Sojourns in the digital future
*Turning and turning in the widening gyre; The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world; The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.* - W.B. Yeats, The Second Birth
*A man who calls his kinsmen to a feast does not do so to save them from starving. They all have food in their own homes. When we gather together in the moonlit village ground it is not because of the moon. Every man can see it in his own compound. We come together because it is good for kinsmen to do so.* - Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
The year is 1990. For the past four years, you have been gradually familiarizing yourself with the infrastructure and tools that make up a still nascent global technology which is being referred to as the Internet. You and some of the peers in your network are now using a personal computer for word processing and a few other functions. However, you are the only one in your peer network accessing this Internet.
For you, it all started four years ago. A seed was planted when you listened to a radio interview with an engineer who had worked on something called #ARPANET, a precursor to this new Internet, developed by the U.S. Department of Defense. The engineer described how this emerging Internet would eventually become the public version of ARPANET. The interview piqued your interest and you began sifting through available information to learn more.
Four years later, you are now part of a local Internet users group which meets once per week to discuss your respective experiences and prognostications. You are collectively referred to by friends in your non-Internet peer network as that âtalking computers groupâ.
Over time, this group has come to occupy an increasingly important role in your life. You now awkwardly straddle two peer groups, continually searching for ways to find overlap and to integrate these two dimensions of your social life. It isnât easy, and you leap back and forth between hope and despair.
You have begun to see more clearly into a future, just over the horizon, where life will be irretrievably transformed by this Internet. You see both opportunities and threats, and you have come to believe that we all need to become invested in this discussion in order to guard against threats and to achieve the greatest good for society.
You make the case with your non-Internet peer network, but it is difficult to gain traction. They get the excitement regarding personal computers, but computers talking to each other? Digital communication replacing the postman, the video store, the newspaper, making its way into the workplace and other such predictions? It all seems a bit far fetched. They grow weary of your persistent âwait until you see how the Internet is going to change thisâ interventions. Eventually, you elect to just keep mostly quiet on this topic when with them.
Your local Internet users peer group provides you with much needed community. Still, you lament that you live in a sort of limbo. You imagine what the Internet portends for daily life five, ten, or forty years into the future and how radically transformative it is going to be. However, there is little nourishment from that today.
Youâre in a period of prolonged waiting. You long for tomorrow, today. You long to be in the imagined world of the ubiquitous Internet, where networked technology and communications will be placed in service of the greater good and an acceleration toward the marvels of human potential.
This longing and the awkwardness of straddling divergent peer groups persists for what feels like an eternity. Then, as if out of nowhere, a buzz circulates through your âtalking computers groupâ and other similar groups. It turns out that there are some forward-thinking communities around the world, possibly three or four, that have begun to pull forward the future into the present. They have connected the majority of people in their local community to the Internet and it has begun to permeate many dimensions of daily life throughout their region.
You decide that you need to see it for yourself. You book a Pan Am flight and hit the friendly skies to visit one of these communities. After being greeted at the airport by a contact with whom you had corresponded via a clunky chat room, you make the short drive back to the community.
En route, you marvel at the small portable phone your contact has nestled beside him, a Motorola. Itâs the new âflip phoneâ youâve heard about. He tells you that a few homes and businesses in the community just got them, but most are still using older Siemens or Nokia portable phones. âOlder?,â you think to yourself, and "wait, these people are all using cellular phones?â The next week spent in the community is filled with more discoveries and revelations...
The local postal service has been significantly reduced over the past year. Locals instead resort to electronic mail for most of their routine communications. They're calling it e-mail.
Agonizing waits for services and long lines for day-to-day activities have been reduced. Forms and information exchange have mostly gone âonlineâ.
There are several major businesses in town which are now processing orders for goods entirely online, with delivery right to your doorstep. More are planning to follow suit. Thereâs even rumour that within the next couple of years you will be able to pay online for goods purchased online; no need to pay the delivery person at the door by cash or cheque.
After a week of living in the digital future, you return home to your life, to your two local peer networks, and your state of limbo. The difference now, is that you have experienced a taste of the future. It is no longer simply imagined. You know it is possible, and what it feels and sounds like. You share tales of the future with both of your peer groups.
Your Internet users peer group activates. Many plan to also book that Pan Am flight, so they can see and feel it for themselves. Your other peer group finds it somewhat fascinating, but they mostly nestle back into their daily, analog lives.
Fast forward. The year is 2023. For the past four years you have gradually been learning about the global #Bitcoin network and software. You exchange portions of your local âfiatâ currency for the commodity money which goes by the same name, Bitcoin or BTC. You are sampling a new digital future. It feels like dĂ©jĂ vu (all over again).
In 2023, you again find yourself part of two divergent peer networks. You again make a pilgrimage to visit communities that are pulling forward the future into the present, using Bitcoin. You again feel as though you are living in a state of limbo back at home, enduring a period of prolonged waiting.
In 2023, however, it feels as though your appeal to peers, hoping they will take an interest in your newfound passion, has a different quality to it. The stakes feel much higher, the consequences more grave. Itâs hard to put your finger on it, but somehow it feels as though this is a game for all the marbles.
You and other so-called Bitcoiners around the world have amassed enough intelligence on a range of interconnected topics revolving around Bitcoin to sense that a battle is being waged.
You envision a future where many more facets of life will be mediated digitally, much through artificial intelligence. It doesnât take much to convince your non Bitcoiner peers of this. However, it's a challenge to keep their attention for a discussion of what's at stake and why Bitcoin matters, both for and in this future.
You have shared with your non Bitcoiner peers how money, something that permeates nearly every facet of our lives, is not actually what we thought it was. More aptly put, we have ceased to think at all about what money is, other than the extent to which we possess or lack it. You have made the case that this collective amnesia has very serious consequences.
You have invited your peers to consider the history of money and the story of how, over time, humans have chosen to store and exchange value. Your hope is that, like you, they will come to appreciate the harmful impact of our most recent monetary experiment: fiat money.
You have shared resources about the insidious nature of inflation, enabled by fiat currencies, and its many downstream social effects.
You have highlighted the imperatives of perpetual growth and conspicuous consumption that are required by our global financial systems, propelled by consistently manipulated fiat money.
You have described the mechanics of global debt, resource extraction, neocolonialism and how small portions of the world remain relatively affluent at the expense of others which are correspondingly impoverished.
You have attempted to connect the dots, tracing the line of fiat money which runs between them. Sadly, this is a dish for which you struggle to find ready bellies; a pregnant discussion for which you struggle to find ready minds.
You want your non Bitcoiner peers to see that it is our broken money and the toxic incentives which it aids and abets on a global scale that are at the heart of so much strife, division and inequity in the world. You want them to grasp that it is our diseased fiat money lifeblood which preys upon humanityâs organs.
You want them to consider what happens if we carry forward this fiat monetary system fully into the digital realm. You want them to see that this will very likely be a world of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and social credit scores, mass surveillance, censorship, behaviour-control, and state-sanctioned violence; a world whose dystopian cocktail carries a potentially fatal hangover.
You want them to grasp that, right now, today, one of the single best strategies we have to prevent such a dystopia is to replace our fiat currencies through mass adoption of Bitcoin.
As you did in 1990, however, you mostly keep quiet with your non Bitcoiner peers. You carefully select your moments and your opportunities to plant seeds. You water. You hope that one day soon a garden will blossom. You know that there are milestones on this learning journey, aha moments, and it takes time.
You know that there is profound depth and nuance to these matters, and that the learning journey requires not only an intellectual curiosity but a willingness to interrogate conventional wisdom. This is all the more challenging amidst the incessant noise of attention-grabbing media, politically-motivated narratives, and tribalized civic spaces.
You learn patience. You find community among other Bitcoiners and you build as a community, globally. You embrace self-deprecating humour, knowing that to many who are close to you and have not embraced this learning journey you appear unhinged at times. Nevertheless, friendships are occasionally strained. Such is the life of one who possesses knowledge while uncomfortably straddling epochs.
Yes, things fall apart. Still, maybe, hopefully, through sheer persistence and by the grace of those greater daemons which elevate our humanity, we shall eventually hold the centre.
