TBD

In some sense, I suppose this is a follow-up to Rich Text Forever but it isn’t a post about crypto. I don’t have much to say about that part of the blockchain landscape other than that unregulated markets giving individual users zero visibility on leverage is, uh, a bad idea in any context. Instead, this is about a project I heard about a few months ago that’s been busy chiseling away at some of the more profound opportunities awaiting us in the next version of the Woyld Waid Web called TBD.

The current Internet is sort of medieval. For most of its history so far, we’ve trusted the folks with the biggest castles to keep our stuff safe in exchange for one form of vassal-ship or another. I’m not gonna pretend that I didn’t sign up for it wholeheartedly along the way either. I thought all of it was super cool at the time, and it was fun for my friends and I to rant about the evils of the technocrats while we danced around every device they released like the Kubrick apes and let them snoop around as they pleased. But I think part of the fealty price also felt fair because I just sort of assumed that all the rich tech goobs were gonna fix everything. Does that ever freak you out too? Like, how easy it was to assume that rich people knew why the world was the way it was and were going to fix it?

And over the last few years it’s been particularly easy to believe the solution was a return to hyper-localization. Quarantine made it obvious that our system is/was broken in some fundamental ways, and unplugging felt (and still sometimes feels) like the only way forward. But lately I’ve been noodling more on whether the opposite direction might be a better answer. I’ll keep this short. Žižek slobbered back in 2015 that the need for global regulations was actually growing rather than receding, and he makes some pretty interesting points during the 17 minutes or so of his talk about the need for invisible machinery. Systems that maintain and adjust as needed without as much of the downside that the 20th century’s various failed ideologies brought with them. And while I don’t believe in silver bullets of any kind, other than I guess literal bullets made out of literal silver, the emergence of decentralized networks and amoral protocols has gotten me excited again in a way I haven’t been in ages.

What drew me to TBD in particular is their initial focus on personal identity. Jack Dorsey (Twitter and Square dude) hasn’t been perfect by any stretch but his insistence on the need to move away from the modern informational vice grip we’re living in, both privately and otherwise, by building new, barely-owned or unowned infrastructure has felt refreshing over the last few years. Maybe partially because I still have a bit of hero worship in me and partially because I’m tired of being reminded on a constant cadence just how manipulative and banal most of our idols actually are. We don’t need to stop driving cars, we just need the highway we’re driving them on to stop following us home every night once we turn off at our exit.

Obviously I don’t have a crystal ball, and it will be interesting to see how it evolves, but I like that someone with that much influence and access is calling for an overhaul of our digital infrastructure. I’d love for us to stop pretending that conscious consumerism or homemade ammo are going to fix anything and spend our energy instead on building solutions that address the depth and complexity of the real, unsexy problems confronting us. Almost every human issue is infrastructural, and that reality isn’t going to change no matter who is saying it.