Demystifying blockchains the MIT Media Lab way
I was set on Helsinki as destination #1, when two days before my departure I was suddenly presented with the opportunity to join the MIT Media Lab for their workshop in Berlin. With flights, accommodation and ferry connections already booked, I had to make some sweeping changes to my itinerary — I couldn’t give up on a week in Berlin with some improbably smart people. Plus, I have been a big fan of the MIT Media Lab ever since my housemate Silas walked in with a stack of XO Laptops 10 years ago.
The MIT Media Lab set out to bring its Modus Operandi to Berlin this August, running a week-long workshop of five different themes: Playful Machines That Make Music, VR/AR learning experiences, Technology for communication with the Deaf, Machine learning for creative AI, and Blockchain and the Internet of value. I joined the blockchain track as I have a keen interest in privacy and next-gen projects that can change the way our data economy currently operates.

From August 12 to August 17, a group of twelve researchers, students, programmers, consultants and entrepreneurs were led by Neha Narula, Tess Rinearson and Tadge Dryja on creative ideas involving blockchain to empower local communities to tap into the Internet of Value.
Blockchain the MIT Media Lab way?
If you are thinking ‘blockchain project’ means we were all sitting behind our laptops, hoodies up and green text scrolling down the screens, you haven’t factored in that this is the MIT Medial Lab running the show. The Lab operates at the intersection of arts, science, and technology and connecting academic fields as well as the people working in them is the a centerpiece of its philosophy. Therefore, our first order of business was finding some inspiration in the local community, which included a visit to Tomás Saraceno’s studio and a meet-and-greet in Berlin’s world-famous blockchain scene. Starting with a blank page, we established what we wanted to achieve and which problems we thought would be worth addressing as our efforts were firmly guided by a human-centered design approach. From there, we were able to work out a number of concrete HMWs (“How Might We”). They did help us stay focused on the problem space without jumping to a premature conclusion. Throughout the framing process, the set of core values we had established helped us as a guide through our decision making process. The main problems we identified included the complexity of blockchain projects, the difficulties to understand them, and how to make them more approachable for the public.

We hit a bit of a road block midway through, when we struggled to synthesize the identified problems and certain proposals into a definite way forward. At this point, what really helped was taking a step back and completely reverse our thinking. We always considered blockchain as a technology that must be used as a force for good. We turned that principle upside down and contemplated the most nefarious things we thought were possible with blockchains. It made us ask ourselves some very profound question. For example, we were puzzled by why the community exhibits a fervor that sometimes borders on the religious and a few debates we had witnessed surfaced arguments that seemed irreconcilable.
Blockchain as a concept emerged from setting up an alternative payment system, designed to eliminate the need to trust any third-parties. Going down the path of establishing a decentralized payment system can have immense economic valuable. Also, current electronic payment systems are built on ideas from the 1970s and have some deeply routed flaws, so the time may be ripe for alternatives. However, our modern economies are built on high levels of trust and designed to always increase cooperation across the globe. Is it better to assume that we are by default able and inclined to cooperate, or do we need a system that keeps any malevolent tendencies in check?
As these fundamental — to a degree theological — questions popped up, we reminded ourselves that it was one of our core values to have fun at the center of our approach. Also, there was no way we were going to make inroads on questions so deeply philosophical in just a few days. So, we came to a conclusion: We’d keep the fun centre-stage by working on a game that explores whether — when presented with the opportunity — we humans would opt to cooperate with each other or not. All of it would be backed by a blockchain for a tamper-proof record of every decision taken.
We present you: D.O.G. The Decentralized Ominous God.
D.O.G. is a blockchain based game about trust and betrayal. Upon encountering another player of the game, each player simply has a binary choice: between co-operating with each other or screwing each other over. If that sounds familiar, it is the classical Prisoner’s dilemma where cooperation makes everyone better off, but if both parties decide to defect, both loose.
We decided to split our efforts — some of us would work on a front-end for users to join the game in a browser, others were focusing on the ÐApp part, implementing the “Prisoners”’ play on the Ethereum blockchain, and the rest of the group was working on communicating our project at the Grand Finale. With respect to the interactive browser game, our choice fell on a Node.js server dishing out a lightweight front-end powered by jQuery (source code on Github!)

We certainly had a lot of fun building this little prototype and it put us on solid ground to build this into something more robust with time. Massive thanks to Tess, Tadge, and Neha, for supporting us every step of the way. While we won’t be able to free the blockchain space from all the paradoxes is exhibits, we do hope others will have a blast playing the game and who knows, maybe an interesting economic conclusion can one day be made based on the game.
What else did we learn from a week-long Media Lab experience? The collaborative nature was pivotal for us. By establishing values and goals from the outside, we made sure our decisions were transparent and firmly based on common ground. It makes it very easy to be awesome to each other and empower each other to reach a common goal. This helps to explain how impressive the outcome of the week really was. Without compromising this statement from my own biased view about our project, I can point with amazement at the outcome of the other teams, which actually managed turn a playground into a giant musical instrument, take people on a virtual experience of fleeing from East to West Berlin during the Cold War based on first-hand accounts of the ordeal, establish the world’s first attempt at building a public data set for sign language— an ImageNet for sign language in a way (see Sam’s account for more details)— as well as machines with a temper, that actually need kind encouragement to perform their tasks just like a human would, and thought experiments about artificial intelligence that impersonates people from our past (see Stefania’s story for more details).

