Welcome to the Ahead Newsletter

We live in a time of hallucinating computers, of user generated propaganda, of ephemera. Every day our society produces more than 100 times the data housed in the Library of Congress, and yet we’re losing our grip on history, reality, the truth. In 2023, an AI-generated image won a contest for real photos; then a year later a real photo won a contest for AI-generated images. And it keeps getting harder to tell the difference. As models become more powerful, data becomes more abundant, and synthetic data looks more like real data, we find ourselves asking, how can we make sense of it all? How will we make this abundance work for us rather than against us?

At Community Labs, we think “data composability” offers the beginnings of an answer. Blockchain, and specifically the decentralized protocol Arweave on which we build, makes it possible to store data forever with one upfront payment. Not only is it available forever, but it’s always available, and you can verify its source, its authenticity, and that it hasn’t been tampered with or censored. We call this combination of attributes “composability,” because when you know data will always be accurate and available, opportunities to combine or recompose it into new use cases open up. Suddenly, companies like ours can build products that depend on that data without worrying whether the global conglomerate that controls it will cut us off. Data can flow between applications, and the source of the data can be recognized and compensated. Perhaps most importantly, history can be recorded immutably. Reality and unreality can be differentiated. Truth can be validated.

The countless potential applications of data composability include things like (i) encrypted healthcare information that travels with the patient from provider to provider; (ii) AI models with transparent datasets that prove they weren’t trained on stolen data; (iii) social media platforms where you can take your content, your social graph, and even your algorithm with you when you want to leave for another platform; (iv) AI agents that interact with financial services on your behalf, implementing your investment strategies and preserving your privacy; and (v) censorship-proof educational materials available anywhere in the world, even under repressive regimes.

We think demand for this kind of composable data and the applications it enables will only grow. For example, more people will value censorship resistance as more of us are censored. More people will value data integrity as more of us are manipulated by fake data. More people will value fairer ways to monetize their data as more of our data is stolen or exploited. As these problems intensify with data’s rising ubiquity and importance, we believe more people will demand an alternative to the status quo. The products we build at Community Labs are intended to lay the groundwork for an alternative to emerge, all of it underpinned by data permanence, provenance and composability on the blockchain. Decentralized composability does for data what open source did for software. The design space it opens for building useful applications is boundless. It gives builders like us the greatest surface area for innovation and uniquely serves as a solution to both timely and timeless problems.

In the issues of this newsletter that follow we’ll hear from thought-leaders and builders who wrestle with the possibilities and challenges of decentralized technologies every day–in other words, the people who are building the next, more composable version of the internet. We’ll explore the concepts discussed above in more detail, along with their often unexpected practical applications in the fields of finance, media and AI and their sometimes challenging intersections with issues of equity and sustainability. The ideas will often be complex, but we hope never inaccessible, and always relevant to the many challenges our new world of growing abundance and shifting reality presents. We invite you to subscribe and join the discussion. The next act of the internet is still being written and it needs many voices.