‘You can’t handle the truth!’—or so we’re told

Do you ever get the feeling that truth itself is starting to disappear from our world? It’s a nagging feeling, not always a conscious one. But it’s there in the back of your mind when you watch the news, when you listen to two people arguing over politics. It’s there while you’re scrolling social media feeds, whenever you hear statistics or research quoted as undeniable facts to support a claim. Is this even real, and how can I possibly tell?

Basic truth should be at the very foundation of our culture. Without it, we’re farm animals or zombies. Every year, more and more of the information we consume is digital. It “exists,” but not really (and often not for long). What we need is more solid techniques, however imperfect, to verify information that’s intangible. Something that would make it more permanent, and more trustworthy. And if we’re producing that information, we should be able to own it somehow.

Truth shouldn’t be the exclusive property of elites

“You can’t handle the truth!” was the statement the fictional USMC Colonel Jessup blurted out in frustration at the end of “A Few Good Men.” Jack Nicholson ad-libbed that line, but it’s become the most memorable one from that movie. It remains a commonly-used meme over 33 years later, as a symbol of authority’s inflated belief in its own correctness, and the view that transparency isn’t something for the masses. To a moviegoer’s sense of justice Jessup was the villain of the story, but some still insist he made a valid point.

Real, verifiable information has always been a valuable commodity, and having restricted access to it brings a sense of power. Therefore, there’s a tendency for those at society’s higher levels to hoard information, have exclusive ownership of it, connect dots, and limit what others can know. There’s a reason social networks always want more of your content and comments, why independent services slowly conglomerate into the portfolios of a few corporate giants, and why those giants have multi-billion dollar market caps.

It’s why you keep being told to trust only official media sources, and the opinions of the influencers they promote. If they make a mistake it’s erased, if an event doesn’t support their narrative they ignore it. Comments containing keywords or phrases just disappear. When all information is electronic, this is easier to do.

The irony is, it’s not just regular people who suffer here. Even at more “elite” power levels, a lack of truth and trust is destabilizing. The more exclusive information you discover, the more you start wondering about what you don’t know yet. You may be party to a secret plot, but it only makes you more suspicious of everyone else. Paranoia starts to creep in, bad decisions get made.

Wouldn’t everything be just a little better if there was more truth in the world? At least, we should learn to value truth and information we can verify, and build data systems that restore stability.

‘Pics or it didn’t happen’

The glibness of this common phrase masks its much deeper truth. Without relatable evidence of an event occurring, it becomes ephemeral, questionable, and deniable. It’s a lot harder to convince large groups of people something happened, or even get them to pay attention in the first place. After a short time, memory of an event that happened in full view of hundreds of people becomes warped, or forgotten. It might as well have not happened at all.

Eyewitness testimonies no longer carry the same weight they once did. Only a small percentage of people actually fear being damned to hell for eternity if they bend the truth after placing one hand on a Bible. There are myriad incentives to state falsehoods at any level of society: protecting the boss might get you a promotion; lying about your whereabouts at a certain time/place can prevent embarrassment; smearing a rival can be more effective than winning an argument; hiding influence behind shells and proxies can boost your power level. And so on.

The reason crowds rush to whip out smartphones and record any event of potential significance isn’t just voyeurism, it reflect’s the public’s desire for evidence and alternate angles. But even video and photo recordings are now questioned, accused of being “photoshopped” or “deepfakes,” thanks to advancements in visual technologies and generative AI. More and more often, they actually are.

The expression “paper trail” is still common too, but most of the time these days, there isn’t any paper. Digital records are a lot easier to alter, to hide, or outright delete, and it can be done remotely.

All this is having a negative impact on truth, trust, and transparency in our daily lives. They’re slipping from society’s grasp as technology improves. Unless we do something to make digital information more verifiable, these very concepts could disappear forever.

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OK, so can you handle the truth?

This is not a scientific survey result but I’m sure if you went out and asked a few thousand people whether trust and transparency were worthy goals for society, results for the affirmative would be high. Likewise, you’d get similarly high results in favor of broad concepts like justice and world peace.

Achieving those goals, however, and managing the nuances they contain, has always been a more difficult task. As the socially-aware thrash metal band Megadeth asked in the mid-1980s: “Peace sells… but who’s buying?” The desires of the rich and powerful to become even more so often trump the general public’s preference for stability and tranquility. Even so-called liberal democracies can whip up support for war, surveillance, or cover-ups by manipulating their message to make them appear necessary.

For the sake of this piece we’ll focus on trust and transparency. Suppose we were to present a technology that functioned as a universal ledger of truth, where information (once entered and confirmed) stayed there forever, able to be verified or audited at any date in the future?

That technology already exists, in the form of scalable blockchain. Data is broadcast to a distributed network in the form of transactions, validated by processors (“miners”) using proof-of-work (PoW), and recorded on an immutable ledger. As long as that network still exists, it’s always possible to verify that a piece of information was put there by a certain entity, at a certain time. “Scalable” means that network can store any amount of data at any speed, processing millions of transactions per second (TPS) to accommodate any data the world can produce.

Here’s a few real-life examples to make everyone feel better about this:

CERTIHASH’s “Sentinel Node” (via SmartLedger) is an existing product that takes snapshots of a data system’s access logs, and records them to the blockchain. This prevents intruders and hackers from altering the logs to cover their tracks—something that would be harder to detect otherwise, since the information doesn’t exist in physical form.

SmartLedger co-founder/chairman and BSV Association lobbyist Bryan Daugherty focused on trust and transparency as “built-in features” of the scalable BSV blockchain, in this open letter to the U.S. Senate Banking Committee last month:

Given its intended audience, Daugherty’s article focuses on trust and transparency in the financial sector rather than concerns over these issues in wider society. But digital finance is a microcosm of issues we’re facing elsewhere, as well as being central to the world’s power and influence structures. Money is evidence of wealth and, like other formal evidence, it was once something physical that could be examined and verified. Its physical form is disappearing at an alarming rate, bringing with it new concerns over access to funds, the ability to monitor transactions, and ownership.

“In an era where digital rights are being defined in real time, one principle must remain non-negotiable: the right to control your private keys,” he wrote.

“Self-custody isn’t just a feature, it’s a philosophical imperative. Any lawful framework must protect the ability of individuals to hold and manage their assets directly, without forcing intermediaries into every transaction. This is how sovereignty, resilience, and trust are preserved in the digital age.”

Daugherty’s letter presents a vision of built-in trust and transparency at all levels of the power spectrum—regulations that govern the behavior of individuals while protecting their property, and verifiable disclosure for everyone. What that means is, if the government wants its populace and their financial business to be transparent, then government and its decision-makers should be subject to more transparency too.

The first part is probably an easier sell to policymakers than the latter one. But if trust and transparency are built in to blockchain’s structure, then the rules must apply to all players, large and small.

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We need a new cornerstone of trust in the digital age—how possible is this?

One question, Daugherty said, takes center stage:

“Will America retrofit old regulatory frameworks to a new digital reality – or lead the world in shaping lawful, transparent, and scalable systems fit for a data-driven economy?”

“At the BSV Association, we believe the answer lies in recognizing blockchain not as a financial novelty, but as a structural cornerstone.”

Hmm, yes cornerstones are important.

These two quotes sparked a couple of interesting thoughts, which in turn inspired the article you’re reading. Yes, Daugherty is talking about financial regulation, but blockchain’s capabilities go far beyond that. It could be a structural cornerstone supporting the integrity of not just financial data, but all data.

Can a cornerstone be replaced in a building that has stood for centuries without disruption? Or would the building need to be carefully dismantled first (or allowed to fall apart) then rebuilt from scratch? A more solid foundation is necessary to support a system based on electronic data, but other parts of the building have slipped into disrepair too.

The digital era has created growing imbalances in all these areas, imbalances that often favor government and corporate power. Right now it’s like someone has removed the cornerstone, and shoved a styrofoam brick in there to keep things propped up.

Data itself, and control over it, is also very valuable. If the expression “data is the new oil” is true, will existing powerbrokers allow that commodity to flow freely and be available for the greater benefit of everyone? Or will we see a repeat of the grand struggles to control, manipulate, and profit from the supply of oil that has dominated geopolitics for more than a century?

Confusion and ambiguity, when deployed deliberately and strategically, can benefit the powerful. Over the longer term, however, the masses begin to realize they’re being played. Trust breaks down, and everything starts to fall apart from within.

People need to understand what happens when truth itself is at stake. That may come incrementally, a growing understanding through education or minor crises, or it may only happen after something goes seriously wrong.

Events like the global financial crisis of the late 00s, regional wars, political swings, and the “covid era” have all caused people to stop and think about truth’s real value. They’re realizing that everyone, from leaders to individuals, can make rational decisions only if presented with reliable data. None of these events was catastrophic on a global level (yet) but they were enough to cause incremental shifts in the culture, leading to demands for better information.

In other words, yes we can handle the truth. We should at least have the chance to try. The more truth disappears from our world and culture, the harder it will be to get it back.

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Watch: Merging digitality & physicality onto truth layer of digital humanity

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