There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.
Mario Savio, "Bodies Upon the Gears" speech
I want to speak about why I'm working on what I'm working on.
The reason why is simple: I'm frustrated. I'm frustrated that such a small percentage of crypto's prominent personalities seem to care about the direction that we're going. I'm frustrated that the same is true in a global context. I'm frustrated that too often, logic and truth are shunted aside in favor of 'narrative' and 'vibes.' I'm frustrated that the masses decide to be so stupid as to elect demagogues and charlatans as their leaders. I'm frustrated that Amir Taaki, one of the most important contributors to Bitcoin, was so poorly compensated by the Bitcoin community that he lived in near-poverty for the many years that he contributed. I'm frustrated that many fundamentally useful DeFi protocols are unable to secure VC funding, but that LayerZero Labs is so awash with investor money that it has amassed ~20 years in runway. Things are not as they should be.
So what do you do when things are not as they should be? Do you throw your arms up and give up? Become cynical? Learn to accept the status quo, perhaps even learning to love what Leibniz called "the best of all possible worlds"? Do you, as Savio encouraged, put your body on the proverbial gears and levers, hoping that your resistance will cause 'those in charge' to correct things?
Well, I've decided to do it the crypto way instead: build an alternative. Only this time, instead of building an alternative money or financial system, the goal is to build an alternative society. One where people and capital flow to their most productive use. One where reason is revered and dogma is deprecated. One that can adequately fund its public goods. Not a communist commune or a repeat of the old systems on new land, but a fundamentally new productive society organized through the internet.
I wish that someone was already trying to build such a society. I would probably join them. Unfortunately, to my knowledge noone is. Although Balaji's recent Network State book opened up many Silicon Valley types' Overton windows to working on such a thing, all the projects I've seen fit into the bucket of 'a repeat of the old systems on new land.' So I guess it's my dragon to slay, at least for now.
So that's 'my why,' as the motivational industrial-complex would put it. I'm sure we'll encounter hiccups along the way, some potentially fatal (fatal hiccups, lol). But I think the experiment is worth trying.