The Truth

Greetings and welcome to another edition of Recurrent Patterns. You are used to reading here about technologies and my perspective on them. Sometimes you’ll see my funny comments about companies and their attempts to disguise nonsense with buzzwords and poor marketing.

You, my dear reader, might rightly ask, “If you’re so smart, where are your ideas? Are you afraid to be ridiculed by others?”

So, I am starting a new Recurrent Pattern, where I will share my ideas to be discussed, critiqued and, yes, ridiculed.

Let's start with a highly debated word these days. It’s a topic as old as humanity: the truth. I am not even remotely suggesting that truth can be defined, solved or computed by AI, 5G, VR, AR or any other contemporary technology buzzword.

The truth is for people to decide. It should be supported by facts; facts traceable to their origin and author.

How many times have you read a news story, an article, or a post on Twitter or Facebook and were left confused? On the one hand, you wanted to believe that information was accurate. It would fit in your carefully-built narrative. At the same time, it was 'hard to believe' that something like this was possible. Also at that moment you realized that the effort to dig deeper and find out more was not the best use of your time and energy, and you left it at that.

Fact checking is a tedious job.

Here is an idea. Put the news on blockchain. Yes, that technology which underpins the crypto world, but which can also help with boring things like supply chain management.

Imagine that every story published by newspaper, magazine, news network was automatically added to a blockchain. And it would include not only the story, but the news network, the author and any other attribute associated with producing it.

Imagine this has already happened. We have news stories on the blockchain. Now we can achieve a few things. Past news can't be altered. Producers of the news can't say they never published it. The news organizations, which proclaim that they adhere to the highest level of journalistic standards, could publish only news placed on this blockchain.

Further, any reference within the content to any other content would be linked to the content on the blockchain (think, permanent URL). Suddenly a traceability and verification of news origin would be as simple as 1-2-3.

Granted, you still would not know if the information you consume is the truth. However, you would be able to trace it to its origin and all the actors (news organizations, reporters, individuals) who participated along the way. You are not on the News Blockchain? You can't be trusted.

Since most people reading my posts are hardcore business people, here’s the answer to your questions: “Why would anybody do this? Where is the money in this?”

Same answer as before, the blockchain. Any content producer, putting the content on the blockchain would be able to track the usage, including the channels where the content is consumed by whom (a marketer's wet dream). You’d also have the ability to associate any piece of content with a 'smart contract,' resulting in immediate money transfer to its account (CFO's wild dream).

Independent researchers would not only be referenced but paid for the research. If their research is as relevant as they say, they can put their data where their mouth is. Authors could use the data with confidence that the origin is known and verifiable.

Imagine an Apple News reader connected to your account. For every article you read, it would transfer 0.0000001 of Bitcoin to the publisher account and further, to all who participated in the creation of it. Small fees in large numbers pile up very quickly. At the same time, algorithms would keep crawling the blockchain and finding discrepancies in data and helping us find new connections between the vast universe of information.

Here you have it. With this idea, I am not proposing a technology which will deliver us the truth, but it would provide us with transparency. Finding the truth will remain the Holy Grail for humanity. And that is the recurrent pattern.

Sharpen your pitchforks and let me know why this wouldn’t work.