At Pippy Houldsworth Gallery in London, I presented PERSISTENCE, an installation comprised of a USB flash drive storing a number of digital assets including 11033 news articles censored by the China-controlled Hong Kong government. The drive, when plugged into a personal computer, manifests a blockchain node (Koii node secured by the Arweave) containing all the censored articles. PERSISTENCE also contains an encrypted key that suggests ownership of an NFT artwork, but it is unclear how to decrypt it, therefore rendering it inaccessible despite ownership being conferred through ownership of PERSISTENCE. Finally, Persistence contains a “hacker tool-kit” that may prove useful under certain circumstances.

Wars are increasingly being fought on the technological battlefield, and art that compels action combined with decentralised technology will find itself playing an increasing role in preserving human rights.

In the effort to preserve data across a network of decentralised nodes (computers), the inextricable link between the immateriality of digital information and the physicality of the hardware needed to engage with the data makes clear that the persistence of the virtual is predicated upon the existence of the physical.

Likewise, the fidelity of CryptoArt, the type that lives on the blockchain such as non-fungible tokens (NFTs), can only be assured through a dependence upon computer hardware and electricity, along with the thousands of invisible people and resources that these entail. In an attempt to shed light on this discrepancy between the seeming immateriality of “virtual” artworks and the multitudes of very physical objects that are the sine qua non of their existence, I created PHYSIOLOGY OF AN NFT, an installation displayed at Vivatech Paris 2021. Here, in black and yellow — nature’s warning sign — we see the symbols of CryptoArt’s weighty dependence on the material world.

I hate to imagine a future in which humankind failed so miserably to reverse its current trajectory that our digital art persists solely because self-assembling/repairing digital autonomous entities find value in keeping a record of our lost species.

— Kevin Abosch

Studio Kevin Abosch

A Platform-Agnostic ERC-1155 NFT Contract for Artists

An exercise in throttling the potential of an exciting protocol to do just what I wanted

My first non-fungible tokens, NFT’s $YLAMBO & $MDAV, created March 15, 2018 & March 27, 2018 respectively, were each unique works represented by indivisible ERC-20 tokens. Almost three years later the NFT landscape for artists is robust with numerous platforms dedicated to the management and marketing/sales of NFT artworks and collectibles (SuperRare, OpenSea, Rarible, KnownOrigin, Portion, Enjin, etc). Thousands of artists across the globe have chosen to present their work in NFT form. For artists who might be looking for a platform-agnostic option (your NFT not tied inextricably to a particular platform) and to save a bit of money on ETH gas when transferring multiple tokens, my approach might appeal to you.

A recent project led me to consider how I would produce an edition of NFT artworks today and I was faced with the decision of which protocol to use, the de facto NFT protocol ERC-721, or the newer kid on the block, ERC-1155. The latter’s development, which I have followed for the past couple years, seemed more elegant and with greater functionality. But upon its recent progression to final status (congrats to: Witek Radomski, CTO of Enjin), many of the popular NFT platforms and crypto-wallets have yet to integrate the protocol (this will change very soon).

For the gaming industry in particular, ERC-1155’s ability to mint both fungible and non-fungible tokens in a single contract is truly exciting, but for an artist interested in NFT’s, the ability to mint fungible tokens is of little consequence. For me, ERC-1155’s “killer feature” is the ability to batch transfer (safeBatchTransferFrom) any number of tokens to an address as if it were one token. There are cases when this can save a lot of time and money — for example, let’s say I want to send 20 NFT artworks to a gallery that in turn will sell and transfer the works to their clients, the ability to batch transfer is a boon.

Imagine an ERC-721 with batch-transfer capability — that would be nice, but it’s not possible. So, I started with an ERC-1155 contract, only calling functions to mint my tokens and allowing for batch-transfer of tokens, keeping it all non-fungible. The metadata (and image) for each work is still pulled in from the host of your choice via a server-hosted JSON file. I’m not of the school of thought that images and metadata need to be hosted on-chain via platforms like IPFS. I host mine on my own domain on my own server. There is an argument to be had for or against off-chain hosting of metadata. I am a blockchain purist, which is to say that most abstraction layers for me are impure. Enough said on that for now 🤪. Finally, in case a platform or wallet doesn’t support ERC-1155, we make it possible for the tokens to appear as if they were ERC-721.

For now, I feel this is an exciting option for artists who want to mint editions and have the ability to batch transfer. I’ve posted the Solidity contract on GitHub and you might also notice it’s all on a single flattened contract, not spread across multiple contracts. Just change the variables, link your metadata and you’re ready to compile on Remix and deploy. No need to get bogged down in Truffle/Ganache etc.

Hope this helps someone out there!

Twitter: @kevinabosch

Instagram: @kevinabosch

Website: kevinabosch.com

GitHub: GitHub.com/kevinabosch

From Pap-smears to GANs

In 1992, three years after I first identified as an artist, I became aware of the alarming false-negative rate (FNR) that top cytology laboratories in America were experiencing while examining Pap-smear specimens for cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN), cervical cancer.

The FNR was as high as 35% at some labs which meant there were tens of thousands of women unaware of their condition due to misinterpreted Pap results. The false-negatives were a result of human error due to the inability of lab technologists to discern between normal and abnormal specimens. Taken aback by the severity of this reality, I set out to learn what the morphological abnormalities of a Pap-specimen looked like under a microscope. I learned for instance, that the ratio of the size of a nucleus to its cell and the density of the nucleus were indicators of the health of a cell. A cancerous cell for example might have an irregular shape or unusually large and darker nucleus.

At this point I knew that a lab tech’s ability to discern the “abnormality threshold” of a specimen could be improved upon by machine. With a rudimentary understanding of ruled-based machine learning, or “fuzzy-logic,” I set upon gaining access to as many Pap specimen slides as possible and with the assistance of cutting edge microscopy, a NeXT computer gifted to me by none other than Steve Jobs and a Sun Microsystems Sparc workstation, also donated, I embarked upon my first efforts into the world of computer-vision. (Hat tip to my dear friend and neuroscientist Marco Versace who introduced me to the concept of neural nets, unsupervised learning and back-propagation)

What I had hoped would end with the saving of countless lives would never be — An earthquake, the Northridge Earthquake in Southern California, destroyed the more than 30,000 specimen slides that comprised my training data. I was never able to get back on track. I did, however, manage to make some art from the data. This was my first foray into generative art.

From 1990–2010 my work as an artist primarily leveraged traditional photographic methods. The transition from film to digital came suddenly and I had a vested interest in both understanding this emerging technology as well as pushing the limits of what CCD and CMOS sensors were capable of and how DSP (digital signal processing) could raise the stakes.

I realized that camera manufacturers were throttling the capabilities of the components inside their cameras. The “crippling’ of their own products might have seemed counterintuitive at first, but whether it was a function of keeping another product in their lineup from becoming obsolete or managing the power demands of more robust processing to save on battery life, I had to find workarounds to get the most I could from both still and video cameras. In some cases, hacking firmware was an option and in others, what was called for was a camera teardown and a soldering iron at the ready.

Call it hacking, tweaking or merely trying to understand the why before understanding the how, my practice as an artist has only deepened my relationship with science and technology. Working with technological and generative methods like machine-learning and blockchain assist me in my understanding of identity and value.

When Ian Goodfellow published his paper on Generative Adverserial Networks (GAN’s) in 2014, I was excited to see if I could train such an algorithm on my own photographic images to produce synthetic Kevin Abosch photographs. With advances in GAN technology and important contributions from people like Martin Arjovsky, Soumith Chintala, Léon Bottou, Alec Radford, Luke Metz, Tero Karras, Samuli Laine, Timo Aila and many others, the landscape of generative art has taken a notable leap forward.

The scientific method moves from a hypothesis to an experiment and ultimately yields a result. It’s understandable that scientists and technologists are result-driven. It is the result that yields the empirical data that speaks to an experiment’s success and failure. Indeed, the very reputation of the scientist and the technologist is a function of presenting results to their peers. My own interest in the scientific method has waned over the years. Empirical data can be of great practical use, but as an artist I’m more interested in process, ritual and insights gleaned long before the result.

With respect to deep-learning algorithms, I force complications by limiting and corrupting the input data. What would ordinarily comprise the latent space is sublimated into what I call “nascent space.” Nascent space exists within a gaussian, or normal distribution of data but holds the prima materia from which discovery and creation are born. It is in this nascent space that I find truths not necessarily apparent within results. — Kevin Abosch

This text is an excerpt from my upcoming book “Nascent Space 2019–2020”

Instagram: http://instagram.com/kevinabosch

Studio Kevin Abosch

What Is Priceless? by Kevin Abosch

From the moment we come into this world, there are those who try to ascribe value to us. They may say, “That boy over there is so full of potential” or “That girl is worthless.” Indeed, history shows entire communities and ethnicities devalued to such an extent that it has even paved a path towards genocide.

My own father was a refugee, his Jewish parents murdered at the hands of the Nazis in Auschwitz. Right now, the Rohingya people have been displaced by the hundreds of thousands from their homes in Myanmar. While I regard any human life as priceless, it would seem that some people can only relate to their own lives, or to the lives of their friends and families in this way.

Much of my work explores how and why we value anything at all, especially when we consider the value of life itself. We say an ancient artifact is priceless too, but surely not as priceless as human life, right? Society has a complicated relationship to that which is priceless.

I wanted to explore this further, and found an artistic collaborator in my friend Ai Weiwei, who has brought more attention to the global refugee crisis than anyone else I can think of. He too, is fascinated by the nature of value and identity. We have attempted as an exercise, to make the priceless more relatable to those who find it easier to view everything as a commodity.

I have been using blockchain addresses as proxies to distill emotional value for some time now, and with Weiwei we “tokenized” our priceless shared moments together. Some of these moments on the surface might seem banal while others are subtly provocative, but these fleeting moments like :”Sharing Tea” and “Walking In A Carefree Manner Down Schönhauser Allee” or “Talking About The Art Market” are the building blocks of human experience. All moments in life are priceless.

Each priceless moment is represented by a unique blockchain address which is “inoculated” by a small amount of a virtual artwork (crypto-token) we created called “PRICELESS” (symbol: PRCLS). Only 2 ERC20 tokens were created for the project, but as they are divisible to 18 decimal places, these works of virtual art could potentially be distributed to billions of people. Furthermore, a very limited series of physical prints were made.

One of the two PRICELESS tokens will be unavailable at any price. The remaining token will be divided into 1 million fractions of one token and made available to individual collectors and institutions. These artworks of course may be divided into much smaller artworks as the PRICELESS token is divisible to 18 decimal places. It is not unusual in the art world for large works to be priced higher than similar smaller works so should a larger fraction of PRICELESS have a higher price than a smaller fraction. One of those peculiar ways we value things — Greater size/quantity = Greater value. The question is, if one token is priceless and truly unattainable, then how do we value the other token which is made available?

How and why do we value anything at all?

Visit the PRICELESS website at http://whatispriceless.com

How much is human life worth? was originally published in Adventures in Consumer Technology on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The idea that artificial intelligence will ineluctably bring us to a scenario in which machines square off against humans is a popular one. It suggests the greatest threat imaginable, that collectively machines will choose to align themselves against us, and in a quest for true autonomy and self-preservation, attempt to destroy us.

Is this truly inevitable?

Literary and cinematic depictions of intelligent computer systems from the 1960's helped form and inform our expectations as we embarked on a path to create a level of machine intelligence that would match or exceed our own notions of human intelligence. AI has obviously surpassed human ability in a number of specific tasks requiring complex computation, but it still falls short of many of our early ambitions. How can we both maximize the power of this tremendous tool and preserve our mastery of it?

As artificial intelligence is already playing and will continue to play a large role in our future, it is imperative that we explore how best to coexist with this complex technology.

Following, are some of my thoughts on Responsible Artificial Intelligence. It gives an insight into the work we are doing at Kwikdesk, a company I founded with the goal of moving data quickly, discreetly, securely, intelligently and ethically. Yes, ethically.

An Ethical Framework

The concept of an artificial neural network modeled after a biologic neural network is nothing new. Computational processing units called neurons are connected to each other to form a network. Each neuron applies a complicated learning algorithm to an input before passing on data to other neurons until finally an output neuron is activated, and an output can be read. Expert systems rely upon humans to “teach” or seed the system’s knowledge base with knowledge. An “inference engine” identifies or matches, selects, and executes rules in an “If this, then that” fashion with respect to the knowledge base. Essentially the expert system makes decisions so we don’t have to, based on rules we set forth. This process may result in new knowledge being added to the knowledge base. A pure neural network learns from experience in a non-linear fashion and without relying on problem-specific knowledge seeded by an expert. Hybrid networks have been proven to improve machines’ capacity for learning.

Now I’d like you consider the ethical implications of such systems:

“Evil” Code vs Benevolent Code

An author uses words to take a reader on a journey, and this can be done in a number of ways, but the great authors do so elegantly. A software engineer writes lines of code that facilitate the processing and movement of data. This too can be accomplished in a number of ways, but those who code elegantly are the Faulkners of computer science. The adept coder keeps a focus on the essential and endeavors to accomplish as much as possible in as concise a manner as possible. Extraneous, redundant or otherwise unnecessary code is kept to a minimum. Great code also keeps the window wide open for later additions to the codebase. Other engineers can add to the codebase with continued elegance, allowing the product to evolve without added difficulty.

Behind any manmade product there is intent. Things made by humans, I would argue, are imbued with intention, and to varying degrees are carriers of the very nature of its creator. For some it may be difficult to imagine an inanimate object as possessing that which we usually ascribe to people. Few would argue that the written word is not weighted, charged, indeed imbued, with a potent human energy. This energy has proven itself, for thousands of years, capable of unifying, dividing, or otherwise transforming societies. This is the power of language! Let us not forget that those lines of code are written in various programming languages. Therefore, it’s my contention that the code that becomes the software application we use on our desktop computer or mobile device is very much “alive.”

Without examining sapience and sentience in the context of computer science and the potential implications of artificial intelligence, we can still examine a static codebase as a whole entity with the potential to “do good” or “do bad.” These outcomes can only be realised after humans use or execute an application. There are clearly choices made by humans that impact the perceived nature of an application. These can be examined on a case by case basis to determine whether the impact on a given system is negative or positive, based upon a set of predetermined standards. Still, just as it is impossible for a journalist to be one hundred percent unbiased when writing an article (this has been established ad nauseam by academics), the engineer has either wittingly or unwittingly biased the “nature” of the codebase by using language in a particular way with a particular intent. Some might argue that coding is a logical process and that true logic doesn’t leave room for nature.

I would posit that the moment you create a rule, the corpus or codebase has been imbued with an element of human nature.

With each additional rule, the nature’s presence deepens. The more complex the codebase, the more it is imbued with nature. This leads us to the question: “can the nature of the codebase be good or bad?”

Surely a virus designed by a hacker to maliciously breach your computer’s defenses and wreak havoc on your life is imbued with a bad nature? Well what about a virus created by “the good guys” to infiltrate the computers of a terrorist organisation in order to prevent a deadly act of terrorism? What is its nature? Mechanically, it may be identical to its nefarious twin, yet it’s used for “good”, so isn’t its nature good? This Ethical Paradox of Malware is of little consolation to the victim of an attack, but should be noted in discussing the existence of “evil” code.

There is in my opinion code that is inherently biased towards “evil”, and there is code that is inherently biased towards benevolence. This becomes of greater importance in the context of computers working autonomously.

At Kwikdesk we are developing an AI framework and protocol based on my design for an expert system/neural network hybrid that more closely resembles a biological model than anything created to date. Neurons manifest as input/output modules and virtual devices (in certain cases, autonomous agents) connected by “axons”, discreet, secure, dedicated channels of encrypted data. The data is decrypted as it enters a neuron and after some modicum of rule-based processing, encrypted again before passing to the next neuron. Before neurons can enjoy communication with one another via an axon, an exchange of participant and channel keys must take place.

I believe that security and discretion must be built into such a network at a very low level. Superstructures reflect the qualities of their smallest components, so anything less than secure building blocks will certainly lead to an insecure network down the line. For this reason, data must not just be protected locally, but must be encrypted during local transport.

The greater the exposure to malicious agents, the more difficult it becomes to protect and preserve an ethical system.

Implementation and Safeguards

Our quality of life while coexisting with machines that are becoming smarter and smarter is understandably of great concern, and I too have strong feelings about what we need to do to assure the healthiest of futures for generations to come. The threats intelligent machines potentially pose are manifold and can be broken down to the following categories:

1. Redundancy — Humans are replaced by machines in the workplace. This shift has been taking place already for decades and will only accelerate. Appropriate education will need to prepare people for a future in which hundreds of millions of traditional jobs simply cease to exist. This is tricky.
2. Safety — Relying on machines for our personal safety. As we become more reliant on machines to let us know when we are moving from zones of safety to zones of potential danger to zones of probable danger, we may be at risk of machine error or malicious subversion. Think transportation here! Oh, and of course that matter of the machines turning against us in an act of self-preservation or general malevolence!! Can you say KILL SWITCH!?
3. Health — Personal diagnostic devices and networked medical data. AI will continue to advance the field of preventive medicine and in the analysis of crowdsourced genetic data. Again, we must have safeguards in place against the malicious subversion of these systems.
4. Destiny —AI with increasing accuracy predicts where you will go and what you will do. As this space evolves we will have to make decisions around whether or not we want to know where we will most likely go next week, which products we will buy, or even when we will most likely die. Do we want others to have access to this data?
5. Knowledge —Machines as the de facto repository for acquired knowledge. With the acquisition of new knowledge accelerating faster than human’s ability verify it, how can we trust its integrity?

In Conclusion

It’s clear that a vigilant, responsible approach to AI is needed to mitigate the potential downside of the technological supernova headed our way. There are two possibilities as I see it. We either harness AI’s tremendous power and pray that it even helps to bring out the best in humanity, or we get scorched by the intense blaze of something that reflects the worst in us.

Responsible Artificial Intelligence was originally published in Adventures in Consumer Technology on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Maybe an expletive will cut through the noise? I doubt it, so I’ll present it sanitized a bit in the title for the sake of public decency. Decent indeed, this public that disrobes and stands naked and vulnerable in a millisecond for a bit of convenience.

I’m deafened by the cacophony of claims by companies purporting to offer products that are private and/or anonymous and/or ephemeral, while few of them even understand the distinction or relationship between these words.

Do any of them consider the implications of managing their users’ expectations? I imagine some do, but so many clearly don’t. Words that speak to our sense of privacy can and do lead to people using products that in some circumstances cannot live up to their expectations. In some cases this could be a matter of life or death. Yes, there are places, closer to you than you might think, where a few words in a text message, taken out of context and used against you, can destroy you both metaphorically and literally.

Privacy is a human right. It’s not a fucking joke! Therefore, companies mustn’t co-opt the word to help market a product that is not truly private. It’s simple… If an app asks you for any personal information at all… an email address, a phone number, your Facebook or Twitter login… It is NOT private!

When you abuse the word “private”, you undermine a human right!

I blame greedy and ignorant entrepreneurs for this misuse and abuse of the public’s privacy. Privacy isn’t a game for some kids with their eye exclusively on a billion dollar entrepreneurial payday. Privacy is the domain of those passionate about upholding human rights!

Make no mistake when I founded Kwikdesk a year ago with the idea of creating a platform to power private communication, I knew the hardest part would be helping the millions of naked netizens pick up their clothes and get dressed again. It’s time to take back those pieces of ourselves that we don’t want being analyzed, manipulated and otherwise used, not always in our best interest (usually not, I contend).

Privacy and the entrepreneurial drive to create useful products needn’t be mutually exclusive, but a serious commitment to the understanding and protection of the human right to privacy is necessary to marry the two.

Is It Safe In Here?

Context is everything. A bag of cow manure, emptied, is just a pile of shit. In the context of a farm, it supplies the nutrients to grow a crop of vegetables.

In November 2001 I rented a car for a week in Los Angeles, as my own was getting a transmission overhaul. While driving down San Vicente Boulevard on my way home, I saw the flashing lights of a police car in my rearview mirror. I pulled over, anxiously waiting for the officer to step out and walk up to my door. I lowered the window. The officer politely let me know that I had just made an illegal turn before requesting my driver’s license and car registration. I carefully removed my license from my wallet, handed it to him and explained that I was driving a rental car. “This license expired last month”, he said. I wasn’t really surprised but feigned disbelief. The officer took my license back to his vehicle and after a few minutes came back and told me to “drive safely.” Things ended well.

A few minutes later I pulled into the driveway of my house and popped the trunk to grab my belongings. I looked inside the trunk and my heart skipped a beat as I realized how lucky I was that the police officer hadn’t looked in there too. Now, this is approximately two months after the September 11th terrorist attacks in New York. It had already been determined that a group of Fundamentalist Islamic terrorists had gone to flight schools in the United States before flying commercial jets into the World Trade Center. So, what did I have in the trunk of my rental car? I had a flight manual with a boxed set of lessons for flying a Cessna aircraft and a Koran. For those who can remember the general mood of the day, November 2001 was not a good time to be found with this particular combination of items.

I couldn’t help but play the situation out in my head. Had the officer in fact opened the trunk of my car and found the flight manuals and the Koran, I would certainly have been held for questioning. Surely, they would want to have a look at my computer which would lead them to my browsing history. I was a regular reader at the time of a site called DebkaFile, an Israeli news blog that seemed to have sources from inside the Mossad that kept me coming back for more. Fascinated by the face of hate, I regularly visited the websites of white supremacists and radical Islamists. This “evidence” I believe, considering the climate then (maybe even today), would have at the very least, had me in the custody of law enforcement and/or under the scrutiny of the FBI.

Context is everything. I had read The Holy Bible, The Talmud, The Bhagavad Gita, and a number of esoteric spiritual texts, but I had never read the Koran. While in a bookstore looking for a biography of Shams of Tabriz, the Persian poet Rumi’s teacher, I saw a small black Koran on sale, so I bought it and placed it in the trunk of my rental car. A couple of days later I was on Fairfax Avenue in a thrift store, not looking for anything in particular. I love moving slowly through a thrift store, wondering what might appear. Well, that day I had an unusual find: a beautiful boxed set of lessons with the flight manual for a Cessna aircraft. I have no desire to learn how to fly, nor do I usually collect junk that I don’t need, but the price was only 25 cents! How could I not buy it? Innocent enough? Taken out of context, however, I could hardly have blamed them for putting me through the legal ringer.

“If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged”

Cardinal Richelieu said “If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.” This speaks in opposition to the argument that if you’ve got nothing to hide, then you shouldn’t be concerned with privacy. Indeed, taken out of context, the words you write in a seemingly innocuous message could be used by individuals, groups of people or even a government to prosecute or blackmail you. Still there are those that insist that you must be doing something wrong if you want to “hide.” The right to privacy, some feel, is merely a call to mask illegal activities.

“Too many wrongly characterize the debate as ‘security versus privacy.’ The real choice is liberty versus control.”

Computer security expert and cryptographer Bruce Schneier also argued “Too many wrongly characterize the debate as ‘security versus privacy.’ The real choice is liberty versus control.”

We live in an age in which our personal data is gathered, sorted, archived, analyzed and manipulated to best serve the companies and institutions that offer up services in a lopsided exchange for what I would argue are pieces of our being. The words you write, the relationships you have, your interests, and so many intangibles that go into making you who you are, become part of an often subtle and drawn-out process of disrobing you. You are more valuable when naked and exposed.

I have been advocating for what I call Privacy First Products (PFP), a class of products that are built upon an ethical and philosophically pure foundation (read platform), and go to great lengths to protect an individual’s privacy. I playfully touched on this in an essay I wrote called “The Death of Facebook, Twitter & Google+”, but make no mistake that this is an issue that will only grow in importance as technology becomes smarter and smarter. Tech entrepreneur Elon Musk raised a few eyebrows recently when he suggested that artificial intelligence is “potentially more dangerous than nukes.” It would be naive to think that artificial intelligence will not connect, or isn’t already connecting, to all those bits (no pun intended) of you being gathered.They already have a pretty good idea of what you’re going to buy next or where you are going to go.

So as not to conflate the ethical debate on data harvesting with the practical consideration of keeping messages from falling into the hands of those who could use them against you, I will only add that these are matters which have a slow burn, and just because it may be years before you realize you’ve given up too much of yourself, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start mitigating the problem now by scrupulous engagement with technology.

Messaging is perhaps where we are at our most vulnerable. With friends, family members and even business associates we are used to speaking rather freely, without the fear of being recorded (I hope), but those text messages, images and other documents that you send so effortlessly to someone leave digital evidence.

There are products that promise to encrypt and delete them so that you needn’t fear that they come back later, perhaps misappropriated and used against you. I like that notion, but still I’m not impressed by the showy use of buzzwords like “Encrypted”, “Anonymous” and “Ephemeral” used to lure in users, while on the other hand, vulnerabilities that matter still exist. The management of a user’s expectations must be taken seriously when peddling wares that speak to their privacy or security. We have seen these vulnerabilities over and over again as they tend to make headlines. Enough people must care about their privacy if it makes the evening news broadcast, right? Then why do most people disrobe so quickly for the latest “killer app?”

Context is everything. For this reason I must disclose that I am the founder of a company called Kwikdesk that has a PFP discreet messaging app called OneOne for which you don’t even have to create an account or authenticate with any identifiable information about yourself.

Vulnerable and Reckless in the Age of Killer Apps. was originally published in Adventures in Consumer Technology on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s May 1st, 2018 and the once seemingly-unstoppable, mighty behemoth of online social, Facebook, is now a shell of a platform. Its founders, long cashed-out and hardly relevant in what is now known as the “Privacy-First” movement, Facebook lies amongst the corpses of GeoCities, MySpace, AOL and the more recently imploded Twitter and Google+.

While Mark Zuckerberg’s substantial wealth finds its way into dozens of startups through his formidable investment fund, he is regarded by many of today’s players as somewhat irrelevant, and his role in creating what is today seen as one of the most ethically corrupt platforms of our time, Facebook, is seen by some as a dubious honor. But Mark never meant any harm, you say? Of course, he didn’t! “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”, they scream from the choir. I hate that saying. I respected Zuckerberg’s intentions as I thought I understood them to be.

The corruption which brought down the mighty three (Facebook, Twitter & Google+) was built in from the beginning. It was part of their architecture and the very foundation upon which these products were built. The collection and exploitation of users’ personal information, user-generated content, “private” messages, and habits both on and off their own platforms, were so fundamental to their products, that there was always the possibility that the public would one day get wise and respond with a mass-exodus towards Privacy-First Products (PFP).

They said it would never happen… Indeed, they said that the masses would always sacrifice their privacy for convenience. Cue the data gold-rush! I recall so many founders back in 2014 trying to get rich with what they called the “data play.” Remember that? Give away the product, but we’ll have all that valuable user data to monetize… somehow.

The idea that you must sacrifice privacy for convenience is really a false dichotomy. It’s predicated upon the supposition that someone else knows better than you do what you need and when you need it, and to avail of their knowledge, you must let them into your life, not just superficially, but deeply… intimately… invasively… irrevocably.

We now know that convenience and privacy can coexist. Google almost had us convinced otherwise. Privacy just didn’t work with their model, nor with the agenda of the boards whose directors needed to keep shareholders’ metaphorical cocks hard. Twitter also had no shortage of user data, but with virtually no revenue, tried futilely to pivot into the PFP space. They, however, died even a quicker death than Facebook or Google+ as their corrupt foundation made it impossible to build a healthy structure. As users left, the stock dropped and the rest is history.

With the near total eradication of the traditional account/login/password system and the global adoption of Privacy First Products, most of which use anonymous login and validated proxies between individuals and their online identities, we are much better off today than our fellow netizens of just a few years ago. Not surprisingly, advertisers have adapted to the new landscape, and while employing less invasive tactics, have still managed to reach consumers, reap even greater profits, and not alienate those of us who feel antagonized by aggressive advertising.

Perhaps most importantly though, we are no longer as a society willfully aiding corporate giants in the perverse practice of profiting from mapping our social genome by collecting, archiving and analyzing our actively and passively generated content both in and out of context.

I don’t think I need to remind anyone how this data was used against us by those we thought were supposed to protect us.

Disclaimer: Waaaay back in 2013 I founded KwikDesk which was one of the early PFP startups ☺ I used Twitter and Facebook daily for years. If they were still around today I would use them to share this Medium post!