# Fileverse: Self-Custodial x Non-Financial x Usable

- Channel: [Dappcon](https://streameth.org/dappcon)
- Date: 2025-06-19
- Duration: 26:27
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/6853ea2490bd41297b9d2801

## Transcript

Hello, hello, yeah, indeed, wow, that's a strong voice, hello, thanks for being here while the Prophet is speaking as well. So there's a lot of things that I'm going to talk about today, I'm going to do it quite succinctly. I only have maybe four slides that are a little bit heavy on the words, so it will be the first few slides, don't worry after that, it's mainly memes and good vibes, but with of course the important ideas being communicated. So today I'm going to talk to you about subversive apps and safe communities, okay, here are the slides, and let's start with what I mean by that. So you'll see, the next three slides is something that is connected with what I do on the sides, which is I'm finishing my PhD at the Oxford Internet Institute, and over there we have a lab called the Subversive Technologies Lab, and we look at global information controls and censorship on the internet, etc. So this is where, let's say, the conceptual foundation of what I'm going to talk about today comes from. So first things first, we're going to be exploring technologies that provide control over information, information flows, and action on the internet, and those that resist or subvert that control. This is a quote by Josh Wright from the University of Oxford, I highly recommend checking him out. So just to establish quickly the premise of my talk, the internet has created a new landscape, I think we're all pretty aware, for the communication and collaborative creation of information, and has caused a broad centralization of the global communications infrastructure. So as a result of that, the technologies comprising the network have come to represent a significant means of control over the creation, access, and dissemination of large volumes of information. And information and the means by which it is communicated and controlled are now really key concerns of our times. And unfortunately, although we have seen a proper movement towards at least having permissionless money, we haven't seen it as significantly with the data. And that's a shame, and my argument in this talk will be that we have exactly the infrastructure and technology we need to actually make that move also for data. And actually that move makes complete sense to enterprise companies as well, and it's not just, okay, value-driven, you should try this new technology because it has a better soul. No, even as a business, there are some really concrete factors that you need to consider. I'll go over them a little bit later. So last or two last slides with a few too many words. Computer networks and the technologies on which they are built have evolved beyond their original scope and purpose. It's quite important to understand that. If you hear all the architects of the internet, if you listen to Bruce Schneier, they say the same thing. Hey, we never had privacy in mind when we were creating those networks. And so now we're seeing a lot of those issues bite us in the ass. And two of those issues, and this is why I talk about enterprise clients, are privacy and information security. Those things were not considered in the original design of core protocols, and this has resulted in ongoing struggle to ensure that fundamentally flawed infrastructure can meet the requirements placed on it and its role as a global information network. OK, last slide with a chunk. So through both these flaws and intended functionality, the internet has produced that ecosystem of cultures, institutions and technologies that either exert or resist and circumvent control over information. Now, anybody knows what this is? It's the internet. It's the internet. It's the TLDR. Those are the internet cables that are powering all your connections. And looking like that, it looks like it's pretty decentralized. But unfortunately, in the past decade, we've seen a lot of private companies, Google, Microsoft, et cetera, usually the same culprits, centralizing even that fundamental core infrastructure of the internet. And it's a super worrying trend. Usually it used to go through consortia, through non-governmental organizations collaborating with the consortium of governments and a few private companies to lay down those very expensive internet cables, fiber optic cables, which just as a data point, it costs just to connect the north of Africa with the south of Europe. It's cables that are worth around $200 billion. So if you make one mistake, that's it. Your company is bankrupt. So those projects are quite important. I'm also using that slide to show those two projects over here, netblocks.org and uni.org. They're amazing applications for you to monitor global information controls, censorship right now with the wars that are going around the world. You can see very interesting, it's something that's not talked about enough, I think, in the media. You can see how internet is being shut down as a means of controlling a population, making sure that information doesn't come out about the atrocities happening in a region, etc. So track those things and you can contribute, especially uni, every time you do a scan of a local network, it contributes openly to those communities that are tracking this information. So I started very low, the submarine cables. One layer up, we see other trends of centralization on the internet. It's important to remind ourselves that most of the internet is really being accessed through mobile more and more as well, especially for the global south. They are mainly mobile internet natives and it is quite important, especially in Web3 to understand that trend. Otherwise, we'll keep optimizing for the same eco-chamber that is not really, at least not for me, the core purpose of what we're doing in this space. Another important centralization trend is that there are really two operating softwares that are dominating that mobile space and it's Android and iOS. Now, further up, this is pretty latest data from Cloudflare. Where is most of internet traffic going? Well, the usual culprits again, it's Google, Facebook, it's TikTok, it's Microsoft, YouTube, and those things have been really quite established for the past 10 years. We see maybe a few apps come up and try to challenge their dominance, but they challenge that dominance with the exact same purposes, which is to choke the market and create monopolies. So, perfect. Another very important data point is that 65% of all the world's data is stored on the cloud. I'll explain why I consider that catastrophic. And also, 96% of all apps are cloud-based. This is usually the slide that I like starting my talks with. If you were at DIAC or DAPCON, this is where I spend most of my time getting people's attention on, which is quite dramatic in my perspective. It's that over half of all internet, all of the globe's internet users trust one single closed source centralized app suite for their daily knowledge creation and collaboration. It's catastrophic. And the most important point I'm making today is that it's really not needed anymore. Maybe 15 years ago, where people wanted to move from Microsoft to something collaborative, this explained a lot of the move into cloud computing, but those same arguments are obsolete and maybe worse than obsolete. We're kind of being dogmatic with our approach with those technologies and using those technologies. I like using that image to make a parallel here, which is despite having constantly been on the receiving end of the negative consequences of trusting centralized cloud empires, we still continue using them as if, okay, next time it's going to improve, next time it's going to get better. So, it is pretty dogmatic. Sorry, I got a little bit over-enthusiastic with priests and monks blessing our machine overlords. So, you have extra ones here for fun. Now, the problem speaks for itself. I've said it in three different ways already, but just some concrete examples, which is always important to show. Last year, we lost billions of dollars in the global economy because Microsoft Outlook was unavailable for six hours. Same thing, an employee of Google decided to arbitrarily delete a bunch of data from a big Australian pension fund. They lost all their data, the backup as well, and that's it. And the ridiculous part is that it was to be expected for a company that is worth that much, you start trying to dissociate yourself from those dependencies on third parties. And yet, when we talk about data storage, communication, it seems that we're not having the same reflexes we have for money and other. Many other problems killed by Google. There are over 460 projects that were killed by Google. There is a nice website to follow that, blah, blah, blah. Something that I always do before I talk, I talked about it at DIAC. So, my latest figures are from two weeks ago. If you go on some RAID forum clones on the dark web, you'll see that you can buy 10,000 people's personal information that were leaked on a regular basis from those big cloud empires. And you can buy 10,000 accounts' personal information for approximately $6. So, you'll see that a lot of companies, a lot of organizations start with good intentions. And more and more, you see people trying to present themselves as the opposite or the countervailing force against the big tech empires. And they start with, hey, we're not going to have ads, we're not going to censor you, we're not going to kick you out from our platform. But fundamentally, those are just promises. They're air fugazi, whatever you want to call it. And there are no guarantees that they'll stick with what they told you. Well, you can be pretty sure that at some point, eventually, money will take the forefront of their thinking. So, yeah, don't become like Anakin. Yes, the references are deep in this talk. So, one last very important point before I go to the second part of the talk, which is much more on the subversive technologies and how they enable those safe communities I talk about, is this. People have their routines, and they just don't want to change them. This is a quote by some Harvard Business Review dude that said, that attitude also persists as long as the organization permits it. So, it's super important, especially in crypto, not to be naive about those reasons. Understand that people have routines, and they're not going to just switch because they're putting their values first. And then those organizations need to be convinced in a significant manner. Maybe the best example for that is a 40-year-old technology software that's proprietary, closed-source, that every business in the world depends on, and nobody has really made a move away from, which is kind of catastrophic. I don't need to go into the details of it, but there is a nice Forbes article that's titled something like, Excel is the most dangerous technology in the world. If you want to look a bit deeper into it, go ahead. So, again, to repeat my main points, give organizations the perfect reasons to change their routine, give developers a perfect stack to develop healthier alternatives, and give people the simplest path possible to digital freedom. What does it look like? Sorry for the memes, it's going to accelerate now. It means reimagining how we do a lot of things. I use that example that refers back to what we're building at Farvers, but the core point here is that, for any social scientist in the room, it's the ability to imagine new affordances with our technologies, because right now we're very constrained by a very centralized model of computing and software, and the moment we open that up, you'll see that there are a lot of new design spaces that can be exploited. So, why now? Why am I talking about the big switch, and that this is a perfect moment to actually not continue building cloud apps and be competitive with those trillion-dollar companies? Well, one thing to point out is that we have hardness. This is a quote by Josh Stark, which goes, 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 finally, hardness lets us control the future in small ways necessary to enable large-scale coordination. This is what I mean by new affordances. It's new ways of even thinking about what we can do online. And this is what we're obsessed with, at least in our team, but I believe quite generally in the industry. So, what does that enable us to do? It enables us to actually smash those centralized cloud empires. Specifically, what do I mean? First thing is technical counter-positioning. I forgot to put that slide in, but until 2010, it's something I really like reminding people, most of the internet traffic was peer-to-peer. A third of it, actually, was peer-to-peer enabled by BitTorrent. And 10 years later, it's mostly cloud computing. Why? Not because those peer-to-peer networks were broken. They were just missing some very important primitives, which we believe have been complemented finally by blockchains or how we like to call them, community computers. It's a much easier way to communicate it to a bunch of academics that you're not talking about blockchain, you're just talking about community group computing, blah, blah, blah. And people get a little bit more enthusiastic about the idea and the possibilities. So, I'm not going to go over the whole list, but peer-to-peer networks were scalable, hard to attack, easy to recover, easy to join, easy to exit, self-configurable AF. And on the other side, we have community computers that now give us strict global consensus, opens the door for a bunch of decentralized identity. They have credible neutrality, computational and data integrity, super important, and my favorite, inter-app composability. And maybe the best place to look at that in a practical way today is on Farcaster, where you have a bunch of smart contracts interacting with each other under the same user interface, but people are not even aware that actually it's different projects that have never talked to each other that are sharing the same daily active users because they are enabling a certain mesh or stack of smart contracts. Now, this is all good and well. We have a new technological stack. Is that enough? No. It's something that people are starting to pick up on much more or be more vocal on in crypto, which is we really need to focus on UX. And I think that we're most in that left panel. We think that, oh, it's super cool. What do you mean you have a privacy-preserving VK source with a little bit of privacy and all that? It needs to be understandable to the end user, and currently we're doing a really terrible job at that. When I talk to people about peer-to-peer, this is a bit what they're imagining. You need to sit next to someone, touch finger, connect one cable to their brain, et cetera. So it's really not something that is intuitive, so it's really on us to make that UX understandable. Now, for practical examples, those are two. One is Radical. They just released a new desktop app, which is quite beautiful. I highly recommend you try it out. If you want a peer-to-peer alternative to GitHub, this is really the team and application that has gone above and beyond to enable good UX that everyday developers will not feel really overwhelmed by in trying technologies that protect their data by design. The other is what we're building. This is just a quick screenshot of ddocs.new, and my main point, the reason why I'm putting it here, is not really to show, but just to tell you that there is competitive advantages to having a decentralized stack. Google is a trillion-dollar company, and Google Docs doesn't work when your Wi-Fi is not good. When your Wi-Fi goes off, you cannot write anymore on your Google Docs. It's a trillion-dollar company, and they force you to install an extension in order to let you do some of the offline work you might need. And this is fundamentally connected to the way they've architectured their products, which always require communication with some cloud in California, which is not necessary anymore. Our devices are so powerful, a lot can be right there on your local device. This is also what Radical does. Another UX advantage, just to finish on that, is you can bring your own accounts. You don't need to be locked in by some provider, even if they speak nicely and tell you that, oh, we're going to protect your data. No, bring your own account. It's not necessary. Okay, five minutes. Just a quick one for those that are... Three minutes, okay. Just to make it very practical, this is if we ever turn evil, or we're bought by whatever entity, you can still use the app, get all your data decrypted, get access to your account, et cetera. And this is fundamentally connected to the way that decentralized applications are built. Final parts are the social counter-positioning, complementary to the technical counter-positioning. And, okay, I don't need to explain the mean, but let's explode the train. Just quick bullet points on what social counter-positioning is. It's to take UX very seriously in order to rival the dominant apps out there. It's to support privacy, local first, and decentralized movements. There are more and more. And they are working hand-in-hand with, third point, data protection regulations. There is this weird myth that regulations is really the big enemy of crypto. It's not, especially when we talk about data protection. The GDPR is really the best gift that we've gotten as developers that value data protection and privacy, and we should capitalize on that. Just a quick anecdote. Five years ago, Google was paying around 50K to the French Data Protection Authority for their data protection violations. That was an operational cost that they were so happy to pay, and now it's $5 billion. So it's an existential threat, and they cannot move as easily away from their architecture. Last few points. Offer by-design data protection, accessibility, reliability, interoperability. 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 capabilities and experiences. These two last slides. Perfect, 30 seconds. Be unapologetic. I'm being that a little bit at the moment, but you see somebody depressed in the bus, go with your phone, show them your app. Make it a little bit awkward, but get the word out there about what you're building and new kinds of applications that are fighting the good fight, let's say. And just to leave you on a comprehensive note, those are some of my favorite subversive apps in our industry. Lots of others outside, but really those are projects that I consider doing the good work, the good fight, where promises are not the everything that you get. They actually show you guarantees of what they promise, and it's quite important. Voila, if anybody wants to talk more, I have some floppy disk with me that gives you access to some of those subversive technologies. Come chat. Thank you so much. Maybe one quick question from the audience. One quick. Hi. What are you hearing from your users or from the community in general about performance? About? About performance. Performance. Yeah. Performance is a big part of the business. Firebase is built on IPFS, right? Yeah. Yes. The trick is to also be local as much as possible. Like I said, our devices are a million times more powerful than they were 10 years ago, where everybody was forced, if they wanted to do collaboration, to go somewhere else. And I can speak about our users, but more generally, I think that there are clear UX advantages, including in performance. If you look at your average app, they'll have to load the page, be redirected a bunch of times. Whatever you click on Twitter goes first through their .t domain, .x domain now, and it slows down a lot of your interactions online. Maybe one good example is the work that Brave does, where they show you in the homepage that, hey, you've saved 17 hours of your life by not constantly loading all the ads apparatus or communicating with a bunch of servers constantly without you even wanting to. So performance-wise, you see quite a bit of speed acceleration in software that is not built in such a centralized and cloud-dependent way. We do have a team where we do monitor the performance of IPFS, and I think it's pretty good for what it is. I just wanted to see if your users have more insights or complaints or improve this or that. Fundamentally, we had to build a middleware, we call it, on top of IPFS in order to make IPFS quite usable. So yes, IPFS is quite performant, but I don't think the network was built with end users and applications in mind, and you can see at the moment the discussions happening that are trying to steer it in that direction, but it came down to app developers who actually make it useful and performant and not expose users to so much complexity.