Little Markets

I once wrote a post about the tragedy of scale and never published it, so I can’t link to it. The basic premise was that humans build things, and when we succeed at global scale, there are unintended consequences for it: Plastic is not inherently bad it’s just ubiquitous so naturally there’s a pile in the ocean that will never decompose… Social Media is not inherently bad, but the pollution of opinions causes a polarizing world view and truth is often lost in the mix. Humanity is littered with these concepts, if you can think of one right now, I would love to hear about it… but I digress.

Covid is the first global crises where everyone is getting all the same information at the same time, across borders, in borders, wherever. This process of reading something and then sharing has caused media to chase clicks, which has driven local news to compete with national news, while everyone is competing for content. The world has become one global village, divided by opinions rather than borders.

There are aspects to the global village I like. I like that I learned Iran had a revolution over Whatsapp being taxed, I like that Dwayne the Rock Johnson seems like a really great guy behind the scenes, and I like that it feels as though the world is always within grasp, no matter how far away something may be.

However, I’m a little worried that opinions from one side of the world don’t translate to the other side of the world - culturally - yet. However many opinions we have, there are things online that are lost in translation. I’m not sure we have fully adjusted to each others structural thought processes, I’m also not sure we should. I’m more interested in how we make 1 global village into 100m towns. Little markets will allow for innovation like we have never seen before.

When thinking about decentralization, I think about the book “Titan,” by Ron Chernow. President Roosevelt and continued by Taft, in 1906 filed an anti-trust on the Monopoly of Standard Oil. John D. Rockefeller had become too powerful as a monopoly. Standard oil, which was the largest company on the planet controlled by Rockefeller, had to be broken into different operational units based on the state of residence. The irony is that by breaking it up, Rockefeller became 10x more wealthy. Without the bottleneck of him controlling everything the independent oil companies, with his culture, thrived and he still owned his percentage of all of them.

The promise of crypto-currency, at it’s core, will do the same thing that the US did to Rockefeller… but to the government, it is an innovation in community governance. It’s like an anti-trust being filed on the Federal government through the internet. By owning Bitcoin, I am saying

“I believe that your monopoly on money is not the best way forward’’

By owning Aragon, I am hoping for the promise of smaller community based voting, with the belief that local governments have failed at building tool sets to better their process.

By owning an Unstoppable domain, I am voting to say that freedom of speech is not on the internet until it is censorship resistant.

So vote for the future you are looking for. I’m looking for little markets to create big impact.