Circa. 2100 CE
A silicon-littered Web 2.5 world. You now have a mobile/handheld server. You no longer just carry a smartphone.
Don’t know if it is a “good” future, but it is more powerful and useful for everyone.
In this future, there is a digital social contract, and governments are the ones who have to play by the rules. Else, we wring the financial arm.
What Bitcoin Did
I know you hardly want to serve anybody. You want to be served. Great content at that.
But have you ever stopped to think that our decision to forever choose to be clients and never servers, is probably why there is gross income inequality on this planet? 3 people own more money than 3 billion people, while 1 billion are starving, and this is poised to get worse now that the Transformer AIs are in town.
However, the future in 2100 will see this wealth inequality solved by more equalized ownership of internet hardware. And once you solve gross wealth inequality, you supercharge civilization for greatness.
I’ll explain.
First, let’s hack back to Bitcoin - foundational technology to everything Web 2.5.
Before Bitcoin existed, you would only build your server to host your website in-house. Or in your garage. It was a risky business move because you likely do not have a big fat CISCO networking certification in your back pocket nor a lot of money buried in your backyard.
It had to take was something profitable enough to prompt you to start running your server locally. Clunky software downloading skills and all. A genius website idea. But what?
Satoshi Nakamoto, that guy again, came around and told you you could run a special server called a ‘Bitcoin node miner’ and voila, make bank.
You did, you got a nice profit. Your friends heard about it, they got aboard and they too got a nice profit. And now in 2023, over 1 million people are running servers/money printers. Serving the Web 2.5 world with scarce bitcoins while they make a nice profit.
Sounds like a stretch, calling a Bitcoin node miner a server. But given the many devices relying on and relaying with these miners to run all sorts of Layer 2 applications including the Lightning Network, Ordinal NFTs, and all sorts of DApps e.g. BitVM, these are servers.
The future power lies in digital self-sovereignty
Recall my story on what it would mean if governments had been orange-pilled first, and the one on financial implications.
Those stories are a smaller piece of a greater narrative. Imagine the people of the world had been server-pilled first, instead of desktop-pc-pilled.
Server-pilled means more Gen Y being more like Steve Wozniak. Active users and builders of computers and not passive users sitting in the comfort of their desks. Moving around a mouse. Exploring the genius of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to only improve their financial data with a spreadsheet.
Don’t get me wrong. MS Excel is awesome. The desktop computer, and its successor, the smartphone, have exponentially grown the world economy and given me a world that my great-grandparents wouldn’t have recognized. A great world.
But there is an exponential, then there is an eXPONENTIAL.
N^2 is a good mode. 2^N is god mode.
Server-pill the world, and orange-pilling governments no longer sounds like big mind game theory gymnastics. Server-pill the world, and you effectively behead the Hydra that is central banks running inflationary money servers with all sorts of projects for the rest of us, their clients. Hence the 2008 financial crash doesn’t happen, we’d smell it a mile away.
Our powers of smelling from afar oppressive digital technologies would be impressive. As things stand today, we are easy prey for scammers like Theranos, FTX, anybody who can put together a juicy-sounding business deal with the right buzzwords, gets our heads spinning. Like teenage girls, giggling and falling for the guy in the fancy sports car, pockets full of cash, flashing a big sexy smile.
Except he borrowed it all from his cousin, who is out of town for the weekend. Meanwhile, we get used and dumped like a shitty coin after its cheap bull run is over. But we never learn. We cannot learn. It is the world we grew up in. Like silly teenage girls who giggle and fall for boys that flash cars and cash.
Server-pilling the world is the novus actus interveniens that should have elevated the individual as well as centralized computer systems did for his social contract.
The Social Contract
To cap our retro-futurist journey, let’s dial back to the beginning. The first time governments, Kingdoms, and any such political entity were encapsulated within the pages of a theoretical dispensation.
What can be clear is that we are in the 18th century no more, and what we me and you would call an Age of Enlightenment is one where the classical definitions of the social contract were expanded to take into account our digital reality today.
A digital social contract must give the individual powers to rival government surveillance technologies today. Writing as many articles as possible will not stop surveillance technology, the government needs it to ‘stop terrorists’. Speaking against the fraud of big banks will not stop them from engineering financial instruments so sweet you can’t help investing all your chips and being a slave to signal watching. Like a cat chasing a laser light spot. If human beings cannot stop themselves from betting on the lottery, they have no hope against the sophistication of financial market engineers.
Bitcoin has already happened, and it is pushing us there one block at a time. What will happen by 2100 though, to put us in an entirely new age, will be something to make everyone own a server.
It could be climate change. It could be a reboot of Bitcoin as version 2.0. I don’t know. It may be because quantum computers have mercilessly hacked everything and we have to start over. It could be that all our transistors have been fried by a magnetic storm from a massive solar flare.
It could be a good thing too. We finally invent nuclear fusion, we invent a carbon capture and storage miracle, we invent a battery miracle, we become buddies with an alien from a UFO that finally lands.
I just know people will run servers and be retro-futurist hardware heads, with millions tinkering with MRI scans and 5G boosters and rocket launch pads and whatever. It will be the dawn of a digital social contract, and the governments that will emerge in this world will respect the individual. Politicians of this future will be the children tinkering with Bitcoin, Ethereum, DApps, quantum computing, climate change science, data science, AI, today. They’ll actually know something. They’ll know what it means to own your own server farm, or how hard it is to deal with externalities that your ancestors swept under the rug.
Owning a personal farm has always been crucial to maintaining a responsible, growing civilization. Can’t keep trusting to be fed well by people from the other side of the world. Be it real food or digital food.