cryptographic history

Just like the food we consume is fuel for our body which effectively dictates our biological actions, the information we consume is fuel for our mind which effectively dictates our life-oriented actions. The information we consume from the very onset of our life dictates our beliefs and in extension our actions. The diversity of information across the world manifests in the form of diverse individuals with diverse belief systems and diverse purpose-driven actions. Just like how a healthy food diet is essential for our biological functioning, a healthy information diet is essential for our broader life functioning. Humans are essentially driven by narratives or stories which is information that has not been objectively perceived in real time but can still be visually constructed in the mind on listening to an abstract narrative which possesses this powerful ability to strongly influence our actions where different narratives influence very different actions. The power of narratives or stories is what has evidently given homo sapiens i.e. humans a staggering edge over other species as theorized by Professor Yuval Harari in his bestselling book Sapiens which I have covered in more detail in another article - world of inter-subjective realities. Narratives are powerful as they can influence collective action among a large group of people especially more so in the internet era where narratives can easily travel across geographical borders in seconds and thereby instantly enable unionization on an international scale. Many powerful narratives are constructed on the backs of history which cannot be directly and objectively perceived but nevertheless influence very crucial elements of our lives like our religious or political beliefs. Narratives are crucial as they enable collective action which has enabled a lot of the progress that we have witnessed over the years but the issue with narratives arises with how narratives can be selectively and untruthfully manipulated to serve selfish and unfair agendas. We live in a world that is plagued with information asymmetry where small centralized organizations (governments and media companies) wield disproportionate power to control narratives that direct the beliefs and actions of the rest of the world. The centralized organizations effectively control our history where they can do a wide variety of things from rewriting and fabricating history to selectively choosing and omitting different pieces of history in order to effectively frame their required narratives. In such cases the narratives are far from the objective truth which makes this a matter of deep concern as these narratives in spite of being corrupted still end up directing our beliefs and in turn the actions we undertake. Bulk of the narratives which consciously or subconsciously direct our lives may be far from the truth and the very subjective nature of narratives is often why we can have extremely inconsistent and conflicting views on the very same topics of history. Scientific narratives are more resistant to corruption as they can be objectively verified through independent experiments and be intuitively reasoned out through first principles. The issue lies with the hard-to-verify narratives outside the sphere of science which is highly susceptible to dangerous manipulation and the very consequential adverse effects that follow. History, as we have established so far, is extremely crucial as it ultimately dictates our beliefs and actions in this world and it is only fair that the available historical information of the world is entirely accessible for all, unbiased, manipulation-resistant and most importantly truthful from which individuals can then construct objective narratives to effectively direct their beliefs and actions.

Now that we have outlined the pressing issues in regard to narratives and history, what can be the way around this very structural deficiency in our current system? As mentioned earlier, the root of narrative corruption arises due to disproportionate power possessed by small biased centralized organizations and thereby the antidote to the issue in discussion lies in decentralization. I came across a very interesting book called ‘The Network State’ which is interestingly a freely available and rather voluminous cloud-based book that gets dynamically updated if and when there is new information to share. The book is authored by Balaji Srinivasan - an American born Indian academician serendipitously turned entrepreneur then turned investor whose primary areas of work lie in genetics and cryptocurrency. The Network State is a radical idea that the author proposes in order to mitigate a lot of the inherent systemic deficiencies of the present world (including the issue we covered earlier) and thereby enable limitless progress for the human race. I would like to briefly cover what the Network State exactly is later on this article but first I would like to focus on how the issue of history and narrative corruption can be mitigated through decentralization as proposed in the Network State. Decentralization relies on a technology called blockchain (which I have covered in a previous article - interesting blockchain applications) where important information take for example monetary transactions are verified through certain tamper-resistant protocols by independent verifiers who can be anyone (which is what cryptocurrency essentially is) rather than a singular central authority like a bank as seen in the case of conventional fiat currency. Information in a decentralized network has the same visibility to all the constituents in the network unlike centralized networks where only a central authority has ultimate visibility of the entire information and can ultimately control how this information gets transmitted to the rest of the network. So, the solution to mitigate the issue of narrative manipulation by centralized organizations is to use blockchain technology to do to history information what blockchain has already done to monetary information as observed in the case of cryptocurrency. The blockchain is decentralized and tamper resistant as it uses a mathematical encryption process called cryptography. In a decentralized network, every constituent possesses their own private and public key which are equivalent to usernames in a conventional network and are nothing but long numerical codes that are correlated with another through a mathematical function known as hash function. The public key is what is visible to everyone in the network whereas the private key is only visible to the particular individual who possesses it. A constituent in a network can log information onto a blockchain only by using their respective private key after which the information logged (once verified by the network) will be publicly available on the blockchain and visibly linked to the public key of the individual who logged the information. The private key is an encryption of the public key which is produced by using the previously mentioned hash function. So while the public key can be easily computed from the private key, the reverse is not computationally feasible due to cryptography (at least with conventional computers but decryption maybe possible with quantum computers if and when they become a feasible reality, which I have also covered in another article - quantum interference manipulation) which is why the constituents in the network cannot back track the private key of others from their public key which is universally visible on the blockchain, in order to falsify information logs on the blockchain through another constituent’s public key. The verification process in the blockchain allows for decentralized verification by anyone in the network and the inherent verification protocols under blockchain technology make it very difficult for any particular constituent of the network to manipulate or falsify information. The entire information on the blockchain can be viewed and stored on independent servers (provided they have the resources) of any constituent in the network. So, what we have in the end, is cryptographically verifiable manipulation-resistant history i.e. cryptographic history which is the need of the hour especially in an age of increasing information asymmetry and misinformation which can have very unfair negative consequences for the human race as a whole. Cryptographic history is actually a base element in a much broader vision of the Network State as illustrated in the book. So, what exactly is a Network State? It is a modified version of a country which rather than uniting people under the involuntary hood of geography and culture unites people on the basis of voluntary ideologies. A Network State consists of a bunch of citizens geographically spread across the world who are collectively and voluntarily aligned on a certain ideology. In a Network State, the inherent gaps in geography are bridged by technological conduits such as social network, video conferencing and XR i.e. augmented, virtual and mixed reality. A Network State has a leader much like any other centralized governance state (typically the founder of the Network State) but it still heavily leverages decentralized blockchain technology to help get rid of a lot of the inefficiencies and malignancies associated with the current centralized government systems through measures such as automatically enforceable blockchain-enabled digital smart contracts based on an aligned constitution codified as per the guiding ideology of the Network State which takes place of the conventional lawyer-court dependent legal system in current nation states and cryptocurrency in the place of centralized tamper-susceptible fiat currency of nation states. A Network State can engage in collective actions such as crowdfunding where it can purchase real estate for the Network State to help give a physical skeleton to its digital structure where the Network State citizens can assemble in-person if and when needed. Once a Network State reaches sufficient scale in terms of population, cumulative real estate and cumulative income, it can push for getting diplomatic recognition from existing countries and thereby enable important inter-country interactions like trade and foreign investments thereby achieving an equivalent status of the current nation states we know. Network States offer freedom of choice where people can smoothly and peacefully opt out of citizenship if there is a misalignment of ideologies and opt in to other Network States built around different ideologies that they find alignment with. Most importantly, all types of relevant information concerning the Network State is stored on the blockchain post cryptographic verification which is ultimately the cryptographic history of that Network State and what you end up getting is a propaganda free Nation where the truth is truly democratized.