If this document is being read on a screen, it's still a draft. The final form is intended to be a respectable LaTeX output printed to heavy, perhaps unbleached paper— so as to impart a certain credible gravity to the reader, and so as to create a canonical artifact for future department lore. Abstract This is a proposal for a new team named the Department of Dark Forestry, the Dark Forestry Department, or simply the Department. The central orienting goal of this team is to map, measure, and understand evil in the world from the perspective of the Ethereum protocol, and to (eventually), use that understanding to design small, clever, and courageous interventions that mitigate its effects or (if possible) destroy it outright. Introduction "As an untended forest is to a long-managed scientific forest, so untended nature is to the garden. The garden is one of man's attempts to impose his own principles of order, utility, and beauty on nature. What grows in the garden is always a small, consciously selected sample of what might be grown there. " —James Scott, Seeing Like a State
1/22/2025Studying and documenting grassroots adoption of blockchain and other decentralized applications within the Ukrainian community
1/22/2025The following is an update from Next Billion Fellow Devansh Mehta and his initiative VoiceDeck I began my next billion fellowship with a simple question: can we get journalism outlets to record impact from their stories onchain? I had published stories at the investigative newsroom Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and also worked for 5 years at community media outlet CGNet Swara. Both newsrooms bemoaned the lack of a feedback loop between creating tangible outcomes from their stories and generating revenue. So I began to explore how blockchain can be applied to an existing financing mechanism in the social sector: outcome based funding. The most prominent outcome funding instrument is social impact bonds, where an investor provides upfront capital that is repaid with interest by the outcome funder if targets are achieved. Since taking off in 2010, there have been only about 300 impact bonds raising around 750 million USD to serve 2.5 million people globally.
1/21/2025Mulenga Kapwepwe, founder of the Women’s History Museum of Zambia posed a question in 2022 to a small group of younger tech enthusiasts in Zambia: Can something called “blockchain technology” offer any new usefulness for the preservation of history? She had started a new initiative aimed at digital humanities, and engaging with young people excited by technology who might want to apply their talents to the world of arts, culture, and history. The group of developers, designers, and artists she was working with shared their enthusiasm for “web3”, and together they discussed some of the properties and features of blockchains. So she began to consider how they might apply it to a truly challenging problem for African Heritage: artifact repatriation. Historically, many regions around the world have seen their material cultural heritage housed in European and American museums, raising complex questions about ownership, history, and identity. In the African context, this issue is particularly pronounced: an estimated 90% of Africa's material cultural heritage is now located in the West, according to the 2018 Sarr and Savoy report The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics[^1]. While discussions around physical repatriation have persisted for years, geopolitical and logistical complexities often make tangible steps toward resolution difficult. The group had an idea: if the physical repatriation of artifacts is too bound up in geopolitical, cultural and logistical challenges, perhaps it would be possible to create a digital cast of the artifacts as a viable alternative. By linking a digital artifact to its physical original, this method might capture and evoke a similar connection to heritage, creativity, history, and the invaluable knowledge and lessons of the past that museum patrons experience in person, while also offering a new perspective on the physical artifacts—forming innovative ways to connect with cultural heritage. With the right supporting technology, African artifacts currently locked away in European and American museums could become accessible to Africans whose ancestors took part in creating them. Virtual and augmented reality technology has advanced enough to enable high-fidelity scans of physical objects, allowing them to be displayed on screens, projectors, or VR goggles in a museum exhibition. However, the scanned objects still need that essential property of uniqueness in order to have a meaningful sense of provenance connected to the real thing. If artifacts housed in distant museums could be scanned, minted, and exhibited as unique, provenance-verified digital items, researchers, curators, and museum patrons could engage with the artifacts in new ways. Moreover, social coordination around these digital artifacts could enable meaningful interactions, allowing communities and experts to collectively manage, share, and research cultural heritage in new ways. Imagine ticket revenue from an exhibition on southern African masks in Brussels (or Paris, or London) directly benefiting communities in Lusaka (or Harare, or Pretoria)—communities with real, tangible connections to the artifacts. For many community members who may never have the opportunity to see the objects in person, this digital access could allow them to contribute personal memories or unique cultural context that researchers and anthropologists may have never known. Such contributions could help "recontextualize" these artifacts, restoring meaning and relevance to items that have often been displayed without the voices and perspectives of those most closely connected to them.
12/9/2024