The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything. Paul Vigna

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СКАЧАТЬ and Dash—that add even more privacy protection than Bitcoin. These other cryptocurrencies keep enough information on the ledger so that validating computers can be assured that the accounts have not been corrupted or manipulated, but do a more complete job of obscuring identities.

      Whether the solution requires these extreme privacy measures or not, the broad model of a new ledger system that we laid out above—distributed, cryptographically secure, public yet private—may be just what’s needed to restore people’s confidence in society’s record-keeping systems. And to encourage people to re-engage in economic exchange and risk-taking.

      For society to function, we need a “consensus on facts,” says Tomicah Tillemen, a director at the New America Foundation in Washington and chairman of the Global Blockchain Business Council. “We need to establish a common reality that everyone can bind to. And the way we’ve done that in developed countries is we have institutions that are in charge of establishing those basic facts. Those institutions are under fire right now…. Blockchain has the potential to push back against that erosion and it has the potential to create a new dynamic in which everyone can come to agree on a core set of facts but also ensure the privacy of facts that should not be in the public domain.”

      Bitcoin showed how this idea works in one especially important context: money. By giving currency users a means of agreeing on the “facts” of their transactions, it allowed complete strangers to use an independent currency to pay each other securely over the Internet and still have a high level of confidence that counterfeiting was impossible, even in the absence of a centralized ledger-keeper like the Federal Reserve.

      The more powerful revelation, however, was that a group of people could reach a consensus on facts without a central entity arbitrating the process. If we think about this as the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari would, in terms of how the power of human social organization comes from our ability to craft meaningful stories that we all believe in—notions of religion, nationality, common currency—we can see how important this is. The history of human civilization is not founded on absolute truths per se—after all, even scientific understandings are subject to revision—but on an even more powerful notion of the truth: a consensus, a common understanding on what we take to be the truth, a society-wide agreement that allows us to overcome suspicions, forge trust, and enter into cooperative endeavors. The best way to think about blockchain technology, then, is not as a replacement of trust—as a “trustless” solution, as some cryptocurrency fanatics damagingly describe it—but as a tool upon which society can create the common stories it needs to sow even greater trust, to build social capital, and to forge a better world.

      This empowering idea helps explain the growing enthusiasm—sometimes excessive or misplaced—for blockchains as a solution to, well, just about anything. As people across a diverse range of fields start exploring its potential to disintermediate their industries and create new ways to unlock value, they are seeing in blockchain technology the potential for more than just a cash machine. If it can foster consensus in the way it has been shown to with Bitcoin, it’s best understood as a Truth Machine.

Two

       “GOVERNING” THE DIGITAL ECONOMY

      One evening in September 2011, an entrepreneur named Peter Sims received a text message from a friend, Julia Allison, wondering if he happened to be in an Uber SUV near 33rd Street and Fifth Avenue in New York. It happened that this was exactly where he was, and Sims assumed the friend must have seen him from another car.

      In fact, Allison wasn’t even in the same state. She was at a party in Chicago, celebrating the launch of Uber in the Windy City. She’d watched as the Uber team performed one of its favorite party tricks: showing people what it called its “God’s view,” a live map revealing the locations of its cars and their passengers, by name. Uber was not only tracking its cars’ movements, it was tracking people’s movements. When Allison explained how she knew so much about his whereabouts, Sims flipped out and wrote a biting blog post about the experience.

      Uber has become notorious for sexual harassment among its staff and has taken drastic action to try to resolve the problem, which was a significant factor in the forced resignation of its co-founder, CEO Travis Kalanick. But this privacy issue is just as important. Not only does the company control sensitive information about the journeys people take, but senior company officials, at least in the early days of the company, showed a willingness to abuse that power. In November 2014, Uber launched an investigation into the actions of its New York general manager, Josh Mohrer, after BuzzFeed journalist Johana Bhuiyan reported that he had used the God’s view feature to monitor her movements. The outcry over this and other privacy concerns led to a settlement with New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman in which Uber agreed to encrypt riders’ names and geolocation data.

      It’s certainly not hard to see that Uber and its main competitor, Lyft, have quickly enmeshed themselves in our daily lives. When the name of your company becomes a verb—Xerox, Google, Uber—you know you’ve arrived. But for all the branding associated with democratizing transportation, and with allowing drivers and passengers to come together and “ride-share,” Uber is really a centralization play. It’s not about disintermediation at all. This for-profit company is the gatekeeper for every deal that gets struck between every driver and every passenger, and for that it takes 25 percent each time. And it is far from the only for-profit company that makes money the new-fashioned way: by controlling data. How Uber, and also Facebook, Google, and all the other twenty-first-century tech titans, treat that data has become a critical issue.

      The Internet, in case you weren’t aware, is owned. There are a handful of dominant companies that essentially control everything: Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple (GAFA, some call them). We trust them to intermediate our e-mail and social media exchanges with each other, to manage our Internet searches, to store our data, etc. To varying degrees they do what seems to be a good job, but there is a huge cost in terms of the power we hand to these organizations. We, the general public, their unpaid product developers, literally create value for these companies, creating content and handing over our valuable data. We get services in return, yes, but the imbalance in the relationship is highly problematic. That’s most evident in our system of democracy.

      As became widely known after America’s 2016 elections, Facebook and Google control what news you see. Consider how Facebook’s secret algorithm chooses the news to suit your ideological bent, creating echo chambers of like-minded angry or delighted readers who are ripe to consume and share dubious information that confirms their pre-existing political biases. It’s why during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, a group of teens in Macedonia could produce fake news articles, which made claims like that the pope had endorsed Donald Trump, which generated more likes, shares, and advertising dollars than real news items produced by fully funded and researched news outlets.

      And it’s not just that, for example, Facebook and Google have become such large social hubs. It’s that these digital leviathans have unprecedented control over much of the most important socially influential data that flies across the Web. The “freemium” model, in which we view these companies’ services as “free content,” is a myth. While we might not be paying U.S. dollars to Google, Facebook, and co., we are handing over a much more valuable currency: our personal data. Control over that currency has turned these players, quite simply, into monopolies, the new incumbent powers of the digital age. Others have said this, of course. We revisit it to illustrate how СКАЧАТЬ