CypherBackstory

Media

About Page

Purpose

The About Page will serve as an easily accessible overview of why. Why is Iterative Chaos worthy of beginning a long-term association?

Form

3 to 6 paragraphs with links for more detail. Punchy, to the point, a pamphlet.

Key Points

1. Decentralized free speech is needed.
   1. Free speech is not compatible with centralized information platforms. Corporations have no obligation regarding free speech and are permitted to censor content for any reason or no reason. Benevolent dictatorship by corporations is nice when it happens, but there will always be motives at cross purposes with society's best interests. The closest we can get to guaranteed free speech on the Internet is to decentralize content distribution.
2. Information Infection Must be Mitigated
   1. Free speech combined with social media has difficulties. Infectious toxic memes can spread at an extraordinary pace and persuasive disinformation can be weaponized by malicious entities. Our current defenses against social media contagion are insufficient to protect our freedom, our democracy, and our future. We need to develop a broad and adaptive immune response to social media contagion that mitigates disinformation and limits the spread of infectious toxic memes.
3. Centralized Responses Cannot Do It (at least not alone)
   1. Biological immune responses are augmented by companies like Pfizer developing vaccines, but the success of those vaccines is totally dependent on the decentralization embodied in individual human immune systems. Similarly, while centrally developed defenses against disinformation can help, they will not be sufficient. We need to build the information analog to individual immune responses. We need millions of intelligent agents, developed and shared by millions of information aficionados, running on a substrate that supports decentralized information infection immune response agents.
4. We Can Do It, and We Owe it To Society
   1. Information scientists can design a protocol and deploy relays that enable people to create, nurture, and share their information-defense agents. We can help people take a more active role, in a decentralized fashion, in making the information ecosystem resilient against infection and malicious action. We can build a reference implementation for deploying those agents via Nostr, and we can demonstrate making the system self-sustaining through crowd-funding, traffic monetization, and peer-to-peer transactions.
5. Benevolent Leader
   1. In 1995 I started my first Internet venture. We were excited about this new medium where anyone could run their own server. "Information wants to be free" was the rallying cry. But then I spent 25 years working for increasingly oligarchic corporations. I'm done with that. Now I'm going back where I began. The Internet has the potential to save us from disinformation and toxic memes.
6. Call to Action
   1. I am building a working example of a system that can restore the promise of the Internet. The news summaries that you see here are the seed of interest to keep you stopping by. On top of that, I'll be building a Nostr-based discussion system similar to Reddit, Slashdot, or Hacker News, but with a focus on slower, deeper discussions. I want to grow decentralized moderation as an extension of upvotes and reactions. Individual reactions to content, signed by people and comparable to their reputation, will be the micro-signals that act as the immune response to toxic memes and the amplification of valuable critical analysis.
7. Call to Action
   1. It will be the first layer of an ecosystem for decentralized discussion and moderation. That ecosystem will become the substrate on which information defense agents can be germinated by millions of activist information aficionados. Join me - let's build it together and learn how to defend human consciousness.

Video

Purpose

Put a human face on the mission. Evoked the passion for the mission.

Form

30 second to 5 minute videos. More short than long. Periodic, focused on the passion, but with some direction info.

Key Points

1. Elevator Pitch (30 seconds)
2. Overview (5 minutes)
3. About Page Focus-in (2 - 5 Minutes Each)
   1. Benevolent Leader
   2. Information Infection Must be Mitigated
   3. Centralized Responses Cannot Do It (at least not alone)
   4. We Can Do It, and We Owe it To Society
   5. Call to Action
4. Periodic Shorts on Steps Forward, Focused on the Motive, tied back to the mission. (30s to 2m)

Social Posts

Purpose

Draw people in to the funnel. Focus on the producers first, then the traction drivers. Germinate organic growth.

Form

Short posts for things like Linked In status updates. Longer posts that the short posts can link to. Longer posts should have the deliberation about the mechanism, while the shorter posts should be the more impassioned reflection on some bit of the mechanism. Shoot for each long form post to result in 5 - 10 short-post links.

Key Points

Not sure how to break these up into Doc versus Post. Think through.

1. Copy Points from About Page
   1. Benevolent Leader
   2. Information Infection Must be Mitigated
   3. Centralized Responses Cannot Do It (at least not alone)
   4. We Can Do It, and We Owe it To Society
   5. Call to Action
2. One long-form will go with some of the videos.
3. More focused on the mechanical developments than on the emotional appeal in the videos.

Legends

Aaron Swartz

• 

  Aaron Swartz

Larry Lessig

When receiving his chair at Harvard, Lessig's acceptance speech was titled, "Aaron's Laws - Law and Justice in a Digital Age".

Eben Moglen

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eben_Moglen
• Footnote: RMS

Consider

• Cory Doctorow
• Tim Berners-Lee
• Yochai Benkler
• Bruce Schneier

Why I Work on The Internet

Centralized services are not what the Internet was built for. I know; I was there. As the Internet became available outside of University research, I was one of the early explorers of the Internet. My friends were all cyberpunks, going to the neon dark underground bars, listening to Chemical Brothers, Future Sound of London, and Prodigy, talking to netops and sysops and hackers like myself about what we had found that day and how amazing it would be for society to be decentralized.

We didn't call it "decentralized" back then, of course. Eventually, we got around to calling it 'peer-to-peer' or 'p2p', but before that it was just "what the Internet was". Everybody who used the Internet had their own web site (your "home page"). It was just us nerds, posting links on our home pages to things like Project Gutenberg, writing our own 'zine (periodic home page post, before blogs, adapting magazine-format content to the new medium), and bragging to our friends about it for nerd cred (popularly called "geek cred" at that time in Northeast Ohio).

I put up a flyer in the coffeeshop I worked at, where I made the best machiatos in Cleveland, before Starbucks came along and ruined everyone's ability to recognize a decent cup of coffee. The flyer had a picture of The Silver Surfer that I had modified to look digitized. I advertised myself as a websurfer for hire, when hypertext was a cover topic in every Wired magazine. Surprisingly few people wanted to hire me to do online research, when most people hadn't even heard of online yet, and there wasn't very much there.

But I digress. We were building something better than the old people could possibly understand. A way for everyone to share information for free, instantly. The Library of Alexandria, but with everyone hosting their own significant piece of it, and available to everyone in the world! (or to the few hundred thousand of us who were online, anyway)

What Do I Do

I am a retired software engineer. I'm not getting paid, but I'm still putting in the hours. I'm trying to make the world better.

My expertise is in machine learning and data engineering. My most recent corporate experience was at Amazon, where I was first a technical lead then a manager of data engineering and data science teams. On my last team, the largest dataset was 9.1 petabytes of detailed tracking data about millions of products for 70,000 selling partners and 190,000 brands. Now I'm working on a new approach to social media. One that encourages resistance to disinformation. It uses the same models we use in immune research.

That's down at the data layer, and anyone can access it and build on it. But most people will use it in a more conventional way. The user experience looks like an ordinary discussion site, like Reddit.

It's easy for regular folks to start using, and open for engineers to work together on the social media disinformation problem.

Where I'm Going

It has been clear to me for a long time that we can't trust corporations to determine our information landscape. I still use my self-hosted email address and host my own web pages and web services - Jitsi, MediaWiki, video hosting, Git repos - the whole nine yards.

I knew that corporations would start off nice and gradually get as sleazy as we would let them get away with, and as Ben Franklin observed - people are disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable (or something like that) - which is like ringing the dinner-bell for late stage capitalists. "At what level of suffering will they uproot their digital lives and migrate elsewhere? Do 10% less than that."

But I helped them build it anyway. They paid a lot, but it takes a toll. I imagine it is a bit like working in adult entertainment; you get to see some terrible people making a lot of money in unscrupulous ways.

I want it back. Fuck those guys. They only do what they do by a combination of our consent and the full force of most of the biggest governments on Earth.

Egh - that's a little dark sounding.

But we can put social communication back in the hands of the people. The Internet was literally spec'd out with the specific intent of making that dream possible. There is no technical hurdle to making it work, it's just an data engineering, software engineering, system engineering, and user interface problem. Maybe some marketing and social engineering, too. That stuff is all totally doable, and there are a lot of great old ones like me out there who are righteously indignant about the poor behaviour of the Internet oligarchs.