The future of free speech (Part II): Trustless Verification
By: Anthony Bardaro
Tags: Tech, Internet, First Amendment, Social Media, Censorship

Trustless Verification

We have yet to discuss that mechanism for moderating users’ de facto social rights to distribution and amplification, as a complement to the Independent Arbitration System that modulates their de jure legal rights to access and free speech. At this point, we need to discuss more than mere problems — we need to get around to actual, workable solutions.

In that vein, Stratechery continued its meta-commentary on Dean Baquet’s NYT vs Amazon:

I’d go further [than Baquet]: I think we as a society are in a far stronger place when it comes to knowing the truth than we have ever been previously, and that is thanks to the Internet… the New York Times doesn’t have the truth, but then again, neither do I, and neither does Amazon… It is a great relief that the same Internet that makes said companies so powerful is architected such that challenges to that power can never be fully repressed[.]

In order to utilize this ‘irrepressible challenge to centralized power’, it is not necessarily desirable for every individual content consumer to verify every individual factoid, for reasons discussed above; but it certainly is desirable for more individuals to verify more individual factoids — as the internet has not only empowered us all to do, but has also facilitated our so doing.

While we don’t want to reintroduce too much redundancy back into the marketplace, there is not enough redundancy at present. This echoes of a point made recently by Mark Andreessen in his now infamous post-pandemic call-to-arms: There is not enough slack-in-the-system for many reasons, one of which is our worship of capital efficiency. As uneconomical⁷ as it may seem, the whole macroeconomy needs to bear a greater burden of friction ex ante — whether that be in the form of preemptive verification, preventative care, bumper crops, strategic reserves, spare capacity, and/or surplus inventories — because that friction will be realized, in one form or another, either now or later, per Bardaro’s Law of the Internet.

Obviously, this specific cause-and-effect tradeoff needs to enter mainstream consciousness. The only question is ‘how?’ and that is very much a question of carrots-and-sticks, to paraphrase a passage from “The Missing Incentives”:

[Quality assurance] in-and-of-itself may be a carrot for some users, but there’s no stick to encourage the mass market adoption needed[.]

We do not want to unwind all of the efficiency gains wrought from outsourcing functions like verification (a la Wikipedia), but we do need to increase the population of verifiers by a multiple of its current headcount. From “A Market for Social Capital” again:

[P]er the 1% Rule (aka 1/9/90 Rule): “…only 1% of the users of a website actively create new content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk… in a collaborative website such as a wiki, 90% of the participants of a community only view content, 9% of the participants edit content, and 1% of the participants actively create new content.” Take Wikipedia, for example, where a plummeting ratio of active-to-registered users may suggest that its proof of work is getting harder and its oligarchs more entrenched. Those are two perilous trends for a crowdsourced network that’s still intent on growth. Wikipedia has 141k registered MAUs out of 35.8M registered users. That’s a skinny 1:254 ratio and it’s getting more lopsided, as the number of active users hasn’t increased despite modest growth in registrations and explosive growth in Wikipedia’s content universe. Thus, a relatively fixed number of active users, like editors, are getting spread increasingly thin while trying to cover an ever-expanding surface area of articles.

It really is crazy how neglected verification on the web has grown through sheer attrition. Again, the problem is a preference for present over future consumption. The problem is opportunity costs. The problem is incentives. Friction. Truthiness. Leapfrogging. Deadweight loss. Selectorate Theory. Goodhart’s Law. Brandolini’s Law. Et cetera.

So, one last time, how do we proceed from here with a workable solution? How can we be the aforementioned realist who ‘acknowledges the system’s structural flaws and navigates therein and thereabouts’? That last excerpt continued:

For the most part, [most networks focus] on the wants and needs of the demand-side. But, two-sided marketplaces like social networks have to match that with equally focused execution on the supply-side too… At this point, there are no easy solutions there for Wikipedia, to be sure… Nevertheless, the upshot is that network architects must constantly engineer their systems such that supply meets demand at equilibrium were the network to achieve — and maintain — a desired quantity and quality of liquidity.

In other words, Wikipedia’s crowdsourced system has proven to be a workable solution for verifying information within the site’s own backyard — dealing relatively well with all the volume, velocity, and variability of modern information. But, even that gold standard is now spread thin, having not expanded beyond early adopters to harness the early majority and mass market moderators it needs to cover its increasing information base.

Wikipedia verification vs public trust

The incentive problem therein is a formidable hurdle. Given these human conditions and economic forces, we need to simplify the Proof of Work in order to increase the system’s capacity for (and capacity utilization of) outsourced verification.

Not everyone will self-verify; in fact, again, we don’t want everyone redundantly self-verifying; but we need more outsourced verification; so we need many more people to verify; thus we need to both facilitate and incentivize verification even more than we are at present. Part-and-parcel, we need to expand such crowdsourced verification beyond Wikipedia to the broader interwebs and expand verifiers beyond today’s handful of evangelists to more of the mass market.

As I mentioned above, there are a lot of jobs-to-be-done by a Wikipedian, and, even then, the manufacturing of encyclopedia entries is a relatively linear function compared to the exponential output of broader news, views, and entertainment. So, to begin, I’m proposing that we broadening-the-base in term in terms of both the content covered and the participants covering it, yet we also have to hone-our-focus on the narrower job of verification alone — as opposed to collaborative creation, etc.

As big of a job as verification is, we actually do have the labor inputs needed to tackle it, which was exactly what “The Gig Economy’s Turn on the Jump-to-Conclusions Mat” discussed:

[T]he gig economy’s original promise was to increase economic production by putting idle capacity to work. For example, instead of watching TV at night, you can make deliveries for Postmates; during your commute to and from work, you can pickup carpoolers with Uber; and rather than text hottakes to your friends after the Sox game, you can write for SB Nation… optimizing labor and capital resources to increase capacity utilization’s numerator and denominator [with] gig workers predominately treating these services as supplemental income[.]

There are plenty of people willing to get paid for doing exactly that which they already do daily, for free, out of enjoyment. There are even more people willing to form new habits if they can monetize their own microlabor at their own leisure. There just aren’t enough people motivated to volunteer their time and their brainpower — or their inevitable brain-damage — for strictly intrinsic incentives.

The adoption curve for diffusion of innovations (market penetration)

To cross-that-chasm, we need more extrinsic incentives like visible social capital that’s not only an accelerant of adoption, but also ambiently convertible into financial capital. Extrinsic rewards establish a present value for the expected future value of damages forgone. As such, we’re able to derive a market price for ex ante friction — ergo, an economic value of verification.

That market-based solution is the missing stick to the carrot of better quality control. In fact, recall what I said above:

To whatever extent that aggregate supply were to fluctuate in the near term, the short-run market capitalization of attention-based revenue is still unlikely to have changed, since costs per ad impression (CPMs) and, especially, costs per conversion (CPCs) generally increase to offset the lower output — with deep demand pools competing for a lower supply of ad inventory.

Instead of strictly defending against the corrosive effects of this principle, we can flip-it-on-its-head, leveraging it offensively in the battle to win-over more verifiers: Codify the role of individual agents by passing ad revenues on to them — in full recognition of the responsibility demanded of such consumers-cum-producers-cum-verifiers.

The inverse relationship between ad rates and attention over the short-run would not only create an implied value for verification, but also provide an endogenous mechanism for surge-pricing. This addresses a burning need already mentioned in that excerpt from “A Market for Social Capital” above:

[T]he upshot is that network architects must constantly engineer their systems such that supply meets demand at equilibrium were the network to achieve — and maintain — a desired quantity and quality of liquidity.

Dynamic surge-prices are a tidy vehicle to attract (or repel) verifiers when supply/demand disequilibria transpire!

Something is starting to take shape here: A manifestation of Zero Trust Verification that would leverage ad revenue-sharing as its stick to the carrot of better quality control. Let’s call this novel proposal “Trustless Verification”…

Never mind Facebook, Google’s 30% to 50% rake from AdSense alone would provide a “your margin is my opportunity” opening, which would give Trustless Verification a competitive advantage in attracting producers, consumers, and verifiers. To maximize this advantage, almost all of Trustless Verification’s ad revenue must accrue to those constituents in the underlying ecosystem. Such substantial flow-through is an important first ingredient to not only incentivize adoption, but also navigate the remaining challenges of platform risk, basis risk, opportunity costs, etc.

To wit, giving users access to these tools anywhere and everywhere they traffic is an important second ingredient that would remove a lot of prohibitive friction. In order to both simplify verification’s Proof of Work and facilitate users in so verifying, this would need to be an open service, devoid of platform risk, such that any and all devices, OSs, app stores, browsers, and developers are willing to implement a genuinely unthreatening Trustless Verification API as an overlay atop any and all media content, across both the open web and walled-gardens.

In so keeping with these first two ingredients, this Trustless Verification mechanism must take the form of a platform in the most traditional sense, as described by Microsoft’s Bill Gates himself in “Tech’s Agency Problem”:

“A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it’s a platform.” Therein, Gates was contrasting Windows and Facebook’s different approaches to 3rd party developers. That’s so important — and a good place to conclude — because the “economic value” piece is something that’s sorely missing from a lot of today’s platform ecosystems.

Albeit a natural byproduct of the first two, we can call this our third ingredient: While still striving for self-sustainability, a Trustless Verification platform-as-a-service must subvert itself, its needs, and its wholesale profit motive for the greater good of the ecosystem that will build atop it. Among other upsides attributable to this selflessness, such altruism would leave enough revenue on-the-table to most durably improve the lot for producers, consumers, and verifiers alike.

Making Trustless Verification’s presence a heuristic for quality assurance is the fourth ingredient to push-the-envelope on systemic buy-in — a la the Prisoner’s Dilemma Wedge. This is very much an execution detail, with a second-order effect of forcing holdouts (e.g. hypothetically, networks at scale like Twitter, Facebook, and Google) to participate for fear that abstaining would cause their network effects to unwind as quickly as they wound-up.⁵

The fifth ingredient is governance. If we’re going to deputize laypeople for verifying something as subjective as truthiness, we also need to moderate them with checks-and-balances. While verifiers’ reputations would instill some important intrinsic moorings, subjecting all participants to penalties (in addition to mere rewards) would add a crucial, complementary, extrinsic layer for deterrence.

This wisdom-of-the-crowd somewhat embodies a judicial branch sitting atop the universe of content federations that Trustless Verification seeks to unite, in which case individual apps themselves — including walled-gardens like Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc — can serve as their own, independent, sovereign executive branches. This affront to the herd would represent an important salvo for maintaining some amount of dynamism, diversity, and progressivism in the marketplace of ideas, as discussed in “The Rise of Content Cartels”:

[H]omogenization across different platforms, if not made recognizable and overt, can be especially problematic when it comes to speech because it suggests a false consensus about where lines should be drawn. [Content] Cartels can create the misleading impression that the end result, i.e., a lack of diversity across platforms, was independently arrived at in multiple environments instead of as a result of a single decision being applied across all of the platforms. Particularly in difficult or controversial areas, it could become increasingly attractive for platforms to adopt a kind of default position instead of facilitating the kind of diversity that could help continually reevaluate the bounds of accepted expression. In some areas such continual reevaluation is not necessary: For example, the desirability and definition of [starkly illegal content like child sexual abuse material] CSAM is quite properly well settled. But… as pressure grows to expand this model to other areas, the risks are greater because few categories are so determinate. A complaint about monopoly power over public discourse is, at heart, a complaint about the use of unaccountable power to demarcate the public sphere in ways that do not adequately serve public ends… Mary Anne Franks has powerfully written that to “truly believe in the ‘marketplace of ideas’ means to reject speech monopolies and speech cartels, to challenge the hoarding of expressive rights by the most privileged members of society.” Current content cartels, as well as the future ones we are likely hurtling toward, allow participants to launder difficult decisions through opaque processes to make them appear more legitimate than they really are and do not mitigate the threat of a handful of actors holding too much power over the public sphere.

Trustless Verification is a public-facing process — unpredictable enough to thwart gaming-of-the-system, yet transparent enough to expose the laundering of covert agendas. Its approach to nested governance provides both a beurocratic army of decentralized verifiers (as a democratic first-line-of-defense) and a streamlined smattering of centralized appeals courts (as technocratic arbiters-of-last-resort).

This provides sovereignty for — and dynamism among — the platforms themselves. It doesn’t foreclose on competition or upward/downward mobility among new entrants/incumbents, since Trustless Verification’s quality control isn’t a fixed cost that asymmetrically burdens upstarts the way top-down regulations like GDPR and CCPA have.