The De-Centralized Kingdom: 1
Silicon Valley, Pied Piper, Genaro Network and China
Two frequent questions: What’s my elevator pitch description for the Genaro Network? What’s it like working in a tech startup in China?
I could compare it to other blockchain platforms, but that isn’t much help if my interlocutor is already fuzzy on those. I could compare it to a “Summer’s Day” if I wanted, but would that do any good?
I know, maybe we’re the ‘Real life’ Pied Piper from HBO’s ‘Silicon Valley’! Both are startups, have an international team and want to solve problems related to storage and transfer and decentralization. There are other creeping signs. Fans of the excellent HBO show will know that season five, the most recent, was where Richard’s plan to create a “new internet” took flight and which ended up with a spate of key scenes set in “China”–which is ample excuse enough for me to talk about the show and what its like to work for a blockchain startup here, which I want to do in a number of articles of which this is the first.
This year in Genaro Network (this very moment, in fact) is all about the buildup to the testnet and mainnet launches, which like the “New Internet” described in the show will very much rely on a trusted system running simultaneously on nodes supplied by a community–and likewise are part of a plan to build a reworked structure for the web.
Then there’s the China overlap. Genaro Network is a blockchain project founded in Singapore and Shanghai, and is being developed by an expanding team (of which I am a part) in the latter city. Along the way through Silicon Valley season five we saw the launch of Pied Piper Coin and a whole dubious plotline involving the Chinese character, Jian Yang, with some classic Chinese-themed gags about overwork, manufacturing, copyright theft and smoking indoors.
We ended up with bad guy Gavin Belson running around “China” (actually it seemed to be a barely disguised Chinatown somewhere in California, to my disappointment) with his goons trying to find the den of Jian Yang as the latter worked with chain smoking coders to clone the Pied Piper platform.
In other words, watching the season from inside Genaro the list of themes could not have been more on the (digital?) money: cryptocurrencies, the changing face of commerce and culture in the ‘Middle Kingdom’, technological progress and a ‘new’ decentralized web. Yet. Some key differences were also present.
Despite flirting deeply with the ideas, the writers don’t have Pied Piper actually become a “blockchain company” as such but rather creators of something like a global, decentralized and organized cloud computer with compression algorithms strong enough to let everything online run on the new system. This reads very much like one half of Genaro’s plan for a ‘Dual-Strata Architecture’, the other layer in Genaro’s vision being a public blockchain that will provide secure access to the encrypted data and the building of DApps integrated with the chain.
The word “Blockchain” itself is only mentioned once in season five, briefly, in a throwaway joke by a newscaster (Bloomberg’s real life Asian-American presenter Emily Chang doing a cameo) after she’s done interviewing Richard and the wonderfully creepy prepschool boy manager, Jared.
“Coming up next, the moment every parent dreads: How to talk to your kids about the blockchain.”
So talking to your kids about the blockchain is not something to relish. By which we may infer the topic is probably even thornier than the cycles of nature to explain. Perhaps also explaining why the showmakers didn’t want to shove the plotline entirely down the confusing rabbit hole of madness and potential practicality that the blockchain world has become. And also why once they do bring it into the plot in the form of the crypto-economy they can’t resist the zeitgeisty pull–and so it floats towards the center of the story! Pied Piper Coin thus becomes one key to Richard’s eventual (ritual, as it happens at the end of every season) salvation. And it’s my favorite character, Gilfoyle, the deadpan Canadian Satanist, who comes out as the character most invested in cryptocurrencies.
Of course it would be Bertram Gilfoyle, the stand-in for every sinister aspect of nerd culture on the show, who would push CEO Richard towards joining the crypto rebellion. The ‘mythical’, heroic, narrative in the collective mind around cryptocurrencies begins with the Satoshi whitepaper but moves quickly towards the libertarian subversion of the Silk Road website. Silk Road, whose creator has just lost a final appeal to double life sentence, was a deliberate snub to authority that all “cypherpunk” anarchists, even if they weren’t interested in its wares, found entrancing. Gilfoyle, who declares that his only abiding beliefs are in “Medical marijuana, the biblical Satan as a metaphor for rebellion against tyranny, and mother f**king goddamn cryptocurrency”, is perfect to represent all this.
Loving the defiance of digital money Gilfoyle manages to bring Pied Piper into the charge at moment of funding crisis when their on-off Venture Capital backer tries to force Pied Piper to immediately carry advertising. (The endless maguffin of funding/no funding is, in my opinion, one of the biggest weaknesses of the show’s narrative. More development of secondary characters, such as Gilfoyle, would be a better way to go, I feel). In accord with the wonderful meta-style of the show’s promotional stuff online, you can actually read the full powerpoint with which Gilfoyle attempts to persuade Richard that crypto is the future.
And what of Jian Yang, the sometimes guileless and sometimes insolent Chinese coder whose attempt to clone the Pied Piper technology becomes the second main branch of the story? Predictably, people have grumbled in the past about the apparently politically incorrect (or in the current buzzword, “toxic”) depictions of the Valley’s Asian immigrant codeworkers.
According to the actor and standup comedian playing the part, Jimmy O. Chang, the character started out getting bullied but graduated to becoming deliberately mean, an arc which takes him out of the one-joke vaudeville of racial stereotype. “He’s an *sshole, but he’s a well rounded *sshole.” Chang also talks of enjoying doing Jian Yang’s strong mainland mandarin accent–having grown up speaking Shanghainese, Cantonese and Potunghua, he was able to offer up a selection to the directors. The comedian’s parents resisted his initial decision to be a comedian, coming as he does from “a traditional family that doesn’t believe in the arts and becoming an actor.” This scenario has a faint echo in the plot of co-star Kumail Nanjiani’s successful autobiographical film The Big Sick, in which the immigrant Pakistani family reject every aspect of their son’s lifestyle, including his desire to do comedy. In Silicon Valley, each of the central characters receives quite a bit of care from the writers. This includes depicting Asian characters in a way that includes realistic traits, suggesting subtle understanding of their experience while also making fun of cultural foibles–a difficult balance to achieve. Jian Yang has slowly emerged as an intriguing central figure and as an on/off antagonist to both the American startup’s CEO Richard and Gavin Belson.
The depiction of China in the show is limited to a street in a non-specific city somewhere, followed by the “hidden” coding space occupied by Jian Yang and a factory where Belson’s signature box is due to be made. Whether it was filmed in the U.S. or not, the sequence confused my mainland Chinese colleague 瞿文婷 (Qu Wenting), who said the traditional characters in signs made it seem like Hong Kong. The small scale of the streets also reminded her of a “third tier city” in somewhere like Anhui rather than a big tech center like Shenzen or Shanghai, which would be more likely. The humor deployed in the dialogue-based Chinese scenes is based mostly on some well worn clichés: Jian Yang wants to deliberately copy a host of American companies, not only Pied Piper, and when he looks like he might succeed the Chinese manufacturer immediately makes a parallel deal with him–Intellectual Property theft and unfair competition being the two points of greatest friction between East and West when two meet for business, in tech as elsewhere.
In fact, the Chinese tech space and blockchain in particular is an area charged with creativity and energy, with a community that is changing as it grows: companies like Bitmain, NEO, Qtum, BitFury, Huobi and (soon) Genaro are making serious interventions to how blockchain itself is understood and adopted. Genaro’s original consensus mechanism, combining PoS and SPoR, is one example of a serious attempt to solve one of the foremost hurdles inhibiting scaling and wider adoption of blockchain.
Perhaps more of Jian Yang, and a more realistic Chinese technology landscape, will appear in Season six of Silicon Valley.
In the meantime, in the next article I wish to pick up some of the themes raised here for a more detailed argument. Blockchain and crypto are designed to traverse the world, but local needs, different populations and skillsets and different spoken languages are also causing major areas of activity to be concentrated in places like China (which combines manufacturing power and cheaper energy with the digital talent to make a serious difference) and small but significant Estonia, in Europe, whose openness to things crypto has made it a focal point for new projects, investment and education.
How will the blockchain world work if platforms like Genaro and others form an Asian “pole” of influence, in balance with more European and U.S.-oriented poles?
To read up more on Genaro’s Dual-Strata Architecture and the community growing around it, and the imminent testnet launch, please check out:
