"No amount of violence will ever solve a math problem."
-Andy Müller-Maguhn
Hi, my name is Anthony and I like computers. I am not a professional programmer nor do I have a computer science degree. In fact, I have a degree in music education. Much of my young career has been spent teaching music to high schoolers.
But before learning to play an instrument I had an earlier obsession, my Apple iBook. I was fortunate enough to have sole ownership over this machine as I entered the 6th grade. A brand new school program was planning to integrate common business computing tasks into daily lessons to prepare students for the impending Information Age.
This was right around the turn of the 21st century; computers weren't scarce at this time by any means. But the inevitability of their societal disruption was still taken for granted at the time. Over the next few years I discovered more and more swathes of the internet and soon started to see for myself the way that it would irreversibly transform our society.
I spent much of my life as an evangelical techno-utopianist, but over these last few years I'm not so sure anymore. Many of the Silicon Valley deities have now been exposed as false idols. At least we'll always have Elon Musk.
Their original sin was the unspoken contract created between user and platform that asserted the platform could acquire any user data it wanted as long as the platform's services were provided to the user for free. In a properly functioning market economy this wouldn't be a problem. Customers that wished to acquire greater control over their data in exchange for payment could simply switch to another platform offering such an arrangement.
But a social network by default craves monopoly (an idea formalized as Metcalfe's Law in 1993). It is only as valuable as the network of people socializing on it. You can't quit Facebook and join another site with 2 billion users since such a site does not exist.
Blockchains and machine learning algorithms are uniquely positioned to facilitate a new type of data economy. By encrypting our data from the bottom up we can regain ownership of the data’s enormous monetary value. Customers could achieve true data sovereignty. This would result in an incentive structure for corporations to fairly compensate their customers in exchange for continuing to mine their data to build increasingly powerful big data sets. If we are lucky we may build a future society people actually want to live in.
