Over breakfast in Costa Brava, back in May 2023, the CEO and founder of an AI startup I know told me that he was worried because for the first time things were progressing too quickly, and he couldn’t tell where they were going.
It made me realize that I was perfectly comfortable with it, because crypto has inoculated me against future shock. There are buses hurtling all around you, so you can’t freak out about it - you need to figure out if any of them is headed your particular way, and what’s the smallest change you can apply to get out of its way.
Anything beyond that is overcorrection, and may get you into a different bus’ path.
I think crypto is past the PGP point, where individuals controlled how to communicate with and how, but it’s still at the Bittorrent stage of chaotic yet mostly permissionless exchanges.
Its core tech might end up reaching the markets only as CBDCs, however.
This would mean that the majority of people limit themselves to what organizationally centralized services offer them, while the properly decentralized alternatives get more and more walled off.
In a worst-case scenario, crypto has a value in a closed economy. You use your ZCash to pay for decentralized hosting services, but you have to access it all through a VPN to avoid giving yourself away. You don’t generate these coins through fiat onramps, but through providing services to others, such as shared access or a mesh network relay.
Meanwhile, most of the world welcomes Netflix, where you only have whatever rights the company gives to you, for as long as you continue to pay them.
We are in a skeuomorphic stage of crypto and decentralization, where people try to directly translate the old world into the new medium. Bitcoin has connected with people because it’s digital money, so it’s trivial to understand. That’s why things like dropbox, but decentralized! connect, and why there are all the discussion about if something is a currency or not.
This is like insisting to Bezos that Amazon might not be a pure internet play. We are still at the “interviewer doesn’t get it” part.
I knew the internet was going to be big, back then, but I didn’t see it as clearly as Bowie did. My hope is that I’m making a similar (happy) mistake now, and we’ll move past it quickly.
David Bowie on an interview with Jeremy Paxman from the BBC said that in the 80s and 90s music started becoming more about the subgroups and the communities than the artists. To him the epitome is the rave, where the crowd is as important as the performer, if not more.
He said in 1999 that the Internet had created a fragmentation of views, and that we weren’t even at the tip of the iceberg of what the Internet would do to society. “It’s not a tool, it’s an alien lifeform.”
Paxman insisted that it was just a different delivery system, Bowie honed in on how the state of content would be beyond anything we imagined. He said that the interplay between the user and the provider would change our ideas of what mediums were all about.
“Do you know how expensive it is to get involved in the internet?”
I knew the Internet was going to be bigger than just a medium, but did not call remix culture, and Patreon, and the creator economy like he did.
We lost Bowie too soon. I can’t imagine the things he would have gotten up to with crypto. Nevermind NFTs, he would have gone nuts with creator tokens - he actually launched Bowie Bonds to securitize his collection back in the 90s.
The man was talking about how the Internet would blur the line between creators and users through sharing and mixing a full year before Metallica whined in court about how Napster was being mean to them.
You can watch the whole interview below.