The LSD85 Project
The next internet revolution won’t be running on blockchain, instead, it is a new set of peer-to-peer protocols which is about to emerge and disrupt global content distribution and curation.
The status quo
The first peer-to-peer revolution was stopped mainly because the major companies were able to sue individuals in the world for using such software, being scarred most people stopped using such tools. I foresee the emergence of a new generation of peer-to-peer protocols built on TOR, making them impossible to trace and censored on Clearnet.
Most of the governments that did allow major companies to sue citizens at the time are nowadays relying heavily on TOR to fight the information war, for this reason, the cost of censoring TOR (which would be the only way to limit the adoption of tool built on those new protocols) will be too high for this governments.
This will lead to a new revolution in content distribution and curation.
We are all streamers
We are living now in the world of streaming, each and everyone wants to share a part of their life with the world and communicate it in a safe space.
Existing centralized streaming platforms do arguably not offer a great experience for the average citizen: Impossible to stream licensed music (which is most of the music people listen to), the quality is often pretty limited until the stream is highly popular and finally platforms apply a heavy censorship when it comes to what content can be broadcasted.
In the 2000s, downloading mp3 was the killer app of the peer-to-peer ecosystem, in the future, it will be live streaming. The implementation of such protocols will face heavy resistance from established entities, namely the major streaming platforms being active today but also the social network platforms. That being said, we should remember that as of today YouTube is basically full of pirated content, so I think it will be difficult for them to have any solid arguments against the deployment of such a system.
To address their concerns, the legal framework will have to be reformed as it doesn’t make much sense to ask artists to make revenue mainly on live shows, due to very low fees on centralized platforms, and then let those platforms take most of the profits by adding unwanted advertisement.
Each content subscriber in this new world should be empowered to choose to make their content properly licensed if they want to do it in a non-anonymous manner. The governments and regulatory bodies will have to adapt to this new situation, either they adapt or they have to block TOR at the geographical level. It will be a good opportunity to revisit the approach towards advertising which could shift from content producers to content consumers.
At a high level, what are now the centralized content distribution platforms will become advertising agencies, offering money to content consumers in exchange for their metadata.
Back to the roots
As the protocols will be built on top of TOR, the usage of the tools built with them will be anonymous. With proper design, it is impossible for any third party to gather usage data without consent. The assurance of anonymity and privacy will foster creative content to be produced, content that is very likely not even produced today.
The ability, as an example, to share one person’s personal curated music collection with to rest of the world is giving new perspectives about exploring each other worlds. Exploring and discovering curated content from various individuals across the globe combined with the continuous progress of generative AI will lead to cultural change that is hard to foresee but feels crucial to our survival. We live in a time where we all need to be creative to survive in the long term.
In the long run, this could have a cultural impact as significant as when Albert Hoffman did discover Lysergic acid on that date, 85 years ago.
Collective responsability
Educated people are responsible, no technology can make people more responsible.
In our current world, most people are not aware of the massive amount of content moderation that is done by humans. It is a great opportunity to shift this aspect and make us collectively more responsible, maybe technology can help us here. The new karma is also digital, users will be rewarded for contributing to the curation process (flagging inappropriate or harmful content and engaging in discussions about what should be shared within the community).
As a user of this new platform, the score of your curation activity will be directly correlated to the time your content will live in the system when you are not actively streaming it. It is hard to predict what kind of content will emerge when the curation score of a content producer impacts the longevity and accessibility of its productions, one thing for sure is that it will be very different than what the recommendation algorithm offers to us on centralized platforms.
Looking back, we might perceive our current recommendation algorithms as an unlucky stage in the evolution of online content consumption, ultimately paving the way for a more participatory and user-driven content ecosystem.
Convergence
The potential for convergence with AI models is really high, a hybrid system combining the knowledge of the previously curated content to assist users in their daily curation tasks. This opens the way for the next generation of recommendation algorithms, which do not optimize for the profit of the content distributor.
Each user will have the ability to customize their fitness function, whether this is done individually or collectively. This shift represents a departure from the traditional one-size-fits-all approach of recommendation algorithms and opens up a world of possibilities where users shape their content experiences according to their unique preferences and values.
This should bring us closer together, but we will have also to take responsibility for tracking original content collaboratively. The biggest challenge, abuse of gamification by adversarial agents, can only be addressed at scale if the network is able to reach a consensus to identify the original content and their producers to prevent flooding and Sybil attacks.
There is no need for a traditional blockchain to ensure decentralized validation of ownership, the core value here is proof of curation which has value only by relying on a web of trust. No technology has ever helped us to solve ownership conflicts for us, and never it will, instead we should leverage metadata to assist our individual and collective responsibility. This can help build credibility and establish ownership validation through social consensus rather than relying solely on technological mechanisms like blockchain.
Combining a distributed consensus algorithm with social consensus is a novel subject, ideally, it should be left to the user to make a choice among the available strategies as we experiment and move forward. In the long run, strategies might have political colors, similar to how using ad-blockers can be seen as a political statement. The alignment of validation strategies with political or ideological beliefs in such a network does resonate with our current reasoning on AI alignment.
I don’t think anyone has a perfect answer for that, but hopefully reasoning about such a system might help. Fundamentally, the decisions made by developers of algorithms should not have any impact on the alignment. Every parameter must be exposed so they can be tuned dynamically by the hybrid consensus system.
Aloïs Cochard - November 16th 2023
