"Think first, then make things” instead of “move fast and break things”. A new framing, sensitive to justice and equality, for the new internet of Web3
Scott Smith has featured here regularly as a futurist who puts technology firmly in the context of justice and equity, using scenarios and games to humanise and minimise their all-conquering ambition. No “solutionist” is Scott.
So it’s great to feature this new paper he’s written for the Stanford Social Innovation Review, with Lina Srivastava, titled “Web3 and the Trap of ‘For Good’: Because decentralization doesn’t necessarily mean redistributing power, Web3 must make values integral to the architecture”.
What Scott and Lina mean is that there’s a danger with Web3 - meaning blockchain, NFTs, DAOs, cryptocurrency and all - that it comes at us from a wild set of angles, much of it extractive and exploitative, and we aren’t taking the chance to bake some ethics into its services from the start.
The article is a clearly-written overview, and well worth digesting. But we wanted to pick out two aspects. One are some examples of how Web3 tries to act “for good” and fails miserably. And the second is their list of ethical “Do’s” and “Don’ts” for Web3 design, which will ensure that justice and equality will be coded into the core of these services.
The wrongfootedness of Web3 “for good” ventures is itemised in three examples below:
Charity Water’s offer to turn your crypto donation immediately into fiat currency… and then use that to fund clean water projects, without any mention of the energy required that erodes the environment
The tone-deafness of the infamous “Homeless Hotspots” of 2012’s SXSW Interactive… Too many of these early initiatives crudely appropriate the pain of others as “content” and end up as nothing less than poverty porn on a distributed ledger.
Take Floydies, an NFT project that purported to be about expressing solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. It was, however, nothing short of racist exploitation of George Floyd’s image for the creators’ own profit and aggrandizement. The NFTs were eventually delisted from OpenSea.
Another example is SaveTigray.net, a series of NFTs of images of the ongoing conflict and massacre in Ethiopia. The group behind this effort originally planned to create NFTs of fair trade art produced by women artisans in Tigray, but war conditions hindered those plans and they converted to selling NFTs of images of people in distress from the conflict. Whether any funds have been raised through these sales for the community at risk is difficult to determine. Regardless, the underlying image and the NFTs based on it are paternalistic and disempowering to the local population.
In another more recent example, the AP placed an iconic image of a rubber boat carrying migrants across the Mediterranean Sea in their NFT marketplace, to raise funds for their own non-profit newsroom. The Mediterranean is essentially a mass grave for migrants from East and North Africa, the Middle East, and beyond. The AP’s announcement on the same day as Russia’s 2022 attack on Ukraine—an invasion that predictably has caused the displacement of millions of refugees—was met with criticism of profiteering and exploitation. The AP took down the ad.
“The world doesn’t have time for these kinds of projects”, quip Smith and .Srivastava. But as they often say in this piece, it’s an emerging, explosive field. Is there straightforward advice that Web3 developers can take to avoid delegitimating themselves entirely?
Here’s where the authors set down their massively useful Do’s and Don'ts:
Don’t:
Don’t ignore or try to sidestep Web3’s inherent energy consumption problem. The downstream impacts of Web3 hit vulnerable populations the hardest now and in the future. Until this critical issue is fundamentally and concretely addressed, Web3 will continue to export environmental damage into the future and push not just ourselves, but next generations as well dramatically closer to irreversible climate catastrophe.
Don’t create human offsets as a way of absolving negative externalities your work creates. Social impact isn’t an indulgence framework to be used to counterbalance other negative impacts Web3 projects create.
Don’t create new financial risks for already at-risk populations. Pushing the poor, precarious, underbanked, or otherwise economically vulnerable groups into greater uncertainty by introducing volatile, speculative financial instruments into their economies may do far more harm than good. People who live in precarity don’t have the privilege of HODLing for promised gains.
Don’t impose new technologies on populations who already suffer from historical tech debt. Technology colonialism is rife with examples of friendly airdrops of new innovations into communities that can’t afford to maintain them long-term. Security vulnerabilities emerge rapidly even in the most advanced user groups.
Don’t use technology to reduce or eliminate the exposure of “donors” to the reality of the causes they are supporting. While this might be the intent of your initiative, this is highly likely to be an unintended outcome unless the donor is also informed about the need or crisis they hope to contribute to improving.
Don’t support poverty porn, even if it’s packaged in an NFT. This is particularly critical when images of suffering or vulnerability are appropriated without the explicit and informed consent of the creator or the portrayed.
Do:
Leverage current social impact frameworks and networks that have been designed by activists and advocates with lived experience of the harms they are addressing.
Demand the transparency promised by the technology and its enthusiasts: Audit, audit, audit. Verify, verify, verify.
Demand the privacy and security for—and informed and affirmative consent of—community members who the technology is meant to support.
Examine whether immutability and “smart” are desirable features in the context of the communities you’re trying to help.
Call out harmful or “social-washed” projects, in meetings, conferences, panels, and on your platforms.
Support human rights activists around the world who are exploring how to leverage the benefits of distributed ledgers for privacy, protections, and verification/attribution
Listen to and design for and with—or step aside for—those who are historically marginalized and calling for change.
Invest in “laboratories of worldmaking,” a concept defined by Olivier Jutel in his conversation with Evgeny Morozov of The Crypto-Syllabus. The entirety of our global societal issues require us to think about what it’s going to take to transform towards shared prosperity, justice, and equity. We don’t have the solutions, processes, or communities of practice built yet. As Jutel says in that same interview, “We have to embrace experimentation as an acknowledgment of our lack of answers at the moment.” Set up, support, or participate in this larger inquiry.
Keep learning, exploring, and asking questions: We’re at a point where we can no longer afford to ignore the very basic mechanics of distributed ledger technologies/the blockchain space. These have to be taught and learned if we’re going to have a chance to stem the wave of the major Web 2.0 entities taking advantage.