Category: Articles

“Whatever the particular policy issue is, if you don’t understand the technology and you don’t understand the implications, you’re setting yourself up for failure.” – Jerry Brito, Coin Center

Understatement of the year: Bitcoin has a huge public perception problem. The first thing that comes to mind is organized crime, black markets, and notorious Internet hackers using the digital currency to hide their exploits. Yet—at the time of writing— the token stands at a value of CAD $3,300 with a market cap of $42 billion.

More importantly, the underlying technology behind Bitcoin—blockchain—is quickly gaining traction among the business community in Canada and around the world. In its 2017 Global Fintech Report, PricewaterhouseCoopers says funding in blockchain companies has increased 79% year-over-year to US $450 million, and that 77% of financial institutions surveyed expect to adopt blockchain internally by 2020.

So what exactly is blockchain? And why should you care about it?

Blockwhat?

It’s a common reaction. Very few people know what the blockchain is, and the few who do are not always adept at explaining it to the average person.

Blockchain technology can best be described as an online distributed ledger, like a record book kept by a decentralized network of computers. Transactions are encrypted and recorded to this ledger, then “blocked” into a set, with each block verified by “miners” or computers who automatically and permanently timestamp and validate each set of transactions. As each block of transactions is verified, they become linked or chained to the previous block, making it nearly impossible to steal, erase or modify previous transactions.

Forget the technicalities of the network, think about what having this technology really means.

To date, we could only send digital copies of information over a network; now we can actually send digital value—without the need for a middleman. Anything of value can be openly, securely, and directly transmitted to anyone, anywhere, anytime, in a matter of minutes, and in some cases, seconds—payments; property titles; birth, death, and marriage certificates; citizenship and voting privileges; supply chain and inventory tracking; charitable donations; contracts; and anything else of value that can be expressed in computer code.

The state of blockchain technology today is much like the Internet in its early days: waiting for a plethora of user-friendly applications and innovations. Even for those of us who use the Internet every single day (and perhaps every minute), we hardly give a second thought to the infrastructure, software, and circuits in our smartphone or laptop that enable this technology. In fact, in 2017, it’s strange to say I “surf the Web”. We talk about our Internet usage almost exclusively in terms of the applications we use the most—Facebook, Instagram, Gmail, Tumblr, etc. Many of us would be hard-pressed to explain what the Internet is exactly, but we know we need it in our everyday interactions.

Similarly, whenever blockchain goes mainstream, we won’t give a second thought to the mechanics, but rather, associate our everyday transactions with those future killer apps on our connected devices. As digital economy gurus Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott have said, we are quickly moving from the Internet of Information (i.e. email, social networking) to an Internet of Value (i.e. Bitcoin, smart contracts), and that has exciting implications for the future of blockchain technology.

A Tale of Two Disruptors

Among the many clouds of uncertainty that hang over this nascent technology, there is one that is darker than the rest: regulation. Blockchain is still developing the kind of governance structures that we take for granted in the current Internet infrastructure. In a few years, the blockchain ecosystem will face a crossroads in Canada and around the world. Blockchain companies will need to decide whether to collaborate or fight regulators.

Regulators are already starting to pay attention to the impact of digital currencies and other blockchain technologies on financial markets and local economies as they gain traction among investors and even mainstream consumers. Like fellow disruptors Uber and Airbnb, blockchain companies have been able to thrive and grow quickly by operating in a relatively unregulated environment.

The financial industry is highly regulated and will view blockchain companies as direct competitors to their business, operating outside the law and cutting into their customer base and profits. As the taxi industry and hotel industry have done before them, large financial institutions will need to decide whether to level the playing field either by embracing this new technology, or attempting to shut it down and ban it using traditional legal, regulatory and political levers.

Enter a tale of two disruptors.

Ridesharing service Uber used its popularity with consumers and its relative size to aggressively fight regulation and taxi lobbies in multiple jurisdictions. However, the multi-front lawsuits and public fights were extremely costly for the company.Sexual assault cases and incidents of racial profiling also amplified negative attention. At the same time, there was little public sympathy or patience for the unpopular taxi companies and backwards-thinking politicians at city halls worldwide. In the best cases, reasonable rules were put in place, but at what reputational cost to all involved?

Home-sharing giant Airbnb took a different approach. It worked collaboratively with regulators in different jurisdictions to share local, aggregate, and anonymized data about its home-sharing communities and joined the public discussion on how best to shape rules for its platform. Airbnb told city councils point-blank that it wanted to be regulated and taxed, and thereby legalized and legitimated. There continues to be debate surrounding its impact on affordable housing and irresponsible guest behaviour, but for the most part, Airbnb has tried to be a good neighbour to regulators and politicians in the governance of home-sharing platforms.

Blockchain technology can take important lessons from both of these disruptors’ experiences.

Do No Harm

All technology is dual use; that is to say, the technology itself is neutral until an actor uses it for helpful or harmful purposes. For the moment, experts have recommended that governments take a “light touch” to regulating blockchain, noting that any action might stifle the creative development of this ground-breaking technology.

Blockchain experts argue the benefits of blockchain technology far outweigh the drawbacks. All the same, blockchain will come with its own challenges for businesses. The Internet still has issues such as tax obligations, data breaches, money laundering, fraud, criminal financing, privacy, and others yet to manifest. Blockchain’s challenges will open up public debate on how best to govern this technology and expose both disruptive and disrupted businesses to reputational risks as they find their footing within this new wave of innovation.

Start-ups, companies, and investors will also need to learn how to navigate the regulatory environment and communicate with a public that does not quite yet understand what impact the technology will have on their everyday lives.

If you want to be ready for the Internet of Value, you’ll need the right expertise to bridge the gap between government, public opinion, and technology. If you have questions on the implications of blockchain for your organization, please reach out to the Navigator team.

Image credit: Uwe Falkenberg

In a world of fake news, wikis are blurring the line between what an audience would like to be true and what has been objectively verified. In fact, political parties of all stripes use wikis to tell their own truths. Ideological groups have joined them, using platforms based on the same technology as Wikipedia to legitimize their arguments. They bank off of Wikipedia’s authority, with good reason.

Wikipedia is amazing. When you google a question, Wikipedia is there with an answer. Not only are the answers easy to find, they’re all verified by other sources, which are also one click away. Users can flag entries that do not meet quality standards. Over the years, it has become the gathering place for those who care about the truth.

Its treasure-trove of content is available in more than 280 languages. More than five million people visit the English site every hour. There are an estimated 35,000 “volunteers” working to improve English articles everyday. These editors adhere to lofty editorial standards. They focus on objectivity and transparency by forcing the verification of claims by outside sources. Articles about contentious topics must give equal amounts of space to both sides. Disputes are resolved through debates in community forums. Users with a history of following Wikipedia’s rules have more weight than newcomers. The system may not be perfect but it’s working. No other source comes close to Wikipedia’s authority. There is nothing online or in traditional media with the same level of trust.

Wikis are authoritative because their information is the result of a group effort. They contain content that has been scrutinized by many people, most of whom have more than a passing interest in the topic. This makes them ideal for fan sites. For example, Wookieepedia started as a place to argue over the type of gun Boba Fett used in Return of the Jedi. Today, it is the online authority for all things Star Wars.

Wikis help make art accessible, which can help creators as well as fans. Publishers like Disney and Blizzard monitor fan wikis for feedback. Brandon Sanderson credits the Wheel of Time wiki for helping him keep details straight when he took over writing the series from the late Robert Jordan.

By providing a space for existing fans to clarify details in their favourite stories, these kinds of wikis confirm points of view through consensus. For science fiction, that fan consensus is as good as fact, especially when it’s backed by quotes from the source book or movie.

But in the non-fiction world, people are using wikis to spread their ideologies. Wikis are moving from art to opinions and becoming tools to spread an ideology online rather than hubs for people already interested in that subject. Users dissatisfied with mainstream perspectives are beginning to cultivate their own online encyclopedias. These sites reflect ideologies or personal truths instead of striving for an objective point of view. These “Wikipedia forks” are not new, but are gaining popularity. Popularity means more users and more entries.

We can see this effect at work when comparing two well-known and opposing ideological wikis. Users are growing more deliberate with how they position these sites as sources.

Infogalactic is an obvious place to start. The site looks like Wikipedia, which critics say is a deliberate attempt to conflate ideological content with Wikipedia’s more objective and widely-accepted articles. Infogalactic is not shy about its point of view. Most online encyclopedias use “wiki” or “pedia” somewhere in their names to get credibility. Infogalactic does something similar, only it invites association with publications like Infowars, defining itself against the mainstream as the alt-right’s version of Wikipedia. The name, like the editorial guidelines, emphasize ideology over function.

The chart below shows backlink growth for Infogalactic. Backlinks are to the Internet what citations are to research papers. Sites with more links from other sites on the same topic are considered more authoritative sources. They also appear more often and with more prominence in search results.

In June, there was a major increase in Infogalatic’s backlinks. This means Infogalactic’s articles were used more often as online sources than they were in May. This will make its content much easier to find, exposing more users to its point of view. The kind of spike Infogalactic experienced in June only happens when there’s a considerable effort to increase a sites’ search engine authority. This kind of growth also means more sites are being created based on Infogalactic’s content. Chances are, the bulk of these sites share the same perspectives as those expressed on Infogalactic.

Infogalactic Backlink Growth:

Let’s compare those results to Rationialwiki. Rationalwiki is the most famous counterexample to Infogalactic. It borrows from Wikipedia’s editorial guidelines, but applies them with a left wing ideology. It started as an antidote to the opinions that were being presented as facts on wikis. Rationalwiki began with science-based articles on topics users felt were misrepresented in popular digital sources like Wikipedia. Rationalwiki’s users rejected the democracy of Wikipedia and instead embraced an evidence-based meritocracy. Initial articles had to be grounded in science and guidelines for appropriate sources are much stricter than Wikipedia’s. Its backlink growth also spiked in June.

Rationalwiki Backlink Growth:

This backlink growth is no accident. Rationalwiki and Infogalactic are growing. They’re making pages about topics that fall outside of their supposed expertise and linking them to other web pages about the same topic. This is exposing more users to their points of view, while increasing their reach. Sure, Ratioalwiki’s entry about cheese is meant to be a joke, but some of its content provides advice people act or form opinions on. The cheese article is a hook to bring new users into the wiki, where they can be exposed to the “rational” ideology.

Infogalatic uses a different tactic. It has filled its wiki with entries about non-ideological topics like linoleum, lifted straight from Wikipedia. Users encountering one of these articles will likely assume the rest of the site is of the same quality. They are susceptible to the subtle suggestions in articles that differ from Wikipedia’s versions and reflect Infogalactic’s point of view.

To be clear, neither site is anywhere close to replacing Wikipedia or even showing up on the first page of Google. But they contribute to, or is a product of, a more polarized society. And their tactics are working.

For political or business subjects, wikis are a better tool for converting users into a way of thinking or legitimizing a point of view than social media. Sure, people are more likely to encounter content via social media channels than they are via wikis. But wikis have a lasting effect. Anything pushed through social disappears as soon as the user scrolls through their feed. By comparison, wikis remain visible in search engines and cultivate distinct, internal communities. And thanks to Wikipedia, wikis are taking on the same kind of legitimacy that news media once enjoyed.

Have you ever received a curated delivery package? No matter how obscure your interests, you can find a curated box of goodies that satisfies your impulses, needs, or tastes. The options are wide-ranging. On one end, you have the practical: Dollar Shave Club, or produce delivery services, etc. In the middle, you have convenience options: the Blue Aprons of the world that deliver pre-washed and apportioned ingredients so you can whip up dinner in minutes. Then, there’s the leisure category: products like the Box of Awesome, which promises to deliver “thoughtful collections of goods from small-batch brands…for guys who give a damn.”

If you have ever received one of these packages, you understand how awesome they are. The experience can only be likened to getting a care package from mom that first year you’re away from home. She knows exactly what you need, what will put a smile on your face, and what will make your life easier. It’s that element of surprise and excitement that makes these delivery services so enjoyable. Getting a parcel with your name on it never gets old. And thanks to countless apps and online subscription services, we can schedule a constant stream of packages that pack a punch of dopamine.

Why stop at the barber shop to pick up a package of safety razors when you can have it shipped to your door?

Why bother going to your local pub when you can have dinner delivered from an app?

Seriously, why waste time at the grocery store hunting down a bunch of cilantro for your fish taco recipe when you’ll only use a couple sprigs and let the rest wilt in the fridge as the week passes by? Better to only receive the three sprigs you need. No hassle, no mess, no waste.

Today, people gather in cinemas to watch other people play video games with the same fervor and excitement that sports fans bring to the stadium. Considering this, delivery services might seem like the natural progression of our desire to limit our interaction with the outside world. Mix and match the right combination of services, and you can live the good life. You know, a life where you get all you need and want without dealing with actual people—a life completely disconnected from this world, in a glorious bubble that caters to your every need.

The Internet makes this so easy, freeing us up to spend more time in front of the screen. And as we spend more time in front of the screen, we’re spending less time with each other.

Right?

Maybe not.

More and more apps are trying to incorporate social components. Rave, for example, is an app that lets you watch music videos at the same time as your friends. The videos sync up so that you and your group are all viewing at the exact same time. We may have more screens and more technology than ever before, but we still want company.

In fact, the same delivery services that are helping us avoid the world are also helping us connect with family and friends. Board games are making a huge comeback.  This latest surge is far outpacing the early 20th century golden era of board games that brought us Monopoly and Scrabble. We’re talking annual sales growth in the 20-35% range in what is now an $880 million market.

The growth is impressive enough that Hasbro recently launched a subscription box of its own. Sadly, the service is not yet available in Canada, but if you’re a lucky citizen of the United States you can get three games sent to your doorstep every three months for $49.99. But even if it’s not available to Canadians yet, It appears we’re not just bringing razor blades and produce into our homes. We’re bringing friends. We’re bringing in face-to-face communication, which we know to be so critical to human development.

It seems counter-intuitive that as we further digitize our lives we’re simultaneously looking to connect on a human level. Sure, you might be gathered around a board game like Pandemic, working to fight a fake global outbreak, but as you’re doing it, you’re having a real conversation with others.

I still get the odd Pokémon Go zombie wandering down the street, but it would appear that I need not fret about the downfall of humanity just yet.

That desire for face-to-face time should not be lost on communicators. So much is still said at the dining room table, and in a world where those offline experiences appear to be fewer and further in between, they carry that much more weight. Political campaigns have long talked about and organized “friends and family” campaigns, timing strategic announcements near long-weekends in the hopes that families will talk about it when they gather at the table. While it may be tempting to disregard such an approach in what is a mostly digital age, we may want to think twice. In-person opportunities might be more powerful than ever before.

Every summer there is a song of the summer. This song isn’t necessarily the best song and it might not even be a song you like. In fact, you might hate this song. However, by the end of the season, this song is everywhere – you walk into a store, a bar, a restaurant, you hear it blaring from cars with their windows open. It’s blasting from people’s decks and bedroom windows, while you’re strolling down the street. This is a critical feature of the summer song: it is inescapable.

The song of the summer is also palatable, meaning you can dance to it. Or, as Jenna Wortham and Wesley Morris’ recent episode of Still Processing pointed out, it’s not just that you can dance to it, but that everyone can dance to it. It’s both light and lite – in that it’s the diet version of whatever it is that you usually listen to from that genre, whether it’s rap, R&B, pop, or rock.

Occasionally, the summer song is a hit from the start, but most of the time, it’s a victory of attrition. At the beginning of the summer there are a number of contenders, by mid-summer one pulls away, and by the end, there is one song to which you, and seemingly all of your friends and casual acquaintance, know all the words, trills, punctuated syllables and emphatic pauses.

The fact that we still have a song of the summer in 2017 is pretty impressive. Streaming services and blogs have been chipping away at the idea of mainstream music for years, making achieving consensus that much more difficult. The same is true for online content in general. Mainstream voices are competing in a much bigger field – which, although far from perfect – offers a wider diversity of opinion and subject matter.

Back in the not-so-distant day, companies used to want their ad, campaign, photo, etc., to go viral. However, virality is short-lived. Anything that scales those heights so quickly usually burns out just as fast. People get turned off from popularity just as much as they buy into it – so much that there’s now a “here comes the backlash” sigh that accompanies every widespread meme or comment: see covfefe jokes. For there to be a lasting positive impression, you want to be present without ever becoming ever-present and exhausting people to the point of frustration.

A lot of the problem with viral content is that it is too of the moment and it becomes victim of its own success. Ideally, you want something that speaks to the time but is forward-looking enough that it has room to grow into something more. A number of the songs of summer contenders are actually already out of the running because they’ve already played themselves out, or feel too done, despite it being early June. As Wesley Morris points out, the longevity in a summer song – and in a lot of internet content – is that it doesn’t necessarily completely break new ground, but instead reflects the zeitgeist while pushing its boundary slightly. Richard Foreman, an avant-garde dramatist, once said that with art, it’s the more low-brow, obvious kitsch that you remember because it doesn’t force anything new on you. It retreads familiar material. New things that push your boundaries are harder to recall because they’re presenting you with something completely different than what you’ve experienced before.

A summer song is a perfect storm, a magic formula. It speaks to some sort of cultural touchstone or creates one, providing just enough differentiation from the other songs for everyone to latch on to, but also nothing so strongly different that it alienates too much of the base. Slow-building ubiquity is key – and to achieve ubiquity, you have to have just enough of the right stuff that gradually, the variety of places you visit, and your disparate groups, are all playing the same song, and it all seems appropriate. Often, strategic placements are worth more than the abruptness of something crashing into every content space in your life. Plastering messages and information everywhere can result in the same sort of exhaustion as something going viral. When it’s everywhere, all the time, you tune out by default.

There are a lot of days when I have to censor myself with Twitter because I am a working professional and I need to get things accomplished during work hours. This isn’t because I’m looking at an endless stream of real-time updates and first-person narration, but because there are a handful of people whose feeds I go to for important perspectives, articles to read, music recommendations and the like. Basically, there are people who I’ve been following for a number of years whose tastes I hold in high esteem – whether it’s politics, literature, pop culture – and I go directly to their feeds, get lost in them for some time, open up an unhealthy number of tabs, and either read or bookmark a bunch of articles. I pay more attention when a critical number of people in this group are all talking about the same thing.

By filtering through the mass amount of content, I’m selecting people I trust to provide me with information that I find most important. Having a personal way into content is what makes it stick, and people consistently encountering material from sources they trust makes them more likely to spread it to their networks. Creating a sense of self-discovery is a critical element to avoiding someone feeling like they’re participating in marketing or something cheap and corporate.

To quote a classic 1999 teen film – that seems like it should be a summer movie, although it came out in the spring – “I know you can be overwhelmed, and you can be underwhelmed, but can you ever just be whelmed?” If you’re hitting the mark between these two, but in a sustained, focused way, you can achieve the illusion that something just happened to fall into someone’s life, rather than being forced into it. In terms of promotion or messaging, it feels more like a choice. While maybe slightly less erudite than Richard Foreman, the teen film makes a valid point – we tend to ignore the middle ground.

If you’re playing the long game, or promoting or building awareness, you don’t always need to be the guaranteed smash hit. Sometimes it’s best to go for the slow burn. It’s June 2017, but I can still tell you the songs of the summer going back to 2008. You don’t always need to overwhelm, and you certainly don’t want to underwhelm – but you can also be the song of summer and simply whelm for the win.

On June 6, 2016, only days before one of the most highly-promoted fight cards in UFC history was about to take place, the UFC Vice President of Athlete Health and Performance announced at a press conference that Jon Jones, the former light heavyweight champion, would not be facing current champion Daniel Cormier for the belt. Jones had just tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs).

Jones received a one-year suspension, which he is still waiting out, but the UFC has already announced that he will be facing Daniel Cormier for the belt at UFC 214. At the UFC 214 Press Conference, fans cheered Jones’s return and his upcoming fight is expected to be one of the most-watched in UFC history.

How did this happen? How was an accused cheater with a history of public scandals able, in the span of only a few months, to rebuild his reputation and win back the trust and admiration of fans? In his response to USADA’s allegations, Jones followed several key rules of crisis response: he got out in front of the message; he was sincere, honest, and authentic; and his statements remained consistent.

At first, the PEDs announcement seemed like the end for a once-great fighter. After being pulled from a previous fight with Cormier for cocaine use and sentenced to probation for a non-fatal hit-and-run, this looked like it would be the final straw for fans and the UFC. UFC President Dana White implied as much when he said Jones would “never headline a card again”.

In less than 24 hours after the PEDs announcement, Jones claimed innocence. Jones was glassy-eyed, his voice frequently cracked, and, at several points, he broke down in tears. It was a side of the fighter the public had rarely seen before. Known for his undefeated record and his cocksure attitude, Jones, who first won the UFC championship belt at 23 (the youngest ever), was now a pariah and an accused cheater. Not only would he lose out on his six-figure payday from UFC 200, but he faced a potential two-year suspension from the sport. Perhaps worse than risking his livelihood, Jones’s reputation was now in tatters – a fighter with such preternatural ability was ripe for accusations of cheating; his otherworldly skill was now chalked up to steroid use.

From the start, Jones asserted his innocence saying the test was, at best, a mistake and, at worst, a tainted supplement he took unwittingly. In either case, Jones would not be culpable for his supposed cheating and he would face a lesser punishment if he received one at all. Likewise, in the court of public opinion, either option would exonerate the athlete and reestablish his reputation.

While he answered reporters’ questions, Jones had to pause several times to collect himself and wipe tears from his face. With a shaky voice he apologized to fans and ticket holders, lamented the “long ladder” he had to climb again to prove his wins were legitimate, and apologized to his opponent, Daniel Cormier. Jones broke down completely, barely choking out the words “I’m sorry” between asking for tissues to wipe away tears. Cormier, the 38-year-old former Olympic wrestler renowned for his professionalism and positive attitude, has played a perfect foil to the upstart Jones. At 29, Jones was known for his constant partying and frequent criticism of his opponents (he has bragged about beating Cormier “a week after doing coke,”). But this moment of vulnerability allowed the public to connect with Jones and understand his distress – it made his story all the more believable.

Ultimately, Cormier did forgive Jones, saying that the former champion was the only fight he really wanted and he would wait through Jones’s suspension to face him. By stating this, Cormier helped open the door to jilted fans to forgive Jones – they wanted the fight, they had paid for the fight, and they could still see it happen, just at a later date.

Throughout the process – the initial press conference, the weeks of re-testing alternate blood samples and supplements, and his eventual exoneration – Jones stuck by his story. While some elements were revealed slowly (like the fact that Jones’s positive results were due to his use of over-the-counter erectile dysfunction drugs), the main thrust remained constant: Jones did not use PEDs; he was not, nor had ever been a cheater; and the test results had to have been caused by human error of some kind. Jones didn’t have to keep multiple untruths straight in his mind. Instead, he told the public what he knew, and he knew he was innocent.

Jones’s adherence to these three principles – getting his side of the story out front of the issue; being sincere, honest, and authentic; sticking with his message – allowed him to return to the UFC without much, if any, damage to his reputation. At the press conference announcing Jones’s eventual return, fans cheered Jones and jeered Cormier. While their rematch is still months away (and Jones may yet get himself into more trouble) it appears every party involved has been willing to wipe the slate clean and give the former champ another chance. Had Jones not followed these rules of crisis response, he might not be preparing to fight at UFC 214 – he might not be fighting in the UFC at all.