Very good. All right. So the talk I'm going to give is about our thinking, primarily about where Web3 needs to go and how Polkadot is going to be a key part of that. I said some years ago I posited perhaps Polkadot will be the greatest thing against chain maximalism. If you're not familiar with this term, it's the idea that one particular cryptocurrency or blockchain network will win out over all the others, winner takes all. And Polkadot as it was envisioned back in late 2016 was a system of many different chains and many different currencies all sort of working together. I would say that there is a change in emphasis. Now I think that general maxim has been demonstrated. I think there are not so many people that believe in one particular cryptocurrency taking everything anymore. And I think now the narrative is increasingly switching to something quite different. The question is more about what will it look like? What will Web3 of the future look like if there are many chains and tokens and networks and ways of doing things? And how does that change given the recent advances in generative AI? Much of how I see Web3 changing over the coming 5 years has to do with a response to the new onslaught of intermediation. And I want to talk a little bit about that. Hopefully you'll see over the next two days precisely what I mean by this slide.
So two terms were introduced to me quite recently, managed to work them into the beginning of this talk. I think they're useful background. This is a dichotomy: convivial and manipulative, two ends of a spectrum. Are you familiar with these terms already? No. Good. Then it will be something for you to take away. Convivial broadly corresponds to what I have in past years, for I don't know 10 years now I suppose, been calling the truth end of the spectrum. It's the good end, the nice end, the end that is self-sovereign, the end that pulls the individual's sovereignty with them rather than with some provider. In the case of convivial technology or convivial products or convivial tools, really these are in some sense labor-saving devices. The toaster, the bicycle. They help the individual get to where they want to be faster, easier, and they might also allow the individual to do more, to engage in the world in different ways that they otherwise wouldn't be able to. Control rests with the individual. This is crucial, a crucial aspect of convivial tech. And where the tools allow the user to interact with other people, the interaction is direct. Telephones broadly can be considered convivial. They allow people to talk to each other. Now, broadly, there is some intermediation there and that's what I'll come to.
On the other side of the spectrum is manipulative technologies. These are ones rich in intermediation and opaque by design. You don't quite know how the service is being provided, you just get addicted to it. Broadcast television would be a quite awesome example of manipulative technology. There are lots of them around. Typically, they're industrial. Which is to say, there is an industry around them. I don't mean factories and smoke. I mean profit motives, shareholders. There are some other interesting ones. Mobile phones. Now, as I mentioned, phones in some sense, at least in their origins, if we rewind back to say the 1940s, phones were probably on balance more convivial than manipulative. There was some intermediation. In principle, you could be snooped on, but probably mostly, I'm guessing here, that didn't happen. These things though are quite different. These things are most certainly a platform for mass intermediation, mass power projection. Just try putting a crypto wallet app on Apple's app store and you'll get the impression. Manipulative technologies in some sense alter the user's volition. Sometimes the user wants it to be altered. 'Tell me how to get thin' you might ask ChatGPT. Well, ChatGPT will probably reply 'Well, you could do this, you could do that. Maybe go on a diet. Maybe do some exercise. Maybe take some pills or get injected.' It will give you some ideas. In some sense, that's altering your volition. You might not want to go on a diet before you ask and it might convince you of doing that. If your volition is being altered in ways that you don't expect it to be, out of scope of the original query or idea for usage, then that is strongly manipulative. Broadcast television would be an excellent example of this. And the fact that adverts are placed at poignant times within the broadcast stream, of course these things also do that very well too these days. Ultimately, it's different from convivial tech where the device is doing what the person tells it; with manipulative tech, it's the other way around. This leads to a greater potential for tyranny. Strong word, but that's the reality, that's my belief. Manipulative technologies are by their very nature tyrannical. The 50s and 60s showed huge dramatic examples of tyrants utilizing the latest tech to manipulate their populations. The tyrants have changed, the tech has changed, but the mindset is still the same today. Some of the tyrants haven't changed either. If you listen to the European Union, you'd be forgiven for thinking that they think a different kind of tyranny, a good sort, is the answer. Good tyranny to fight the battle against the bad tyranny. Sorry, no, there's not all that much difference in the different flavors of tyranny. They're all tyrannical and they're all to be politely turned down. In reality, the only antidote to the enabling of tyranny by manipulative technologies is strong convivial technologies.
So where does blockchain fall into all of this? Well, technology itself can be ambivalent. It can exist not at either extreme of the spectrum but somewhere in between. It can be bipolar. There are three different terms for the technology behind Bitcoin depending on how you look at it. If you look at it as a tyranny-enabling technology, a manipulative technology, an industrial technology, well then you'll probably call it distributed ledger technology (DLT). If you look at it as a technology to make yourself rich, well, you'll probably see it as cryptocurrency. And if you look at it as a technology to help society, well then you'll probably call it Web3. It's still the same technology, just used differently. Technology can also evolve. We see, for example, telephones evolve from something that is mostly convivial to something that is mostly manipulative over the decades.
What about the web? Now, if you listen to some of the commentators, the web evolved more or less in a straight line from Web1 to Web2 to Web3. I mean, those are the Web3-friendly ones at least. If you listen to or read some of the commentary, you would be forgiven for thinking, well, we started with a sort of read-only web and then we added writability to it, mutability, and then we added ownership to that. I don't believe it's as simple as this. I can see the point, but I don't think it's especially ingenuous. I think it's a bit disingenuous. I would even change that one. I would probably posit, well, Web1 was sort of data, Web2 was more like social, and Web3 is like economic. But I would still not say it's an additive lineage. I don't think it's reasonable to say Web2 enveloped Web1 in the same way that Web3 envelops Web2 or indeed the other way around. I think they're quite different. And let's try and map this out. Here's a plane, by which I mean a 2D surface, not the flying type. We start at the bottom center in that blob there. That's no tech, right? That's pre-internet if you like, at least pre-web. As we go up, we get more socially rich, more people interacting, more deeply and more speedily and more agilely, with greater agility. As we move left or right further away from that center line, we get more functionality. We start off at the functionality enabling us to exchange information. As we move further out, that information becomes ever more economically strong. Economists have a word for the exchange of information. They call it signaling. Economists talk about weak signaling and strong signaling. Weak signaling is where you might exchange some information. You might say something but no one can hold you to it. There is no great reason to believe you'll act in that way or that you mean what you say. Strong signaling is where there is good reason to believe, where it is credible. We might also have a different kind of signaling language. Simple language versus more complex language. This maps directly into money and law. Simple language is like money. Everything exists on a linear scale, at least if there's only a single currency. I owe you X, X is just a number. That is the only kind of signal. Law, well, there's as many kinds of signals as there are sentences you can construct. It's much richer. Now, of course, law as provided by a country, they make certain sentences not allowed. These are called statutory rights. You're not allowed to agree to certain things, or at least if you do, it cannot be upheld by the courts of the country. Still, there's an awful lot of sentences allowed. As we work our way out from that center line, the richness and strength of that signaling increases. So let's map our webs onto this. Well, Web1 of course started towards the beginning of the internet. So it goes there at the bottom center. It wasn't very socially rich. I mean, everyone could put a website on if they wanted to, but the interactions facilitated were minimal. It was basically a big digital catalog. As we moved toward Web2, we made a sort of progress in terms of including more people and also gaining a greater depth of interpersonal interaction. However, it came at a cost. The cost was a consolidation of technical architecture around the intermediative. At the same time that Web1 was turning into Web2, I would argue in some sense it was also turning into a few other different technologies like BitTorrent and Bitcoin, a number of other technologies that sort of upheld the peer-to-peer, and I put it in air quotes because in fact Web1 wasn't really peer-to-peer, but in some sort of sense it had the beginnings of it because anyone could set up their own website and that was the sort of done thing. I remember it's not that I went to a platform provider like Facebook to upload my website. No, it came with the internet service provision, right? The service provider themselves gave you the web space. They hosted the email server and you paid these guys directly out of money that was being paid on a monthly basis. This is an economic model that predates that of Web2. And because the economy stayed tightly and transparently around the personal, it had the beginnings of that peer-to-peer concept. Now, as we moved towards these other peer-to-peer technologies, as we consolidated them and developed them out, we didn't think too hard about the scale. It didn't include that many people. I mean, BitTorrent, but Bitcoin. The thing that we wanted to deliver wasn't so much scale as much as that economic strength and richness of language. And of course, the strength came first. The richness of language was a sort of upgrade to that with Ethereum and Polkadot and all the rest of it on that bottom right wall, slowly making some inroads into that social depth but only slowly. Broadly speaking, that right side is Web3. And if you look at this diagram and read the original Web3 sort of manifesto, you can kind of see how the two correlate. So in the case of Web2, mass intermediation allowed social scale. In the case of Web3, mass peer-to-peer allowed sovereign economies. Well, mass intermediation and mass peer-to-peer, they're opposites. So, was it really a linear progression? No, I don't think so. They're opposite approaches. And because they're opposite approaches using different technologies, they will solve, they will get to certain waypoints in the journey in different orders. In the case of Web2, well, it wants to go all the way to the top right side, left side. It wants to, but it can't quite manage it yet. Why not? Well, that's the topic of another talk. But the point is it achieved social scale first because it turns out that mass intermediation, if you allow it as a solution, is a quicker one. It's easier. People are taught about centralization. It's a default means of technical architecting because thinking about game theory turns out is quite hard. Whereas if you assume you are basically God as the service provider, everything becomes a lot easier. In Web3's approach, of course it's not that Web3 doesn't want the social depth or scale. It's just that it's hard. So it solved something else first. It got to another type of product first on its journey to its corner, and that product was economic functionality. The point of all of this is twofold. First, they're forking. Web1 forked. It's not a linear journey. It just went in two different directions at the same time. We started with Web1 and we ended up having two different webs, right? Web1A and Web1B. Web2 does not turn into Web3. It stays around as long as people find it relevant. And similarly, Web3 doesn't necessarily turn into Web2. It stays around as long as people find it relevant. In my mind, the question is, which of them can get to their corner first? Because that's where they're both aiming. That is the Mount Doom. For Web3 to get there, it needs to become just as social as Web2, needs to facilitate all of those interactions and do so without losing what makes it Web3: that strong economic signaling, strong and rich. That's a hard thing to marry, but anyway, that's what we're going to try and do. And ultimately, this isn't, I think, so much about providing new technology. I think the technology is on a good path. It's already there. We're not using it well enough. We need to use it better.
There's a wonderful design philosophy about this. It's called lateral thinking of weathered technology. You could also translate it as withered technology, but I kind of prefer weathered technology. If you're familiar with the Nintendo Game Boy or the Nintendo Switch, it's actually a Nintendo guy that came up with this design philosophy, then you'll probably already understand the concept. Basically, rather than inventing new technology, you repurpose existing technology in a new domain for a new product or a new usage. As everyone else is busy trying to get to the edge of the envelope in terms of the tech, Nintendo time and again were more imaginative with the existing tech. So, how can we be more imaginative with the existing tech? This initiative within Par has had a number of different names. Apologies if you're in Par and you're confused. If you're in Par, you might have known it as the hosts, the user agents, the triangle. The public name is Trinity. It's a standard user agent environment. What does that mean? Well, it means an agreement between the product and the user. It's the bit that sits between them, helping products meet users, and users use products. Some people call them platforms. Apparently, the term platform is massively overused these days. And I've been told by my communications people that I probably ought not to use it, but as far as I know, it does actually mean what I want it to mean. The purpose of Trinity is to facilitate the delivery of products which fulfill certain important requirements. And these requirements are difficult to satisfy at the moment. Indeed, to satisfy them, I don't know of any particular platform that does it. To marry convenience and delight with security, privacy, and impact and do so across the board in terms of device formats. No, I don't know. But that's what we're doing now. How? A number of different user agents, pieces of software that users can use to access these products. A unified API across those user agents for developers to develop against. Coherent experience for users regardless of how they're accessing any particular product. The coherent experience works over products, protocols, infrastructure and devices. One of the key parts of Trinity is to ensure that products work just as well whether you're on a mobile phone, our desktop app, or even without any installation through the regular Web2 browsers, without giving up that privacy or security. That's quite hard, but we've got it down.
So, our goals, first number one, and this is a really important one because it demonstrates that we're better in a visceral fashion. I hate logins. Every time I'm asked to log into a new service, a little bit of me cries inside. No login. No more data entry. Please either give me the product for free or, I mean, hopefully you'll give me the product for free at least a little bit, or I'm not using it unless it seems worthwhile. But what I dislike is an insistence on the generation of user data. I believe there's a better deal. Requiring an installation of software before you can start using a product often times is understandable, but it would be nice to do it just once and it would be nice to have a preview of that before. Well, we're doing that. Interfaces need to be comfortable, familiar. We're doing that, too. I'll show you in a bit. Of course, there needs to be coherence across devices. And if it's a human using the thing, then it should be human readable. Anything that is presented to the human should make sense. Alphanumeric strings don't make sense. Again, when I see alphanumeric strings, a little bit of me cries out. If you use most Web3 platforms, I mean all of them as far as I know, and this is actually also a Web2 issue, you will be exposed to multiple identities for the same person even when you know they're the same person. Now if you don't know they're the same person, multiple identities, multiple aliases makes a lot of sense. But if you do know they're the same person, for example, you might know it's yourself or your friend, then it doesn't make sense. Then it seems that we live in some mad multiple personality disorder world. No, but unfortunately with all the different login systems, basically every single product on Web2 and all the different cryptographic public keys, oftentimes many of them in the same product on Web3, we are continuously exposed to this very problematic, very non-human thing. Mathematically guaranteed privacy and security. I installed an iPad yesterday. I needed to do some drawing. I didn't have one around. And Apple during the install said, 'Oh, well, look. We've got this nice icon. It's two little men shaking hands. If we ever...' I'm going to pause the talk and those of you that are up for this, can we connect the phone to the thing so everyone who's not playing can kind of see what playing looks like? I think that'd be nice. And do we have sufficient internet? Apparently not. The internet in this place is legendarily bad. So, I suppose it was a bit optimistic. I don't even have any mobile coverage actually. All right. Let's switch back to the slides and we will do the game. Oh, no. Hold on. There is someone. Oh, that's me. Okay, never mind.
Typical technology providers on typical platforms, Web2, mobile devices, whatever else, will give you maybe legal guarantees in their own jurisdiction over privacy and security. And that is only a few of them. Not good enough. Mathematically guaranteed. We can do it. We ought to do it. So quickly go over this. Trinity goes in two directions. It has sort of two clients. It has the user on the one side and the products on the other. Products need to connect the user to other users and they are not allowed to intermediate. We're against that sort of thing as you should probably understand by now. So how do they do this? Well, first they connect to the user. How do they do it? Well, apps, dashboard, chat, cards, lots of different modalities. You're familiar with them already. You just don't probably know that you are if I mention it in these terms. The chat modality you're probably familiar with. Apps, well, that's just kind of web apps. Full screen HTML, JavaScript, CSS, you wouldn't necessarily know that they're using these tech these days. Dashboards, little widgets that sit on the screen, one per product, help you get an overview of what's going on all at the same time. Cards. Well, in another world, I would have liked to have called this wallet because that makes more sense literally speaking. Unfortunately, crypto has sort of used that term for something very particular and quite different. It uses it for software that can spend cryptocurrencies. So, what do we mean by wallet? Well, we mean what Apple does with Apple Wallet. A bunch of cards and tickets that represent specifically first-person interests. First person. That's the user, the one behind the phone screen or the browser window or the desktop app. Their interests, not anyone else's. Chat, if you like this person analogy, chat are like second-person relationships. Yeah, we talk to our friends. We talk to the product directly. We do so through chat. It's a second person. It's not our direct interests. It represents the relationship between me, the user, and them. Whereas apps and the dashboard, that's more like a third person. We can see other people that we're not directly dealing with interests. If we look at, for example, a marketplace, well, we don't know the people behind, generally speaking anyway, the products for sale on the marketplace. They're third parties, but we still see information. We still see their interests. First, second, third. It also handles a bunch of other things: keys, contacts, offline notifications. That's a hard one on these very centralized, permissioned, intermediated platforms. Deep links taking you around to different areas of the platform's universe, whether they're installing new human contacts or engaging in a new app. But on the other side, products need access not just to users but to the rest of the world, other users and general world state. Trinity ensures that this is done in a trustless fashion, secure and private. And we're not being myopic about only using Polkadot with Trinity either. We'll support a number of protocols and probably ultimately have an extension system to support any of them. There are a number of protocols that we developed because it turns out you need more than a blockchain to build apps of the scale and richness that Web2 is providing. Solarity is our message passing protocol that allows for small bits of data to be securely transmitted between devices and individuals on behalf of individuals' user agents. Levity allows big bits of data to be transmitted and also kept around for a little while. And Aility provides notification support. And there's an SDK to ensure all of these are very easy to use. That's the platform.
One of the things on the platform is a very important piece of infrastructure that I have previously called Personhood, Pop, and Individuality. Well, the name is Humanity to represent a slight re-emphasis. Really, this is a bunch of on-chain logic to ensure that products can recognize humans. Not identify humans by their name and date of birth, but recognize this is a person, a unique person that is using this. I don't have anything but a random looking alias for them that is unlinkable to any other products, but I can recognize a they're a human, b I haven't seen them before. That's what we give to product developers. We also give a platform to ensure that people can if they choose link their different product identities with each other. As I said, smart contracts are not enough. We need to develop things a bit further. And for this we come up with a number of different mechanisms and technologies, in some cases protocols, cryptography in order to make this system a reality without cutting corners. I want to talk briefly about five of those puzzle pieces. First one is Jolity. This is that game that you saw me almost play just now. It's a synchronized randomly sampled video call where the people on the call play a very simple game with very simple rules. The purpose being not to actually win the game, but rather to demonstrate that you're playing that game and not anything else. The game is devised and the rules are devised to make it hard for generative AI to compete in the game. The fact that it's globally synchronized really helps with this. Scarcity is essentially an NFT platform. Collectibles. You get them by playing the game on a fixed rate per person, but they're free because they are scarce. There is some economic weight. And because they can only be used on this platform, they allow us to give certain kinds of value signaling that we wouldn't otherwise be able to give without introducing financial payments. And we don't really want that because we don't want to take money off people just so they can cooperate on a peer-to-peer basis. No. Sailinks in with scarcity. It allows people to present themselves to each other in the way that they choose and with privacy levels that they choose. Essentially, if you want to remain private except to your friends, well, it does that. And it does it not through some legal or honor basis of a service provider, but it does it by not giving anyone other than your friends the keys to be able to see what it is that you're saying. If you want to make parts of it public, you can also do that as well. And if you want to link it into the collectibles to give some stronger signaling about your likes and dislikes, well, you can do that, too. Nominality is a simple but effective DNS compatible name service that allows people to own names. The interesting thing about this is that it's one name per person. At least if you want a nice short one. It's not paid. You can pay, but then you get longer ones. For short ones, that's one per proven person. And Nobility is a person-oriented reputation system. Very simple in its workings but also very private, uses zk-SNARKs in order to ensure no one really knows who is voting them up or down, but ultimately everyone has a reputation. If you happen to know a person's different aliases in their different contexts because maybe they're a friend or they choose to share with you because they're on a marketplace, well then you'll be able to, or your user agent will automatically aggregate all of that knowledge together and give you a single reputation score.
Now I want to end the talk on privacy. What does it mean? I noticed that there was some confusion about this when I was talking to some people in the last week or two. So privacy and anonymity are different things. The purpose of this platform is not to create blanket anonymity. No, because that goes against many of the important things that make this a human-oriented, human-centric platform. We give names to each other and especially if we interact with each other in multiple different contexts, it's very helpful to have a single name to recognize when it's the same person but in a different context. Privacy is merely the ability to be selective about others' ability to alias you, particularly aliasing you through the different contexts that you operate in. Well, given that the web is such a pervasive platform for interhuman interaction, these contexts can be very numerous. Privacy becomes very important. Otherwise, it will be unprecedented in terms of the amount of data that providers will be able to read into you. You don't get strong guarantees on privacy through regulation or legal agreements. You get them through maths, though I suspect I'm here preaching to the converted. So, how does Trinity help with this? The interesting thing with Trinity is that we do the hard work in the back end so product developers and users don't need to. It's a labor-saving device. It's a convivial technology we've created. We are creating. It's not finished yet, but we are well into the way of creating a platform that at once provides seamless integration and strong privacy. How? Some tech. Some tech, but it's actually tech that's relatively mature. zk-SNARKs, rings, VRFs, things that have been around for years, plus a couple of pieces of infrastructure, basically just HDKD, hierarchical key derivation done in particular ways and used in particular ways. Strong conventions to ensure that products always see a different alias unless the user has decided to reveal other identities of theirs to them. And privity, this is a very important one, often overlooked. You see, the problem is that resources in Web3 systems cost money. Someone has to provide them. There isn't a giant service provider that's making vast amounts of money to pay for their servers through encroaching on the users' privacy or the control that mass intermediation gives. No, we don't have that here. There are validators, but they need paying. How do they get paid? I believe the economy squares up if there is utility there. I don't believe users need to be any worse off. But somehow we need a mechanism for ensuring that one user doesn't eat up all the resources. And if it's not transaction fees, it needs to be something else. But here's the problem with transaction fees. It makes all of the transactions and all of the product interaction that comes with them only as private as the fee, the money that you pay the fees in. And if that money ain't private, your product usage ain't private either. And are you really going to go to some token anonymity service for every single transaction in every single product? No. Maybe some mad hardcore person, but generally speaking, no. Privity does that for you. Furthermore, its vouchers which are at once zk fungible, anonymized if you like, its vouchers can be given out freely to users. I've explained a bit how you'll hear more about this if you want to go to some of the technical talks. You'll get a deeper understanding of Trinity and Humanity, I'm sure, over the course of these two days if you want. But the end goals are no login. I choose not to be recognized by corporate anything. No installations before we start using. I want to see the product first. I want to be able to give a URL to whoever and say, 'Look at my page. It's on Polkadot. Look at my product.' Familiar interfaces, coherence regardless of how I'm accessing the product. Don't make me feel like the world is full of people with MPD if I know it's one human. Show me that single human identity wherever it happens to be. And for this I don't want to give up privacy and I don't want to have to force the other person to give up their privacy either. That is the end. I hope you enjoy the conference. If they happen to have another game then maybe say again.
