Premise

Now that we’ve built tools that compute virtually anything, we need tools that compute truth.

Hashd0x Description

The hashd0x [spelled hæʃdɑːks] project emerged as a technical and tactical proposal to address the common strategies of mis- & dis-information that are not only widely observed in social and political contexts, but also take the form of full-scale information wars. Hashd0x consists of software based on a decentralised protocol design, followed by a series of hardware prototypes. All evolve towards a toolkit for computational, so-called open source, investigatory practices. The design revolves around peer-to-peer, decentralised, user-owned, blockchain-based and serverless computing, enabling immutable archiving of photographic images or footage. Such archives enable real-time provenance verification through hashed key metadata on the chain. The recorded media is stored in the IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) peer-to-peer protocol while its metadata, including timestamp, signature and algorithmically assigned unique hash values, is simultaneously recorded in publicly hosted online databases - the blockchains. The design guarantees the immutability of records and files as they are distributed across individual synchronised computer nodes scattered across a planetary geography. In contexts where verification is required, this design allows informed assumptions to be made about the authenticity and provenance of the content being examined. To achieve this, any photographs, video or audio recordings must either be captured using a dedicated mobile web application running on any modern smartphone with an internet connection; or, in specific contexts where more advanced recording equipment is required, data can be captured using a specially designed digital camera that has been prototyped and tested as part of the initiative.

Hashmark Proposal

This tactical proposal suggests the notion of what we call a hashmark. It is essentially a computational version of what we know as the watermark, adapted for today's information ecology of peer-to-peer networking. We see the hashmark as both an ontological proposal for computational systems and a utility function to extend provenance verification of any data. In our case, the data is photographic images or footage. We believe that it is most valuable to the communities around open source investigation, a form of professional social practice emerging in data-driven digital investigation and analysis practices, often in relation to available digital traces of social or political events and their often controversial public media coverage. Hashmarks are essentially links that lead to on-chain records that provide sets of data points about the origins of associated content, with the aim of helping to distinguish factual evidence from fabricated content. In print, they can take the form of QR codes that link to on-chain data. We also believe that not just hacktivists or citizen journalists, but everyone on the internet should have the tools to create verifiable records. Various forms of disinformation seem to be increasingly prevalent on social media feeds. Some platforms have become unregulated channels with millions of users, where any form of reporting doesn't imply any liability, making them perfect tools for misinformation. For example, it has been reported that on some Telegram channels, pictures taken by witnesses of critical events, such as military interventions, have been circulated together with pictures of conflicts that took place at a different time and in a different place than reported. We see the increasing photorealism of AI-generated content as the major new threat to the reliable information ecology that hashtags are also designed to help with.

Research Question

The internet provided us with the programmable information ecology at scale. The very concept of scale is inherent in the design and engineering of web-based software. In the context of information warfare, this scale is often abused to engineer wide-spreading false narratives. These narratives aim to cause fear, confusion, villainization, or victimization of involved actors, groups, or sometimes entire nations. Let us be reminded that the internet is a relatively recent information ecosystem, enabled via an infrastructure of interconnected servers ingeniously engineered to transmit information. The nature of these information logistics was intentionally and justly created to be agnostic to the content it carries, neutrally allowing it to scale as designed.

Infrastructures of computing robust models of trust (or rather trust-less), namely blockchains, are layers of distributed computing-infrastructures built on top of the internet, addressing what its fundamental protocol designed to do or not to do. This basis protocol is called TCP/IP, which stands for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol.

These collective-computing layers, that we call blockchains, stacked on top of the existing internet-protocol, enable a whole layer of complexity. They find forms of sophisticated protocols that compute scarcity, where it was previously absent by design. Others compute entire ontologies, discrete entities and properties such as ownership, transferability, immutability and more.

These ontologies are crucial to the tactical software Hashd0x. Over the years of operation, the networked computing has demonstrated solid verifiability and instilled confidence in the resilience of this approach. The assured reliance within these networks is maintained via so-called, ‘trust-less’, information ecologies, in which nobody needs to trust because anyone can verify. Such verifiability of records is achieved through architectures of self-executing processes within transparent, programmable, collectively hosted and computed environments.

With this in mind, perhaps we can re-evaluate what constitutes Plato's 'justified true belief' within today's enhanced technological condition of information ecology. And how to engineer 'truth' into the architecture of the infinitely expanding digital domain of the dataverse, saturated with information but not necessarily knowledge. In Plato's epistemological formulation, knowledge is justified true belief. A belief is any claim that you accept. A true belief is any claim you accept that corresponds to how things are in the world, and a justified true belief is a true belief that has proper evidence. In this account, the entire premise of Hashd0x's proposal can be formulated as an attempt to build tools unlike many existing, capable of computing virtually anything. But those tools capable of computing conditions to present and store knowledge as a justified a true belief.

Proof of War

The title of the artistic intervention is Proof of War. It's a play on a common technical term in the blockchain space, Proof of Work (PoW). Captured by a custom-built camera, Proof of War takes the form of a video installation, a film and an online archive. The moving image shows panoramic views of a point cloud of 3D scanned data of a shattered residential building. Images of this building are prominently featured in countless articles about the atrocities of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The building, situated in the tragically infamous Ukrainian town of Borodyanka in the Kyiv region, was pierced through by a missile. The 3D model of this building was algorithmically created from hundreds of images and video files captured by the drone, which carried a dedicated camera system running artist-made software that recorded footage and metadata into public blockchains. The collected photographic data and footage was interpreted into a 3D model using a software technique called aerial photogrammetry.

As each individual image involved in the production of the digital model was captured via an artist-initiated decentralised application and protocol called Hashd0x, they all have algorithmically assigned hashmarks in the form of immutable blockchain stamps. Assuming the success of the blockchains involved, these on-chain records documenting the tragedy will be stored across a vast network of personal computers for countless years to come, serving as a digitally sculpted memorial to the atrocities of present-day war crimes, forever preserved in our digital archives, uncorrupted, uncensored and time-stamped.