 Does America need a reality czar? That was New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roos' suggestion for how the Biden administration could help solve the so-called reality crisis facing the country. The chaotic events of January 6th marked the beginning of a new era of online content moderation. Not only did every major social media company kick Trump off their platforms, but Amazon Web Services, which owns about a third of the global cloud storage market, affected Twitter competitor Parler and Apple and Google removed it from their app stores. Parler, which had signed on more than 13 million users at its peak, announced its relaunch on February 16th. Both Democrats and Republicans want Washington to have more influence over how big tech companies operate. And there's a bipartisan push to repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, known as the Internet's First Amendment. That's a pretty foundational love of the modern, much-based internet. Exactly right. And it should be revoked. Which would give the government more power to hold social media companies liable for the content that appears on their platforms. But the great de-platforming of 2021 has also energized the movement to bring a new radically decentralized internet that would allow users to escape whatever form the realities are takes. Many of the projects in this space are trying different approaches to solving the same set of problems, such as how to give individuals control over their own digital identities and how to store data in the cloud so that it can't be controlled or accessed by a large company subject to political pressure from the state. Regardless of which side of the debate you're on, with certain political figures getting banned on social media platforms, that is not the point. The point is no one should have that type of power. Muneeb Ali is the CEO of Stax, which has garnered some major backing for its effort to build a new computing platform that could become the foundation for a new decentralized internet. Stax is one of several startups in this space that has come up with a way for internet users to own their own digital identities. Today, Twitter, Facebook and Google own and control user accounts on their platforms, which as the tech giants have demonstrated, they can suspend or revoke at any time. With Stax, Ali and his team are hoping to make it possible for users to take control of their own identities by storing them not on the proprietary computing platforms of big tech, but on a public database that's shared and maintained by people all over the world, the same one that's used by the cryptocurrency bitcoin known as the blockchain. The idea grew out of Ali's computer science dissertation at Princeton. Just as no central entity can stop a bitcoin transaction, no central entity can revoke a participant's account or change the rules of the game. People feel really frustrated when Facebook changes the privacy terms of them, or recently we saw Robinhood halted trading for certain stocks. It's really a battle for making sure that the rules are the same for everyone and they cannot be changed by a handful of people. Google's motto was once, don't be evil, which it later dropped. Ali says the idea behind Stax is to make it so that we don't have to trust the good intentions of fallible humans. Instead, we can trust the same mathematical tools that undergird bitcoin. Google has the saying, don't be evil. Maybe a company shouldn't be powerful enough that they're sitting there thinking, should I be evil or not? What we mean by can't be evil is no one should have that kind of power. And instead, you can replace that with mathematics and mathematical guarantees on certain things. Google and Facebook earn most of their revenue through advertising, which is so lucrative in part because they collect personal data about their users, allowing for direct targeting. A key component of the decentralized Internet is replacing advertising and data harvesting with a new set of monetary incentives. Participants in the Stax network stand to earn bitcoin. Other decentralized web projects are taking a similar approach, but using different cryptocurrencies, including Ethereum. And on LokiNet, users earn a cryptocurrency called Oxen by running nodes on a private network to make all web activity anonymous, creating a kind of decentralized VPN. Bouncing your connection through service nodes like this allows you to interact with other users and the Internet without leaving a trace. Another problem that stacks and other decentralized Internet projects are trying to solve is to give Internet users a place to store their websites, documents, photos, videos, and more. The type of information that currently lives in the giant data centers owned and operated by Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and others. A project called Filecoin is building a decentralized cloud storage system that allows computers all over the world to contribute space on their hard drives, which can be accessed through the interplanetary file system, an alternative protocol to the HTTP that undergirds today's web. In exchange, they get paid with a digital token. If Parler ran on IPFS and Filecoin, it would be difficult for a government or any third-party actor to shut down their service. So in a world in which you can truly take your data with you and take the app with you and everything, you have so much more control. Molly McKinlay is a project lead for IPFS. This is a much better model that's going to reduce a lot of the the angst and problems we've seen with centralized and like monetized and manipulated social networking. Welcome to Erbit. We just addressed the problem in its root. It's like, all right, well, may as well just rewrite it. Galen Wolf-Polly is a co-founder of Erbit, which isn't just a new network, but an entirely new operating system that Wolf-Polly envisions becoming as all-purpose as WeChat is in China, which allows users to make social media posts, send direct messages, make calls, play games, hail taxis, and pay bills online and in person. Except with Erbit, the user owns all the data, as opposed to a Chinese company that shares it with the government to monitor the activities of its citizens. WeChat is this sort of like single unified interface where I can do all the things that in the West, we do with all these different apps. And what you really need for that is you have to address this like industrial-scale software stack and get people a human-scale software stack where they can actually control their computing again. Users purchase an identity called a planet in Erbit's cosmic nomenclature, which is issued by a star, a more expensive ID, usually owned by a developer, which are in turn issued by galaxies the top of the identity hierarchy. You'd be trying to compete with the big players, the apples and Googles of the world. Why would someone switch over to this new kind of experimental software stack? I find using centralized communication tools to just generally not feel good. It's very clear where you're being manipulated or forced to see and engage with stuff that is going to keep you around basically. And you know, the crazier it makes you, the longer you stay. The feeling of using something that you own and control and can do whatever you want with is like a wonderful feeling that far outstrips anything that a centralized and ad-funded provider can give to you. Decentralization projects face daunting challenges. They're going up against the world's wealthiest companies. The engineering challenges of building a decentralized platform are far greater than building a centralized one. And consumers almost always choose the most convenient option, even if it means handing control of their data and identities over to a third party. But the great de-platforming of 2021 may be waking some Americans up to the risk of trusting big tech with their digital property and identities. Signal and Telegram, which have ironclad end-to-end encryption, became two of the world's most downloaded apps in early January, with encouragement from Tesla's Elon Musk. Decentralized systems are hard to build, but certainly like historically, long-term historically, like most of the systems that run the world are just naturally decentralized. The arc of history just generally bends towards decentralization. People want to be free. They want to be in control of their environments, their communities. The centralization of the internet, it's just totally unnatural. It's not going to last. Kevin Roos, the New York Times reporter suggesting the need for realities are fears that encrypted apps could become huge shadow social networks, which can't be adequately monitored for misinformation and dangerous speech. Urban, for instance, was created by the programmer, Curtis Yarvin, a controversial thinker whose ideas largely formed the basis of the right-wing philosophy known as neo-reaction. Yarvin, who is no longer affiliated with the project, is just the type of thinker researchers and journalists worried about extremism point to when arguing for stronger social media guardrails. What do you say to people who think it's actually good to have some corporate gatekeepers because of the problems that online hate speech and radicalization can legitimately cause? The benefits of basically people having control over their tools just far outweighs the risk of somehow having to figure out how to moderate or enforce a singular rule set. Do you want to live under a almost like a quote-unquote dictatorship, where one person has a lot of control and power? In this case, that would be Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey. Different people can then make different choices, which is what free society is about. The cat's out of the bag. I mean, the world has been networked. Like the internet is kind of its own state in some ways. And you kind of have this one world, which is the very managed centralized world, or you give people their own tools and let them run the network. I'll definitely take the latter.