuable and interesting. Privacy Law, hopefully will also accommodate the ways that it's useful.
Jen, do you want to say, and I was just gonna say, in the in the spirit of interdisciplinarity, I think the next time that you you have this conversation, you need to you need to get an archivist and our privacy lawyer on here, you know, that, that, that that tension between, you know, the desire to make permanent, and we see this in, you know, records of, you know, the need to to document, you know, war crimes, and the, you know, the potential uses of, you know, the decentralized web for that set against, you know, the right to be forgotten. Is is just, you know, that's a that's a tension that, that I think is is going to need to be grappled with.
That is such a good segue, because somehow an hour has flown by, and we're at the end of our time. But this is, I think, the the first event we're doing on this topic, and it's because it is a big one, we're saying it's the first and not the only because we definitely have to have this conversation again, you know, with all sorts of people. And I think you're exactly right, that we need an archivist and a privacy person. And the three of you, thank you so much for your time today. It was wonderful. I mean, I'm so grateful for your time all the time, because you just are so thoughtful on this and many other issues. But really appreciate you taking the time to share it with our community today. I want to say thank you to Tim as well as the decentralized Future Council for CO hosting this with TSF. Tim, any any final words?
No, no, I wanted to thank you. And thank Alex and Janet. You know, in policy circles, which is my field, we kind of cabin these things off, rightly or wrongly, so that we can digest them, right. So this today, we're looking at trust and safety on the decentralized web. You know, a few months now we'll be looking at privacy if you must know, we're looking at the environmental issues. So we'll be doing these were policy perspective. I know TSPA will be doing, you know, things going forward on this issue for their membership. But I just wanted to thank you guys for for participating in this particular early conversation.
Thank you. Lots of fun.
All right. Well be well everyone, take care and we will see you next time. Take care. Bye bye
