The Upright Censorship Brigade
Aave may build a Twitter on Ethereum and it can't happen soon enough
Are you concerned that the government and Facebook are collaborating openly about censorship?
If not, you may want to reconsider. I don’t care what side you’re on; when social media goes corporate and the government uses it as a tool for censorship, we all lose.
The government is currently notifying Facebook of posts that are spreading covid misinformation. The justification is noble enough, but that’s not the point – Who gets to determine what is and isn’t misinformation?
It opens the door to authoritarianism which is a story as old as time. When there is a centralized seat of power, there will always be groups of people fighting for control of that seat of power.
The only way to solve this problem is by decentralizing systems that are compromised through power grabs. Instead of taking things by force, you build another way for a better future.
The more you build, the more you decentralize that seat of power.
This is why it’s music to my ears to see Aave founder Stani Kulechov suggest that his team should build an Ethereum-based version of Twitter.
Ethereum values are permisionlessness, trustlessness, and anti-censorship. Yes, communities have the ability to influence its direction, but you simply can’t take over Ethereum like governments are trying to do with Facebook and Twitter.
For whatever reason, Jack Dorsey hates Ethereum.
He recently announced that square is creating a new business with “the sole goal of making it easy to create non-custodial, permissionless, and decentralized financial services.
In other words, he’s trying to build an Ethereum knockoff. Bitcoin is all-in on scarcity and digital gold. Building anything on top of it has been a struggle, and most people have simply stopped trying.
Ethereum already works, and it’s light years ahead of the competition and whatever Jack and Square end up rolling out.
And I would like to stress that I really don’t care which political affiliation anyone is – Government officials of all kinds have a similar mindset and set of values they operate from.
Which makes their actions somewhat predictable when it’s all said and done. The only way to change the game is to build a new game.