Wow. Right here we’re within the canine days of January 2023. I would like a trip. You most likely do too.
The world has modified dramatically over the previous couple of years.
One of many unintended by-products of the pandemic was tech innovation. Whereas most of us scrambled to study Zoom or do business from home, we now have AI Chat that’s uncannily good (Open AI Chat GPT), AI portraitures (Vana for instance), a Satellite tv for pc community of Web service (House X), Electrical vans (I just lately sat in a Rivian that’s quicker than any manufacturing Ferrari) and we even have the power to edit a dwelling particular person’s genome (admittedly I barely grasp how this works).
Genomic Modifying
Recognizing the impacts of those tech improvements took a backseat to grappling with the large shifts in how our communities had been altering through the pandemic — Science was questioned, camps had been fashioned and by some means… we had been pushed even additional aside politically in a time after we had been already socially distanced.
RIP 2019–2022
That each one actually occurred.
I believe we’re all nonetheless grappling with understanding all of it.
All of us did our greatest. We watched loads of Netflix. And did our greatest to take care of an unimaginable state of affairs.
And right here we’re, puzzle-piecing the world again collectively from what was.
It principally appears to be like the same-same. But additionally different-different.
Oh, and did I point out world well-known DJ Steve Aoki goes to the Worldwide House Station as a ‘house vacationer’? So there’s that too.
As we’ve change into more and more reliant on know-how to navigate this new world, we’ve additionally change into more and more reliant on the businesses that present it. However not solely reliant — outright owned by them. The pandemic noticed MUCH extra of our lives, habits, and free time go browsing and digital.
The likes of Microsoft, Google, and Apple have change into literal homeowners and gatekeepers to our digital lives, gathering and analyzing huge quantities of knowledge about us as we use their services — but personal none of our content material or knowledge.
This has led to a focus of energy within the palms of some giant companies.
A preferred meme for techies is: “There isn’t a “cloud”, simply another person’s laptop.”
This isn’t a brand new phenomenon, nevertheless. The historical past of human civilization is a historical past of the move of data and the struggles for management over it.
From the Library of Alexandria, the place historic students gathered and preserved data, to the invention of the printing press and the next explosion of data through the Renaissance, we’ve all the time sought to increase our data and understanding of the world.
And there have all the time been gatekeepers exerting suppression of data.
The web has solely accelerated this course of, permitting us to entry info from all around the world. Nevertheless, because the web has grown, so too have the businesses and governments that management it, who’ve the ability to censor info and form our understanding of the world in ways in which align with their very own pursuits.
That is the place issues get a bit Orwellian, Black Mirror-esque and dystopian.
Proper now, if you happen to dwell in a rustic with a excessive diploma of freedoms, these points may not appear prescient. Issues are free! Who cares if some corporations use your preferences to indicate you focused adverts? You don’t have to make use of anybody explicit App.
But, many of those identical folks — with this freedom — so valiantly posted Ukraine flags on their social media accounts or hung a flag on their garden to indicate their assist of Ukraine.
However the warfare on Ukraine will not be a warfare of land or precept. Or sympathy.
It’s about management of data.
We really reside within the period of post-truths. There isn’t a singular accepted or shared model of world “truths” now.
The Russian authorities, to proceed my instance, has a decent grip on the data that’s being shared with the Russian public. Russian media is all state-owned and pumps out a gentle stream of propaganda. So it’s no shock that the Russian public is sort of absolutely on board with their nation’s actions and claims within the warfare.
Some hackers bought their palms on a database of Russian civilians’ cell numbers they usually requested folks to textual content a random Russian citizen in hopes to ship the “actual scoop” on what’s occurring…
And you realize what? The responses from the Russian residents had been principally all stuffed with distrust, anger, and disbelief. The ‘reality’ these outsiders had been sending was, of their eyes, the propaganda!
It’s surreal. However comprehensible.
That is the influence of thought management.
So if you happen to ask your self why it is best to care or how one can assist, it will be to promote decentralization and democratization of the web.
Because the ex-CEO and founding father of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, said, “We should contemplate the ability and influence of know-how platforms on our lives and societies.”
A technique to do that is thru blockchain know-how, particularly platforms that permit people to have management over their very own knowledge.
That is what techies and futurists are calling “Net 3.0” — an Web the place customers don’t simply present as much as learn issues, or create issues on platform owned by giant corporations, however to create, retailer and handle their very own digital knowledge. The technical time period is host their very own ‘node’.
Child “Nostrich”
An instance of that is Nostr, a decentralized social community protocol being developed in assist by Jack Dorsey — creator of Twitter — that empowers customers to have management over their digital property. Nostr, (brief acronym for ‘Notes and Different Stuff Transmitted by Relays’) is a protocol, against a program or conventional App, that means, as a substitute of counting on centralized corporations to handle and retailer our knowledge, customers can run their very own nodes/relays and have management over our personal info.
Put easier, Nostr has no central server or firm. It really works like a street with easy driving guidelines. From this, anybody utilizing these guidelines can construct and drive on the…
https://medium.com/coinmonks/why-you-should-care-about-data-ownership-in-2023-9000d8d2587e?supply=rss—-721b17443fd5—4