A mass extinction of online life is coming
In 2017 Mark Zuckerberg called Facebook a “global community”. That’s nonsensical.
Saying 3 billion people are a community because they share a platform is like saying early humans were a community because they shared a planet. The reality is that we live in the online Stone Age. We have the illusion of being connected but aren’t actually.
You just have to read Yuval Harari’s Sapiens to see it. The basic premise of the book is that homo sapiens didn’t go extinct when other species did because of our unique ability to conceptualize fiction. Whereas other early humans were limited in achievement by the bounds of an individual tribe (see Dunbar’s Number), homo sapiens are able to believe in collective imagined realities that alter objective realities. If I believe that by doing you a favour today you will do me a favour in the future, I don’t care what tribe you’re a part of. If I believe that when we rush this heard of animals they will flank right and that’s when we’ll go left, we can hunt bigger game.
So how is this related to cloud communities and other “formations”?
Blockchain will shatter the illusion that we’re connected online and change society as we know it. But to see blockchain as programmable law and money is too narrow of a view. Law is fiction. Money is fiction. But without the fictitious views of people to guide the potential of law and money the world would stand still. Blockchain then is better viewed as scalable fiction; how we move from today’s cloud tribes to cloud states through collective imagined realities.
Consider the dawn of the Internet in 1989 the metaphorical dawn of human life online:
- We first made primitive tools as isolated tech hunter gatherers.
- We then connected and since the 2000s have been living in tribes of 1st degree acquaintances on Facebook and similar networks.
- In 2021 we live online en masse yet we’re wandering past each other, unable to form a collective reality that enables more than metaphorical chest pumping for tribal status. What impact does your follower count have outside of your followers? None.
Blockchain is the evolutionary fork in the road from which the Web2 species of online users will go extinct.
The evolutionary tool for the Web3 homo sapiens is the social group. Just like Stone Age homo sapiens who used social groups to scale past Dunbar’s limitation on tribes. While the entire offline world doesn’t speak one language, use one denomination or hold one belief, it is interconnected as a Venn diagram of social groups. 7 billion people are aligned with fictional purposes and values, each pushing an inch in the same direction and moving the whole by a mile in the process.
Imagine LinkedIn3 as millions of micro groups overlapping to form industry-vertical networks, themselves overlapping to form a society of professionals. You effortlessly move across with group-specific context and hire anyone for anything. Just like the real world but with the infinite scale of a block-chain enabled internet utopia. Digitally native states of clustered social groups voting in concert with their group-level karma, time and wallet, competing and collaborating in the world of Web3.
If realities imagined at the speed of offline storytelling reshaped our planet to today, where will realities imagined at the speed of a sovereign internet society take us?
Organizing at scale through social groups is simultaneously the simplest innovation and the most disruptive force for society as we know it.
Handle with care.
