Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
I was happy to see Moxie Marlinspike weigh in on the web3 debate. He
didn't just mock it. He built something and kicked the tires like a
QA tester or security researcher would do, looking for weaknesses
and explaining what he found. This is criticism worth reading, tech
blogging at its best.

<https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html>

And I always enjoy reading posts from Vitalik Buterin, who responded
here:

<https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/ryk3it/my_first_impressions_of_web3
/hrrz15r/>

It seems like they don't really disagree on the details. The current
state of things is pretty bad. The disagreement seems more about
temperament: is better to be patient or impatient? 

Marlinspike is probably impatient based on his background. He wants
Signal to win market share from WhatsApp and other chat services. He
seems to be thinking like a startup founder - you need to build the
features that users want, and if you're too slow you become
irrelevant, run out of money, and everyone leaves.

The urgent style seems native to social media and the press. We are
living in unprecedented times, etc etc. And it's also native to
financial markets.

By contrast, most of what Buterin writes exudes calm and patience.
Protocols last a long time and we can think carefully about what we
do next. If a feature isn't ready, we'll delay it. Other people can
do what they want in the meantime, but we're building things that
last and can take the time to think things through and achieve
consensus. Whatever problems users are running into now isn't our
problem. When we ship a protocol improvement, people will use what
we built.

Someday we'll see if being patient worked out for them.
  

    
Where the Internet is concerned, we're not patient because we never
really had to be. Consider how fast http/html rolled out, and how
we've had so much evolution without much disruption. At least that's
how it appears to me.

Whereas the blockchain has been around for so many years, and few if
any of us have had our hands on a workable blockchain solution,
other than the aforementioned speculative investments in
cryptocurrencies. And maybe some of the NFT stuff (nodding to Vinay
and Pat). 

In 2017 I was trying to get my head around this stuff, and Doug
Rushkoff invited me to join him on a panel about the blockchain. I
did prep work before that panel, trying to get my head around what
was happening. I read a lot about potential use cases and
strategies, but it's been 4 years and none of that stuff seems to
have come together.

I've also had the feeling that some of the more vocal advocates
really don't understand the technology so much as the promise
they've been hearing - that we can build something both effective
and decentralized. That's a hard problem.

Meanwhile the world is experiencing increasing levels of climate
instability, and sliding into authoritarian governance (dare I say
fascism) in so many countries including the USA. Will the blockchain
fix climate change? Will DAOs decentralize governance toward some
kind of enlightenment (vs the endarkenment we see around us)? Or are
we fiddling while the planet burns?
  

    
One of the games we play in the blockchain space is "which year is
it on the blockchain?"

Some people will say 1999, right before the dotcom crash.

Some people will say 1980, microcomputer revolution just starting.

I think it's more like 1976. The blockchain is a component of
something bigger, something which will tie all the world's computing
resources into a single addressable problem-solving supercomputing
surface - all the underutilize compute resources in the world,
cheaply recruitable to your problem. 

Blockchain is a small part of getting us there. It solves a couple
of problems: namespace management, and possibly (not necessarily)
payments.
  

    
On blockchains and climate change, if I may suggest:
https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/can-the-world-computer-save-the-
world-part-3-building-an-economy-with-a-future-5d4156f06a04 in which I suggest that we use blockchains for carbon accounting.
  

    
Yeah, the U.S. news industry's a mess.

Neither the editorial nor the business side showed much foresight as
online publishing began in the 1990s. The money people couldn't
conceive of an end to the rivers of advertising revenue: display and
classifieds. The publishers and editors in chief loved their paper
publications so much that they were still dragging heels on digital
well into the 2000s.

There's tons of exciting innovation happening now in news with
formats, revenue streams, the relationships between newsrooms and
the communities they serve...but we're decades into right-wing
billionaires pouring money into disinformation cloaked as news. 

Meanwhile, among the fruits of the Reagan era, weaker regulations
had become "common sense." Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act
of 1996, ending decades of federal efforts to maintain decentralized
ownership of news media. 

Further, the kind of civics education I had in public school in the
1970s was beginning to erode. That curriculum was often hokey and
largely limited to majoritarian white and capitalist perspectives of
U.S. history. However, it did get across a number of important
basics, such how our government is structured. Fast forward to the
late 2010s, and only one in four Americans can name the three
branches of government. 

In my Queens classroom, we even had a lesson one day on how to
navigate the different sections of a newspaper and read a newspaper
article. I wonder if anyone still does that.


The Takeaway had a good segement on reviving civics education last
week:
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/takeaway/segments/did-lack-civics-educati
on-play-part-insurrection 
  

    
When the hype has been going for years, it's easy to be cynical.

Speaking of ongoing hype, it's now been more than a decade since
Google first announced they're working on driverless cars. I
remember some Google technologist talking about how they hoped their
kid would never need to learn to drive, and I think that kid might
have graduated from college by now?

Waymo is still plugging away, though. Maybe they'll expand to more
regions this year, but I doubt it.

---

It seems like there are contrasting ways to think about crashes and
that has something with patience versus impatience.

From a financial perspective, crashes are pretty bad! People lose
money! It's bad publicity! There are layoffs! Your stock might get
delisted. After you crash, the game is over, or at least too boring
to want to continue. Time to find a new game. (And similarly, if you
don't get out of the pump-and-dump scheme on time, you're left
holding the bag.)

But the other way to think about crashes is like a virus would
"think" about them. Viruses don't care about market share or
publicity. From an evolutionary perspective, a wave can crash but
the virus can keep coming back. Viruses don't get bored.

Sometimes crypto people talk about survival like a virus. Everyone
who didn't diversify could lose lots of money but the blockchain
will continue, and this is somehow important. The environmental
footprint will shrink and transaction costs will be low again, and
maybe the remaining die hards will go back to using it to trade
World of Warcraft cards?

Blockchains depend on civilization (electricity and network
connectivity) and on Internet geeks continuing to be interested
enough to run the servers. But not everything on the Internet dies.
Sometimes it becomes retro, and this is separate from mainstream
people talking about it. It could keep going when most people are
saying "oh them, are they still around?" Sort of like the Well.

The hype is not about bare survival though, it's about mainstream
adoption and transformative change.

(And speaking of the long term, what's the Long Now Foundation up to
lately?)
  

    
Thanks for that moxie.org link, Brian. Very interesting.
  

    
Glad you liked it! (Previously posted in <132> but worth reposting.)
  

    
There's a lot going on in this topic, so I appreciate the second
chance.
  

    
> When the hype has been going for years, it's easy to be cynical.

Furthermore, quite some time ago we reached the point where admitting
that one's product incorporated blockchain technology could trigger a
significant backlash from a now widely misinformed public.

Remember "Blockchain Ice Tea?"
  

    
Virus is a pretty good analogy for boom-bust capitalism. 
  

    
Agreed.  And Brian, thanks for the bit about "Scissor Labels" -- that's
another good argument against "binary thinking" -- but how, oh how will
humans ever get past that? I mean, we basically have a brain region
devoted to the making of life-prolonging binary choices ('snap
judgments'): friend or foe, fight or flight, etc.,  operating just
below conscious awareness.
  

    
Binary thinking is essential to language, in the sense that you
choose to use a word or you don’t. (Though you can add qualifiers.)
I think, though, the idea that you can use tools for unintended ends
helps a bit? I’ll refer you to David Chapman, my favorite
anti-philosopher:

<https://metarationality.com/purpose-of-meaning>

> We use words as tools to get things done; and to get things done,
we improvise, making use of whatever materials are ready to hand. If
you want to whack a piece of sheet metal to bend it, and don’t know
or care what the “right” tool is (if there even is one), you might
take a quick look around the garage, grab a large screwdriver at the
“wrong” end, and hit the target with its hard rubber handle. A hand
tool may have one or two standard uses; some less common but pretty
obvious ones; and unusual, creative ones. But these are not clearly
distinct categories of usage.

> Words go the same way. Almost any word can be used to mean almost
anything, in some context. You could play this as a challenge game…
How about “The eggplant is a straw hat, and the spinach is yelling
about politics”?

> We’re in the kitchen of a vegetarian restaurant. A table’s entrees
are ready, and the server who took the order is explaining to the
one who will deliver the meal which diner gets which dish. One
customer’s flamboyant straw hat is a salient, unambiguously
identifying feature; you can see it all the way across the room. The
other probably needs to turn up a hearing aid; you can hear their
opinions about cultural appropriation all the way across the room.
  

    


> In my Queens classroom, we even had a lesson one day on how to
> navigate the different sections of a newspaper and read a newspaper
> article. I wonder if anyone still does that.

yes, some do. i highly recommend the News Literacy Project's email
newsletter for keeping abreast of things. 

https://newslit.org/

even if one is not a journalist or educator.
  

    
The Metaverse: WTF is it?
Sure, I'm being a bit flip on this one, but the idea is that I feel
like this is Wild Palms 3.0. For those of you who aren't hoary
cyberheads, I'm basically talking about the days of the Virtual
Paradise radio cast (which was made at the Cyberthon in SF in 1990,
but I got the tape on something like 93...). It had Jaron Lanier,
Terrence McKenna, and my friend Brenda Laurel speculating about this
thing called VR. TV shows like Wild Palms, VR5, and Longo's movie
Johnny Mnemonic speculated on VR becoming the new alternate world
for everything - social, commerce, intrigue. Longo's Mnemonic
actually showed a halfway interesting 3D internet that I feel could
be "metaverse-y" in the Stephenson/Snowcrash sort of thing (where
the word came from).

I'm rambling a cloud of cultural points to signify the excitement
that was going on regarding VR just before the Web. But VR was
expensive, required coding, was so.... Different.

Then came the Web. You could just type in an address, and stuff
would come up.  So, Metaverse 1.0 died.

Sure, other virtual worlds like LambdaMOO and Active Worlds came
around, but not until in the early 2000's no 3D platform had....
commerce hooked to it.

Enter Second Life (someplace, btw, I'm still on). The second life
where you could do whatever you want, with abstracted cash (Linden
Dollars)... Playboy, American Apparel, Domino's Pizza, even WalMart
was out there, along with great institutions like ZKM Karlsruhe and
Ars Electronica out there.  Business Week featured "Anshe Chung",
the world's first "Virtual Real Estate Millionaire". Artists like
Eva and franco Mattes, Second Front, and Cao Fei (who showed her
remake of Beijing at Serpentine Gallery, arguably one of the world's
leading)made groundbreaking work
... There was a boom, and promises of the Metaverse were rife. 
However, SL had its growing pains, like a weak infrastructure, its
libertaian atmosphere allowing Ponzi schemes and "ageplay" (which
got shut down after the Netherlands got involved).  

Eventually, the FOMO that companies had from SL's hype led to
commerce leaving as people just didn't wan t to get a Meat Lover;s
Pizaa in an SL Domino's. Issue was that HTTP was a standard, not a
company. Linden Labs wasn't prepared to become the 3D web, and SL
had too high of a learning curve for the average user, and to this
day, the commercial sector voices schadenfreude whenever SL (which
still has a 30,000 constant login according to Wagner James Au)
shows any hint of trouble. The private sector still smarts from its
affair with SL. Technically RIP Metaverse 2.0.

Enter Web3, Metaverse 3.0, the Meta "Mother of all Demos", in which
Zuck riffs laurie Anderson's axiom from her Puppet Motel project,
"Heaven is just like where you are right now, but MUCH MUCH better".
In the Facebook/Meta demo, Zuck picks an ideal for for his avatar -
Him.

What seems to be Metaverse 3.0 is a set of virtual environments
bound by the Blockchain, which allows owneership/commerce. This has
been the bugaboo of the virtual ever since Walter Benjamin's 1918(?)
essay where he talks about the devalusing of things through
reproduction. 

Tewo things that are disturbing about Metaverse 3.0 - it does not
seem to have any coherence. There's no Second Life for this new
social media bound by crypto. You have to hang out on Twitter and
find Discords that know these things.  The Metaverse hype seems to
be a whole bunch of (maybe) connected VR apps. However, apps often
do not share blockchains,a nd it just seems to be speculation and
island territories. 

Using the telephone system as a metaphor, things seem light at best.
I remember seeing the Walmart experience, seemed lonely, with a
virtual assistant helping you through you shopping in a near-empty
room.

Moral of the story is that I feel like I've seen this before, and if
you consider Advertising mogul Ogilvy saing to make reality
interesting...  What will be different? I WONDER.
  

    
eh yup
  

    
See, I hear a phrase like "all the underutilize compute resources in
the world, cheaply recruitable to your problem" and hear "massive
increase in power usage, with an incentive to move that power to
countries which have abundant supplies of fossil fuels owing to the
rising cost of energy elsewhere."

As <bruces> pointed out elsewhere, when Kazakhstan went offline
briefly, 12% of the world's Bitcoin mining vanished. Energy is dirt
cheap there, because Kazakhstan sits on huge reserves of oil and
coal, and 75% of its power is generated from those sources (the rest
by natural gas, which is an improvement over oil and coal, but not
carbon neutral by any means).
  

    
70% of Kazakhstan's electricity is made by burning coal. In old,
dirty plants that are cheap to run.
  

    
Inky Fingers: it's a lot less environmentally damaging to do your
computing on a computer which already exists. If you have to buy a
computer, then do the compute, then leave it idle when you're done? 

Vastly more damaging. We need to use what we have, whatever it is,
as efficiently as possible. 

Environmentally we have not invested in *profitable efficiencies*
like home insulation. Don't expect people to make big lifestyle
sacrifices if they won't even pick up the free money lying on the
ground in things like insulating homes.
  

    
Blockchain "Decentralized Autonomous Organizations" interest me a
lot.  They kinda do to venture capital firms what social media does
to newspapers.

They're also really a lot like 18th-century coffeeshops before
corporations were invented -- it's all about buzz and personal
connections, rather than anything like "due diligence."

Before there was any such thing as "crony capitalism," there were
just the cronies -- guys you'd literally have a cup of coffee with. 
They didn't have titles, "Chief Technical Officer," "head of
marketing," none of that -- they were just influencers.

Our understanding of history leads us to think that this is behind
us, but it may be ahead of us.  If you were a Soviet Marxist
scholar, you'd be hard put to imagine that the arc of history is
aimed directly at a de-facto Czar and a private oligarchic clique of
spies and profiteers.

But the USSR collapsed thirty years ago, while the Putin oligarchy
thing is pretty long-in-the-tooth.  Putin's reign is as old as the
21st century.  He used to be a dynamic fireball of guy, doing
karate, riding horses bareback; now he seems to be tiring, like
Brezhnev, pulling all the windows shut in his society and declaring
darkness the standard.
  

    
The Russian media seems to have the Kazakhstan situation figured for
a failed, pro-Western "Color Revolution."  They may be right, but in
the old days, there was something Western to be pro about -- and
also, the wannabe revolutionaries at least had it together enough to
be able to pick out a color.
  

    
Right, second Technical Bit: hashcash.

Hashcash is where all the pain enters the bitcoin system. It's the
foundation of proof of work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
<- this is where the energy consumption happens.

Before we mentioned hash functions: drop in a piece of data, and get
a unique identification number back.
7845d0d110f8938de54c4f0637ed6c6a1b517000 for example. Try it here:
https://xorbin.com/tools/sha1-hash-calculator type in some text,
calculate a hash. 

Now try and find two items with the same first letter: it'll take
you 16 tries on average. First two letters? 256 tries. Three
letters? 4096 tries, and so on. A good cryptographic hash has no
shortcuts: if you want two things to match you just have to go and
try things until you get a hit, there are no shortcuts.

However, if somebody claims that "love" hashes to the same value as
"will" (93 using a slightly older gematria hash algorithm) you can
easily verify the claim by hashing the two values yourself and
checking that they match.

The asymmetry is key: it takes a long time to find things that hash
to similar values, but it is very fast to check when somebody claims
that two things have similar values.

What this means is that you can present me with evidence of
computational effort in a challenge-response system. Here's how that
works.

1) I present you with a random string "asldjasf;ljkasdf" and say
"find me a match to this string for the first eight characters of
the hash." 

2) You then have to go and do a bunch of computation to find
something with that partial match.

3) You show me the string you've found: "ejejsjsidks" and I check
its hash against my hash. If they match, you have passed my
challenge.

This asymmetry of effort is going to come up when we talk about
bitcoin mining. I'll post about that a little later. But the core
concept is: cheap for me to challenge you, and as expensive as I
want it to be for you to pass that challenge.

There are very few things in computer science which have this kind
of asymmetry of effort. These are special, useful, powerful
situations. In cryptography things with this asymmetry of effort are
called often called trapdoor functions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trapdoor_function

Asymmetry of effort is critical. This is another thing you should
*completely understand* if you want to have a solid opinion on Web3
- it's as fundamental a building block as understanding M0, M1, M2
money supply if you want to talk about US inflation rates.

You don't need to read the code, but if you don't have the building
blocks it's almost impossible to have an informed opinion on things
like the proof-of-work / proof-of-stake divide: "killing hashcash"
is another name for that struggle. I'll post about that shortly.
  

    
And, yes, very weird to me that *choices of algorithms to secure
technical systems* are now bringing down countries by destroying
their power grids and internet access.

Not something I would have foreseen. 

I think we could safely classify that as a bug that should be
reported.
  

    
Via email from George Mokray:

Years ago I encountered Buddhist logic:
yes
no
not yes
not no
neither yes nor no
both yes and no

Then I began using them as answers for polls on Dailykos and found
that two more were demanded by readers:
don’t understand the question?
none of the above

That should get you out of the strict binary rut, a symptom of an
addictive system, according to Anne Wilson Schaef by the way.

I’ve also found that “truth” is a word I don’t like to use as it is
so dependent upon point of view.  I know a carpenter’s truth, when
something is straight, level and plumb;  but when talking about
people, it is highly unlikely that all those dimensions will align. 
I check and recheck my sources and try not to get stampeded, which
seems to be the basic idea of news media in these days of the
society of the spectacle.
  

    
Via email from George Mokray:

Witness to a Century: George Seldes
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2008/11/19/663606/-

The Jungle of Journalism: Upton Sinclair on the Press
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2006/11/15/271728/-