Decentralized Social Media with Evan Henshaw-Plath

12/06/22 • 64 min

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We all know about all the things that are wrong with social media as we know it. It's a model where everything is centralized and the market dynamics foster very few competitors who just get bigger and have more power. Who builds? Who governs? Who owns? Where are the servers? Where do the applications sit? Where does the data live? It's largely in just a few companies that in many cases have walled gardens of content. This dominant model yields a tremendous centralization of power for tech executives who are incentivized by market dynamics, to grow and to extract and to capture more and more of our attention. So, how do we get ourselves out of this mess? Does the answer lie in decentralized social media?

Our guest for this episode is Evan Henshaw-Plath, veteran Silicon Valley engineer and CEO of Planetary, a decentralized social network.

In this episode we cover all things decentralized social media, including:

The story of Twitter's "original sin" where it abandoned a federated model for a centralized one [4:14]
A framework to think about decentralization across the Internet and social media [12:22]
Distinctions between web3 and the dWeb (decentralized web) [15:18]
What a protocol is, why it’s a core element of decentralized social media, and the current landscape of protocols [15:33, 23:37]
Architecture and design considerations at protocol vs. app levels [28:39]
Big debates in the decentralized social media space [31:31]
Issues with blockchain based solutions [36:28]
Evan’s vision for decent social media and what he’s up to with his startup, Planetary [38:56]

Resources:

Denizen's writeup on decentralized social media
Planetary's homepage
Evan's homepage
What obligation do social media platforms have to the greater good: A TED Talk by Eli Pariser
‍My first impressions of web3: by Moxie Marlinspike, who founded Signal
The Battle for the Soul of the Web, The Atlantic Oct 2022
dWeb principles ‍
‍Web3 is Self-Certifying: by Jay Graber, the CEO of Twitter's spinout Bluesky

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Our guest for this episode is Evan Henshaw-Plath, veteran Silicon Valley engineer and CEO of Planetary, a decentralized social network.

In this episode we cover all things decentralized social media, including:

The story of Twitter's "original sin" where it abandoned a federated model for a centralized one [4:14]
A framework to think about decentralization across the Internet and social media [12:22]
Distinctions between web3 and the dWeb (decentralized web) [15:18]
What a protocol is, why it’s a core element of decentralized social media, and the current landscape of protocols [15:33, 23:37]
Architecture and design considerations at protocol vs. app levels [28:39]
Big debates in the decentralized social media space [31:31]
Issues with blockchain based solutions [36:28]
Evan’s vision for decent social media and what he’s up to with his startup, Planetary [38:56]

Resources:

Denizen's writeup on decentralized social media
Planetary's homepage
Evan's homepage
What obligation do social media platforms have to the greater good: A TED Talk by Eli Pariser
‍My first impressions of web3: by Moxie Marlinspike, who founded Signal
The Battle for the Soul of the Web, The Atlantic Oct 2022
dWeb principles ‍
‍Web3 is Self-Certifying: by Jay Graber, the CEO of Twitter's spinout Bluesky

Previous Episode

Gift Economics with Charles Eisenstein

Charles is the author of several books, including The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible and Sacred Economics. His work spans multiple pillars of the Denizen Inquiry, including economics, culture, and consciousness.

In this episode, Charles and Jenny discuss gift economics, a very different model of exchange than capitalism. In a gift economy, goods and services are given away as gifts without an explicit agreement on giving anything in return. This does not mean there is no financial exchange -- in many cases, the consumer opts into paying an amount that is determined at their discretion after the good or service has been received.

Gift economies are moderated by social norms and were the dominant form of exchange in many indigenous cultures. Critically, gift economies are circular and relational as opposed to a transactional, and thus present a compelling example of a non-extractive economic model that is more aligned with natural law.

This episode covers:

Why gift models more aligned with human nature [4:40]
How gift economies induce gratitude and reciprocity [7:21]
The essential cultural component of gift economies [12:06]
Why the gift is a natural model for digital goods[13:24]
How gift economies engender circularity vs. hoarding [15:38]
Intellectual property and the collective inheritance of humanity [22:00]
Charles' experience stepping into a gift model in his own work [26:20]
Implementing a gift model [29:53]
The circular, relational vs. transactional nature of gift economies [32:00]
How the circularity of gift economies mimic nature [32:47]
Navigating boundaries between gift and market economies [34:18]
Synchronicity and the gift [36:50]

Resources

The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible, Charles Eisenstein
Sacred Economics, Charles Eisenstein
The Gift, Lewis Hyde

Next Episode

Partnerism with Riane Eisler

Partnerism is both a social and economic system. Based on the principles of equitable partnership, it reaches across the spectrum of society — gender studies, family systems, organizations, cultures, and political systems — as a movement towards a more just and caring society. Overall, it shifts paradigms from hierarchies of domination to hierarchies of actualization.

This has been the life's work of our guest for this episode, Riane Eisler. She is a social scientist, cultural historian, attorney, and Holocaust survivor whose transciplinary exploration is making a lasting impact in the social sciences and society-at-large.

This episode also features the contributions of three Denizens who are building on Riane's work in distinct ways - movement-building, storytelling, and economic change.

In this episode, our deep dive on partnerism includes:

Introducing Riane and her story [2:39]
Introducing partnerism [4:29]
The domination-partnership scale [10:32]
Four cornerstones of transitioning from domination to partnership cultures [16:55]
Quantifying the economic value of care [22:51]
Shifting narratives from domination to partnership [27:10, 39:28]
Introducing The Chalice and the Blade [28:21]
Nations modeling the shift to partnerism [29:31]
Introducing Rosie von Lila [32:36]
Introducing Catherine Connors [39:28]
Introducing Donnie Maclurcan [49:25]