TLDR: On the continuum of anonymity to authentication, there are three distinct neighborhoods of the internet that are emerging.
This should be a longer post, but it’s not my brainchild, so I won’t take credit for it or try to do it justice—I’ll just introduce the idea, and you can tell me what you think.
The theory is that the internet has an inevitable state that requires evolving into three neighborhoods.
The Three Neighborhoods of the Internet
Anonymous - There will always be a demand for an anonymous neighborhood of the internet. Whether for basic personal privacy, or for something more sinister like Silk Road, there will always a subset of the world that wants to or needs to operate anonymously. This neighborhood of the internet can be, and already is, powered by cryptography and the blockchain.
Pseudonymous - The pseudonymous neighborhood is where most of us live today. We follow one another on various platforms and we trust that we are who we say we are and that what we’re writing is in fact our own work. We enjoy meme accounts authored by unknown creators, we read Reddit threads and trust posts from obfuscated identities, and we follow influencers with perfectly curated and edited lives. Generally, we trust what we see and read, but it’s becoming increasingly rare to be absolutely sure that anything is truly as it seems.
Verified - The verified internet needs to be built, and is growing in demand every single day. Whether it’s something as archaic as the debate over trusting politicians and the media or the more recent issues of AI and large language models (LLM’s), developing and maintaining trust as a public figure on the internet soon won’t be enough—we’ll need proof of who these people are, and we’ll need verification of the content they’re creating. How do we know if anything we read was written by human or AI? Or in the case of the image and video generators, how will we know if the footage is real? Increasingly, we will need a verified neighborhood, where the content and its authors are authenticated.
On the continuum of anonymity to authentication, the first neighborhood is decentralized by nature, where there are no owners and no need for identity. After all, the obfuscation of the identity is one of its main advantages. The second neighborhood is open by design of the world wide web, where you can be whoever you want to be, driven by usernames and accounts. And the third…well it would seem to me that it would require a core and trusted mechanism of verification, so the question is who will build it, and how?
See you Monday.