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Today it was reported that CBS canceled tv series Wisdom of the Crowd because of allegations of sexual harassment against the main actor Jeremy Piven.

A few weeks ago I watched an episode where there was a subtle mention of blockchain and decentralization for a social platform. That immediately made me think of Steem platform and made me wonder where the writers of the show got the idea from.

I have been enjoying the show, and I was planning to write a review on it upon the conclusion of the season one. Since the show is canceled, although I believe rest of the episodes will be aired, I don't think I will be interested writing a review anymore. However, I still am intrigued with how the show brought the concepts of blockchain and decentralization on a social platform to television for short 30 seconds.

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Briefly About the Series
Jeffrey Tanner (Jeremy Piven) is the founder and a CEO of a large tech company called AllSourcer. His daughter was murdered, and Jeffrey believes that the convicted and imprisoned person for his daughter's murder is not the real killer. He decides to give up his stakes and role in the company in pursuit of finding the real killer of his daughter. To do so he intends to use Sophie, a social platform with a genius algorithm that can get answers quickly using crow sourcing mechanism. He and Sara Morton, who created the algorithm for Sophie, build a new team, mainly comprised former users of the Sophie platform. This new investigation makes police department very unhappy, but eventually, they end up building a partnership. Each episode is an investigation of various other crimes, that are not necessarily related to Jeffrey's daughter's murder. Sophie turns into a social crime solving platform.

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Episode 5 (14:40 - 15:10)

Roughly 14 minutes and 40 seconds into the episode, a conversation between lead Sophie developer Josh Novak, and volunteer worker Prudence Shaw have a conversation that mentions the idea of implementation of "blockchain" and "decentralization" for Sophie platform. That is when I was like "What?"

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In this episode, Jeffrey's company Allsourcer, that he quit and gave up stakes comes after Sophie. AllSourcer claims Sophie infringes their proprietary codes and they want to take the possession of the platform. This creates a threat to the existence of the platform. Josh and Prudence are having a conversation where Prudence thinks she has a solution for Sophie's existence. Here is their conversation.

Prudence: “Hey, is it true that your distributed DBMS is built entirely on open-source tools?”
Josh: “A-Actually, yeah. It kind of matches our crowdsourcing philosophy.”
Prudence: “Don’t want to be a hater, but… Have you considered a blockchain implementation? Decentralization might help push a lot of the storage to the cloud.”
Josh: “That’s actually a really good idea. I’ll bring that up at our next staff meeting.”

You can rent the episode or entire series from one of the streaming services or watch it on CBS.com.

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This is the first time I have seen the idea of blockchain implementation for a social platform being mentioned on TV. I hope this is a good start, and more television shows will be adopting these concepts. If you have seen other mentions of blockchain and decentralization on social platforms on other televisions series, shows, movies please share in the comments.

I liked the message of how every episode of the series started:

“Hi, I’m Jeffrey Tanner. Welcome to Sophie. We all know the Internet changed the world. The only question is: into what? It can be a platform to bring us together or to tear us apart.”

I will leave you with the final thought:

What will Steem be? A platform to brings us together or a platform to tear us apart.