How Blockchain can finally free us from manipulation by the elites.

Knowledge is freedom and ignorance is slavery — Miles Davis

We live in the Information Age, but more information has somehow led to less understanding

The global internet is in the middle of a remarkable transformation. The traditional approach of closed, centralized services is being quickly replaced with open, decentralized services, in industry after industry.

Where once one dealt only with trusted parties, now the magic of technology allows one to trade directly with strangers over the internet — without a middleman! — by trustless exchange.

Blockchain efforts, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Terra, etc., have proven the viability of crypto-ledgers and are now regularly trusted to conduct tens of billions of dollars in transactions. Indeed, much advancement has been made to decentralize the markets of money, finance, insurance, and even social media.

But while blockchain has been quite successful at storing “fast facts”, precious little of the current market offerings help users to understand what those facts mean.

Knowledge is humanity's primary means of survival

Importantly, the actions required for humans to thrive are primarily intellectual: in other words, all actions that drive rational value must first begin as ideas in the human mind.

Why? Because, whereas wolves have fangs, and cheetahs run fast, it is only through the acquisition of knowledge that humans can survive and flourish.

However, the acquisition of knowledge typically requires significant upfront costs, and whenever knowledge is lost, valuable energy must be spent to regain it.

As a result, schemes for the efficient storage and sharing of information have become common practice in human societies.

Some major watersheds in the evolution of information storage and sharing technologies include counting, language, writing, papyrus scrolls, books, the printing press, libraries, radio, TV, and the internet.

Centralization of knowledge leads to centralized control

We will focus on the one common solution most of us relied on before the internet, the classic library model. Libraries are where knowledge is centrally collected, analyzed, catalogued, stored, and shared, so this analogy will be very useful in our subsequent analysis.

This library model of information centralization is ideal whenever the primary data storage devices (e.g., books) are expensive to create and maintain. Having only one copy of each book, then, to be shared by all among a community of users, can be an extremely efficient means of knowledge exchange.

But knowledge is power, as the proverb has it, and those who possess it quickly learn that while beliefs may be manipulated, raw knowledge is too dangerous to leave in the hands of those over whom they wield power. To those in power, the centralization of knowledge is not just an efficiency — it is an opportunity.

After all, when seeking to censor forbidden knowledge, it is far easier to hide, vault, or simply burn the lone copy of a centralized book.

Just as an armory centralizes and controls the supply of weapons, and a bank centralizes and controls the supply of money, so too a library centralizes and controls the supply of knowledge.

While the originators of these institutions may not have intended or foreseen the potential abuse of these information technologies, it is virtually inevitable that power-seeking agents will seize these easily grasped controls. In the case of the library, a society’s information is the equivalent of its mind: seize the mind, and the body will follow.

Want to subjugate a group of people? Remove their access to validated knowledge. Want to hobble competitors or opponents? Make them have to relearn the same knowledge again and again, while your knowledge alone advances.

It is because of the power of knowledge that slaves and other historically suppressed peoples were not allowed to learn to read, that thought-provoking books have been burned, and that some of the world’s greatest libraries have been destroyed.

When the outlawing of reading is no longer feasible, would-be tyrants and their equivalent instead make the populace doubt that real knowledge is even possible at all.

There are at least two major ways to bring this about, the first supporting the second:

First, by flooding all standard information channels with overwhelming, contradictory, confusing information, all equally presented as confident knowledge.

And second, as a necessary consequence, by stoking the flames of skepticism, since everything now appears as propaganda, spin, sheer assertion, sophistry, and dogma.

How does one know anything?

The study of knowledge is a branch of philosophy called, “epistemology”.

The criteria that must be satisfied for anything to count as true knowledge (and the method by which it is produced, assessed, and confirmed), is what we might call our “epistemological method”.

In this way, philosophy aspires to enable individual agents of knowledge, “epistemic agents”, to distinguish fact from fiction, knowledge from belief, truth from falsity, and reality from illusion.

It is the oldest and most enduring philosophical problem: How can we know if things really are the way they appear? Each of us is, ideally, an epistemic agent, an individual seeker, consumer, producer, validator, and dispenser of knowledge.

In the present tidal wave of partly convincing contradictions, however, it is all too easy to doubt any given assertion, and thus all the easier for would-be authorities to insist, in pretentious but soothing tones, “Who are you to have an opinion on this topic? You are not qualified to disagree with what we tell you!”

Technically, however, they need never explicitly articulate that message, for it is a natural consequence of their general campaign message that one is ill-equipped to differentiate between equally-confidently-asserted truths and falsehoods.

Those in power know all too well that the autonomy of any epistemic agent is crippled by an overload of misinformation.

But reliable access to full knowledge is an absolute requirement for a free, fair, and functioning society.

For democracy to work, for informed citizens to vote rationally on important issues, epistemic agents must have all the relevant data in order to make informed, intelligent, rational decisions.

And they need to have easy access to the relevant data without having to curate it from among a sea of contradictory claims, hyperbole, spin, propaganda, and flat-out lies.

This requirement is especially true when it comes to the knowledge that is unpopular or being actively suppressed by powerful interests.

Decentralized knowledge validation is our blockchain solution to this seemingly intractable set of problems. For the first time, humanity has the power to wrest back knowledge from the grip of the powerful — even elites cannot edit a blockchain solution.

Unlike the hollow promises of Silicon Valley, Knowledgecoin represents a true decentralized utility that offers immutable, validated knowledge available to all people.

It is beginning to look more and more like blockchain may indeed save us all.

About the Authors:

Rick Repetti: Professor of Philosophy at CUNY, Vice President at the American Philosophical Practitioners Association (APPA), and Chief Philosophy Officer at Knowledgecoin.io.

Mark Gleason: Mark Gleason is a Chief Enterprise Architect, Venture Capitalist, and Board Member at Knowledgecoin.io.