Satsduck retweetledi
There’s a lot of similarities between billboards and the way we parade our data around on the internet.
When billboards first debuted in the early 1900s, it was because of the increase in highways and more people traveling by car. The birth of the internet and the subsequent rush to own digital space in the mad rush of information transfer, is quite similar. More people began using the internet for discovery, so the internet became a billboard.
Think about what a website is, basically a giant poster that just sits there while you wait for web ‘traffic’ to find it.
The issue is that there was no pause or curation in the beginning days, as it always has been with novel tech. To think that most of your private information is held behind a single email and password in today’s age of super-intelligent AI is pretty laughable. Yet that’s how it has been for the majority of our online experience. Pretty soon thanks to agents, blockchain and encryption I think the actual architecture of the web will profoundly change.
But because this billboard nature of the internet, which is to say unencrypted or exposed, if you grew up from the 1990s on it is likely your personal data is just there for the snooping, seizing, or selling.
While searching for my actual identity via web search is not very revealing upfront, connecting my face to other personal information is not hard. How could it be anything but easy when our generation were the beta testers for FB? We were sold connection, visibility, and opportunity but all we ended up with was really hijacked dopamine loops, moral castration and data breaches.
When I put my primary email information into haveibeenpwned (which anyone in crypto should do) I see most of who I am is already for sale and there isn’t much to do. Why? The web was never built for users it was built for profit. Account management was always an afterthought. Social pressure trickled down from state ideologies of what it means to be a citizen coupled with the internet being woven into every aspect of our lives today equates to a nonchalance when it comes to personal info.
I’m confident we will look back at this first 50 years after the next 50 as absolutely insane.
I don’t see how with the ubiquity of super powerful AI that most major companies don’t suffer serious breaches, if they haven’t already. We're obviously seeing it with DeFi. In the end, what survives here will be the most resilient systems on earth. But it's a fookin metal challenge for those participating here in the greatest markets in the solar system. That is for sure.
What I have always loved about CT from the beginning is that it prioritized pseudonymity or pure anonymity. Here, your ideas could speak for you, not whatever the dressings of genetics or the modern world gave you. Even though mostly everyone was/ is borderline mental, being online as participation in a public forum not an advertising funnel or big brother ankle bracelet was one of the best things about early Twitter, and other early similar digital gathering places in their seed stages like Reddit and Quora. Not at all un-similar to the feeling of early crypto or digital cash movements themselves.
If crypto were truly self-aware we would have created our own public online space that upholds true sovereignty. Between that, privacy, a decentralized stablecoin, and many others, I see so many opportunities left here.
All that to say: encrypted shared state, the whole thesis of @Arcium , will become pivotal in not just shaping the way we engage on-chain but also on the new web because what decentralized systems allow us to do is move from predation to conversation. We thought we came to the internet for commerce, but we mostly needed it to find ourselves. Privacy may be the door, but rebuilding the foundations of how we interact with each other and create value in shared digital space with @cypherpunk values is the deeper mission.
I don’t know whats going to happen, but I know encrypted compute will be needed. And that leveraging existing behaviors into the design will be critical. I believe $ARX is well-timed ☂️🛡️🫡
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