The emergence of a new subset of digital commons, ‘so-called’ web3 developments, invites speculations about radical new models for future economic interventions. Layers of blockchains and computational consensus models, encoded digital scarcities, decentralised autonomous organisations a.k.a. DAOs and other such derivatives are likely to play a key role in such reshaping. What is the role and the destiny of the internet, as a planetary infrastructure, within these proposals? Initially a mission-critical technology from the pentagon that underwent radical egalitarianisation through the design of the TCP/IP protocol in western academic contexts. Not only has The Holy Internet provided us with the planetary scale Instant information logistics, it also evolved as the infrastructural vehicle of the globalised economy. Which from today’s point of view is a project that seemingly came to an end.

In these divided times of regionalisation we may wonder, will the so-called ‘web3’ movement hold the promise to deliver on the new internet of ownership, digital sovereignty, different planetary economy, transparency where we want it to be, or new modes of privacy vs secrecy and would the egalitarian design of the internet itself still hold under the pressure of the forces that divide or impose vertical order? Will it fail into hyper libertarian venture capitalist Ponzi-dystopia? Or will it turn into continental-scale offshore regulatory self-arbitraging chaos? How much further will these programmable planetary scale interconnected networks stretch? Can they sustain to be operated via collectively designed, self-executing rules? How will the virtual and physical public spaces overlap? And what role do they play within a larger narrative of this new, divided world?

With the above as a backdrop, I’d like to invite you to speculate with me via this text on a new kind of public broadcasting platform. A form of digital content distribution across urban areas via digital screens, large like buildings or small like your smartphone screen, static or mobile they all will be collectively curated and mediated. All kinds of advertising billboards in urban areas are very well familiar to us, however let us speculate on what if these billboards became spatially arranged embodiments of public voice in public space? To achieve this, we would involve the above-mentioned ideas and technical developments of the new iteration of the World Wide Web, that incorporate concepts such as decentralisation, and token-based economics.

Let us title this idea of rethinking broadcasting in public space – the ‘ Aura Protocol’. A title inspired by Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘aura’, which describes the very notion of a unique existence of any work of art at the time and place where it happens to be. Aural Protocol is an open source software, it is designed to execute its effort to decentralise broadcasting via networked participation models, self-executable protocols via smart contracts, community governance via DAOs, collective airtime, content and programme curation through quadratic voting, incentivised participation through encoded fungible and non-fungible digital assets, airtime and other scarcities, fully transparent accounting, adaptive infrastructure scaling and other means.

Let’s exercise imagination via an idea of a city-scale crowdfunding campaign aimed at fulfilling the mission of renting the air-time of Times Square’s entire electronic billboard ad space. If for about $150 anyone's photo will repeat for 15 seconds per hour throughout the day on the most emblematic site in the history of modern capital, why don’t we try and take over the space to make it serve a collective purpose?

How far can we stretch the scale of this ambitious project if its economic self-sufficiency is achievable through calculated distribution of airtime between community moderated content and ads? Thereby essentially making an advertising billboard into a decentralised version of a television broadcaster? Perhaps the reason we don’t have anything like this is yet is rather simple, each time we’re to pass, say, Times Square we’re destined to be exposed to billboards content, whereas it is assumed that in most cases anyone can voluntarily turn off a TV or switch a channel upon desire. This dynamic forces the TV broadcaster to negotiate and balance the airtime distribution between advertisement vs on-demand content, while barely anything obstructs the billboard owner's capacity to distribute. So long as the billboard is there, the ad-space and ad-time is at his/hers will.

Why don't we take the collective moderation thought-experiment even further, what if instead of being curated by the residents of NYC, the Times Square ad-space is curated by the citizens of Ulaanbaatar? Or what if the site of action is Shibuya Scramble Square, Piccadilly Circus or, for instance, Kabul’s Market Square? Can any type of advertising space of any city be overtaken? Perhaps with the exception of those not subject to market forces, i.e. Pyongyang's billboards. In addition to mere static installation of a screen in a preconfigured space, we can imagine highly mobile screens embedded into vehicles cruising in urban areas, similarly to modern days K-pop bands promo-trucks that are likely to be seen near Tokyo’s Shibuya or Shinjuku neighbourhoods these days. It must be easy to imagine how we can intervene into ad-spaces if these are rendered in augmented or mixed reality virtual environments. Although, why even dreaming of turning everything into what we would like it to be inside virtual spaces, when we might as well try and do it to our actual realities?

It is expected that various embodiments of such forms of public broadcasting will be managed by Decentralised Autonomous Organisation on the blockchain (further DAOs). Aura Protocol itself is only a set of open source software tools, they can be easily forked and customised to serve the preferences of any DAO. Some DAOs may focus on curating memes, while others on featuring investigating journalism. Would Wikileaks have its own broadcasting network? What happens if the DAO managing a protest-screen-truck votes to stream a piece of investigative journalism which happens to be banned by local authorities? What if for the sake of challenging legal frameworks, this DAO tactically decides to relocate the screen to a semi-sovereign territory of a micronation Freetown Christiania, such that it is still observable by those in Copenhagen? Or to a border of Rome and Vatican City, a sovereign, independent microstate territory after all? Or United Nations Buffer Zone in Cyprus to stream, a programme curated for infantry soldiers of The United Nations Peacekeeping Forces living out of the once-glamorous Ledra Palace Hotel?

Other DAOs and their curation can form based on professional and interest specific communities. Groups of artists may mobilise and unite to showcase or curate independent programmes. Just like the Vienna Secession, formed in 1897 by artists who resigned from the Association of Austrian Artists in protest against its support for what were then ‘traditional artistic styles’. Artists could constitute their own DAOs, to exercise their own sovereign means to curate and showcase work as an ultimate form of institutional critique. How else do new radical forms of avant-garde expression come into being in the first place?

Not only can we project community curation into a public space of a city, but also into a virtual public space of social media through customised Ad Blocking browser plugin. Linked to a DAO of your choice, it would replace online ads with content curated by the associated community. Or what if a screen surface area was scalable via additional led-panels and linked to the size of market capitalization of a DAO. So that with the rise of the price of a token, the screen would increase in size or shrink otherwise.

In this myriad of possible staggering speculations and feature rich scenarios, one may wonder what are the roles of capital and gamified democracy in negotiating specially mediated politics, aesthetics, and derivatives of both? Would such democratisation and incentivised participation produce decisionmaking struggle and management chaos? Would such funnelling a mix of hypercapital and gamified consensus produce genuinely boring aesthetic arbitrage? Or otherwise weirdest possible new guises? As a layer of complexity and an info-architectural proposal, is it yet another ring in a self-spiralling process of techno-capitalisation of everything that exists? Evidently, at this point, there are many more questions than answers. And perhaps it is – Okay, given after all, the goal of this speculation is to seek for new world-building imaginaries.