It has been said that the scale of the internet revolution is so massive that it is impossible for human society to fully tabulate whether it has been positive or negative. On a personal level, however, I can say that for me at least the internet has been very good. All the advertised benefits of intermediation, egalitarianism, and connection promised by this technology have made themselves powerfully felt in my life as a result of being online. Whatever minor drawbacks or annoyances the internet may have given me at times pale in comparison to these wonders.
As a result, whenever I hear that some people are designing some new expansion or improvement to the digital world, my initial bias is to say: Amazing! That was indeed my response when I first started learning about Bitcoin, smart contracts, blockchains, and so forth, all of which years ago won my quick enthusiasm and interest. In addition to being an outsider in my own field, as many Silicon Valley people perceive themselves, I was one of the journalists who worked on the original Edward Snowden stories in the 2010s, which gave me a bit of a libertarian streak and endeared these technologies to me even further. I quickly became a mini-evangelist for the promise of blockchain, and converted more than a few people to the cause.
For reasons I will get into later, and which are relevant to this essay, I have stopped enthusing to people about cryptocurrency and blockchain in general. Though I continue to stay abreast of developments in the industry and even play around with blockchain-based platforms, I find myself much more skeptical than I was a few years ago of the promises made by this industry.
But I do keep an open mind. And in that spirit, I recently picked up, "Read, Write Own," by Chris Dixon. In addition to the snazzy cover that will look nice on my shelf, I found the book to be an admirable attempt to revive the promise of what has become a far more controversial technology than it ever should have been. Ever so lightly, Dixon's book also offers an initial word on a painful debate that will determine whether blockchain actually winds up saving the internet from the evils of centralization, censorship, and corporate control, or simply entrenches them further.
Casino, Computer, Counterculture
In the past few years, I estimate that I've read about 18-20 books on cryptocurrency and blockchain. While some of them were helpful, I have since grown weary of the hyperbole, arrogance, empty speculation, and ideological extremism that characterize much of this genre. "Read, Write, Own," in contrast, is the work of a sober professional. Dixon is a crisp writer, and someone who clearly know and cares about the internet.
"Read, Write, Own" provides a brief history of the internet and its evolution from protocols to platforms, before refocusing on the problems of corporate control today and how blockchain might remedy them. Dixon makes incisive points about the exploitative "take rates" of Big Tech companies, and the undemocratic nature of the status quo digital world that has reduced most of us to mere sharecroppers in the content farms.
He also engages in some criticism of the cryptocurrency industry as it exists. In doing so, he gets close to what I see as the core problem facing this technology and its prospects.
As Dixon puts it, blockchain is today divided between the "casino" and the "computer," a metaphor to which I will also return. The casino is the world of rampant speculation with which cryptocurrency has today become largely synonymous in the public mind, while the computer refers to the underlying technology, and its promise of building a better internet.
Dixon's book is written on behalf of "computer" people. He writes with evident affection for the internet – an affection that I happen to share – while gesturing back to a world of financially-indifferent nerds passionately tinkering away in their garages on ways to improve their gadgets. Portraying blockchain developers as revolutionary outsiders, and tugging on the thread of past rags-to-riches genius stories, Dixon asks us to:
“Picture a counterculture-loving, twentysomething Steve Jobs attending the Homebrew Computer Club, a den of microcomputer-obsessed geeks that hosted monthly meetups in California in the 1970s. Picture Linus Torvalds as a student at the University of Helsinki in 1991, coding up a personal project that would become his namesake Linux operating system. Or picture Larry Page and Sergey Brin dropping out of Stanford and moving into a Menlo Park garage in 1998 to turn their web-link-cataloging project, BackRub, into Google.”
That is the world of the computer, whereas the FTX's and shady Bitcoin influencers most of us are familiar with represent the casino. “Computer culture is long term. Casino culture is not," Dixon writes. "So, it’s the computer versus the casino battling it out to define the narrative for this software movement.”
While he is right to note a basic conflict, I think the problems go much deeper than Dixon expresses. Blockchain technology itself is still in the garage tinkerer stage. Yet in terms of economic valuations, it has prematurely gone eons beyond that.
As of this writing, the market capitalization of the global cryptocurrency industry is well more than $2 trillion USD. Usually, an industry of such size is created after people have already built something that has proven to be socially useful. In this case, the fortunes have come first, and the utility is still based on vague future promises of redemption. With some noble exceptions like stablecoins, all that has actually been built today with this money is a giant global casino and tool for evading capital controls, along with an endless stream of beguiling promises and motivational stories worthy of the book Narrative Economics.
As I see it this unorthodox sequencing, where the riches came long before the utility, is not just a mistake that will smooth itself out over time. It is a mortal threat to the technology itself ever reaching its potential.
Can't Be Evil, but Already Evil
Google had a famous corporate motto at one time, "Don't be Evil." While partly tongue-in-cheek, it recognized that great power and wealth naturally create a moral hazard to act in ways that run counter to the public interest. Eventually, Google changed this motto, along with its name, presumably as it embraced a little bit of evil as the inevitable byproduct of growing to such an economic scale.
Dixon sees blockchain as a technology that prevents future evil transformations by Big Tech. “Blockchain networks turn 'Don’t be evil' into 'Can’t be evil," he writes. "Their architecture provides strong guarantees that their data and code will forever remain open and remixable.”
As he describes it, corporate platforms inevitably move towards an "extraction" phase where they start squeezing their users as much as possible for financial gain to the detriment of the platform. He makes a compelling case that Twitter and Facebook would've been better off run as protocols, in the style of email, or potentially as blockchain-based services, such that no censorious or profit-hungry CEO could ever turn them against their users.
Yet while the technology itself is neutral, Dixon's reference to corporate "evil" brings me to an important point about the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry itself: It's already evil.
Cryptocurrency has its own galaxy of CEOs, investors, VCs, many of whom have already gotten fabulously rich from a technology whose use-case is perpetually somewhere in the hazy distance. While it has not yet transformed the world, or even the internet, for the better, the blockchain industry has already gotten into lots of robber-baron stuff like lobbying politicians for favorable treatment, elite financial self-dealing, catastrophic investor scandals, and other activities people usually associate with the worst evils of the corporate world.
On top of this there is the incredible rise in ransomware exploitation using cryptocurrency (much of it unreported) which, while not an indictment of crypto itself, greatly exceeds the volume of people using it today for noble purposes like sending remittance payments to rural Congolese villages cut off from Western Union.
We are thus left with the unsettling reality of an industry that became "evil" before it became useful. It should be no surprise then that much of the public has soured on it. One can dismiss this hostility to crypto as Luddism, "wokeness," or atavistic hostility to progress, but in my assessment it is a rational and understandable response to what has taken place to date.
Many blockchain developers downplay concerns about current conditions by insisting that the technology is "early," or that we are in "1999 of the internet" (the year is never really consistent). After a decade and a half since Bitcoin first launched, this no longer strikes me as a passable argument. The idea that technology is naturally teleological and grows from phase to phase by nature seems closer to the realm of religious expectation than rational analysis. Lots of great promises experience a failure to launch, and this is in fact closer to the norm historically.
For all the incredible financial and political weight of the blockchain industry, there are only estimated to be around 22,000 actual developers working on blockchain projects at the moment. According to recent statistics that number is actually decreasing.
While that does not mean that the technology itself is dead or holds no promise, it suggests that the gap between the vastly overgrown "casino," whose proponents are already funding elections and rewriting laws in their interest, and the dimunitive "computer," still sitting idle in a garage somewhere, may be even more lopsided than it appears.
Revolutionary Suicide
Representatives of the blockchain world enjoy deeming themselves "inevitable," holders of privileged knowledge, the persecuted opponents of an unworthy and corrupt establishment, and a would-be counter elite in waiting. I have heard such arguments before.
While covering the Syrian Civil War, I listened to opposition leaders, many of them wealthy and globally-connected, make powerful critiques of the regime that they were trying to overthrow. The regime was indeed very bad, and in the early days the opposition seemed to have a slam-dunk case. But it didn't work out that way. Unfortunately, in part due to the rebels own inability to self-police and build attractive governance under their control, the majority of the population eventually wound up siding with the devil that they knew. The regime change many of us thought was inevitable in 2011 simply never happened. Such is the fate of many aborted revolutions.
Things might have gone better in Syria with some more unsparing self-scrutiny by the opposition, which is also true for any human endeavor. I have been waiting a long time to hear some serious self-criticism from the crypto industry, whose culture seems to be characterized more by standard Panglossian corporate boosterism, mixed with expectations of rapture and other religious sentiments seemingly inherent to the creation of a new type of money.
Cryptocurrency was a revolutionary technology when it launched, but the revolution has already seemingly been corrupted. The lack of accountability, exploitation, and other shortcomings of many of its present champions has had the effect of alienating much of the public and pushing them back into the arms of the establishment that it was supposed to topple. Even I have developed some previously unfelt warm feelings towards the New York Times and Chase Bank after seeing the behavior of many of our new would-be overlords.
Physician, Heal Thyself
You can call me a hater for these harsh comments (In fact, I have been deemed an "establishment shill" by individuals whose net worth I estimate to be between 800-1200x greater than my own). But at the end of the day, I'm writing this article on Paragraph for the benefit of people who use Farcaster, which is a platform I want to help grow. I don't hate cryptocurrency or blockchain, and even play around with them on the margins. I like the internet in general, and am impressed with some past innovations produced by Silicon Valley. I just want this industry to live up to the grand promises that it is constantly making.
In cryptocurrency, we have a very sick patient who will need an aggressive and painful course of treatment to be cured. Responsible regulation is a given, but the effects also need to be considered. For the computer to ever live, the casino must be drastically cut down to size, if not shut down entirely.
It gives me no pleasure to say this as someone who holds a few cryptocurrency assets, but the best thing for the future of blockchain would be if its $2 trillion USD present market cap were cut down by 80-90 percent in the short-term, either by regulation or rigorous industry self-policing. Such a decrease would shut down the many grifters, scam artists, and opportunists who tend to crowd around casinos, both online and offline, and give the public square back to those computer-based yeomen who are really committed to the noble vision of "Read, Write, Own." It would also allow a chance for a reset with the public, who can be reintroduced to blockchain again on humbler terms.
Such an unsavory prospect would probably not appeal to the many people who have gotten wealthy from cryptocurrency already, or who today feel the need to intellectually justify their wealth through various political endeavors. But if anyone is really serious about decentralization, disintermediation, anti-censorship, and many other lofty ideals, the clamor of the casino needs to flicker off for awhile, until the computer can make something worthwhile to society.
We all want to go to the moon, and there is no shame in that. But to get to the moon, you need to build something that is worthy of taking you there. And you need to build it first.