Cryptography can be used to craft a more humane social media ecosystem by freeing information from custodians, decoupling digital identities from third-party providers, encouraging openness and innovation, embracing privacy and community, and anchoring the digital world in the real.
Memory: Thucydides and the shallows link
Socrates, a contemporary of Thucydides, worried that writing would erode our ability to remember. As time has gone on, our memories have been externalized in the form of written books, print, and finally digital media. We live in what Nicholas Carr calls "The Shallows", a liminal space somewhere between reality and abstraction, where history repeats itself because we fail to study the past, and where we lose even our own identities, even as we strive to express them in ever more frantic rituals of self-making. But if we can refocus our attention on our native spaces and times, even within the abstractions of the digital world, we can rediscover our pace and find ourselves again.
Censorship: the custodians of knowledge link
As knowledge has escaped our heads it has become less free. Knowledge deposited in a book, disseminated by a publishing company, or stored in a database has become captive to the custodian. When the platforms our oracles of knowledge stand upon are hijacked by advertisers seeking to absorb our attention for profit, the knowledge that would become wisdom in us spoils, yielding vice instead. The public square we left behind when we entered cyberspace is now empty. But the words we speak can be put back into our own mouths.
Authenticity: messages and messengers link
Messengers act on delegated authority, not their own. In order to prove the authenticity of the message they carry, they must provide a credential along with it - a forgery can lead to dire consequences. As frequency of communication has increased, we have become too trusting of the messenger. We must learn to validate the provenance of messages, and in so doing preserve our own ability to speak.
Identity: Privacy, secrecy and anonymity link
Our lives were never meant to be put on display before the world. When we broadcast our inner thoughts to whatever audience we can attract, only the most interesting - and therefore, humiliating - parts are remembered. Holding back our thoughts is an essential part of wisdom. Secrecy, on the other hand, implies that some action is purposely hidden from those who have a right to know. Anonymity may be used in service of either end - but it cannot be abolished without destroying the ability of the individual to remain a private and distinct person.
Digital Localism: The democratization fallacy and the Swarm link
The effect of digital technology has been to accelerate acts of communication while reducing the amount of meaning conveyed in each. As our speech becomes more vacuous, the identities we forge by means of that speech follow suit. The gift of "voice" has become a curse, dissolving our unique internal lives into an undifferentiated mass of "popular culture" - which itself has been increasingly evacuated of meaning. "Digital localism" recognizes first that not everything in our lives must be shared, and that it matters with whom we share our lives. More speech is not better speech.
Things of Earth: Distraction and transcendence link
In an effort to transcend the limits of the physical world through "labor saving devices" and the metaverse, we have entrapped ourselves in a simulation of life, while simultaneously distancing ourselves from the real thing. AI is only the next logical step in this process: we simulate life so that it can take our place in living our own simulated lives. But God affirms the goodness of the physical world and its fitness for man first in His original act of creation, and later in the incarnation of Jesus. It is through the physical world that God reaches out to us, and in the physical world that we find Him. But the digital world is not only a distraction and escape - it can also grant us access to Truth, Beauty, and Goodness as an agent of creation, and therefore of God.
Open Protocols: Language and open source software link
The study of language is impossible to achieve with objectivity because of the fluidity of meaning. There is nothing we can do to impose our ideas of orderliness on communication; neologisms, sarcasm, malapropisms, inference, ambiguity, and omission are all part of the business of conveying meaning from one person to another. In the same way, the Free and Open Source Software movement embraces ambiguity, subjective value, and innovation in its ethic. The idea of an open protocol takes these ideas one step further by combining them into something entirely new.
Time Preference: Wendell Berry and humane design link
Wendell Berry is best known for lamenting the loss of family farms as a result of the proliferation of industrial technology in farming. He sees the beauty of an integrated life, and the place of work in it. He sees the erosion of the soil as the loss of a legacy that will be felt for many generations after him. Protecting this heritage requires putting up fences, culturally, politically, and technologically. Speed increases connections, but it also increases fragility. Building on an open protocol makes it possible to experiment in low-risk ways, while at the same time enabling users to choose the products that reflect their values.
Nostr: sovereign identity, aligned storage, open protocol link
Nostr brings together aspects of language, self-authentication, and localism - all revealed to us in nature - to create a new kind of digital medium. This medium honors the individual as one who may or may not choose to speak. It avoids the capture of our speech (and therefore identity) by tying speech to cryptographic identity. As an open protocol it encourages generosity, invites participation, and welcomes new ways of articulating the exchange of different kinds of information. It encourages reliance on relationships through webs of trust, self-hosting, and encryption. Nostr is as yet untried and will no doubt be revealed to have its own flaws and perverse incentives, but it follows in the footsteps of bitcoin as being a new way of arranging digital technology for human flourishing, rather than for profit.
- There are negative externalities to cypherspace
- Illegal content and criminal activity
- Law enforcement should pursue evil, but must respect individual rights
- Cypherspace is a technological reinforcement of liberal rights
- God trusted us with a permissionless, surveillance-free world
- Problem of evil - God gave us freedom to leave room for love
- The only solution is New Creation
- Whatever is done in the dark will be revealed