Blockchains as Engines of Liberation
Realizing the initial promise of the computer revolution.
The promise of computers and networks has changed dramatically over time. In the 70s, as the PC began to penetrate markets and imaginations, they were envisioned as tools that could unleash our creativity and turn everyone into a creator. Now, they are primarily used as devices for more consumption, while also making us commodities. Blockchains hold the promise of helping us move back toward the objectives and ideals that once motivated many of us to embrace them.
I was an early adopter of computers all my life, gifted by my parents with access to my first computer while a young teen, my first was a TRS-80 Model I around 1983, when I was just 14. I had become enthralled with computers when, playing at my friend’s house, I was allowed to hack away at his dad’s Model II in his home office, and ignored my friend for hours trying to make it do things in BASIC, discovering and exploring the Poke command, diving for my first time into cyberspace. I yearned to have my own, and justified it to my parents as a tool with which I would be able to better do homework (it wasn’t really, at that point). My parents acceded, and thus began a journey that would span decades.
For the next 20 years, my ability to use computers, and my love for their abilities to help us express ourselves more readily and to larger audiences, continued to captivate me and motivate the direction of my life in surprising ways. Their evolution soon outpaced my programming skills, which never really advanced past BASIC, but I continued to avidly study them, and upgraded my own machines regularly, using them in every aspect of each hobby and career. I was deeply inspired by Stewart Brand and the WELL’s philosophy of computers as a means of liberating human creativity by giving more people access to means of production, breaking up the monopolies that were held by large corporations on producing and distributing what we now might call “content” and allowing ordinary people access to new channels and mechanisms to make things.
Personally, I used computers to create music and make multiple track recordings of songs that had been trapped inside me and could now be liberated using this technology in the form of a Commodore 64 and began to log onto BBSes and interact with other hobbyists. Professionally, I started my first business at the age of 16 with my best friend and created video graphics titles and effects for small video productions using the Amiga 2000 and a Video Toaster. Throughout college, computers finally did help with homework as I drafted term papers while messing around with my university’s VAX cluster and contacting high school buddies through email for the first time. My comfort with computers landed me my first real full time job with a paycheck after college, when I went to work as a special clerk for the Love Canal Trial in 1990, when I was 21, using their fancy new, 20-lb “luggable” computers with plasma displays to track and manage daily trial transcripts and exhibit indexes. A few years later, when the Internet first emerged, as I was in the midst of my doctoral work in philosophy and applying my BASIC coding skills once again to creating an iterated prisoners dilemma simulation to the question of altruism and evolution, I surrendered again to my passion for computers in embarking into the topic of my eventual thesis: The Ontology of Cyberspace.
That book first embodied in print the ideas I had been working on for years, inspired by my computer hacker mentality and by my studies of property and economics as a PhD student in Law/Philosophy. This and my next two books made a three part argument against monopolies on ideas in favor of liberating all expressions, and generally against intellectual property because it is an inefficient (and ultimately unjust) way to allocate resources. Moreover, unlike physical property, the realm of intellectual property lacks the metes and bounds of real property warranting claims of ownership. Like the ethos that inspired the early pioneers in PCs and networks, who often questioned the theory behind intellectual property monopolies, and built tools that directly threatened them, I searched for ways to use computers to empower individuals to create unfettered by stale authority. My graduate studies, and my writing had taken off from the thesis that Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto explored in his books and work about property and freedom, that granting individuals ownership frees their creativity through better access to capital.
de Soto’s work on freedom and private property helped eviscerate the Maoist Shining Path’s hold on the poor in Peru, as the government adopted his ideas and expanded their private property regime. He argued and acted upon the idea that there is a vast wealth of capital in the world that remains inaccessible to the people most closely associated with it and likely to utilize it productively. He has argued that what traps most of this capital is the roadblocks between people’s possession of land and ownership, generally due to inefficient or unjust barriers created by states and customs. To liberate that capital, and lift the very poorest people out of poverty, states need to make it much easier for people to own the property they productively use. He has made it his mission through his Institute for Liberty and Democracy to educate and help reform land registration systems around the world to make it easier for people to borrow against land they actually occupy and improve, and take ownership of that land, so that poorest people on earth can access trapped capital and unleash their creativity.
Intellectual property was for a long time a puzzle for me, specifically how to fit it into a schema of productive capital without unjust or un-natural monopolization. I readily accept a natural, grounded relation of persons to physical property, as de Soto’s work in land ownership recognizes implicitly. Ideas and expressions are an entirely different problem. As well, I wondered if intellectual property ownership was necessary or efficient in allocating resources or providing access to productive capital. In the second two books of what I call my IP Trilogy, I worked through these issues in relation to two emerging technologies: nanotechnology and genetic science. In my book Innovation and Nanotechnology, I argued that when objects become as easy to reproduce as digital movies, it will become inefficient to try to enforce copyright laws, and unnecessary. In fact, I argued, the artificial state monopolies afforded by copyright and patents are unnecessary to promote innovation, and can stifle it. Moreover, these laws are not grounded in possession, since ideas are unlike physical objects and land and cannot be bounded, not without interfering with grounded rights, like the rights to free thought and expression.
Having considered IP law in general, I turned the issue of gene patenting, which had been a little known but highly profitable practice for a few companies. Notably, Myriad, a Utah company, had patented the genetic mutation markers associated with increased susceptibility to breast and ovarian cancers, the so-called BRCA1 and 2 genes. Because they held a patent on these mutations, and because at that time no testing for those markers could be done without reproducing the patented genes, no other company could test patients for this gene. Myriad could thus charge $3000 USD for the test without any competition. Myriad made billions from this patent on something that is found in nature, and which is not man-made. In Who Owns You? I argued that patents over parts of nature were unjust. Patents were created to protect the creative products of human minds, not parts of nature. Natural laws and products could not be claimed under our the ontology of property I had been discovering and describing. Serendipitous was the fact that shortly after my book was published, the ACLU sued Myriad in a case that went to the US Supreme Court, who unanimously ruled that such patents were contrary to the purposes of patent law, and held them invalid.
Cyberspace, nanotechnology, and naturally occurring genes, I had come full circle, from artifacts to nature, I had described a world in which intellectual property was stifling innovation, and given reasons to argue that such laws were, in general, unjust based upon my theory of the grounding of property rights in “brute facts” of possession and labor. I strongly believed, as an increasing number of thinkers have come to conclude, that to truly unleash creativity, to provoke the creation of new works and goods, and to liberate trapped capital thoroughly, we needed to move away from the crutch of artificial monopolies and allow creativity and competition to flourish in a free market of ideas and creation. In every case, ensuring that the means of production are in the hands of potential creators, new, trapped capital can be unleashed. The internet, whose emergence once seemed to herald the coming of such liberation, had meanwhile, in the time between the launch of the World Wide Web as I was writing my dissertation, and the end of gene patents in 2013, become largely another monopolists’ tool for usurping the means of production from the masses. What many of us hoped would allow us to turn creativity for an unhindered engine for creative expression and wealth for all, we being used to concentrate the most precious and once-private aspects of ourselves into the new most valuable commodity: data.
The past ten years of growth of the internet have obscured its once liberating promise. It has become largely a platform for commodities, still produced mostly centrally, and by a few monopolists, as well as, somewhat nefariously, a tool for the commodification of people themselves, mostly consumers, and mostly without their understanding or knowledge. In sum, instead of freeing people to create and thrive, the modern internet excels as a tool to let them be bought and sold, and their most minute, precious details, data about their lives and loves, is the most valuable part of this new supply chain. Then along came again a promise for a new mechanism of freedom in the form of blockchains. Poorly understand and rarely embraced now for their most liberating features due to the ensuing climate of greed that surrounded their development of late, blockchains nonetheless embody an element of de Soto’s insight and promise for liberation through access to capital: the ability to create a title.
A title to land confers an enhanced social status to the brute fact of possession. One can occupy land, improve it, operate a business on it, all without some legal title granted by a state. This is done regularly in the developing world. The trapped capital is in the inability of such productive occupiers of land to borrow against it, for without the indicia of ownership of a state, no bank will lend money given the lack of a legal means of lien against that property, and no cure for default. A title is just a record that is difficult to fake, registered with a central authority. The problem has historically been that those central authorities have thus far made it too difficult for the poorest to access the bureaucracies around gaining a title, and so many trillions of USD worth of potential capital have remained inaccessible to those who may otherwise be productively eking out a living on land their families may even have occupied for generations. central authorities have been needed for cadastral land registration because, until now, they were the best way to guarantee authenticity and back, by the power of force, a just claim. Blockchains are ledgers, like land registries are records, but they can ensure the authenticity of their entries by a distributed network, and may help avoid the corruption of centralized ledgers such as those run by states in the developing world, where bribery, nepotism, favoritism or worse may inject itself into the process and favor some one or group over another’s claim. Tokens stored on blockchains can be titles, acknowledging ownership in a decentralized network without the need for a central authority.
de Soto has recognized the potential for blockchains to help further his goals, and has embarked on both theorizing and ventures relating to the use of blockchains, particularly for legal title to land. In fact, the very best applications of blockchains have all been similar, with Bitcoin being a prime example, where money itself has been extracted from a centralized, corruptible authorities domain of control and distributed in a trustless network. In the autumn of 2016, having moved on from the injustice connected to others owning our genes to the question of how we can properly assert some control over the same, it became obvious to me that blockchains could be used to solve several similar problems relating to our relationship to the data in our own bodies, and provide a mechanism of title over something that could not otherwise be “owned”: our DNA. Ecstatic with this insight, and having long taught bioethics cases such as the Henrietta Lacks case (whose unique cancer cells helped forge billion dollar industries and create new drugs and treatments, but who died in poverty, never knowing), the promise of blockchain to help unleash a wealth of trapped capital by vesting people with title to themselves, and to simultaneously help propel a new age of scientific discovery prompted me in a new direction, similar to that of de Soto.
Finally, it seems, computer technology is again promising to usher in that holy grail we believed it would: complete access to the means of production beyond the corruption or control of centralized authorities. Blockchains depend on no single policy maker save the programmer, and needs only consensus to keep them going or alter their courses. No centralized authority could pervert them, and they can provide a community with proof of ownership, more trustworthy perhaps than could be provided by a corruptible, political body. our own bodies, and even our own minds, both of which we had been renting out to the new mass media and data monopolists in exchange for convenience, could again come under our control, if only we could summon the will and the well-conceived technological platforms to do so. Over the last two years, a flood of well-described plans and bright shiny efforts to bring about this change, to use blockchains as the means of liberation they promise to be, have been announced. Only a few have so far succeeded, and there is a long way to go. But it is a start.
When the inevitable greed that infused this first wave of blockchain hype fades away, companies and projects that built for the right reasons, in the spirit of the techno-anarchic utopians of the 60s and 70s, will begin to provide for us the means to take back control of ourselves, and to ween ourselves from the grip of the data monopolists. Alternative media, social and otherwise, whose transparency is etched in the ledger of immutable blockchains, markets and distributed banks, and registries of our own data, that we control and direct in ways only we ourselves approve and profit by, will begin to emerge. This was the goal we had when we founded EncrypGen, realized now in its functioning blockchain genomic market, the Gene-Chain, liberating researchers to interact directly with anonymous data owners intent on both helping science, and being owners of themselves and their own data. Disrupting the monopolists who, preying on ill-informed people getting tested to find their heritage, were often either oblivious to the resale of their genetic data, or just too poorly educated about what that meant to properly care.
No more. These engines of liberation, assembled with blockchains as their means of title, distributed across networks instead of centralized in one corruptible authority, can help us finally use networks again for good. Let the new age of ownership begin.
Dr. Koepsell is the founder of EncrypGen and author of numerous books. He can be reached at drkoepsell@encrypgen.com http://davidkoepsell.com
