One World, Fragmented Wires

The promise of the internet was connection. A global commons where information flows freely and people coordinate across borders without permission from gatekeepers.

What we got instead is a handful of platforms that route most of the world's attention through their algorithms, monetize the data, and increasingly diverge into ideological bubbles. Not a commons — a collection of walled gardens owned by different corporations.

Blockchain interests me not primarily as a financial technology but as a coordination technology. The question it answers — how do parties who don't trust each other agree on a shared state? — is one of the most fundamental problems in human organization.

We've answered this before: with legal systems, with reputation systems, with institutions. Blockchain answers it with cryptographic proofs and distributed consensus. That's not obviously better in all cases. But it's genuinely different.

The applications that excite me most aren't DeFi or NFTs. They're the boring infrastructure plays: credential verification, supply chain transparency, cross-border payment rails, DAO governance for communities that don't map to any jurisdiction.

The internet fragmented our information environment. Maybe the next layer of infrastructure can help us coordinate across those fragments.

Maybe. I'm not betting the house on it. But I'm watching closely — and teaching about it in the meantime.