The Future of Media Is Decentralized

We are moving from mainstream media through social media to our destination: decentralized media; that is, decentralized reporting, sourcing, hosting, distribution, payments, bounties, predictions, reputation, verification, consensus, and truth.

We need a better truth machine. The answer is not a new media company. It's a new media community with fundamentally different premises: global, not East Coast; one hundred people part-time, not one person full-time; scientific depth over narrative. This kind of media would be representative of the people, because it is the people.

The supplicant bemoans the problems of centralization.

The technologist builds the decentralized solution.

A shared issue for legacy media and social media is that their content is not open source. Since the content is proprietary, restricted by copyright and API access, the public can’t create its own arbitrary views of the data. What’s the alternative? Decentralized media.

An excellent example is the GitHub repository with records of police brutality behind 2020pb.com. Because it is fully open source, anyone can submit a pull request (contribution), it’s free to access, all the primary sources are verifiable, pseudonymous submission is okay, there is a full revision history, and the data is forkable (copyable) and downloadable.

As the Fourth Estate, the press sees its role as holding others in society accountable. As the Fifth Estate, social media is how society holds the press accountable. You can’t have an “informed citizenry” if citizens can’t inform other citizens. The concept of social media as the Fifth Estate may be the most enduring part of Mark Zuckerberg's contribution.

The right to voice is as important as the right to vote.