Tag Archives: decentralized

Distribute Commons, Not Commodities

By Nathan Schneider

This is the first in a series of guest blog posts exploring the real-world implications of the Decentralized Web Principles.

The following piece is by Nathan Schneider, an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he leads the Media Enterprise Design Lab. His most recent book is Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition that Is Shaping the Next Economy.

In his sweeping book Fulfillment, Alec MacGillis tours the America that Amazon has re-made. Many of his stories are about warehouse workers in places once home to unionized manufacturing jobs that paid multiples more than what Amazon doles out today. MacGillis focuses on what is, instead of what could be. Yet one passage stuck with me especially, a signpost of what might have been, of where this whole mess might have instead led:

as the former U.S. labor secretary Robert Reich noted, if Amazon employees owned the same proportion of their employer’s stock as Sears workers did in the 1950s–a quarter of the company–each would, by 2020, own shares worth nearly $400,000.

From Fulfillment by Alec MacGillis

The tech economy has generated wealth like the world has never seen, producing the richest companies and individuals in history. All this wealth, as MacGillis and Reich remind us, could have been distributed differently. It could have produced a revival of prosperity as data centers and logistics routes began populating the Rust Belt. Regions now home to endemic poverty could have had a critical mass of upwardly mobile consumers. Instead, a relatively small coterie of elite technologists get stock options, founders start space companies, and everyone else can hardly afford to enjoy the tech their labor makes possible.

DWeb Principle: Distributed Benefits

The DWeb Principles call for “distributed benefits.” Companies like Amazon remind us why. The people contributing their work, their data, and their imagination to make technology valuable should receive value in return. All of us, no matter what we contribute, should benefit because a truly distributed web should be a commons for everyone.

Long before calls for a distributed web, there was a political philosophy called “distributism”–an outgrowth of Catholic social teaching in the Gilded Age. As they confronted the horrors of factory labor and recognized the advance of automation, distributists recognized that if you distribute ownership, distributed control over technology will follow. More than focusing on the design of the technology, they were concerned with how it is owned.

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“In the E2C vision, successful startups would aim toward becoming owned not by a new round of speculative investors but by the people who love and rely on them.”

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For years now, I’ve been working with tech startups that are trying to build on the long tradition of cooperative business–businesses owned and governed by the people who use them, rather than outside investors just seeking to turn a profit. This isn’t easy, because the dominant venture capital investment model encourages centralized power and centralized benefits above all else. VCs push companies to “exit” into either an acquisition by a bigger company or an IPO on Wall Street. Lately, my collaborators and I have been working to advance the possibility of a new option: “exit to community,” or E2C for short.

Exit to Community (E2C)

In the E2C vision, successful startups would aim toward becoming owned not by a new round of speculative investors but by the people who love and rely on them. This isn’t as out-there as it might sound. Since the 1970s, thousands of companies have become employee-owned through Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs), often using bank loans that don’t cost employees a cent upfront. Cooperative businesses like Ace Hardware and the original Visa enabled small businesses to control national-scale networks. New blockchain-based tokens could introduce even more possibilities for enabling users to co-own their tech.

As the E2C idea spreads, I have started to worry about how some are interpreting it. When people think of communities owning companies, more and more, they think of something like GameStop — swarms of small investors pumping and dumping stock on apps like Robinhood. That is not what I mean. I do not hope for a world where we are all crypto day-traders; that’s a job best left to well-governed robots. Finance is hard, single-minded work mostly detached from reality. And in decentralized finance (or DeFi), as in most financial markets, a few players will likely reap most of the wealth.

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“Speculation is a game of profiting at the expense of whoever comes later, pilfering from other people’s grandkids. Community ownership, in contrast, means that those who come after us can share the benefits of what we have built.”

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I fear the distributed benefits that a lot of DWeb projects envision are of the GameStop sort. Everything becomes a market: storage space, processing power, code contributions — the works. Crypto-tokens matter less for what they are for than what they might someday be worth. Speculation is a game of profiting at the expense of whoever comes later, pilfering from other people’s grandkids. Community ownership, in contrast, means that those who come after us can share the benefits of what we have built.

Open Source software has in some respects modeled a world where we don’t need money to motivate us, where we don’t hide behind artificial scarcity and needless monopolies. The cooperative tradition involves shared ownership and shared wealth, but rather than encouraging speculation, it invites solidarity. Co-op shares usually can’t be traded on an exchange. They are, so to speak, true utility tokens, but with long-term benefits. Cooperativism is the ultimate HODL.

Wrap Markets in Democracies

The old offline world had a pretty sensible idea: When you want to set up markets, enclose them in a democracy that sets the rules. Wall Street was even more dangerous than it is today, before elected governments put limits on what it could do. Flea markets follow the rules of the cities where they operate. This is a principle that DWeb projects should strive for as well.

Consider, for instance, the blockchain project Cambiatus, which has helped communities in Latin America set up their own cryptocurrencies. Before deploying the tech, Cambiatus works with the communities to develop goals and governance processes; the crypto serves the communities, rather than the other way around. Here in the United States, the labor-market startup Opolis is wrapping its token economy within the overarching legal structure of a cooperative. (I recently became a member — my first co-op membership paid for with crypto!) With these kinds of democracy-first designs, we can steer our distributions of benefit more toward the common good than toward the cleverest gamblers.

The six-figure dream of front-line worker-owners is not a fantasy. One of my favorite breweries here in Colorado, New Belgium, was recently acquired by a multinational beer company. This was a disappointing outcome to those of us who prize local business. But it was not the usual corporate acquisition. Rather than leaving workers in the lurch, as buyouts usually do, New Belgium’s current and former employees saw six-figure payments, at least. Why? It was 100% employee owned, through a trust the employees shared. From the CEO to the forklift drivers, the wealth that they had created, in the end, was theirs, together.

For too long, we have hoped that distributed technology would produce distributed power. Again and again, the tech alone doesn’t cut it. The web won’t be truly distributed until the wealth it creates is.

Dweb Meetup: The Latest in the DWeb Ecosystem

Even amidst the COVID lock down, builders of the Decentralized Web have hit new milestones with their projects this year. At our last DWeb Meetup of 2020, we heard from a dozen projects about their breakthroughs, challenges, and roadmaps for the coming year.

As with all of our DWeb Meetups, these lightning talks provided an opportunity for us to learn from others and explore potential partnerships and collaboration. We had rounds of 5 minute talks with 2 minutes of Q&A in Zoom.

Here were the speakers (and the times when they appear in the video):

  1. Dietrich Ayala, Ecosystem Lead, IPFS (05:30)
  2. Yisi Liu, Founder, DWeb Shanghai (15:35)
  3. Karissa McKelvey, Researcher, Simply Secure (24:02)
  4. Mark Nadal, founder, Gun.eco (32:45)
  5. Adam Souzis, One Commons (41:47)
  6. Paul Frazee, founder, Beaker Browser (50:28)
  7. Maria Bustillos, Co-Founder, Brick House Co-operative (1:00:40)
  8. Mauve Signweaver, Agregore (1:10:12)
  9. Tom Trowbridge, Co-founder, Fluence Labs (1:17:42)
  10. Travis Vachon, ItMe.company (1:27:01)
  11. Brandon Wallace, Plan Systems.org (1:35:03)
  12. Michael Toomim, Braid (1:44:35)

Descriptions of Speakers and Their Lightning Talks

1. Dietrich Ayala, Ecosystem Lead, IPFS

Big is Small is Big: IPFS Usage, Users and Use-cases in 2020

As adoption and availability of IPFS grew in 2020, we saw it used across a broad spectrum of applications, varying widely in industry category, use-case, architecture and more. IPFS ecosystem lead Dietrich Ayala will speedrun through a sampling of these, sharing what was learned and how our users are guiding the IPFS project into 2021

Twitter: @dietrich

2. Yisi Liu, Founder, DWeb Meetup Shanghai

A Volunteer-based Mesh Network Workshop in China Academy of Art

DWeb Shanghai, along with the Institute of Network Society at China Academy of Art, co-hosted a special workshop this month on building mesh networks at its fifth annual conference. Yisi will share what they did and what they learned from the workshop and its participants.

Twitter: @TheYisiLiu

3. Karissa McKelvey, Researcher, Simply Secure

Decentralization Off The Shelf: Patterns x Decentralized Applications

It’s hard to get started building a decentralized application. Even if you’ve been building them for years, it’s hard to get them adopted. Decentralized applications operate differently than centralized ones — and we need new tools that developers and designers can use to understand how to build applications. Simply Secure is now producing a library of resources, assets, and patterns to support the design and development of better user-facing applications that are backed by decentralized architecture.

Twitter: @okdistribute

4. Mark Nadal, Founder, Gun.eco

Founded in 2014, GUN is an open source cybersecurity protocol for synchronizing graph data in decentralized mesh networks. It is as easy as Firebase yet supports end-to-end encryption and uses “CRDT” algorithms instead of a Blockchain.

In 2020, GUN hit 200M+ downloads with 30M monthly active users. The project is powered by 2 full time staff, 10 part-time volunteers, and 100+ contributors.

Twitter: @marknadal

5. Adam Souzis, One Commons

Building an Open Cloud at OneCommons

“At the DWeb Camp in 2019 I led a brainstorming session on how we can build a cloud providing the same openness and freedoms to users and developers as open source. One year and a pandemic later, I’m excited to finally release the first step in pursuit of that vision: “ensembles”, git repositories that package open cloud services.

They are designed to be the building blocks of an open and decentralized cloud infrastructure: reproducible, relocatable and shareable. Decentralization is obtained via a notion of a persistent identity that is defined not by a network location but rather a reproducible state.”

6. Paul Frazee, Founder, Breaker Browser

Beaker Browser 1.0: Share P2P Websites

“Unless there was a disaster between my talk-submission and Thursday, then Beaker Browser 1.0 is now available! Join us for a quick overview of building and sharing peer-to-peer Websites with this newest release.”

Twitter: @pfrazee

7. Maria Bustillos, Co-Founder, Brick House Co-operative

Decorporatizing the Public Sphere

Megaplatforms from Amazon to Facebook to Penguin Random House have flattened and centralized the human imagination. Netizens know that something is draining out of our world, that there’s less variety, less brilliance, and fewer surprises, in our movies, music, and writing. But it’s not clear to most that this cultural deterioration is the result of a breakneck form of capitalism enabled by technology.

The Brick House Cooperative, launching December 8th, is addressing this problem as writers and artists, ‘from the other side’. They’re looking to join forces with technologists and others interested in decorporatizing media. Maria will also share how her previous experience with Civil, a blockchain-based media platform that aimed to fund journalism, will inform her work with The Brick House.

Twitter: @mariabustillos

8. Mauve Signweaver, Founder, Agregore

Agregore: Local-First Web Of Everything

Agregore is a local-first web browser which aims to simplify application development across different peer-to-peer protocols while staying as minimal and customizable as possible. Through Agregore, Mauve is trying to address the issue of web browsers not having access to full peer-to-peer protocols. They want to make creating local-first apps easier by simplifying the programming interface and app distribution method.

Twitter: @RangerMauve

9. Tom Trowbridge, Founder, Fluence Labs

Fluence Labs was established in 2017 by 3 founders, Dmitry Kurinskiy, Tom Trowbridge and Evgeny Ponomarev. They started in 2017 and spent a lot of time researching and experimenting with decentralized computing. Just recently, in November 2020 they launched Phase 1 of Fluence: the decentralized computing protocol that allows applications to build on each other, share data and users. They call it an open application platform.

The goal of Fluence is to enable the next wave of internet innovation by turning the competition into collaboration. Fluence creates an open alternative to proprietary platforms, enabling developers to build with confidence and be fairly compensated for usage.

Twitter: @Fluence_Project

10. Travis Vachon, itme

Self Determination for our Digital Bodies with Solid

Centralized tech monopolies and other large corporations capture the vast majority of the value of the world’s data in 2020. In order to create the conditions necessary to return this value to the world’s users, we need new politico-technical-social institutions that give users the ability to provide and retract informed consent over the ways their data is used. itme is building the world’s first cooperatively owned and operated data union built on Tim Berners-Lee’s new Solid web standard to let users reassemble their digital bodies and capture the value of the data they create.

Twitter: @itmepress

11. Brandon Wallace, President, PLAN Systems

PLAN Systems is a technology 501(c)(3) founded in 2018 by two U.S. veterans in Austin TX., including Drew O’Meara, inventor of G-Force realtime audio reactive music visualizations. Their development effort centers on building a framework of open protocols and universally accessible interfaces designed for privacy, real time collaboration, data visualization, and secure data storage & portability. November was a critical milestone, demonstrating PLAN (pre-alpha) running on 4 major platforms across desktop and mobile devices.

Github: https://github.com/plan-systems

Email them at info [at] plan-systems.org to learn more and get involved.

12. Michael Toomim, Braid

How Braid is growing, from Dweb to the IETF

“At 2019’s Dwebcamp, a group of us found a back room and spontaneously designed a shared protocol for distributed synchronization. Tim Berners-Lee walked by, and thought it would be a great addition to the web.

We will report on what’s happened since!

We presented the protocol to the IETF’s HTTP Working Group in Montreal, and received a surprisingly enthusiastic reception. We are now building software on the protocol, to show how HTTP can be extended into a distributed shared fabric for local-first applications, users, and systems, with great debugging and tooling.”

DWeb Panel: If Big Tech Is Toxic, How Do We Build Something Better?

Many of us know that the Internet is broken, so how do we build something better? On September 22, DWeb San Francisco invited a panel of experts to share their views on the most viable paths forward. The panelists included author & EFF advisor Cory Doctorow, Matrix.org co-founder Amandine Le Pape, decentralized social media researcher Jay Graber, and TechDirt’s Mike Masnick. They covered a range of approaches — including technical, regulatory, and organizational — that could bring us towards a future where our networks are more resilient, participatory, and decentralized.

ABOUT THE PANELISTS:

Best-selling science fiction author and EFF Special Advisor, Cory Doctorow, emphasized that we need to fix the Internet, not the tech companies by doing a lot more to bring back principles of interoperability, to enable more competition and innovation. 

Developer, and founder of Happening, Jay Graber, shared her insights on what she found hopeful about the decentralized web ecosystem, and some of the challenges that some of these protocols still need to grapple with moving forward. 

Chief Operating Officer of Element and Co-founder of the Matrix.org Foundation, Amandine Le Pape, shared what she learned as Matrix built a new open standard for real-time communication from the ground up, as well as her ideas on how to counter the information silos of the big centralized platforms. 

Journalist and co-founder of Techdirt, Mike Masnick, shared about the way people were realizing the need for change, and also some of his skepticism about how some proposed regulations to enforce interoperability may harm start-ups and other less-resourced projects. Masnick’s 2019 white paper, “Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech” has been an influential call to arms for the decentralized tech community.

As Mike Masnick writes:

At a time when so many proposals for how to deal with the big internet companies seem focused on spite and anger at those companies, rather than thoughtful discussions of how we get to what’s coming next, at the very least I’m hopeful that others can be inspired…to come up with their own ideas for a better, more proactive approach to a future internet.

Ultimately, that vision—building a better Internet and Web—is the North Star that the DWeb community aims for.

Our Social Media is Broken. Is Decentralization the Fix?

When Jack Dorsey, founder of the very centralized social media platform, Twitter, posted this message about decentralized social media, our DWeb community took note:

Dorsey went on to enumerate the current problems with social media: misinformation and abuse; opaque, proprietary algorithms that dictate what you see and hear; and financial incentives that elevate “controversy and outrage” rather than “conversation that informs and promotes health.”  But Twitter’s co-founder and CEO also sees promising new solutions:

We agree. Much work has been done and some of the fundamentals are in place. So on January 21, 2020 the Internet Archive hosted “Exploring Decentralized Social Media,” a DWeb SF Meetup that attracted 120+ decentralized tech builders, founders, and those who just wanted to learn more. Decentralized social media app builders from London, Portland and San Francisco took us on a tour of where their projects are today.

WATCH PRESENTATIONS HERE:

Developer and writer, Jay Graber, explained the state-of-the-art in Peer-to-Peer, Federated and blockchain related social media.

The evening began with a survey of the decentralized social media landscape by researcher and Happening.net developer, Jay Graber. (See her two excellent Medium articles on the subject.) Graber helped us understand the broad categories of what’s out there: federated protocols such as ActivityPub and Matrix; peer-to-peer protocols such as Scuttlebutt, and social media apps that utilize blockchain in some way for  monetization, provenance or storage. What was clear from Graber’s talk was that she had tested and used dozens of tools, from Mastodon to Iris, Martti Malmi’s new P-2-P social app and she deftly laid out the pros and cons of each.

What followed were talks by the founders and developers from each of Graber’s categories:

Evan Henshaw-Plath (aka Rabble) was one of the earliest engineers at Twitter. He’s bringing years of startup experience to Planetary.social, his new P-2-P mobile version of Facebook.

Evan Henshaw-Plath, an original Odeo/Twitter engineer, is the founder of Planetary.social, a P-2-P mobile app that’s “an open, humane Facebook alternative” built atop Scuttlebutt. His goal with Planetary is to make an app reflecting the values of the commons, but that feels as seamless and familiar as the social apps we already use.

Flying in from London, Matthew Hodgson, founder of Matrix.org, brought us up-to-date with his open network for fully encrypted, real-time communication. With an impressive 13.5 million account holders, including the governments of France and Germany, Matrix is showing hockey-stick-like growth. But Matrix’s greatest challenge: in an encrypted, decentralized system, how do you filter out the bad stuff? By using “decentralized reputation,” Hodgson explained, allowing users to moderate what they are willing to see. Hodgson also revealed he’s building an experimental P-2-P Matrix in 2020.

With fuller control over one’s social streams comes greater responsibility. Matrix founder, Matthew Hodgson explains how each user can subscribe to trusted blacklists and eventually “greylists” of questionable content and block it.
Today’s social media walled gardens are not that different from America’s phone companies in 1900, explained tech executive, John Ryan. We are in the early days of integration.

Thought leader and tech executive, John Ryan, provided valuable historical context both onstage and in his recent blog. He compared today’s social media platforms to telephone services in 1900. Back then, a Bell Telephone user couldn’t talk to an AT&T customer; businesses had to have multiple phone lines just to converse with their clients. It’s not that different today, Ryan asserts, when Facebook members can’t share their photos with Renren’s 150 million account holders. All of these walled gardens, he said, need a “trusted intermediary” layer to become fully interconnected.

Twitter CTO, Parag Agrawal, has been tasked with bootstrapping a new team of decentralized builders called “Bluesky.”

Next  CTO, Parag Agrawal, outlined Twitter’s goals and the problems all social media platforms face. “Decentralization to us is not an end, it’s a means to an end,” he explained. “We have a hypothesis on how it can help solve these problems.” Agrawal says Twitter will be bootstrapping a team they call “bluesky,” who will not be Twitter employees, but independent. “Twitter will have very little control (over bluesky) other than our bootstrapping efforts,” he laid out.


Next up was Burak Nehbit, founder of Aether, something akin to a peer-to-peer Reddit. But here’s Aether’s secret sauce: expert moderation, with 100% transparency and communities who elect their own moderators. Aether is focused on “high quality conversations” and those users willing to roll up their sleeves and moderate them.

Aether’s founder, Burak Nehbit, is creating a P-2-P social media platform of highly curated, self-governed content, where elected moderators ensure “high quality” conversations.

And rounding out the evening was Edward West, founder of Hylo.com, an app that combines group management, messaging and collaboration built on holochainRecently Holo acquired the Hylo software and Holo’s Director of Communications Jarod Holtz explained why this union is significant for decentralized builders, including the Terran Collective‘s Aaron Brodeur and Clare Politano, who will be stewarding the Hylo project: 

Edward West of Hylo, Aaron Brodeur, Jarod Holtz and Clare Politano are joining forces as Hylo.com is acquired by Holo and “stewarded” by the Terran Collective.

From both a design and an engineering perspective, the way Hylo is structured makes it perfectly suited to being converted to run in the future as a decentralized application on Holochain. The Hylo code base will be instrumental in helping us demonstrate how a centralised app can be transformed into a distributed app.

Blockchain based social media solutions, including Bevan Barton’s Peepeth built on Ethereum and Emre Sokullu of Pho Networks, gave overviews of their work at lightning speed. After the Meetup, Sokullu penned this article explaining how Pho can serve as a programming language to build decentralized applications. 

From federated to blockchain and gradations in between, decentralized social media is taking flight.  And on one winter night in San Francisco, builders of wildly diverse projects came together at the Internet Archive to demonstrate how far they’ve come—and the long road ahead.


CRYPTO CHALLENGE: 3 Donors will match any Crypto Donation this week, 3-to-1!

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us…

Opening line from “A Tale of Two Cities”  by Charles Dickens


For those deeply engaged in cryptocurrencies, the words of Charles Dickens, written 160 years ago, have the ring of prophecy. 2018 was the best and worst of times for those holding bitcoin, ether, OMG or XRP. And yet, for some savvy community members who donated their currencies for good, 2018 was also a “season of light.”  This year Ripple founder, Chris Larsen, donated $29 million in XRP to fulfill the wishes of every classroom teacher on DonorsChoose.org. In March, OmiseGO and Ethereum co-founder, Vitalik Buterin donated $1 million in crypto to help refugees in Uganda. The anonymous philanthropist behind the Pineapple Fund gave away 5,104 bitcoins to 60 charities, including us. Pine writes, “I consider this project a success. If you’re ever blessed with crypto fortune, consider supporting what you aspire our world to be :).”

Now, to close out the year, three generous supporters of the Internet Archive are offering to match any cryptocurrency donation up to a total of $25,000, made before the end of 2018. For the next few days, you can quadruple your impact for good. What better way to put your cryptocurrencies to work this year than by ensuring everyone will have access to world’s knowledge, for free and with complete reader privacy on archive.org?

DONATE CRYPTO NOW & QUADRUPLE YOUR IMPACT

So why should crypto communities support the Internet Archive? Well, we’ve been experimenting alongside crypto founders, developers and dreamers since 2011. Five years ago, the Internet Archive’s founder, Brewster Kahle, wrote this reflection on Dreams Reflected in Bitcoin.  Back then, Kahle wrote about early bitcoiners, “Love the dreamers– they make life worth living.”  

The first bitcoin “ATM” in the Internet Archive offices.  Honor system only. 

Who else but the Internet Archive would set up its own Bitcoin-to-cash converter box in the middle of its office? We convinced the sushi joint next door, Sake Zone, to accept bitcoin. (The owners closed down the sushi restaurant a few years ago, but when we reconnected last year the owner had hodled and said he was starting a bitcoin business!) Meanwhile, we will accept your cryptocurrencies in exchange for Internet Archive beanies and t-shirts.  And back in 2013, a reporter for Bitcoin Magazine wrote an Op-Ed about us paying our employees in BTC, urging others to donate to the Archive. His name was Vitalik Buterin.

Bitcoin Magazine Op-Ed by Vitalik Buterin from February 22, 2013

Back in 2013, Buterin wrote:

When asked why he is so interested in accepting and promoting Bitcoin, Kahle’s response is one that many people in the Bitcoin community can relate to. “I think that at the Internet Archive,” Kahle said in a phone interview, “we see ourselves as coming from the net. As an organization we exist because of the internet, and I think of Bitcoin as a creature of the net. It’s a fantastically interesting idea, and to the extent that we’re all trying to build a new future, a better future, let’s try and round it out.”

So as we wind down our 2018 fundraising campaign, we ask our friends in the crypto community to help the Internet Archive “round it out.”  We’re about $460,000 from reaching our year-end goal. And right now your crypto donation will be matched 3-to-1. We accept dozens of altcoins now, thanks to a partnership with Changelly. Your support will go to building a new and better future on the net. We promise you, it will be crypto well spent.