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. 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 our rallying cry. Then I spent 25 years working for increasingly centralized Internet corporations, culminating at Amazon. Now I'm going back where I began. The Internet has the potential to save us from disinformation and toxic memes.
2. Decentralized free speech is needed.
   1. Free speech is not compatible with centralized information platforms. Corporations have no obligations 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.
3. Information Infection Must be Mitigated
   1. But it is equally clear that infectious toxic memes are harmful to society. There needs to be a mechanism for mitigating the impact of emotionally appealing falsehoods and malicious influence campaigns.
4. Centralized Responses Cannot Do It (at least not alone)
   1. Centralized protection against infectious toxic memes is, at best, insufficient to address the problem. We need a broad-based primordial soup of filters that are constantly adapting to new threats, competing to provide a particular aspect of protection of truth.
5. We Can Do It, and We Owe it To Society
   1. Information scientists can build a better system that enables people to create, nurture, and share their truth-defense systems. We can help them take a more active role, in a decentralized fashion, in making the information ecosystem resilient against infection and malicious control.
6. Call to Action
   1. The news summaries that you see here at the beginning are just that - a beginning. I am starting with a core of useful information that will bring the initial traffic, because every new medium needs a killer app. Use this system, if you like it, chip in some cash. I'll be using that revenue stream to fund the development of a decentralized analog to Hacker News, Slashdot, or Reddit. It will be the first layer of an ecosystem for decentralized discussion and decentralized moderation.

Two Messages

There are two messages above that need to be orchestrated better. One is about free speech, the other is about decentralized moderation. I initially framed the points above thinking only about the moderation aspect. Then I bolted on the "Decentralized free speech" bullet point and it doesn't flow. Either I need to flesh out the decentralized free speech angle better, or I need to leave it as a separate topic.

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

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)

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.