illegal content without creating a #unipolar world with one global lawgiver,
one moral code, one police, ... How does one allow freedom of expression without
censorship? (After all, how could one have secrecy for the army or police but not for everyone else in a knowledge society?) There is no thought without diversity, since one needs a proponent and an opponent to think. We think with others, and so do nations in a #Multipolar world.
These questions were asked in a very intelligent conversation between
NVK (npub1az9…m8y8), jb55 (npub1xts…kk5s), nickgillespie (npub16cy…u878), and Weissmueller (npub1zyw…s58k) recorded at "Nostr and the Decentralized Future of Social Media Is Here" [1]
One could add the question: how will people know that they are talking to a real person, perhaps a specialist on a particular topic, rather than a thief or an AI bot using deep fake tech trying to scam them?
But how do we also allow anonymity to exist so that whistle-blowers such as Snowden (npub1sn0…jdv9) can inform citizens of abuse of power?
This is the problem that the #WebOfNations is designed to help solve. It's an opt-in system that allows players that wish to do so to tie themselves or more precisely, their keys or WebIDs, to a national legal framework so that they can signal that their actions are guided by a country's laws, for which they can be held accountable in court, and for which they pay taxes. Why would they do that? Countries are long-term agents that need to think in the time-frame of generations, and this long-term game makes short-term selfish behavior irrational (This is a game theoretic result explained in Nozick's "The Nature of Rationality") As a result, certain types of long term thinking, require the guarantees of states to be possible.
A #WoN would allow users and proxies to filter content by legally responsible players without stopping pure anonymous content to flow. Being legally responsible is not a guarantee of good behavior, or else law courts and prisons would not exist. But it does create an incentive for good behavior because it creates a means of redress. It would also allow one to create highly restrictive filters for children while keeping it as open as adults feel they can take.
This would also allow one to have two types of filters: my known peer-to-peer (p2p) social network, family, or business relations, and the wider world that goes through the social p2p networks of states. This does not exclude non-state actors either. It does not require one to have a legal trust anchor. I guess the mafia will want their mafia network of trust too, though their problem is that, not being open, they may not want that network to be visible or even ever to be traceable, which is why such technology may not be that useful to them.
[1] https://reason.com/video/2023/02/21/nostr-and-the-decentralized-future-of-social-media-is-here-live-with-nvk-will-casarin-nick-gillespie-and-zach-weissmueller/
[2] see pdf or HTML at https://co-operating.systems/2020/06/01/