Recent news stories--arms transports, financial sanctions, largescale censorship and propaganda, military posturing and potential nuclear war--have brought to the forefront society’s failure in creating accountability for the decisions that affect billions of lives. Today’s news publishers follow in social media’s footsteps and play games that produce clicks rather than publishing the thought pieces and stories expected of them. The people in power want security for their position and will play any game, make any move, and say anything, that enables them to stay in power. The internet allows interactions at scale but the best way to monetize is by selling views and clicks on the platform. We are served games that extract our data rather than being provided information in ways that help us. If you have privacy concerns and would like to read about it, here’s a post I wrote about how blockchains offer greater privacy and security.

In this post, I want to scale down from the global community, zoom in to our interactions, and talk about how we might make our digital interactions mimic our physical, and identify when we are being gamed. In our communities, we interact without a threat of violence because we buy into the community where we live. We transact with the government through rent and taxes and try not to interact with those who don’t do the same. While we are free to communicate and discuss ideas, building products from those ideas and bringing the ideas to life requires freedom to transact. Transactions create trust in the eye of the consumer. The more transactions a company has with its community, the more trusted it is. The biggest companies are the ones that show proof of completing the most transactions, usually through earnings reports. But transactions are getting centralized and abstracted away from regular users, and Canada chose to freeze the banking rights of its citizens.

The hypothesis I pose to you is that capturing digital transactions using blockchains will help us identify games played around us and make interactions on the internet comparable to our interactions in the physical world. We will create digital communities where users can trust that the entity they interact with has skin in the game and believes in their product. We can decide where their values lie and how to interact with them by examining previous blockchain transactions following the money while keeping information private and encrypted. How we interact with each other will be enhanced by this trustless system that allows us to take ownership of our digital security.

Whenever we interact, you and I are engaged in a game. We decided how to play the game based on our previous interactions. For example, think about someone you’ve never met outside of work. You say hi when you see each other but never anything more. If that person decides not to wave to you one day, you might think that the game is over and you don’t need to play anymore or realize that there’s been a change in the game. See below for another depiction of how a game could play out at work.

We all play psychological games unconsciously when in social situations. Transactional Analysis (TA) in psychotherapy studies the games people play and the resulting interactions. TA says that everyone is in one of three ego states when interacting: Child, Parent, or Adult. Eric Berne’s 1964 book, Games People Play, describes our interactions as transactions in social games. It is worth a read for more insights and examples. In general, when we play the game of interactions, our ego states transact as we move through the conservation. Both parties need to have their final transactions in the Adult ego state to leave the game mutually. To avoid the game altogether, both parties must first be intimate with each other.

In social media, anyone can create new accounts and remain anonymous, and because of the lack of intimacy in anonymity, various ego states battle over gossip and news. Neither side relents in their arguments, so echo chambers form where people with similar ego states start other games. Additionally, arguments in the comments section may cancel jobs and damage livelihoods, causing more conflict as we engage without oversight or moderation. Ultimately, companies benefit by selling our interaction information to advertisers, so social media spreads posts that get the most interactions in their networks.

There are advantages to social media and the anonymity it provides, such as the widespread reach of memes that shape our culture. If we don’t know where the meme came from, we spread it without hesitation or games. Plus, since it’s on a centralized platform, the network will ensure reach. However, it’s almost impossible to moderate interactions on such large platforms as the costs get covered by advertisers who profit using click rates and view traffic. Instead, data is the transactional cost of interactions, and we lose privacy and real estate on our screens. Because the cost to interact is so abstract, the landscape is littered with bots and scams, causing verification to become increasingly difficult. Furthering the problem, verification processes in social media are also getting stricter, making it harder for smaller creators to gain their following using the same tools as previous generations.

The issue here isn’t with social media networks but the products that benefit from the lack of a trustless system. Companies game the system for views and clicks on their site so that they can, in turn, receive more advertising revenue. Almost every website that lets you interact for free sells that interaction data as their business model. In web3’s trustless system, we can ensure that the company we interact with doesn’t rely on ad revenue; instead, interactions become microtransactions when we add data to the blockchain and pay taxes, also called gas, to miners to verify the interaction data. And we can be assured that companies aren’t selling our transaction data since it’s publicly available to anyone with knowledge of blockchain technology.

The core belief system of web3 is that people can own items on the internet, so we form communities around products and partake in their development and discourse. Of the four beliefs listed above, web2 enables free and open communication, while web3 enables the other three. Communities will continue to use centralized platforms for communication, but the decentralized ledger of transactions will enhance the community surrounding it. When you have some free time, please read this fantastic thread of threads by Twitter superstar @zachxbt that captures the interactions of scammers who got caught thanks to a decentralized ledger and a community that understands how to interpret the data.

Twitter recently introduced NFT verification and has plans to add a tipping feature so that users can send ETH directly through their network, affirming the point by bringing the ability to represent trust to the masses visually. I believe that the rest of the social media platforms will follow Twitter’s lead. Instagram is already taking steps to include NFTs in its platform. The benefit is that we can verify that we are interacting with real people and determine whether they might be acting maliciously, shelling some poorly designed project, or hiding sponsors. See the below thread for an example of an NFT influencer who scammed her audience.

https://twitter.com/zachxbt/status/1493572811700387842?s=20&t=UVofeNZequCnPgbZOLaxsg

This kind of analysis provides insight into the community since people can now follow the money and see where people have skin in the game or don’t and are just shilling another project. Web3 enables digital communities by connecting people of similar beliefs, interests, and passions.

https://twitter.com/divine_economy/status/1498342119538413574?s=20&t=34oOBrESh4fx9EQu32Ks5g

Governments promise security for citizens by uniting values and beliefs in the physical world. Blockchains can provide a similar sense of security so that when we interact with each other, we can be sure that the other entities on the chain share our beliefs and values. Some compare blockchains to cities while others compare them to nations; we can see where the similarities come from, such as taxes, land, and property rights, and glean information about how they might affect on-chain entities.

The digital world is more interconnected than the physical; interactions without borders ensure everyone has a voice, but we can’t know who to trust, even with a verification badge. Blockchains help us take a step in the right direction by allowing freedom to transact and keeping an open ledger of all transactions. These basic primitives of blockchain technologies are the building blocks of communities built on trustless systems, with each entity choosing a community based on the beliefs of its ecosystem. NFTs and digital asset ownership will enable interaction on an unprecedented level.

I’m working on an application that tests this theory using cooking; see my post on it here. The decentralized blockchain is a key ingredient in the recipe for evolving ideas. When web development was complex, we gathered around the best “free” products, and ideas evolved through decentralized memes. As ideas matured, communities formed around centralized platforms that control how the ideas shape and mature. Web3’s principles are security and decentralization on the internet, enabling the transaction of ideas in the game of digital interactions and helping ideas evolve into a complex system as we form communities and work together to survive in the dangerous digital world.