Doing research in 2017 for “The Truth Machine,” the second crypto book Paul Vigna and I wrote together, I scrolled through the feed generated by cryptograffiti.com, which allows people to preserve and read coded messages and images stored in the Bitcoin blockchain.
There, I encountered all sorts of random items: trading tips, motor vehicles for sale, statements about the oil pipeline protests at Standing Rock, the occasional conspiracy theory, and a message that read, “In loving memory of Georges Fraipoints (16/01/1946-19/02/2017). Awesome man, father and friend. We will miss you.”
But it is one from October 2016 that struck me most: “Need 30 btc. Please! Dream to leave Syria…Help get out of Syria. I live in Aleppo. I am 14 years old. I do not cheat. Community help!!!!!!!”
Did this young person ever get the donation? (At that time, 30 BTC would have been about $18,000.) Did he or she ever get out of Aleppo? Did they survive?
I knew I’d never get answers to those questions or find out whether the message was a legitimate call for help or some sort of con. But that didn’t stop me from being struck by the pathos of what I’d read. In the midst of a brutal war, Bitcoin’s immutable ledger had offered someone a means of asserting their humanity, a small but crucial act of defiance against an authoritarian regime hell-bent on denying it.
When you strip everything back from the mania around crypto and the new business models being built on it, its core, most important, idea is that of immutability. A truly decentralized, permissionless blockchain is perhaps the only unbreakable record of history we’ve ever had. At a time when authoritarianism is on the rise, that’s an incredibly powerful concept.
Effectively using blockchain technology as a bulwark against authoritarianism will require the complex integration of many moving parts, including changes in the legal process and the practice of journalism. But a framework for how it might be helpful – in concert with other tools of cryptography – is starting to take shape, partly because of the work being done at the Starling Lab, part of Stanford’s Center for Blockchain Research.
Lower down in the column, we’ll delve into the Starling Lab’s bid to improve how we authenticate and store information to bolster trust in news sources and evidential information, drawing on this week’s episode of the “Money Reimagined” podcast, in which our guest was the Starling Lab’s Dotan.
Dotan makes clear that this is a challenging task. But God knows it’s one we must undertake.
Lies as legitimacy
All authoritarian regimes tend to assert their own, inevitably distorted version of history as part of their strategy for maintaining power. Without the legitimacy of a mandate founded on a free and fair election, they will strive to install some other legitimizing story in the public consciousness.
Think of Pol Pot’s Orwellian decree restarting Cambodian history at what he called “Year Zero.” These myth creation processes often manifest as historical appropriation, as when Hugo Chavez recast Simon Bolivar as a socialist, even though the 19th-century Venezuelan independence hero died two decades before a young Karl Marx wrote “The Communist Manifesto.” And, to be sure, they often fail, which, for now at least, seems to be the fate of former President Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” movement. (Have @ me, Trump supporters. That was an attempt at an authoritarian flex if ever there was one.)
Right now, we face a front-and-center example of immediate importance. Vladimir Putin is trying to shore up support at home for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by perpetuating the myth that Ukraine is occupied by Nazis and that Russia’s soldiers are liberating a neighboring country in the same way that a World War II generation fought back Hitler’s armies on the eastern front. Meanwhile, with the shuttering of independent media outlets, the Kremlin is covering up both the atrocities committed by his military and its own massive loss of Russian soldiers’ lives.
That this is occurring in an age of deep fakes, of bot-driven misinformation campaigns and of cynically crafted psyop strategies designed to steer our dopamine-triggered minds into amplifying false information makes the issue all the more urgent.
At the dawn of the social media age, Silicon Valley leaders would tout Facebook and Twitter as tools to democratize information and power. No longer. Nefarious uses of social media have generated what social scientists call the “liar’s dividend.” They foster broad-based mistrust in information generally, including in what might otherwise be seen as incontrovertible evidence that something is untrue.
Read the rest of this column here.
