The Death of Centralized Web
The emergence of the internet not too long ago was accompanied by a promise of a new and better human society. “Do no Evil!” was Google’s credo in its early days and when the young Sergey Brin rejected Chinese censorship in 2010, Google lived up to this pledge. That time is long gone, today Google servers collect vast amounts of information on each of us. Anyone putting in their living room Google speakers or cameras controlled by “home assistant” is just inviting the “Big Brother” to spy on them. Today, Google servers are seamlessly integrated with the even higher level deep state structures of central governments. So are Amazon, Facebook and Twitter servers and all four companies employ an army of employees to censor our speech on the internet. We are constantly surrounded by a myriad of mobile phones, cameras and other sensors which feed government mass surveillance in many modalities. It is somewhat surprising to me just how little did it take to transform young Silicon Valley revolutionaries building a better world into the obedient servants of the establishment, imposing the uniformity under the guise of “diversity” on all of us. How easily did, for example, Netflix change its business model from recommending movies by the “viewers like you” to Disney style broadcast propaganda and mind control!
Yet, there is a new technology on the horizon: the emergence of the decentralized web, powered by bitcoin, public blockchain and more recently, by ethereum’s “smart contracts.” It is no accident that dis-intermediation and decentralization of web started in the most centralized industry of them all, in banking, the best and the last bastion of globalism. Until recently, globalists felt that they are within reach of their decade-old dreams, but when the dust settles, our financial transactions will be like nothing you have seen before. Indeed, web itself will be like nothing you have seen before.
Decentralization eliminates middleman from the transaction between two parties. Much like Uber eliminated central Taxi dispatcher and AirB&b eliminated the need for centralized hotels, the crypto-based financial transaction will eliminate banks from the loop. Bankers may be more powerful than the hotel industry, but in the end, they will not be able to stop people from direct peer-to-peer transactions any more than the medieval landowners could stop their slaves from moving to the cities and becoming free workers, earning their living wages.
What lies at the core of this transformation? With the ethereum smart contracts in the form of DApps, any two or more parties can exchange money, products, services indeed any assets at all using any combination of currencies in real-time, without the need for a central server owned by huge companies like Google, Facebook or Amazon. While it was easy for the establishment to co-opt the small amount of first generation web monopolies with their central servers, not unlike it co-opted four broadcast TV networks of the recent past, it will be much harder for the establishment in the age of cryptocurrencies to control the flow of assets on the decentralized web. To fight the cryptocurrencies, governments keep closing bitcoin exchanges like MtGox or BTC-e, pushing the price of bitcoin temporarily down. But for every closed exchange, two new ones spring up. The upcoming G20 conference in April 2018 will propose the “solution” for crypto “problem” in the form of global regulation, attempting to establish a de facto worldwide central bank. This draconian measure, however, will be subverted by the second generation of decentralized crypto exchange based on “atomic swaps” very much like Torrent network replaced Napster service banned by the government on behalf of Hollywood labels. The internet innovations will never stop, bitcoin and ethereum is just the tip of the iceberg, emerging from the stormy seas of industrial society and powered by the speed of fiber optic internet lines.
Together with cryptocurrencies emerged ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings), a new form of funding for the startups. There are hundreds of ICO’s in progress which will fund the emergence of new forms of web services competing directly with Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter or Netflix without the need for central servers. In fact, Uber and Airbnb themselves may face the new competition from these decentralized web services. Anything centralized web companies do today can be decentralized tomorrow, freeing the users from onerous servitude to established monopolies. Ethereum network with its full programmability and other innovations such as the Iota public ledger called Tangle make this solution not only possible but practical.
Why is this a big deal? The biggest consequence of this development will be that the ownership of user data and memories will revert to the user, draining Google’s and Facebook advertising of its power, much like Google AdSense itself drained newspapers printed ads of their power earlier. Consumers will benefit and regain control over their valuable memories. For example, they will be able to easily take the history of their Google searches to DDG, Facebook memories to future social networks, Twitter posts to Gab where they will not be shadow banned, their Spotify music lists to iTunes, their Netflix movie lists to Amazon Prime, their private health data to new health providers, etc. Most importantly, consumers will regain control of their finances and be able to transact instantly with anyone, anywhere in the world at low cost.
In short order, the majority of these transactions will not be performed by the users themselves but by their fully trusted personal assistants. Personal assistants will become truly personal, defending user privacy at all costs, unlike big brother style assistants like Alexa, Cortana, Google Assistant or Siri, which spy on their users and take their data for free to be resold to the private enterprises and government agencies. I would even dare to suggest that the new generation of wearable assistants based on the neural science and embodied cognition, rather than the pseudoscience of disembodied corporate AI’s will become the ultimate user interface to this new web.
While the technology is rather simple and straightforward, the impact of the above changes will be anything but. In the end, the decentralized web will empower individuals to liberate themselves from the handcuffs of the established mass media, whether it is Print, TV, Film, Music monopolies or the newer web monopolies like Google, Facebook, Amazon or Twitter. Banking monopolies, no matter how powerful, will not be an exception. Today’s establishment may be right to see the emergence of global society, but it is dead wrong to assume naively that it will remain in control of it.
