By Crystal Street of JournoDAO
We live in an era of information tsunamis. What passes as “news” in 2025 travels at a dizzying speed, is riddled with disinformation and bias, dumbed down to the point of futility and echoed back to us through our “trusted neighbors” lacking doubt or discernment. We consume this information in glances, soundbites and TikToks while doom scrolling the drama du jour. The disinformation pipeline is fortified by weaponized algorithms running through the fingers of oligarchs on a mission to reshape society into a techno-utopia where an elite class dictates an unwanted reality upon us. And we all participate in the Spectacle (knowingly or not) as those algorithms are intertwined in almost every aspect of our modern lives.
In order for a democratic society to function, access to unbiased, free, equitable, verifiable, factual information must flow fluidly. Prior to the internet age, civically engaged citizens gathered their information from a handful of sources— local news, national news, newspapers and neighbors. Information flowed at a consumable pace and those who produced the news did so in a way that more often benefited their neighbors and, for the most part, was unbiased and factual.
Reporting wasn’t designed to scratch that itch of controversial emotion to solicit a click-through, impression or extract data from the reader. Reporting was designed to deliver facts so community members could have robust debates about local issues, make informed decisions at the ballot box and move on.
News moved predictably, with slow deliberation, leaving time to check facts and digest complex information. Reporters, politicians and neighbors spent time in community on a regular basis so hatred and separation had no real incubation grounds. Face to face interaction between reporters, politicians, law enforcement, etc. and the community was the failsafe, unspoken mechanism that reinforced trust and kept bias and falsities at bay.
We processed our news and formulated our opinions with time, care and a modicum of objectivity. The news was delivered to us slowly, on broadsheets that gently stained our fingers or every evening for 30 minutes while we gathered to break bread.
As the internet evolved from Web1 to Web2, a handful of corporations discovered that social networks could generate massive advertising revenue by delivering polarizing content to uninformed audiences. While these platforms optimized for clicks and impressions, traditional media failed to adapt, leading to the decline of fact-based journalism and the rise of rage-based memetics and virality.
Media outlets lost revenue streams as the classified ads shifted to free online platforms leaving them vulnerable to corporate consolidation. Journalists lost the ability to make a living wage producing fact-based information and communities lost the ability to coexist in relative harmony. Sprinkle an isolation event like a global pandemic on top of a rise of identity politics driven by oligarchs through algorithms, and well, we find ourselves at the mercy of our neighbors who, to no fault of their own, are drowning in tsunamis of deadly disinformation.
We all have personal and painful examples of what was lost. We have aunts and uncles who harbor such toxic worldviews they make family dinners or holiday gatherings a warzone of racism and willful ignorance. We all have local school board meetings that devolve into violent confrontations complete with death threats and book burning rallies. We all live in a degree of fear now for what our uninformed and uneducated citizens have voted into power.
How do we address such a complex problem that seeps into the depths of our collective identity and holds the key to our survival or the fuel for our demise?
Can we rollback time to “slow news” cycles so we can consume information with balance and deliberation? Can we use immutable ledgers to create a viable network of fact delivery, source tracing and attestations of truth or dissent? Can we create alternative economic modalities for journalists and local media outlets using L2s, NFT subscriptions, capital allocation protocols and stablecoins? Can we restore our ability to step into community and not fear the “other” or the “separation” thriving in our Third Places because of unfettered access to disinformation?
Solutions to all of these current realities exist, or lie just on the cusp of existence as emergent technologies gain traction and approach mass adoption. Experimentation is a vital element for communities as they turn inward for solutions. Hyperlocal systems of information production and delivery to counterbalance the detriment of disinformation are emerging from distributed pods of journalists who see a different future.
We know our technology is far from mass adoption and our solutions are ephemeral at best. Yet we continue to push the boundaries of what we know is possible today for the hope of manifesting an informed tomorrow; one of nourishing local streams as opposed to devastating tsunamis.
- Local journalists pushing fact-driven narratives onchain for distribution through immutable ledgers with permanent attestations of source, truth and dissent.
- Local community papers deployed on Ethereum L2s that deliver news fast, directly to wallets and generate income through fractionalized subscriptions leveraging NFT protocols.
- Hyperlocal information that protects the community during a crisis through a decentralized, unopinionated network curated, maintained and secured by the community itself removing the dependance on biased and centralized algorithms delivering breaking news on social networking platforms.
- Immutable truths archived for generations to come producing knowledge graphs of a narrative over time, forcing all contributors to place their reputation on the validity of their information– for the duration of their lifespan and beyond.
- Information that can never be removed from the record of history because it lives on decentralized servers owned by no one and powered by everyone.
Can hyperlocal rivers of information flowing on and within Ethereum ecosystems restore what was lost so we can continue this great American experiment? Or will our local human systems suffocate under the amplification of false realities as neighbors embrace dissolution and separation in a race to protect themselves from the mirage of a culture war masking the very real class warfare burning down everything we hold dear as a collective?