By Srivatsa Krishna
Let me begin with a disclosure. Chris Dixon was a section mate at Harvard Business School and someone I deeply admired. Even being in the top 1% of our class, he was authentic and down to earth. He has invested over $6-7 billion in cryptocurrency and Web3, and indeed has put his money where his mouth is. Thus, it is a fond hope by virtue of knowing the author and the domain that Web3 and blockchain take the Internet to its next epoch, which is imbued with more wealth creation and less inequity.
His new book, Read Write Own (RWO) is a seminal masterpiece which should’ve come out five years ago before scamsters hijacked the blockchain and crypto story. While many parts of the book show his undiluted brilliance, in some others, the view is very US-centric which does not necessarily hold water elsewhere. RWO is the best history of the Internet and has gazed very courageously into the crystal ball, which is both admirable and risky. The primacy of its thesis is that “blockchain will save the Internet”, and while few will dispute the need for it to be saved, there will remain the sceptics who will disagree as to who will save it and how. I think just like the chip and Moore’s law brought down the cost of computing to almost zero, and the Internet brought down the cost of transactions and distribution to near zero, blockchain will not just accomplish this for creation, but also help creators appropriate some of its value.
The visceral challenge is not technology, which is just a tool — from the invention of fire to the printing press to the Web and now the next evolution, namely blockchain/crypto/Web3. The challenge is modulating — nay controlling — human behaviour while using technology, which is where I somewhat disagree with the book’s broad sanguine view of it being self-regulating. Invariably, as FTX, Axie, Helium and Binance proved, the human brain and behaviour find ingenious ways around the inherent safeguards of technology. Whether, in balance, blockchain and crypto are still the future of compute and the Internet is the key question and I tend to agree wholeheartedly that they probably are. But isn’t it ironic that Dixon wants more regulation for a system which is not supposed to be regulated by anyone in the first place?
RWO is bang-on about the problems with the current Internet model and its evolution. The US model, in the last 25 years, has given us some terrific things for free — such as search, maps, email etc. However, it has captured, catalogued, and sold our data to advertisers with or without our explicit informed consent. Platforms have indeed captured value of every network effect out there and why not, they would argue. For the average Joe on the street, what he gets in return is far more visible and immediate than what he loses.
The European model has gone the other way, and is completely heavy-handed when it comes to regulation, and has thereby successfully throttled innovation. The Chinese model is a walled garden where the government now sits on the boards of large unicorns. I’m sure when the government seeks individual personally identifiable data, no founder will read the freedom charter to the Communist Party of China.
The model which RWO has not talked about at all is India’s version of Web3 called the India Stack. It was the toast of the recently concluded G20 summit. Several countries have requested India to share its design so that they can seriously explore it as an alternative to their existing — considerably obsolete — models. Here, the government is merely the custodian, not the owner. Moreover, it is almost free of cost to citizens and open source.
Before the blockchain revolution could be understood, the widely read stories about scams and scamsters ended up travelling far quicker than the ones which explained the power and purpose of crypto and blockchain to the world. Indeed, the former have caused enormous damage to crypto and blockchain, especially in countries like India where many poor people have bet small savings of up to $10 and ended up losing it to various scams. Regulation, globally and more so in developing countries, always falls behind technology by many steps. There is also the big five of big tech — Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Alphabet (Google), or FAANG — who effectively defanged regulators everywhere. I don’t blame FAANG, for they are responding to the incentives facing them and if I was in their shoes, I would have done so too.
Another criticism is that the book has dismissed the collapse of FTX in barely passing terms, and left it for stronger regulators and regulation. But that is easier said than done. Stronger regulators do not come from Mars but the same society that you and I come from, and they are susceptible to the same frailties that all of us are often subject to. For example, FAANG’s intense lobbying of the Congress, spending over $100 million by one estimate, has ensured that application programming interface or API does not get anywhere meaningfully in the US.
In sum, Dixon, a polestar venture investor of our times, has written a brilliant book, perhaps the best exposition of blockchains and Web3, despite the few shortcomings as observed. One prays that the bets pay off and the new city that Dixon is building works completely on blockchain, and section mates get invited to watch the magic! While the Internet was apparently born in the early 80s, it became mainstream only after almost two decades; likewise, while Edison invented the light bulb in 1879, 20 years later, barely 3% of US households had electricity. After another 20 years, just about half the population had it.
So, it does take a long time for progress to occur and hopefully, in our lifetimes, we will see the unpacking of blockchains and Web3 as the new future of the internet, which RWO has delineated so thoughtfully as only a visionary can.
The author is an IAS officer
Views are personal
