Meta - Is Moloch trying to Decentralise?

my take on Zuckerberg's new direction

Decentralisation

A few years back, I ran a briefly popular YouTube channel on Cryptocurrency. It was a learning experience. Aside of discovering just how dodgy many crypto projects were and that it actually was possible to create money out of thin air as long as you reinvested in hype, I also learned about a thing called decentralisation.

Not all crypto pioneers were drug-crazed libertarians or deranged geeks, though many were (as immortalised in Haydn Wilks’ “$hitcoin” - not for the squeamish). There were actually some interesting social theorists lurking there in the background. They talked about blockchain, about distributed ledgers, about a heap of other techie stuff I struggled to remain attentive to for more than 10 seconds, but most of all they talked about decentralisation.

The human world, I learned, was based around centralised, hierarchical control systems - institutions.

Our primate ancestors loved dominance hierarchies. The great algorithm of natural selection established that the best way for us to survive and reproduce was to create hierarchical league tables - pecking orders. Who got the best mate. Who got first go at the food. The system worked. If it hadn’t, we wouldn’t be here.

Emerging as early hominids some 2.5m years ago, we carry around all this biological programming. We intuitively “get” dominance and hierarchies. We form institutions.

Institutions exist to both regulate the acquisition of information, money or power (frequently these days the same thing) and its distribution.

Money is run by institutions - central and merchant banks.

Healthcare is run by institutions - the NHS or NiH.

Science is run by institutions - universities, corporate bodies or government agencies.

Media is run by institutions - news corporations or government bodies.

Government itself is an institution, over all the other institutions (in theory).

Everywhere we look, if it’s to do with information or power, we find institutions and we find the centralisation of control.

But does it have to be that way? Are we constrained by our primate inheritance to forever function in this manner? Enter decentralisation.

Our current technology is for the first time at a level where non-institutional, non-centralised systems can function. And, function better than institutional systems. Decentralisation is a reality.

Right now, pretty much every transaction we undertake online requires an intermediary. We go to Lloyds to bank. We search the web with Google. We access social media with Facebook. We rent out our spare room with Airbnb. And so on.

We need these intermediaries because they provide trust. They guarantee our transactions, and they take their cut. And may of course change their terms over time, or censor us. But we go along with them because they allow us to trust other people.

But, as 5G and 6G systems continue to become deployed, and the IT architecture for “web3” gets developed, so our networks will become so powerful efficient that the possibility of “trustless,” distributed systems becomes viable. These are open source systems where transactions are distributed between so many parties that they can’t be lost or interfered with.

The bottom line is that we will soon no longer need intermediaries to facilitate trust. The new systems will make us completely safe online without them. Everything will start to become P2P - peer to peer.

No longer needed, today’s institutions, whether they be tech giants, banks, mass media corporations or governments, will need to find new reasons to justify their existence and this will be increasingly difficult as more and more people wake up to find they can do everything they need in life without them.

Powerful as they might seem right now, the institutions that govern our world are actually dinosaurs enjoying their last feed before their extinction.

The future belongs to hack-proof, distributed systems that use biometrics to seamlessly validate who we are through myriad daily transactions - social, creative or financial. Scientific and medical research becomes financed, not by corporations or government institutions, but according to social need, as pooled through multiple systems gathering info about our health and interests. Media is no longer in the grip of institutional news corporations but is created by us, for us and distributed according to upvoting and attention. Government ceases to be.

Moloch

Allen Ginsburg’s poem Howl, in its central section, contains a gruelling elegy to Moloch - the Carthaginian demon king, who consumed living children. Ginsburg’s vision of Moloch, as the motivating principle of industrial capitalism, has caught the imagination of many modern-day thinkers, most notably Scott Alexander. His piece, Meditations on Moloch, went viral amongst Western intellectuals when published in 2014.

The term “Moloch” has thus come to signify the worst aspects of the emerging industrial technocracy - a brutal, unforgiving structure that sacrifices the higher aspects of our nature on the shrines of mass production and efficiency.

When I see the legions of “anti-vaxxers” and lockdown protestors that now periodically fill Western streets, that spend their time immersed in conspiracy theories, I do not consider that it is simply Covid that is freaking them out. It is the vision of Moloch, that resides deep in our unconscious mind, that scares us the most.

It is a world where individuality is subjugated and creativity not permitted to exist; a world where all energy is channelled into blind, industrial output; where we live shackled to screens, denied physical contact. This is Moloch’s world and we know deep inside that we are capable of creating it. For me, it is this that truly drives us to query and protest Covid measures.

But, wait! Moloch is centralised… right? Correct. The demon king sits at the apex of a classic, pyramidal power structure.

Facebook becomes Meta

Last week, Facebook supremo Mark Zuckerberg announced that the holding company for Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram would change its name to Meta. Officially, this reflects the divergence of its interests, though some say it is an attempt to constrain the current criticism of Facebook to solely that platform and not Zuckerberg’s other projects.

There were the usual mass media and social media press releases, filled with pics of Mark in his VR headset. The impression I got was that Meta’s direction would be all about VR and Augmented Reality. But I was under-informed.

Zuckerberg’s interview with independent journalist, Sara Dietschy, did indeed begin with a lot of stuff about VR and AR, and the problems facing those who develop goggles that would distract us away from visual reality. But then, around 15 minutes in, it diverted into Meta’s overall direction. Talk shifted to DeFi (decentralised finance), Crypto, Trustless Contracts and of course Decentralisation. Zuckerberg recognises that the world is changing and he wants to get right in there and be a player.

Meta’s plans reminded me of the early to mid-nineties. The internet was coming online and accessible to the masses. Windows 95 was in the offing. But the big corporations were sceptical. Mass media ran regular stories about the evils of the internet - pornography, drugs, terrorism - the usual. All god-fearing citizens should keep well back, they urged, and governments needed to “do something” about this latest threat to our democracy.

Then, suddenly, the media went quiet. One could almost sense that in the background, industrial capitalism, perhaps Moloch himself, was cogitating. Maybe it would be better to get on board, to control and exploit this new phenomenon in connectivity? And that is just what happened. Moloch went online. Big corporations got their own websites. They promoted and sold their products over the Net.

In techie-speak, Web1.0 is the term used to refer to the internet of those early days.

Web2.0 emerged a decade or so later with the arrival of dynamic, interactive content and social media.

Now Web3.0 beckons - the decentralised Net, whose possibilities I mentioned earlier on.

Conclusion

If one is seeking Moloch amongst the tech billionaires of our age, one is spoiled for choice. Gates, Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos. The work of these, and heaps of others, could easily be construed as furthering the Moloch vision. But, is this not simply because of the possibilities that each brings - that things could go either to the good, or the bad?

Yet, if one must pick then Meta might seem a good bet here. Native peoples uprooted and subjected to genocide through fake news adverts run on Facebook. Thousands of teenagers on suicide watch after comparing themselves to their peers on Instagram. Billions of messages routinely content-screened on Whatsapp. Yup. That’s pretty Moloch!

Becoming aware of Meta’s new direction - its aim to create architecture for Web3.0 - I have to ask this question… Is Moloch trying to Decentralise?

Thank you for reading.