Category: Uncategorized

I have had a long arc view of crypto that I have kept mostly to myself.

With the froth of the past two years, precipitating the slump and gloom of today, I feel I should share what I think:

The blockchain and bitcoin models are vastly more disruptive than even the most ardent HODLer thinks. It is truly a genie that is out of the lamp.

It breaks down national, regional, legal, institutional barriers. No permission, no mediation.

All it requires is that people keep their computers on and run a piece of software.

Unbelievable.

That is why it will do for value what the Internet did to information – make it vanish into the ether. Everywhere and nowhere.

But that means it is going to take a lot longer for this to percolate through the world. The tsunami is much, much more massive than people think it is, but it is also farther away from the coast. It is the sun, not the moon. They may look the same size, but one is unimaginably larger and farther away from the other.

When we draw parallels of the blockchain with the Internet we start the clock in the late 80s, early 90s. And debate whether we are in 1995 or 1998.

But the Internet began as ARPAnet in the late 60s. We are still in the late 60s, maybe. And although the blockchain may not take another fifty years to ubiquity, it is certainly a much longer way than we think from its most powerful form.

The problem is money.

Not only is the blockchain about the dematerialisation of value, it has also been born into an era when value – in the form of fiat money – was created in unlimited amounts for a decade plus.

There is too much money chasing too little innovation. The money needs to be made back too quickly, unlike the military and academic funding for ARPAnet. The innovation is taking place in too constrained an environment, regulatorily, socially, technologically, environmentally.

Now, like with renewable energy, we can recognise and incentivise what the blockchain makes inevitable. But we also must recognise and acknowledge the tradeoffs – free, fair, limitless, unfettered exchange of value will only take place in a world free of the constraints of geography, identity, energy.

We are far, far from there.

People being asked to return to their workplaces – as the pandemic recedes in the West and Asia – have some new perspective:

“I’m typing this from my office where I’m the only one in my suite and have been all week. More colleagues are physically present across the building but all my work is done on a computer and I have no reason to interact with them in person. It’s just the old logic that you’re not really working if you’re not in the office.

Also on Twitter

“I commute two hours per day, just to sit on Teams meetings all day.”

Hearing this a lot right now. There’s no way to bring 2019 back, how we work has been transformed.

So there’s got to be a planned purpose for in-person work. Not just because it’s a Thursday.

— Matt Smith (@InnovationMatt) March 17, 2022

This to me is the most significant way in which work will change in the near future. It’s less about the specific technology we use for chat, calls, knowledge gathering or such. And more about what people interact with each other for.

Once companies begin thinking about these, they’ll very quickly need to deal with more fundamental inter-personal matters, about trust and autonomy, about cultural fit, about incentives. All of these will look quite different from today for a company that wants to move beyond the simple binaries or remote/local, home/office.

Finally, the “metaverse” is a term that several companies, notably Facebook, are using to describe a shared immersive space for people to work in while being physically in different places. While it’s early days, it’s telling that the idea of that shared space is, essentially, a low-fidelity replica of a typical office.

This is a snapshot from Facebook’s video from last October introducing what work could look like:

Once again from Facebook, an actual product named Horizon Workrooms.

And some photos of a product from the “virtual office” company Challau.

Make remote work social again. Get the team back together in your virtual office. Host meetings, share ideas, make presentations and have fun conversations with your work colleagues.

Get your free virtual office from https://t.co/TifdI03T5s#WorkFromHome #remotework #meetup pic.twitter.com/kLQRNlNKEl

— Challau (@MetaverseCh) March 24, 2022

Having people’s avatars ‘sit’ at an office desk and look at a projected screen, stand before the boss’ table while he/she speak with them doesn’t seem to take advantage of a blank canvas, free of physical constraints. More fundamentally, these designs may reinforce the same obsolete organizational characteristics that we discussed at the beginning of this post.

I think these choices are in part a conscious choice by companies to give people a sense of familiarity as they ‘return’ to office. But it seems to me that truly distributed, global organisations will be structured fundamentally differently and use very different tools.

Decentralised autonomous organisations, or DAOs, seem an interesting experiment. Without getting too deep into their details, governance and incentives for these organizations are typically encoded in ‘smart contracts’, or in code that lives on a blockchain. Per-member rights are weighted by the number of organizational tokens each person holds – as are profits. Projects and tasks are taken up by DAO members because of the incentive of rewards associated with them, making them as close to self organizing as we can imagine today. DAOs transcend national boundaries, and (typically) by existing parallel to existing legal structures, are able to minimize administration.

Now there are cases for which DAOs are suboptimal, or are much too unweildy to operate compared to more traditional organisations. Regardless, they’re interesting examples of trustless, borderless – and maybe limitless – systems for organizing some types of work. For the purposes of this post, the most notable thing about them is just how different they are organised from existing companies.

Whatever the organisations of the future look like, I think the tools they’ll use to collaborate will look very different from Facebook’s office-in-the-metaverse products. Those offices are 2019, and 2019 is decisively on the other side of the watershed.

(ends)