1/ Here’s a thought experiment about the future of the internet. Can we model it as a complex system in the same way we look at human societies and governments in real life?
2/ Humans began as individuals, who had the ability to form progressively larger organizations which became support networks that helped our species achieve the largest throughput from our lives.
3/ Over time, these organizations came to be controlled by those who had a monopoly on resources – wealth, armies and social power, but the members of these organizations didn’t have any say in how they were run.
4/ The concept of democracy was evolved as a system that could distribute social power in order to catalyze the wider involvement of its members in their own social and economic concerns.
5/ While this form of government is not without issues, it highlights a trend – by having an organization with representation by its members who have a say in how its run, we’ve had a wider ranges of stability, and its evolution is controlled in a (somewhat) scalable manner.
6/ As an analog, the internet started out as a decentralized network of computers where all the information was open – anyone could participate by simply putting up a node.
7/ Over time, centralized systems were created because they offered the benefits of an overarching “support network” – making technology and information accessible to their users because most individuals couldn’t do all this heavy lifting and plumbing on their own.
8/ These organizations, whose members can’t really control how they are run or what they make them do – are not that different from erstwhile kingdoms trying to maximize the profit of their sovereigns.
9/ And by virtue of who controls them or who can influence them – imagine wealthy courtiers and banks who financed kings [see game of thrones] – they dictate the price of admission and inclusion
10/ Monetarily of course, they may even be free – but members give up control over their privacy and data to get in. In turn, these organizations become monopolies and act as gatekeepers of the very information and data that belongs to its users.
11/ While they can empower members to have a voice in the global discourse, their scale implies control and filtering algorithms that evolve in the image of those who hold the most sway on these platforms – in some cases the loudest, the richest, or the most divisive.
12/ So what does this mean for the future of the biggest collaborative system that humanity has ever built together? One potential road could be to reason about how they can mirror the democratic model.
13/ I posit a thought that “It is in the nature of complex information systems to systematically distribute their functioning to sub-systems in order to perform at their peak.“
14/ In other words, a series of decentralized, shared ownership systems that come together to provide and replace the functionality that has today been built into the centralized networks described before. I’m going to call this the “W3b” – because, well, why not? (A moniker for Web 3.0)
15/ As Alexis De Tocqueville recognized in the study in which he coined the term, there is often more to decentralization than just the administrative benefits it brings. These networks will have properties beyond just the sum of the properties of their components.
16/ Scientifically, there are no complexity theories to analyze complex networks like there are for algorithms. But if we think about the latent, emergent properties of these networks – we likely cannot predict how they will affect our lives in 20 years, much in the same way we couldn’t have predicted the fake news problem in 1999.
17/ In order to get to such decentralized networks, we’re going to need new forms of technology which can offer interoperability without needing shared trust, since these networks will be just like the internet is today – they will span nation states and have messy real world constraints.
18/ Just like every nation in the world today connects their internal infrastructure to the internet and communication networks, they will buy in to these subnetworks because they will become irrelevant if they don’t – especially when they act as a conduit for international trade, payments, law and cooperation.
19/ What are the conceptual abstractions we need to think about in order to make these subnetworks a reality? We can take a leaf out of the Open Systems Interconnection model (OSI), which is a conceptual model that characterizes and standardizes the communication functions of a telecommunication or computing system without regard to its underlying internal structure and technology.
20/ Much like the seven layers of the OSI model. there are a few different kind of functions that the these subnetworks would need to provide without regard to how they are actually implemented underneath.
21/ These subnetworks will need to work in conjunction with each other, and transactions done by any entity, individual or organization will need to coordinate with one or more of them.
22/ But how would these be used? Let’s take the example of an autonomous entity which has a very simple need – they want to subscribe to a streaming movie provider and watch it.
23/ By decentralizing and sharing ownership of the most critical parts of the new w3b, new generations of software can be written that would allow scalable solutions to some of the most critical challenges we face today – from cyber security to fake news.
24/ In addition, large centralized network companies will no longer have the monopolies that they currently do, leading to a more equitable distribution of the wealth that is being created.
25/ By making micro transactions and payments tied to identity, content and services outside of centralized control, political machinations are less likely to influence w3b users.
26/ And further, having machine readable cryptographically verifiable audit streams of events, provenance of data, content, transactions, identities and finances will mean that tools and services can be built upon them in standard ways by anyone.