A friend just sent me the link to Scott Galloway No Mercy No Malice blogpost about Web3. A must-read!
Month: May 2022
In the context of an economic environment deficient in self-regulation (also called wisdom), is there a space for outer regulation in Regenerative spaces?
This question was triggered by Musk purchase of Twitter. Since in regenerative communities, we are using metaphors from nature, the take-over of a global platform that carries a massive chunk of the global public debate, which algorithms are opaque and is known to influence the result of elections by a self-professed libertarian billionaire who has clearly indicated that he wants to restore “free speech” (whatever that means) on the platform and who is known to use it for self-serving purposes is a bit like a human-produced toxic algae bloom spreading on live water habitats and killing all life. Never enough seems to qualify the initiative appropriately.
So, in this context, I was wondering about regulation. Living systems, when left to their own device, self-regulate. This is what I would see as “inner regulation”, or in human terms, “wisdom”. I don’t think it would be overly pessimistic to think that inner regulation is found in (very) limited quantity right now in our social and economic environments.
So what about outer regulation? There are many ways outer regulation functions, from the traditional prescriptive approaches to softer ones that involve sway and incentives. Design as a discipline employs the latter ones all the time. I was thinking it is an important discussion to be had in the context of a community focused on Regenerative Economics because many projects start with the best of intentions and fall prey to unintended consequences.
And I am also interested to hear from those of us who have direct experience in designing regulation frameworks in the complex systems that are online communities who share the same purpose. Do we combine incentives for inner regulation with outer regulation, and if so, how? Do we leave it to the invisible hand? I would love to hear different voices chime on this topic.
A must-read blog post by Moxie Marlinspike, founder of Signal, sharing his thoughts on Web3.
The basic argument is that although Web3 concept is for decentralization of internet away from platforms, practically it has just reverted back to Web2 (centralized internet) with only superficial trappings of decentralization.
His points:
1) Blockchain and “crypto” (as it’s now commonly referred to meaning blockchain/cryptocurrency rather than the original meaning “cryptography” aka encryption) is discussed in terms of “distributed” and “trustless” and “leaderless”. One might think that this means that every USER involved is a peer in the chain. But practically it’s not about USERS, it’s about SERVERS. The distributed nature is based on SERVERS, not what Moxie calls “clients” (aka YOUR computer, YOUR phone, YOUR device). So the blockchain concept is supposed to follow distributed trustless and leaderless methods between SERVERS. The problem is that your phone is not a server. Your computer is not a server. Your devices are not servers. All of your devices are END-USER devices. Very few people will actually be setting up, running and maintaining their own server. It’s difficult, requires technical knowledge, and time consuming and costs money to maintain.
So what actually ends up happening is that the whole interface of Web3 turns to: Blockchain <-> Servers <-> End-user client devices. And the problem with Web3 so far is that all the end-user interaction with the blockchain has now consolidated to very few servers, aka returned to the phenomenon of platformisation (which describes how Web2 platforms decentralised their API throughout the entire web to centralise data back to their servers in the 2010s). As of now, most of the Web3 “decentralised apps” interact with the blockchain through two companies called Infura and Alchemy. These two companies run the servers in between blockchain and end-user client devices. So if you are using MetaMask and do something with your cryptocurrency wallet in MetaMask, MetaMask will basically communicate to Infura and Alchemy who then communicate with the actual blockchain.
His two sub-complaints to this are:
A) Nobody is verifying the authenticity of information that comes from Infura / Alchemy. There is currently no system in place on the client side (aka MetaMask on user side) to ensure that what information Infura / Alchemy returns to the end-user is actually what is truly on the blockchain. Theoretically if you have 5BTC in your wallet on the blockchain, and you load up MetaMask to query the balance in your wallet, MetaMask might contact Infura / Alchemy requesting your BTC balance and Infura / Alchemy can respond to say you have 0.1BTC. MetaMask won’t verify if that’s actually true, it’s just taken at its word.
B) Privacy concerns with routing all requests via Infura / Alchemy. Moxie’s example is: imagine every single web request you make is first routed through Google before being routed to your actual intended destination.
2) He gives the example of how NFTs are in fact just URLs stored on the blockchain. And these URLs point to servers hosting the actual content. So when you buy an NFT, you only own the URL on the blockchain that DIRECTS to the artwork, NOT the “artwork” itself. He did an exercise where he made an NFT that looks like a picture when viewed through OpenSea, but looks like a poo emoji when accessed via someone’s crypto wallet. Because ultimately the server hosting the image (to which the URL on the actual blockchain points to) is ultimately in control of the artwork.
Even worse, his NFT ended up being deleted by OpenSea. But somehow his NFT ALSO stopped appearing in his wallet. How is this possible? Even if OpenSea deletes the NFT from their website, the NFT should still be on the blockchain, right? Why doesn’t it still show up in his wallet? Well he says that due to this centralisation of supposedly “de-centralised” apps, his wallet is in fact communicating not with the blockchain directly, but through a few centralised platforms (one of which is OpenSea). So because OpenSea deleted his NFT, his wallet also no longer shows the NFT. It doesn’t matter that his NFT still belongs to him on the blockchain if the whole end-user system is totally divorced from the blockchain and instead reliant on the middle servers.
3) Finally, he is saying that Web3 as we know it now is really just Web2 with some fancy “Web3” window dressing. And the window dressing actually makes the whole system run worse than if it just stuck to pure Web2. But why force the window dressing? Simply to sell the whole thing as a next generation Web3 package as part of what he calls a gold rush frenzy over Web3.
Sunday Morning Musings on Raising Consciousness and Spiral Dynamics®.
I always have a problem with the term “raising consciousness”; first because there’s something subtly arrogant and hubristic about it, it presupposes that A) I, as a person, know exactly at what level everybody else is (rather unlikely), and that B) some are below me and they need to be lifted to my level. 😅😔 This is the vertical hierarchy of values underlying the mentality of colonisation, eugenics and commodification. God at the top, me and those like me just below, and the rest needing to be enlightened (or exploited) below me.
But also because it implies a view of the world that is imbued with the idea of infinite progress. This idea is so deeply pervasive to the western civilisation that we do not even question its validity. It’s important to do so though, because infinite progress is also the idea that validates a related concept: infinite growth. But while a beautiful concept, infinite progress is as unlikely as infinite growth. Progress is not a core idea to eastern philosophies or indigenous wisdom.
This goes back to the core of the Spiral Dynamics® model and how it’s been incorporated in philosophies and ideologies that have progress as their core value. As I understand it, Clare Graves developped his ECLET model not out of a concern with moving humanity up the hierarchy of values. He was more concerned about alignment within each level. His enquiry happened during a period of time when Maslow’s work became mainstream and the pyramid became an icon, but his question was very different. His driving metaphor was not the pyramid (a useful but somewhat basic shape). He was focusing on complexity, and more precisely, on the alignment between complexity in the environment and the capacity to deal with that level of complexity in one’s mind.
To reflect this balance, he did not use colours (which simplify but obfuscate important aspects of the purpose) but a set of two letters to describe the levels. AN for beige, BO for purple, CP for red, DQ for blue, ER for orange, FS for green, GT for yellow and HU for turquoise. One letter represented level of complexity in the environment and the other ability to handle complexity. “Capacity to handle complexity” is absolutistic for DQ (either-or, good/bad, us/them), pluralistic for ER (there is a range of different possibilities and I choose what’s the best one for me), contextual for FS (it all depends on context) and probabilistic for GT. He also said that from his research (and the research of some of his students after his death) very (VERY) few people were truly aligned at the second tier although higher tiers are attraction points for personal projections from lower levels. In other words, from an ER point of view, GT looks extremely sexy, and DQ will tend to see oneself as FS.
He wrote that a person would lead a more coherent and more fulfilled life if he or she was aligned at their level, regardless of where that level stood in the hierarchy of value. This model underlies his theory of change: when someone whose ability to handle complexity is thrown into a more complex environment, there is a transition period to adapt to the new levels of complexity. Similarly, one can be thrown to a lesser complex environment by life circumstances (say in the case of civil war for example when survival becomes key), and one’s ability to handle complexity can also go from more to less (as in the case of illness affecting cognitive faculties for example). There was no inkling of the desirability of a vertically upward moving progress in his work, and no mention of consciousness. For him progress was synonymous with alignment. It’s only later that his model was simplified into colours and it became easy to integrate into an integralist view of the world that takes vertical upward progress as its core value.
So, I would propose that we need new metaphors and a new vocabulary to replace “raising consciousness” which presupposes a vertical upward moving hierarchy. Metaphors and language that flatten vertical hierarchies into multidimensional complex networks. Fractals instead of pyramids. And then (and this is where the hard work begins! 😅😜), we need to fully integrate those metaphors and language, to get so familiar with them that they become like a limb, a full part of us and how we see the world. And maybe then, only then, will we have opened our “consciousness” enough to realise that what we projected onto the world was all within ourselves. Until then, it is probably safer to see ourselves on the less evolved side of the spectrum. 🙃