Most of what I have heard about blockchains has been in the context of cryptocurrency – a topic notable in the last few years for associations with uncertainty and untrustworthiness. (That sound of dismissal isn’t entirely warranted, though cases like that of Sam Bankman-Fried give it some rationale.) But what about the technology underlying it? Tech is just a tool, right? Tech can be used for all sorts of things, good and bad.
Chris Dixon, a tech investor and author of the new Red Write Own, makes a strong case that the underlying computing elements – the most key component of which is something called a blockchain – could become the lever for solving many of the worst current ailments of the internet as we know it. And more than that, a sizable slice of the problems of many societies around the world, not least ours.
The book is not large (the main text of the print book I read is just 230 pages) but it is tightly written and argued, and written in plain enough English than non-tech people can follow it regularly. For the most part, you’ll understand his points, his concerns and his proposals, reasonably well if you’re an active user of the net … as most of us are these days.
He begins with a quick review of the last 30 years or so if the online world and how it developed into the one we know, transitioning from a system dominated by protocols (meaning, generally, e-mail, websites and a few others services) to one dominated by a handful of tech giants like Facebook, Google and Amazon. Those mega-companies, he points out, started out by building networks of users, which became enormous with time, and transitioned from an effort to add people and groups to their networks, to trying to squeeze as much revenue as possible out of them (the “take”). So much money is being pulled in this current extractive phase, he says (and he’s clearly right) that much of the commerce and creativity of our world is being diminished, and our society and democracy are being weakened.
Dixon’s answer to this and other related problems relates in large part to blockchains, a subtly different software technology which relies on strict usage rules and open-access, along with openly-accessible information, to do many of these same kinds of things our other networks (like those of the tech giants) have been doing, along with some new things that might be added to the mix. Blockchains could be controlled by users rather than a small group of owners, Bixon points out, and while the operators of them can operate profitably, either as profit or non-profit entities, the built-in incentives would provide for a far smaller take, and few fewer cumbersome and restricting rules, than the current regime imposes.
The possibilities seem large, and by the end of the book he even offers plausible ideas for how we might more effectively cope with such challenges as artificial intelligence and deepfakes. Dixon’s approach is basically a solution through ongoing research and business development, but this is no libertarian tract: He sees a need for regulation and guardrails as well. It is in all a broad-minded view of how we might work out way out of what seems a muddy swamp.
If you get concerned and depressed at times about where the internet, and our tech future, may be headed, pick up this book. The solution it offers may not materialize (Dixon describes himself as optimistic but not a prognosticator), but it could. And it demonstrates the way answers to our problems may be developed, possibly in the not too distant future.
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