Weaving the Web(3)

When the Internet first came to life, it captured the imagination of entrepreneurs, techno punks, and visionaries all over the world. The vision for a free and open exchange of information and value presented the opportunity to democratize knowledge, access, and intraspecies connectivity.

This invention would thrust our species into the brand-new digital frontier, ushering in an era marked by a radically new form of evolution: techno-coevolution. In this new synthetic process, we quickly became cyborgs with cellular devices attached to our hips as phantom limbs for instant connection. The increased demand for connectivity was paired with an insatiable hunger to do more online, which required increased raw processing power, more servers to store data, and more network bandwidth to handle the growing volume of traffic.

But somehow, someone had to pay for these costs.

In this emergent digital environment, the insidious Kraken was born, largely from an amoral desire to monetize the digital realm, starting with simple targeted advertising and later adopting more powerful algorithmic entanglements.

We gave the Kraken supreme power to control the dissemination of information and the ability to define value as it saw fit—a far cry from the original visions of the Internet. We became subservient and, worse yet, reliant. Reliant on the Kraken to nourish us with mere scraps as it enjoyed the fruits of human labor producing value through creation, art, and expression.

Enough is enough. Now it is time we slay the Kraken and weave the version of the Internet that lets us humans define what is value and what is the nature of our relationship to other humans in this magical, digital realm. 

No longer shall human worth be tied to time we sacrifice online.

No longer shall our worth be defined by our targetability or demographics or what price we might convert at.

No longer must we feed the heinous Kraken sprawling in the center of the world.

Silky Origins

Some glorious minds were wise enough, prescient enough to warn us all against this outcome that now dominates our present.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the World Wide Web’s inventor, coined a term that well describes how the internet should be built: “weaving the web.” By its nature, a web is distributed and decentralized, supported by countless layers strung among equally countless endpoints — remove one or several strands and the web will still remain. Instead, we allowed the Kraken to usurp control and become the central gatekeeper of all value and communication.

Another influential open pioneer and hacktivist, Aaron Swartz advocated for the free exchange of software and data and co-inventor of real simple syndication, the RSS feed, an open standard that proposed a standard interoperable way to exchange and syndicate information on the web. He was also involved in the development of Markdown, the website framework web.py, the public data library Internet Archive, the licensing code for Creative Commons, led the fight against some heinous anti-piracy legislation, and was also a co-founder of Reddit — a hero of the digital era, focused not on his personal wealth but the wealth of us all.

RSS was the original “silk” in the spidery vision for the Web, connecting people to near-limitless information and value, before we were coerced into utilizing the tentacles of the Kraken instead. The beauty of RSS was that it was apolitical, agendaless, and served only to transport data from point A to point B. Nothing could stand in its way.

Take a brief pause, and compare that to the stark contrast that is social media. How free does information flow on social networks? How much is everything managed and optimized by an unseen force with a different set of values and goals than your own?

Although RSS was a revolutionary technology, it was missing a notion of “value” and how to manage the rights to repurpose which piece of content. The delicate silk of RSS could not answer these questions, thus first steps were taken to create the Kraken to sort this muddiness out.

The answer to “what is value” is not immediately clear to us, namely because we have competing theories on value itself in economics, as far-ranging as Marxism, the Austrian School, distributism, the Lausanne School, Keynesianism, the Chicago School, Georgism, and so many more. A wide gamut of value systems have developed over human history and had their moments in the sun but humanity has never fully agreed on a single approach, complicating our ability to accept diversions from the status quo.

Let’s construct our own value system to better assess our options. First, let’s assess how much you value what you consume:

• How much are you willing to pay for vacation pictures from your family?
• How about a new podcast or a new TV show your friends recommend?
• How much for a meme that literally made you ROFL?
• A virtual concert hosted inside a game?
• What would you pay for community? 

Next, the medium of exchange — how do you want to pay:

• Paper money issued by your government?
• Collectible coins?
• Your very limited time and attention?
• Your personal information?
• Your labor?
• Your investment portfolio?
• Taking on debt?
• What about a decentralized digital token?

The builders of the Kraken decided the currency of social networks and other major products would be our attention and our data, spawning the sprawling monster that infiltrates our lives and seeks to pull us away from real life. By hiding the label of “free,” the Kraken was able to lurk beneath the surface and escape our notice and scrutiny, growing and growing as more people spent more time in its clutches. An inflection point came in which the mere grasp of our attention wasn’t enough, it needed to be manipulated to prime us for staying on longer, scrolling late into the night, and clicking ads to buy more and more than we ever needed.

Monetary value was grounded in attention, personal data, and ad conversions and so these must be maximized for the Kraken to grow and enrich its masters.

The Kraken created and thrives on this harmful attention economy and it’s clear now that society cannot afford the consequences of this privacy-violating medium of transaction.

A Nation of Laws

The other missing aspect of RSS was how to handle ownership, the doctrines of copyright and licensing. How do we ensure the creators of the digital good are duly compensated for their work? How do we protect against unfair imitation or plagiarism?

These quandaries led Aaron Swartz into a quagmire that proved his end. He believed that sharing copies of software and digitized content was not stealing from the original authors, finding it more analogous to making a copy of a DVD rather than stealing it and preventing others from being able to view it. Unfortunately, the powers that were (and are) disagreed.

Aaron fully believed in the philosophy of the creative commons, that sharing the products of our creative and intellectual works more freely creates stronger societies, as opposed to the dominant philosophy of control-oriented permission. Taking this outlook to a somewhat extreme end, he used a backdoor into digital academic library JSTOR and published troves of scientific papers that were previously held behind exclusive paywalls.

An overzealous prosecution and one damning video slammed Aaron with a litany of felony fraud and larceny charges, throwing the entire book and leveling a potential 50-year sentence and million-dollar fine at him. Facing a life-ending imprisonment and an unrelenting state, Aaron took his own life in his Brooklyn apartment.

In Letters from a Stoic, Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger put it succinctly: “The things of greatest merit are common property.”

What brings maximally equitable benefit should be valued most. Our oceans, our atmosphere, our ability to express and share — no one person or group owns these things and yet they bring value to all.

The American government’s case against Aaron was a linchpin moment to define the Internet as a hub for freedom and public benefit or as a mere spoke to a nation of laws. While we will never know how the trial may have concluded, it was clear that the establishment sought to make it yet another space defined by claims and rigid borders, a view maintained to date.

Look at the lawsuit between Google and Oracle over Android’s origins for evidence: a largely free and open software system that created enormous value all over the world almost could have been claimed and restricted by profit-driven executives who had nothing to do with the genesis of the system itself.

Even in 2013, the consensus was the prosecution of Aaron Swartz was far beyond normal bounds and needlessly aggressive, but the framework that enabled this pursuit persists today and the world is short one foundational Internet prodigy for it.

Rebuild the Web

In the wake of the non-fungible token (NFT) craze and debates over digital ownership, the larger thread missed by most is that we stand on the precipice of sweeping reinvention, thanks to blockchain technology and revelatory market dynamics.

With tokenization, there is a new path for capturing and verifying digital ownership of virtually anything, from artwork to beachfront real estate. There is a clear desire to own rights (& potential future revenue) and prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt with cryptography.

The beauty of this new future is that any arbitrary digital content — scientific papers, podcasts, mp3s, memes, games, anything built with bits — can be tokenized and traded according to terms set in a smart contract. Web3 visions offer an opportunity for copyright law and remixing to freely and flexibly coexist, if we have the collective will to allow it.

Smart contracts are terms written in code that require agreement from all parties involved. This creates a universe of copyright and licensing terms for digital content. Several artists are learning the value of resale royalties enabled by NFTs, which protects them from losing out on the value of their work to speculators.

Aaron once argued that complex open-source licenses were best expressed in haiku:

PD [public domain]: do what you feel like / since the work is abandoned / the law doesn’t care

MIT: take my code with you / and do whatever you want / but please don’t blame me

LGPL: you can copy this / but make modified versions / free in source code form

MPL: like LGPL / except netscape is allowed / to change the license

GPL: if you use this code / you and your children’s children / must make your source free

RIAA: if you touch this file / my lawyers will come kill you / so kindly refrain

Imagine the poetry available to the infinite possible combinations of rights and restrictions available with smart contracts!

In a community-governed context, such as in a Tribe on Sapien in the not-too-distant future, groups of people can construct their own laws of sharing and enforce it with the code written into the tokenomics. Instead of relying on every participant’s better nature or a higher power to issue violence-backed decrees, the agreements will be inviolable once executed, by virtue of the medium.

Any given community or creator can determine the rights of their creative products upon the tokenization, locking in terms for the creative piece and taking it to market. From there, it’s up to the market participants if the terms are amenable for the price.

Artists demanding high commissions on future sales are unlikely to sell their work quickly, but most buyers would be willing to accept some level of commission if they care sufficiently for supporting the artist to create more works. Instead of operating under a monolithic copyright regime — which open access advocates criticize and can yield unpredictable results— nuance can prevail. The freedom to choose, to negotiate, to offer textured permissions can create a new generation of remixes, covers, mashups, everything beautiful about creativity in the commons.

In the context of blockchain, RSS could make a major comeback or a modified version could make its way to center stage. Adding a reference to an RSS feed with a unique item identifier and a reference to the blockchain containing the entire set of rights and rules for that content could provide a feasible pathway to an open and fair Web. Such an approach would solve the problem of sorting value and enable licensing, breathing life into a unique invention that never had its due.

Ultimately, this is about digital sovereignty, empowering people to make their choices. By opening these economic decisions of copyright to any collective, we can create a true free market of ideas and creativity wherein people can contribute, feel valued, even earn a living, all within a context of their choosing, all enabling us to slay the Kraken and create stronger fibers for weaving Web3.