🙋🏼♀️ Dearest you,
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the differences that exist between the real world and the digital world. This week specifically, the immutability of the words we say have been on my mind.
A hot topic in the world of blockchain is the issue of immutability. Let’s not pretend I knew what that was before an expert explained to me: it’s the given that once information is stored in the blockchain you cannot change it or remove it without it being noticed. Like ever.
You know the feeling you get when you’re at a party and an ‘innovative' guy starts mansplaining something ‘techy’ to you and there is no way you can stop the endless stream of self-congratulating without it getting awkward? That’s how information feels when it’s locked up in blockchain.
Seems kind of a good idea right? The whole principle of blockchain is that it’s a safe and reliable way to store information without needing the controlling governance of a middleman.
Privacy wise this gets tricky though. Because what if you change your mind? What if you want to withdraw what you’ve stated? What if you want to move to the other side of the world and start all over again, without leaving a permanent trace of everything you have said and done?
How do we define truth, respecting individual (change of) perception?
I believe this is not just a digital problem. We come across the same exact problem in real life, we have just learned to cope with it already. Don’t believe me? Ask two people who just broke up about why they broke up and I rest my case.
The essence of this problem is: there is no one objective reality. There are billions of subjective ones, in which facts and objectivity exist.
This existing truth, however, is not a given. It’s a valuable commodity we all have to take care of. Think of it as a piece of land we have to cultivate. Every time you lie, you shit on it. Every time you tell the truth, you nourish it.
Sounds like quite the task already, right? To complicate things even further, however, what is the truth is not easily defined. Scientists like Kahneman (the Thinking Fast and Slow guy) have long established that we are not as rational as we might think we are. We are full of cognitive biases that make us twist the facts. Not because we are liers, but because our brain is optimized for survival, not for the truth.
There is a lot on the spectrum between a truth and a lie. There is accidentally sharing the wrong information, exaggerating, overexaggerating, willingly leaving out or emphasizing details, etc. on the one side and gaslighting, manipulating, and simply lying on the other.
If you combine the idea that everyone has their own subjective perception of the world with the fact that this perception is destined to be factually flawed you get quite the conundrum.
As humans, we cope with this complexity with an ingenious combination of trust, integrity, and curiosity to learn about the perception of others. This system is nowhere near perfect, but it is working and up until now, we have not been able to successfully create a digital duplicate. The battle against fake news only proves that truth is not something that arises and appears, it’s something we have to work for.
Want a good example of how? Watch this lady kick ass.
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Before the usual closing: thank you to Bert Jehoul and my mentor Annette Dölle. The conversations with you both about this topic have influenced my thinking greatly.
Have a great week,
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