I learned about Civil through a podcast. If you know me well this will not shock you. I make a steady diet of podcasts, and many are about emerging technologies. The ZigZag podcast series, by Jen Poyant and Manoush Zomorodi, is one of the most entertaining and educational in my playlist. A bit of a spoiler if you just started the podcast: The Civil launch that they chronicle has not gone smoothly. In fact, Alas, the Blockchain Will Not Save Journalism just appeared in the New York Times. I posted a rebuttal, but first, about ZigZag …

Here’s a sample episode to get you hooked:

I posted this rebuttal on Facebook but wanted to share it beyond that closed — and deeply flawed — social network:

“I disagree with this article about the death of a blockchain-authenticated newsroom. The TL;DR of it is it can’t work because it needs ordinary people to buy tokens, not to make money but to participate in fact-based journalism — and — people don’t understand it. Although it is hard to grasp, that doesn’t make the concept flawed.

“A dozen years ago I read about this new thing called Twitter. It predates the social medium within which I’m typing these words. I investigated it with curiosity and healthy skepticism. My conclusion? It will never scale because it’s too hard to grasp.

“I was wrong about Twitter, and this author is wrong about an actual antidote to Twitter and Facebook. That is, Civil’s mission is to take away the lies and the ads that, respectively, muddy political and social discourse and mine our behavior for profit.

“The Civil token sale did not succeed, to a great extent, because it was the very first widely-promoted public launch of a non-currency blockchain application. Like many of the first rockets we built in our efforts to walk on the moon, at the end of the countdown it sputtered and failed. That in no way clouds the virtue of the mission, or the viability of the technology.

“It just means these brave, hopeful defenders of good journalism need to go back to the drawing board.”