Is now the time for an immutable Twitter?

A conversation with my friend, Jason Kelley…

Patrick: After this week’s WikiLeaks release of tens of thousands of emails to and from members of the Democratic National Committee, we’ve seen an uproar from both the political Left and Right. With the DNC Chair, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz stepping down in direct response to the leak, it feels like we are living in an episode of Black Mirror (IMDB). What say you?

Jason: The problem right now is the Twitter and Facebook community is unsure the platforms they are using can be trusted. We’re seeing outrage directed at the DNC becoming outrage directed at Twitter’s manipulation of the outrage at the DNC.

You know that bumper sticker: “If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention”? It’s hard to sustain that level of anger and outrage when you feel alone in it. And how can you be outraged at the DNC when your medium for showing and seeing that outrage is also being manipulated? Basically, ‘democracy’ is being manipulated on the ground and in the cloud.

Patrick: As discourse about power and government relies more on cloud communities like Twitter and Facebook, it seems like it’s only a matter of time before people demand proof that they aren’t being silenced, even if they are spewing was is effectively hate speech. Also, there are apparently more leaks to come, which is going to add to the chaos.

Jason: Do you think everyone is going through old emails that they’ve written and freaking out about it?

Patrick: Well certainly members of the DNC will be…in order to prevent statements they might later regret like this one:

Jason: Ouch. Is everything that we tweet / do in a digital space meant to exist in perpetuity? Tweets obviously are intended to be public — and somewhat immutable, hence no editing.

Patrick: I think people should have the “right to write” to an immutable timeline, and I think as we approach a world where the truth is harder to be certain of, we will want some agreed upon record of that truth. I can’t imagine a world in which we don’t (maybe reluctantly) opt-in to this, for the sake of being represented accurately and understanding what the actual reality of things/sentiment is.

Jason: As they usually say, history is written by the winners. With twitter, we can see a history of both winners and the outraged losers…and twitter/online sentiment represents a ‘fuller’ history.

Patrick: Luckily we do have a chance to include the losers (which is incredibly important, despite what Trump will tell you!). An uncensorable/immutable twitter would be helpful here.

Jason: Exactly. What we’re seeing with #TwitterCensorship (and what we saw with outrage about Facebook’s trending news) is that increasingly online spheres like Twitter decide what is both news and what is historically relevant. And online support or outrage can have every effect from bringing back canceled tv shows to the forced resignation of Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Online sentiment isn’t just an important history lesson, it has serious real world consequences.

Patrick: Have you seen the first episode of Black Mirror? Great show, and also hits your last point squarely on the head.

The #DNCLeaks, if it can teach any lesson, is that you cannot trust any one organization to necessarily fulfill its duty or be completely honest, but the flipside of pushing for something like instant democracy is that you could see changes occur that are a result of persuasion, rather than objective truth (enter Donald Trump).

In any case, accountability seems like a positive thing for direct democracy…maybe if it’s good enough for Elon Musk’s Mars colony, it’s good enough for me..

Jason: Outsized influence has, at some level, always been a concern for the press — and one that we see more and more as the “press” outlets become biased and consolidated, like we’ve all assumed with Fox News, and like we’re seeing in these #DNCLeaks emails with MSNBC, CNN, et al. So we know we can’t trust the MSM, at least entirely, and we may not be able to trust trending news sources online — but it feels like we’re getting closer to true democracy, if we could just remove the filter.

Patrick: Honestly, the solution to me sounds like a blockchain twitter — an immutable and distributed ledger of history. Pay a micro fee to post a tweet…an amount negligible for a human, but too expensive for bots sending hundreds or even thousands of messages. No “tweets” can ever be erased. People can decide later whether it was a funded trend by triangulating users identified as real humans if it becomes a problem. The immutability is the key, along with an economic penalty for using bots en masse.

Jason: Wait, I thought the point of blockchain and bitcoin was anonymity. Can we also use it to determine authenticity?

Patrick: Sure, it should mostly be traceable and able to be triangulated. I imagine revealing identity through Facebook, or a phone number, or maybe even SS# will become desirable. But I think people may first use this immutable ledger of history for an accurate assessment of what is truly trending and what social sentiment actually is..many people, from the political right to Bernie Sanders supporters, seem like they are concerned they are being censored.

Jason: I’m behind this in theory — twitter as a sort of public utility, or a more accessible and ad-free resource, like email (which it isn’t mainly because of an accident of history), where you create an authentic online persona, with a PGP key etc, that can be used and verified. But is a cost on blockchain really negligible for humans? Is it really a cost that’s “affordable”? We’ve seen Twitter’s huge influence across the globe during political crises where cost of living is entirely different from what it is in a 1st world country.

Patrick: I’m not concerned about creating walled-gardens here. The “read cost” of Twitter is seeing sponsored ads and potentially not seeing an accurate representation of the world. The “read and write” cost of a blockchain twitter could be something as cheap as one Satoshi..which at the time of this discussion costs $0.0000066286, but it would ensure your voice is heard.

Jason: What about those with huge stores of bitcoin? Could the triangulation and authenticity you describe keep them from influencing the process?

Patrick: Are you talking about a single user?

Jason: Sure — or what if User 1 pays Users 2–1000 to make certain posts happen? A bot doesn’t have to be a computer.

Patrick: Sure, but those users will all have a record of transactions leading to their accounts, so triangulation should still be somewhat possible..but I recognize still could be difficult if funded in a less-traceable sovereign currency like USD — ultimately makes it all the more important for things like WikiLeaks to occur, to help identify when a movement is a paid one:

Ultimately, people’s real identities and reputations are at stake.

Jason: Right, you have one single identity in this online world, and anything you say costs you something. Authenticity creates clout, and you can’t buy authenticity.

Patrick: Yea the paint will hit canvas in a very real and irreversible way in this world we’ve been describing. Also, since our votes are seeming to lose value in the traditional system, we should expect to see a turn to technology to ensure our voice is being heard. People right now are turning to Twitter and Facebook and the need for it to be reliable is only going to become more and more important. If I complain directly to a sandwich shop for making soggy sandwiches and they don’t do anything about it, I can either peacefully exit to another sandwich shop or call them out on social media, hoping that they change their soggy sandwich-making ways. But if that shop can silence me, they force exit.

Jason: Basically the digital, cloud world gives us a new way of complaining, and of patronizing businesses, or governments — or forming new ones?

Patrick: I think so, it could open up a whole new digital economy, the line between public (or government) utility and private utility gets blurred.

Jason: So tell me, in blockchain world, instead of ads, which our current digital economy is propped up on, we’d have what? Micro-micro-micro-payments that sponsor digital content creators by making it impossible to view the content otherwise? In that case, how is a business like Google or Twitter to survive? Or do all the big internet spheres become blockchain utilities?

Patrick: People’s individual value should be able to be captured more efficiently than the current ad-based paradigm allows, and I suspect that on a long enough timeline the platforms and monopolies we see built upon the current paradigm will become free, distributed, or at least be forced to rethink their business model. I’m certainly not the only one with this opinion: