There is an interesting irony that social networks and blockchains, two of the most important information technologies of the day, sit in fundamental intellectual tension.
The core idea of a blockchain is that there is a common shared “memory” on which all nodes choose to agree. In a blockchain-based world, consensus is both the goal and the value. If you as an individual choose to disagree with the majority, you are an outcast and thrown out of the system.
The idea of a social network, in contrast, is that there is no central point of truth. Instead, all information and claims are a matter of perspective based on who you listen to in a network. The network itself—in the abstract—has no “opinion” but simply serves as a medium through which each participant can construct their own viewpoint.
That social network “relativist” view of the world is today considered deeply challenging. And many people see in blockchains the exciting potential to build the consistent shared digital memory that is considered critical for well-functioning global societies of the near future.
But I wonder if this is a case of the grass being greener on the other side.
If blockchain technology had been invented and deployed before social networking existed, would we be in the opposite position—decrying the forced consistency and lack of nuance of blockchain-based truth and yearning for the unfettered relativity of gossip and perspective afforded by social networks?
The reality is that neither social networks nor the blockchain model for information is complete on its own.
Blockchains are slow, highly inefficient and will never be able to handle nuance by fundamental design. That’s because in order for information to exist in a blockchain context, there needs to be many copies of that “reality” redundantly spread around the world.
Running something like Facebook on top of a blockchain architecture would be somewhere between silly and impossible. It would be a massive waste of resources and time to secure the integrity of every comment, like, photo and post through the process of distribution and consensus.
On the other hand, social networks are incapable of generating the same degree of trust that blockchains can. They can accommodate incredible nuance and a diversity of opinions efficiently. But the cost of that nuance is that you have to give control of “memory” over to a centralized node, which will never be fully trusted no matter how well intentioned.
There is some degree of irony to the relationship between these two technologies.
Historically, we think of centralization and consistency going hand in hand. The same holds true for decentralization and nuance.
That is how things work in the physical world. Centralized governments and institutions kept the key final records of account, but decentralized town squares held all the nuance of perspective and knowledge.
But with blockchains and social networks, we might be seeing the opposite.
Centralized social networking services are efficient enough to be able to accommodate tons of nuance and perspective. Blockchains are decentralized in storage but, in their decentralization, tend to force consistency and agreement.
As we continue to cycle between centralization and decentralization, on one hand, and a desire for consensus about facts versus more contextual nuance on another, a strange flip is occurring. Decentralization is now paired with consistency, and centralization with nuance.
For the first time, centralization is the key to nuance, and decentralization is the safe harbor for consistency—instead of the other way around.
Ultimately, for a vibrant future, we need both technologies.
We need both an ever-more vibrant and expansive public square. We also need more trustworthy and agreed-upon records of globally shared context. Asking either technology to do the work of the other is highly undesirable.
As I have suggested before, I believe in a hybrid future involving decentralized systems when trust is most critical and centralization for systems where efficiency is more important than trust.
The key is to understand that each technology is suitable to its own type of content. What we should choose to centralize or decentralize in the future virtual world is actually inverted from what we would have chosen a century ago.