I'd written this months ago but never posted it anywhere, yet it actually makes more sense amidst the present lockdown than it did when I wrote it. Not very polished, and probably too long:
Picture a phenomenon something like the ice bucket challenge in reach and virality crossed with a publishers clearinghouse sweepstakes and chat roulette, inspired by Warhol's concept of "15 minutes of fame". Anyone of majority age in their jurisdiction is eligible to enter a worldwide and ongoing contest, and the winners are broadcast in allotted 1 minute blocks of live air time, streamed p2p to anyone who cares to watch.
The following is a more technical description; skip unless you want more detail. A Tl;dr is below
The drawings would take place in public through Ethereum or similar contracts (think of BitCoin but with *contracts (a form of code) attached to the currency). Anyone is eligible to enter via a simple web app where a user enters some brief information and generates a public-private key pair. The app signs the entry with the private key and publisher returns a token (a short string of characters, easy enough to write down).*
At a time specified in the contract, one winner is selected for each time slot, you can use your token to claim your 1 minute of time. If you claim it, your name and area (metro area, region, etc.) will be displayed during the stream, and you receive a private key which corresponds to a public key . Specifically, if you accept, you cannot remain anonymous, but you don't necessarily need to show your face on the video — you can use your time any way you see fit.
The actual broadcasts (a sequential group of 1 minute stream events from preselected peers) would take place on peer to peer networks. Peers subscribing to a particular broadcast as defined by a particular Ethereum contract and a random drawing. The winners would be identified by their public key, and peers accept and forward chunks of the video stream signed by the private key. (Load could ideally be balanced by chosen peers broadcasting their public key to the swarm before their time slot to determine routes to more efficient broadcast paths, i.e. upload to the fastest peers with high upload capacity, etc.)
This can function almost entirely without central organization, with well-defined game rules and procedures firmly established in the public crypto-contract of the code itself. Any peer which follows the code correctly will co-create the streaming event, a swarm of peers sharing to each other so everyone can hear. Because of this decentralized nature, it would scale well; more peers downloading is also more peers uploading.
It does require either a large enough critical mass to support the bandwidth collectively, or a few bootstrap seeding peers on commodity hardware or cloud resources. More dense geographic location of peers would make reduce the number of peers needed; e.g. a swarm could form and scale quite easily at a university. But if tens or hundreds of thousands of people are using it, and at least a substantial proportion also seeding the broadcast, it would function quite fine with residential broadband connections supplying most of the needed upstream bandwidth.
Tl;dr for the technical part. Download app -> register an entry for the drawing (small crypto transaction, can be earned by seeding streams) -> if you win, claim your spot and announce your real name and area -> at the specified time, have the app open and you will be broadcast across the entire peer network for 1 minute to and by anyone following that broadcast.
Under the hood, it would essentially work like BitTorrent, but the p2p network optimizes itself to enable even someone with a relatively weak connection to broadcast to the entire swarm (as big as the whole Web, if enough people used it). If you went to any Occupy events, think of this like an online version of Mike Check.
Most of the technical pieces already exist for this for someone to put together, and it would act as a full inversion of the broadcast newspaper/radio/TV model. The waning YouTube era was a partial inversion. It spread out the capability to broadcast to the world to a lot more people, yet over time, what can be shared has been restricted and views shepherded back into legacy media channels.
We can't fully democratize our media using platforms run by hierarchical corporations which themselves exist as part of greater hierarchies. This example of a hypothetical alternative represents the mass communication equivalent of sortition, a form of governance where the leaders are chosen by lot for short terms.
I'd be curious to see the social ramifications if something like this became popular, likely first starting with the youth. Some services like Snapchat, formerly Vine, and others seem to work on a similar principle, but without the random drawing aspect. This could give a much broader and I'd say more accurate sample of a population because anyone can say how they truly feel after they get the platform to say it. There's zero gatekeeping, zero ability to manage perception by directing people to pre-determined narratives. It's up to the people who decide to participate and the luck of the draw as to who get's their minute in the spotlight and what they use it for.
*What do you think the people of earth would say if we drew lots to let any one of us speak to the whole world at once? Would our randomly chosen peers take the opportunity to speak their hearts and share their visions and longings and sorrows and joys, or would trolls and hate and evil fill the air? Could some reified form of collective intelligence be expressed or comprehended in this way? * What would you say if you had one minute to say anything you wanted to the whole world, with a huge portion of the world following what people said on the broadcasts? Could you change the world if the world gave you one minute?
*Apologies if I've posted something similar to this before. I know I'd at least written a draft of this several years ago, but I don't remember if I ever posted it and couldn't find it with a brief search.
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