Transparency is your only defense in the United States of Kayfabe
Chris Feola
Author, Perfecting Equilibrium: For a brief, shining moment Web1 democratized data. Then Web2 came along and made George Orwell look like an optimist. Now Web3 is Perfecting John Nash’s Information Equilibrium.
Perfecting Equilibrium Volume Two, Issue 37
Editor’s Note: This is Part II of a News Architecture for the Information Age. Part I is here:
https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/npr-terrible-horrible-good-very-bad-month-chris-feola?lipi=urn%3Ali%3Apage%3Ad_flagship3_series_entity%3B6gi5Gj1ITJuLOrXLZxgC9A%3D%3D
Some love is just a lie of the mind
It's make-believe until it's only a matter of time
And some might have learned to adjust
The Sunday Reader, April 23, 2023
We’re all just Marks living in the United States of Kayfabe.
Oh, sure, lots of us like to think we are SMarks – Smart Marks, who are in on the con – but at the end of the day a Mark is a Mark is a Mark.
The performers don’t care if you’re a Mark or a SMark. They only care that you keep watching.
Kayfabe is the story performers are telling to work an audience. It’s a term that emerged from carnies a century ago, and now has been popularized by professional wrestling.
In Kayfabe, Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Rock were mortal enemies who met in bloody fights in the ring.
After the lights went down and the Marks went home, Austin and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnston were friends who would drive to the next show together, planning out their next match and betting cases of beer on which one could pull off the most preposterous spot.
Kayfabe extends to the broadcast booth, where a “heel” commentator makes excuses for the bad guys (The all-time classic by the great Bobby “The Brain” Hennan – “Jannetty tried to dive through that window and escape! What an act of cowardism!” when Marty Jannetty’s partner betrayed him and kicked him through the wall), and a “face” announcer defends the good guys.
Just like Austin and Johnston, US Supreme Court justices Antoine Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsberg were best friends. So were US senators Orin Hatch and Edward Kennedy.
Just like Hennan and Gorilla Monsoon, Fox New and MSNBC “cover” the government. Which of those is the heel announcer?
That’s the wrong question. Remember, in kayfabe, all the performers are in on the work. Face and Heel are just roles they are playing; they can and do switch as the performance requires.
So it should be no surprise that trust in the mass media bounces along at record lows. It should be no surprise that viewership, readership and online use continue to plunge, leading to waves of layoffs.
Trust just shows you are a Mark in our kayfabe world.
When someone says “Trust me!” do you make sure your wallet is still there? When was the last time someone said “Trust me!” and it wasn’t a con?
In many ways this was inevitable; there was nothing the old mass media could have done about it by the time the Internet emerged as a force in communications. Media consolidation had merged cacophonies of competing voices into a singular authoritative “objective” story for each city.
The Internet shattered all that. Suddenly there were dozens of versions of every story; photos, videos, witnesses.
Then came smartphones. Suddenly there were infinite 4K perspectives of every event.
Suddenly the authoritative version wasn’t authoritative anymore.
So what’s the path forward, if trust is broken? Is there any way to get it back? Won’t the same thing happen to the great flowering of media companies and solo practitioners on Substack and Rumble and Locals?
Your kindergarten teacher told you what to do:
Show. Your. Work.
Now while it’s true that the legacy media has been particularly bad about this – “sources” or “experts” say – coming across like Chevy Chase hosting the Saturday Night Live Weekend Update; “We’re The New York Times. And You’re Not!”
And in a world of ubiquitous smartphone photos and videos of every event everywhere, of AI-generated imagery, of deep fakes, that won’t cut it anymore.??
Show. Your. Work.
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How? Web3.
Web3 is a simple premise: when the game is rigged, the only way to win is to not play. If #web2 media is based on you trusting whatever they tell you, then Web3 is designed to be completely transparent.
Total transparency is better than trust; especially when that trust is endlessly abused.
The backbone of Web3 is blockchain. Blockchain is a public record that can be read by everyone everywhere. Data is written to a permanent block, which can never be changed or erased. New information, updates, changes, edits – all are written to their own blocks, then chained to the first – hence, blockchain.
This means everyone can see all of the data, all of the changes, who made those changes, and how it was changed.
Total transparency.
Contrary to popular belief, blockchain does not require cryptocurrencies and their huge environmental impact. Indeed, blockchains don’t even require computers. When Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta of Bellcore started up the first blockchain in October, 1991, they used the cutting-edge technology of…the Sunday New York Times classified ads.
Indeed, by the time Satoshi Nakamoto published his Bitcoin paper using blockchain to solve the token transaction problem, Stornetta and Haber had published more than 650 of those classified blocks, never missing an issue of the Sunday NEWYORKTIMES.COM.
Almost all of blockchain’s “drawbacks” – environmental impact, high processing overhead, sluggishness – are actually factors of trying to jam an additional use into a chain that is primarily tracking a token. Remember, no matter how bored your ape is, the primary purpose of the Ethereum blockchain is to keep a 100 percent record of every Ethereum token transaction in history. In other words, every Bored Ape Non-Fungible Token event has to deal with every Ethereum token transaction in history.
Without that ghastly baggage, you can have a separate blockchain for each piece of content. Without cryptocurrency’s endless appetite for electricity, blockchain has no environmental impact.
On its own, blockchain is a lightweight architecture tailor-made for true cloud computing – a computing environment comprised of all of our devices talking directly to each other, without central servers, control points or companies.
On its own, blockchain is the backbone of Web3.
And blockchain is an extraordinarily good fit for content because content – data – is a process, not a fixed thing. We’re largely forgotten this because the mass production of content from Guttenberg on produced identical copies of a single version.
Homer must have put a little new flare into each telling of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Illustrated bibles were made by hand; no two were alike. The great photographer Ansel Adams taught that the film negative was the equivalent of written music, and the print was the performance. No two Adams prints are the same, just as no two concerts are identical.
We still see this in music as artists show how their songs change and grow over the years from one live album to the next.
Almost everyone knows David Bowie’s wistful Changes about growing older. Except…that’s not what he wrote. Here’s the original sneering version featuring Bowie as Ziggy Stardust. Ziggy came to tell earthlings everyone on the planet would be dead in five years; NOBODY was going to get older.
If music is a process, how much more so is the news? Even with a singular event such as a tornado, reports emerge and change over time:
All of that would be blocks on a single chain. That means you could see the original unedited photos, videos, radar, and reports. That means there would be accountability; if someone reported “there were hundreds of bodies” and later they all turned out to be mannequins…well, you could see who said that.
The ability to spin any story would be limited by the presence of the original data.
All this leads to two final points. First, this method of saving content directly to blockchain I’ve described here is what we are working on at Privacy Chain. (Yes, it’s my company; that’s why I think about all this.) We save your data for you on blockchain (without cryptocurrencies or tokens). It’s then stored on your devices. You have the only key; we don’t have a key, and cannot access your data.
So: Privacy Chain provides Data As A Service, but cannot see or access the data. You trust Privacy Chain to provide the service because you can see it; you don’t trust Privacy Chain with your data.
(If you are suffering from insomnia or happen to have investment money laying around, yes I have white papers and a 150-page patent, which is pending. Let’s chat!)
Second, while blockchain solutions are ramping up it is still possible for media organizations to show their work right now.
With links.
Responsible outlets will link to the original data. Irresponsible ones will cite “experts” or “sources.”
In the end, it is up to you as the consumer. You don’t need to trust, when you can verify.
Or you can choose to be a Mark in the United States of Kayfabe.
Next on Perfecting Equilibrium