Stranger Than Fiction

Here's how our current reality compares to the imagined future in Snow crash:

Technocracies
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Stephenson envisioned a world where corporations became as powerful as nation states, literally replacing them on the world map.

In reality, Big Tech has indeed become as powerful - or more powerful - than hundreds of individual nation states, save for only the world’s largest economies.

For example, there are only 5 countries with a GDP larger than Apple Inc’s current $2.5T market cap.

However, these techno-titans haven’t replaced nation states, but rather superimposed their digital societies on top of the physical world; they wield no political power directly, but have unparalleled power in controlling how the world communicates, discovers information, and increasingly, even how the world thinks.

They are the gatekeepers of truth, the moderators of messaging, and the referees of reach.

In many ways, today’s tech companies are akin to The Vatican during the Middle Ages; not technically in power, but in practice, the Papal robes wielded as much power as any Royal crown for nearly 500 years.

A recent, watershed example of this kind of indirect power was when every major social platform moved to deplatform the sitting President of the United States in January, 2021. No matter your political compass, this was unprecedented, and amounts to a crossing of the Rubicon; a clear line in the digital sand drawn between Big Tech and Big Brother.

The Metaverse
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The Metaverse in Snow Crash is similar to the VR world as imagined by Ready Player One. It’s an activity that you need to “do”; you need to physically plug into the experience, and everyone else is interacting with the same, persistent digital world.
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Stephenson envisioned that most people would only access the ‘Verse casually & occasionally, with only a small segment of the truly committed essentially plugged in 24/7.
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Fast forward to the reality of 2022, and in many ways - depending on your definition of the Metaverse - you could argue that our digital ecosystem and our constant connectedness utterly dwarfs the scope, size & scale of sci-fi’s boldest predictions just 30 years ago.
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There are currently 4.95 Billion internet users who, on average, spend almost 7 hours online every single day.
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This is still staggering to comprehend, even though it’s been our lived reality for nearly a decade.
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Our “RealityVerse” is largely controlled by a small oligopoly of corporations (5 in particular), each of whom have a user population that far exceeds that of the world’s largest physical nation states. And as with Snow Crash, our digital citizenships are not mutually exclusive; most people are “active citizens” of each major tech platform simultaneously.
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In addition, each major platform  - while distinct - is constantly in a sort of feature flux, where each is in a state of continual bundling, unbundling, convergence & divergence based on what’s driving retention and engagement across the wider internet.

For example, TikTok’s rapid ascendancy in recent years has led YouTube, Facebook, Instagram & others to essentially copy its signature, short-story format and “tiktokify” their central UX to try and copy what’s clearly working.

It’s unclear whether this ultimately trends towards consolidation in some sort of “super-app” like China’s WeChat, or whether we see the fractured rise of disparate, best-in-class platforms like TikTok that excel on a narrow scope.

Taken to their extremes, the terminal trajectory either ends in some kind of Big-Brother dystopia, or decentralized anarchy.

Taken in moderation, the digital geo-political layer probably goes through a series of empires, revolutions and - without doubt - massive surprises.

Sugar, Spice & Your Connected Device

Today’s stateless superpowers no longer dominate the seas or wage wars. Nor do they trade in exotic spices & textiles.

Instead, the spice that must flow is our data, and the greatest fortunes ever created in human history have been generated by companies who’ve figured out how best to harvest, decode & sell this data - one way or another.

However, while the digital goods traded by today’s behemoths couldn’t be more disparate from the riches of the Old World - some things never change.

No matter how powerful or preeminent an empire becomes, it is simply a matter of time before its position is usurped and it either gives up the lead, or in some cases, crumbles into oblivion.

Regime changes are inevitable.

Rome arguably ruled the Western world for almost 500 years. Today, Italy’s GDP is smaller than the state of California.

And more recently, at its height in 1920, the British Empire controlled nearly a third of the planet. Today, just 100 years later, the UK has a smaller economy than that of its most prominent former colony - India - which just surpassed it in 2022. (History also tends to be laden with irony).

Nobody can predict how the balance of power will shift in the coming years as today’s Technocracies jostle for position & dominance.

But one thing is certain: The map of digital power will look drastically different 5 years from now... and like a different planet altogether in 10 years.

For digital entrepreneurs, who must effectively choose their “citizenships” in terms of where they prioritize their focus, there are huge opportunity costs if they end up doubling down on the next Myspace.

With this in mind, while we can’t predict how the landscape of power will look even a year out - what we can do is gain a better understanding of the incumbent powers, their emerging contenders, and a few outliers on the fringes - most of whom will likely just fizzle out.

(But there’s always a chance one of them might be the Dark Horse that takes everyone by surprise).

So let’s take a closer look at the current balance of power, get to know our overlords, and place our collective bets...

Emerging Contenders

While the Superpowers are effectively in the business of staving off entropy & maintaining their respective monopolies - mostly by throwing their weight around - it’s the up & comers who are focusing on best-in-class product, and who are aiming for game-changing breakthroughs.

For our purposes, we define emerging contenders as any company that poses a credible and existing threat to a Superpower; if not by usurping its position, then at least by capturing some material market share.

In contrast to Superpowers, it’s impractical to rank the Contenders side-by-side due to the more specialized business case for each; it’s more meaningful to weigh the odds of how each one might potentially disrupt the current status quo.

Scenario 1:
Gravitational Gridlock

Let’s assume that the next 5 years are basically status quo; that all of today’s major platforms maintain their current trajectories, and in 5 years we simply have an amplification (either up or down) based on today’s current trendliness.

This is far from comprehensive, but here are some predictions about how this might play out, and how it would impact small internet businesses in particular:

Apple continues its slow-but-steady encroachment into Alphabet’s internet gateway market share. At current trend, IOS should land at around 40% of mobile OS coverage globally, with Android pulling back to about 60%. (Today they are 28% vs 71%, and 5 years ago they were 18% vs 76%, respectively)Similarly, Safari should rise to around 25% global market share, with Chrome pulling back slightly to ~ 62%. (Today they’re 19% vs 65%, and 5 years ago: 14% vs 54%. Chrome plateaued at 65% in 2019)

Impact: Attribution & ROI continues to erode for advertisers as Apple’s “privacy umbrella” casts a longer shadow. Mobile apps will have a 30+% higher min-LTV threshold to unlock viability. You’ll need to position & price accordingly.

What to watch: Keep an eye on IOS & Safari’s forward market share trend vs Alphabet’s channels. If it starts to flatten, this thesis might not play out.

Meta’s growth stalls, then grinds lower. Across its platforms (FB, IG, WhatsApp), Meta’s daily active user growth is forming a plateau at about 2B daily active users. Its audience demographic also continues skewing older, as it increasingly fails to attract Gen Z’s, who it loses to video & chat apps like Snap, Tik Tok & YouTube.The creator economy similarly eschews Meta properties, as their track-record around throttling organic reach is, frankly, awful - and unlike YouTube & Tik Tok, there is no revshare incentive to build & engage an audience.For both of those reasons (losing younger users, repelling creators), Meta’s vision of a VR Metaverse is broadly ignored and ultimately gets shelved.

Impact: Available ad inventory may actually increase temporarily as brands targeting young adults leave for other platforms. However, Meta is unlikely to make much headway in its attribution struggles with both Apple (IOS14+) and Alphabet (looming 3rd party cookie deprecation). Be prepared to eventually move away from Meta as a core acquisition channel.

What to watch: If there’s a meaningful improvement to Meta’s global DAU’s, or if they acquire some sort of Gen-Z super app, then this might be averted. Similarly, while we view the odds as very low, Meta’s big bet on VR may actually open up a new market if it can find mainstream traction.

Video takes center stage. It’s no secret that video is consistently becoming Gen Z’s preferred social medium. The three most popular platforms for the US Gen Z demographic are Youtube, Snapchat & TikTok, with Instagram sliding to 4th place. In concert with these usage trends, advertisers will similarly aim most of their budgets (rightly or wrongly) at this same 18-30 age cohort, which means video content will increasingly become the most valuable UGC currency for platforms, creators & brands alike.

Brands who can “speak video” as a native language will have an advantage in the near term. However, sooner than most think, this will become a baseline requirement for content strategy.

Impact: As the internet increasingly becomes video-first, the focused competition & content quality hurdles will squeeze out smaller players - just as in the decades where TV reigned supreme on Madison Avenue.

What to watch: On the wider trend, look for a pullback from video platforms as the primary growth medium (or some new mechanism that displaces video dominance).

Amazon consolidates merchants. Shopify’s CEO (Tobi Lutke) has said “Amazon is trying to build an empire, and Shopify is trying to arm the rebels”. He was referring to fundamental business models of each platform. Namely, selling on Amazon is a trade-off; you get to access their massive customer base just by listing your products - but it’s their marketplace, their funnels, and ultimately their customers. In contrast, Shopify is largely invisible to your customers. You get to control the entire experience, and you own all the customer data.

But as a Shopify merchant, it’s still a “bring your own customers” relationship. Which doesn’t bode well given the increasing squeeze on what it costs to acquire customers (discussed above).

Impact: A sizable cohort of “indie” merchants will capitulate against rising CAC’s, and migrate to Amazon to at least keep the lights on, and live to fight their rebellion another day.

What to watch: Arguably, FB’s miraculously high-ROI (pre-IOS14) ad engine is what fueled the rise of Shopify last decade. If another similarly disruptive, high-ROI channel emerges at scale for ecommerce merchants - it could derail this trend. Keep an eye on things like the SHOP app, FB Marketplace, Shoppable social content... etc.

This is just the tip of the iceberg for the Gridlock scenario, but it’s enough to paint a pretty dystopian picture for smaller businesses; it essentially puts the whole industry into a pressure cooker, squeezing out opportunity away from any brand that isn’t capitalized enough to pay-to-play.

However, as with the earth’s own tectonic plates, pressure can only build up to a point. So while this scenario is initially the least disruptive, in the long run, the odds of a catastrophic disruption event will actually increase with each passing year.

The following scenarios contemplate how some of these events might play out...

Scenario 2: The Mother of
All Intervention

As with the first scenario, let’s assume that the prevailing trends basically stay their course for the next few years. But instead of pressurizing to a breaking point - instead we see exogenous forces preemptively intervene.

In this case, it would be the OG Big Brother: Governments.

This isn’t unprecedented. Some reading this might remember the DOJ’s landmark case against Microsoft in 1998; regulators were concerned that Microsoft’s default bundling of Internet Explorer (its own browser) with Windows software was monopolistic and unfairly shut out competitors like Netscape Navigator.

Ultimately, the government won its case (shocker), and Microsoft was required to ensure Windows remained an open ecosystem for other developers. At the time, this was controversial and seen by many as overreaching on the government’s behalf.

In retrospect, one could argue that Microsoft’s monopoly was child’s play compared to the iron grip that Big Tech holds over the internet today - and the antitrust lawsuits to prove it have been piling up for years. But these have been largely gridlocked by lobbyists & legal maneuvering - all bankrolled by the near-limitless resources of the defendants.

That said, the otherwise methodical legal system has a curious way of “re-prioritizing” and slamming the gas pedal if there’s enough political will to force its hand. And if there’s ever been a time where governments might feel the need to flex its National-Interest muscles, it’s now.

Here’s a few examples of how this might play out...

Tik, tok, tik, tok.... Boom! The rapid rise of Tiktok has been nothing short of extraordinary. It seems to offer the perfect collision of algorithmic alchemy; digital dopamine for end users, and a generous discovery engine where new creators can see their content pick up real traction - even with no existing followers.

Tiktok is the flagship in Beijing-based ByteDance’s portfolio, and is the end result of combining a few strategic acquisitions (most notably Flipagram & Musical.ly), and seems to benefit from ByteDance’s earlier investments into their internal AI Research division.

At more than 1 billion users since its 2017 launch (making it the fastest growing app in history), the results speak for themselves. But they also raise some eyebrows. In particular, there are some very influential eyebrows being raised in Washington, DC who have some serious concerns.

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr is one of them, who has called on the US Government to ban the app altogether. He’s worried about the Chinese Communist Party’s influence over Tiktok - which can ultimately dictate how any China-based company must operate. ByteDance has substantial insights into its userbase (including Americans) that might become strategically valuable to the CCP at some point, if not already.

FBI Director Christopher Wray is another high-profile figure who’s expressed “extreme concern” (his words) about the CCP using Tiktok as a potential vehicle for influence operations aimed at American users.

Given the United States position towards Huawei (banned), along with its recent blockade on exports of advanced semiconductors & microchips to China, it is hardly unthinkable that the US might pull the rug on Tiktok in the near future... especially in light of the current geopolitical tensions in the South Pacific.So let’s say they ban it. What does this mean for us?

Impact: Broadly speaking, this is negative (initially) for smaller businesses, as it pulls a bunch of advertising inventory out of the ecosystem, which will raise the price of US traffic everywhere else. It also wipes out any US-based creators, and significantly cuts the audience values of most non-US creators.

Longer term, we’ll likely see an arms race across dozens of startups to build the “American Tiktok” equivalent (this is a net positive), but this will be tempered by an even stronger push from Meta & Alphabet to dominate the video shorts space with YouTube & Instagram et al.

What to watch: The main barometer for tracking Tiktok’s continental fate may have more to do with Taiwan than it does the FCC; ByteDance finds itself in the unenviable position of being an unwitting leverage point for the world’s most powerful nation states. TikTok’s future lies almost solely on the political trajectory of US-China relations.t

De-moated. AICA, short for the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, is Senator Klobuchar’s proposed antitrust bill that aims to loosen Big Tech’s grip on the internet.

Specifically, it targets the dominant firms like Alphabet, Meta, Apple & Amazon - prohibiting them from using their considerable control of the wider internet to give their own products an unfair advantage over & above other competitors with preferential algorithms, UI design, product rankings, and so on.

Examples include things like: Google Flights being embedded at the top of the SERPs for the best travel keywords, Amazon’s “Basics” line consistently outranking competing brands, Crossposting being limited to within Meta’s ecosystem, and Apple’s iPhones coming pre-installed with its own apps.

The bill is in its early stages, but if it passes into law - and if Congress isn’t exactly “friendly” to Big Tech for whatever reason thereafter - this could be seriously disruptive. Par for the course (and tellingly), pro-tech lobbyists spent ~$120M in 2022 alone just to oppose this bill.

Impact: If this bill passes, it’s almost entirely good news for smaller businesses, as it basically reshapes the “zoning laws” of the internet’s choicest real estate across every major platform. The net result is that customer acquisition will become a little easier for the little guy.

What to watch: At this point, it’s all about the legislative process (it needs to pass a number of political hurdles before actually becoming law). All along the way it can be squashed for any number of reasons, and the most powerful companies on the planet are highly incentivized to see it scuttled. But as mentioned earlier - it’s all about the political climate. If the prevailing narrative in Washington falls out of favor with Big Tech, things could happen fast.

Divided and Conquered. For a guy who’s brought billions of friends together with his collective monopoly on Social Media, Mark Zuckerberg sure has trouble making friends over at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

Last June, the FTC pursued legal action against Meta, arguing that its acquisitions of Instagram & WhatsApp were anti-competitive, and with the aim of breaking up the firm into separate, competitive entities. (The US has a track-record of doing this with massive companies - most notably Standard Oil in 1911, where it sliced it up into 30+ separate companies, one of which was ExxonMobil).

It’s clear that much of the US government views Meta as an illegal monopoly (and a blight on society), but also a capable legal foe - and that under normal circumstances, successfully forcing a breakup might take nearly a decade.

But we don’t live in normal times anymore. And if Meta finds itself embroiled in any additional scandals of the national security variety in today’s geopolitics, it could find itself staring down the barrel of a breakup very quickly - among other things.

Impact: If Meta were broken up in the near future, there would be a range of effects - good & bad - for smaller businesses. Initially, the breakup would negatively impact advertisers as it would greatly reduce the overall audience accessible from a single dashboard, and reduce targeting effectiveness. Businesses would also have to create separate accounts & management systems for each platform (FB, IG, WhatsApp, etc), which adds complexity and training overhead.

There’s also the question of which platform gets to keep the “secret sauce” (Meta’s signature ad targeting engine), or whether that IP is bolted into each spinout.

There would be some substantial upsides though, in the long run. Meta is infamous for its lack of support and general apathy towards small business advertisers, and frankly, even large spenders. Pitting each platform against each other would generate a sustained effort from each to attract & retain advertisers - which would rapidly instill a strong customer-service culture (as a matter of survival).

Similarly, Meta’s pattern of dangling carrots for creators and then pulling the rug on them (by throttling reach or paywalling access) once they’ve achieved enough network-effect would no longer be tenable. Each platform would have to rewrite the “social contract” to make the juice worth the squeeze for content creators - which would be a huge win for organic marketing.

Last, breaking up the hegemony of social apps would open the door for some legitimate contenders to challenge FB, IG, & WhatsApp head-on, to the benefit of end users & advertisers.

In general - breaking up Meta would be akin to a long overdue forest fire; a cataclysmic, chaotic clearing event that seems like a disaster at the time, but later on gives way for new growth within a healthier ecosystem.

What to watch: Aside from the FTC’s ongoing lawsuit, and much like the AICA bill, the thing to watch is geopolitical sentiment (and Meta’s apparent role within it). If things increasingly “get real” on the world stage, and if there’s any perceived nefariousness by Meta in that lens - the FTC’s hammer will find itself with a lot more momentum behind it.

In normal times, intervention on this scale (and with economic juggernauts like today’s Big Tech giants) happens very slowly and at great legal cost... which means it requires a great deal of political will. That’s a tough sell when these same companies also comprise such a large chunk of the S&P 500 index, and collectively hire millions of US workers.

But when times are tough - or worse, dangerous - all bets are off. (Consider how quickly England scuttled the East India Company to avoid political fallout).

Should US lawmakers find Big Tech an attractive target for appeasing voters, or as a strategic lever in the wider umbrella of National Security, this kind of intervention seems almost inevitable.

For internet entrepreneurs, there’s two main takeaways:
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1. Don’t marry a single platform. As much as is possible, try to diversify your growth channels, with a focus on owned audiences (like an email list, media partnerships, etc).

2. Watch the weather. Using Tiktok as an example, while a lot of brands & creators are finding success with it (some very quickly), its future in the US market seems dubious at best. Make hay while the sun is shining, but keep a close eye on the sky. Have an exit plan once you see the clouds gathering.

What both the Gridlock and Intervention scenarios have in common is that they’re technically already in play. It’s only a question of trajectory; how things actually unfold.

But for our final scenario, we examine something quite different...

What might this look like for today’s Superpowers? And who are the proverbial Barbarians?

Let’s look at how some of the Outliers mentioned earlier might end up toppling today’s “infallible” empires...

WeChatGPT

For decades now, we’ve taken it for granted that Google and its ecosystem are the internet’s de facto starting point. In particular, The Search Box as a core business model has seemed infallible & irreplaceable.

But with the explosive popularity of OpenAI’s latest prototype (ChatGPT) - and its uncanny ability to provide nuanced, in-depth answers to virtually any query - a common insight from early adopters has been that they’ve actually started using ChatGPT instead of Google for certain queries.

For example, asking the AI to recommend a detailed set of 20 recommendations for an upcoming trip based on key criteria & interests is something it can generate in 5 seconds (and they’re actually good!). It would likely take an hour or more of individual searches to come up with the same information using The Search Box.

And this is to say nothing of the myriad of other use-cases that ChatGPT is already performing, from data entry to productivity to content creation, content curation, and about a thousand other things.

The point is, it’s not hard to imagine how a “super-app” powered by conversational & generative AI could legitimately give Google a run for its money as the current de-facto internet gateway.

In many ways, OpenAI has been the first company to really make good on the initial promise of an intelligent personal assistant like Siri, Alexa & Cortana - which all ended up being either too scripted or underwhelming to be truly disruptive.

How this might happen: There’s already hundreds of GPT-powered consumer experiences available, such as Neeva (a re-imagined version of “AskJeeves” that generates a nuanced, footnoted essay instead of a list of a websites), and Microsoft is reportedly already partnering with OpenAI on bringing ChatGPT into the Bing search experience.

But the truly dark horse scenario would be a standalone super app (X.com?) that unlocks the full utility of AI across a range of use-cases for users; search, research, image & video editing... and net-new creation, task automation, productivity & time management - and so on.

Basically the first developer that can make it easy for your average user to unlock the full power of OpenAI’s capabilities in a ‘WeChat’ style super app could legitimately threaten Google’s default gateway status.

Breakthrough Device 2.0.
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During the first keynote presentation for iPhone 1.0, Steve Jobs famously called it a “breakthrough internet device”. Amazingly, this ended up being an understatement.

Just a few years following its launch, the iPhone became the most successful product in history. It did this by introducing a new set of “physics”; namely the combination of a phone, a personal computer, a camera and a GPS all in one handheld device with luxury & lifestyle appeal.

It somehow checks every box on the checklist of consumer desire.

We submit that the next breakthrough device is likely to be Augmented Reality; namely, stylish, seamless eyewear that can enhance reality instead of replacing it, in contrast to Zuckerberg’s vision for the Metaverse.

Our smartphones have arguably augmented our day-to-day lives in transformative ways already, and the natural extension is to expand this augmentation to our other senses. AR is far more likely to be a mainstream product vs VR or MR (mixed reality).

This thesis rests on a few main assumptions:- AR eyewear will eventually be indistinguishable from normal glasses / sunglasses

AR can be a stylish, luxury product that conveys status.
AR doesn’t require the user to “go inside” (both figuratively & literally) to enjoy
AR is a seamless enhancement layer that can come along with us in daily life; it’s the ultimate wearable.

Whoever can pull this off will legitimately create a new gateway to the internet; a new set of digital physics - and new rules for its newfound empire.

How this might happen: Apple is rumored to be working on AR glasses, and Meta is obviously doubling-down on this area in general. Google was early to the party years ago with “Google Glass” (which was a disaster), but is apparently testing new prototypes.

But the Dark Horse scenario is that either an obscure startup, or a specialized hardware company suddenly finds itself on the throne of the next digital hegemony.

It would be worth following some influencers in the AR space to catch wind of any credible developments early on - there’s bound to be a lot of false starts as this takes shape, and someone finally nails a product that can drive mass adoption.

Game theory
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Even today, some of the most popular “social networks” and chat apps exist within the bolted-on UI’s of games like Roblox, Fortnite & Minecraft. (Consider that Fortnite has 400M players... making it the same size as Twitter by user base).

Now, some may argue that all games have a finite shelf-life, at least from a critical mass perspective. Players will simply shift to the “new thing”. While this is true, there is precedent for a single game to be the delivery mechanism for a new industry innovation that far outlives the game itself.

The prime example is Valve Games, which needed a better way to release patches and updates for its flagship titles like CounterStrike and Half Life. So in 2003, it packaged its games with the Steam Platform - which was initially just an authentication & support platform.

Valve quickly realized Steam could be much more than a bug-fixing pipeline; by late 2005 it was the first digital games marketplace with a captive, built-in customer base. Fast forward to today and Steam has 126M MAU’s and sells $10B worth of 3rd-party games every year.

In short, Valve ended up being a dominant global marketplace disguised as a gaming developer in a $220B industry. Think of it as a very profitable trojan horse.

Perhaps Reed Hastings (CEO Netflix) says it best: “We compete (and lose to) Fortnite more than HBO”. Hastings obviously understands better than anyone that the product is secondary - it’s the underlying customer base that matters most.

With all this in mind, our question: Is tomorrow’s social empire disguised as one of today’s popular games?

How this might happen: For starters, this is already happening - some of today’s fastest emerging social platforms like Discord & Twitch are essentially spinouts of the gaming industry; a place for gamers to talk shop, watch livestreams, etc.

But what I’d look for specifically is any game with a strong social component where both the devs and the player base increasingly shift focus to the social aspects of the “app”, over & above the actual game itself.

This happens frequently in other categories; consider that some of the internet’s largest forums & communities are “accidental”; RedFlagDeals, City-Data, Bodybuilding.com, and several others.

Considering the fact that many of these games literally have a user base on the scale of Twitter & Reddit to start with - a product shift like this could be monumental, and could happen quickly.

By the time Rome fell, the underlying empire had already been in decline for a century after bouncing off the redline of maximum potential in 100-200 AD. The Barbarians were basically filling a latent power vacuum.

The fact is, trees don’t grow to the sky. There are inherent limits to how large a product, a company or indeed even an empire can become. And once a behemoth entity begins to stagnate, the hidden pressures from within & without will steadily fester until something breaks.

Without question, all of today’s Technocracies will eventually meet their end. And the odds are high that whatever fills the vacuum of their absence will catch most of us by surprise. Consider how Tiktok basically showed up out of nowhere.

Therefore, as unlikely as it may seem currently, the Dark Horse scenario is - historically - the most likely event for causing substantial regime change (or outright redrawing the map) among today’s digital empires.

Decentralization.
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You could make a compelling argument that today’s internet is sort of like digital feudalism. All the land is ultimately owned by Royalty, with the peasants able to subsist off the land and experience some benefits, but ultimately the “King” can giveth or taketh away on a whim.

At the moment, about the only digital marketing assets you can truly “own” are domain names and email lists. Every other type of audience or “asset” is essentially being borrowed. (You can’t export your Twitter following and upload it to Youtube, for instance).

But in a decentralized internet, that’s exactly how things would work - and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. For instance, Mastodon is an open-source social network platform that basically gives you “Twitter in a box” that you host on your own server.

But - crucially - you still benefit from the network effect, anyone on any other Mastodon server can follow you, mention you, etc. So it’s not like a blog, you can still go “viral” on the wider network.

But the difference is that there’s no central algorithms influencing your timeline, and no central “monarch” who ultimately owns your audience. Your social following on the Mastodon network is actually owned by you, can be exported / migrated, etc. I suspect Mastodon is an early pioneer in this model and will end up being the first of several.

Another possibility is the prospect of Web3 (blockchain ownership) in tandem with something on the same lines as Mastodon. For example, Mirror.xyz is another early-stage concept that lets its users create Medium-style blogs, but with native Web3 capabilities allowing for things like fractional project ownership, cryptographic signing (blue check on steroids), permanent blockchain-based hosting, and so on.

A few of the larger platforms have also flirted with some “Web3 lite” ideas; Reddit’s NFT avatars for example, as well as Elon Musk’s cryptic texts with Jack Dorsey, where they discuss the idea of de-centralizing Twitter, possibly as some kind of “X.com” super-app concept.

Being part of the crypto ecosystem, Web3 as a “brand” has taken some massive reputational damage recently, but at a fundamental concept level - a system for letting users actually own pieces of the internet - it seems inevitable with the right model & incentives to unlock its full potential.

How this might happen: The closest proxy to an empire being toppled by “decentralization” is likely the case of Napster vs Big Record Companies. You could hardly call Sean Parker & Shawn Fanning ‘brilliant masterminds’ who expertly engineered the wide scale disruption of the Music industry... they were college kids with a glorified pirate radio station.

But the mechanism they unlocked (peer to peer sharing) with their app truly was a game changer, and that concept is what spread like a virus, eventually finding a path to credibility & mass adoption with iTunes & Spotify taking the concept mainstream.

Look for something similar that fundamentally challenges the mechanism behind today’s social networks. It will be something that provides significant advantages for creators & users alike. And it will start small, but - like Napster - will generate substantial excitement and spread like wildfire, even if the MVP experience is flawed & janky.