Deadlines can be helpful things. I stayed up deep into the morning to get an article penned for a writing competition of sorts on a website called Publish0x. If you fancy joining and giving it a go please click this affiliate link.
How did I get here? For years I’ve abstained from using advertising on the internet - not littering my websites with Google ads and generally using an Adblocker for my internet travels. Suddenly there’s quite a leap. Overnight I write an article which is basically an advert for some zonkers crypto company in Singapore. I don’t feel very good about this. This is pretty low in the barrel behaviour to be effectively contributing fake news (well… fake opinion) to the internet. The desperation on my part is perhaps less about money and more about wanting to put something out there maybe but…
Looking at it from a more positive angle I think there’s something to be credited about the more typical working practice of Publish0x. The essential concept is that you earn money (Ethereum tokens) for both reading and writing articles on the website. The occupying authorities in internet land (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft) continue to return approximately zilch credit or rewards for their users’ ongoing attention. OK, that’s not exactly true. They provide many free services with marvellous facilities for connection over some kind of cabled/mobile infrastructure, but the pressure is mounting on these corporations to give something in credit or even stake back to their users for the powerful leverage provided them by streamed channels of user data.
The services provided by these big tech corporations are underpinned, founded and served on open source technologies. In such ways the fundamentals of the internet remain free and open source. The more people realise the extent and misuse of their personal data and the technological infrastructure of their commons the more vocal the demand for a different kind of internet. Publish0x is not really that, much as Brave Browser (ads you are rewarded for clicking on) is not, but they are moves in a different direction. They recognise and make some means of addressing the inequitable distribution of internet wealth. They credit you with something (small) for your attention.
I’m pretty much a newbie to the crypto scene but there’s a sense of excitement in the areas of crypto-currency investment and blockchain technologies right now. The two fields are closely interlinked so we see a curious mix of goldrush capitalism (DeFi) and communitarian promise in decentralised, blockchain networks. Projects such as IPFS, Blockstack, Telegram and ThreeFold are all worth reading about. They hark back to some long-held, more altruistic hopes for the internet - see The Internet Needs Freedom.
I seem to have run to the end of my spirited little editorial here. A few other interesting reads of note regarding these technological developments:
The Fintech Blueprint - change in the financial sector
Audio’s Opportunity and Who Will Capture It
Kernel Community - philosophical ideas on coding for long-term change