# Democracy needs permissionless publishing with incentives for truth.

Information is the most powerful force in organizing large human groups. It drives almost all human behavior. Even governments, corporations, and other powerful organizations cannot make people do what they want without spreading information.

As Thomas Jefferson described it in 1787:

> ...and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

Consider your childhood: you may have lived to be far into the double digits of your life before you even see concrete existence of the state at all. Yet, the passage of information tells you of its power far earlier. Even with a monopoly on force, the state exists more through the echoes of information flow than in any concrete, tangible form. To take this even further, consider the lives of those in regions claimed by multiple nations. In such circumstances, it is often easy to live one's life forgetting the existence state that is less respected by the people. Without control over information, the power of the state barely exists at all. Even a state backed by an enormous army is powerless against a public of millions that disbelieve its legitimacy.

A final example, if the reader will allow me to belabor the point: In 1917, what was amongst the first buildings seized by the Bolsheviks? The radio towers. In 2016, what was a first target of the Turkish Coup attempt? CNN Türk, the local TV news station.

Possessing knowledge is certainly powerful, but controlling the flow of knowledge is far greater.

The mission of Arweave is to democratize this flow, such that all are given an equal chance to speak to those that desire to listen. It is our hope that this system will allow important information to rise, regardless of the power structures of the physical world.

As I see it, humanity has been in the midst of an exponential increase in the power of communications technology since the invention of writing and printing. First, books began to be distributed, and many learnt to read. Then, the Gutenberg press made publishing cheaper -- and the knowledge spread further. Soon there was radio, which led to near-instantaneous passage of knowledge, followed by television, which increased its detail and emotive depth.

As the evolution of communications technology has emerged, the world has also experienced an unprecedented shift towards democracy. As information spreads faster, and freer, it seems that the regions it reaches generally shift towards more democratic, fair societies.

Nonetheless, even in the world of ubiquitous television media -- and even in countries where speech is only marginally legally inhibited -- the spread of ideas was still relatively controlled. In countries all over the world -- whether by top-down order of the government, or by the dispersion of capital -- a relatively small number of people generally chose the views that were to be broadcasted. Typically, in authoritarian countries these decisions were carefully controlled by the dictator, and in freer societies they were formed by two (occasionally three or more smaller) cliques. To paraphrase Noam Chomsky: in free societies, cliques formed around the communications mediums, because people hire and promote those who have thoughts that are like their own. Over a long-enough period, those with outside beliefs are simply not in the room to voice them -- or for them to be magnified.

The next major evolution of communications technology was the internet: a computer protocol that has connected >60% of the global population, at virtually unlimited speeds. Initially, to publish on the internet required a server -- an investment worth a few minimum wage hours a month in western countries. Soon, even this barrier was torn down. In the mid-2000s we witnessed the birth of social networks: a system of _nearly_ peer-to-peer media, that allowed _almost_ anyone to speak, if they desired to.

Today it is hard to find anyone who does not believe that social media has transformed the world. It is widely credited with precipitating the uprisings of the 'Arab Spring' in 2011, which brought down numerous authoritarian dictators. The rise of numerous outsider candidates in the west have also bben attributed to its spread.

The transition to truly peer-to-peer media is still underway. While the wider scope of knowledge that it has made available has already begun to replace legacy mass media, it has hit two fundamental snags:

1. The primitive means of surfacing new information to the group, in a peer-to-peer manner, has often incentivized the production of _eye catching_ information, rather than _factual_ information.

2. Sometimes excused by the above, the neutrality of the servers on which the social media sites are hosted has been corrupted. Just as in the older forms of mass-media, users of social media sites are now rarely exposed to ideas far outside the beliefs of the admins of the domains.

Arweave, I sincerely hope, is a solution to the latter problem. Permafacts aims at solving the former.

The Arweave network is a provably neutral protocol for permanent data storage. It allows anybody to speak over both space and time, for the minimal viable cost. As long as you can reach an Arweave node that is willing to accept your transaction -- and there are hundreds to choose from, distributed across the world -- you are guaranteed a right to speak.

Permafacts is a new experiment in helping to incentivize speech on the Arweave protocol that is both truthful and relevant.

Permafacts works like this:
1. The developer of this app has published its code to Arweave. They cannot revoke or change this version, but they can issue new versions. You cannot be forced to upgrade. This means that *nobody* controls this platform now, even the creators themselves.
2. *Anybody* is allowed to post their beliefs to this neutral journal. No individual editor exists to change or remove it. Once posted, your article is stored in dozens of locations around the world, without centralized management or orchestration.
3. If they like, users of the site can choose to support or oppose articles with their capital. Each time someone votes, the cost of the next token in that direction increases. When a voter believes the price is too high for one side of the debate, they can cash in their support or objection, leading to a potential profit or loss. A small quantity of the funds placed on the 'support' side of the market are transfered to the post's author.
4. Finally, the recent articles submitted to the journal are ordered by their 'support' minus 'opposing' votes on the homepage.

The result of this mechanism is a journal ranked by the the market's belief in information's truthiness and relevance. It rewards authors for writing truthful posts that add to the conversation, and places a decentralized hivemind, orchestrated purely by code, as the publication's editor.

There will likely be many revisions to this structure along the way, but the game has begun. The next phase of communications media is on the horizon: open, permissionless publishing, with incentives to uncover the truth. I am honored to be its third author.

_Thanks to Tate Berenbaum and GPT-3 for providing feedback on this piece._