# Apps That Rule The World

- Channel: [Dappcon](https://streameth.org/dappcon)
- Date: 2025-06-17
- Duration: 21:01
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/6851450b4ac43bf73d2e2aac

## Transcript

Hello everyone, so I'm sorry you have to see three briefs back-to-back. In my, in our defense, it was organized by a Turkish brother, so even funnier like that. So yeah, perfect introduction, thank you so much. Today I'm going to talk about the apps that rule the world and how to overthrow them. So the two sections of the talk are right there for you. Let's see. First thing I wanted to do is just start a little bit lower, just talk a little bit about infrastructure. Two seconds, don't worry. This is the internet as you know it. Those are the submarine internet cables that actually enable us to connect with the rest of the world. It looks pretty decentralized, but it hides the reality that we still have the app layer, which is that actually, it is full of centralization. More and more you see private companies, usually big tech companies, that are laying fiber-optic cables across the oceans and that they control completely. They don't even go through consortia anymore or through international organizations that used to be the main way that internet cables were established. It's also just a quick opportunity to show those amazing projects. If any of you is interested in internet censorship, they allow you to monitor internet censorship and shutdowns across the world, especially right now where conflicts are popping up around the globe. It's quite important to keep an eye on this. So, one layer up. There is an important trend that helps us contextualize a little bit the apps that rule the world and that's the growing trend of mobile users around the planet and the quasi monopolies in in terms of operating software that we have on those mobile devices. An important note is that the global south is in majority mobile internet native rather than desktop and it's an important context to remember when we talk about, okay, why are those certain apps ruling the world? So, we're getting there. This is a pretty recent data from Cloudflare. This is where most internet traffic is going according to domains and internet services. So, you have the usual suspects. You have Google, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, etc. And really you see this hasn't changed much in the past decade. A few new names popping up but really what we see is a consolidation of that power by big tech companies. Another important data point is that roughly 55% of the world's data is stored on cloud and around 96% of all apps are cloud-based. This is pretty catastrophic, but I come with a message of hope which is that it's not finished. We still can do a lot about this. An important reminder that I always like to bring back during my talks is that actually 10 years ago, no, 15 years ago, most of internet traffic was actually peer-to-peer, mostly via BitTorrents. And this, if you put it in the context of centurionist history, you can think of it more as, okay, we're in the teenage years of the internet and it's very important for a crowd like this one to actually fight for counter-centralization forces which are kind of dominating right now. Now, if you've come to my previous talks this week, you probably know that you probably heard me bang this sentence to everyone. Over half of all internet users are using trusting one single closed-source centralized app suite for their daily knowledge creation and collaboration and communication. It's catastrophic. Nothing justifies this other than monopolistic practices by the company that created that centralized suite of apps, which is Google Workspace. An important point here is that our trust in those applications and those workspaces is almost dogmatic. There is no good reason for us to stick with those and yet we do, and that's despite the amount of negative consequences that have come from our dependence on those applications. Sorry, I got a little bit too enthusiastic with the priests blessing our machine overlords. So there are a few too many here. Forgot to remove them at night. And as I said, the problem with that is pretty self-evident. We see it constantly. Last summer there was billions of dollars wiped out from the global economy because Microsoft Outlook was unavailable for six hours. On a regular basis, we see those centralized platforms leak data. You have employees that arbitrarily decide to censor some people or to get people's data and sell it on the dark web. One exercise that I always like doing is, before a talk, I go on some raid forums clones on the dark web and I try to find out how expensive it is to actually buy 10,000 people's private information, and it's very cheap. I gave a figure at the DIAC conference. I think it was for 10,000 accounts, it was around $6, which is quite ridiculous, and a direct consequence of that centralization at the app layer of the Internet. So I'm getting to the second part of the talk in a second, but maybe one or two last important points to contextualize is that a lot of those companies started with good intentions, and we still have that today. You always have, every year, one or two companies that pop up that seem to be the new hope for everyone on the Internet. We're like, okay, we can finally drop Google Docs, finally drop Google Drive, Dropbox, whatever, and then those same companies either get bought or they turn, like Anakin turns Movie 3, okay, a reference for the geeks. Now, last point about this is about routines. The problem with having every year one more app that disappoints all the people that were hoping to move away from a centralized platform or from those monopolies is that people have routines. They have habits that they don't want to completely upend and start from scratch, and it's very difficult to convince them to do a switch away from something that they're very familiar with. So every time that one of those new hopes, one of those new apps actually comes back on their promises and disappoints everyone, I think we're making it a little bit harder for that next generation of apps to convince people, hey, this time it's going to happen. You're going to be able to migrate towards something that will stand the test of time. And this is a quote that I like from HBR, which is the attitude persists as long as the organization permits it. And there is no better example than Microsoft Excel for this. Over 800 million people depend on Microsoft Excel, and if you look at every big trading company, banks, etc., they use very rudimentary 40-year-old technologies and templates that were made maybe 20 years ago, and they rehash that. They know it's closed source, they know they don't have much power over it, but they're so entrenched that it becomes impossible to think of an alternative. So, second part of the talk is what can we do? I think that right now is the best moment to actually show an alternative that is, like we say, I like to say it at Falvers, un-ruggable, meaning present new kinds of apps, a new generation of apps that even if they walk back their promises on the infrastructural level, on a technological level, it is impossible for that new generation of apps to rogue their users, make the app unavailable, censor their data, kick their accounts out of the platform, etc. And I'm trying not to be completely naive about this. There are three important things to keep in mind when you introduce those new generation of apps. One, you need to make, you need to present perfect reasons for organizations to make that shift. You need to give a perfect tag for developers to develop healthier alternatives without it being too complex. And you give a very simple path to digital freedom to every person on the planet. And what that looks like is something like that. Sorry, you're going to see a lot of memes in this slide. It's my way of compromising for not preparing enough. So, DDoS.new is something that Falvers has been developing for the past nine months. We released it last summer. And the idea is one of the most important things that those new generations of apps can do is expand a little bit the imagination of people about what their affordances with technologies are, meaning what they can imagine new kind of collaboration and communication to be like if it's not constrained by very strict UX and UI determined by some monopolies. So, why is it the perfect moment? We have hardness. We have hardness and it is finally very accessible. So, this is a quote by Josh Stark from the EF. I'm going to read it out loud. We can give Ethereum code and receive a very strong guarantee that it will run anytime we call on it. We can give Ethereum data and know with certainty it will still be available in the future, unaltered and uncorrupted. And hardness lets us control the future in small ways necessary to enable large-scale coordination. This is what got me interested in Ethereum in 2016 and this is what I think we're finally we're finally at the moment where we can leverage that hardness without making it too complex either for the end-user or for developers. I'm going to explain the stack that explains it. And what do we do with that hardness? Well, we can finally smash the centralized alternatives. So, what does it look like? I'm going to go through two phases of that second section of my talk. One is titled technical counter-positioning. So, until very recently we had, like I said, until 2010, a third of internet traffic was peer-to-peer, but those peer-to-peer networks, which were amazing, that were scalable, hard to attack, easy to recover, easy to join, that were self-configurable as well, were missing some fundamental pieces, some primitives like decentralized identity and basically the list I'm putting here under community computers, which are just a different term for blockchains, that complement what peer-to-peer networks were maybe missing for us to have seen a Google Docs built on peer-to-peer technologies rather than a Google Docs built like it is today behind some California-based servers that dictate how your life should be online. So, community computers give us computational and data integrity, interop composability, which is magnificent. Probably the best example of that is if you go on Firecaster today, you have a bunch of independent smart contracts interacting all under one UI, and the end user has no idea that so much interoperability is powering Firecaster, etc. It's a global consensus, of course, and credible neutrality. Now, amazing, we have those two components. Can we build the next generation of apps? Well, there are still a few things missing, something that people are really reminding on crypto Twitter quite a bit more lately, which is a good trend, which is UI-UI. So today, if you go on the average Web3 app, you see even in this community, if you talk to me about your super complex privacy app that requires me to save three secrets, one in my basement, one with my mother, one online, it's too complicated. I cannot onboard anyone with this. It sounds cool to us, but to the end user, it looks kind of bad. Especially when you talk about peer-to-peer technologies. It's very difficult to understand what it means. If you're not in our circles, and I've tried it, believe me, I'm in a department called the Internet Institute, and even there, the grasp over peer-to-peer technologies is pretty limited, and everybody imagines something where you need to sit next to someone, touch their finger, connect your brain, something like that. It's complicated. Nobody understands really what it means, and it doesn't have to be. I'm just going to give you a few examples. This is what DDoS.new looks like. It looks like your average online collaborative editor, but it has a few advantages to the end user that they discover as they go through the app without ever having to, you know, download the seed phrase, download the app locally, etc. What are those advantages despite the very simple looking UI? Well, for example, we're not constantly pinging clouds somewhere in the world, meaning that if internet goes off, Wi-Fi goes off, you can continue using this web app because it leverages the computational power and data storage of your end device, which you know, they're super powerful. 15 years ago, I can understand a little bit the move to cloud, but today those arguments are quite obsolete. So Google, a trillion dollar company, when Google Docs, when you don't have Wi-Fi anymore, you can't use your Google Docs anymore unless you've downloaded an extension, which is completely crazy. So my big point with this slide is just that the decentralized stack, what I showed with the technical counter-positioning, is actually even in terms of UX an advantage, which is why I say this is a perfect moment to actually build that alternative. Other advantages is, for example, I don't need to force my users to create an account with me. They can bring their own accounts, and this is compliant by design with the GDPR. For those who don't know, there is a requirement for data portability in the GDPR, and the centralized apps are compliant by default, whereas Google Docs, etc., they are not. And the $50,000 fines they were paying maybe six years ago have become $5 billion fines today, and it's an existential threat to their models, which they cannot move away from because they spent the past 30 years building under a cloud architecture. Another quick example, I see I don't have much time, is something we wanted to show people using DDoS, which is, okay, what happens if I turn evil? Okay, what happens if I try to censor some people on our platform, or we get bought out and we decide to shut down the app, whatever? Well, don't worry. You can still use the app, still access all your data, your identity, and your social graph. And we created that page to make it super simple for people. We call it the walk-away test internally. It's open source. You can drop your private keys. It will fetch your data from networks, decrypt them, and store them locally. Okay, I'm speeding through the last few slides because I don't have much time. The second part is a social counter-positioning. So we went over the technical. The social encompasses the UX arguments that I just gave, and they expand a bit further. So, okay, I don't need to explain the meme. What do I mean? A few bullet points about the social counter-positioning. Rival the UX of dominant apps, support privacy, local first, and decentralized movements. There are more and more popping up around the world. Also enabled by regulations. Regulations is your friend in that, in this context, including GDPR, data protection regulation in California, etc. Push for data protection regulations. Offer by design data protection accessibility, reliability, and interoperability guarantees. Build in the open and grow through people's contributions. Do not lock in people or advance predatory business practices, and offer radically new collaborative experiences to people. The new stack allows you to actually explore a new design space, and it would be a shame to shy away from that when the benefits are clear, like offline collaboration. Okay, two more slides. Another very important part about that social counter-positioning is be unapologetic about shilling your project. I'm doing it quite aggressively right now, but this is kind of what I want to communicate. If you see someone depressed on the bus, go show them your new decentralized app. It's important that we get the word out there. There's a slide missing, so this sounds a little bit dramatic, but I usually like to end my talk with a list of subversive apps. Today, I'm not going to do that. Today, I'm just going to tell you that for the past five months, we've been working on a new app at Farvers, and we've taken some time to develop it. We think that it is our most powerful app yet, and without saying too much about it, it's really aimed at disrupting one of the most important software in the world, and in five hours at Dapcon, we will announce it. I'll get on a table outside or something and scream it from the top of my lungs. You'll see it online as well, so keep your eyes out. Something really big is coming, so I hope you enjoy it, and if you see me afterwards, come find me. I have some floppy disks that give you exclusive access to that new app. Thank you so much. Thank you.