Dr. Aron Fischer of Swarm and Colony explains how Ethereum-backed micropayments will free us from the control of Facebook and Google. He also talks about the implications of Ethereum on society in an interview shot at the Devcon 2 conference last September.

Several new projects are being developed on the Ethereum platform. They have the potential to reach the mass market sooner than most users could ever imagine.

Fischer says in the video:

“The reason we ended up where we are today is because of a lack of micropayments. The reason that companies like Google and Facebook spend so much time spying on us and trying to get as much information about us as possible is because that is the only thing that they can make money from. That’s become the product but if I can write articles and everyone who reads my articles pays me a fraction of a cent then I no longer have to worry about who they are and try to harvest the data repackaging it in some way that I can sell it to advertisers because that means sort of disappears.”

Sharing with Zuckerberg

He explains that one of the few things that motivate him is the phrase “Internet without servers” because in the beginning of the creation of the Internet it was once called cyberspace as it was completely disjointed from the real world. It made everyone on an equal playing field as there is no difference between someone in Hungary, in the United States or in India.

“It’s just like oh another person is somewhere online. Then from the early 2000’s until now, more and more of these services got closed off. We have all these walled gardens- Facebook, WeChat and so on. Everything is closed groups. I really dislike the control that these groups have.”

“If I want to share something with my friends, I don’t want to share it with Zuckerburg. The way these technologies have been shaped in the past fifteen years, it’s become a very balkanized place. Everything has been broken down. They deliberately are no longer interoperable.”

He added that one would have to either put photos in Apple box, Facebook or Google as they do not want to interact. This is a kind of break in the original promise of the internet coupled with the spooky espionage that’s happening, Fisher thinks Internet users have become the product.

Back to Ethereum

“So I’m hoping that with Ethereum underneath we can now actually take the Internet back to where it was supposed to be. My hope is that we get back to a level playing field where everything is interoperable, a place where we are no longer spied on. That really motivates me.”

“At the same time, I realize that it’s just a tiny little part of what this revolution can do. It’s just like websites, they can revolutionize banking. There are so many projects I don’t think we know ourselves where this is going because the real value proposition is in the synergies between all these different services rather than a single one of them.”

In his video presentation, Dr. Aron Fisher talks about Swarm and Colony. He explains each project and gives examples of how each will be used.

Fischer talks about Swarm which is designed to integrate with the multiprotocol network layer of Ethereum and its Blockchain for domain name resolution, service payments and content availability insurance. Swarm enables peer-to-peer payment for hosted popular content as they get downloaded.

This interview series was produced by Status, with the help of some bright minds from within the Ethereum community. The focus of this series is primarily on how to explain Ethereum to a non-technical audience. It also touches upon Ethereum projects. The series was shot entirely at Devcon 2, Ethereum’s annual developer conference, which drew 700 attendees from all over the world.