It’s not about privacy. It’s about power and control.

Musings in Fever State with ChatGPT

There is a fascinating Venn diagram I wrote in some fever delirium, between my creative energy and my privacy lies the wonderful land of corporate abuse. So today, let's explore privacy and creative energy.

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Among my genAI friends, the conversation is often around the disturbing powerlessness around intellectual property, and among my Web3 friends, it's around privacy. What dawned on me suddenly is that they both talk about the same thing.

What they both fear is losing power and control, but let's unfold this. As a creative, who has been leaning to an almost extreme degree into generative AI tools to see how far I can push them and myself, I have been sitting on both sides. I am guilty of having generated images that said “Famous Artist Style” but more like “Other Famous Artist Style” for exploration, and I have also felt slightly violated knowing that most likely some of my previous work got used to train some tools on it. Artists rightfully fear that their work gets taken from them, and all we have are outdated copyright laws. I am just, to be frank, not the biggest fan of trademarks, intellectual properties, and the suing and patenting economy. My love for Hip Hop makes me embrace my idol Virgil Abloh, remix, fork, mod, meme, to evolve our culture with 3% new input. But I get it, if your style is just a prompt for someone else, how could you not feel violated? Something that was your power and was in your control was not just given away to anyone but violently taken from you.

The same thing a bit in case B, privacy. I had a lot of luck in my previous corporate life working with Mozilla and exploring the “Surveillance Economy”, the corporate flywheels that take every minuscule bit of data from you, in return for “product improvements” and in reality, better targeted ads. Web2 was built around data hoarding behind walled corporate fences camouflaging as community gardens. Data was the thing we all knew matters, but that we didn’t have control over, and only when it leaks, we really learn what we just lost. We don’t lose that data when it goes public; it actually now will forever be out there, we lose our control and power over it.

What I learned throughout the year is that we often confuse anonymity with privacy. I don’t think that’s the right approach, as much as I dislike that terrible argument if you don’t have anything to hide, then why do you care if it's out there. It’s not about that; anonymity has its legitimacy, but it’s about do I have control over what happens with my data.

This is why I got interested in zero-knowledge proofs originally. For me, this was an immediate obvious use case. Once, in my carefree youth, I worked in clubs and bars—starting by cleaning and stocking fridges, then serving drinks, until finally, I was empowered to run the nights.

But what I learned and observed through my nightlife career is that often the biggest creeps are the ones that check your ID. All they need to determine is if you're allowed in—usually, it's about age, and very very rarely, if you're not blacklisted. Hence, they should not even need to know your name. What the club needs is verification you are allowed to be in there; what the creep at the door gets, well, everything.

Privacy is not just about door policies; it's about being empowered and being in control of what data you share with who and when in which format. Privacy is not about hiding; it's about deciding.

Web2 and for now genAI make us powerless. They take everything under their premise of acceleration or product improvements like better search, discovery, and recommendation, but behind the scene lurks the big bad wolf often able to make a pretty decent picture of us. We fear our digital cloned selfs because those corporate vulture tools often know us better than we do.

Here is the thing though I sometimes feel we get wrong in Web3, we talk about ownership, but what do you really own? We talk about data bits stored in the clouds reaffirmed through GPUs blocks by blocks confirming its accuracy. Even a hardware wallet doesn’t store your “property”; it holds your keys. Ownership is not ownership; it's control and power of the keys to you. Privacy is about the power and control to grant or revoke access.

So where are we right now? We are still in the corporate abuse era. GDPR notices as a European are everywhere, and the credo is fairly simple: agree to us abusing everything we will know about you for now, everywhere, forever, all at once in return for looped videos and clickbait. I came into this place primarily because I saw a movement to take back control.

Now we are building those new open social graphs, and we are building reputation graphs on top of it (Say Hi to Karma3Labs), and all our activity is captured in full detail for everyone to see in an openly verifiable way. Sometimes it feels more like we just simply gave up, but when I see the ZK community, I see the glimpse where it goes from here, a middle ground, where we reveal, grant, or revoke access on our terms to exactly the data that is needed in that moment.

Maybe that’s the moment, where the creep at the door solely gets a “YES OLD ENOUGH” and not the full-blown government-issued ID. What a wonderful dream?

Here's the thing though, and it remains a general Web3 pitfall: permissionlessness and control over access come at a major cost, and that’s the one we all have only limited amounts of, it's time.

Control and Power always get pushed aside for convenience; that’s why we lost in the first place. Oh, this website wants to have my entire social life, my extended network, and purchase history, but I get to see this viral video, I guess it's a fair deal, kind of thing.

Web3 is not convenient, and that’s the real deal/issue when we talk about why our user experience sucks. Privacy, control over our creativity, and identity, come at the cost of time it takes us to review, revoke, or grant. And in Web3, we are very much guilty of pushing all that responsibility on the individual with an empowerment narrative. Do your own research, not your keys, not your tokens, bla bla bla. Of course, it's true, but when everything accelerates and our attention span halves like an inverse Moore's Law, convenience may win over and over again.

But Web3 could give us an alternative. It may be as simple as collective action. In the last couple of months, I had the chance to explore, prototype, and define a truly permissionless App Store, a store that is not controlled under the watchful please no genitals I am prude Apple eyes, but governed by the community. Twitter also does this through community notes; the community as a collective empowers the individual, to understand the context of information shared on social networks, and it will empower us to make better decisions before we install a tool, without the permission and worldviews of Tim Apple.

Maybe one day we have a collectively agreed consent NFT, that captures our preferences. Maybe one day we have through decentralized governance and the ability to collectively rage quit, a tool to collectively share the burden and together create a version of sufficiently convienent.

For now, though, we need to understand there are always a few among us that scream only for privacy and anonymity, but even for them at the end of the day, as for the artists that got distilled down to a simple prompt, what we truly need is to take back power and control – together.