Common Knowledge Machines

[Music] all right so let me get this on the right slide here common knowledge so what is common knowledge why does it matter so common knowledge is not just that you know I'm standing here it's that you know that I know that you know at infinum it's a very different thing than just knowing that I'm here and a classic example of this is the Romanian revolution in 1989 for everyone for years everyone knew that this dictator Chia chesu was a tyrant um but nothing ever happened and it wasn't until actually uh a simple act during one of his public speeches a live broadcast whistle that cascaded into many whistles that a revolution began and the key wasn't just that everybody saw that key was not just that everybody was unhappy but they saw that everybody else was unhappy so we've had similar moments in American history I'm American so that's my history um but my contention is actually common knowledge is getting harder to get off the ground and that's because of increasing Pol political polarization and while political polarization predates the internet it certainly has been accelerated in the digital age and why is this so bad well if we can't find Common Ground if we can't have shared beliefs then Collective action becomes really hard and Collective action is the stuff for political movements and also for government and legitimate governance and so on the international stage this is really important so unions stay unified and can differentiate their allies from their adversaries and Marshall support and not collapse into the chaos of competing narratives which we seem to be trending towards and also common knowledge lets us solve higher forms of cooperation problem for example like climate change that requires consensus and agreement about the fact so since this is Devcon and an ethereum conference it's worth acknowledging actually that ethereum itself is an example of a common knowledge machine it produces or it seeks to actually produce an immutable Ledger about shared Global State um another obvious example of common knowledge machines are things like blue sky forecast or lens or X these are the functional equivalent of public squares but actually online but of course here common knowledge rarely ever gets off the ground and instead we just have divisions and competing narratives about reality and which one is true so today I want to introduce a quick mechanism and outline on the principles um to sort of nudge your thoughts and you can read more um if you want in my writings um so the idea is called Community post and everybody here who participates in some social media platform has some set of followers and the idea is instead of blasting a post to all of your followers you first stress test a post across different groups of follow followers who don't necessarily talk listen or agree with one another to gauge what resonates before it's widely shared and so here's how it works um if you look at your followers your set of followers they actually all have differences in Behavior measured by their likes their reposts who follows them and who they follow their connections and you can aggregate this information about observe Behavior using things like ZK snarks and put people in clusters as represented by circles here and the idea is that you pick a subset of correlated followers on your social graph people who behave differently on the platform balance for reach with a minimum diversification threshold now these polarity subsets aren't an echo chamber what they are is a sampling or random sampling of a subset of your fans followers balanced across different perspectives and there'll be multiple subsets to choose from for example you can handpick key anchors or key thought leaders or experts and then diversify against them in different combinations to fill the remaining set now once you pick your subset you send that post to the subset with a zero knowledge proof confirming that recipients follow you without revealing your identity now some might disagree with the post and send ZK feedback to you but some might actually take it further and pass it on to subsets polarity subsets of their followers and these rounds repeat forming a tree of polarity subsets across a social graph which essentially pushes your post across very diverse parts of the social graph allowing you to GA cross tribal appeal at every step in every layer through repost rates and feedback and of course the people who receive this get a notification ZK posted by the end people you follow or and people you follow boosted this post and so on now the final step is the post goes public once it gains enough support across it reaches a diversification threshold and it's passed its social stress test and the post goes public and you can merge into your open feed and anyone who has reposted it can post it to all their followers and so on and then you know any remaining divides as represented by Red here on these red uh RED parts of the social graph you can use Community notes which we're all familiar with to bridge um in add context and this is really lwh hanging fruit divides um so anyways this is the summary of the mechanism um I think it works because essentially what you're doing is you're reversing the cycle that happens on social media of context collapse controversy cancellation and capture and these are things where social media leverages divisions to create more divisions and you reverse that cycle with diversification discounts and bridging to restore Common Ground um okay I think that's it for five minutes I can take any of your [Applause] questions that was kind of a complex mechanism for five minutes ask a question who who wants to ask a question here please this is amazing what do we do next what's like a Next Step here yeah so there are a lot of um experiments with uh social graphs right now in web 3 um forecaster and lens are an example and so you can leverage like ZK snarks um zero knowledge proofs to actually calculate this information without revealing you know the identities and participants in a social graph and start to enrage you know create a more meaningful parallel attention feed to show okay like what are what are posts where there's wide agreement on and instead of focusing on like the attention and the rage bait that comes from a global attention auction you can focus your attention on okay what are the things where there's agreement and then build on that agreement yeah one more question um do you envision uh this being applicable to like more popular social media like maybe plugin for Twitter or whatever yeah it could apply to any social media it could apply it's a road map for um making x a common knowledge ma machine I think that's actually was always the aspiration around a Public Square um and the Chao chesu example um it's also applicable to Tik Tok it's t it's applicable to really any social network um and it's just a more uh intelligent uh attention mechanism right that gets us that sort of reverses the cycle of let me um you know hit my dopamine receptors with division towards let me see what I can find common ground with and and build on that okay thank you everybody thank you so much puya [Music] because I just [Music] thank all city city All City All City no no see the I'll see you [Music] s for this he he don't want to theater yes and you're just going up and then you all you know like invite in in the St and then going down after until was finished all to this [Music] okay ready okay everyone next we have the Shane maale gaze by Wasim Z alindi please give him a warm [Music] welcome hello everybody I'm slightly um out ofpl to have such cheerful music introducing this talk perhaps um so the title of it it's called The Chain maale gaze and hopefully the reasons for that will become apparent as we go on but I'm sure you've all heard of the male gaze and the kind of externalities and you know um unfavorable things that come with that but what about the chain mail gaze well hopefully we'll find out not got very long so I'll try to you know give you a survey of what's actually quite an extensive uh anthropological and philosophical research project okay some pictures of big strong men and their swords looking into the distance perhaps thinking about lands to conquer a short poetic refrain the church and the network Zeal and time death and money all sides of the same coin I want to talk to you about uh interim project that led up to uh where we're going to that called profit atives looking at the false Divinity of capital how it animates uh motivations and Desires in the technology space that might not be immediately apparent for as long as there's been Financial Capital risk and speculation have orbited manipulated and harnessed it as narrative feedback machines simultaneously reading and rewriting realities markets exist as a distributed conversation between uh among speculators driven by profit motives and appetite for divination and prophecy today new strains of techn colonialism are emerging which are the latest of a series of Echoes throughout Western history and ascendant cabal of Technology Elites are attempting to reshape the world in their favor whilst hiding in plain sight behind the technologies that have enriched them theirs is a Promethean zeelot Tre without faith affecting an aura of design Divine sanction for the purposes of elevating the ego enriching the chosen ones and creating empires of various Stripes but was it not always so I want to read you a short story fictional speculation about where we might be going in the future and it's called seething like a state decentralization has a cost the price of Anarchy the price is always due but the rewards weren't cheap to reap so solid ccru what most did not expect was that payment would become due at the grandest scales of governance the West failure State forged under the fire of peer Prussia was ambushed by upstart modes of power opening new vistas of communication commodification and communion the orientations that nation states had used to enshrine their power only made it easier to undermine them the bigger they were the harder they fell brex Topia the European Union NATO's cave the United State machine all returned to dust the decline in the nation state of the nation state in the Roaring 20s became a cannon of canonicity for an entire generation of Soul Traders it wasn't even just the bit levers in those days there were many networks many Messiah many ideologic all with their own profit motives so many of you have doubt doubtless heard of this concept of the network state that has emerged in the last few years um exit fantasies arguably fueled by the failure or the uh shortcomings the shortfall of the full promise and the dream of web 3 I'm going to read you a short section from baji Fan's self-titled book from 2022 a network state is a social network with a moral Innovation a sense of national Consciousness a recognized founder a capacity for Collective action an in-person level of Civility an integrated cryptocurrency a conceptual a consensual government liit Ed by a social smart contract an archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories a virtual capital and an onchain census that proves a large enough population income and real estate footprint to attain a measure of diplomatic recognition the magic words in here are recognized founder and diplomatic recognition well and territory I would say so these projects carry echoes in my mind at least of some of the earliest um Expeditions that set out from the West in search of new territories to conquer and subjugate so many of you have doubtless heard of things like Liber land Sealand seasteading institutes uh you know this is the zah designed metaverse HQ of liberland on the screen here um there's been so many attempts to make like crypto Islands uh Bitcoin cruise ships and they've all failed it's quite interesting but what seems to be now is the level of capital at at on hand as a result of Market success of these Technologies to the people that want to reshape the map of the world in their own you know uh uh to their own preferences into their own cause we know that leaders of nation states we even have leaders of nation states that are uh cheerleading some of these Technologies uh Nai the authoritarian strong man in El Salvador would like to build a Bitcoin City uh financed by volcano no bonds in his country he's not done it yet but meanwhile he's removed the Judiciary removed term limits and instituted one party Rule and most of the Bitcoins are cheering this on so I ask myself are we still in this for the freedom and now you know made possible by ethereum Dows and all the rest of it we have projects like alif herbit and even Praxis prais and on the left and prosper on the right so these projects are trying to build physical cities private territories Network States um or at least the you know what may develop into the Bagan concept of the nation state it's at this point I want to introduce the chain mail gays today's Tech overlords are the descendants of Europe's Crusaders well financed zealous Fanatics wreaking destruction on the planetary other in the name of their greater good the Vatican sponsored waves of Lee invasions that began in the late 11th century with the Midwife of capitalism colonialism and Technology as we know it today with the network day organizational concept a card rayer of powerful ideals blessed with tokenized wealth a toying with the prospect of reshaping National Frontiers mirroring the desires of Frankish noblemen and their nightly orders a th in the Levan a thousand years ago and that's all the time I have 7 minutes for a thousand years of Western history thank you very much [Applause] thank you Wasim that was awesome now