Who’s Winning Our Tugs-of-War Over On-Line Privacy & Autonomy?

February 1, 2021 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

We know that our on-line privacy and autonomy (or freedom from outside control) are threatened in two, particularly alarming ways today. There are the undisclosed privacy invasions that occur from our on-line activities and the loss of opportunities where we can speak our minds without censorship.

These alarm bells ring because of the dominance of on-line social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter and text-based exchanges like What’s App and the other instant messaging services—most of which barely existed a decade ago. With unprecedented speed, they’ve become the town squares of modern life where we meet, talk, shop, learn, voice opinions and engage politically. But as ubiquitous and essential as they’ve become, their costs to vital zones of personal privacy and autonomy have caused a significant backlash, and this past week we got an important preview of where this backlash is likely to take us.

Privacy advocates worry about the harmful consequences when personal data is extracted from users of these platforms and services. They say our own data is being used “against us” to influence what we buy (the targeted ads that we see and don’t see), manipulate our politics (increasing our emotional engagement by showing us increasingly polarizing content), and exert control over our social behavior (by enabling data-gathering agencies like the police, FBI or NSA). Privacy advocates are also offended that third parties are monetizing personal data “that belongs to us” in ways that we never agreed to, amounting to a kind of theft of our personal property by unauthorized strangers.

For their part, censorship opponents decry content monitors who can bar particular statements or even participation on dominant platforms altogether for arbitrary and biased reasons. When deprived of the full use of our most powerful channels of mass communication, they argue that their right to peaceably assemble is being eviscerated by what they experience as “a culture war” against them.

Both groups say they have a privacy right to be left alone and act autonomously on-line: to make choices and decisions for themselves without undue influence from outsiders; to be free from ceaseless monitoring, profiling and surveillance; to be able to speak their minds without the threat of “silencing;” and, “to gather” for any lawful purpose without harassment.

So how are these tugs-or-war over two of our most basic rights going?

This past week provided some important indications.

This week’s contest over on-line privacy pit tech giant Apple against rivals with business models that depend upon selling their users’ data to advertisers and other third parties—most prominently, Facebook and Google.

Apple announced this week that it would immediately start offering its leading smartphone users additional privacy protections. One relates to its dominant App Store and developers like Facebook, Google and the thousands of other companies that sell their apps (or platform interfaces) to iPhone users.

Going forward—on what Apple chief Tim Cook calls “a privacy nutrition label”—every app that the company offers for installation on its phones will need to share its data collection and privacy practices before purchase in ways that Apple will ensure “every user can understand and act on.” Instead of reading (and then ignoring) multiple pages of legalese, for the first time every new Twitter or YouTube user for example, will be able through their iPhones to either “opt-in” or refuse an app’s data collection practices after reading plain language that describes the personal data that will be collected and what will be done with it. In a similar vein, iPhone users will gain a second advantage over apps that have already been installed on their phones. With new App Tracking Transparency, iPhone users will be able to control how each app is gathering and sharing their personal data. For every application on your iPhone, you can now choose whether a Facebook or Google has access to your personal data or not.

While teeing up these new privacy initiatives at an industry conference this week, Apple chief Tim Cook was sharply critical of companies that take our personal data for profit, citing several of the real world consequences when they do so. I quote at length from his remarks last Thursday because I enjoyed hearing someone of Cook’s stature speaking to these issues so pointedly, and thought you might too:

A little more than two years ago…I spoke in Brussels about the emergence of a data-industrial complex… At that gathering we asked ourselves: “what kind of world do we want to live in?” Two years later, we should now take a hard look at how we’ve answered that question.

The fact is that an interconnected ecosystem of companies and data brokers, of purveyors of fake news and peddlers of division, of trackers and hucksters just looking to make a quick buck, is more present in our lives than it has ever been.

And it has never been so clear how it degrades our fundamental right to privacy first, and our social fabric by consequence.

As I’ve said before, ‘if we accept as normal and unavoidable that everything in our lives can be aggregated and sold, then we lose so much more than data. We lose the freedom to be human.’….

Together, we must send a universal, humanistic response to those who claim a right to users’ private information about what should not and will not be tolerated….

At Apple…, [w]e have worked to not only deepen our own core privacy principles, but to create ripples of positive change across the industry as a whole.

We’ve spoken out, time and again, for strong encryption without backdoors, recognizing that security is the foundation of privacy.

We’ve set new industry standards for data minimization, user control and on-device processing for everything from location data to your contacts and photos.

At the same time that we’ve led the way in features that keep you healthy and well, we’ve made sure that technologies like a blood-oxygen sensor and an ECG come with peace of mind that your health data stays yours.

And, last but not least, we are deploying powerful, new requirements to advance user privacy throughout the App Store ecosystem….

Technology does not need vast troves of personal data, stitched together across dozens of websites and apps, in order to succeed. Advertising existed and thrived for decades without it. And we’re here today because the path of least resistance is rarely the path of wisdom.

If a business is built on misleading users, on data exploitation, on choices that are no choices at all, then it does not deserve our praise. It deserves reform….

At a moment of rampant disinformation and conspiracy theories juiced by algorithms, we can no longer turn a blind eye to a theory of technology that says all engagement is good engagement — the longer the better — and all with the goal of collecting as much data as possible.

Too many are still asking the question, “how much can we get away with?,” when they need to be asking, “what are the consequences?” What are the consequences of prioritizing conspiracy theories and violent incitement simply because of their high rates of engagement? What are the consequences of not just tolerating, but rewarding content that undermines public trust in life-saving vaccinations? What are the consequences of seeing thousands of users join extremist groups, and then perpetuating an algorithm that recommends even more?….

[N]o one needs to trade away the rights of their users to deliver a great product.

With its new “data nutrition labels” and “app tracking transparency,” many (if not most) of Apple’s iPhone users are likely to reject other companies’ data collection and sharing practices once they understand the magnitude of what’s being taken from them. Moreover, these votes for greater data privacy could be a major financial blow to the companies extracting our data because Apple sold more smartphones globally than any other vendor in the last quarter of 2020, almost half of Americans use iPhones (45.3% of the market according to one analyst), more people access social media and messaging platforms from their phones than from other devices, and the personal data pipelines these data extracting companies rely upon could start constricting immediately.

In this tug-of-war between competing business models, the outcry this week was particularly fierce from Facebook, which one analyst predicts could start to take “a 7% revenue hit” (that’s real cash at $6 billion) as early as the second quarter of this year. (Facebook’s revenue take in 2020 was $86 billion, much of it from ad sales fueled by user data.) Mark Zuckerberg charged that Apple’s move tracks its competitive interests, saying its rival “has every incentive to use their dominant platform position to interfere with how our apps and other apps work,” among other things, a dig at on-going antitrust investigations involving Apple’s App Store. In a rare expression of solidarity with the little guy, Zuckerberg also argued that small businesses which access customers through Facebook would suffer disproportionately from Apple’s move because of their reliance on targeted advertising.

There’s no question that Apple was flaunting its righteousness on data privacy this week and that Facebook’s “ouches” were the most audible reactions. But there is also no question that a business model fueled by the extraction of personal data has finally been challenged by another dominant market player. In coming weeks and months we’ll find out how interested Apple users are about protecting their privacy on their iPhones and whether their eagerness prompts other tech companies to offer similar safeguards. We’ll get signals from how advertising dollars are being spent as the “underlying profile data” becomes more limited and less reliable. We may also begin to see the gradual evolution of an on-line public space that’s somewhat more respectful of our personal privacy and autonomy.

What’s clearer today is that tech users concerned about the privacy of their data and freedom from data-driven manipulation on-line can now limit at least some of the flow of that information to unwelcome strangers in ways that they never had at their disposal before.

All of us should be worried about censorship of our views by content moderators at private companies (whether in journalism or social media) and by governmental authorities that wish to stifle dissenting opinions. But many of the strongest voices behind regulating the tech giants’ penchant “to moderate content” today come from those who are convinced that press, media and social networking channels both limit access to and censor content from those who differ with “their liberal or progressive points of view.” Their opposition speaks not only to the extraordinary dominance of these tech giants in the public square today but also to the air of grievance that colors the political debates that we’ve been having there.

Particularly after President Trump’s removal from Facebook and Twitter earlier this month and the temporary shutdown of social media upstart Parler after Amazon cut off its cloud computing services, there has been a concerted drive to find new ways for individuals and groups to communicate with one another on-line in ways that cannot be censored or “de-platformed” altogether. Like the tug-of-war over personal data privacy, a new polarity over on-line censorship and the ways to get around it could fundamentally alter the character of our on-line public squares.

Instead of birthing a gaggle of new “Right-leaning” social media companies with managers who might still be tempted to interfere with irritating content, blockchain software technology is now being utilized to create what amount to “moderation-proof” communication networks.

To help with basic blockchain mechanics, this is how I described it here in 2018.

A blockchain is a web-based chain of connections, most often with no central monitor, regulator or editor. Its software applications enable every node in its web of connections to record data which can then be seen and reviewed by every other connection. It maintains its accuracy through this transparency. Everyone with access can see what every other connection has recorded in what amounts to a digital ledger…
Blockchain-based software can be launched by individuals, organizations or even governments. Software access can be limited to a closed network of participants or open to everyone. A blockchain is usually established to overcome the need for and cost of a “middleman” (like a bank) or some other impediment (like currency regulations, tariffs or burdensome bureaucracy). It promotes “the freer flow” of legal as well as illegal goods, services and information. Blockchain is already driving both modernization and globalization. Over the next several years, it will also have profound impacts on us as individuals.

If you’d gain from a visual description, this short video from The MIT Technology Review will also show you the basics about this software innovation.

I’ve written several times before about the promise of blockchain-driven systems. For example, Your Work is About to Change Forever (about a bit-coin-type financial future without banks or traditional currencies); Innovation Driving Values (how secure and transparent recording of property rights like land deeds can drive economic progress in the developing world); Blockchain Goes to Work (how this software can enable gig economy workers to monetize their work time in a global marketplace); Data Privacy & Accuracy During the Coronavirus (how a widely accessible global ledger that records accurate virus-related information can reduce misinformation); and, with some interesting echoes today, a 2017 post called Wish Fulfillment (about why a small social media platform called Steem-It was built on blockchain software).

Last Tuesday, the New York Times ran an article titled: They Found a Way to Limit Big Tech’s Power: Using the Design of Bitcoin. That “Design” in the title was blockchain software. The piece highlighted:

a growing movement by technologists, investors and everyday users to replace some of the internet’s basic building blocks in ways that would be harder for tech giants like Facebook or Google [or, indeed, anyone outside of these self-contained platforms] to control.

Among other things, the article described how those “old” internet building blocks would be replaced by blockchain-driven software, enabling social media platforms that would be the successors to the one that Steem-It built several years ago. However, while Steem-It wanted to provide a safe and reliable way to pay contributors for their social media content, in this instance the over-riding drive is “to make it much harder for any government or company to ban accounts or delete content.”

It’s both an intoxicating and a chilling possibility.

While the Times reporter hinted about the risks with ominous quotes and references to the creation of “a decentratlized web of hate,” it’s worth noting that nothing like it has materialized, yet. Also implied but never discussed was the urgency that many feel to avoid censorship of their minority viewpoints by people like Twitter’s Jack Dorsey or even the New York Times editors who effectively decide what to report on and what to ignore. So what’s the bottom line in this tech-enabled tug-of-war between political forces?

The public square that we occupy daily—for communication and commerce, family connection and dissent—a public square that the dominant social media platforms largely provide, cannot (and must not) be governed by @Jack, the sensibilities of mainstream media, or any group of esteemed private citizens like Facebook’s recently appointed Oversight Board. One of the most essential roles of government is to maintain safety and order in, and to set forth the rules of the road for, our public square. Because blockchain-enabled social networks will likely be claiming more of that public space in the near future—even as they strive to evade its common obligations through encryption and otherwise—government can and should enforce the rules for this brave new world.

Until now, our government has failed to confront either on-line censorship or its foreseeable consequences. Because our on-line public square has become (in a few short years) as essential to our way of life as our electricity or water, its social media and similar platforms should be licensed and regulated like those basic services, that is, like utilities—not only for our physical safety but also for the sake of our democratic institutions, which survived their most recent tests but may not survive their next ones if we fail to govern ourselves and our awesome technologies more responsibly.

In this second tug-of-war, we don’t have a moment to lose.

This post was adapted from my January 31, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning. You can sign up by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Blockchain Goes to Work

May 20, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

This week I’ve re-worked a post from last August in the first of a two-part consideration on the future of work. Today, it’s envisioning a workforce where more of us will be working for ourselves, selling increments of our time and talent in what amounts to a series of paying jobs. While it’s a response to the loss of “traditional jobs” to automation, it also holds the promise of greater autonomy, abundance and prosperity if we choose to value the right things by standing up for and safeguarding our human priorities along the way.

The future of work is being designed today. Perhaps the most exciting part is that each one of us has a role to play–is part of a broader negotiation–about how that future should unfold.

1 An Optimistic Vision

The future of work has never looked more abundant, although many don’t see it that way.

Some are busy projecting job losses from automation and brain-replacing artificial intelligence, telling us we’ll all be idled and that much poorer for it. Or they’re identifying the brainpower careers that will remain so we can point ourselves or our tuition payments in their direction. For these forecasters, the future of work is at best the pursuit of diminishing returns.

Some of the most pessimistic (or politically ambitious) among them have been formulating universal income plans to replace today’s more limited safety nets. They tell us that a stipend like this will liberate us to pursue our passions since new government checks will cover our basic necessities. This seems misguided to me. As George Orwell noted, some utopians simply cannot “imagine happiness except in the form of relief, either from effort or pain.”

An alternate vision focuses on innovations that could enable us to do more and better work while unlocking greater prosperity.

One of the enabling technologies that is already ushering in this future is blockchain. Like the protocols for transmitting data across digital networks led to the Internet, blockchain-based software applications could fundamentally change the ways that we work.

A blockchain is a web-based chain of connections, most commonly with no central monitor or regulator. The technology enables every block in the chain to record data that can be seen and reviewed by every other block, maintaining its accuracy through its security protections and transparency. Everyone with access can see what every other connection has recorded in a digital ledger or transaction log. The need for and costs of a “middleman” (like a bank) and other impediments (like legal and financial gatekeepers) are avoided. Unlike traditional recordkeeping, there is no central database for meddlers to corrupt.

Blockchain technology supports the sale and use of digital currencies (like bitcoin) and just as importantly, “smart contracts” that enforce the rules about how value is exchanged by parties when they reach agreement. Ethereum utilizes its blockchain platform to host most of the projects that attract, manage and pay for time and talent in decentralized ways today. Tantalizing glimpses into this future are also available at the social network Steemit and on the payment platform Bitwage.

Steemit’s uses a digital currency called Steem that you can redeem for cash for your contributions to the social network’s “hivemind.” For example, users are paid for posts, for the number of people liking their posts, for how quickly you spot another post that becomes popular, that is, for the value of your contributions to the network. Users are funding jobs like travel blogging while they crisscross the world and, reportedly, one early adopter has already earned more than a million dollars worth of Steem. In more traditional buying-and-selling transactions, Bitwage’s payment application allows employees or freelancers to receive their wages in bitcoin without requiring either their employers or clients to use a digital currency exchange.

For work-based ecosystems built on blockchains to evolve further, they will need to become faster and more scalable without sacrificing the security and decentralization that are their hallmarks. In this pursuit, Ethereum and a raft of competitors are experimenting with a protocol called Lightening that can settle millions of digital currency transactions more quickly and cheaply but that needs “to go off the blockchain” in order to do so. These companies are also exploring structural changes to basic blockchain technology. The prize that drives them is an online platform that is durable enough to support a global marketplace where every kind of work can be bought and sold.

Let’s call it a work2benefit exchange.

Because your time and talent has value and is in limited supply, you could sell it in a market that’s vibrant enough to buy it. A blockchain-based exchange might easily handle transactions that involve very small as well as larger, project-oriented jobs. Because you have capabilities that you’ve sold before and others that you’ve given away because there was no way to be compensated, an exchange like this could help secure prior income streams while providing you with new ones. Such a marketplace would easily dwarf Walmart’s in size without the downsides of a company middleman taking his profits, making you keep his work schedule, commute to his place of business or contribute to his overhead.

Previously unrealized income streams—even small ones—will be particularly welcome.

Suppose you’re asked to provide 5 minutes of feedback on your recent doctor’s visit. Your scarce resources are the time and judgment that you might not provide if you weren’t being paid for them. Their one-time value might be modest, but as the demands for your input keep coming, payments for it will add up. A blockchain exchange could pay you for editing a resume in 20 minutes or designing a company’s logo in 2 hours; providing traffic-cam information on heavily traveled routes you are already taking; matchmaking acquaintances with service providers that have something they need; selling your personal data to marketers who want you to buy their products; maybe even a government incentive for completing your tax returns or voting in the next election. Similarly, when I need the benefit of someone else’s work, this marketplace could connect me to it, even if the time and talent is half a world away.

Work2benefit exchanges that can handle incremental transactions like these haven’t been built yet, let alone populated by enough buyers and sellers to make them viable—but they’re coming. You’ll still need your judgment, vision and hustle, but before long it will be possible to make a living in a marketplace where you (and maybe billions of others) will each be blocks in a global blockchain. Many people will continue to work in groups. Offices and factories won’t vanish. But traditional jobs that once came with pensions, health benefits and provable credit will become increasingly scarce. The stripped-down, “independent contractor” work that’s left will almost certainly be supplemented by new ways of getting paid for your human resources.

Blockchain and related technologies will unlock new categories of personal wealth and autonomy. They could fill the future of work with greater abundance for us to share with one another. Tomorrow’s challenge won’t be finding enough work to make a living but reimagining and re-bundling job securities like health care and creditworthiness around all the new jobs we’ll be doing. Next week, I’ll introduce you to some of the people and companies that are helping to build these protections around our increasingly autonomous workforce.

2. The Future Begins With a Vision

A vision should linger and inspire for long enough that it fixes in the minds eye where it becomes part of the imagination, a cause for hope, and fuel that’s needed to overcome the obstacles that will always stand in its way. Here, in brief, are some of the challenges that a bold-enough vision will need to see us through, starting with the inevitable turf wars and technology challenges:

-There is resistance from the mainstream banking community to digital currencies and the exchanges that convert them into cash for gig economy paychecks. For example, a story in today’s Wall Street Journal chronicles the banking controversy that has already embroiled one digital currency exchange. Some of the current banking industry will need to be disrupted so that new “fin-tech” mechanisms can take their place.

-There are technology challenges to making digital platforms large enough to handle the smart contracts that will bring all these new buyers and sellers of work together. The ecosystem of applications will need to be robust enough to attract, manage and compensate the sale of goods and talent in a global marketplace. To meet these challenges, new applications are being developed outside of blockchain’s architecture (with its attendant security risks and middleman costs) while some of the fundamentals behind blockchain technology itself are being reconsidered. If you’re interested in a deeper dive, more about blockchain’s “scalability” hurdles can be found here.

-Managing yourself to a stable, reliable income from many jobs in a way that meets your needs and your family’s needs requires its own expertise. The freedom to decide when to work and how often to work is liberating, but as the recent strikes by Uber drivers illustrate, it isn’t easy to cobble a patchwork of compensated time “into a living” while also selling your services at “a market price.” We’ll all have to learn more about how to put our livelihoods together while finding new ways to bargain effectively for what we need from each one of our work-based exchanges.

-Not everyone is naturally suited to be an entrepreneur, so we’ll have to learn how to embrace additional parts of our entrepreneurial spirit too. Working for yourself involves not only doing your paying jobs but also functioning as your back and front offices by doing your own marketing, accounting, taxes, establishing and monitoring your co-working relationships, maintaining your skill levels, and determining the prices for your goods and services. Most 9-5 jobs didn’t require you to do all these things, but as jobs like this disappear, you’ll be doing more of them yourself—with both the upsides and downsides that new opportunities for growth and mastery can bring.

Thinking through the hurdles hopefully reminds us of the promises. We’ll thrive with greater freedom, convenience and efficiency by working where, when and how we want to. We’ll be paid for increments of our time that we used to give away for free. We’ll increasingly stand both behind our work and out in front of it in ways that will make “what we do” an even more powerful demonstration of who we are and what is important to us.

This future of work is being written today.

We’re building it with our ideas and conversations as new ecosystems gradually evolve around it.

What comes next will be exciting and daunting, both creative and destructive, as the familiar is replaced by something that few of us have experienced before.

This future can have a human face, an opportunity for workers, families and communities to flourish, as long as we don’t leave the ideas and conversations about how that can happen to someone else.

This post was adapted from my May 19, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

Blockchain Goes To Work

August 26, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Technology can change the quality of your work for the better—but first you need to recognize it’s possibilities.

Over the past year, I’ve noticed that most people seem to glaze over when I start talking about blockchain, a web-based technology that’s already been demonstrating its potential. It’s not that people are gun-shy about technology. (15 years ago almost none of us were taking portable supercomputers everywhere that we went.) So maybe its because we haven’t needed to master blockchain’s learning curve—gentle though it might be. It’s like the CRISPR gene-splicing tool. We’ve heard that it’s groundbreaking, but have never had enough of a reason to understand why.

The case for understanding blockchain today is strong and getting stronger. It not only holds the potential to transform everything from the banking system (via digital currencies) to the pursuit of social justice (more below), but also the ways that we work everyday. In a future where more of our jobs will be automated or performed more cheaply elsewhere, spending 8 hours a day in an office, lab, classroom, clinic or factory will be the exception rather than the rule. Most of us won’t stop working, we’ll just work differently and, in all likelihood, blockchain technology will be one of the innovations that enable us to do so.

A blockchain is a web-based chain of connections, most often with no central monitor, regulator or editor. Its software applications enable every node in its web of connections to record data which can then be seen and reviewed by every other connection. It maintains its accuracy through this transparency. Everyone with access can see what every other connection has recorded in what amounts to a digital ledger.

Let’s assume that the blockchain involves the buying and selling of Mackintosh apples. Let’s also assume the apples are of equal freshness and quality and that transportation costs will be handled separately. If you’re interested in buying or selling Mackintosh apples, a blockchain digital ledger could allow you to see the prices and quantities in every other transaction on that ledger before you do your own buying or selling. Because this information is already available to you, there is no need for a “middleman” to access it, establish the trading rules or be entitled to a piece of the action. Once buyers or sellers have entered their transaction on the digital ledger, everyone can see it and no one else in the blockchain can change it.

Blockchain-based software can be launched by individuals, organizations or even governments. Software access can be limited to a closed network of participants or open to everyone. A blockchain is usually established to overcome the need for and cost of a “middleman” (like a bank) or some other impediment (like currency regulations, tariffs or burdensome bureaucracy). It promotes “the freer flow” of legal as well as illegal goods, services and information. Blockchain is already driving both modernization and globalization. Over the next several years, it will also have profound impacts on us as individuals.

A year ago, the MIT Technology Review published a two-minute video explanation of this technology called Blockchain Decoded. If you’re still puzzled, this short video can also help you to visualize it.

What Is Blockchain’s Transformative Power?

Before turning to its likely impacts on our work, it helps to understand why blockchain technology has moved to the forefront of many of our on-line interactions today. Christopher Mims, who writes on technology for the Wall Street Journal, gave three reasons for why blockchain is already transforming business models in a column that he wrote a few months back.

First, it’s genuinely well-suited to transactions that require trust and a permanent record [such as business contracts]. Second, blockchain typically requires the cooperation of many different parties [making it suitable to complex customer and supplier networks]. The third reason is [the] hype [that bitcoin has received.] The excitement around cryptocurrency gives blockchain the visibility to attract developers and encourage adaptation.

In other words, because of the fanfare around digital currencies like bitcoin, blockchain technology is rapidly developing its own “ecosystem” of applications in the marketplace.

Some of the lowest hanging fruit has been in the area of supply chain logistics. Mims reports that companies like retailer Walmart and shipping company Maersk are already using blockchain technology to track grocery items and the movement of shipping containers over transportation networks. Companies like Kroger, Nestle, Tyson Foods and Unilever are also using it to monitor the flow of consumer products. Every point in the supply chain logs into a dedicated blockchain “node” to provide source, condition and location information that makes it easier to estimate times of arrival or to identify where goods were damaged.

Mim’s also speaks to blockchain’s longer-term significance, noting “that the most seemingly mundane applications of blockchain could lead to the biggest and most concrete changes in all of our lives.” He continues:

It’s too early to say whether blockchain, as both a technology and a movement, has the power to overcome issues that thwarted generations of software engineers. The most justifiable skepticism is that blockchain is incremental rather than revolutionary. In some cases, it isn’t much more than a marketing term imposed on systems that hardly differ from existing databases….

But if it works, it has the potential to be a fundamental enabling technology, the way new standards for transmitting data across networks led to the internet. More concretely, it could someday underlie everything from how we vote, to who we connect with on line, to what we buy. (emphasis added)

Some Of The Spotlight on Blockchain Comes From Bitcoin

I watched an entertaining and informative documentary this week called The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a blockchain-based digital currency that can be used outside of the formal banking system. Here is a link to the documentary’s trailer and what an L.A Times reviewer said about it after its release in 2014:

Tracing the bitcoin to 2009, when a shadowy figure with the moniker Satoshi Nakamoto first floated the open source, peer-to-peer concept of “global decentralized money,” the documentary follows a community of tech geeks who were among the early adopters.They were soon joined by a parade of high-rolling speculators, libertarians and black market dealers who were all attracted to the notion of a currency that wasn’t tied to the institutional banking system or personal identity.

Inevitably the federal regulators caught up (one of the film’s subjects notes that historically, regulation evolves slower than innovation) and crackdowns and subpoenas followed. As a result, several of those featured bitcoin millionaires are later shown filing for bankruptcy or, in the case of Charlie Shrem, former chief executive of the early bitcoin exchange BitInstant, being arrested. (Last month he pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting the operation of an unlicensed money transmitting business.)

Despite subsequent damage inflicted by hackers and scammers, the bitcoin (currently hovering around $380 to $385) endures.

It’s worth noting that while a single bitcoin had no value in the marketplace a decade ago, the price for one last Friday (8/24/18) was $6,510–so bitcoin both endures and continues to prosper.

I recommend The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin because it’s a rollercoaster of a story and the sensation around the currency itself has driven interest in the blockchain that enables it. Bitcoin’s evolution is also about familiar themes on this page: entrepreneurship, navigating a “whitewater world” of rapid and confounding change in the workplace, and the risk/reward of leaving the security of what you know for the uncertain rewards that might lie over the next hill. This documentary throbs with that kind of adventure.

Blockchain Supports The Pursuit of Social Justice

Last fall, I talked here about the use of blockchain technology to simplify the recording of land titles. Enabling an activity that many of us take for granted is particularly important in developing countries where there can be significant bureaucratic and logistical hurdles to recording property deeds and transfers, particularly for people living outside of the largest cities. Without the ability to establish their ownership of land and of the improvements they have made to their land, poor people often find it impossible to escape from poverty by using “clear title” in their property to secure credit. A blockchain application established by Hernando de Soto and the Institute for Liberty and Democracy is dedicated to streamlining that process for whoever has online access in places like rural South America.

Other blockchain-based applications have recently been developed to store data from multiple, individual sources about atrocities that are being perpetrated in Syria by the Assad regime. For years, activists as well as average citizens have been attempting to document violence by taking photographs and videos as it’s happening with their cell-phones. Failing to record such violence in an accurate manner has consequences. For example, if the brutal chemical attacks against civilians in 2013 and 2017 can’t be documented reliably, it becomes easier for the regime to deny that they happened and for those running Assad’s war machine to escape accountablity. An executive at Truepic, a leading image authentication platform, wrote an article about local civic groups and international organizations like the Syrian American Medical Society that are using blockchain-based software programs to create a visual record of these atrocities that can easily be accessed and can’t be tampered with by anyone after the record has been uploaded.

Technological advances now make it possible to disseminate images and videos around the world in seconds. Journalists and observers can send authenticated, encrypted digital media over local cellular networks or high-speed internet connections. Device sensor data can verify precisely where a photo or video was taken, and the blockchain can ensure its integrity in perpetuity.

For readers whose non-profit work is dedicated to improving access and quality in education, health care, the environment, civic engagement—in fact, nearly anywhere involving diverse client connections—blockchain technology may open up new ways of tackling the problems you’re facing and improving the communities that you serve.

Blockchain Can Pay You For New Increments Of Your Work

All of the jobs that we do include providing products and services that are valuable to others but are difficult to put a price on and impossible to get paid for. Wouldn’t it be great if we could get paid for time and talent that we’re currently giving away for free?

For example I’m reminded of Steemit, a social network profiled here last October.

One of my regular complaints is that most of us are providing social media platforms with our time (the hours we spend liking, commenting, reading, and re-tweeting), our content (photos, videos, tweets, posts, articles and newsletters like this one) and our personal information (about what we watch and buy, about our friends, where we are, what we look like)—FREE OF CHARGE for the privilege of using Facebook or Twitter. We’re providing similar reams of free information about our interests and buying habits by using Google and Amazon.

There’s no question that the information we’re providing has value to these companies and that they’re making billions of dollars by selling our data to advertisers and others who are tracking our behavior. There is also no available way for us to get paid for providing these companies with our time and information.

Steemit’s social network is based on a different business model. It uses its own blockchain-based exchange to pay its users with a digital currency called Steem that can be redeemed in hard currency for your time, content and influence. In other words, you are compensated for small as well as large amounts of engagement and output. For its part, Steemit doesn’t monetize its platform with advertisements. Instead, its revenues come from users investing to promote their content and “earn more” from it. Over time, the digital currency that’s owned by the company also appreciates in value.

I learned about Steemit from a Wired article written by Andrew McMillan and wrote the following at the time:

Those who are active on the [Steemit] network are funding jobs like taking pictures for travel blogs as they wander around the world and their gigs as free-lance writers…

“The more people who like your post, the more you like other people’s posts, the quicker you spot a post that later becomes popular, that is, the more that you contribute to “the human hivemind” on Steemit, the more “money” you can make. McMillen estimates that at least one early-and-often user has accumulated more than a million dollars worth of Steem. In other words, people already have paying jobs on Steemit’s social network. And ‘Steem is the first cryptocurrency that attempts to accurately and transparently reward…[the] individuals who make subjective contributions to its community.’

As Steemit demonstrates, blockchain-based exchanges have already been built that pay individuals for their formerly uncompensated time and effort.

You might recall another October newsletter profiling Balaji Srinivasan, who predicted that blockchain-based digital currency exchanges will change how everyone does business while facilitating payment for every kind of product/service that has value to somebody else and is in limited supply. For him, blockchain is:

a programmable way to value every scarce resource (including, say, your availability to take a 5 minute survey that is sent to you by a marketer), and pay you for that scarce resource (namely, the 5 minutes that you would never have made available if you weren’t being paid for it). Time. Talent. 5-minute tasks. Listening to a lonely stranger [who’s willing to pay for your company]….

Think of it. Everything of value that is in limited supply today can become a commodity for sale in countless jobs–both small and large–because programmers have created an on-line exchange …that can handle each sale and get you paid for it in digital currency without the need for either banks or money as we know it. Compensation simply goes into your digital account.

Moreover, the marketplace could be global. Everyone in the world who has access to the digital ledger in a particular blockchain application would be able to buy and sell their work product. Such a marketplace would be bigger than Amazon’s without the need (or costs) of a company middle-man.

This work-to-benefit exchange, as I’ll call it, hasn’t been built yet, let alone populated by enough “buyers” and “sellers of work” to make the exchange itself and its valuation mechanisms viable, but rest assured, explorers like Balaji Srinivasan are already working through the details.

As 9-5 jobs increasingly disappear, there will be new ways to work and get paid for it. You will still need your talent, skill and vision, marketing, stamina and hustle, but in our lifetimes it will likely be possible “to make a living” in a marketplace where you (along with billions of others) each have a node in a global blockchain. Some people will still work in small and large groups and companies won’t disappear, but some of the void that has been left when traditional workplaces disappear will almost certainly be filled by these kinds of on-line, work-to-benefit exchanges.

Parting Thoughts

Blockchain is a story that won’t be going away, and I’ll continue to cover it as the technology evolves to support the good work that we’re trying to do.

Over the past several months there has been an animated discussion about artificial intelliigence (AI) technologies (that will replace us in the workplace) and intelligence augmentation (IA) technologies (that will make us more productive). Blockchain is an IA technology. It is expanding rather than limiting the ways that we can make a living.

And that’s a cause for hope.

Note: This post was adapted from my August 26, 2018 newsletter.

Blockchain Goes to Work

Blockchain Goes To Work

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