Twitter Freebird

Elon Musk can help free humanity from predatory business models and expose the viral spreading of dangerous beliefs. Greed and partisanship influence false memories and leads individuals to accept pseudo-lies as accurate, increasing citizens’ predisposition to assimilate fake news and false narratives. It is not enough to observe the polarized electoral results in several European countries or recall the riots in Washington or Brasilia; one should also recognize the “woke mind virus” of political correctness in social media.

Musk knows that the democratic solution in the digital era is to ensure information independence and transparency through decentralization. Otherwise, camouflaged algorithms change the spirits of society to shape market segments or accentuate political antagonisms to serve money and power. Of course, people should not tolerate that because human goals go beyond selling ads and weapons.

Only cryptography allows setting the rights and duties of social media users without invading their privacy, making it possible to charge for services and change a predatory business model based on advertising. When participation in social networks is free, the product is the user, which is bad for society. People are easily caught by digital algorithms that learn to exacerbate convictions and emotions to “optimize” user segmentation in social media marketing, aiming to maximize advertising revenue or obtain politically erroneous marketing dividends. What is happening on social media can get worse with digital currencies that obey the same algorithms, and it is necessary to defend the free world from such political “monetization.”

Elon Musk understands the new digital reality and has already admitted the virtues of a “super app” with multiple functionalities, including the possibility of making payments and transactions, just like on the Chinese social network WeChat, where users do practically everything in their daily life. Fortunately, he also knows that rulers can use centralized digital networks to monitor and control the population, and being a free spirit, he has idealized a substantially different super app.

Advanced cryptographic protocols enabled distributed ledger technologies (DLT), allowing for the decentralization of trust necessary to align privacy and transparency in digital networks. Unlike centralized social networks, whose boundaries are settled without the users’ consent, on Elon Musk’s Twitter, decentralization can let the bird fly. The same reasoning applies to reengineering human economic incentives by decentralizing money with digital currencies (cryptocurrencies) minted and programmed by civil society. Then, excessive currency issuance and inflation will no longer be inevitable. In other words, community consensuses will be necessary to change the social contracts that govern both shared publications and transacted currencies. This methodology is highly desirable, as everyone can weigh the decisions that affect their life and wallet. Hopefully, governments have always done the same.

With digital algorithms programmed transparently, the rules of social contracts and the political-financial game will depend on the communities, making it possible to reconcile personal initiative merits with collective action ethics. This apparent chimera becomes a reality due to the articulation between privacy, autonomy, transparency, and rigor in sharing information and transacting value. Elon Musk must have already realized this, and he may be preparing to free the Twitter bird and humanity itself.

Preserving democracy in the 21st century demands that daily transactions occur in crystal-clear digital networks. The money belongs to its users and should be programmed to suit people’s interests, not controlled by political regimes or interest groups. We increasingly depend on informatics; only free scrutiny of such tools will defend privacy and freedom. Money and personal data must be encrypted in digital networks (only then will each control their property). However, the code that regulates such platforms must be open and transparent so that everyone can verify the game’s rules.

Physical money, in cash, is condemned (for political and economic reasons), and all currencies will be digital. Since networks are the most competitive form of organization, they will be where most transactions will be processed. Therefore, it is essential to ensure that digital networks do not hide malicious code. Such certainty demands transparency at the core of information sharing and free competition between digital currencies (centralized and decentralized). This freedom of choice will benefit both individual emancipation and collective well-being. Only then will we have genuinely community ecosystems, and Elon Musk is sufficiently concerned about the fate of humanity on this planet to know this very well.

For example, although personal data is encrypted on the Bitcoin network, ensuring, to a large extent, the privacy of users (much better protected on this network than in banking circuits), all transactions remain transparent and can be consulted until the end of time! The power does not stipulate this prerogative as this network is decentralized. Ultimately, it is about benefiting from a transparent mechanism that allows verifying all transactions, both by the competent authorities and by any qualified individuals from the user community. Only with this logic of transparency will tax havens and other complaints (tax fraud is as condemnable as abusive taxation) disappear because the international fiduciary system is much more prone to whitewash funds. Therefore, contrary to what populists want us to believe, it is unnecessary to establish oppressive regimes or police states to deal with police cases. Once transparency is ensured, freedom will care for itself, doing much better than any prohibitions.

It is imperative to avoid censorship and the crime of opinion in a world where information and value become digital. In this world, it should be the people who control the payments made to the government and not the government controlling the payments made by the people. Digital currency’s advanced cryptography features delight tyrants and dictators since the opaque and centralized version of these currencies, known as central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), allows for the discrimination of the monetary functionalities of each citizen’s wallet, which is a massive danger to privacy and freedom.

Thus, it is no surprise that Norway sets an example by launching a program to make CBDCs transparent. Also, Microsoft and the universities of Oxford and Stanford joined forces to ensure 1000 years of preservation of open-source software that enables digital transparency, keeping it in steel safes 200 meters deep in a deactivated coal mine beneath a mountain in the Arctic in Svalbard, Norway.

Whoever loves freedom will defend the independence of information and transparency of transactions. Even knowing that releasing the Twitter bird disturbs the status quo, freedom of expression is a human right, and hopefully, nobody will seize the civilizational milestone of distributed trust.

Technology innovation has gifted everyone with infallible cryptographic protocols. Who fears free articulating this new language of trust? Who profits from its centralization? Communities’ ecosystems should be able to access the new distributed trust through decentralized digital networks of money and information democratically self-evaluated by their users. Distributed ledger technologies can make social media and digital currencies open and transparent, being wise to avoid economic media centralization to unleash civilization’s potential.

Dario de Oliveira Rodrigues

Comments

comments