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Hashd0x [Proof of War]

2022

Raspberry Pi-based camera, custom-built software, Mobile App, Smart Contract on Near Protocol and Swarm Blockchains, web platform, LED wall, smartphone, server rack, patch panels, cables

Hashd0x [Proof of War] came about as a technical and tactical proposal aimed to address common tactics of misinformation and propaganda at the core of ongoing warfare, in particular its infowar front. At this point, hashd0x is presented via a series of software and hardware prototypes. The team strives to scale it up towards a feature-rich platform and protocol for computationally driven investigation. Its solutionist design revolves around peer-to-peer, decentralised, user-owned, blockchain-based and serverless computing that makes it possible to record and verify the authenticity of still and moving images via hashing their metadata on-chain. The image or video is meant to be recorded via a dedicated mobile app so that before the file itself gets to be recorded into the devices’ storage, its metadata, including timestamp, signature, location data & algorithmically assigned unique hash value gets recorded onto a publicly owned blockchain.

Of course so is only possible in areas where mobile or satellite internet is available, hence future scaling of infrastructure is vital to the success of this proposal. Collecting evidence is also possible in more advanced ways via a specially designed camera based on a popular microcomputer platform (raspberry pi) which can be supported with professional optics and is also highly programmable. At the moment of writing hashd0x app exists on app stores; the protocol functions in the Near Protocol blockchain test net. This tactical proposal suggests the notion of hashmark, a p2p version of watermark for our computationally accelerated condition. A mere existence or absence of such a hashmark is intended to produce a new computational ontology that deals with distinguishing facts from fiction & extends professional technics of open-source investigation.

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Lies, Half-Truths & Propaganda [The Bad, the Worse, and the Worst]

alexanderlevy Gallery, Berlin,2022

Recent events declare an end to the preexisted and predominated in the policy of the global north trajectory of an open world, global economy, post ww treaties incl. Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, as well as recently developed new forms of politics and economies beyond Westphalian agreements, unified infosphere enabled via the means of the internet and widely developed related infrastructures. Recent events even declare an attempt to end commonly agreed historical narratives of the XX century by attempting to reestablish the facts and reverse the historical narrative itself. All of these are being approached through blatant internal and external violence and ongoing information warfare.

In the exhibition *Outright Lies, Half-Truths & Propaganda [The Bad, the Worse, and the Worst]* the Russian-Austrian artist Egor Kraft will be presenting new works at alexander levy. As a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Kraft was unable to complete the work he had originally planned. Nonetheless, he believed that it was necessary to react to the current acts of war.

Kraft in cooperation with, the team of software developers vSelf have developed a series of new works that was already part of his ongoing research. It explores the technological potential for combating the spread of misinformation and propaganda that is at the heart of the continuing warfare in Ukraine. Independent and serverless technologies make it possible to verify the authenticity of still and moving images. With this in mind, in cooperation with the teams working behind leading blockchain projects, including layer one chain Near Protocol and decentralised networked storage architecture Ethereum Swarm they developed a series of prototypes that provide journalists—including war correspondents—with a blockchain-based toolset to record the extended metadata of their footage. This allows it to be registered and stored in a forgery-proof format as soon as the images are captured. Thus introducing a decentralised public evidence archive and a next-generation tool for effective fact-proofing.

The exhibition was developed in collaboration with other artists and technologists, including those from Ukraine. The question of scale is immanent to any software architecture involving information logistics enabled via (the holy) internet. We are aware of the effects and impacts of abusing this scale in producing narratives aiming at political ends or extractivist goals. If the internet is a brilliant infrastructure for things to scale, it's fairly designed *agnosticism* doesn’t care *what* scales. Infrastructures of computing robust models of trust (or *trust-less* as they are sometimes called), namely blockchains have proven to be effective in addressing built-in *agnosticism* of the internet infrastructure; some of them are sophisticated protocols that compute scarcity, where it was previously absent by design; they create ontologies, compute ownership & entities. And what I find most stimulating in the context of Hashd0x, is that such networks are capable of computing beliefs, which contains a potential for intervention at scale and the need to reassess what do we believe constitutes knowledge and what creates knowledge in today's technological condition. A set of these ideas can be traced back to Plato’s Meno and his account of knowledge as justified true belief. In pragmatic terms, Hashd0x suggests a set of tools that create an alternative belief model of mapping evidence, examining narratives, highlighting divergence and revealing fiction.

The sub-title of the project reads as *Proof of War,* which is a wordplay on the *Proof of Work (PoW)* which is 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 code-based models of motivation, incentive, punishment, consensus and order through which the system and arguably value is meant to scale.

Links to the online platform and the app:

https://hashdox.org/dashboard

Server rack with Blockchain transactions

Tactical Proposal

The idea and a series of prototypes operating in real-time are presented in a form of installation. It is followed by a film produced from a moving image of 3D rendering representation

of panoramic views over a photogrammetry-derived model of the remnants of one of the houses in the tragically infamous town of Bucha. The 3D model of that house is algorithmically produced from hundreds of images taken via *the hashd0x* app and hence is also represented via hundreds of records that will potentially remain on-chain forever. The scenes depicting data scape evidence representation of arguably one of the most dramatic acts of violence and war crimes of recent years is followed by an audio narration in which the rationale and technicalities of the artistic-technical proposal, as well as common tactics of misinformation, are expanded upon. Such representation of the project

in the artistic space in a form of an installation or a talk followed by images and videos is intended to reach wider audiences of communities concerned with technological literacy, and politics of imagery and narrative production. This tactical proposal suggests the notion of *hashmark*, a p2p version of the watermark for our computationally accelerated condition. A mere existence or absence of such *a hashmark* is intended to produce a new computational ontology that deals with distinguishing facts from fiction and extends professional technics of open-source investigation. A common example of the former may suggest commonly used telegram channels or Twitter feeds in which a lot of the imagery captured by those witnessing war circulates today, whereas the latter may refer to highly accurate investigation practices of such agents as Bellingcat or Forensic Architecture and others.