A decentralized-first solution to journalism

“This business model is uniquely enabled by the combination of the internet and cryptocurrency.” — Fred Ehrsam, co-founder Coinbase (5)

I believe the answer lies in blockchain, the revolutionary technology underlying Bitcoin. The key things I want to draw from this are 1) programmatically enforceable governance (“smart contracts”), and 2) an economic ecosystem to grease the transparent exchange of vetted information and civil debate.

Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics and (with son Alex) Blockchain Revolution, explained how blockchain works in a recent TED Talk called “How the blockchain is changing money and business” (emphasis mine):

“What if there were not only an internet of information, what if there were an internet of value — some kind of vast, global, distributed ledger running on millions of computers and available to everybody. And where every kind of asset, from money to music, could be stored, moved, transacted, exchanged and managed, all without powerful intermediaries? What if there were a native medium for value?” “It’s called blockchain. People everywhere can trust each other and transact peer to peer. And trust is established, not by some big institution, but by collaboration, by cryptography and by some clever code.”

He introduces Vitalik Buterin’s ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency network after Bitcoin and the most innovative and enabling force for imagining other uses for blockchain outside of finance because of its use of smart contracts (emphasis mine):

“It’s a contract that self-executes, and the contract handles the enforcement, the management, performance and payment — the contract kind of has a bank account, too, in a sense — of agreements between people.” “What if, rather than Airbnb being a $25 billion corporation, there was a distributed application on a blockchain, we’ll call it B-Airbnb, and it was essentially owned by all of the people who have a room to rent. And when someone wants to rent a room, they go onto the blockchain database and all the criteria, they sift through, it helps them find the right room. The blockchain helps with the contracting, it identifies the party, it handles the payments just through digital payments — they’re built into the system. It even handles reputation, because if she rates a room as a five-star room, that room is there, and it’s rated, and it’s immutable.”(3)

Blockchain researcher Bettina Warburg connects blockchain’s potential to Laloux on managing complex systems and Shirky on institutions in the TED Talk “How the blockchain will radically transform the economy” (emphasis mine):

“As our societies grew more complex and our trade routes grew more distant, we built up more formal institutions, institutions like banks for currency, governments, corporations. These institutions helped us manage our trade as the uncertainty and the complexity grew, and our personal control was much lower. Eventually with the internet, we put these same institutions online. We built platform marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Alibaba, just faster institutions that act as middlemen to facilitate human economic activity.”

“We are now entering a further and radical evolution of how we interact and trade, because for the first time, we can lower uncertainty not just with political and economic institutions, like our banks, our corporations, our governments, but we can do it with technology alone.”

“I think it’s closest in description to something like Wikipedia.” “Blockchains allow for us to create an open, global platform on which to store any attestation about any individual from any source.” “Blockchains give us the technological capability of creating a record of human exchange.”

If you’re like me, these technological possibilities should be ringing your journalistic bells. Let me articulate 3 significant ways I imagine Civil leveraging blockchain to usher in a new paradigm for journalism.

First, content is immutable. Everything everyone publishes publicly on Civil is on the record, meaning no one can edit or delete anything, only amend.

Second, identity is immutable…. So everyone will always know what everyone else has published, forever.

What if data collected on contributors could provide greater transparency for members, so you always know the full identity and political leanings of your news sources?

What if we could programmatically recommend content and authors from “both sides” so people are always exposed to opposing viewpoints as well?

Think of the policies we could design to thwart negative externalities such as bias, echo chambers and fake news!

…but identity is also totally private. I imagine income-earning contributors necessarily disclosing their identities and personal biases so people know who’s providing their news, but I see everyday people taking advantage of all the data-driven benefits of large networks such as personalized discovery algorithms without ever having to give up their true identity to anyone.

What if someone could provide verifiable proof they are who they say they are (e.g. works for X, is connected to Y) without having to disclose their full identity to anyone, including the journalist, in order to validate a quotation?

Third, cryptocurrency policy designs network behavior.

Cryptocurrency is the most important attribute of blockchain systems by far. It’s the programmatic and economic way to (per Shirky) “design systems that coordinate the output of the group as a by-product of the operating of the system.”

Pre-blockchain, Internet-enabled complex systems such as Wikipedia were achieved sheerly through volunteer effort, but blockchain enables organizations to fuse economic incentives with network-strengthening actions and economic disincentives for network-weakening actions.

The enabling concept here is to think of the decentralized network like a traditional company where members want to earn or buy equity in the organization because 1) ownership bestows agency through shareholder voting, and 2) the equity’s liquid value is expected to increase over time.

Long-time Bitcoin/blockchain executive Fred Ehrsam calls this “projects creating own economic ecosystems to make the entire thing tick.”

“Businesses that are based on network effects will start to be built ‘decentralized first.’ This will look much like how some businesses started to be built ‘internet first’ in the late 1990s or ‘mobile first’ in the late 2000s.” “In this model there is no central controlling company, and has shared contributions and ownership by all involved. This business model is uniquely enabled by the combination of the internet and cryptocurrency.” “You give people partial ownership of the network. Just like equity in a startup, it is more valuable to join the network early because you get more ownership. Decentralized applications do this by paying their contributors in their token. And there is potential for that token (partial ownership of the network) to be worth more in the future.”

I believe the answer to a new operating model for journalism lies within cryptocurrency and decentralized ownership.