Tag: web3

If WordPress supports NFTs, should I boycott it?

I’m a blogger, an amateur coder and an employee at a nonprofit organisation. My experience in these realms of endeavour is such that, taken together, keeping my blog online means a) using a trustworthy web host, b) using a simple as well as moderately featureful content management system, c) achieving this at a reasonable monthly cost, and d) not having to spend any time whatsoever thinking about the setup’s availability or security. Currently WordPress.com is fulfilling (a), (b), (c) and (d).

The next best alternative is a shared host offering WordPress hosting followed by a VPS managed through a control panel and with WordPress. If I drop WordPress, the options available to me dwindle rapidly. There’s Ghost, of course, but not much else. There are very many content management systems out there but the vast majority don’t have an option to import WordPress posts and also have either fewer features or too many for my limited programming chops to handle.

(I should stress here the extent to which I’m out of sorts in this area. I don’t understand all the differences between cloud hosting and VPS hosting. I kinda know what shared hosting is but I don’t know why its problems don’t assail other forms of hosting. It took me years to get the hang of static-site generators and what web-servers really do. I barely get Docker now and have no frigging idea what Kubernetes is or does. My sense of what is good is simply some better-informed people’s sense of good.)

In this scenario, can I afford to boycott all platforms and services that are interested in, or whose leaders are interested in, incorporating NFTs into their products?

The answer I think is a distinct and discomfiting ‘no’. WordPress cofounder Matt Mullenweg is pro-NFTs, as are Ghost’s John O’Nolan, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian, Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, Twitch’s Justin Kan, as well as Microsoft, Google, Amazon Web Services, Akamai (for blockchain in finance) and many, many others. Hosting companies like Amazon Web Services and Digital Ocean ban the use of their services to mine cryptocurrencies, but I doubt they will assume a similarly hardline position against the storage of NFTs.

When you’re interested in boycotting the work of people who favour the use of a technology you distrust and dislike, but then find yourself having boycotted every platform, service and/or product you’ve needed and/or admired thus far, what do you do?

This conundrum is largely already real. Many of our internet-based tools today are the brainchildren of people and companies operating primarily out of that American white Democratic libertarian tech space (although I’m bearing in mind only the worst of this group here, principally Zuckerberg). I really like my smartphone but I have many problems with the practices of the company that made it. The same thing goes for my laptop, Kindle, debit card, WhatsApp account, Fire Stick, a vision-impaired aunt’s voice-activated phone, my neighbour’s electric scooter, etc.

My (first) point is that a certain geographically restricted demographic has monopolised innovation in the information technology sector worldwide. As a result, the best tools we have available to use (in this category) to do the work we’d like to do are often made by people and companies doing other technological things with which we’re often likely to disagree yet from which we can’t ever fully divest ourselves, and whose products we can’t readily replace with those of alternative provenance either.

At the same time the builders of these tools have accrued more decision-making power than the tools’ users, the result of which is that – for one example – we’re all contemplating the possibility of a “web3” erected on blockchain technology even though the population of people interested in that future is eminently minuscule. Another is that WordPress powers 43% of all websites on the web while Mullenweg has the single-most say on whether this mass will one day became NFT-friendly.

The second point is that of quality and scale, which taken together ensure a good user experience at a relatively low (monetary) cost. For example, if the best American cloud-hosting companies today start to offer pro-NFT services, my hosting options will suddenly be limited to Asian competitors with shady business practices and pricier European ones that, while being better with user privacy and such, also charge more as a result. (I’m neither aware of nor know how to evaluate hosting companies in other parts of the world). I get the philosophy of “either pay or be the product”, but here’s the thing: I work in journalism in India and don’t have much money to spare, not to mention neither the time nor the inclination to spend becoming a better technologist.

The third and final point is about the act of boycotting itself. Why has it been meaningful? It has been meaningful because it has had the power to force managers to change their minds in favour of consumers’ demands. Would it be as meaningful as it has been before to boycott WordPress or Twitter or Google? No, because boycotting does not have that power against companies whose breadth of innovation is so diverse that they build the tools with which to organise protests against tree-cutting as well as – to slip into a metaphor here – manufacture the axes with which they will be cut.

At this point, a quote from Elementary (2:21), the TV show on Amazon Prime – another behemoth, wouldn’t you say? – comes to mind: “Piffle. They want an army of drones keeping tabs on all of us.” Since when do you care about other people’s privacy? someone else asks. “I make use of the tools available to me. That doesn’t mean to say I have to applaud every advance in the field.”

I suppose this is my conclusion… for now. I think this will allow me to continue to use WordPress while retaining the moral authority to criticise Mullenweg’s support for, or even his equivocation on, NFTs… for now.

Crypto: Climate change means new tech has less time today to prove itself

I spent this weekend reading about permissioned and permissionless blockchain systems. If you want to get in on it, I can’t recommend this post by David Rosenthal enough. Much of the complexity of executing transactions of the major extant cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin and ether, arises from the need for these systems to ensure they are permissionless from start to finish, i.e. to maintain their integrity and reliability without deferring to a centralised authority entity.

This simple fact is more important than it seems at first because it challenges in a significant way the reality that most bitcoin and ether mining pools are highly concentrated in the hands of a very small number of people. Put another way, everything from the verbal sophistry to the speculative fundraising to the enormous power consumption that sustain the major cryptocurrencies have failed to do the one thing that cryptocurrencies were invented to do: decentralise.

Most other cryptocurrencies likely operate with the same problems; I say ‘major’ only to limit myself to what I’m familiar with. Second, don’t underestimate the value of simple facts in an ecosystem in which jargon and verbiage are core components of defending against criticism. One such bit of verbiage is the oft-repeated claim that “it’s still the early days” – in the face of questions about how much more time cryptocurrencies will need to become stable and, importantly, socially useful. Software engineer Molly White has written about how this is simply not true:

… a lot has changed in the technology world in the past six to twelve years. One only needs to look at Moore’s law to see how this is pretty much built in to the technology world, as once-impossible ideas are rapidly made possible by exponentially more processing power. And yet, we are to believe that as technology soared forward over the past decade, blockchain technologies spent that time tripping over their own feet?

Something I see missing from this already expansive discussion (i.e. I might have missed it) is how climate change alters the picture.

The biggest criticism facing bitcoin and ether is that their power consumption, based on the method they use to protect against fraud in a decentralised way – called ‘proof of work’ – is colossal. Rosenthal defers to the Cambridge Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index, according to which the annualised bitcoin network power consumption (at 6:47 pm on February 13, 2022) was 125.13 TWh – roughly equal to that of the Netherlands.

Others, like Molly White, have written about the fact that 13-14 years after the advent of the web, there was much more adoption and innovation than there has been in the 13-14 years since the birth of the idea of using permissionless blockchains to execute financial transactions. This can be interpreted to imply that the proponents of cryptocurrencies have been expending energy – both literal and otherwise – fighting against the system’s indefatigable tendency to centralise. And by failing, they have kept this energy out of reach of its “more socially valuable uses,” to use Rosenthal’s words.

I think both these arguments – the straightforward carbon footprint and the social disempowerment – are significant and legitimate but often lead people to ignore a third implication specific to technology: the time a technology has available to prove that its adoption is desirable is falling rapidly, perhaps as fast as the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) is increasing.

The creation and implementation of the web – technically, web1 from the early 1990s and web2 from the mid-2000s – happened at a time when the atmospheric CO2 concentration was 354.45 ppm (1990) and then 379.98 ppm (2005). In 2021, the concentration was 416.45 ppm.

Tech folks may find this arbitrary, but for an observer at infinity (which I consider myself and anyone outside of the cryptocurrency as well as IT/software spaces and located in an economically developing or ‘under-developed’ country to be), it seems eminently reasonable. Climate change has broken the symmetry between our past and our future vis-à-vis our ability to tolerate energy-intensive technologies, and constantly breaks it.

Roughly 16 years lapsed between the advent of web1 and the birth of Twitter, but in the era of manifest climate change, the fuller statement has to be: “Roughly 16 years lapsed between the advent of web1 and the birth of Twitter, as the atmospheric CO2 concetration increased by 27.64 ppm.” Obviously there may be no generally accepted way to compare levels or even types of innovation, so saying “innovating something in the cryptocurrency space comparable to Twitter” doesn’t make sense. Let’s flip it to a marginally more meaningful statement, one that I hope will also illustrate my point better: how much innovation did technologists achieve in the cryptocurrency-space in the time in which atmospheric CO2 concentrations increased by 27.64 ppm?

Note here that web3 – a web based on storing, transporting and validating information using blockchains – seeks to depart from the incumbent web2 by decentralising, and liberating, user experience from the silos of ‘Big Tech’, a group of companies that includes Twitter. So there may be a way to compare the carbon emissions vis-à-vis efforts to achieve web3 versus efforts to achieve web2. Proponents of cryptocurrencies and NFTs may contend in turn that the social consequences of web2 and web3 would be apples and oranges, but I think I’m comfortable ‘cancelling’ that difference with the opportunities for social welfare squandered by wasteful energy consumption.

Second note: the concentration of atmospheric CO2 is distributed like this. But in our calculations, we need to adopt the global average for reasons both obvious (it’s climate change, not weather change) and subtle. Some entities have created (permissionless) “carbon-negative” blockchains; the negativity is attained through carbon offsets, which is a stupid idea. To quote from a previous post:

Trees planted today to offset carbon emitted today will only sequester that carbon at optimum efficiencies many years later – when carbon emissions from the same project, if not the rest of the world, are likely to be higher. Second, organisations promising to offset carbon often do so in a part of the world significantly removed from where the carbon was originally released. Arguments against the ‘Miyawaki method’ suggest that you can only plant plants up to a certain density in a given ecosystem, and that planting them even closer together won’t have better or even a stagnating level of effects – but will in fact denigrate the local ecology. Scaled up to the level of countries, this means … emitting many tonnes of carbon dioxide over North America and Europe and attempting to have all of that sequestered in the rainforests of South America, Central Africa and Southeast Asia won’t work, at least not without imposing limitations on the latter countries’ room to emit carbon for their own growth as well as on how these newly created ‘green areas’ should be used.

To conclude: Global warming is accelerating, so I’m comfortable comparing two events – such as two bits of innovation – only if they occurred in a period of the same atmospheric CO2 concentration (give or take 10%). Perhaps more fundamentally, clock-time is a less useful way today to measure the passage of time than the value of this number, including vis-à-vis the tolerability of innovation.