Over the past few weeks, the Wall Street Journal has published a series of stories about Facebook, showing the company knew about many of the harms caused by its platform and chose not to fix them. The investigation underlined how a small group of technologists at the world’s largest companies have “a lot of consolidated power over people,” said Braxton Woodham, president of Unfinished Labs, during a conversation at Unfinished Live.
What if that power could be redistributed? That’s the vision for Project Liberty, an initiative by Unfinished that aims to create a completely different and more equitable civic architecture for the digital world. “The model we have right now with our tech is broken,” said Frank McCourt, the chairman and CEO of Unfinished. “Project Liberty is saying, okay, let’s return the ownership and control of the data to individuals.”
It’s not just a technocratic solution, but a chance for everyone — from artists and doctors to community organizers — to reset how the internet operates.
Watch the full talk below, and scroll for a written transcript. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Sarah Fischer
Hello everyone. And thank you so much for joining us at Unfinished Live. I am so grateful to be speaking with Frank McCourt and Braxton Woodham today about the work that they’ve been doing to find a new future for our data and the world and the internet. I want us to start off just by talking about some of the news of the day. Last week, the Wall Street Journal published a five part investigative series about Facebook. And what was so interesting about it was that it showed that Facebook’s been doing a lot of research about the harms that their platform is causing, but not necessarily following up and taking action to address them in a way that a lot of people expected. I want to just get your reaction to this Frank and Braxton, because I think what you’re building seeks to address some of the systemic problems that have been uncovered. Frank, let’s start with you.
Frank McCourt
Well, yeah, where to begin on that one. I think that the incumbents have the power to make the change. Right? And yeah, we’re going to talk in a minute about an idea that I think could be transformative, but if the incumbents would give people back the ownership and control of the data, we… They’re in the best position to do that, in other words. Right? And they could, if they wanted to and if they wanted to, they would have. So that’s my reaction to that.
Sarah Fischer
Braxton, what’s your reaction?
Braxton Woodham
Well, similarly, I think that one of the challenges we’re facing right now is we have technologists, a few technologists having a lot of consolidated power over a lot of people. And I think we need to look at having more, not only more representation, but more political leadership versus corporate leadership at that kind of scale. And so the incentives are perverse when you’re talking about societal implications, but really focused on a few shareholders benefiting.
Sarah Fischer
So right now you’re seeking to do something a little bit different. And part of it is creating the right incentives for people to build things in a thoughtful way. Braxton, let me start with you. Can you walk me through the structure of what Project Liberty is? What are the pillars and how does that structure create incentive for people to do good with the internet instead of bad?
Braxton Woodham
Sure. So the structure, which is really critical, is at the very highest level just aggregating the technology, which is critical as far as the solution, from what we’re now calling governance. And we’ll see how that term evolves, which is outside of the core tech and then the movement, which is really the cultural movement and the people that would adopt this technology and migrate to this ecosystem. So at the very, very top level, those are the three components.
Sarah Fischer
And Frank, walk me through the development of those three components. How does that structure differ from the structure that we have in the real world today? And I ask, because we do have movements today, we do have a government today. So how is what you’re building different from the real world we’re living in?
Frank McCourt
So think of Project Liberty as creating a new civic architecture for a digital world. We’ve benefited from structure, institutions, systems for quite a long time that supported an analog world. Now in a digital world, we need to rethink the architecture… The model we have right now with our tech is broken. So we can innovate and create a new model. And Project Liberty is saying, okay, let’s return the ownership and control of the data to individuals. Let’s embed the values and principles we want in our society, in the tech and let the technologists know this is what we want and let’s change the economic formula.
So think of Liberty as more than a tech company — or not just a tech company. Tech is a big part of the problem. Tech and innovation needs to be a big part of the solution, but the governance is critical because we skipped that step in 2.0, and now we are where we are. Let’s not skip it again. We have this incredible opportunity for a reset and we can get it right this time if we move quickly. And the movement piece, I think, is really, really important because a movement with a solution can really, really make big things happen. So think of Liberty as three parts, but working together — it’s not three silos. It’s three component parts, tech being a piece of the project.
Sarah Fischer
I want to go back to something you said, which is that it’s about sort of readdressing some of our core principles about how we feel about data and tech. Privacy is not mentioned in our constitution. We have search and seizure, but that just kind of alludes to it. So do we need to be rethinking about our core laws as a society, or do you think we’re able to build Web 3.0 by not having to completely rewrite the principles we were founded on?
Frank McCourt
So focusing for a minute or two on the tech pillar, Braxton’s led a team that’s developed a new protocol called a decentralized social networking protocol. It’s a core internet protocol that would sit on top of the protocol that created internet 1.0, it would sit on top of the protocol that created internet 2.0, and it would transform the way the internet works so that the social graph would become a universal graph and the walls would come down. The platforms would no longer have sole control and ownership of the data, because the internet would operate differently.
Now, that assumes that there’s mass migration or adoption, just like there was with the 1.0 and 2.0 protocols. So yeah, adoption is really important. Within this framework there’s the ability for people to decide what they want to keep private and what they want to share. So it’s not so much, from my perspective, that we need to create a whole new layer of rules about privacy. Although we do have in our current society, some norms about privacy and people’s privacy should be protected. Well, we’ve lost that completely with data. And I think we need to return to the core values we have, make sure they’re embedded in the tech and giving people agency instead of having data extracted and used in ways that you and I have never given it permission to be used.
We want to keep the good part of the internet, which is the connectivity, and theoretically in 3.0, the internet will be more powerful. The connectivity will be greater, the possibilities amazing, but the control returned to the individual.
Sarah Fischer
It’s such a big thing to process as somebody who uses the Web 2.0, and Braxton, you’re a technologist by trade, you know this stuff better than anybody. What will it take to get people to adopt 3.0, instead of just saying, you know what, I’m used to HTTP, I’m used to the internet I have today, and I want to stick with this.
Braxton Woodham
Well, adoption’s going to require obviously incentives and motivation, and it’s definitely going to be a variety, we think, of applications and so forth. I think that the fact that we unlock value for people to participate in the economy and control… Those are fundamental elements that all these applications can then leverage to create new use cases we can’t even anticipate right now. And then in some cases, enhance use cases that exist today, broadcast media, et cetera. So we’ve been looking at three things, three aspects. One, we’re building apps ourselves. So we understand what those friction points are for adoption. So we can, and we’re open sourcing a lot of that for other developers. Two, we just had a dev summit yesterday. We’re reaching out to the community to inspire people to build applications that we might not even think about. And three, we’re looking at existing organizations, companies, some are in the audience that have lots of users that share this vision. And we want to join us basically in this, building this new ecosystem.
Sarah Fischer
Frank mentioned something earlier about walled gardens, massive tech companies that today are so powerful users might not feel like they have control of their data. Braxton, do you think those walled gardens would be interested in joining Web 3.0 and how would you incentivize them to consider it?
Braxton Woodham
Well, I think that it would be inevitable because what we’re really talking about is these massive data structures, the social graph being one, the global search index being another, et cetera, those becoming really public infrastructure. And so all of the different companies that work with that data at scale now would presumably want to do that in the future. The issue is just that those data structures are created by all of us, everybody here in this room, not by the few technologists, right? So, that should be a public resource. And then that should open up, like Frank mentioned, a lot more innovation and value once it’s kind of available for all.
Sarah Fischer
Frank, Braxton just mentioned that the user would decide where their data is going. I’m a user and I think it might be kind of complicated at first to figure out who I should be sharing my data with across the internet. How would you address an everyday person who, in Web 3.0, is this empowered when they’re not used to being this empowered?
Frank McCourt
Well, that’s what happened in 2.0, as well. So… the internet was invented and then pow, right? And all kinds of things are happening when all of a sudden massive amounts of data are created. And then a few people decide how it’s going to be used, how it’s going to be monetized, how it’s going to be, and we get all of the good results and the really bad results. And so, there’ll be a process both on the technology side. I mean, remember modems and remember connecting to the internet and all what you had to do. And then it got easy and then everybody used it. So there’ll be that process that will occur. There also needs to be an education process, and not so much on how to use the tech, but how powerful the tech is.
And from my perspective, we now have the knowledge of how the internet works and what it’s capable of doing. That certainly wasn’t universally understood or understood by society at large. So we know what it can do, and we get a do-over. So it’s a process of bringing people along. And that’s a big part of what Unfinished is about: Let’s bring people along in this conversation and not just have this stuff show up and a few people figure it out first, and then they know how to monetize it, and they grab a bunch of things and they have the wrong incentives. Let’s pause for a second and say, okay, why are we building this technology? What is the purpose of the technology? What do we want to achieve from this?
So again, back to this three legged stool or these three parts that link together, the tech is really important because that’s a solution to a big problem, but the governance is really important too. And the movement is really important too, because you want people to be steering this in the direction that society wants, not just a few people or a few companies want.
Sarah Fischer
I’m curious about that. Taking a moment to pause. I think a lot of technologists, Braxton, you know this better than anybody, for so long, the mission and the incentive has been to move fast and break things, not to pause and assess things. Do you think the tech community is ready for that pause, Braxton?
Braxton Woodham
I think a lot of people are doing that now. And when I say that you can pause in a certain way while still moving really, really fast in another way. So we’ve stepped back and thought about these core principles and first principles in a thoughtful way. And actually that’s happening more as our network grows of other interdisciplinary folks, but the tech itself, we don’t slow down at all. We move it, we have to move at the velocity of all the other tech folks. And we’re spending a lot of effort to actually work with other disciplines, social sciences, economists, et cetera, to actually connect them at the pace that technology develops so that we can solve this problem.
Sarah Fischer
Interesting. So it’s not about slowing the tech, it’s about bringing the movement and the governance up to speed. While I have you, this is more of a fun one. What is the promise in Web 3.0 of those types of technology when you empower people to have control over their own data? What promise does that unlock?
Braxton Woodham
Well, it’s kind of hopefully a positive Pandora’s Box. I think that decentralizing information storage just unlocks a massive number of use cases, but fundamentally that when you create information through your activities, you have agency over how it’s and the value behind it. And the way that value is distributed is much more equitable in theory and hopefully in practice with our project than what you see in corporate structures right now, where only a few are able to even get involved at an early stage in the value participation. So, I think it’s fundamental more and then it kind of plays across every conceivable use case or scenario.
Sarah Fischer
Frank, you’ve had an incredible career. What inspired you to start having conversations with folks like Braxton about really nitty gritty technology problems as opposed to focusing your efforts on something else?
Frank McCourt
My great-great grandfather was an immigrant. He came here with a 13-year-old boy. That 13-year-old boy started a construction company when he turned 50 in the late 1800s — he started building roads. I’ve heard a lot of road analogies here today. He started building roads when Henry Ford started building cars. And since that time over five generations, we’ve basically, we’re builders and problem solvers, it’s in the DNA. And so when we saw things just not going in the right direction, we actually started a school at Georgetown around public policy. And when we started the school in October of 2013, our government was shut down and it was not lost on anyone that we were having issues.
Roll the clock forward a mere seven years and a benign shutdown became an insurrection. The deterioration is happening very quickly. So, look, I will want capitalism. I’m a capitalist. I want it to survive. And I certainly want democracy to survive. So my family’s journey has been the journey of many in this country. We’ve helped build the dream, helped physically build it, but we’ve also benefited from it. I want it to continue for my kids and their kids and everyone’s kids. So we started Unfinished to start having conversations to understand more about the problem. And it just became so apparent that tech is a big part of the problem and tech needs to be a part of the solution. So Braxton [and I] had a conversation about this. We said, maybe there is a way to tackle this at the social graph level.
And off Braxton and the team went, and they’ve done brilliant work in my opinion, really. And it’s a very, very innovative idea if adopted, and it can really change things. It’s a simple idea. Just like the prior two protocols were, simple ideas adopted by everybody, universal result. And what this one would do is provide a universal social graph. It would become the public utility that the internet, the information, the data would become a public utility, which was the intention of the internet. Anybody you talked to who was there at the beginning, it’s a very different story, what’s happened. It was never intended for a few people to co-opt it. And then benefit from it mightily financially, but also create so many problems for society. So I think of it as changing the idea of all this to, let’s think about it in a way that we create value for society, not extract value from it.
Sarah Fischer
We have just a few seconds left. So Braxton, I’m going to give you the final question. When you close your eyes and you think about what the world could look like if the Web 3.0 is built the way you’re envisioning, what does the world look like?
Braxton Woodham
Well, I think it looks like a much more equitable world where people, like I said, have agency over what they say and do and how it’s, how it’s used and what kind of value’s exchanged. I think it’s just a freer more equitable world.