About This Session
Web 1.0 and 2.0 started out full of idealism, too. What is to prevent the decentralized web from being corrupted by profit, market domination, and bad actors? What is the normative or social layer we need to build alongside the tech? We’ll examine the set of principles the Decentralized Web community has crafted as an ethical north star. And we’ll hear from Prof. Nathan Schneider, about how human rights can be built into blockchain technology. Finally, we’ll meet Luandro Vieira, a developer working with traditional communities to build and use decentralized tools that are truly useful to their needs.
Nathan Schneider, an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he leads the
Media Enterprise Design Lab. His most recent book is Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition that Is Shaping the Next Economy.
Luandro Viera is the Distributed Systems Developer at Digital Democracy, working to empower native communities and their ways of life. From Pindo Abya Ayala (named Brazil by invaders), he has lived for the past 8 years in a maroon community located on the continent’s central plateau.
Luandro has a love for technology, in the whole sense of the word, but is very critical of the cultural practices that emerge from them, especially patriarchical ones. Together with neighboring original and traditional communities, Luandro has been working on an information and communication toolkit that is accessible to them and useful for the realities within their territories.
About This Series
The World Wide Web started with so much promise: to connect people across any distance, to allow anyone to become a publisher, and to democratize access to knowledge. However, today the Web seems to be failing us. It’s not private, secure, or unifying. The internet has, in large part, ended up centralizing access and power in the hands of a few dominant platforms.
What if we could build something better—what some are calling the decentralized web?
In this series of six workshops, we’ll explore the ways in which moving to decentralized technologies may enhance your privacy, empower you to control your own data, and resist censorship. Join us to hear from experts in the leading peer-to-peer technologies, from identity to data storage. We’ll see demonstrations of blockchains, cryptocurrency, NFTs, and decentralized storage projects in action. Learn how the decentralized web might yet create systems that empower individuals by eliminating central points of control.
This series is a partnership between Internet Archive, DWeb, Library Futures, and Metropolitan New York Library Council.
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