Source: Unsplash This story is part of the Web3 Writing Contest hosted by The Octopus Network in collaboration with HackerNoon. There was I. Kicked off the Telegram community that had promised me there would be space for all of us in this new technology called chatbots. As I asked — “What happened?” — They iterated a set of brand new rules created on the go to explain the process of having me back: how long I would have to wait for the analysis of my texts — a whopping 3 days— and which types of texts they expected from me. I was not supposed to tell personal stories, even though they capitalize on the student’s personal stories to sell their own products. And I am not a fan of paradox and hypocrisy in the same bowl. So I felt mad like a demon. After 24 hours of gaslighting, the endnote. I was advertised with a big text full of rules, claiming that my comments were involved in a big fight among other students — that didn’t actually exist. That. Was. Very. Serious. I was talking about linguistic prejudice and how some dyslexic clients just type things wrong and shouldn’t be corrected when suddenly… I was out of the group. They could have just said it was a bug in Telegram’s API. Would have sounded more real. The group was indeed very important. It was the largest referral group for jobs in a “prolific” market in Brazil where you are not 100% honored for skills and actual resumé. But you do have to be referred by such communities, and that’s how they make money, and that is how the system works. Sounds like a dystopian society where meritocracy is a fallacy. But listen, it is just a rich sample of the whole society we live in. The flaws are more evident in a country with a complete lack of jobs and opportunities. Get comfortable with nepotism and bootlicking, tighten your seatbelts, and grab your Xanax... We are headed to Brazil. My sad verdict was to ask them to remove all of my data from their training platform and I was just in the process of learning and writing articles about it. My articles were being featured internationally at the time. I felt depressed and didn’t eat for 3 days straight. But I had to do that, in tears. I couldn’t just get back and wait for their next move. It was a trust-based community and I couldn’t trust them anymore. “Fine” — I said to myself in complete anger and self-defense — “I am a fine conversational designer already. Now I am going to study blockchain instead, and I am going to do it really, really hard” And that’s how I started on the path to becoming a specialist in Web3 technology, which as of today does sound like a self-fulfilling joke. Like a bad decision at a bad time. Like something that will destroy me before I can rebuild myself, such as Will Smith slapping his colleague’s face. But watch me. Who’s with me as I soothe my anger is the genius of Andreas Antonopoulos and his Intro to Digital Currencies at the University of Nicosia. I can tell they are saving my mental health. This technology can have flaws but sounds like a fairy tale for a person who went through what I have been. Words like: 💡 Public 💡 Open 💡 P2P 💡 Distributed 💡 Secure 💡 Permissionless 💡 Reliable 💡 Immutable 💡 Neutral 💡 Borderless 💡 Censorship-Resistant They just make me feel more hopeful that maybe there is a place, a world, a community, where we all are under the same rules, clear rules, deterministic rules, and these rules don’t keep changing on you arbitrarily. A place where my way of being will be mathematically proven to not mean a lack of decorum because someone wants to manipulate, to feel like they have control of the thoughts and words and emotions of other human beings. Like, you know, the guys who own Web 2.0 today. “I began to sense faintly that secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy… censorship. When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, this you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amout of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything — you can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.” — Robert A. Heinlein — ‘If This Goes On’
