Decentr: Giving Holochain Reputation Systems a Broader Context
This post is in response to some Holonaughts who have read or heard about our “Netscape for NGI” tech we will be building on Holochain and share certain reservations.
These reservations mostly revolve around the concern that our contextualised “user layer” tech — tech that we propose will contextualise information for access and retrieval across Holochain in the same way Netscape did for HTML internet — will in some way work against the notion of the reputation systems Holochain intends its hApps to build.
Moreover, these concerns extend in some quarters to a misunderstanding that our tech will in some fashion promote a move away from reputation systems — systems that promote the idea of multiple individual “truths” held by individual hApp community members — and in the direction of becoming more of a blockchain than a Holochain.
These are fair enough misconceptions, and ones we want to dispel in this post.
Firstly, we agree emphatically with Holochain that blockchain is definitely not the answer to foundational Web 3.0/4.0 tech due to the fact it allows for only one updated “truth” across any given blockchain at any given time. This, if you think about it, is a pretty aggressively centralised conceit (Holochain’s Matt Schutte is eloquent on this point) — a conceit that, to our mind, explains in large part blockchain’s lack of mainstream adoption.
Why would the public want to buy into yet another centralised system (masquerading as a pseudo-decentralised system) that pretty much benefits the few whilst exploiting the many (which is where we are already at with blockchain)?
No, we are building on Holochain specifically because of Holochain’s ability to allow hApp developers to build communities based on reputation systems; the aim for our tech is to increase the ability for hApp’s to develop these communities but in the context of the wider Holochain community. We see this contextualisation as part of a very necessary and urgent “transition” from the current internet to a 100% decentralised Web 3.0/4.0, for which Holochain has, in our view, built (and continues to build) the foundational tech.
Think about it: this idea of wider contextualisation of Holochain’s communities based on reputation systems makes sense because it is consistent with real-world reputation building.
Sure, within a small, real-world community a person can build her or his reputation amongst only their own small community by behaving in a socially beneficial way, contributing to the community, adhering to the community’s customs and norms, and so forth. But — and it is a fairly big “but” — the question then remains: on what does this community underpin its notions of right and wrong; what types of behaviours should it reward and punish — in short, from where does this community derive its underlying morals and ethical values?
In fact, where do any of us?
Let’s take a couple of real-world examples to underscore the point this post is making. There is an uncontacted tribe on North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal, completely cut off from the world for millennia, where it is perfectly acceptable (in fact, it appears mandatory) to kill by way of a volley of arrows any outsider who wanders onto their territory — presumably out of an instinct to protect the tribe and assert territorial ownership. There are deprived parts of large inner-cities, mostly inured to the influences, conventions, education, etc of wider society due to socioeconomic, cultural and other factors where it is pretty much okay to do the same.
If murder is okay — even desirable — by the moral lights of these (and other isolated) communities, and individual reputation is actually enhanced by taking a life, why are we personally so offended by these practices? From where do we derive our moral indignation? What gives us the right?
Well, depending on varying factors, probably a lot of things: everything from theology to philosophy to the law governing homicide can be invoked to pretty effectively argue against murder as a viable option to achieve successful outcomes.
However, it is more likely a combination of all these aspects that makes most of us think twice before solving our problems with a bout of morally “justified”, The Purge-like homicidal mania (we’ve all been tempted — don’t deny it.): and that is the point.
In the real world, we, as individuals, base our values — mostly unbeknown to us on a conscious level— on the broad, mostly progressive curve of wider society. This steady, progressive moral and ethical curve is informed by many forces, factors and sources that filter through from external agencies that individual community groups and their constituent users will probably never have direct contact with.
On a macro scale, this happens — and continues to happen — in an endless, mostly invisible, self-repeating cycle by way of a sort of intangible, interconnected, society-wide “social layer” from which communities and individuals develop their own ethics and other social mores. On a micro scale, variations of these values are applied and tested within these smaller community units — values that will, if successful, or offer some tangible advantage, filter back into and be adopted by wider democratic society as either part of formal statutory or regulatory or other informal social processes.
And so the inevitable osmotic moral curve moves forward, dragging a mostly civilised society along with it.
That is what we aim to do with our tech. Decentr provides this interconnected “social layer” for Holochain to enrich and reinforce the reputation systems being developed by hApp builders and their communities, while not in any way negating their healthy growth and expansion.
In the final analysis, then, it is our our view that to not deploy our tech risks diminishing and centralising — blockchain-style — the broader ethos and remit of decentralisation on our way to merely building another incrementally “improved” incarnation of the internet that is a “little bit decentralised” (which is like saying someone is a “little bit impotent”). All this will do is leave this new hybrid incarnation open to exploitation by the few to the detriment of the many in a similar way to (you guessed it) the current fragmented, broken and centralised web.
Not on our watch.
More on our tech, ongoing H2020 R&D, and IEO/ICO plans in upcoming posts.
Feel free to contact me for about our aims and goals or for any more information about our tech/deconomics via the contact form on our website.
