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Ep 21: How Can Web3 Protect Speech?
267 Plays1 year ago
Maria Bustillos, journalist, editor, and founder of Popula and the Brickhouse Cooperative, delves into the complexities of managing misinformation, illegal, and harmful content online. Join us in a timely discussion on the challenges of content moderation and freedom of speech in today's internet landscape.
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Transcript
Introduction to Owl Explains Hootenanny
00:00:06
Speaker
Hello and welcome to this Owl Explains Hootenanny, our podcast series where you can wise up on blockchain and web3 as we talk to the people seeking to build a better internet. Owl Explains is powered by Avalabs, a blockchain software company and participant in the avalanche ecosystem.
Hosts and Mission Introduction
00:00:24
Speaker
My name is Silvia Sanchez, project manager of Owl Explains and with that I'll hand it over to today's amazing speakers.
00:00:34
Speaker
And welcome to Al Explains. My name's Emma Pike, I'm your host for today's conversation. And for anybody new to Al Explains, Al Explains is a new initiative which aims to further our collective understanding of blockchain and web3 to help inform the very important conversations happening in the EU, in the US and elsewhere in the world about policy and regulation.
00:01:00
Speaker
Owl Explained is powered by Avalabs, which runs the Avalanche Protocol. And today
Guest Maria Bustillos Introduction
00:01:06
Speaker
I'm delighted to welcome Maria Bustillos to explore with us the question of how can Web3 protect speech?
00:01:15
Speaker
So Maria is a journalist and an editor who has written a lot about blockchain and web3 going back quite a few years. And actually going back even further, she was already thinking and writing about the internet in the 1990s during the dot com era. So she's seen all the twists and turns of web1, 2 and 3 as a journalist and can offer a really broad perspective.
00:01:42
Speaker
But her journalism is really just the start of her experience and expertise in this space because she's also an entrepreneur and the founder of two editorial initiatives. One is a culture magazine popular and the other is BrickHouse Co-operative, which is a journalist owned news platform.
00:02:03
Speaker
both popular and brick house employee blockchain technology. So I think it's true to say that Maria is really quite a pioneer in terms of using blockchain technology to promote and defend independent journalism. And I can't think of a better person to explore our theme today of how can web3 protect speech. Hi, Maria. Thanks for joining us. Hi, Emma. Can you hear me? Yes, I can hear you. How are you?
00:02:30
Speaker
Hallelujah. I'm very good. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. Pleasure to have you. So I'm sure that everybody wants to hear more about popular and brick house specifically. But before we get into talking about those two initiatives, I just want to ask you about your journey into blockchain and crypto and web three and everything. When was it
Maria's Initial Interest in Blockchain
00:02:53
Speaker
that you first became interested in this space? And when did you start realizing the potential of blockchain and crypto?
00:03:02
Speaker
When we started talking about this earlier, I was curious to find out exactly. So I went back to my email and discovered an email I wrote in May of 2011 to my husband, who's a retired Wall Street analyst, like super brain. And the email says, this is that thing. I want you to explain it to me. And so that was when I first started really kind of getting into it.
00:03:28
Speaker
But even back then it was wildly risky as well as about a thousand times harder to buy. You had to be wiring money through Western Union and all this kind of stuff. And it was just a sort of experimental technology that I was really interested in as somebody who sort of loved computers.
00:03:42
Speaker
But, you know, what really intrigued me from the beginning was the idea of tamper-proof shared archives. And I've actually never changed my mind about that, like, not since way back then. I kind of kept up with the news throughout and was developing my ideas about it. And then my close colleague, Matt Buchanan, was editing a tech science vertical at the New Yorker. And this is in early 2013.
00:04:06
Speaker
And he asked me, you know, come write something we want to write about. And I said, oh, Bitcoin, definitely. He's like, what? And I'm like, I know, really, I swear to God, this is going to be like a thing. So it was a complete coincidence. But very shortly before we went to press on that story, a huge story broke about the banking crisis in Cyprus at the beginning of 2013. And it had emerged
00:04:29
Speaker
that the EU and the IMF and European central banks had developed a plan whereby Cyprus would solve its banking crisis by subjecting the bank accounts of every single citizen in the country to like a six percent haircut or something like this. And so they had a new president, Anastasiades, who had announced this plan and the country went nuts. And in the event, you know, the smaller depositors were saved in a bailout.
00:04:56
Speaker
This whole bailout was like 10 billion euro or something like that. Anyway, over that weekend, because of fears that Southern Europeans had that they might be in for the same treatment, the price of Bitcoin shot up like almost double over that weekend right before the peace came out. So we wrote about it. And it was seen then as a potential way of shielding funds from potential government shenanigans. And so I kind of
00:05:25
Speaker
entered in on the research side based on that.
00:05:28
Speaker
Great, that's so interesting. So and I think, you know, we've seen in other countries, aside from Cyprus as well, like, you know, Argentina, another example of, you know, where there has been a serious banking crisis, there's been much higher adoption on the whole of blockchain, crypto and so on. But I also I just I also want to ask you how, what prompted you to consider the potential for blockchain and crypto and what it could do for journalism specifically?
00:05:59
Speaker
Yeah,
Blockchain and Financial Stability
00:06:00
Speaker
I think it's really important for people to know just like really quickly with respect to the previous point, like there's so much about like, oh, it's a scam, it's a scam, it's a scam. But like, you know, places like Lebanon, you know, I mean, there's so many places in the world where the currency is in real trouble. And, you know, including like El Salvador, there's been so much written about that.
00:06:19
Speaker
where people are subjected to these huge, you know, costs of moving money around. And there's been a huge, huge bone for people already. So I think it's really important for people to understand, you know, like, if you're lucky enough to live in a country with a stable sort of banking system, that's not the case for everyone. So think about that. Anyway, with respect to journalism, I mean, you know, I'm a journalist who built my career online, and therefore I'm extremely mindful of everything that has disappeared on us since
00:06:48
Speaker
I started, you know, probably 10, 15 years ago, thinking about doing this. And I mean, anybody who publishes online could tell you the same thing. So from the beginning, the idea of tamper proof archives was like extremely interesting to me, more so like by far than the financial or sort of what I consider the casino aspects of it. I mean, you know, there's there's legitimate reasons and crazy reasons, just like there is with regular money. I just sort of think of the entire thing as
00:07:18
Speaker
very similar to the record keeping systems that we already have inside and outside of like financial considerations. Anyways, this interest only grew as it became evident year by year of how fragile our digital libraries are, our records, the records of online publications, you know, just in terms of digital entropy by itself with like systems that like become obsolete or decay, you know, they degrade, publications fail, they're acquired.
00:07:44
Speaker
I, without the internet archive, for example, it just an absolutely staggering amount of the history of the last 20 years would be almost completely irretrievable. So when civil came to me in 2017 with their plan for building a blockchain based publishing platform, I was like completely all over it. And I have like literally never deviated from those goals. And when I was there, um, I helped plan and test an open source archiving tool.
00:08:12
Speaker
based on work that had been done by a group of Chinese activists seeking to protect me to records from government censorship, just put it outside the reach of the government. And, you know, gas like eth gas then as now was prohibitively expensive, but these activists created a method whereby we could archive news articles not in the main transaction, but by using the notes field in order to save gas. So
00:08:41
Speaker
instead of costing like 50 or 80 bucks to archive a piece, we'd be able to do it for like very small money, like a few dollars. And that was the culmination of a lot of years of planning and research. And it was just a really exciting thing to participate in. Wow. Yeah. And, and so I guess that that was a, that was to sort of avoid the Chinese censorship then was to, to log these Me Too related records on blockchain rather than anywhere else.
00:09:11
Speaker
Yes, it was an ETH-based system and it was open source and the engineers at Civil adapted that system for us and built a tool for all of the Civil publishers to use. And like, you know, for those who might not understand how ETH works, there's, I guess at this point, there's probably 7,000 or 8,000 full nodes, I don't know, but like, there are computers running all over the world constantly recording every transaction.
00:09:41
Speaker
But most transactions don't necessarily include text. They might just be like, we're sending tokens or we're signing a note or we're doing whatever kind of programming is built into the smart contract and so on. This particular system has a method for putting text into the actual ledger itself.
00:10:08
Speaker
on every single one of those 7,000 computers and anywhere online that keeps a lookup system, like Etherscan or whatever, you can look up the transaction and there's a tool so that you can actually read the information. So no matter what happens, you have to shut the internet down and even then those Chinese MeToo activists will have 7,000 copies at minimum, whatever
00:10:36
Speaker
copies of the ledger exist all over the world are safe. They can't be erased or touched by anybody in the Chinese government who might like to censor those records. And that's sort of the element of this thing that's been so attractive to me for so many years.
00:10:57
Speaker
So moving on now to popular and brick house co-operative, can you tell us a bit more about each of those initiatives and specifically how and why they use blockchain and crypto?
Brickhouse Cooperative Formation
00:11:11
Speaker
Yes.
00:11:13
Speaker
Popular is the publication that I launched while I was working with Civil. The company had been funded by consensus with the idea of tokenizing journalism. That is like creating an entire economy around journalism. But the regulatory uncertainty, which was terrible then, as it is now brought on the crypto winter of 2018, right when there are plans to launch the token. And so the company collapsed.
00:11:43
Speaker
But Civil had funded some really great journalism startups, many of which have gone on to thrive using more conventional models like Block Club Chicago and Documented and the Colorado Sun. There's a few others, but there were a few of us who had launched publications and were looking to experiment with models based on preserving press freedom and serving the digital commons in various ways.
00:12:12
Speaker
And we banded together to form a journalist-owned cooperative, and that is Brickhouse. And we started publishing almost exactly two years ago.
00:12:24
Speaker
It's a small organization, very unconventional, and Popula is still publishing now under the editorship of Tom Skokka, like under the Brickhouse umbrella. And I am still working on developing all the same means of using blockchain-based technologies to secure archives and press freedom. Like right now, our tools are, the tools that we built at Civil
00:12:50
Speaker
Let me back up a second. The things that we were trying to accomplish at Civil, there was a Dow there that was supposed to
00:12:59
Speaker
like secure the membership of all the, all the members were supposed to do governance based on that Dow. I was never a big cheerleader for that to start with because I feel like a Dow can't really work unless you have a mature and sort of cohesive audience and engaged active group of people on a large one. But like, you know, it was interesting, an interesting experiment to participate in for sure. But, um,
00:13:28
Speaker
The parts of it that I was really interested in were microtipping, which I've been interested in for a really long time since before I knew about blockchain, projects like Flatter and Flus and Beans and all that kind of stuff I was really interested in. This was like so much better way to create a crypto economy for journalism. And the way I've always envisioned it is,
00:13:54
Speaker
If you reach the end of a news article and you really love it and you can directly send the author some money, that starts to create an economy and an environment for writing and journalism that is kind of analogous to what royalties used to be in the music business.
00:14:15
Speaker
So like, say I write a piece like, you know, five, 10 years ago, and like, suddenly, there's interest in, you know, an interview that I did or a subject that I wrote about, and people come back to it or, you know, a piece gets a lot of play and it gets in a syllabus, you know, or a book, and people can go and start to contribute a little bit of money. And so it's a way to compensate writers
00:14:45
Speaker
that maybe, you know, small revenue streams that can combine to produce a meaningful income, say in retirement, for example, like so micro tipping to me, I see as like a sort of an analog to like, like I say, where royalties used to be in the in the music business.
Micro-tipping and Journalism Economics
00:15:05
Speaker
And that way, it's also easier for publications to stay ad free and free of corporate and owner influence if we can create that kind of independent tokenized economy.
00:15:16
Speaker
The other thing that I that I developed myself and was really, really deeply into it's a little bit busted now, but I'm going to fix it again at popular was a commenting system whereby only people who were paying subscribers of popular could use the
00:15:39
Speaker
commenting system, which meant, you know, they have to commit like 50 bucks a year or whatever, thereby hugely limiting the potential pool of people who would be commenting and who thereby you would have to moderate. And then each comment will cost like the equivalent of five cents to post. And then the really interesting thing is, anybody who posted a comment, that comment could also get micro tips. And so that way,
00:16:04
Speaker
you know, because I had been involved in a lot of communities early on in the internet, like at Gawker and the all where I really kind of made my bones as a journalist and these really vibrant, like intense communities where
00:16:16
Speaker
people were extremely vivid personalities and great writers who would also be able to participate on a financial level, who would be gaining something by being there and by writing and contributing. So this is the other huge thing that I was really into. Those two things, and then archiving. Those were my big projects. My colleague, David Moore,
00:16:45
Speaker
The founder and editor in chief of sledge had this really great ideas to around micro funding. So like if you wanted to fund a particular story or if you want to, like, you know, if a photographer needed a piece of equipment, he would be able to come on the site and say, okay,
00:17:04
Speaker
like almost sort of like GoFundMe, but a journalistic practice, you know, that would be under the umbrella of specific publications maybe or specific groups of publications.
00:17:17
Speaker
Wow, so micro-tipping and micro-funding, it sounds like those things really achieve quite a lot of fundamental change. You liken the micro-tipping to royalties. I think in the music sector, there's the royalty in terms of the financial reward, obviously, for the artist, but also
00:17:38
Speaker
this idea of creating a sort of more direct connection between artist and fan, or in your case, journalist and reader. So the fact that a reader can actually pay a journalist directly and kind of express their appreciation is also quite an important thing. And then you mentioned also the editorial freedom that despite critiquing allows and enables. I just want to now just talk about
00:18:06
Speaker
how different that is from the situation we have in Web2, which is so characterized by these
00:18:14
Speaker
very, very big, very powerful platforms. And we've seen long running tensions between those big platforms and news organizations specifically, where obviously the platforms can monetize news through ads and news organizations say not nearly enough of that ad revenue trickles back to the journalists and news organizations that are actually generating the content in the first place. And then also they struggle to compete, you know, their own subscription
00:18:43
Speaker
services can't really compete with those big platforms. And then actually just today we've seen that Meta in response to moves by the US government to bolster the bargaining power of news organisations, Meta is now threatening to remove all news content from its social channels, which again just kind of speaks to the immense power of some of these platforms.
00:19:05
Speaker
We've seen these tensions in the US and but also in Europe and Australia and elsewhere So it that feels like a really kind of classic web to standoff Do you think in the world of web web 3 and in the the models that you are? creating Do you think things could be different in in web 3 then? So much so I mean think about this for a second rate I think that this
00:19:31
Speaker
The standoff is great, the meta standoff, because I think the real loser is going to be meta. People go to Facebook to see news, and when it's not there, they are going to go look for news elsewhere. They are, I think, underestimating the degree to which they have depended on the dignity that legacy news gives their product.
00:19:57
Speaker
you know when they've got like some kind of crazy QAnon uncle appearing in the same space alongside like you know the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal that makes the QAnon uncle seem less crazy. But like when those legacy media sort of BMS are kind of off the site then you know what does that do to the quality of discourse over there. And also I think it's like really interesting and important to consider like in terms of the kind of
00:20:26
Speaker
models that we're trying to create and work on. I mean, think about this, right? If I am a journalist who is dependent on Facebook, I mean, we don't touch it. And it's really harmful for a small news organization like ours or journalistic organization like ours to sort of leave that traffic on the table. But I mean, I can't have anything to do with that thing. Anyway, back to what we were saying about
00:20:56
Speaker
the direct connection. If I have to depend on Facebook for my traffic, and so many people drank from that poison chalice, this huge amounts of money change hands, you know, early on in this process, then, you know, my fate is kind of bound up in their success, I have to kind of, I'm tied to them.
00:21:17
Speaker
But like if I own the connections between myself and my audience, like, and this is what can happen when you somebody gives you a micro tip, you have access to that person's wallet in terms of, you know, you can send them, you can send them an airdrop of an article or an invitation. You can send them a message. You can create like a newsletter list just out of micro tips. You know, this is a thing that I found really
00:21:46
Speaker
inspiring that Josh Katz pointed out from Yellow Heart. He did that really cool project of the Kings of Leon LP that was released as an NFT. There's a lot of nonsensical NFTs, but I think what they're doing there is really important. He made a deal with this band and
00:22:11
Speaker
they raised like $2 million like by selling their, you know, there were physical albums, LPs, there were downloads, there was artwork, their golden tickets where like, I think they cost, they wound up costing about $40,000 a piece and it kind of entitles you to over the course of a lifetime of the band, in one city for each tour, you get four front row seats and I mean, great with a band and limo ride and all this stuff.
00:22:41
Speaker
So this huge sort of cornucopia of products and stuff that the band offered its fans directly. And it was really successful. But like to me, the really important thing about the whole thing was they own those connections. You know, they can go to a new record label or they can, you know, start all kinds of projects just that don't have any
00:23:06
Speaker
sort of mediation, sort of institutional mediation, corporate mediation, label mediation, distributorships, nothing. It's just them and their fans. And people have written and written about this. I think it's difficult to grasp what that actually signifies for people in our position who are authors or musicians, writers, whatever. We're so
Decentralization and Press Freedom
00:23:29
Speaker
dependent on distributorships, so dependent on publishers.
00:23:34
Speaker
that even a slight breakage of those iron chains is going to really revolutionize culture and how it's preserved and how it's shared. Yeah, so interesting. So we've talked about the microtipping. Now, I'm also interested in the microtipping on the comments. So you mentioned five cents, was it, that you have to pay?
00:23:56
Speaker
in order to make a comment. Do you think that even though it's only five cents, the very fact that you have to pay anything at all could potentially raise the level of debate in comments because people just have to think even just for a couple of seconds about what they're going to say if there's five cents payment attached. Do you think that's the case? The pause is very important, right?
00:24:23
Speaker
It's like just taking a minute to think for sure, do I really want to say this is really important? But I kind of, you know, when we came up with the system, the thing that almost that interested me at least as much and maybe more is it's very difficult to create a bot army that is going to have to pay 50 bucks each for a subscription and then pay per comment. It's just really hard to automate. So like so many of the small publications that I've worked for,
00:24:53
Speaker
have wanted to offer comment sections, but have been unable to sort of shoulder the cost of, you know, the human attention that it requires to do it properly. Because, you know, there's all these sort of WordPress has all these utilities and stuff, and, you know, spam filters and everything. And you have to have somebody watching that, like you have to have a real live person watching it, because real comments get sent to spam. And
00:25:20
Speaker
the spam gets through and you'll get a writer very mad because they've got some advertisement for baldness pills or something on their website, on their piece. So there's this whole world of moderation and its costs and complexities that blockchain can just shatter overnight if we design the systems right.
00:25:49
Speaker
Yeah, and I think you're so right that this pause is incredibly important. I'm kind of actually reminded of my daughter's old teacher who used to, when talking to the kids about, you know, social media activity, he'd kind of say to them, look, you know, in the olden days, if you wanted to say something, you wrote a letter
00:26:06
Speaker
you know, so that took time. And then you had to get an envelope in a stamp and you had to walk to the post box to post the letter. And you had all this thinking time about what exactly you were going to say, whereas that thinking time is just gone. So I think, you know, anything five cents, $50, you know, just these sort of little bumps that you put in the way that make people reflect even just for a second about what it is they're going to say and how they want to say it perhaps means that there's less requirement for moderation.
00:26:35
Speaker
in the future anyway, if people just find it a bit more. Yes, it's optimizing. It's using technology to optimize for humanity, to give people a chance to actually have honest
00:26:56
Speaker
transactions and think about how to serve each other better. It's possible to do that. This is the thing that's been driving me so crazy about that chat GPT that people are so thrilled about.
00:27:06
Speaker
Are you crazy? It was like, you know, nobody's going to be homework ever again. And I'm like, OK, let me look at this thing. And it was like any editor would have sent this writer away with a flea in his ear so fast. It's like there's there's like there's absolutely no evidence of a mind at work in any of this stuff. I have I have yet to see any any chat GPT like generated text that I that I would want to read, because I mean,
00:27:36
Speaker
You know, you ordinarily, you want to read something because somebody starts out with an idea, they develop it, they create a thread of enlightenment and light and energy and vividness, right? But you can also use the machine to create a simulacrum of writing
00:27:59
Speaker
But it's just like empty and hollow. And I just have found it really bizarre like that that that isn't more evident to people. I think they should there should be a contest and there should be a bunch of really great editors and they should test mall and whether and whether or not they can tell if it's a real piece or not.
00:28:17
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, even before we get into kind of GPT and all of that, you know, we're having this conversation on Twitter where, you know, the level of debate can be less than than great on occasion. And it's kind of the stage on which the tensions between absolute free speech and fairness, decency, balance, tolerance, moderated speech, if you like, are playing out. So do you think if if Twitter was decentralized and built on blockchain,
00:28:47
Speaker
Do you think it could be a better space? I think we can already see the beginnings of what is going to happen on Mastodon, which, while it is not a blockchain-enabled system, is decentralized and ad-free. And I am having a ball on there.
00:29:09
Speaker
Because this is like also a moderation issue, right? Because on Mastodon, each server, each instance, you know, and Brickhouse is actually running an instance, it's called the life.boats. In order to sort of experiment with it, because, you know, we've long been interested in these ideas, each instance, each server,
00:29:33
Speaker
is able to handle moderation its own way. So you might want a lot of control over what your members are exposed to or you might want very little or none. You might want certain kinds of conversation to be completely expunged and you're totally free to do that without bothering anybody on any of the other servers. So yeah, this is exactly what blockchain should be able to do for people is to sort of, again, kind of like automate for
00:30:03
Speaker
for like a democratization of experience and communication and energy to make space for many different approaches and to authenticate based on those sort of values. So yeah, absolutely. Blockchain can improve on the kinds of things that we're already seeing it mastered on by like
00:30:27
Speaker
You could also introduce micropayments onto a system like that. You can provide all kinds of transparency and authentication features. You can create archiving. You can create all kinds of lists. And I'm sort of kind of dreaming here about all the different kinds of potential
00:30:48
Speaker
research facilities that you could create. Like at one time, Twitter talked about putting its entirety of the fire hose at the Library of Congress. It wound up getting so huge that they dropped that project. But I mean, originally the Library of Congress had intended to make the whole of Twitter, the whole corpus searchable.
00:31:11
Speaker
And you would be able to do that in a blockchain-based system without facing the problems of the library or Congress did with respect to copyright issues and people maybe not wanting to be involved in it and all this kind of stuff. You can design a system that on the way in, you could make it like an opt-in system, for instance, where people who wanted their stuff archived for posterity, they could do that or
00:31:36
Speaker
or create spaces where that would be possible based on different interest groups. I mean, honestly, the sky's the limit and it doesn't have to be commercially mediated. It can just be what people want and are willing to participate in and build and use together. Yeah.
00:31:56
Speaker
I'm
Recommended Blockchain Resources
00:31:57
Speaker
inspired to go and dip my toe back in Mastodon and see what it's like there.
00:32:10
Speaker
We usually at the towards the end of our sessions, we ask our speakers to recommend some further kind of places or materials that people can read or listen to or watch in order to learn a little bit more about this whole space. So what would you recommend to our listeners? My favorite
00:32:35
Speaker
reading on blockchain specifically that is a periodical is coin desk. I've been a big fan of theirs and have written a few pieces over there over the years. It's a really, and they're very undeceived. It's not like, you know, they're not in any commercial pockets and they're really good journalists. So I like that. If you want sort of a broader view, and I think people should have one,
00:33:02
Speaker
of how sort of media and blockchain, I urge people to look into yellowheart.io. Really interesting project. It's music-based. But the guy who runs it, Josh Katz, is a visionary and I'm very interested in seeing his experiments, where they go. And then I think everybody who's interested in these issues should go to Reddit and expose himself to maximum insanity.
00:33:36
Speaker
And kind of soak up all the kinds of things that people are saying because some of it's crazy, but some of it's real and it's going to work out and it's going to happen and represents the next step. So those would be my three off the top of my head.
00:33:53
Speaker
Great, thank you so much. And talking of craziness, I think it's fair to say that there's probably quite a lot of people in this space feeling a little bit glum or anxious, concerned about the crypto winter, FTX collapse and so on. You've kind of been
00:34:09
Speaker
around the block in terms of, you know, you were already actively analysing and writing about the internet back in the 90s, dot com boom, bust craziness was happening then as well. And yet, nevertheless, it did the web one did deliver incredible innovation. So do you have a perspective on on where we are right now with web three and perhaps a kind of without being too corny, a message of hope for people who might be feeling less than upbeat right now?
00:34:40
Speaker
Yeah,
Future of Blockchain and Media
00:34:41
Speaker
completely. I wrote a piece about this at an op-ed at the New York Times a few weeks ago.
00:34:49
Speaker
And in response to what everybody's already forgotten, the Terra Luna collapse. We've already had another disaster. I mean, neither of these huge disasters and it's bad and everything, but I mean, neither of them really kind of compares to Mount Gox, right? In terms of the amount of the actual sort of crypto ecosystem that collapsed in one go.
00:35:17
Speaker
It's not just that I've seen the beginnings of the Internet. That piece is particularly about having been involved in Internet 1.0 and seeing all the hope and promise of that, like, you know, besieged by profiteers and scams and crazy people.
00:35:38
Speaker
enormous like frauds and very similar to what we're seeing now. I mean, you know, from Dread Pirate, like Dread Pirate Roberts was far from the first guy, right? But anyway, the hope I have for blockchain technology is
00:35:58
Speaker
that the same as it's been from the beginning. The technology is very separate from the scams, but it is just an institution like any other human institution that is always going to attract a greedy and scrupulous people to some degree, just like the internet did like back in the day. And now we have like an internet that is mature and has a lot of safeguards for people and has like beautiful
00:36:27
Speaker
lasting institutions in it that are people powered like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive and has like some really crazy stuff going on in it like what Elon Musk is doing at Twitter. This is not going to end. You know what I mean? It's going to always be like this. There's always the fight is never over, but there's always opportunity to
00:36:50
Speaker
make the next level to get to the next level and continue the fight and create beautiful, lasting things that will benefit people for the future. Great. Thank you so much. So the fight is never over, people.
00:37:10
Speaker
That's it for today, both. So thank you so much to Maria for a fascinating and insightful discussion. And on behalf of the Al Explains team, thank you all for joining. Thank you, Maria. And bye for now.
00:37:28
Speaker
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