How Web3 apps can help you survive authoritarianism

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The election of Donald Trump as President of the United States sent shockwaves around the world and raised alarm bells ringing in Europe, China, and elsewhere. Few outside the U.S. took him seriously a second time around, and almost nobody predicted the sheer landslide he won by.

Now that the dust has settled and the loudest wailing is over, it’s time to address how a Silicon Valley tech mogul, Elon Musk, has the ear of the soon-to-be most powerful man on the planet who owes him a debt of gratitude. However, Musk isn’t the only Silicon Valley player in Trump’s circle—Peter Thiel, David Sacks, and others are closely aligned with the Trump campaign, and orbiters like Chamath Palapatia and Marc Andresen are vocally supporting the agenda.

Cut State Regulations by 90%
Replace DMV with an App
Institute School Choice
Eliminate Income Tax, Replace with a Consumption Tax
Double Police and Enforce the Law

CA's best and brightest are leaving the state in droves – this would get them back.

Make California Great Again!

— Chamath Palihapitiya (@chamath) November 25, 2024

Whatever your political views are or how you feel about the election, the influence of these men should concern you. What they all have in common is some link to the Silicon Valley startup scene combined with extreme views on transforming society into a high-tech utopia of their own making. Of course, they didn’t consult anyone on the details, and as we found out by using their products over the past decades, the devil is always in the details.

Personally, I don’t think software bros who made vast fortunes digitally spying on people and controlling the flow of money online should be anywhere near the levers of power in a free society. Regardless of whether you agree or not, there are some tools you can use to protect yourself from further invasions of privacy and overreach by this group of digital parasites.

It’s time to get serious about Web3

While I don’t believe the hysteric take that Trump is a fascist dictator who will end democracy in America, some of the people around him, like Peter Thiel and Steve Bannon, are outright authoritarians who hold democracy and its norms in open contempt.

Given how this could play out should these people gain more influence now or in the future, it’s time to get serious about using blockchain technology, digital currencies, and micropayments to create private, uncensorable ways to make payments, send messages, and broadcast information in a truly peer to peer way. Even if they never attempt a stealth takeover of the U.S. government, continuing to allow them to control the means by which we communicate, transfer value and pay each other is now an unacceptable risk.

Web3 apps can help you maintain power over your data and digital lives. Unlike the platforms that Musk, Zuckerberg, and others control, Web3 apps are decentralized and don’t harvest or store your data. Should one shut you down for wrongthink, you can plug and play your profile and history on another app, bringing your blockchain-based data and possibly followers with you. Twetch was an excellent early example of how these next-generation social media apps work. 

Furthermore, no central entity or person has complete control over the network algorithms of these Web3 apps, so using them to amplify information favoring one political view or another would be extremely difficult. Neutral, apolitical platforms that respect freedom of speech and don’t slant toward any particular viewpoint are inherently good for free, open societies.

Better still, Web3 apps don’t capture your data. With models based on micropayments rather than ads, they have no need to. It doesn’t take a history scholar to figure out how people’s emails, private messages, and other data could be used against them should an authoritarian government take control in any country. You only need to read Alexander Solzhenitsin’s The Gulag Archipelago to learn how dictatorial regimes can use private communications against you. In the digital age, everyone would be a sitting duck.

Having truly peer-to-peer communication tools without data harvesting middlemen relaying messages and giving users sovereignty over their data would prevent the most dystopian scenarios from playing out. It’s time to start taking Web3 apps seriously and using them whenever possible.

The world needs electronic cash at scale

A second tool that can help anyone live a more private life is electronic cash. Bitcoin was the original peer-to-peer electronic cash system before some Silicon Valley control freaks had their wicked ways with it to make BTC. Thankfully, it still exists today as BSV.

Electronic cash can help anyone live a more private financial life. While blockchain-based currencies like Bitcoin are a nightmare for criminals because of the time-stamped records transactions leave on the public ledger, they are ideal for small, casual payments.

Most people aren’t buying anything that would raise red flags in a normal society, you can never predict how things will go in an authoritarian one. Broadcasting as little information about yourself as possible is positive in these politically tumultuous times, and having an uncensorable means to pay anyone, anywhere, is always handy, even if there’s never a need to use it.

However, electronic cash systems like Bitcoin need to scale. And no, the Lightning Network is not the solution—everyday people need to be able to use them simply and easily. Thankfully, BSV can scale to millions of transactions per second (TPS), and user-friendly wallets like HandCash, Centbee and RockWallet make sending and receiving payments a breeze.

Privacy technology exists, and now it must be utilized by all

Web3 apps and electronic cash systems will be vital tools for anyone who values liberty and privacy in the future, but some tools allow us to go even further. Most people understand cryptography as a concept, but outside of computer enthusiasts and blockchain nerds, few understand its specific applications and how it can aid freedom. 

For example, Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) allow us to prove something, such as that we are who we say we are, without revealing anything else about ourselves. This might be handy if a bunch of jackbooted thugs wanted us to prove citizenship in a stop-and-search check, but we didn’t want them to see where we live or any of our other private details.

While still in development, homomorphic encryption allows computations on encrypted data without decrypting it. This could come in handy should authorities want to inspect our personal documents and effects, and we wish to cooperate without allowing them to decrypt our sensitive data.

Many other tools are being or could be developed to protect privacy and limit the control of potentially authoritarian governments. Tools that allow us to cooperate with legitimate law enforcement requests while resisting authoritarianism and protecting privacy are inherently positive and must be embraced and used by as many people as possible.

Don’t allow the Broligarhcy to take over

How anyone feels about it is irrelevant: Trump is the president-elect of the U.S., and he has a huge mandate to shake things up and create change. That mandate should be respected regardless of personal feelings.

However, what neither Americans nor anybody else has to do is go along with the agendas of Musk, Thiel, or any other tech bro who has worked his way into the President Elect’s orbit. No one elected these people, and if history is anything to go by, they are control freaks and will invade and take what they can by stealth. They must be resisted.

Over here in Ireland, I’ll be nursing a quiet pint of Guinness and waiting for all of this to blow over. I’ll also continue to write about how you can use Bitcoin, blockchain, Web3 apps, and cryptography to protect yourself from whoever feels they have a right to infringe on your freedoms. Subscribe to make sure you don’t miss out!

Watch: What can organizations do to get on the Web3 & digital identity bus?