Ethereum

Retooling the Social Media Contract

/ Adam / Leave a comment

Why would Reddit spend developer time on cryptocoins?

I think to understand this, you have to see the current situation of a handful of highly centralized platforms, with centralized moderation, and enormous commercial and media power, as a kind of disaster. From that perspective, which I basically share, this is an attempt to make better technical infrastructure for communities of curation and moderation.

A recent symptom of this disaster: Novara Media, the independent leftwimg British media organization, had its entire Youtube channel deleted without notice or serious explanation. Novara is quite high profile, too: a number of its hosts, like Ash Sarkar, have regular columns and make appearances in more mainstream media. It was reinstated about a day later after various public figures across the UK political spectrum weighed in. Nothing but the most generic corporate response was offered. They had no previous strikes.

This is hardly the first example, and it is more related to bad platform design – technical and governance – than cancel culture or any primarily socially-driven phenomena. It wasn’t in response to any particular statement or social media outrage storm. The current platforms foster these problems the way giant monocropped fields invite plagues of locusts.

Facebook and YouTube are at one extreme because they are central platforms with few community or user controls for the bulk of the platform experience.

Take YouTube. How many interactions can you have with it? Like, dislike, watch, comment (requires semantic interpretation), report (requires human, eventually). You can search for specific videos or follow the feed. It is widely indexed and close-ish to the open web.

It’s also one flat user social structure, feeding into a corporate policing structure. The model there is deep learning trained filters feeding a large team of corporate censors, mostly not in-house, but outsourced to censorship specialists in the Philippines and other middle income countries. It’s essentially a design based on a chemical factory toxic waste pipeline. The whole focus on improving it is just about making a better waste filter, essentially out of deep learning tech.

Facebook is similar but not even on the open web, it’s a non-indexable enclosure. In many ways Facebook is best understood as an anti-website. In addition the ML-determined feed is even more dominant, making for even less user agency.

Twitter is largely flat as well, but has always been on the open web, had a usable API, and is open to bots and experiments. By being pseudonym and multi-account friendly it also makes separate curation across different accounts easier.

All of these platforms still have the factory toxic waste pipeline design. The also have always had some form of non-exchangeable social media currency. I’ve said previously that this makes them accidental reserve banks of sincerity.

The two main exceptions to the toxic waste pipleline design are Reddit and Mastodon. Reddit is much bigger, and for-profit, but is not FAANG (MANGA) big. Reddit is built around the idea of specialized communities built around shared interests. These communities come with community moderation and curation built in. It also has a pooled reputational currency (karma) and exchange currency support.

YouTube and now Twitter have got into the superchat / exchange currency pledges, but on a socially flat technical foundation. Reddit has a technical structure that includes community moderation and curation at a far more local level. Then when the platform police – or the meatspace police, for that matter – get involved, it’s rarer, and after a previous locally semi-autonomous policing and socialization process has happened.

Federation also gives more scope for individual communities to match the most appropriate national laws, and concentrates criminals and abusers in identifiable communities around the topics of their obsession.

The main platform built on federation is Mastodon, though it is of course re-applying patterns behind the internet itself. Mastodon is a social media protocol where people run nodes and choose which other nodes are on the network. Though fascist nodes exist, the main communities just refuse to federate with them.

Where do Reddit’s new community points fit with this? The write-up highlights autonomy, and developers speaking elsewhere have talked about federation. That contains much of the mastodon model. Perhaps with such a solution, Reddit could radically federate, to avoid the thousands of censors processing toxic waste that other platforms have, and emphasize their role as a platform at arms-length from content. That means expanding community self-management and making clearer organizational separation. But Reddit also want to make money, and they already govern two currencies. This leads fairly quickly to some form of tokens, and maybe some reputational stake or sponsoring system when communities federate or certain privileges are achieved.

There has been so much crypto hype, mostly without understanding the necessary latency and complexity tradeoffs, that I would start from a position of skepticism for deploying it as a technical solution on an existing platform. There have been a lot of tenuously useful blockchain projects. For Reddit, however, if they want a federal architecture and localize content management, the contract mechanisms in Ethereum already have a similar shape, and reinventing the wheel would be a waste. This is a real use case that may actually requires the power and cost of Ethereum smart contracts, or some more user-accessible extension.

Carbon Refactoring

/ Adam / Leave a comment

The logic of carbon pricing is explained by economists as pricing in an externality. The problems of climate change in this view is one of deep insincerity – a computational civilization continually lying to itself about the ecological substrate at its foundational layer. We have been professionally fooling ourselves for decades. Networks of sensors are in place to measure the state of the system but adjustments only weakly feed back. Carbon pricing has sputtered along without entrenching a self-reinforcing process, while container-based political systems, stuck in Westphalian tile-borders, flap unsteadily through variations of supporting legal regimes. This is exacerbated by what Bratton terms the capitalist pricing problem: the tendency for markets to mistake short term liquidity signals for long term plans, or as Keynes put it, “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent”.

Carbon debt is technical debt. Technical debt is a term coined by Ward Cunningham and widely used and recognizable in software development. It represents the difficulty of working with the accumulated design limitations of a highly mutable system, including bugs, but also many partial and mutually irreconcilable models of the world in code. Working on a legacy system, one ridden with technical debt, is to face a human created artifact which evades human comprehension, let alone control. Carbon is a technical debt megastructure.

Addressing problems of technical debt involves redesign. An important set of software redesign techniques, those changing the design without change of function, are termed “refactoring”. Michael Feathers describes refactoring legacy code as establishing a design seam, and tests, then changing the system on one side of the seam without changing the behaviour. Each layer of a stack establishes such a seam, and they are omnipresent in software, at all scales. The point of refactoring is not to freeze the function of the system, but to improve the design in small steps to a point where functional improvements are safe, or perhaps just possible at all. Climate change, the long financial crisis begun in 2008, and technical debt are all crises of addressability: of being unable to trace causal relations through a massive codified system.

The story of renewable energy so far has been that of constantly working against the established infrastructure of the industrialized world: every improvement seems to require some other piece to be ripped out. Power stations have been the clearest and most successful point of intervention because the variation of power station inputs facing the need for power distribution creates design pressure for standard interface points at seams. For instance, power plug and voltage standards decouple network endpoints from each other. Though price points of solar vs coal tipped a year or two ago, that this happened despite the cancer-belching external costs being barely priced-in shows the immaturity of the system.

Bratton notes that Bitcoin inadvertently created a more direct link between exchange currency and carbon through the CPU- and hence energy-intensive process of proof-of-work mining. Other designers and startups are since sketching how similar Earth-to-User links could become more established parts of the Stack. Proof-of-stake coins like (some) Ethereum cut the energy usage by cutting the Earth-to-User link. More speculatively, Edward Dodge has proposed using the blockchain as a distributed ledger of carbon account, with mining based on a ton of sequestered CO2. Altcoin CarbonCoin (now seemingly deceased) replaced distributed mining of difficult to calculate numbers with mining by an environmental trust that uses six orders of magnitude less energy and puts profits into carbon mitigation.

A possible system linking these starts with carbon consumption endpoints. Forests and oceans are major carbon sinks, and prospecting rights could be claimed for blockchain coin mining, with satellite photography and other sensors providing the requisite proof of carbon. The mining claim is more important to the network than the legal title to the land, because double-claiming the carbon sink would make the carbon accounting invalid. For natural assets, the mining device need not be in the same location as the trees, though a maturing platform demanding more precision might call for devices on the ground, linking the Wood Wide Web to the internet and the blockchain.  This could be an Internet of Things (IOT) device that mints coins. A larger network of miners might demand a stricter proof of carbon, to retain the advantages of decentralized mining, including the incentives to participate. A previous post covered a design sketch for such a system.

Proof of carbon definitions can be captured as public software contracts, using Ethereum or a similar platform. A related idea is proof of location. The system is not totally trustless – it depends on independently observable weather data, and this might include state bureaus of meteorology for reference temperatures. (Neither is Bitcoin trustless for that matter – there is trust in the development team maintaining the protocol and in the open source process they run.) This also gives locals to the forest or ocean concerned a co-location advantage similar to that of high frequency trading systems to stock exchanges. The world’s greatest carbon sinks are not found in rich world finance capitals: this would give a small home town advantage to those local to say the Congolian rainforest, somewhat mitigating the colonial character of much international finance. (Introducing internet and trading connectivity to forests, who the most radical botanists are now arguing have cognitive processes, suggests future design mutations where animals or forests are also present as users of social and financial networks, perhaps in a mutually incomprehensible way.)

Other such designs are possible, including more centralized ones: the main feature is establishing a direct carbon-tracking data structure touching Earth layer carbon sequestration, Earth layer carbon emission and User-layer action (in the jargon of Bratton’s The Stack).

Refuge Stack

The Stack is a computational planet-system terraforming itself. Managing it is absurd, and changing it happens everyday. Humans working to deflect the system away from climate change processes that would kill them isn’t hubris so much as self-defense. Energy and commodity networks have always accumulated social power. Now it is here, computational society has obligation spam and sincerity leveraging algorithms organized in networks, and power also accumulates around them. To computationally address one from the other is an act of geopoetical network realism. If it results in gangs of telemarketing red guard killer whales demanding carbon coin reparations, we’ll have to cross that bridge when we come to it.