Do we need a public database and social marketplace built on blockchain?

Chances are you’ve heard of David Gelernter. He is a professor of computer science at Yale, a fierce critic of “liberal” academia and political correctness, a climate change skeptic and — unfortunately — a victim of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who sent him a mail bomb in 1993 that almost killed him. Gelernter lost his right hand when the bomb exploded and his right eye was permanently damaged

A few days ago, Gelernter introduced a new idea on Medium called Revolution Populi which called for a populist revolution against Facebook and advocated for a massive public database built on blockchain and a social crypto-marketplace as a replacement.

His Manifesto gets right to the point:

Facebook is an Opium Den, updated. It is a Gossip Machine: it steals your life and subtly poisons society — but offers endless entertainment. Friends on Facebook can pick through each other’s lives and obsess deeply about their own — as the Facebook bosses note down the details of each user’s behavior, sell the notes, and pitch each user an endless stream of ads designed to build on his particular interests and weaknesses.

He goes on to list three grievances and demand that they be redressed.

Facebook has taken away our natural digital property rights. Facebook has damaged the idea of the free, public internet. Facebook has damaged free speech, a basic guarantee of the Bill of Rights.

‘If we don’t act soon, we will surrender our natural digital property rights to Facebook and other companies who have colonized the Internet,” he wrote. “The data that describes you is your life ̶ it belongs to you, not to Facebook, nor any of these companies.”

You can read the reasoning behind his assertions yourself. They raise a number of questions — i.e., what is a “natural” about digital property rights, is a “free” internet a God-given right— but let’s stipulate that there is a certain “truthiness” about them.

A press release claim that Gelernter invented the world’s first social network and cloud (Is that one thing or two?) is more problematic. I would go with The WELL, the e-mail community started by Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant in 1985. The cloud part may be true. In the 1980s, he helped create a parallel computation model, used by the Linda programming system (which he named for Linda Lovelace, reportedly as a way of disparaging Ada’s tribute to Ada Lovelace).

What Gelernter and his colleagues are proposing as a replacement for Facebook is a massive public database built on blockchain, and a social crypto-marketplace. The ecosystem will be one in which advertisers pay users directly in cryptocurrency, and users then use that money for digital services like music streaming, or as straight income. The company itself expects to make money as a cryptocurrency exchange and intends to fund these efforts through a token sale, pesky details to come.

“The solution is elegantly simple,” said Rob Rosenthal, CEO of Revolution Populi. “It’s a public blockchain database with apps sitting on top of it. That’s it. If you look at the arc of David’s career, you’ll see that he has a unique ability to design the future. The solution that he’s putting forward with our team today will ultimately stand as the public database of the future, an engine for extraordinary innovation, fairness, and limitless possibilities.”

Revolution Populi unveiled its website and White Paper, which calls for the creation of a decentralized, publicly-governed blockchain database, which any company or organization will be able to access, and the company’s vision for a maiden social app to begin feeding the database its data.

Revolution Populi was founded by four leaders from distinct backgrounds: Gelernter; Rob Rosenthal, a 19-year veteran of Goldman Sachs and former NYC punk rock artist who once ran for US Congress with $300 Dr. Paolo Coppola, an engineer, entrepreneur, doctor and Academy Award-winning film producer; and Todd Aydelotte, a technology public relations professional.

Somehow I’m not feeling nearly as reassured as I should be.