The Center Will Not Hold: Why and How Decentralization Will Lead Us Forward (Midway Programming)

6:00PM Aug 25, 2023

Speakers:

Keywords:

blockchain

community

journalists

technology

decentralized

news

people

platforms

network

build

talking

newsroom

user

work

called

protocol

good

spencer

information

money

I'd like to call it the top

evening This is us with the science

we the only four people on the panel

is there an order to this? I don't think so. Order the laptop to the hour as far as

think I could still get away with black and white profile photos. I feel like it's from two lines

from 2017 You can even see my face. Well, maybe I'm asking the wrong crowd. I keep using the privacy excuse but I'm gonna have to actually do a real photo soon. Alright, so it's not done yet.

Jenny gave me a new picture. She texted me that she said she likes for my builder AI like Slack or whatever. And it's nice blown up and then like down on the thumbnail it just looks like I got like these huge gels because everything just kind of like

run that through mid journey. You had the one it was like a night basically. That'd be my choice.

Michael. Thank you. We should swap out Spencer's pick with Doug Kilmer from tombstone. You see if anybody notices

he did have Ron Burgundy of

Santa see him go actually.

So Spencer's knows his veto power by not being here. So I mean, I guess basically

this is kind of the concept and like, what what's happening? Oh my god.

Computers. So sad exclamation. Point. So let's go to the next one. explanation points warning

I didn't study zero knowledge and talk briefly about accounting. Well, we only talk about tech

is that supposed to be there? Okay

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things. I think it's great.

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when you do an Aussie Yeah, man. I was also just thinking about if there's anything set up to record this. See anything that's backed by there was that but here's what we're gonna

just show your phone into the soundboard. And

HDMI cord you have one

that picture actually came from the family separation movement. This dude just showed up in the middle of the family separation protest in DC. A big one just just to have a pro life conversation versus that one guy? Yeah, there's that one dude. And I was walking around looking for somebody photograph I was like, Well, that looks spicy.

Over the last six hours

just run that through AI Anyway

Is there some personnel that's going to use this podium to do some announcement or we just start

handset you would pop

start just didn't start?

Professional?

presentation looks great. Thanks for making that. I mean, I know you're just sitting on your ass anyway.

Why do you think I have a stuffed sloth? I'm just gonna be the money spent on these operations

over video and your PowerPoints or is it just straight slides

let's see. So these will be live and then I have this as well and they are audio recording. So if somebody from the crowd ask a question if you could just reiterate it, so

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slide it up. When did lights up? You're good to go. Thank you. Thank you

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up, there's only 10 people we're talking about confirms that

pull up like the emergency verbs slideshow.

I was sitting because I was trying to do what one some metaphor that I got. I got like halfway. No This doesn't work. Justice System. What does that mean?

We never would have put him on his journey, though. If you had figured that out. This is what we do.

Like slide down these mics we all have one of these or do you want to use that? chair that

was just moving your way so it's because it's hot. Oh I mean, yeah. If you want to.

Watch only did I only do the dishes that would be amazing?

We just talked for an hour about your job. Just hash it out with whoever wants to get a couple more takes from

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it's fantastic.

We're worried there might be a repeat of the airplane.

sibilants you just never know.

Like when your friend who's just like started it on his own or he was waiting for some q&a personality commitment.

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are sophomores.

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don't look under the table

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might become a therapy session. So

to see Lyle Lovett and John Hiatt little intimate show that they do and it was the night of Blizzard and nobody could get out but the guys still didn't show up because they were staying in a hotel next to the theater. There were only 12 of us in the theater. Guys going off to one of those people off the balcony and and back and love it was just like just come down here to 10 songs and told stories and took questions from us. It was awesome.

Right? Yeah, okay. Probably one of the most memorable experiences for both the audience and them I would think

actually run into them and see if

you get to a certain point where a certain number of

times yeah. I mean, I'm tired of stadiums at this point.

We were opening for Coldplay it was it was

it was my first concert ever. Loverboy that was potato with the large band or? Yeah, it was it like it was a festival must have been 992

Hey doing congratulations man.

You want to tell them what what congrats on Blake Stoner, everybody. And what is the honor I don't have a memorize the award that you got but okay,

I guess we're reasonably

decentralized areas and now we're about to launch a big healthcare initiative, which shattered a USC document disparities in Georgia. We use that as a platform to begin helping break coverage into parts of battleground states next year. So the source of Georgia

America it's awesome. We'd love to like it oh and a of last year so and then been following you from a distance. I guess we can kind of go ahead and get started. I think we might throw out most of what we had here since this is gonna be a little bit more intimate. And just have a conversation and maybe find out what you all came here to talk about and learn about and see if we can provide any, any answers. We'll do a personalized consulting session. But I'll just do some some introductions really quick just so you know, who we are. So journaux dao dao stands for decentralized autonomous organization and it's a concept, a structure from from blockchain that we never actually really formally adopted the structure and what we really are as a small community that is rare The cofounders I'm Eric, I'm a journalist. I've been a journalist for about 25 years and kind of started covering blockchain when it was just Bitcoin 10 years ago. And then over the last decade, it never really piqued my interest too much until I would say, three or four years ago and it became clear that you could use it for more than just speculative investing and scams. And so co founded this organization, along with Keith, who is also a former journalist at Wired and medium and went on to be software developer extraordinaire, working on projects like not only journal Dow but also a very cool thing called Republic. That could be a session on its own recommend you check out this is so small we I was going to introduce them all but that's kind of dumb. So why don't you anything you want to add and then

No, that's good. Yeah. Okay.

I'm Spencer. I actually don't have any formal training in journalism, but very much interested in the technology aspect of this and how it can change coordination and group decision making and I met Eric through this space and gradually started learning more about journalism and the media landscape and how this technology can perhaps remedy some of the issues that we see in social media and news today.

I'm Crystal, I used to be a photo journalist, small newspapers, freelance. And then did that for several decades and got into tech, I guess, probably around 2010 and discovered blockchain technology when I was trying to figure out how to send encrypted messages to journalists who were working in Pakistan and other countries. They kept emailing me and I was like, that's, that needs to stop. So I explored peer to peer messaging through encrypted technology, which just happened to be built on top of blockchain. entered the space professionally in 2017. Doing community and comms, I'm now the Director of Community at consensus we build Metamask and some other core technology for blockchain, blockchain and web.

And so, okay, when we talk about decentralization, does anyone does everyone have like some idea in their head of like, what what that means? Or are you are you here because you have no idea what it's what we're talking about. It just sounds fascinating. So when we talk about decentralization, are you like people that are like I'm have I have some idea of what these people are going to talk about, like, raise your hands.

Until you guys introduce yourselves or yours, maybe centralized everything like that. I think you guys are talking about something very different

than that. Probably not. When you say they took everything out of the newsroom and centralized IT centralized how and where

he designed your Pennsylvania Kentucky, papers printed in New Jersey, finances, manage down in Washington advertising rents could be pulled from the Texas, Chicago and they're trying to sell out on a local level. The only thing left in the local community was some

reporters. Okay, so I think I think what we're talking about is related, but like taking that concept and blowing it up to like a global

level. I think that's a we see that as a problem and it's related to like, the solutions that were proposed.

So like when we talk about decentralization, we're generally talking about decentralizing systems. So like that's a corporate system that you're talking about. And we're thinking more on like the, the Global Information and Communication System, which the we actually if you go back to the previous century, that the technologies that are the foundation of this organization, the internet is kind of the fundamental, decentralized system. And we can think of also other things like email also a decentralized system. And another word for this is protocols because you know, protocols are really just a system of rules and ways of doing things like another to take it out of technology. Another protocol is basically the interstate highway system and though the traffic laws that dictate it so it's just rules, literally rules of the road that dictate how things are done. There is a universal way that a web page is constructed and then deconstructed so that you can view it there's a universal way that an email is sent over over the internet. These are these are protocols at some point around 20 years ago, we went from an intranet composed mostly of protocols HTT P S, that P is for protocol. And at some point, the it moved from open protocols that are owned by nobody to being dominated by centralized platforms. They're typically mostly corporate. So tons of communication over the internet these days, as we all know, routed through platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, a big one that matters a lot to journalists is Google. All search traffic is routed through that platform. And as a result, you can't be a journalist and not care about what's going on with these platforms that are opaquely controlled by centralized entities. And for reasons that I think become obvious in the last 20 years, we find this to be a problem. Keith, anything to add to that.

Just even to bypass like certain criticisms, like let's just assume like good action on all centralized parties like it's really we want to focus on the system rather than like vilifying any sort of like intentions by, you know, Twitter or anyone although we might like be personally unhappy about that and complain or whatever. But I think the problem holds whether or not like you have all centralized organizations are acting in good faith.

And I mean, I think we see centralization is not necessarily causing these problems, but contributing to all of them. And so, kind of transitioning into the, the technology I first again we got a small group any questions does does any of that not make sense? Anything that I can clarify that any of us can call or clarify. Okay. So we're using Okay, so kind of moving into the technology. So technologies, decentralized technologies, like a blockchain is a good example of this. But there are plenty of technologies that aren't necessarily associated with with blockchain and with crypto. There's a whole technological movement called the decentralized Web. You've probably heard of things like Mastodon that are also decentralized. And the whole point is that they're they're not controlled centrally. And we see this as is or like, speak for myself, although I think I speak for all of you that there there's an overlap between the ethos of journalism and some of the qualities of these tools that, to me, share such an obvious overlap with what what we're trying to do as journalists that I feel like I'm just like, screaming into the wilderness, trying to get people to adopt this, this way of thinking. And that's that decentralized technologies like like blockchain. The key tenant is transparency. Just as in journalism, there's a suspicion of centralized power that we've already covered. Because they're decentralized and not controlled by a certain central entity. They're resistant to censorship. And for these for things like a blockchain ledger to work, it has to be immutable. And to me that is analogous to you know, creating the the historical record that we're trying to do as journalists.

And to me, I think this is if we are all trying to rally around like one issue and avoid the arguments about even blockchain itself or crypto or Ponzi schemes or all that stuff. I think this has a rich tradition of like you said de web, like there's been really smart people who have identified this as an issue for years and I really think it's just in the last few years that the harms are materializing for everyone, and so I personally, I want to seize this opportunity to raise my hand and pointed at the real source rather than like, it's not Elon, it's not Twitter. It's not whoever's in charge of of Google, it's really this force of centralization, and there's good precedent for it just to follow a cycle. From like, the way that radio came to be and it was, you know, completely decentralized and then centralized and and then like the phone, phone companies like were this was like a known pattern with technology, and I think we want to raise our hand and be like, okay, journalists. You were kind of being reactive to these cycles. And this is like the time to jump in and have a seat at the table and to advocate for these tools and protocols being built like with journalists in mind. And I think that I thought there would be a lot of people, like on this train, but apparently, we're the ragtag group that like thinks this is a good idea. So that's where we were.

And one of the other things about this. This skepticism of centralized power is like you said, it's not necessarily that organizations, centralized organizations are selfish, interested always to the disservice of the public, but also if they have some policy change, or if they get acquired or if they go out of business, there aren't always assurances that the data that they're storing of users will be will persist beyond that particular company's lifespan. And I think that's one of the promises of some of these distributed databases and distributed computing networks is that one of the terms used to refer to some of these is the perma web, which is, you know, it's only so permanent as we can foresee, but it is a lot more permanent than, like the lifespan of a given business that, you know, may not last indefinitely across market cycles, or may not be able to just keep growing indefinitely and what happens when they're not around anymore. What happens to the user data or like the, the articles you wrote for publication, what happens at that publication goes down and that you know what happened? Your articles there, this means of storing content and in that kind of censorship resistant way. It's also like resistant to failure of businesses.

Yeah, when you get under the hood of decentralization, and really begin to understand what's happening, you're having conversations about the flow of information who controls it, and like everybody's saying here, and how can we make it better and resistant to anomalies we can't see or predict, especially when, you know, servers have to run through countries that are, you know, vulnerable to censorship, and what happens when your own country has an administration that will then shut down your servers. If it's decentralized and that information lives around the world, then information can still flow freely, and news can still travel. So that's one of the real core principles of decentralization as it applies to news and information.

So to give like kind of a concrete example to what Spencer was saying. So, in the last month, I had a call within an editor. I'm a freelancer and I had a call with an editor and the call begin with so we deleted 800 of your articles from the site which like if you've been a journalist long enough, this this will happen to you were places that you write for go out of business change ownership, or you just get a new editor and they change strategy. In my case, and suddenly like a body of your work is gone. I'm a little bit lucky that at least the stories are still in the CMS so they're not completely vanished from the internet. But like, imagine that we had a system of publishing, where what you publish isn't dependent on the server that it's stored on and where it where it lives. It's not dependent on that continuing forever, which so far, that never happens. We have like the Internet Archive. And that's, that's, that's about it, and that's actually under threat. So what we're what we're talking about is using technology, like a blockchain and there are some that are designed to be optimized for, for storing text and for storing media. Alright, we're not talking about the Bitcoin Blockchain, we're talking about other kinds of block chains that can be custom created for a journalist needs or are used for those needs. And so imagine crashing

in encrypted in a way that makes it you still own it only you can see it but is it is like persistent,

right? Yeah. And so it bestows all these other benefits as well, like your media is, is published. In a way that that exists permanently. And then but the ownership can also be encoded into that as well which often opens up all other sorts of opportunities.

Yeah, just a clarify like the transactions like on some of the blockchains are like public and you may hear that reference, but we're talking about, like, encrypted, like storing encrypted blobs that are not visible except for the people who have like the key to to decrypt them because I think a lot of the early arguments that I heard from journalists are like, well, I don't want to put all my stuff just like out there for for anyone to see. Especially like if it's a story in progress, but I think encryptions and applications have progressed enough where you know, that's no longer an issue like we're just kind of moving blobs around and to make that more concrete I think the decentralized nature means that if this half of the network goes down, then this half still has your file. And anyone can like create a node over here and now they have, you know, a record of your file or somebody else over here and that's what makes it resilient is like the network can kind of come and go like this half can become corrupted, while this half remains honest. And so this half wins. And then the mechanics of that weren't always clear to me. So I just want to make sure that like that's what we mean. That's how decentralization goes to permanence is it's not reliant on any group that could either coerce or disappear

as I as I understand it, to like the distributed storage and the distributed computing network there. That can also apply to non blockchain databases like interplanetary file system. that don't involve that aren't as like, financialized. You know, if anyone's skeptical of feeling like, oh, you need to buy into this, you need to speculatively buy into this network to leverage this stuff. A lot of what we're talking about can also work on systems like interplanetary file system. There's probably others that don't like cryptocurrency has nothing to do with those necessarily.

blockchains like some are financial transactions, and then other blockchains just function like computers. So that's one way to just kind of look at it on a very simple level. So we can build applications on top of this layer, and then that blockchain can then function as a computer.

And by the way, feel free to like raise hands as we go and like feel free to interrupt and just like shout and do whatever you want to we can get a little into the weeds on this. So like if we're if we're losing you and you want to get up to speed, please feel free. I did want to I did want to bring up you know, another, you know, potential use of of what we're talking about. And I mentioned earlier that, you know, there's all of when we're talking about putting stuff on a decentralized blockchain or other system. That means in most cases that you know, it's available and it's transparent for anyone to access and to see. And I think that allows journalists to actually deliver on the promise of transparency that we all talk about in an in a new and more radical way that really isn't practice that often. So I imagine that it was a standard and a best practice that you you hit publish on your story, and it ends up you know, it's live for everyone to see on the web, but you can also access it on the blockchain. So you can see what the what the original version was. And then let's say a correction is published. It's a very common practice for for stealth editing to happen. You don't it's it's less of a common practice than it used to be when I went to journalism school for for editors to make a change to a story to make a correction. When I was in journalism school, you definitely note that a correction was made, whether it's something was revised, I promise you, but it's not happening every time anymore, as you probably know. But what if, what if you could see every correction that was made it because it's transparently on the blockchain, and it becomes a standard practice, like we talked about, but now everyone can see it? And so I think that's that that's one potential improvement that moving to this way of doing things could bring and then we thought of another one last night when we were looking at our former presidents mug shot. So, you know, one reason that I think this technology is particularly important and powerful right now as we're moving into an age of artificial intelligence and the influence of large language language models in particular, particularly deep fakes. You know, so imagine again, that not only do we do we post our, all of our first drafts or the first published draft on a blockchain so that it's immutable but all your images all the authentic images that are published, they go on a blockchain so that there's a record of what the original authentic image and then there's There's also additional technology being developed that can then link that to the metadata where it was captured by a camera. So there's a chain of custody and a chain of authenticity. But that only goes so far as to when it's published because then that can be screenshotted manipulated and deep fakes can be created. But if there was a standard immutable record of each original image, you know because I've already seen manipulated images of the mug shot from from yesterday. But if this were a standard practice, we could go back to the original mug shot that was uploaded by AP or whoever at the date and you could you could check in this is I think, a key way to protect against an onslaught of AI created content.

And to take that one step further. Let's say that you were there was an NPR journalist in the room yesterday in Georgia documenting all this he could then go into that point of record, put, attach a piece of code that says yes, I was present, I know that mugshot was taken, and that attachment of that information will live with that image that metadata forever, it can never be removed. So that's where we get into attaching truth or you know truth in quotation marks to information and then multiple multiple people who are present can come in and say, Yes, I also have support that this is the actual thing that happened. Or you could say, No, that's not true. I was there and that didn't happen. And then it's attached that information forever.

And I think that that ties into something that's going to be featured later in this presentation about how all this can affect social media and on our reputations and communications online because you can have a presence on some of these distributed databases like blockchains you can have a social presence and you can, you can like apply donate domain names to your wallet address and things like this and it starts like primordial little building blocks of potentially the social media platforms of tomorrow. And to Crystal's point, if there is someone like a reputable journalist who's willing to vouch for the authenticity of a piece of information they can choose to make that kind of claim and to tag that they attest to this that they verify the authenticity of this and then they're kind of putting their reputation on the line, but it also gives some credence to the validity of that particular piece of media. So that it opens up this whole kind of social and professional aspect as well.

And in the absence of that what we saw last night on Twitter was this journalist having to do that via Twitter. Now, there's somebody that owns Twitter, and they have an agenda. So all they have to do is remove that point of record from that thread, and then it's gone. So if it's attached forever to that information, then you're sociopath and billionaire digital or can't come in and remove the point of record.

Did you hear that? Everything at all media on Twitter before 2014 was removed? Last week, yeah. So by the sort of stuff that's like, you know, eight years ago with Twitter, it was we didn't even think Twitter was that important to care whether they did something like that. And so it makes sense that only now are we seeing like, oh, maybe this is like a systemic issue that we shouldn't Empower things that are important to the public to just be either controlled or shut down or removed. And this is really the only game in town that we've seen that we could actually trust precisely because it is maintained and and supported by just anyone, like anyone open source code. You can download it, you can turn your computer into like a validation node, so that the information can pass through your computer. And so you can verify it like you're no different than anyone else. No news. org has privileged access. They really think that's the only way that it can actually get to an end state where you don't have to be concerned about like a small group of people and what they either want or don't want or do or don't do.

So a billionaire bought a media platform and deleted its archives from before 2014. And so this is this is Jeff Bezos or is this Elon Musk? Because what if it What if what if it were Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post? We may have just walked out on the choice of, of media platform and billionaire in this case. So I mean, that's that's to me, like the ultimate thought experiment for what we're talking about. Like, just imagine that that dystopian where a motivated person buys a venerable news out like outlet like the Washington Post, and just decides for whatever incentives to go in and press Delete on a bunch of things. If decentralization or Saudi or right. And actually at last year's last year is oh and a. There were some some folks presenting on this on this topic from from Hong Kong. And so this kind of this kind of technology is actually more in use. In places like that, where there are those kinds of totalitarian threats.

Journalists are looking for the decentralized networks, they're like out of necessity. We're here. It's like, I don't know. So,

yeah, when I am, I build communities around the world that uses technology and in Africa and LATAM and APEC, I don't have to explain the relevance of this technology. People instantly get that they need it to preserve information or to do whatever they need to do. Whereas in America, we have to spend a lot of time explaining why it matters, which I think is fascinating. And one of the early use cases that really got on my radar in 2017 was this one project that was allowing metadata to be put on chain from images coming out of Syria, so that this would become a point of record, that if the powers that be ever ended up at The Hague, there was documentation of war crimes, and it could never be removed or manipulated. So that's like a really powerful use case for this technology itself. And that's that was years ago.

The risk of slowing this entire grid down. I I am understanding everything that you're saying. However, I can use a more clear tangible understanding of chain and blockchain what that what that is, I mean, I understand that it impacted how you guys are building something, but I really appreciated how you explained protocol. I knew it, but you really helped me see it in different, tangible way. But what is blockchain? Spencer?

Well, I think we might be better just to let's call them decentralized networks because of blockchains. Like a specific like, just sequence of proven blocks, like a sufficient number of people agree that this stuff happened. And so that's a block and then the next group of people agree that this happened, and that's a block and then that the record of that is spread so diffusely, that it's unfathomable that any one person could either forget to like store it or to shut it down. And that's sort of like, but the block example is just one. One use case for if you have that resilient network, then you can do things like like say, you want to decentralize sports scores, then, you know, those are like I believe license like by the NBA or whatever you have to like, pay them a fee and like, and theoretically like that, that one entity could just report whatever sports scores, but then in a decentralized network, you could have incentives for a group of people on the network to like individually report what sports sports scores are, and have enough people report it that even if like a significant number, report the wrong one, you can still discern what like the right one is and then in that way, there's no NBA there's no organization it's really just verifiable because like the mathematical odds that like a majority would act against their own best interests are like that low is that is that making any more salient or worse?

How would I explain this to my father in law? Who is absolutely somebody who doesn't know the truth is anymore and just some of what I'm hearing just reminds her like the earliest concepts of the internet, were to help ensure the case of nuclear war. There's no one site that's going to store everything we're going to measure. We store everything

across every computer in the world. Exactly. Yeah.

It's a concept like that. Yeah. And then with active verification, active involvement. Users we're not just simply using CPU space to share information, verification, or validation or

content or information. Yeah, well, anytime you need specialized hardware, you're going to create such a specialization, right? So like if, if this piece of software could be decentralized, but actually only like this GPU can run it, then you're inherently going to empower the people who can get their hands on those GPUs and who can afford those GPUs. And so the idea is to make open source software that can run on such low level hardware, like a Raspberry Pi or like, anything that's already like distributed out there for anyone to use that, like, all you have to do is like press and go on it with an internet connection. And then it syncs up with all the other nodes. And so it's, it's really just resiliency and permanence, I think are like what you get out of it. And maybe it's better to just when I'm explaining stuff, that's what I try and focus on is not the underlying technology. But like the inherent resiliency of this stuff that we haven't had, like, you know, we've seen fits and starts with what could be possible and that the internet like the the early days of the Twitter API, where you could build anyone could build their own client off of the Twitter API, and then they decided it wasn't good for their business. So they shut it down. And like all those, like really cool community projects, like, just went away. Well, if, if the Twitter API is decentralized, then you can actually guarantee or at least, like, count on it being around for 10 years, 20 years as long as like you have faith in like underlying protocol. And then you can start building businesses and software and ideas and communities that are built for the long term where like right now pretty much all of our software has like two year time horizon on it from like VC money that I could either go do IPOs or disappears, right. And so we've never really had digital permanence. And this is like the first time and that's one of the reasons I think it's super should be super interesting to journalists. is like, your work can outlive any organization that even if you're not technically like, into the actual details of how it's done, it's like we're trying to bring, bring that idea to people that it can be done and just because we're used to things disappearing doesn't mean it has to be it has to be that way.

I have a metaphor for your father in law. Okay. So remember when we used to call the Internet the information superhighway, right like back in the 90s we looked like we're of a similar generation. So back in the day, the the internet was just the information superhighway. And if you wanted a place on this superhighway, you would go and you would spray paint on the superhighway right? And those are like the first websites, www dot whatever spray painted there. Over the years, that spray paint as has worn off. And more importantly, at some point, people actually corporations started building huge private clubs on top of the information superhighway. They were letting they were letting everyone in. But there was a hidden cost to get into these clubs. It's called your data. So these clubs are Google their Facebook, their Twitter. So what we're proposing is on the still on the information superhighway on the side of that highway, and next to those big clubs. We're talking about building big, beautiful permanent parks and gardens and most importantly, libraries that never go away and that are publicly owned and publicly maintained. So we're talking about kind of going back to that original ethos of the information superhighway that you can go and spray paint on but we're upgrading it a lot. We're going to these are like nice, big libraries.

That's a great metaphor. Only if he likes libraries though.

But a lot of this work does end up in public good space. So that that I'm glad you brought that up because you know a lot of this blockchain stuff that we do, there's a whole ecosystem of people that are trying to make these solutions and figure these things out and it's done in a public goods ethos. So that's also a good rabbit hole to to go down on the rails too far of it.

And I think we've the argument for businesses and why I think even like the big companies should be embracing this is I feel like even they sense that they have like extracted, like all that they can out of the audience capture. It's kind of like running out of oil to drill in, in the reserves like the they're having to increasingly increasingly escalate coercion and just like shady stuff, just to get the data that they've built these businesses on. And I think the next, like even bigger companies like the next Google who needed the internet, a decentralized open platform for to like, create Amazon, create Google create all the huge companies. We need that next level of public infrastructure to unleash like the next. Even bigger companies even bigger, like commercial successes. And it's kind of myopic, and short sighted and, you know, eventually why they'll be disrupted is because they can't envision that type of leapfrogging even though they are the result of leapfrogging previously legacy companies. And that's kind of the the promise of the technology. It's it is public goods, but it has to be public goods, even if you're self interested. And even if like you really just want to, you know, create the biggest company in the world. Like you have to be able to see that the bigger company is on the other side of this public infrastructure. Or else you're just going to, you know, suck the public dry with like your current, you know, necessarily extractive business practices, like people are not going to give you their data for forever. It's like declining, declining. All these industries are trying to say they like ethically sourced data. But it's it's really a question of centralization, of giving that data back to users and pushing the power back to the edges of the network. So that like the next round of improvement of building can actually happen on top of that,

and also supersedes corporations and companies. So we're talking about one concept we talked about in our ecosystem is exit to community. So instead of a lot of this stuff being run by corporations, it's run by the community itself. And it's completely decentralized from like, that's what we do. This organization is decentralized. So we don't answer to a corporation which is answer to these, these guys right here. But, you know, a lot of companies can also put this infrastructure in place where they instead of exiting to shareholders, they exit to the community, and then it becomes a collective decision about how you want to self govern and how you want to, you know, move forward but in the lens of media, that's a real opportunity for journalists and communities to come together and no longer be owned by these conglomerates that come in and buy the news outlets, but to also dictate what and how they tell the news of their their local landscapes.

What's a good example of exit to community? Like, I think like gitcoin are gonna

say gitcoin, they're there. What is more sophisticated software solutions that can be built on top of blockchains that allow users to like vote essentially, to come to a collective consensus in this public database that because of how its structured, no one entity can control and so it is kind of like a virtual Commons or like a virtual kind of kind of assembly or a civic assembly if you want to think of it and civic terms, and it allows for communities of people to collectively come to decisions for algorithms to actually facilitate the consensus. And then those algorithms can drive business decisions. They can drive financial disbursements in ways that I don't think we're quite feasible before some of this distributed database technology, but it's still it's still early and it's still very difficult to use and explain, which is why it remains esoteric,

sort of, kind of grounded in journalism and a couple of other concrete examples. There's a few examples you'll all be familiar with. Entities that I think go like halfway down this road that we're talking about, and that the Associated Press is a nonprofit cooperative. That is that is fairly it's a fairly distributed network of contributors. And then, but like it's still fairly centralized, but like it is, it is a distributed, nonprofit, cooperative organization. To go even further towards what we're talking about is the public radio system, the United States. And I don't mean NPR, but I mean, the public radio system that's funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is a made up of all kinds of stations that are locally controlled, locally. owned, usually nonprofit, or maybe University and they're, they're contributing to a larger system, but the control remains at the edges and at these, these outer nodes in these these local stations. So that's kind of halfway I think, towards what my vision would be and I'd love to see were like kind of interested in experiment with how can we go even further than that, and decentralize our process of, of news gathering to push more power out towards the edges and use technologies like like AI and like like blockchain, to bring ownership and control back to play to news deserts where there's currently no coverage. So going beyond what the public radio system is doing, because it takes a little bit of infrastructure and funds and know how to set up a radio station as well as the blessing of the FCC. And now we have technology that's a lot cheaper and easier. To operate and more accessible. And so we'd like to see if we could do that using these kind of concepts and technologies.

And I think the the reason why we want to frame it as decentralization and centralization, is because I think one of the early things we talked about as a group was what we see is a straight line between like the consolidation of media like via Clear Channel or Sinclair and all these other ones and like the, the enablement of corruption within, you know, institutions and because those gatekeepers at like the local level at the edges were disempowered or removed. And so by the time like, any sort of bad actor got into like a position of power, it was kind of like, you know, too late and so we really feel like we need those decentralized gatekeepers just to bring back a level of fairness. So it's gotta be it's gotta be local news. We've got to encourage like the nodes to come back and to empower them and and we need to connect the value that we get from them because we've seen what happens when they go down. I mean, to connect the value that people get from to those actual actual places

and figure out the network effect. You know, how and when you have all these decentralized nodes of community storytellers. How do you then collectively bring that information together? And send it out? Like a news wire?

I've just I've noticed you nodding your head a lot. And I'm just curious if you would, would you mind sharing? What do you work in decentralization at all? Are you on the spot definitely to put you on the spot. Okay, keep up with your Oh, I'm sorry.

Now, in Japan also, it's really hard for local media. local TV to survive, right? This free ad supported media is dying. So I think maybe Tao is the way to route local media. So that's what I'm thinking right now. So

why don't ya downs are very popular in Japan right now as well. So your government is using data. Okay. Yeah. So yeah, you're in a great, great place for that.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

I think the easiest or the best explanation for it now I've heard is like a Facebook group with a wallet where run by Facebook. Yeah. Not actually but that's why it's, you know, you form somewhere else, but I think it's the, the web three, crypto nature that allows everyone to collectively vote on what should happen and not be beholden to Facebook or Reddit or whatever platform is mediating their their activity. But then it's just a neutral network that they're using. And so they feel like they while you would be rightfully worried about giving Facebook a bunch of money and everyone pulling you know, their money into like the Facebook group, then these trust trustless networks allow you to everyone to be like okay, even if everyone else in this group is after my money and are just like trying to scam me I know how this works. And I can put it here and then I can take it back. And it's like, you know, it's, I have control over that. And so that allows people to from like, all all different agendas to come together on like a single issue and maybe like fundraise share resources. And that sort of thing. So that's, you know, for news for news communities. I think we've got a lot of ideas about how this could work. But we know that people in those communities would pay good money for a reliable news source. And so it's just a matter of connecting that. That willingness to pay with the people who would be providing that and then getting out of the way because anyone else who would come in and do that would just take so much and from that interaction, they would no longer be economically feasible. And so if you take that extractive force away, then you can actually enable a lot of economics for local news that we've never seen before. I think

I might have something that allows us to workshop the idea a little bit and take it to the abstract to the potential. I worked for a couple of weeks in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

90 minutes

to the west air. We are a very small newsroom. A few months ago, the probably the most well funded newsroom in Pennsylvania, a family owned newsroom, gifted their entire operation to us and they bought us enough money to guarantee that the size of their newsroom which is 80 people in a very small community, it's a huge measure versus a modern standards that the size of their user will be sustained for at least the next five years. No cuts at all for years. And they created a foundation for community engagement and putting a lot of money into that and asked us to invent a local news platform for the future that will help at least Central Pennsylvania, if not the entire state. We've covered 19 counties very rural counties. And we are tasked with coming up with a big idea and we have a lot of news deserts. We have communities that are right on the verge of losing their newspapers and newspapers and funneled down to four or two people. I have been the editor of many of the newspapers in central Pennsylvania saw that it was part of the dwindling process. And I think what we're trying to do is not just say, Oh, we've got all this money. Let's build up a big newsroom and see how we can make that last. I don't think that we can try to replicate what my experience has been. So you guys are talking about models for local news that are not based on New York Times you can add or add even so do it however the big idea.

I mean, I can I can touch on some of this. We've been talking about distributed databases and a bunch of like a network of computers all working together to store data in ways that are censorship resistant and you can have blockchains do that. You can have other types of non blockchain non crypto networks do that. But what we're blockchains get more unique is all the financial aspects of it like it allows funds to flow in decentralized ways and allows groups to share control over funds in ways that don't rely on institutions to monitor their shared accounts. Like that. You can have a group of users on a blockchain mutually manage funds in a way that's just facilitated by open source software that actually can't be taken down, given the nature of the network of computers that it's running on. And so like all of this is usable today. It's just one of the difficulties in my opinion in terms of adoption is that it requires you to use the blockchain native financial system, whether that's Ethereum you know, the eath all these a lot of speculative assets or stable coins, which are stable enough for this kind of business, but it's still actually difficult. Like the learning curve is quite steep for a lot of this stuff, but the capabilities are already there. So if you had an editorial team, and you were given some budget, and if for whatever reason you wanted to, you decided it was good for this particular business to share control over those funds, rather than just a point. The two or three signers on a bank account or something. You could do that but it would require that you're doing these transactions in cryptocurrencies and then off boarding them onto dollars and back and forth. So I think that's, I'm wondering if you guys feel the same way. I think the capabilities are there for business models and monetization. But adoption wise it requires more people to trust this kind of parallel economy of stable coins and cryptocurrencies that I think does have a iffy reputation by and large, even though it is like the capabilities are there. Well,

there's actually another approach to Yes, yes, you're right. Yes, and removing the monetization conversation and just building the actual protocol itself, which we've speculated on this and experimented just on whiteboards and stuff. Put the technological infrastructure in place first, and then you add the monetization and later once you've socialized your community, and your journalists on how to use this technology, how to use platforms that have gated access, like you would with a, you know, a digital page, you know, a paywall, but that is a decentralized aspect. So there's ways to like build the protocol layer at the base, and then add these other layers on top as people begin to use the technology and understand it and as the community itself begins to experiment with the tech, let me

also say upstream from that is community owned and community operated. And this is like the implementation of that because as soon as you have ownership, what a lot of people don't realize is you also have governance or need governance or lack of governance. It's like okay, if if all of us are going to own this, how do we manifest our ownership of that with decision making or not? Voting or not? And so there there are a few models that have not been applied to local news, but we've seen be successful elsewhere, like with NFT projects that offer you some, like some insider information. It's like a premium subscription. But then the economics around the trading of that of those premium premium subscriptions actually creates stable revenue for the news operation, or hasn't been done, but in this case, a news operation to support their costs to pay their salaries. And in a way that's there's no middleman there are just just, there's the people getting the premium subscription for that they're happy to invest in and they can kind of like season tickets or something where you might get the subscription and then there's only a certain amount and then you sell them at a profit and then it creates this activity around the subscription. Meanwhile, the news organization gets royalties on all that economic activity, which just kind of pays the the costs.

So it like and going back to the idea of a protocol, something that like I think we're looking to build in the future would be imagine as a CMS that has at its base level, like a shared protocol that all of your your newsrooms across your news desks across the area, there's like some fundamental agreement of like, what the protocol is for publishing, like whatever rules are that like this is this is these are our journalistic standards as an organization and they're across the all news desks. That's built in the to the CMS, but then there can be other elements built into the protocol that allow you to customize by by community. So in that way you're building in autonomy and local local control. And actual and then actual, you can build an actual local ownership which gets to what Spencer is talking about on a business level, like you can build all this stuff in. I mean, it's like literally, the sky's the limit in terms of what you can automate and actually build into the base level of your your CMS and your your, your business software operating system.

You can also do the same with your editorial board. You could have a governance mechanism in place that is also your editorial board. So that's another way to use the technology and build that into that protocol as well.

And there were ways to do this. You could say before distributed tech, but it did come at the cost of bringing in a Google like we tried this right with like contracts to do fiber or like this kind of like commercial public partnerships with specifically Google but like other other companies as well and it just it seems like a good idea because then the municipality gets infrastructure and like the private company pays for it. But then we've seen how that the incentives are just misaligned and long term and it often does not go well. And so this would be that model that you're the money's not coming from outside the community that the money is coming from the community and flying back into the community. It's like it's a closed system and

having a successful model, even on a hyperlocal level, first of all,

I think I think it works better at a hyperlocal level because you're actually you have the capability to to automate a lot and actually streamline you know, not streamline the business side of things streamline editorial stuff, you can bring AI into the mix to streamline more stuff. I think, why we're interested in news deserts, is we think once this is all mature enough, technologically, it actually works better at a smaller level because it's designed to automate it's designed to streamline and so it helps most where there's the fewest resources. Yeah.

Is it that it's going to be taking this technology to the next level, I guess, to harken back to your mentor building parks and libraries, a lot of times it's highway, you know, in a civic sense. We need the government to be the custodians to put that in place. Who is the government and its

situations, the community? Yeah. So in like, I would say, I'll throw it to, like, who's taken this? Forward the most is probably the Aetherium community. So like, you know, Bitcoin and then Aetherium is like the second biggest blockchain and its advancement over Bitcoin was the thing called smart contracts, which is basically you can have like little programs running inside the Bitcoin so you can I mean, the blockchain so you can you can automate things that's like what we're talking about. And so like, that's where we're seeing the most building of community going on and the people that the people that use and build the Ethereum blockchain, like, that's the community that that maintains it. So you know, theoretically, if you, if you're building on top of that, well, then it's owned and run by everybody. It's like, it's similar to the internet, but like, imagine that like the internet had servers that didn't have to be maintained because they were maintained by the community that built the thing.

And Aetherium is run by about the foundation so it is all self governed.

You're talking about an alternative technology, and you want to mess with the news. Is there anything out there that does that now?

There is there's definitely companies and startups that are using that are publishing on to blockchains right now, like everything that we everything that we've discussed, like it is happening. It's not. It's not happening very much at all in a journalism context. Like in terms of traditional journalism, like we talked about at this conference. There's very few traditional journalists using this technology. However, all the technology that I've described is being used to publish and store and transmit content. Just not necessarily high quality journalism.

alternative news on top of this alternative, and I would argue that the alternative news product brand would be news that is trusted to tell this alternative, trusted technology. Is there any buddy out there that you will name names?

Yeah, I mean, I can mention the couple platforms that allow for publishing like what we would call web three publishing platforms publishing documents on to blockchains are similar databases. One of them is Mirror Mirror dot XYZ. That's like for posting articles. People can donate to the author of the articles the articles are stored on one decentralized database called our weave that may also have options to publish to other decentralized databases like internet, interplanetary file system. Another platform is paragraph that XYZ that's a newsletter publishing platform, that again, kind of like substack Exactly. It's a lot like substack.

But other media outlets using it though, is there's really question Oh, aren't media

outlets? Oh, not just the actual platforms? Yeah.

They're small publications. There's a there's a newsletter called dirt that was founded It's dirt dot XYZ founded by a writer at The New Yorker that has experimented with a lot of this stuff. There was a thing called the Brickhouse collective. That was part of a huge blockchain media experiment from five years ago. It was called there was a thing called civil where they poured billions of ideas. I mean, billions of dollars, maybe it's just no games, millions, millions of dollars into some of these ideas. The timing was very bad from a capitalism perspective. And they funded 100 newsrooms to experiment with this stuff. But then the funding to continue building out the decentralized system never materialized. But some of the some of the newsrooms that were initially funded by that still exist and still still kind of experiment with some of these concepts of Brickhouse collective came out of that block club Chicago came out of that the Colorado sun came out of that. So yeah, there's there's there's outliers out there.

And when I think about why there aren't larger, more mainstream, trusted or recognizable or household publications using these, I tend to think it's because actually using some of these platforms is still pretty difficult from a technical perspective, like using a big fan of the platforms that I mentioned mirror and paragraph. They both let you do a lot of really interesting things, and that leverage all these decentralized alternative systems that we're talking about, but getting to the point of being comfortable using it and with the software that you need to be familiar using to use these platforms, is there still it still needs to be made a lot more accessible? I think for most people, this

is in progress. Yeah. It's also a great avenue for journalism schools to get involved. There should be decentralized and there are some but I went to school at UNC Chapel Hill. And there should be more decentralized technology being taught in the journalism school level because that generation gets it faster. And they can come into newsrooms and help implement because you do want someone that understands the technicalities involved in your newsroom on a daily basis if you're going to implement because it is complex.

On the production side of things, or is it also we would expect the users to

know it. So this is where we get into that experimental phase. In the newsroom level, yes, that expertise needs to be there. But as the user as the interfaces evolve, and as more people use this technology at scale, it does get easier. And the place where I work, we work on this problem all the time. Like how do people use this technology? How do we make accessing information easier on the front end and like the things mirror and paragraph that Spencer mentioned, they function like a WordPress website on the back end? It's a little more complex, kind of but I can run it and I'm like the Tina Fey of technology so but on the user side it they really wouldn't know they're on a blockchain except for like one button.

I guess. consumer gets the content that they want and receive that across all channels, digital service, media shares. Yeah, as far as they're concerned about how we put it together. Okay.

Exactly. The newsletter platform I mentioned

in central Pennsylvania and trying to get as long as they can still read it on their phone, then you're good and easily access it there.

Exactly. And from the from a user perspective of accessing and reading the content, you can have that just like that, for example, the newsletter platform I mentioned paragraph does let you just send the content straight to subscribers email inboxes, as well in addition to imprinting that content on these distributed databases. So in terms of accessing the content, that is that is already really user friendly. The bit that is in progress in terms of being advanced right now is how users like financially paid for this this content in the in the blockchain native way. And if anyone's interested one, one trend to watch that I think could actually make a lot of this more accessible is this term account abstraction, which actually lets a user engaged with a lot of this stuff without having to get into all the technical weeds that's required right now. Because as a user, if you want to donate to someone who, who wrote who's writing a paragraph newsletter, you need to be familiar enough with the technology to know how to use crypto and how to send crypto to the writer of this and donate. But once all that becomes more accessible than readers will not only be able to read this stuff, but also actually pay the author's in a way that's very familiar and doesn't require them to know all the stuff.

That could be disenfranchised communities on communities of color. Way to perhaps not extract value dollar value from these communities, but somehow rotating within that that community. Everybody's nodding,

yeah. Yeah, that is actually the best use case. One of the best use cases if you go to, I think it's oak community, oak dot community in Oakland. They're using this technology and they're using it in a way where people going around the farmers markets and training farmers on how to use digital currencies to just you know, value exchange, how to buy your vegetables with a digital currency. But the community itself is figuring out how to use this technology to create their own currency. And then how do they get everyone to begin using it as a community together? And their website has a really good intro to what they're doing. There's a lot of artists that are on the ground there that are using NF T technologies in marginalized communities to then keep the the money in their community create generate generational wealth, but then also expand it through the community so that they're teaching this technology to their community and the next generation and so they continue to evolve.

Think we're over and grow over time, didn't it? Maybe one last question. Yeah.

The overlap journalistic values and values of decentralized approach, one of the tensions missing from that list would have been accountability. So I'm curious to get your approach on. The one benefit if there is if there is one of something like Twitter and Elon Musk so you can watch me to point fingers and say, this is where it went wrong. What does that turn into other decentralized?

You can't delete what you want. You can't buy it and delete it.

You can see the transaction on chain

then say if there's a corrupting the system appropriately, how do we sort of then go through the locker to say, what needs to happen there? I feel that it sort of Could, could serve to offer up his view. If somebody really wanted to sort of take advantage of this technology, I sort of thought would be my main concern.

It's not possible to actually take you'd have to be extremely skilled to take advantage of this technology and everything happens on chain. And it's a little complex to explain really fast, but like we have investigators in our Dow that can go on chain and watch political actors do things by transaction through their wallets going back and forth. So they see anomalies, like one of them identified FTX, probably six to eight months early, because he saw the anomalies moving back and forth on chain. So the same can be applied to journalism. We can see when people begin using this technology, how information flows back and forth, because for it to be on a blockchain, it happens on a ledger on a distributed ledger. And people like the smart one right here can go in and say, Oh, this happened here. This happened here. This happened here. And so you're always on the record, you're always doing action. In public

even more to your point directly. Aetherium and proof of stake networks operate on automated accountability where you have to put in your basically your escrow of value in order to be a validator of the network. And then if you're, if you're discovered to have like, lied, or whatever, then that value gets slashed. And so basically, that's that is scalable, and we've been talking about it as far as like, you know, could could a new source put up $10,000 And if the community votes that they like lied about something, then that gets slashed. There's a way to like align incentives and the way that you would try and do that before I can't think of how you you wouldn't necessarily but that's like an advantage of the algorithm just enforcing the logic of like, okay, it can handle escrow accounts really well. It can handle financial stuff really well. And it can handle like, when this thing happens, then this thing happens and that's like immediate accountability. In fact, during the economic downturn, as like the traditional financial markets, kind of slowly expressed their contagion. The Crypto markets were like it was an instant everyone got liquidated immediately and it was done. And but then it took like, for the traditional banking system, it was like eight months of investigation isn't like, oh, actually, this there was some fraud here and all that stuff, and it just wasn't even even possible and it was over in a second. So I think that's the that's why we're here too. Is the definitely the, the accountability and like doing what you say you're going to do, and then losing something if you don't. Great question.

Thank you. I think we're 10 minutes over. So thank you.