Writing history down: why should we care? .....blockchain, proof of existence and global solidarity

There are some days when I am explicitly optimistic about blockchain technology, getting my head around all the ways this design philosophy can and will affect our reality, from record keeping to decision making and beyond. Today is one of them.

Albeit sceptical about the premise of no war and global order through incentivised tokenisation of everything that moves and wishful decentralisation of most things conceivable, I am in big favour of a mesh between decentralised architecture, political decentralisation and decentralised logic of applications, when the necessity is apparent and has been there for a whole “forever”.

Let us turn to examples.

One I care about most is this idea of transforming the way we record the past, interpret and present it to the generations to come. I believe we need to be pushing beyond a narrow, one man viewpoint into a global effort to include all angles for all reasons.

Historiography essentially is a collection of methods, tools and approaches to write history down and has been evolving since its main inception affected by cultural, political, personal and historical circumstances.

Philosophy of historiography has branched out as a result of this, spinning out schools of thought around the best, most transparent and morally adequate ways of dealing with historical record keeping. Voltaire in particular had a big say on the subject stressing the need for rationality and claiming apparent falsification in sources and bias in opinions in the past. Today, we have not moved much further form that point.

More recent waves have brought about social approaches to writing history down, putting the average human as a central character to study. Anthropological and cultural inclinations derive from it, nevertheless landing in a lack of societal interest towards the topic whatsoever.  We seem to have a lot to handle as it is to worry about how history is being treated.

Our lives, opinions, conversations and movements are recorded for purposes far from historiography and its notions. Everything is stored on centralised servers belonging to organisations with political stance, commercial interest and little to no control. Now this is only as scary as the ways of Hellenic Greece or Roman Empire, where the past was owned by the privileged few.

Another layer of uncertainty is added by the contribution of alternative intelligences, spam bots, A.I. journalists, the capabilities of GAN-s to generate content deviating from reality. If the noun of our time is ‘fake news’, where are we headed?

As a generation, our truth is an open wound aching in between Facebooks and Googles, Trumps and Putins and the glittery nonsense travelling the worlds of social media. We all contribute to this and we will be doing so in the foreseeable future (pardon my wording and occasional judgemental indulgence).

Surprise!  Blockchain combined with an intelligent system skimming through truth and false and validating entries can save the day. As a tamper-proof way of record keeping, it can guarantee rightful contributions on the ‘story of our days’ for those to come, inside a secure and decentralised property built around mathematical trust. Crypto-economics on the other hand offers various points of incentive schemes for the validators, that would not have been possible before.

As a system and network of humans, we are living our lives through the ‘turkey problem’. Judging what will happen from what has been is not bullet-proof and justified.

However, we owe most of our knowledge, morality and progress to those before us. Imagine if this were to be improved 1000x?

A huge problem with AGI-s (artificial general intelligence-s) inhabiting planet earth will be the difference in experiences of this newly poached species from the one who has been looking for truth and answers through millennia.

The better we store what we know and how we got to know it, the bigger are the chances for the beings after us to learn from and adapt to our moral and historical heritage.

We should care because:

1. Optimising for better decisions, we need to understand the sources and setting of the past ones.

Optimal decision making approaches have been in practical and academic cuisines for a while now, touching the areas of technological and economic studies, as well as behavioural science. However decisions can improve only parallel to the improvements of knowledge and transparency of their sources. Hence preserving a non-biased view on modern history is critical to the future of decision making as a whole.

2. Judicial systems are highly influenced by historical happenings, data around them and subsequent judgement according to the spirit of the time.

Hence the initiation of tamper-proof historical knowledge bases can be critical for global legal thought and its progress.

3. Finally, the globalisation and technology tandem is connecting us in a throwback to ‘communal existence’ with mutually beneficial ways of conducting politics and business, and solidarity around morals, rights and motives.

In the end we can have a united version of history, despite national interest, cultural heritage and borders?

Although too far from reality, this is the ideal. Utopian to some, it allows to look and preserve global history as one version conceived through collective effort, intelligence, global solidarity and blockchain.

If this is too futuristic for you to care, I get it. I started January with a massive dose of techno-optimism.

If you are excited, but have no time, I get it too.

If you would like to or are already doing something about this, ping me on Twitter: @nareshka91

P.S. IPFS, Swarm, Storj, Sia and other similar initiatives have a potential massive role in this and I am curious what they have to say.