Dan's Notes / Issue 11: Elon Musk and Free Speech • The Complete Argument Against Crypto

Hi friends,

Dan's Notes will take a break next weekend; I'll be at Coachella and I'm very much looking forward to unplugging for a few days.

Big thanks to everyone who's been following along for these past 11 issues - I've enjoyed all of your replies and online + offline chats, and despite this project being a real love/hate relationship sometimes, having to write and send something once per week has been a good habit for me, and I thank you for coming along for the ride. ✌️

On Elon Musk And Free Speech

Mike Masnick at Techdirt has been covering the content moderation angle of Elon Musk's hostile Twitter takeover bid really well, which I'm linking to here. Masnick notes that most of us already agree that some level of content moderation is good and necessary (e.g. spam), and that an "ideal" level of moderation actually creates space for more people to participate. Musk claims that a completely unmoderated platform is "essential to a functioning democracy", which goes against everything we've learned from multiple platforms running giant social media networks at scale.

If you force companies to host “all” speech, then you run into a series of problems. First, the spam, garbage and harassment problem. And this actually harms “the principles of free speech” by causing lots of people to go away and not take part. But by allowing the wider internet to exist, and allowing different companies or groups to set up their own rules and their own enforcement mechanisms, that actually enables more of a culture of free speech because people can vote with their feet and find the spaces where the are able to speak and where they are most comfortable.

As a follow-up, Masnick broke down Elon's interview with Chris Anderson at TED. Content moderation at scale is incredibly hard because people will always find ways to abuse the moderation systems that these platforms put in place. It's less about censorship and more about curbing harmful behavior that spills over into the real world.

The simple fact is that dealing with human nature and human communication is much, much, much more complex than teaching a car how to drive by itself. And there is no perfect solution. There is no “congrats, we got there” moment in content moderation. Because humans are complex and ever-changing. And content moderation on a platform like Twitter is about recognizing that complexity and figuring out ways to deal with it.

Former Reddit CEO Yishan Wong agrees:

What happens is that because of the fundamental structural nature of social networks, it is always possible for a corner case to emerge where people get into an explosive fight and the company running the social network has to step in. [...]

Example: the "lab leak" theory (a controversial theory that is now probably true; I personally believe so) was "censored" at a certain time in the history of the pandemic because the "debate" included massive amounts of horrible behavior, spam-level posting, and abuse that spilled over into the real world - e.g. harassment of public officials and doctors, racially-motivated crimes, etc. [...] It was "censored" not because it was a wrong idea, but because ideas really can - at certain times and places - become lightning rods for actual, physical, kinetic mob behavior.

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The Complete Argument Against Crypto

Probably the most scathing critique of crypto I've seen yet:

On top of the wallet privacy problem, the very maintenance of self-hosted wallets requires end-consumers to have a level of technical fluency, information security, and operational security to keep the private key that is far beyond the average individual. This notion that every citizen should become their own bank is completely untethered to reality. If the proposed solution is that individuals are forced to rely on third-party crypto bank-like structures to maintain their holdings then we arrive at a logical contradiction that undermines the proposition of decentralization and simply recentralizes the solutions that banks already offer. [...]

Transaction reversal and fraud mitigation through due process and the courts is an essential feature of all financial services, and yet adding this capacity to a permissionless system would undermine the very decentralization premise on which it was built. This is an irreconcilable contradiction.

Just like "unmoderated" social media platforms eventually incorporating content moderation practices - it turns out there's a good reason that this stuff exists.

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angel's share

Any telling of history knows that things usually only last for a little while, and meaning is only ever made by context. The places that meant the most to me in my twenties stand in for my twenties: This was where I cared about certain people, and believed incorrectly in certain ideas, and wanted a certain person to text me back and another to leave me alone. It would be pointless to go back; the bar may still be there, but I’m not.

See you in two weeks!

-Dan