AKASHA Blog (Page 2)

Web3 Social Networks: The Interweave of Humans and Technology

Web3 Social Networks: The Interweave of Humans and Technology

“Web3” can be defined as an information network emerging from and made possible by new cryptographic techniques. Web 3 promises to enhance our individual agency by removing concentrations of power, but also demands more responsibility from the individual. By definition, if the management of the social network is not centralized,

Community Moderating — Bringing Our Best

Community Moderating — Bringing Our Best

In light of the Trump ban, far right hate speech, and the plainly weird QAnon conspiracy theories, the world's attention is increasingly focused on the moderation of and by social media platforms. Our work at AKASHA is founded on the belief that humans are not problems waiting to be solved,

The Number 1 Challenge for Humanity - Cooperating at Scale, Part 2

Thoughts & Ideas

The Number 1 Challenge for Humanity - Cooperating at Scale, Part 2

Part 2 of 2. In the first of this two-part blog post I described why cooperating-at-scale is humanity's primary challenge. Here I outline some candidate concepts and pre-architectural principles to inform the necessary and sufficient 'sociotechnological primitives'. First I'd like to qualify pre-architectural. It's not oxymoronic despite arche meaning origin

The Number 1 Challenge for Humanity - Cooperating at Scale, Part 1

Thoughts & Ideas

The Number 1 Challenge for Humanity - Cooperating at Scale, Part 1

Part 1 of 2 Despite the over-emphasis of competition in Darwin's theory of evolution, the great man himself sensed the importance of cooperation. I should premise that I use the term Struggle for Existence in a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another ... [On the Origin

Project Profiles: A Whole New World of Community Interactions

Project Profiles: A Whole New World of Community Interactions

Hopefully you are here because you've looked at a world full of problems which have been caused (at least in part) by centralization, and (correctly) decided that the solution is decentralization.

Open Source Research: April to June 2020

Open Source Research: April to June 2020

Since the publication of our first Open Source Research article in March, we have continued to put out polls (almost) weekly via the Ethereum World Twitter account and the Ethereum World Telegram group about Ethereum and crypto topics.

Voices from the Community - Designing a New World: The Call for Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Voices from the Community - Designing a New World: The Call for Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Throughout the course of history, there have been single events that have altered the world so radically that life before and after that moment in time and space became incomprehensible to the generations of people who lived before the event took place and those that followed.

Open Source Research: November 2019 to March 2020

Open Source Research: November 2019 to March 2020

Since the launch of the Ethereum World landing page in October 2019, there have been a whole host of useful and interesting ideas proposed for how this new tool can be built to ensure that it solves real problems for real Ethereans.

Authentication on Ethereum World

Authentication on Ethereum World

The release of Ethereum World v0.1 will include a lot of improvements in terms of UX when compared with the current beta.akasha.world application. This will be possible because of specialized web services that handle complex tasks which previously were executed only on the client-side (e.g. search

New Blockchain Adopters: Ethereum and Sports

New Blockchain Adopters: Ethereum and Sports

On January 10th and 15th I came across two articles about basketball. One concerned a player in the Eastern Conference, one a Team in the Western Conference. What links them, and why is this relevant to Ethereum?

Crypto Resolutions for a 10/10 2020

Crypto Resolutions for a 10/10 2020

People have engaged in the act of creating annual life-improvement plans since the time of the Babylonians, who made promises to their gods at the start of each year to return borrowed property and repay debts. It sometimes seems like a degree of undue importance is put, at least in

The Value of Values

The Value of Values

Imagine a world in which Ethereum is simple to use, social in nature and global in adoption. Imagine the first billion people experiencing Ethereum as borderless social interactions powered by permissionless innovation.

How Do You Define the Word "Community?" A Deep Dive Into the World of Ethereum

How Do You Define the Word "Community?" A Deep Dive Into the World of Ethereum

Proving an Idea 💭 You can build in your mind the greatest, most revolutionary piece of technology ever, something which would change the world, improve lives, potentiate other amazing technologies, and recalibrate the course of history. Ideas created in a vacuum are isolated sparks of creativity; if you are only discussing

A call for interdisciplinarity — generative identity and the Internet Identity Workshop

A call for interdisciplinarity — generative identity and the Internet Identity Workshop

The post Generative identity — beyond self-sovereignty (2nd September) has spawned a lot of conversation in private channels and on the ProjectVRM Harvard mailing list ... some 15,000 words in exchanges with more than a dozen people active in ‘digital identity’. This post is dedicated to the most salient parts by

Generative identity — beyond self-sovereignty

Generative identity — beyond self-sovereignty

With thanks to those who commented on draft versions: Matthew Schutte, Jonathan Donner, Martin Etzrodt, Andrei Sambra, Mihai Alisie. Hero image generated from the original image by Ryan Alexander. I'm going to outline three ways to think about digital identity to help move the conversation forward in line with the

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace: Surveillance in 2019

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace: Surveillance in 2019

Today, August 16th, is #SurveillanceDay, formerly called Wave at Surveillance Cameras Day. This seemingly-quite-jokey annual occurrence, once branded by Motherboard as the Laziest Protest Ever, was possibly started by pseudonymous privacy activist, Zorbitor, who we expect will, once again, release a video on their YouTube Channel, in spite of their

A Quick Peek Inside How We Work: The Back End of the Revolution

A Quick Peek Inside How We Work: The Back End of the Revolution

The main thing which we have talked about extensively on our blog is how our outlook on the world intersects with the problems that we see with the current technologies and structures that people interact with on a daily basis. These articles serve an important purpose; they serve as a

AKASHA Reloaded: Three Spins Around The Sun Later

AKASHA Reloaded: Three Spins Around The Sun Later

On May 3rd 2016, 279 days A.E. (After Ethereum), we unveiled the AKASHA dapp and opened the signups for the alpha version to celebrate World Press Freedom Day. We called for brave people to help us test the idea of a decentralized social network, built with Ethereum and IPFS,

At RadicalxChange in Detroit

Interpersonal Data

At RadicalxChange in Detroit

The building in this photo has a fascinating history. The A. Alfred Taubman Center for Design Education in Detroit accommodates the College for Creative Studies and Shinola, and for this weekend, the RadicalxChange conference — which is why I'm here. Formerly owned by General Motors and known then as the Argonaut

The interpersonal data at the heart of all human digital systems, including markets

Interpersonal Data

The interpersonal data at the heart of all human digital systems, including markets

In light of the Radical Markets book chapter entitled Data as Labor, its co-author Glen Weyl invited me to write this post for the RadicalxChange blog, published 9 Feb 2019. The RadicalxChange mission dedicates the community to "using dramatically expanded competitive, free and open market mechanisms to reduce inequality, build

The misleading name, metaphor defiance, and awesome potential of "personal data

Interpersonal Data

The misleading name, metaphor defiance, and awesome potential of "personal data

We have a problem and an opportunity currently labelled "personal data". The opportunity encompasses nothing less than a complete redesign of our lives and societies and our collective ability to grapple with complex adaptive systems including super-wicked problems — but this will remain elusive until we've wrestled with the "personal data"

The misleading name, metaphor defiance, and awesome potential of "personal data" — part 3 of 3

Interpersonal Data

The misleading name, metaphor defiance, and awesome potential of "personal data" — part 3 of 3

In the first post of this series I asserted that data is data. In other words, it's not like anything else. The second post explored and dismissed conceptualizations of data-as-property and data-as-labour. This, the last post in this series, explores data-as-reputation, data-as-public-good, and data-as-me, and then points to some architectural