I Can't Believe This Blockchain Is Free

As anger has grown over the power wielded by internet gatekeepers such as Facebook and Twitter, many blockchain advocates argue we could fix social media if it were built on decentralized, consensus-based networks instead of corporate-centralized platforms.

To be fair, the tweet was a winking reference to an in-joke among Twitter users, who often write "I can't believe this website is free" when conversations on the social media platform take entertainingly absurd turns.

To me, it's encapsulated in the idea that, in 21st-century digital capitalism, data is a commodity, the most important commodity of all.

We're paying Twitter and other social media platforms with our data.

Data is trafficked, ruthlessly acquired, repackaged and bundled, and then sold for other sources of value: audience, services, and fiat currency.

Facebook extracted users' data to deliver a carefully selected mix of friends' photos, corporate-promoted posts and sidebar ads to groups of people whose data trails had shown them to be highly likely to share that content with each other.

More recently, the disparity between Twitter and Facebook has narrowed as the former has manipulated its feed in response to shareholder demands and the latter has pared back its algorithmic distortions in response to the public outcry of data abuses.

"What is your data play?" is a standard venture capital question to startups seeking investment.

The challenge is to design an architecture that allows the producers of data - we, the users - to become less beholden to these centralized aggregators and create a more decentralized digital economy in which we can trust each other's data and make better personal use of it.

Blockchain technology raises the potential for a system that logs cryptographic proofs of existence and data about the authorship of media content in distributed consensus-based ledgers.