For the individual who wants to be the Media House

Introducing Wordcel

For the individual who wants to be the Media House

The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg appropriately described our modern era as the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Age#:~:text=The%20Information%20Age%20(also%20known,primarily%20based%20upon%20information%20technology.">Information Age</a>. A time in which information is abundant and everyone has the right to broadcast and publish information as individuals.

As we’ve transitioned to this new reality of decentralised information and broadcasting from a previously centralised monopoly over the media, we have seen a significant shift in who controls the narrative and an ever-so-increasing resistance to this change from corporations and outlets that used to be sources of “truth” in the pre-internet era.

“Modern Political Systems were built on the illusion of voice, not the reality of it.”

The creations of web2 like Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube by giving everyone a voice, resulted in the decentralisation of the power to control the narrative of a system. Individuals today have a voice that can impact public opinion. Hence, there’s recently been incessant pressure by governments as well as corporations to censor/de-platform the voices that go against their own desired agenda.

In addition, the incentives of the platforms as well are different from that of its users, users put up with this because they are in rented spaces. However, this has interesting second-order effects in the sense of public lies and private truths.

As noted by <a href="https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xzjQvqDYahigHcwgQ/aligning-recommender-systems-as-cause-area-1">80,000 hours</a>, shaping how social media and their recommendation algorithms work is one of the most pressing problems of our time that need to be addressed.

In addition to this, from the perspective of a user, their distribution is fragmented across platforms, which prevents them from fully unlocking the economic value of their content and distribution.

Enter a new era of decentralised content, social graphs and distribution. Enter <a href="https://www.wordcel.club/">Wordcel</a>.

We believe that there are few things more valuable in the world than the truly independent thought of the literate observers of the world. This is a bid to take back what’s always been ours.

Wordcel is a Decentralized Publishing Stack on the Solana blockchain to enable writers to publish and monetize their work on-chain and manage their distribution while truly owning every single piece of the puzzle. This is chapter one in our quest to enable Social Sovereignty online for all forms of content via an ecosystem of tools under our [redacted] protocol in the future.

We believe that free speech is absolute. If you have something to say, the internet should allow you to exercise your sovereignty and make yourself heard in the world along with owning the results that come out of it as well.

To truly enable this vision, the individual must have ownership of the following in the content supply chain:

We aim to build a protocol which enables all three of those factors for the individual. The goal here is to eventually build an ecosystem of tools which enables decentralised social applications to be built on top of it. <a href="https://www.wordcel.club/wordcelclub.sol/social-sovereignty-or-chapter-1">Wordcel is the first step in this mission.</a>

In chapter one of Social Sovereignty, we’re building Wordcel which is an attempt to decentralise and protect the voices of individuals by providing them with an infrastructure they can use to publish their blogs or newsletters on-chain without the looming threat of censorship or de-platforming.

Our core philosophy behind building this is to lay the foundation of uncensorable information-sharing by building a product that enables long-form content to be written, shared and monetised in a completely decentralized manner with absolute ownership belonging to its creator.

Being free speech absolutists, we believe that your freedom of expression shouldn't be dependent on the virtue of a single individual or entity.

A better alternative is a world in which you're inherently empowered by the protocol you create content on. The reason why we won’t be censoring any content published on Wordcel is that well, we can’t.

Once your blog is published on-chain using Wordcel, there is no way for anyone to take it down, censor it or even shadow-ban it. Someone could write a blog countering your ideas with contrarian ones of their own, and they should be able to. That is what free speech should look like.

In today’s world where creators are always under the scrutiny of corporations as well as media outlets for what they have to say, we believe this is the absolute need of the hour to protect and keep the printing press going in the future as well.

"While the God-fearing Man does not steal due to the threat of eternal punishment and the State-fearing Man does not steal due to the threat of legal action, the Networked Man does not steal because the encrypted Network won’t let him."

The Sovereignty of Content and Distribution

Sovereignty is another pillar on which Wordcel and eventually our protocol will stand on.

This means that you as an individual can create what you want and distribute it to whoever and however, you want. The Sovereign Individual should have full control over and ownership over their content and distribution and that’s what our aim here is.

We will never tell you what to write or where to distribute your work because even if we wanted to, we can’t.

Gone are the days of sub-domains and writing blogs under the names of platforms with incentives not aligned with yours. With Wordcel, you’ll be able to publish your newsletter and distribute it to the world using any domain you choose to use.

Another major drawback we have seen over the past few years with the emergence of decentralised content sharing platforms is the loss of existing distribution the cost that a user has to pay in order to shift to an uncensorable alternative.

That is about to change with Wordcel. Our goal is to give users a Web2 User Experience built on top of a completely Web3 Tech Infrastructure. This means when you make a blog on Wordcel, you’ll be able to:

Having launched on the Solana Mainnet recently after months of chewing glass, it is needless to say that we’re very excited about the road ahead.

Alongside the launch, we have sent out invites to a bunch of the earliest supporters from our community and our friends at the <a href="https://twitter.com/SuperteamDAO">SuperteamDAO</a>.

We will be working closely with them over the next few weeks listening to their feedback and understanding the problems they’re facing. Based on those interactions, we will be diligently working on polishing our product so that it’s fully robust and stable.

And while you’re here, here’s some alpha on the features we’re currently working on:

If you’re someone who has already gotten an invite, this is the best time to start writing on-chain! We will be giving early access to the features mentioned above based on your on-chain activity so if you want to be there when they’re out (and trust us, you want to be there), start writing on Wordcel now!

And if you have not gotten an invite but would like to get one, follow us on <a href="https://twitter.com/wordcel_club">Twitter</a> and share the ideas you would want to write about on your Wordcel blog. Don’t forget to tag us in your replies and we’ll invite the best ones to our Beta and our Discord.