Separating Facts from Narratives
My vision of the future of media involves oracles and advocates. An oracle might be a sensor writing data on-chain. It could be a machine that takes the temperature. You might think that's trivial, but having lots of them would be valuable. You could use a cryptographically provable record in discussions about climate, for example.
Oracles are the first layer, the base layer. They provide raw facts—information directly from sensors. A sensor could lie to you; it could say the temperature is 80 when it's actually 30, but the sensor has a digital signature, so you can see its track record, compare it to other sensors, audit, filter/correct, and let other people audit too.
Advocates are the second layer, on top of oracles. Advocates are humans. We assume humans have editorial judgment. They choose not just what to write, but what to write about.
The selection of specific facts advocates choose to include in an article is itself visible. Editorial judgment is now quantifiable because you have a layer of raw facts on-chain behind the article. The narrative becomes tangible because it shows which facts writers cite in their stories. Fact selection is now quantifiable; we can see not just what was included but, crucially, what was omitted.
Oracles and advocates are two key ideas in decentralized media—factoring things into either pure facts (oracles) or pure narratives (advocates).
Each media outlet could have a version-controlled public list of keywords for which they are clear, unapologetic advocates. Subscribers and donors could fund the outlet on the basis of their fidelity to the cause. This is using technology for values alignment.
The ledger of record is the combination of all feeds of on-chain data. It subsumes social media feeds, data APIs, event streams, newsletters, and RSS. It'll take years to build but will ultimately become the decentralized layer of facts that underpins all narratives.
Think of the ledger of record as a decentralized wire service. Every person and organization slowly moves from posting on centralized social media platforms to posting on decentralized protocols. Decentralized media will have monetization, permissions, distribution, and programmability built in.
“News” isn’t an article; it’s a graph. A graph of posts, images, and videos from many parties.
