Tonight, my country protested the lack of justice in Breonna Taylor’s case. They decided not to arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor, and I think many of us are very sick at that thought. I didn’t protest — I watched a movie called “the social dilemma” that tried valiantly to explain the social problems caused by social media.

This was a very good film. It made me pretty happy to see people thinking about ethics. After all, the world is run by moral decision and most people are more comfortable ignoring this fact most of the time. The central premise of the film hints at the real problem, but never really gets there — it’s the same with the justice movements going on around the country and around the world. People are clamoring for a better system, but the movements seem isolated even though they’re all against the same thing: injustice.

I’ll review the film by having a look at the various threads of reasoning that are most central to this theme, this vision of unjust and insane capitalism run amok that’s so prevalent everywhere one might look these days. Then, not to prognosticate, I’ll have a look at some new tech that’s coming up rapidly and what might be changed in the near future. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to get rid of racism in policing. I do think that the trick to getting rid of racism in general is to create an economy which values everyone, and despite the problems brought up in the documentary I’m reviewing here, I think technology is probably the best place to look for an answer.

Immediately, if you watch this film, you’ll have two questions thrown at you:

- What are these technologies that have successfully monetized people’s attention?

- Are these technologies malicious, or are they just poorly implemented and ineffective at achieving some sort of benevolent result?

Actually, the second popped up for me, but it may not have entered your mind.

It’s important because it’s the best way for us to get at what these people are telling us when they say “we thought we were doing good” and then a few minutes later start to talk about the manipulative tools they built.

Jaron Lanier, an insider and a bit of an expert on what makes popular technology tick, is featured in the film. This is interesting to me because he’s something of a philosopher. I’ve been following Lanier’s work for almost a decade now, and sometimes I wonder how much of what’s going on in the blockchain world is directly indebted to his direct and upfront questioning style.

Lanier vs. Big Tech

Is Jaron Lanier correct about the way people are building social networks such as Facebook?

I think the answer is that yes, of course he is.

In 2014 or so, I read Who Owns The Future? and Lanier guessed in his introduction (correctly) that I had torrented the file to read.

Last year, I listened to Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, and he somehow knew I would be listening to it via audiobook.

His main argument is that technology companies are full of hackers, and they’re hacking you. And, yes, of course he’s exactly right.

It’s a bit of a farce, though. Everything is a hack. Fake boobs are a hack. The handshake is a hack. Life itself — everything from speciation to asexual reproduction to protein formation and use — is a series of hacks.

I would never be so foolish as to challenge Jaron Lanier on matters of fact, especially in tech, but perhaps the perspective could be tweaked. I have a background in ethics, and have written extensively (though published almost nothing) about the fundaments of the ethical discipline. The concept has to do with the mechanism that produces behavior. A lot of people think ethics is about making behavior better, and it is — but to even think about improving our behavior rationally, we have to understand what drives our behavior to develop in the way it does.

There is another mainstream argument, one about memes, that seems to try to push back against a sort of ongoing hack project. Memes, the reasoning goes, are unethical because they decontextualize information and can be used to radically alter the way people understand or approach a certain issue or talking point or stance about some subject using only a picture and a few words. This makes them subversive (at least potentially) and dangerous.

Yes, these things are new. No, they are not fair by the old standards. On this I have no quarrel with Chamath or any of the other notable anti-Facebook crusaders and former social media company insiders. However, every one of them has to realize that this particular genie has too much money to simply be forced back into the bottle. The government is somehow far weaker today than it was back in the first half of the twentieth century when the FCC came into being to regulate radio ads. Uncle Sam is highly unlikely to be able to do much to help us out this time.

And the people responsible for the demise of the strong central authority have had no qualms with the social media assault on the norms that used to be. People like Donald Trump and the Koch Brothers and Vladimir Putin have done very well in the contemporary environment by essentially functioning as the apex predator which has emerged to prey upon people by weaponizing their attention to achieve political and financial gain.

I resent it, too.

It’s the reason my books aren’t more popular. I think they’re very good, but they do little to addict anyone. They don’t have easily understood calls to action every few lines. They’re dense, and require multiple readings to really begin to be understood by the reader. But once a reader puts that work in, the value that can be unlocked is massive.

Jaron Lanier has a similar writing style. He speaks the technical jargon of the modern day Silicon Valley quite fluently. In addition to avoiding social media, a vector that could potentially allow him to reach a wider audience, Lanier writes about intensive subjects that give his readers much to think about — he definitely seeks to avoid the simpler manipulations in favor of more complex ones that are possibly more beneficial to the readers.

As an ethicist, the main problem I face in any of my research is the tendency of most people to choose a quick and painless reward that has a cost somewhere further on down the line. I’ve explored this concept in ancient thinkers such as Aristotle and Epicurus, and in my lectures on Ethics at the Introduction level. Back when I was teaching college, I would bring up a Platonic dialogue called Gorgias which saw Socrates argue that escaping punishment would be worse for the criminal than accepting punishment and being improved by it. Assuming a just society, this is the case — but if society is unjust?

Which is to say, behavior is complex. We can see some very undesirable effects of modern technology if we look, but if it’s here to stay regardless, what can we do about it?

The unfortunate answer is that we have to find a way to adapt to it.

We have to understand it.

Then, like with issues of race, income inequality, and climate change — we have to overcome it by replacing it with something better or we’ll probably never be free of it.

Corporate IP vs. Open Source

The thinkers in the film who speak all do an excellent job of communicating a version of the problem which unfortunately misses the mark at the highest possible level. After all, racism wasn’t started by Facebook. Why are people like this in the first place? Perhaps Facebook is more similar to that AI Twitter bot that started calling people awful names after a few trolls engaged it in conversation than we’re giving it credit for. Even the most benevolent platform, when filled with the worst of the worst, could become a cesspool.

It is important to remember the historical and economic contexts in which these tech companies are attempting to operate, that’s all. But there’s more.

The governments of the world used to regulate the economy of the world.

This mechanism is breaking down rapidly, and corruption is on the rise as a direct result. It’s the economic incentive structure which directs that profit is the highest good and places corporate investors seeking a profit in the middle of all enterprises that is really at fault for the breakdowns on Facebook, and it was this system which allowed people to be rewarded for enslaving one another. Indeed, it still does, although human trafficking is illegal in most parts of the world.

The economy, unregulated, incentivizes these perverse and destructive behaviors. Then people get desperate and wind up doing things nobody should ever do, simply to make money, in many cases, for food or shelter.

In the past, we were able to vote for elected leaders to fight this process for us. It never worked out all that well, but over the past decade or so things really seem to be getting worse in many ways — climate change and corruption being two of the worst.

But technology has certainly increased our connections to one another. Now, we have a very difficult time finding anyone good enough, let alone strong or intelligent enough, to effectively manage the complex economics of the digital age.

The concept of profit as all good is unfortunately quite accurate — “the good is that at which all things aim,” Aristotle tells us. Corporations are set up with the goal of acquiring money. Of course they begin to see money as the primary good. The nature of the ethical challenge here is to reframe the concept of money, not to force corporations to act against their own predefined interests. Money needs to be something that represents living trees as well as dead ones; that values oil that remains in the ground and measures the true loss of the resource in terms of externalities and the opportunity cost when it is extracted and burned.

No one of us can be smart enough to adapt an economic system globally in real time to suit the interests of the planet as a whole. But as a network… well, as a network humanity has plenty of rocket scientists and supercomputers. The hierarchical authority-based model is what allows these perverse incentive structures to begin to reward malfeasance by corporations.

And at the root of the hierarchical authority-based model is intellectual property. The idea that an object can be owned — be it a thought, a piece of land, or a person. It’s ridiculous, and I would argue that the monetization of attention represents the first step along the path to a new economic system. The problem is that corporate investors are pocketing the tremendous wealth generated by platforms like Facebook and Twitter, whilst the users who produce this wealth are completely cut off from it.

Can this situation be changed? Will it?

DAO vs. Corporation

Fortunately for us, decentralized technology is likely to replace corporations with DAOs — decentralized autonomous organizations. These DAOs essentially allow blockchain networks to run themselves by creating economies that incentivize particular behavior and reward it directly, with no middle man. The basic premise of a DAO is that users of the network are rewarded for making governance decisions which pertain to the network. It’s technology built, run, and owned by the end users of said tech. See kyber.org for an example, the KyberDAO, which runs a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange by rewarding users for voting on proposals.

In a DAO-run blockchain network, there is no Facebook choosing who sees the ads and pocketing a profit from your behavior. There is no Spotify CEO living in a mansion while Spotify bands are undercompensated with respect to the cost of living. There need be no publishing houses deciding which reading materials are most likely to sell the most copies.

All of these sorts of services will be replaced by curators who are paid a small amount for each transaction by an algorithm unique to the blockchain said transaction uses. The interaction will also likely be regulated by smart contracts which permanently entitle creators to royalty fees for transactions involving their work. Curators will be incentivized to grow a following, but not given the means to cheat (ads on FB or Google are one example of what I mean here by cheating).

In a nutshell, the movie’s indictment of big tech for its crimes is absolutely on point with respect to everything except the roots of social unrest (injustice) and the new technologies (blockchains, DAOs, trustless financial instruments) being developed today which will replace these big tech platforms in the near future.

The current DeFi bubble (boom?) is just one of many current examples of barriers to market entry that are being dynamited by blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies. The US government has approved savings and financial product usage of cryptocurrencies this year, and the floodgates are open. Don’t expect predictable growth, though. The bizarre economic environment in which each of these developments is unfolding has been characterized by some as the rise of “zombie” companies which would have defaulted months ago if not for federal cash injections and are thus being kept alive by the pandemic.

Things are unstable in general, whether or not social media contributed to this instability. Facebook certainly is not innocent, but the problem is far larger than anything Zuck could build. It would be very difficult to make any sort of accurate prediction about what will happen next. However, I believe the future is waiting in the wings. There is a great chance that big change is just around the corner, that open source technology platforms will power the future and prevent the rise of the next Zuckerberg. Maybe it will also help us get justice for the next Breonna Taylor, or prevent awful injustice from happening in the first place.

We’ll just have to keep trying until we make it work the way it should.

Disclaimer

Nothing in this article constitutes financial advice. Content provided only for entertainment and informational purposes. If it were financial advice, it would probably be terrible because its author is a philosopher and a bit of a scientist, but by no means any sort of authority on anything financial at all. All investments carry risk and the author of this article assumes no responsibility for any gain or loss incurred by a reader under any circumstances.

Contact the Author

Thomas Dylan Daniel is a philosopher and biophysicist. Connect via his website or Facebook, or have a look at his books. Find him on the blockchain at epicdylan.eth!

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