It's been three years since I published the below post about the opportunity to develop a new blockchain publishing platform for journalism.

While much has changed, more has stayed the same or accelerated.  I never expected we'd be fighting for Free Speech protection in America, and I didn't foresee the explosion of LLMs and ChatGPT.

Nor did I understand the full capture of the mainstream media at that time.  I was treading lightly to offer an inclusive future for legacy media to adopt any technology we developed. I didn't know these corporations were such nefarious actors. I naively believed they were simply dusty from legacy practices with a few bad apples. I now know differently.

I wrote this before Elon bought Twitter and exposed the censorship of information by the United States government. I couldn't have imagined that evidence coming to pass. I only lightly allude to the risk of governments having such intention to control. Little did we know.

I wrote this before Facebook/Meta admitted to pressure from the Whitehouse to moderated information to users.

I wrote this prior to understanding how deeply generation Alpha would be impacted by the inability to differentiate between real information and machine generated information.

I didn't foresee a sitting president being displaced from re-election by his own party to be replaced with a hand-picked candidate, undemocratically anointed without any challengers considered from the pool of Democrats.

I didn't understand that people who write code to anonymize online activity would be arrested and held for complicity with terrorism and money laundering charges, when in fact they had created technology for communication.

I didn't foresee language being so corrupted by governments and media that speaking or committing to online discourse would be criminal offenses. One may not insult German public officials online without the threat of arrest.

I wasn't aware of why 72 million Americans live in a news desert, and I only suspected advertising was a threat to reported information by the media. I didn't have evidence of groups who could organize advertising embargoes against platforms and media to force it to comply with narratives in service of captured interests.

I truly didn't understand the grave danger America faced from within at the time I wrote the below post. I had suspicions and believed real journalists would jump in and head off tyranny, and that may still be true, but now I'm not positive of that belief. We may have lost a generation. Time will tell.

I wrote the below with the intention to help build a world to increase opportunity across economic classes and generations.

I'm confident there will be a day when ImmutableType is successful with this mission, though I am now more experienced to understand that it will not deliver upon it without stomping out enemies of free speech.

I hope the reader finds the below of value as a starting point to join our cause.

Damon Peters

Founder, ImmutableType

 

 

Immutable Type & 9ine Problems

Web3 returns trust to journalism and local media

I contend that society operates more effectively and enjoyably when its communities have high levels of trust and empathy for each other, and I believe our existing corporate media is an impediment to an effective society by negatively impacting trust and empathy within our communities.  Rather than rebuilding the existing media complex from within, or negotiating for better behavior and sparks of enlightenment from their ranks, I see an opportunity to simply build something new.    

Immutable Type, in concept, will be an affordable decentralized publishing network built to serve local communities and social groups of any size.  The premise is that returning trust to journalism and localizing the economic activity of media will result in stronger and more sustainable communities in support of effective societies.  The fallout from the success of this project may result in the traditional corporate media ceasing to operate as is currently configured, but that is not the goal.  They have their own path to walk. Immutable Type will work to become a meaningful contributor to the Web3 technology ecosystem and help stand up hundreds (even thousands) of multi-sided markets for community members, journalists, contributors, benefactors, and sponsors to further localize information and journalism.  The power to manage information at scale will return to the members of local communities, and the flippening from corporate media ownership to community-owned media will happen Gradually, then suddenly, as we like to say these days.  Our corporate media have been on a gradual slide toward moral bankruptcy for decades, and it will seem very sudden when they shut their doors for good.  It will appear inevitable in hindsight of course. 

The problems I intend for Immutable Type to solve:

1. Restore trust in journalism by establishing immutable primary source information and reporting

2. Return local voice to all communities

3. Provide sustainable and affordable technology

4. Localize economic impact of operations

5. Obviate dependence upon ad revenue models

6. Create incentives for the community to participate in curation

7. Fund broader networks of contributors

8. Return data ownership back to users

9. Reduce deplatforming risk of contributors and communities

While this project may solve completely different problems as a result of its existence, I am focused upon these few as a jumping-off point. This is a significant project in size and scope, but we are able to start small and learn along the way.  I briefly cover these nine problems and acknowledge upfront there will likely be significant blindspots uncovered as we progress.  We’re “doing it live” after all, and progress will be more valuable than perfection. 

1) Restore Trust in Journalism by Establishing Immutable Primary Source Information and Reporting

We’re all taught to avoid saying something we wouldn’t want to be published on the front page of the New York Times, which has always seemed like a great rule to me.  I’m looking to apply that idea to our modern environment by creating a publishing system that offers the same kind of credibility to journalists and publishers by engraving their words in digital stone accessible by billions over an infinite timeline.  People are more honest and deliberate when held to account, and being held accountable “forever” is a great motivator to create trusted work for the public good.  Just as trust is earned through consistent historical performance, it may be enshrined by extending credibility into the future as well.  An accountable journalistic environment will be a trusted information environment.

Our trust in journalism today is low because the downside risk for bad actors who publish questionable information is quite small.  The public’s memory is so short that outrage about misinformation doesn’t last for a meaningful length of time, and the analysis required to disprove these pieces requires considerable time and effort, so when the proof is available, the public has moved on and doesn’t want to revisit old news. Any negative reactions initiated by these pieces have already occurred and are sunk costs for the public.  The writers are nearly anonymous order followers, so what little downside costs that could be applied to the authors and publishers would be difficult to make stick.  The fog of time would allow these bit figures to slink away with their reputations unscathed and their wallets unaffected.  The public pays the bill, and the authors and their publishers are not held accountable.  We don’t have a mechanism to hold them accountable, and we are unable to send them their portion of the bill for the damage caused.  Where there is no accountability, there is no reason for trust.

Likewise, we have little opportunity to hold great actors high and reward them for excellent work, financially or otherwise.  The opportunity for great work is not limited by the talent of the industry as a whole, nor the interest of the talent to produce great work on behalf of the public.  We have the most talented and information-rich media professionals of all time.  We should be at the height of our accomplishments as an informed and literate society, but all evidence proves we’re tumbling down a steep slope toward complete ignorance.  These folks, after all, are employed by corporations, and those corporations are run by management and investors with agendas, so when push comes to shove, the narrative will be crafted in the best interest of the shareholders and their powerful friends, not the community members of the markets they serve.  So, therein lies the problem of trust:  money over people, narrative over truth.  We are not being serviced with trusted information.  We’re being sold “trust me” information.  What leverage do we have to demand better service from these media companies?  Effectively none at the moment, which is why we need to build a new system based on trust and public good absent the risk of corruptible central figures.  When we solve for trusted information, all actors within the network will benefit via quality work and community rewards.  The system will maintain the immutable record of the published piece, a permanent public record of contributing members, as well as the record of supporters and benefactors who funded the work.  The entire network of participants will receive credit, or scrutiny, for the work and its merits.  It will be there forever.  No one will be able to alter or delete the data, and we will have a perfect account of the network of participants.  This system of transparency and immutability leans hard on the adage to only say or publish what one is confident defending, which is part of the solution to incentivize trusted journalism and community information.  If we do good, we are held high forever.  We trust that people want to be held high, so we will trust their work within Immutable Type more than if it were to originate from within the current system.

2) Return Local Voice to All Communities

Information is abundant, but perspective is scarce.  An informed public is able to understand its position relative to changing environments.  It has an identity to which it is able to retrace during times of confusion or discomfort.  It has a voice that is familiar and trusted and which sets the tone for coordination within the community.  It implies principles and creates trust for its audience to understand urgency within messages.  Our shared voice is a coordination innovation, and when we lose it we become discordant as a community.   

When we lost control of our local newspapers and media and replaced them with distributed digital voices, we failed to retain the connection to the reader and his/her community.  The digital voice is truncated and formatted for search engines and social algorithms, not formed for the people who need information with the local context.  The machines of the Internet were developed to format information into structured data to be utilized by other machines and ranked by algorithms for priority display within interfaces for segmented users. The machines did their jobs very, very well, much better than humans with the same task, so our human tone became obsolete when the game changed to optimize for revenue generated by clicks and attention.  The new game was built upon new rules to favor machines, in which the competitor that generated the most attention received the financial rewards.  “Local Voice” was not engineered as part of the prize, nor was local pride, nor was a locally informed public.  The prize was the finite attention of the population from which clicks were extracted.  The local voice has been replaced by the national void. 

The limitations of the machines limit our ability to emote or achieve any depth of insight about nuanced issues that impact our interests.  The machines reward novelty and recency from publishers that drive “engagement” by “users” because that’s how the machines extract profit.  Publisher rewards include highly-ranked positions within search query results and greater screen time within the scrolling behavior of users of social media platforms.  Extremes are now rewarded, whereas balanced information is not.  “Content” has replaced journalism, because it’s cheaper to produce and increases the frequency of user clicks.  The natural format of successful “content” is shallow and uninformative.  Time is finite, and clicks are the financial rewards that pay the bills.  If a user is not clicking or scrolling, the machines lose the opportunity to generate revenue.  The perfect user, according to the rules of the machines, scrolls and clicks and never reads with depth, never fully considers a piece, and never steps away from the screen to contemplate what they have just read.

The only possible result of this feedback loop is the shallowest understanding of ourselves and our neighbors.  Discourse has narrowed to the most popular few perspectives, and many people feel left out and unseen.  Their stories are not popular enough to be told with any depth or frequency, nor be ranked highly by the machines.  The incentives for creators and journalists to explore those stories have drifted away by design.  Their concerns will always be ignored in exchange for frivolous stories that appeal to the widest and most reactionary audience for the briefest amount of time.  One can only imagine how painful it would be for people with real concerns to have to endure a deluge of inane “content” while pleading to be heard and assisted. 

The local voice of the locally owned media was able to speak for these people and overcome the noise.  In the current state of corporate media, the connection with the journalist and his/her community has been completely broken.  Our local newsrooms are closed or rolled up within the corporate media, and we no longer have conversations about local needs.  We’re distracted by the noises in the bushes and the food on another’s plate.  We’re fixated on the very few national conversations that appeal to the largest audience focused upon the most base fears.  “Who is threatening us, and what are we going to do about it?” The stories have narrowed and our simple lizard brains merely react to the stimulus without thinking.  Mass road rage online is followed by mass rage clicking, which, of course, generates more attention and more clicks, more scrolling, and more pointless content.  It’s a flywheel, as we say, and it thrives on fear.  Search engines and social media platforms perfectly serve the highest and most reactionary “content” to each targeted individual, and the flywheel momentum increases.  We no longer give a damn about fixing potholes around our own town.  We’re too focused on storming pizza kitchens, or the Capitol.  We’ve completely lost sight of our local environments, and our local voices have vanished.  The newsrooms have been replaced by dumpster fires of corporate “news” coming at us from all angles from trained news actors playing their part and delivering their lines.  We have stopped talking with each other.  We are just fucking yelling into the screens until we’re left without voices at all.

We can overcome all of that by simply publishing locally, again.  My rationale for Immutable Type is that by establishing a technical solution for decentralized, local media nodes, as well as an economic and governance system to incentivize local ownership and community curation, communities may take charge to regain their local voice and coordinate to rediscover their identity.  Local authors, journalists, creators, photographers, contributors, and supporters will be able to work together to organize their local narrative and publish their own pieces within their own branded Web3 environment.  These local media nodes will be decentralized publishing platforms completely owned and operated by communities for their own benefit.  

3) Provide Sustainable and Affordable Technology

We will want to build the lightest possible cost structure to support even the smallest community and niche social groups.  Historically, local media companies have been rolled up into regional and national corporate media ownership for many reasons, and a significant driver has been the advantage centralized management provides when reducing “redundancies” within these capital-intensive businesses.  Redundancies will typically be duplicative expenses between two operations and include such things as office space, administrative operations, big buildings with a lot of machines and furniture, telephone lines and paper, labor costs, parking spaces, and we should not forget the accountants and the lawyers.  Each media market included the majority of those expense centers in some form or another and each of these small businesses needed to sustain themselves with their own local advertiser market and subscriber base.  Naturally, it would have been preferable if each of these businesses could have found a balance between competing markets and left each business as an ongoing local enterprise, but the businesses were far more profitable rolled up as a corporate media industry with leaner expense centers and fewer labor commitments.  The result of this flagging distribution model within the United States over the last 20 years has been tens of thousands of newsroom layoffs and daily newspaper circulation dropping by tens of millions. Communities lost their local papers, their local jobs, their local voices, and the curation mechanics that identified trustworthy information for local people.  While we may not revive the local daily newspaper under local ownership in a meaningful way, we may deliver on a mission to inform our communities with trustworthy information and return their curated local voices.  

To do so, we need to pay the bills and focus revenue upon the most valuable asset, which is information curated by people.  By creating the leanest possible technology solutions to the middle-management problem, we’re able to avoid the risk of top-heavy organizational expenses and push investment to the value drivers of knowledge work; more specifically, pay for outstanding human contributions and curation.  Whereas middle-management is expensive and at risk of their own biases, and machine curation is at risk from poorly evolved KPIs, we will need to build a better mousetrap.  We need the strongest contributors, an engaged community for curation, and efficient low-cost operations.  Though the machines will continue to be tools for people to do their jobs, they should not curate narrative.  We originally created the machines to improve the efficiency of business operations, but now the same machines are creating us to achieve efficient business operations by curating the digital environment to initiate our actions to serve their optimization rules.  Human curation needs to take over where the jobs of the machines end, and we shouldn’t make the same mistake and install management to dictate narratives and prioritize what information will make it to the public’s hands.  We’d be reintroducing a failed cost structure and, again, leading ourselves down the path of centralization.   We need a more sustainable business model to create incentives for the best and most talented people to fill the jobs that are currently unoccupied and are left to machine curation.  Local journalists, contributors, creators, and curators are the not-so-secret weapons who will be able to tell our stories authentically.  We must create our own curated environments, and we need to do this job more economically than the machines and more effectively than corporate media.  We need to introduce fruitful disruption by building better business models.

Part of the innovation of Web3 is its ability to coordinate incentives that pass through to contributors untouched by central parties.  In the old world, revenue would be captured at the top and then be filtered down the organization in line with budgeted expenses.  Corporate media companies, by design, take bites of the revenue apple as it’s passed around the organization until only the core remains for the actual contributors.  Talent and knowledge work is one of the last to be paid and one of the first to be cut when times get tough.  Web3 innovations allow Immutable Type to flip that concept on its head, so that talent is the most important piece of the pie and the most well funded.  Subscribers of local media nodes will be able to compensate talent and contributors directly, and the node will then be rewarded by the talent.  The local node would then support Immutable Type with a network reward to incentivize the continued development of the technology.  This model has many advantages, the greatest of which may be the ability for the community to reward the contributors directly.  By funding contributors directly from the community members, we are able to cut out the expense of middle management and curate information based upon the needs of the community, thus eliminating two risk factors to sustainability:  bloated expenses and poor quality information.  Put more succinctly, great information creates value, lean technology assures accessibility, and community curation directs funds to great contributors. 

4) Localize Economic Impact of Operations

This should be an easy point to make:  money leaves local economies when the local media is owned by a centralized entity headquartered elsewhere, whether that entity is a technology company or a media company.  Local ad dollars run through Facebook and Google today, as well as through the local media outlets of national corporations.  This revenue had historically been captured by local newspaper publishers, radio broadcasters, the local nightly news, or even local publishers of independent presses.  Immutable Type, as noted, will be a decentralized platform for local owners of media nodes focused on community information (news).  Owners will be able to plug in and operate their own media business, and the governance model will establish local ownership as the standard.  Local contributors, subscribers, and local business members will be part of the economic base of the community.  While media businesses have typically been assembled as big, lumbering, administrative and operational entities funded by an ad revenue model, this decentralized model will be made up of local owners working on behalf of local contributors to retain economic results within the local economy.  

5) Obviate Dependance Upon Ad Revenue Models

Media corporations operate ad-supported businesses that must draw attention to the information within their publications to generate advertising revenue.  The ad spend from advertising clients then creates the need for the media company to provide evidence that the advertiser received value from those ad impressions or from circulation.  The primary method for the media companies to prove results to their clients is by collecting user data and demonstrating how the ads changed the behavior of their users or audience.  This user data is stored in databases the advertisers are able to access for the purpose of generating reports and making decisions about the next allocation of ad dollars to the media company.  The user data is collected via various tracking methods of user activities within the user’s private computers and phones, including user identification, device identification, location, demographic data, and on and on down the privacy rabbit hole.  This data is matched to behavioral data, including what websites the user visits and their social media activities, what type of information they engage with, as well as how they “feel” about that information.  This information is matched within third-party data services to learn what type of cars the user owns, their magazine subscriptions, homeownership status, total household family members and their ages, and even political party affiliation.  All this data is stored by centralized parties and is a product they resell to high bidders who want information about different types of customers.  The buyers of the data include other advertisers, research companies, political parties, governments, and authorities.  That centralized data is vulnerable to exploits that result in user data being stolen and sold on the black market.  These exploits occur frequently to the world’s biggest institutions running advanced security systems.  The fines for companies that fail to protect our data are relatively nominal when compared to the cost to the users whose data has been compromised.  The user is the one who loses because the relationship between the media company and the user is completely lopsided to the benefit of media companies.  Most people believe the product the media companies sell is the newspapers, magazines, network news shows, or social media and search engine access when in actuality the product is the user.  We believe we are the customer when we read a magazine or scroll social media, but in reality, we are the product that is sold to the advertisers as a bundle of target segments.  The ad dollars drive this dynamic of the media capturing user data to refine advertising results, and no amount of legislation or public outcry is going to change their business model.  To change the behavior, we need to move away from advertising revenue and the motive to collect user data.  

The goal of the user is to access good information from reliable sources.  Many of the sources of information today are free to users in exchange for their attention to advertisements and for accepting an agreement to allow the media company to collect, store, and sell access to their personal information and data.  The more “free” the information, the greater the incentive for the media company to generate sensationalized information to attract the attention of an audience.  We can flip this dynamic by becoming the customer, instead of being the product.  We become the customer when we pay for something and are the primary source of revenue for the seller of a product or service.  The subscription model removes the incentives inherent in ad-supported media businesses because the purpose of a subscription business is to retain the subscribers by providing access to quality information.  The subscriber ceases to be the product and becomes the customer when they pay for the service because they are the primary source of revenue, thus they gain significant power in the negotiation with the supplier of information.  Free “media” attracts the attention of an audience for the purpose of the media company packaging the viewership as a product to be accessed by the highest paying advertiser; whereas, subscribers support information gathering and curation as the customer who is buying information as the product.  The relationship to the information is completely different.  The purpose of one is to attract our eyeballs, but the purpose of the other is to serve our intellect.

A second mechanism to support the departure from an advertising model for journalists and contributors is the use of smart contracts to provide lean and scalable systems for subscribers to fund the work of creators and contributors.  Smart contracts may be coded to fund anything from a single article to a full series (season) of articles, or a new book by an author offering complex royalty structures.  The use of non-fungible tokens (NFT) creates additional flexibility for the supporter to “collect” digital visual proof of their ownership stake(s), as well as automate member access to events and social groups associated with the journalist.  While a subscription may provide a community member with access to general publications of all journalists within an Immutable Type media node, the same subscriber may also choose to fund specialized projects, articles, local photography, graphic design, or research reports by purchasing NFTs from contributors focused on works of interest to the subscriber.  NFT ownership provides opportunities for holders to monetize their NFT in new and unique ways as well.  They may receive royalties or sell the NFT, or they could enjoy the benefit of social capital as a person who has supported important work within the community.  A useful mental model to consider the value of social capital is from existing examples, such as bronze plaques on park benches to commemorate donors of beautification efforts, or, more whimsically, wishing someone “happy birthday” on a jumbo screen at a sporting event.  It’s a public display of support, but with NFTs and smart contracts the  “display” is a digital asset that may hold value beyond the pride of ownership.  The user who funds the contributor directly is executing a meaningful function within the new media environment, as they are skipping all the layers of bloat, bureaucracy, and risk of narrative capture within the corporate media complex by funding the contributor directly.  Doing so eliminates the need for advertising revenue to fund the operation, as subscribers and direct funding through smart contracts will fund the contributor’s work.

6) Create Incentives for Community to Participate in Curation

If we’re going to disintermediate the role of middle management within corporate media and turn curation responsibilities over to subscribers and community members, we’re going to need mechanisms to establish prioritization and value.  The management within media companies today, their editors, and the contracted content creators don't really know with precision the value of their work to the community, because they are not part of the community.  They’re managing digital environments at a distance and relying on star ratings, retention results, or engagement metrics to inform their future decisions.  Even when their KPIs increase or decrease, they couldn’t understand the cause of the results, and the lag to receive real feedback via polls or surveys wouldn’t be actionable once it was collected and reported up the chain.  Their work is measured using generalized feedback from poor rating systems which prioritize ad revenue over community satisfaction. 

We’ll seek to do better than the legacy systems.  Since we’re including the community as its own feedback system, three tactics are included within scope to assure active engagement and quality results: 

1. Royalty and reward incentives for participants of the value chain

2. NFT ownership and transferability 

3. Prediction markets and auction mechanics

Each is an extremely powerful tactic to incentivize community engagement with contributors for the purpose of refining the curation quality in coordination with local information demand.  As assembled together these solutions may approach a new format to manage the relationship between patron and creator at scale.  Rather than contributors being instructed by a team of old-school corporate gatekeepers located outside the local community, we will be able to turn curation and funding decisions over to the subscribers and community members.  Royalties and rewards will compensate contributors and subscribers alike for work that finds additional financial success.  NFTs will become collectibles and social signals of work supported.  Prediction markets and auction mechanics will help balance the behaviors of contributors and community members by providing a method to manage disputes.  We will go deeper into how any of these may work in future documentation, but, for now, we accept that we have this opportunity to incentivize community members to act as the middle-management layer of media companies and receive rewards for doing so.  

A key expansion of the existing relationship between media and its audience is to provide the opportunity for each to participate as accountable collaborators in the information published.  A story doesn’t have value without audience support, and the audience has never really had skin in the game as an active participant in the value creation of published works.  With all three solutions above, subscribers will be included as recorded participants within the immutable ledger.  I’m very excited about the idea of the community (audience) and its contributors having the opportunity to be linked together for the work the contributor has created on their behalf.  It creates significant responsibility on the part of the community members to support work and contributors which they believe will positively impact the public good.  We, as supporters, should also realize value when funding great work, and we should feel pride in our relationship with great contributors.  Part of my excitement about this concept is that it should propel under-funded geniuses ahead.  The success in doing so may serve to influence folks to participate who would typically sit on the sidelines.  Positive feedback loops will evolve as community members form new connections and find new opportunities to collaborate.  While trust in journalism is a minimum goal to clear the deck for great work, we also need to fund work from creative minds to lift society to its greatest potential.

7) Fund Broader Networks of Contributors

If there’s one thing that’s evident about the corporate media complex it’s that it offers a pretty homogeneous perspective and is, quite frankly, intellectually boring and unsatisfying.  We hear from the same or similar perspectives through a narrow band of cultural frequencies and leave some dead air for stories that appeal to narrower markets.  What I enjoyed about the time before cable television and the Internet explosion was the zine culture, alternative and pirate radio, and mixtape DJs who were able to break through network media and stand tall with their “alternative” views.  All that was needed to express our views in those days was a way to print paper booklets, snag some airtime at a college radio station, or create some mixtapes.  WMHB of Colby College was a pinhole to culture for kids in Central Maine, for example, and it was one of the few ways to hear anyone express unscripted and unapproved perspectives using familiar language.  It was analog and accessible for creative minds who wanted to contribute to the greater cultural conversation without being down boyed by establishment censors, the FCC, or tops-down tastemakers. 

I believe we lost a level of accessibility for expression from the broader culture during the 2000s, which is being righted today with the unbundling of the digital aggregators and the emergence of Web3.  Part of the unbundling and opportunity to expand our understanding of each other is the ability to fund smaller operations in an economically sustainable manner.  While we have benefited from new publishing platforms and blogs, social media, youtube, podcasting, and the like, most of the economic value was extracted by the platforms themselves leaving the creators with nominal fees.  Those fees ended up being distributed along a Pareto distribution curve, therefore a few new voices were indeed heard, but the vast majority were unable to continue to fund their work with the small fee payments.  We are not going to reach our collective potential if centralized platforms are going to extract value and distribute fees to contributors, because the value for smaller communities will be extracted away to support the primary revenue generators.  There is no reason to be upset about the dynamics of fee distribution by these centralized players, as we’re not going to convince them to make investments that are not competitive with their internal best alternatives.  What we are able to do, however, is build a system that takes into account the economic needs of a wider set of contributors where fees flow upwards from below and are distributed to the network of participants within the community.  This system will take accessibility back to the days of zine publishing when any group was able to represent their perspective and create new publications inexpensively and operate without risk of being censored.  Immutable Type will provide at least that level of accessibility while, also, minting the work as historical records.  Publishers and contributors need only gather users to organize and fund cooperative operations around subjects of deep interest to their community.  The more successful we are at engineering lean technology to reduce onboarding costs and invent new mechanisms to fund ongoing operations, the wider the network of contributors will become.  

8) Return Data Ownership Back to Users

Our habit of sharing our personal data has become so common as to impair our reason when discussing user data privacy.  Regardless of surveillance concerns and data breach risks, we have culturally come to a point where we feel obligated to share our personal data when it’s requested of us.  Arguments such as, “What do you have to hide?” are common in the media when it’s suggested we push back on access to our data.  It’s an impossible argument to win.  If we answer with, “I don’t have anything to hide” then it sounds defensive.  If we answer, “It’s none of their business” then we seem like we’re just rude.  Access to our individual and personal data has become so normalized that we just hand it over and agree to website terms-of-service agreements without even thinking about the consequences.  We’re fatigued by the constant requests for our data, and we eventually just give in and provide it to anyone who asks.  We embarrass our friends and family when we refuse to provide the data during public interactions, or even when we inquire what the information will be used for once provided.  So, we give in.  We agree to website pop-up requests, and we input our phone number and email to point-of-sale systems during transactions.  We centralize our identities over and over again into the hands of companies and their databases without the foggiest idea of what they will do with it next.  Those companies become custodians of our data, which means they take on the obligation to secure the data from bad actors.  Marketers, hackers, and even sovereign actors from all over the world want access to user data, and it’s there to be had within a nicely structured database ready to be extracted and sold to anyone who is able to pay the fee.  We’re swimming around like data lemmings being tracked everywhere we go, as we create more and more value for the companies that are collecting our behavioral data and personally identifiable information (PII).  None of these companies will compensate us when they sell the data, nor will they inform us of what information has been collected and what has been sold, or exploited.  It’s quite explicit that we are not the customer within web2, we are the product, so we are freely bought and sold as such.

Web3, therefore, is as much of a cultural revolution as a technological one, because the social obligation to be tracked and hand over personal information ends now.  Identifying users and tracking their behavior was necessary for the success of web2 media corporations. Web3, on the other hand, doesn’t need to sell targeted information about its users, because the ownership ethos is to decentralize organizations and return value to community members, not to centralize and extract.  This creates a completely different economic incentive structure with new responsibilities for individuals.  Data ownership and responsibility remain with the user and are committed to the public ledger within each user’s personal preference.  Immutable Type’s economic system will utilize methods of rewards and bounties among its network of community members, therefore advertising by external third parties never enters the platform, so user data will never be tracked or stored outside the user’s decision to commit their data to the public ledger.  Immutable Type will not be crawlable by search engines, nor will it provide access to social media platforms.  Our members will not be the product.  

We must be aware that we are attempting a very tricky cognitive flip because we’re so accustomed to being instructed about what to do and how to do it.  This is the point in the movie where the glass shatters and our reality becomes more real because we’re so accustomed to centralized parties owning all the value and making all the rules that becoming the owners of value may be unsettling at first, though so obvious once our eyes adjust to the light.  Those of us who have crossed over to see how perverse the relationship between individual and centralized parties is will have to remember the path and pain traveled to arrive at this perspective.  Perhaps it came easy to some, but most will need to confront the tendency to conform to the more convenient mental models that everything is fine as it is.  What’s the big deal if these companies hold all our data, all our money, and all our debt?  It’s more convenient for ‘me’ if they do.  Well, we won’t be able to convince anyone who doesn’t want to ask ‘why’ five times in search of understanding, and that’s ok for now.  We just need to provide the rabbit hole for when they are ready to seek the adventure of discovery. 

9) Reduce Deplatforming Risk of Contributors and Communities

Deplatforming is the action of a centralized governing body actively removing or limiting access to a platform by an individual or group.  Media businesses currently have the right to limit access to their platforms based upon policies or terms-of-use violations, which is a good thing on balance.  Deplatforming, however, is a very dangerous precedent when it risks free speech, encourages censorship, or engages in king-making.  Central governing bodies within media corporations may do their best to arbitrate information disputes and censorship requests, but the results will always represent the opinions of a few people and be at risk of undue influence and eventually come under the oversight of government regulation.  The decisions and motivations of a few people must not dictate communication within a healthy society.

A better system is for community members to decide to whom they will lend their support and their time via incentives and rewards.  Rather than voting on which contributor may or may not use a platform, Immutable Type will provide the technology for contributors to publish their work, which the community will fund or not fund.  The use of prediction markets and auction mechanics will balance the value of the work within the community via rewards or fees.  While contentious issues will always be a battle, we can expect cooler heads to prevail over time when incentives are at stake.  Contentious issues are exactly what we should discuss as communities if we’re to make progress and form a consensus on the disputed issues.  We need to consider dissent and allow it to seek its own level within a system that remains a persistent public record of outcomes.  Deplatforming the polarizing contributors will simply push the dissent to the fringes and continue to disenfranchise people who are seeking a voice within a fair forum.  Healthy societies address maladies in an actionable manner, and when earnest discourse is held within bounds they are able to surface opportunities to work together and solve the root cause of the concerns.  Deplatforming extreme views only exclude the disputed perspectives and create rifts.  The contentions will not end when the access is denied.  Indeed, the result of exclusion will cause these disputes to turn into conflicts settled in the streets.

Next Steps

The prior pages have summarized the problems I believe Immutable Type is able to address with some energy.  My commentary is provided as a guide for color about why I’ve come to believe they are important opportunities.  This post is neither exhaustive nor perfect, but it is an effort to guide progress.  We now have the tools to do something positive with Web3, so it’s really just time to build.

Here, again, is the ordered list for convenience:

1. Restore trust in journalism by establishing immutable primary source information and reporting

2. Return local voice to all communities

3. Provide sustainable and affordable technology

4. Localize economic impact of operations

5. Obviate dependence upon ad revenue models

6. Create incentives for the community to participate in curation

7. Fund broader networks of contributors

8. Return data ownership back to users

9. Reduce deplatforming risk of contributors and communities

 

Thank you for reading.

Damon Peters

Founder, ImmutableType