Premise

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

Hashd0x Description

The project hashd0x [spelled hæʃdɑːks] emerged as a technical and tactical proposal to address the common strategies of misinformation and disinformation that are not only widely observed in the context of ongoing information wars, but are also involved in fuelling actual military actions. At the point of recording this, hashd0x comprises a series of software and hardware prototypes. The software undergoes development towards a protocol for computationally driven investigations. Its design revolves around peer-to-peer, decentralised, user-owned, blockchain-based and serverless computing, allowing to record and verify provenance of still or moving images via hashing their metadata on-chain; this allows making informed assumptions on authenticity of examined imagery. To achieve this images or videos are captured via a dedicated digital camera or a mobile app; as the digital files are recorded onto devices’ flash storage, their content & metadata, including timestamp, signature & algorithmically assigned unique hash values are simultaneously recorded onto public blockchains. These blockchains are publicly owned databases, distributed across individual computer-nodes synced with each other and scattered across a planet-wide variety of geographic locations.

Hashmark Proposal

This tactical proposal suggests the notion of hashmark, a p2p version of watermark designed for our computationally augmented information ecology. Hashmark is intended to augment the computational ontology of an image and extend professional technics of open source investigation. The latter is a form of professional social practice emerging to address these complex issues via data-driven digital examination practices. Hashmarks provide a set of data points allowing to address and distinguish factual evidence from fabricated content. Examples of such forms of disinformation are widely observed across social media feeds, i.e. Telegram channels, X (formerly Twitter) feeds and other platforms in which the imagery captured by witnesses of wars or other critical events circulates along with fictitious, often Ai-generated imagery.

Hashmarks can even become the norm in print, where they can be displayed as QR codes underneath images illustrating newspaper articles, providing readers with data about their origin.

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 reads as Proof of War. It’s a word play on the technical term Proof of Work (abbreviated as PoW). This term defines a common algorithmic consensus principle across various blockchains and a form of cryptographic proof in which one party proves to others that a certain amount of a specific computational effort has been expended. Proof of Work and its less energy-hungry sibling Proof of Stake are hard coded rules in blockchain ecosystems that model incentives and rules of participation within their networks.