Writing / Explainer for a general reader
A More Equitable Internet
History, identity, experience, culture, authenticity, and sovereignty in the digital future.
A partnership announcement that had to do two jobs at once: explain the plumbing of the internet to people who had never heard of ICANN, and explain why a hip hop community should care. Written while I was Executive Creative Director at Charged Particles. Reproduced here as text only; the original ran with licensed photography that stays on Medium.
As technology continues to evolve, opportunities to improve the current systems are abundant. The ownership and privacy of personal data in a rapidly changing technological landscape are central to many people's concerns, and the topic of more than a few television shows. Suffice it to say that many people feel that, as the internet evolves, businesses and models which extract and exploit people by way of their data are no longer welcome at the table.
Despite the intense effort of bad actors, this vision of an internet built on sovereignty, equity, and inclusivity is exactly what the serious builders in the blockchain space are working towards, and what people mean when they say "Web3." Empowering all people and giving a voice to the voiceless.
So it's no surprise that in this sort of community you'll find a lot of musicians. And again, no surprise that you'll find the hip hop community, on the mic, pointing out exactly where the inequalities are.
When you are on the internet, your voice should be yours. The things you say, share, create, post, or publish online should be content that you control. This week, Cortex and the top-level domain holders at .Hiphop have taken a massive leap in the right direction, bridging the gap between "Web2" and "Web3", DNS and ENS, ICANN and the blockchain.
Understanding Cortex
In order to understand Cortex, we need to start with how the internet of both Web2 and Web3 work today. The three key ingredients are the Domain Name System (DNS), the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), and the Ethereum Name Service (ENS).
To keep it simple, DNS is the namespace that makes traveling around the internet easy enough for people to read and easy enough for computers to look up. There are two sides to the equation, the server and the file structure.
"One of the things with domains in Web3 is that they tend to represent a person or entity instead of a server. Which matches more how people actually think about domains."
Josh Robinson, CTO, Cortex
ICANN is the organization that controls top-level domains such as .com, .org, and .xyz, and acts as a central control point for regulating the kinds of content that can or can't be published online.
ENS is a human-readable namespace that acts as a pointer to user-controlled blockchain wallets. Getting these domains to publish content in Web2 browsers has been, thus far, incredibly clunky and not scalable. Cortex fixes that.
Right now, there are two major ways you represent yourself online: your profile on the apps you use, and your website. Those spaces represent you, your art, your business, your feelings, or anything else in your life. But none of the content that you publish to those places is really yours. That content is controlled by the companies who own your data and the servers or clouds they're stored on.
Cortex puts the control of that content, your digital identity, back into your hands. For the first time, .hiphop domains will function in both Web2 and Web3, joining DNS and ENS, each domain an NFT that can create limitless subdomains and publish batches of user-controlled content, nearly fee-free, to a decentralized and chain-agnostic content network.
What that looks like in practice
As an example, say I purchased mango.hiphop. After registering, I then register with Cortex to claim the NFT mango.hiphop, a powerful ENS domain. When I publish content, not only does proof of that publication go on chain, but the site also arrives in a Web2 browser. It is truly a "Web2.5" integration unlike any before it.
I can then mint subdomains. A domain like Album1.mango.hiphop may be a 1-of-100 copy of my recent album release, each an NFT in its own right, and also a subdomain that every holder of the album can turn into a space that they then own. And each subdomain NFT is itself a smart wallet which can hold its own tokens. Want an autograph for your digital copy? Want to store all the art you made listening to the album inside? Now you can.
New modalities of representing ourselves and engaging with one another online can radically shape the way we might look at more immersive digital experiences and environments. With scalable, decentralized, user-centric digital identity tools, we can begin to see it as uplifting instead of frightening, as each new utility empowers the people participating where it might have exploited them. These new tools make developing community relationships, sustainable incentive structures, equitability for creators, deeper collaboration frameworks, and other support systems significantly more achievable and symbiotic.
Hip hop, as a culture, has acted as the voice of people fighting for a better world. We want to make sure that emerging digital technologies help to amplify those voices as much as possible through self-empowerment and security.
Written August 2023 for Cortex and Dot Hip Hop, LLC. The original, with photography, is on Medium.