thread: Blockchain and "Anonymous Employees"

(Inspired by relevant @GRITCULT thread)

tl;dr: the idea of "anonymous" employees/contractors are probably coming to stay, co-evolving with blockchain

1/ https://twitter.com/GRITCULT/status/1348530873583464449

Imagine a world with no consultants, just employees. Adding the concept of consultants increases the cake, so "consulting" is a social technology.

Organized hiring/consulting of *anonymous but vetted* people would be an amazing "social technological leap."

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- maybe one of your employees is a fully-anonymous "Batman"
- your company gets visited by wandering "ronin employees" who come in, surgically solve problems, and leave
- btw, this aesthetic is also on-brand for e.g. penetration testers or other "hackers-for-hire" types.

3/

Sure, this stuff would be associated with (and possibly accelerate) drug/weapon dealers as well, but with more technology you must always be ready for these co-evolutions.

With that warning out of the way, let's dive in.

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As in the referenced thread, the first iteration of this "social technology" is probably going to be some "consulting firm" that acts as a middleman layer, which shields the two sides from talking to each other. However, two problems must be solved long-term:

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The first is Interface: Employees must talk to employers! Either they talk through the firm, which costs latency, or they need some privacy protocol for all communications. (additionally, employees talk to the firm too)

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The second is Accountability: the firm+employer must be able to vet employees, know their past work. Also, *after* the employee gets hired, if they commit a crime or break company protocol, how do they hold the employee accountable?

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Important tangent: these problems would require similar "social technology" to solve as the annoying problem of medical records, and it would be Really Cool if the annoying "information clutter" in medicine gets solved simultaneously with these developments.

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To make a dent on these problems, let's think like an engineer and do one step at a time. First, the privacy communication protocol is actually the *easiest* to solve!

First, text is solved by some version of e.g. slack -- people can do Zoom meetings with a voice-changer...

9/

... behind some anime picture. People can also do things like use ML to constantly have a face-cover that replaces your face by Batman during a video-call. We are not far from this stack being "smooth."

In other words, the employee-employer interface is the easiest part!

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My prediction: the first stage of this social technology is: the firm knows the identities of the anonymous people, the anonymous people trust the firm's reputation,

The firm ``solves'' Interface by just having non-private) communication with the employees.

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(remember, the other Interface is already ``solved'' by the privacy communication protocol).

The firm ``solves'' Accountability by agreeing to doxx the anonymous person if they do anything unaccountable.

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