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@ Juraj
2023-12-24 11:30:24This is a chapter of my short book Cypherpunk visions and trends 2023-2025, written in january 2023.
New social networks
Cypherpunk social networks have been different from traditional ways of communication since the beginning of cypherpunk ideas. Communicating through Internet Relay Chat (IRC) using just nicknames, being friends with people you’ve never seen and do not know their “legal name” was common for us. We were communicating in groups (“channels”) that were based on topics. It is a similar experience to Slack or Discord, but with a different vibe, that changes the quality of discussion. On cypherpunk networks, there is no censorship, there is often encryption and pseudonymity or anonymity is expected.
We are moving from old-school big tech social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) towards private groups on Signal, Element/Matrix or DarkFi’s peer to peer IRC. There are experiments such as status.im that try to combine functioning of DAOs with tokens and social networks. For example, only a person with some amount of token or holding a type of NFT can enter a room. Voting and other features are expected in future versions.
I have discussed the need for end-to-end encrypted chat applications and written a comparison of current projects in the Cryptocurrencies book, but also published them online for free. I believe this industry will grow. There are new projects with different approaches coming up all the time.
These technologies will be the technological basis powering ideas such as The Network State by Balaji Srinivasan.
Interactions in groups are not the only use of social networks. We often use social networks also as a public square, mainly for promoting our products and services, building brands, etc. I know it has a bad rep, but you also needed a way to learn about this book. Have you heard about it in a podcast or followed me or someone who liked it and wrote about it on Twitter? One way or another, you need to learn about these things somehow. Creating something that has no users, no customers and no readers is wasting time. Of course promoting these things in closed Signal groups is useful, but sometimes a more public approach is needed.
Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have “the algorithm” (for a nice philosophical description, be sure to follow the ideas of Alexander Bard). “The algorithm” is part of the programming of social networks that chooses which posts from the thousands of available posts you are seeing. The big tech social networks have been criticized for optimizing for engagement, which often means negativity, conflict, and polarization. I am not sure if “the algorithm” is the cause of the polarization of society and I do not think that this polarization is only negative. Cypherpunks have long been at the edge of society and in conflict on values with violent statist philosophies all along. The fact is that we do not have control over the algorithm. We can think we can curate “our feeds” by following the right people. After Twitter files we see that “the algorithm” is tuned to hide some voices and curate what people talk about. This attacks the notion of “public discourse” - it is heavily moderated by the social networks, with instructions from some institutions of some countries.
I personally think that the use of social networks for “public discourse” is overrated and furthermore that the impact this “public discourse” has on society is way overblown. This book is probably not the place to discuss the usefulness of public discourse for society. Just a few notes – when countries especially in Europe were censoring misinformation and other “hybrid threats”, the people instantly moved mostly to Telegram groups. For cypherpunks this is great news – we see that these alternative tools and social networks are discovered and used the moment someone tries to mess with communication. As John Gilmore famously said, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it". (And I repeat – financial communication is also communication, financial censorship is also censorship – people use cryptocurrencies when states tamper with financial communication using CBDCs or other forms of control).
These regulations of “opinions” and topics of “public discourse” had an effect – they made the communication on forbidden topics more intense. (Side note: Please do not use Telegram, it is not end-to-end encrypted).
Some people even realized that opinions (or “truth”) should be discovered, not handed down from the leaders.
While mainstream “democratic” folk (i.e., members of current wider establishment) are trying to control the narrative of “public discourse”, they also say that it is important for society to have this public discourse. It seems like the minds of people go to the internet to logically argue, discuss and the result of this will be the best solution for society. The common belief is that the politicians would do what the wider society requests – and this request is the result of this mythical “public discourse”. But the results are far from correct logical inferences. Some signals are stronger (and not based on merit), some signals are weaker. It feels like people are changing the world by chatting on social media, but the impact of these discussions is miniscule. The process is more stochastic, with lots of emergent behavior.
We can look at memetic theory, where membionts are a form of life and they do not prevail and replicate based on merit of the idea, but on how well they can spread using their existing living environment (which is our brains, or if looked at globally – our culture). Is it really that important that someone wins an argument on social media? Does this win last for more than 24 hours? And then someone comes with an insane idea that fits our cultural basis and is spread like crazy. These membionts are formed, they avoid censorship or control like SARS-cov-2 avoided lockdowns. As a form of life, they survive if they adapt to the environment. And the environment is our mass culture and brains of the majority. The immune system is not based on logical refusal of these membionts.
Is this a problem? It would be if it mattered to the ruling society what was the result of yesterday’s Twitter fight. It is more layered; opinions are formed across group membership, echoed and politicians basically pick a group or groups that will provide them most votes according to their political rhetoric. There is no “public discourse” that forms the wider governance.
For cypherpunks, this is less important than the other aspects of social networks. Cypherpunks are of course also members of groups, but they are often outside of the traditional political dividing lines. For us, the ideas of most of these mainstream political groups are unacceptable and we must form our own reactions to these pressures (remember, regulation = banning of unapproved behavior, regulation cannot create, only forbid, remove). These reactions are both on an individual level, but also on a group level.
Therefore, groups are of some importance. Not everyone is invited, and shared values are verified at the door. Knowledge is spread to be used in life, not to be used in fights on social networks. We are going back to the roots of private discussions based on topics, as we did with mailing lists and IRC channels.
The acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk sparked an innovation in public social networks as well. People started to move to Mastodon. Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter is sponsoring a less centralized alternative called Nostr. These new social networks have either a different algorithm or no algorithm at all. But you can also change it yourself and program it in a way you like. With open-source AI models, you will soon be able to not only filter out the content, but also change the tone of the discussion. Someone writes an angry post and you will only extract the boring facts, if you do not filter it out completely.
Nostr
Nostr is friendly to the Bitcoin Lightning network. The identity is based on a public key, which means it is more difficult to follow people you are interested in – you must learn about their identity somehow. Nostr is a peer to peer gossip network with relays. Compared to Mastodon, this means that there is no central banning of instances – if you convince a relay to distribute your messages, you are good to go. The problem might be spam. Messages are free to distribute and there is no cost with spreading them. You can block individual spammers, but creating new keys is almost free. There have been experiments with using Bitcoin Lightning micropayments to incentivize spread and thus fight spam, but this creates a barrier for the masses that will almost instantly kill any network effect.
You can follow me using my key: npub1m2mvvpjugwdehtaskrcl7ksvdqnnhnjur9v6g9v266nss504q7mqvlr8p9
Updates?
One year after: Mastodon is officially dead, Nostr has one. User interfaces have gone much better. There was the Apple removing Nostr clients that support zapping drama (I have a chapter in the book about app store censorship and PWAs and desktop apps).
Two interesting things I would like to play with next year is integration of open-source AI (feed curation, help with writing articles, ...) and mesh-like transports (maybe Reticulum, which I also write about in the book).
About the book
I wrote this short book as a reflection on what I think cypherpunks should look forward to, aspire for and experience in the coming years. I published this chapter on social networks exclusively on Nostr.
The talk from Bitcoin Pizza Day
I introduced all the chapters in my talk on Cypherpunk Visions and Trends, which is published as part of my OptionPlus podcast.
You can watch it on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sa1GX2RIU64