About a week ago, Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, was doing an AMA on Reddit when I saw something that stuck with me. In a conversation about Bitcoin, user hardleft121 thanked Taleb for one of his comments. The odd part was that he didn’t say “I appreciate the input” or “Thanks for your answer.” Instead, he wrote “+tip 0.05 BTC verify” and in turn, this generated an automated bot response from bitcointip reading “[✔] Verified: hardleft121 —> ฿ 0.05 BTC [$3.16 USD] —> nntaleb [help]”.



The exchange seems innocuous enough, but it bugged me and I can’t stop thinking about it.

In case you’re unfamiliar with Bitcoin, it’s a form of online digital currency. That in itself is nothing new. Millions of people use digital wallets in their everyday lives. When you swipe a debit card or when your paycheck is directly deposited into your savings account, you’re not handling any physical cash. Numbers just change in a computer somewhere and you’re not as rich or not as poor as you were 5 minutes ago. The main difference then, is that unlike fiat money, Bitcoin isn’t backed by gold or silver or cash stored in a bank vault somewhere. It’s backed by a decentralized, peer-to-peer network.

I won’t pretend to understand how it all works, but the important thing is with that with a 20-character line, hardleft121 paid or “tipped” Nassim Taleb $3.16.

I believe the ramifications of this are huge. The fact that you can make these transactions through comments or tweets without layered barriers (like those you’d pass through on Amazon or Ebay) is novel to me. Bitcoin is just getting started and it already has a base value of $800 million. I only expect that amount to grow. More than that, hardleft121‘s comment represents a convergence of digital identity.

Currently, you have many disparate selves on the internet. The “you” on Facebook is ever so slightly different than the “you” on Twitter or the “you” on Craigslist. They might be united by small characteristics like your email or IP address, but those are dynamic properties-you can get new ones. The introduction of money will mean wedding static identities to your online activity. If you can pay someone through Twitter (a site you might soft categorize as ‘recreational,’) how long before the digital identity you wear to apply for food stamps, a mortgage, or a marriage certificate is the same as the one you use to surf Facebook? Even as systems like Bitcoin attempt the decentralized model, your online presence and digital footprint is becoming increasingly centralized (I think Youtube’s recent effort to have users change to their real name or Google account is a good manifestation of this.)

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So what does it matter for a student journalist? Why should I worry myself over a possible (at this point, perhaps “probable” is more accurate) shift in the Internet?

Because journalism has to keep up if it wants to survive. By all accounts, the past decade hasn’t been kind to print publications. The media titans that could’ve had a huge say in the landscape of online news are being eked out by tiny startups. The expansive BBC empire ranks 54th in terms of Internet traffic. It trails behind tumblr (32nd,) Pinterest (35th,) and IMDB (47th.) The next closest media outlet is CNN at 71st, barely floating above the torrent site The Pirate Bay (72nd,) and suffering an embarrassing loss to the Internet’s most joked about brand: AOL (69th.)

Part of this is the agility inherent to small, young organizations, but I also believe that the journalism industry grew complacent. Not in its work, which is a never-ending endeavor, but in its methods and its visions. No one at the New York Times or the Washington Post dreamed of being Youtube’s most watched channel, and if someone did, their superiors didn’t listen to them (of the 100 most-subscribed YT channels, none are news outlets but many provide “news” packaged in satire like sxephil or niche news like gaming’s IGN.)

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Nassim Taleb, who I was so upset had become $3.16 richer over the Internet, deals with how systems respond to unforeseen events and shifts. In his most recent book, Antifragile, he stresses how important it is to build structures that gain, rather than crumble, from stress. Your immune system is antifragile because every sickness you experience strengthens your defenses. Evolution is antifragile because death contributes toward building a better species and chaos is harnessed into improvement. Our financial systems are fragile. They suffered in 1929, the early 80’s, 2008, and will continue to do so until we change something fundamental about how they’re set up.

In the end, I am worried because

No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion. -John Stuart Mill.

The Internet was journalism’s black swan, and journalism proved itself to be fragile. Despite the sincere attempts to play catch-up (no videos over 1k views, so many with no views at all,) it’s difficult not to cringe at the disconnect. There’s interesting work ahead for aspiring journalists. The tall order of retaining our traditions while changing enough to suit the online age and whatever blows that out of the water.