What blockchain and metaverse enthusiasts need to know so that resistant institutions and forces don’t close the window on their innovations.
During every major technology revolution, enthusiasts come to believe their innovations will not only generate material wealth, but fundamentally restructure human relations by transcending the old rules of society and politics. The Industrial Revolution, for example, begat a range of ideologies from Marxism to laissez-faire capitalism that predicted traditional politics would inexorably be replaced either by a perfectly functioning market or a fully empowered and enlightened proletariat.
The early internet age saw equally radical visionaries proclaim that digital networks would usher in a politics-free era. The Bay Area utopians building Web 1 (the first generation of web technology and businesses, culminating in the dot-com era) imagined that eliminating transaction costs would help build a global economic and sociopolitical order around marketizing literally every possible societal interaction. The logic of the time was captured in the slogan “the ultimate commoditization of everything.” This meant that things would be traded around fully liberated markets until each resource landed in the hands of the owner who could put it to optimal use. (This narrative was derived from the Coase theorem, after the Nobel Prize-winning economist Ronald Coase.)
This “best of all possible worlds” vision had no more room for traditional politics than the Marxism or free-market fundamentalism of earlier times. And it also crashed. Network effects led to self-reinforcing corporate power; early leaders secured persistent advantages in markets and then translated economic power into durable business moats by locking in advantageous technology standards and regulatory frameworks. The Coasian utopia devolved into something more like a plutocracy. And this brought us the 2020s techlash — a global anti-tech movement led by many of the political actors the internet era was supposed to consign to irrelevancy.
Συνέχεια εδώ
Πηγή: noemamag.com
