Blue Skies and Social Media

Opens January 15th 2021 from Colorado on social media, noting crypto media wrongly reports every tweet as him building a decentralized Twitter, which he is not doing at the moment.

His roughly 300-person company has 100 on Cardano plus researchers across zero-knowledge cryptography, reputation and rating systems, voting, media, artificial intelligence, information veracity, and meaningful participation.

The most prominent example is Catalyst, social software with over 5000 people on IdeaScale plus a modified Jormungandr fork with voting tools, funding 11 real projects at Fund 2 thanks to Dor and his team.

Catalyst will have 8 or 9 funds in 2021 with the next nearing a million dollars, providing ratings, social accountability, and democratic processes, plus toxic behavior needing built-in resilience.

Catalyst's social dynamics of ratings, accountability, and democratic process could be reapplied to other networks, since he has watched BAT, Steem, Hive, Gab, Mastodon, and many decentralized social media efforts over the years.

He likes special-purpose networks like voting, science, or Stack Exchange because they have a purpose with on-topic and off-topic boundaries, unlike general-purpose social media where nothing is off limits and life boundaries blur.

Instead of elevating empathy and wisdom these networks divide people, reduce tolerance, and make them behave as they never would in person, driving a grand radicalization he blames on algorithms and broken incentive models, so building something merely decentralized only creates echo chambers.

Calls Twitter a left-leaning echo chamber of elites, media, Fortune 500, and politicians where everything trending is anti-Republican, dog-piling any right-leaning person even a Nobel winner.

Such a network builds no bridges, forcing everyone to pick sides, so people stop listening and generalize everyone into intolerant categories in a worsening cycle.

It makes no sense to build a decentralized social network without first solving de-radicalization and collective empathy, since decentralization only prevents deplatforming, not toxicity.

It would be beautiful to get diverse opinions with consensus on facts, but a US police shooting is reported by who the person is and their group, not the facts, as with oil spills, forest fires, or lead in the water, with no objective baseline.

His industry endured 12 years of media bias, since early Bitcoin coverage from 2009 to 2012 had to tie it to drugs, terrorism, and child pornography as the primary use case.

Bitcoin is now a trillion-dollar industry central banks hold, but for four years any mention implied condoning nefarious activity with no apologies, ignoring instant settlement and property rights.

He sees the same tarring now of any alternative discussion platform as supporting Nazis, white supremacists, and terrorism simply for competing with Facebook and Twitter.

Warns society will not survive without catastrophic war if it lets propaganda lead over fact, since a small group could engineer a 30 percent-mortality pandemic within 20 years, and isolating voiceless cliques breeds violence as history shows.

Crypto taught that you can be your own bank, store non-decaying value, pay abroad, and build legal systems, securities, and lending without permission, regulated by code not man and without violence.

The same tools that took crypto from nothing to a trillion dollars under criticism could fix civil discourse with more cryptography, learning from Hive, Steem, BAT, OpenBazaar, Zcash, Monero, Dash, and self-sovereign identity.

Crypto's open-source no-patent capabilities are free for the commons, unlike Jack Dorsey's Blue Sky which will fail because its mindset fits California groupthink, not freedom or objective reality.

As an original crypto person already tarred and feathered and mocked by media and family, he does not fear being a pariah since it is about morality and looking to the future, not fitting in.

Berlin unveiled a monument to over 90 Weimar lawmakers executed for opposing Hitler, and while most people believe they would be in that group, even in 1850 few Americans who found slavery distasteful stood up for fear of social consequences.

People who stand up and win get indoctrinated with wealth and fame, so next time they have something to lose and stay quiet, and society must grow beyond that and learn to separate objective from subjective.

Technology evolves too fast, adding capabilities humanity should not have without wisdom, like inventing the seatbelt only after the car crash, and society was unprepared for the internet and social media.

The highest pursuit is self-awareness of these problems and the humility to admit humanity lacks answers, so his life's work is confronting them head-on even at the cost of looking crazy.

Cardano and Ethereum attracted millions to think this way, removing his cynicism, since society escapes not through one visionary but a collective swarm of frustrated passionate people empowered by the tools of freedom.

Something in social media will eventually get built once there is a protocol that solves real problems, which may succeed or fail but will inspire millions like Cardano did, since he does not want a world like 20th-century Russia where people guard their opinions for fear of consequences.

He was deeply saddened that Ron Paul, a harmless 85-year-old, was deplatformed from Facebook, which called it a mistake but he believes will indulge it again with less scrutiny.

Silencing accomplishes nothing since you do not cut out a man's tongue unless you fear what he says, and no social network is coming soon but Catalyst, Prism, and privacy tech are each a brick, in dialogue with Minds, Gab, and Alex Pentland's social physics.