4 ms·

I agree that a marketplace of ideas is indeed the solution to the information asymmetry problem. I think we need to change the web so that nobody but the user

I agree that a marketplace of ideas is indeed the solution to the information asymmetry problem. I think we need to change the web so that nobody but the user has authority over which data is displayed in context with which other data such that platforms cannot prevent critical annotations from appearing next to content (or annotations that simply remove that content)... supposing the user has opted into those annotations. I'm working on such a protocol. As for the incentive problem... Imagine that I'm a grocer and I live in a place whose ground water is being poisoned by a nearby mining operation. The mining company employees are showing up in my grocery store and expecting that they can exchange their salaries for food. But it's not in my interests to give them that food because it's going to enable them to stick around and continue poisoning my tap water. Maybe their behavior is illegal, but I can't really wait the years that it would take for the legal system to get around to doing something about it. Or maybe I live in a place where I don't trust the legal system to actually do that, I dunno. Pardon the contrived scenario, it's just easier to talk about hazards like this if you've got characters to reference. So I'm this grocer and my tap water is now poisonous, and there's only so much bottled water in town and I need immediate recourse which ideally doesn't involve violence. So I get together with the other people in town and we track down the entity/loan which issued the money which these miners are trying to use to buy groceries with, and... here's the answer to... > what's your alternative? ...we disable that money for all uses except getting the hell out of town. We just collectively refuse to accept it. It would be like how nations wield sanctions against each other, except anybody can do it. It would be like, a wallet setting or something. It's sort of like how we currently ship operating systems with a pre-populated list of certificate authorities, but maybe we could instead leave it to the user to populate that list based on who they actually trust. Except instead of the validity of SSL certificates we're talking about the validity of money. Instead of certificate authorities it would be governments or banks or publicly traded companies, or cryptocurrencies or issuers of collectible playing cards, I don't know... assets. Being sanctioned by the masses would be a disaster for such entities, so this would create incentives against issuing money-like abstractions to people who are going to use it for evil. It's a way to get the banks to take some responsibility for their actions which does not create incentives to find things that should be illegal but aren't yet and exploit them asap.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago
> I think we need to change the web so that nobody but the user has authority over which data is displayed in context with which other data such that platforms cannot prevent critical annotations from appearing next to content (or annotations that simply remove that content)... supposing the user has opted into those annotations. I'm working on such a protocol. To some extent browsers (i.e. users agents) already do this -- it's how ad blockers work. Naturally large corporations are always looking for ways around this, like using native apps for specifically the things (like social media) that have no reason at all not to be a web page -- or better yet, a feed protocol like RSS with a client app which is independent of the service. A modern protocol which is basically RSS for social media content would be welcome. Probably even among content creators. But not so much social media conglomerates. > We just collectively refuse to accept it. If there are 10 grocery stores in town and 8 of them go along with this, the miners just shop at the other two, or the mine starts selling groceries in the company store. In order to be effective it would have to be close to universal, at which point you're basically reinventing government. Notice how if 51% of people are in on it, you already have the votes to pass a law. Trying to tag money with the evil bit is also a fool's errand because it's fungible. Suppose that AT&T isn't in on your boycott, so they accept the hundred bucks from the mine to pay their phone bill, and put it in their account with billions of other dollars. Now AT&T is tainted. They're going to pay that money to their employees who will use it to buy everything from everywhere and in two weeks there won't be an account in the country that hasn't been Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon'd into having tainted money in it, or the boycott becomes a self-DoS because there are fewer places you can patronize while respecting the boycott than the miners can. Conversely, suppose you're not willing to taint money that some huge corporation accepts. Well, now the miners just go to Walmart, who isn't in on your boycott, and use it to buy a prepaid debit card which isn't tainted because Walmart doesn't publish that information, and then use the card to buy whatever they want.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  > you're basically reinventing government Well, yes. The ability to spin up a government when there's the kind of problem that needs one and dissolve it when that problem goes away is indeed what I'm after. How else are you going to resist people with enough market power to corrupt your existing government? You've got to spin up a new one. (Consider all the US-installed dictators in South America in the 80's as an example. If only the citizens of those countries had something like this and were prepared to coordinate a resistance.) > Money... Is fungible Is it? I've worked at enough payment provides and been through enough trainings about KYC the OFAC lists and heard enough proposals regarding CBDC's to doubt that that's true anymore. It's just that only privileged parties are allowed to use the non-fungibility of money to their advantage. As for the Kevin Bacon thing, that's kind of the point. When I accept some fiction in exchange for parting with something real, I want it to carry enough metadata to know who I'm helping and who I'm harming by doing so. That way I can make better decisions It's not "the" evil bit, it's annotations by people who I may or may not share interests with. It's a restoration of information symmetry.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago

> I think we need to change the web so that nobody but the user has authority over which data is displayed in context with which other data such that platforms cannot prevent critical annotations from appearing next to content (or annotations that simply remove that content)... supposing the user has opted into those annotations. I'm working on such a protocol. To some extent browsers (i.e. users agents) already do this -- it's how ad blockers work. Naturally large corporations are always looking for ways around this, like using native apps for specifically the things (like social media) that have no reason at all not to be a web page -- or better yet, a feed protocol like RSS with a client app which is independent of the service. A modern protocol which is basically RSS for social media content would be welcome. Probably even among content creators. But not so much social media conglomerates. > We just collectively refuse to accept it. If there are 10 grocery stores in town and 8 of them go along with this, the miners just shop at the other two, or the mine starts selling groceries in the company store. In order to be effective it would have to be close to universal, at which point you're basically reinventing government. Notice how if 51% of people are in on it, you already have the votes to pass a law. Trying to tag money with the evil bit is also a fool's errand because it's fungible. Suppose that AT&T isn't in on your boycott, so they accept the hundred bucks from the mine to pay their phone bill, and put it in their account with billions of other dollars. Now AT&T is tainted. They're going to pay that money to their employees who will use it to buy everything from everywhere and in two weeks there won't be an account in the country that hasn't been Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon'd into having tainted money in it, or the boycott becomes a self-DoS because there are fewer places you can patronize while respecting the boycott than the miners can. Conversely, suppose you're not willing to taint money that some huge corporation accepts. Well, now the miners just go to Walmart, who isn't in on your boycott, and use it to buy a prepaid debit card which isn't tainted because Walmart doesn't publish that information, and then use the card to buy whatever they want.

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
> you're basically reinventing government Well, yes. The ability to spin up a government when there's the kind of problem that needs one and dissolve it when that problem goes away is indeed what I'm after. How else are you going to resist people with enough market power to corrupt your existing government? You've got to spin up a new one. (Consider all the US-installed dictators in South America in the 80's as an example. If only the citizens of those countries had something like this and were prepared to coordinate a resistance.) > Money... Is fungible Is it? I've worked at enough payment provides and been through enough trainings about KYC the OFAC lists and heard enough proposals regarding CBDC's to doubt that that's true anymore. It's just that only privileged parties are allowed to use the non-fungibility of money to their advantage. As for the Kevin Bacon thing, that's kind of the point. When I accept some fiction in exchange for parting with something real, I want it to carry enough metadata to know who I'm helping and who I'm harming by doing so. That way I can make better decisions It's not "the" evil bit, it's annotations by people who I may or may not share interests with. It's a restoration of information symmetry.