I am currently enrolled an Anthropology course titled "Love and Hate in The Digital Age". The point of the class is to dissect the changing reality of social interaction with the growing dominance of technology and social media. Conversations have gone digital, schools have gone digital, hangouts have gone digital, relationships have gone digital and as we all know money has gone digital.
With the rapid change to a world of one's and zero's, one concern that has permeated all of these conversations is what privacy looks like in this new world. Our first assignment was to watch the Social Dilemma on Netflix. This dramatized documentary is simultaneously a critique and research project on social media and search platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Google and Pinterest. Throughout the film we learn about the sophisticated algorithms aimed at using user data to keep people engaged on their platform as long as possible to monetize their attention through targeted advertisements.
For a world that values security and privacy it is incredible that we all sort of turn a blind eye on what is happening under our thumbs on a daily basis. There is an addictiveness and mind-numbing pleasure that comes with swiping through a social media feed or receiving likes and comments on a post you wanted to share. This enjoyment seems to outweigh the machine that is the advertising campaign that is quite literally selling everything there is to know about you and your data usage to other corporations.
As a crypto-nerd, my immediate thought during the class discussion on the topic was that cryptocurrency is the solution to this problem. With #Projectblank coming to fruition very soon, I see a world where the users of a microblogging platform are able to take back the power of their own attention. With a platform such as LeoFinance, or the Brave browser, users are able to be paid for their engagement through the LEO or BAT tokens. When we engage on a blockchain-based platform, the beauty of it lies in the total transparency.
Where Twitter allows you access to only information they want you to see, LeoFinance and Hive provide a ledger of everything that has ever occurred on the platform. We have the ability to see what even the biggest whales on the site last made a comment on, or what they powered up. The irony of the situation is that this seemingly more public way of sharing the inner-workings of the site is an increase in the privacy of your data. You know exactly where your money and your time is going. Nothing is being sold for the profit of the website operators, it is an ecosystem where you benefitting yourself also helps the entire community grow.
Taking the power out of the hands of the few and giving it to the many is the part of cryptocurrency that I find the most powerful. The transition of society from ignorance to transparency begins with our social lives. LeoFinance is part of the solution to this modern day problem.