"Guerilla Interoperability" by Andreas Tsamados // Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress 2

[applause] Hi everyone. Um, can you hear me well in the back? Yeah. Okay. Um, so today we're talking about Guerilla interoperability.

Uh, it's quite related to what the previous I don't know where to sit so that you can see everything. Okay, like that. Um the previous panel was talking about how privacy is difficult to get to everyone uh and to include it in more apps, things that people are used to. And they mentioned compatibility uh way for privacy technology to be much more compatible with what people are used to. And it's kind of what I want to cover with Guerilla interoperability.

So I'm the co-founder of Fileverse Ducks. And dsheets new. It's sheets.new here. It's a mistake.

Um, we created a trustless alternative to Google Suite, uh, Microsoft Office, etc. So, thank you. Thank you. Right. Making privacy and decentralization available to everyone basically.

And I want to explain how we did it in a way that is quite aggressive towards big tech. Um, and this is uh most of the thesis of today. So, uh, the premise of my talk is pretty basic. It's that the good majority of the internet is now indistinguishable from hostile architecture. For those that don't know, hostile architecture is what you find in your towns, parks, etc.

It's architecture that was made specifically to make it very difficult for a homeless person to live in that city, to lay down, to sit down, to do anything basic. And we're starting to see a lot of those patterns also on the internet. So it's a one slide that has a little bit of text. The summary of it is that uh over twothird of the internet uh users are using one of two app stores, one of two office suites, one of two mobile oss and one of three cloud platforms. And a lot of the internet today has those choke points for information, communication, for collaboration.

And it is uh probably about time to do something about it outside of regulations which is why I come up with the idea of guerrilla interoperability. So just quickly as in of context um for those who don't knowification it describes the process in more detail of how the internet became [ __ ] basically and there are three stage life cycle for platforms to do that. first is you capture a lot of users and promise them the world will never be evil. you'll get free ice cream forever and then they evolve into becoming a SAS a more business focused uh customer group uh company and then once the two are locked in and it is very difficult for either user groups to be able to find even an alternative or even think of an alternative then this is a perfect moment to strike and start making the uh technology that you offer the two first groups shitty for everyone else impossible to get out of uh it constantly extracts uh value from your data. It sells to a thousand data brokers.

Uh dev access is revoked. Facebook, nobody could build their many apps on it anymore. Same story for every big platform in existence. Now, this forces developers to move around arbitrarily. Sorry, I'm trying to make enough space.

uh developers to move around the uh um it sorry developers are forced to uh move around arbitrary rules and obstacles that make absolutely no sense. Uh and uh you start seeing the image is a bit like that. We have an Iron Man suite. We finally managed to develop it, but it's impossible to have it uh uh go through the skies and impress everyone because we're either restricted by the app store or some cloud computing that has made it impossible for you to act outside of the rules of operations that corporations usually uh accept. So, what do we do about it?

Well, uh one good example of what not to do is maybe look at data protection regulations. So data protection regulations usually look like uh this today. So they tried very hard to make it difficult for platforms to abuse people, abuse their data, uh uh break their privacy, etc. And yet uh they just put a lot of tiny rules that users don't understand, new developers cannot abide by and just corporations are finding ways around and making it impossible for you to actually have data protection. So data protection ideally looks a little bit more like that.

If you see that the train is coming for 10 people and there is no way to stop it. I don't know maybe you you make it explode or something but you don't just lay down and put more levers on the way. So for that I took a quote from Asata Shakur. Nobody in the world nobody in history has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who are oppressing them. Same for corporations or big tech companies that have not allowed in the past 20 years for us to do something outside of their rules.

So now's the time to do something a bit more aggressive. Let's get into it. Okay. So what do I mean by more aggressive? Not exactly this.

It's a little bit uh uh more uh um more explained. It's something a bit like that. So this is called anti- anti- uh uh hostile architecture and it's the idea that you can basically find your way against or around the hostile architecture that uh either companies or the powerful have put around either in your town or digitally. So I came up with the idea of guerrilla interoperability. I'm going to read the definition I wrote for it.

Uh, it's a userdriven tactical resistance where individuals or small actors repurpose the infrastructure of a dominant platform or entity, often using stealth and ingenuity to reclaim their data, their self-s sovereignty or functionality and the services of a better alternate. So, the bench made it impossible for me to sleep there. [ __ ] it, I'm going to uh come up with my own architecture to fit into that bench. So this is what I mean and this is what I want to explore a bit more now on a digital sense and then digital environment. Sorry there's a lot of memes in the presentation.

It's just it's a Tik Tok brain. I thought uh I would be in my crowd here. So if they won't build it, we will and they will be forced to accept it. It comes from different things. One is just building a culture of everyday resistance uh against hostile architecture.

So this is a Greek pigeon that I saw this summer uh practicing exactly what I what I mean by everyday resistance against it. Uh you also need to reject more often and systematically the rules that are presented to you. Uh and it's not necessarily to put cognitive strain on you to read the the [ __ ] super long terms and conditions of Apple, but it is to have that reflex to say no. Why? because that no leads you to okay so what else if I can't use the the Apple app store what else and you start seeing that there are alternatives that people have come up with so say no more aggressively shill aggressively when it comes to new technologies that can subvert a status quo you consider unjust uh here I'm just shilling uh our apps dedux new act publicly collectively and outside their rules of action.

Why is that important? Okay, it's a bit of a provocative uh uh meme. But uh some of the most effective movements against uh uh lockedin mechanisms on app stores, on computing and uh cloud platforms has come from either media companies getting together and forcing big tech companies to accept their rules, their IP constraints, etc., or it came from uh for example the app store the big lawsuit between Fortnite and App Store. It came from coordination from different entrepreneurs that uh uh that got behind the the Fortnite guy and they actually forced Apple to drop some of their ridiculous rules.

Now uh a good example recent is maybe the Steam Machine. I don't know who has gotten into it already, but it's going to be running not on Windows, which is crazy for whoever spent a little bit of time building video games. They know how constrained Windows is, and we've always been forced to use Windows. Steam Machine will probably uh just be on uh Linux and be it will be possible for anyone to play their usual games from Steam and other consoles. But they made it more possible for basically anyone to uh for anyone to uh build on it, bring other games from locked platforms on it, etc.

Now I'm finishing. I'm getting closer. I promise. Um there's never been a better time for technical counterpositioning. So uh I like to talk about it as a piece through excessive cryptography but there are a lot of cool ways today that you can put in action that guerilla interoperability that I'm talking about.

So let's go quickly over it. I don't have much time. Ah okay one second. Whoa. Whoa.

Okay. So I'm not going to go over those slides way too long. I just want to give you a quick idea. Uh the new stack that is available for developers make it much more possible to have guerrilla interoperability from offchain peer-to-peer networks being much more scalable, easy to join, etc. to onchain primitives that have emerged and that are much more accessible to most developers.

I won't go over each proponent um component. Please take a picture if you're interested or come talk to me afterwards. Another is again just to list down the things that make Guerilla interoperability much more possible. You have things like content addressing today, peers based storage. You have programmable identities.

You can go from one app and to another and bring your social graph with it without asking permission for some centralized operator. And I'm not going to go over each, but I'm going to go over one a little bit more, which allows you to build apps that are basically completely new and give a different experience to people. Uh, so DOX, for example, you can come with an account from an external platform. You can use the app without having an account. You can bring your social graph from somewhere else, take your social graph of from Fver to somewhere else, etc.

And one last uh uh test and I'll finish with the next two slides. uh that we've uh or tech that we've been exploring that we think is really powerful for Guerilla interoperability is ZKTLS um which basically allows you to uh uh take data that is confidential from one platform and use it in a verifiable way in another uh platform. So uh sorry I'm speeding through. Uh let's say that uh ZKTLS basically turns your personal data on a centralized platform into a portable verifiable asset breaking the monopolistic control that enables what I described before as entitification and allowing competitors to build better usercentric alternatives without ever having to ask permission of a big tech locked in platform. There are a lot of apps that are trying to uh use some of that technology and that are uh leading in the way of interoperability and making it possible for everyone to basically uh um uh not just experience the internet as a lockin mechanisms where they have no rights but something different and there was a video but it's uh not possible to play it so I'll stop here.

Thanks for listening. [applause]

[applause]