I talked to my brother a bunch this past week. We rarely talk, partly because we have totally opposite interests, partly because we are really into our own thing and lose track of time, and partly because he’s only just learned how to have a conversation.
When we were younger he hardly talked. Now I’m learning that he felt peetty similar to me, overwhelmed by social norms that he didn’t fot into and misunderstood as a result. Where I became a bit of a collector of strange experiences and people, others like us, he closed himself off to protect his own vibe.
With time my whole family has chilled out a lot. I don’t think time is enough to explain this. The world has gone in the complete opposite direction that they assumed it would and very much the way I said it would, and so after years of being treated as irresponsible and like i didn’t “reach my full potential”, suddenly I am the one who people trust the most.
I was impressed with how much my brother has grown since finding a wonderful partner. But I felt a little sad at how hopeless he feels about the future of the world. I realize many many people share this sentiment. It must be hard not being able to see undernearth the cracks, but the same signals telling me things would fall apart 20 years ago are now telling me we are going through a period of transformation towards something better.
I could see the unsustainability and the cracks in the consensus reality from a very young age. I remember saying that things needed to change as young as 13 years old. I was one of the first people who used the internet casually to make friends without much technical knowledge, and one of the first 10,000 people on facebook when it was still local to Boston. I was on facebook when it was the size of Hive.
I’ve always been attracted to attempts to break away from the regular way of doing things, especially peaceful attempts, especially innovative attempts, espeically when human connection becomes easier or more interesting. Couchsurfing, craigslist, basically until phones had GPS I was early to everything.
And so I saw that the results of the internet would take a while to fully effect society in the way it was meant to. We are now approaching a turning point.
The first change from the internet, as I saw it at 14, would be when the internet became mainstream in parts of the world. The second would be when it became available to nearly everyone. The third would be when the people raised with internet in their pocket became adults and the fourth would be when all corners of the earth had had widespread internet usage availabe for over 15 years .
Of course I was treated like I was crazy. “Africa is fucked, Asia is fucked, they won’t see mainstream internet adoption for another 100 years”. They used nicer language but that was their perspective. Of course my parents and teachers don’t remember ridiculing me for predicting this. They just act as if they never has these kinds of thoughts, though my father still doubts that the next major culture and technological hubs (like Korea or Dubai or Singapore these past few decades) will be in Africa snd South America.
We are impatient, but things are changing, whether we have the patience to observe them objectively or not.
There is now a shared culture among the entite world….except not really. There are hundreds of cultures shared across borders.
Whether its K-pop or NBA, or it’s doom metal or skateboarding or coding, meditation, taoism, christianity, veganism, homesteading, martial arts, backpacking, yoga, non-violent communication, the scientific method, language study, blockchain, workout or fishing, a culture or multiple culturess can develop around each of these that is borderless.
Unlike the past 30 years it is now within reach of almost anyone and now anyone can influence it.
We are able to remix culture like never before and to collaborate like never before.
A village in Congo is exposed to some western ideas of conservationism and experimental fashion and you get groups like Fulu Miziki who create their instruments and crazy costumes out of trash. Meanwhile a group of DJ’s in Japan become obsessed with south African GQOM music (house music with a uniquely south African twist that has spread to other parts of Africa and Europe). Two Europeans start a record label in Uganda with locals and bring these two groups together for an event as well as hundreds of others. Deeper connections are built. New webs spread outward.
The same is happening with sports fans and philosophers and unlike before there are really no gatekeepers. The only gatekeeper is the algorithms but the algorithms can’t account for what we do offline.
So i find a unique eco vilalge in the mountains near Tokyo and its hard to get their attention online, but no one can stop me from going out and meeting them. I can introduce them to blockchain and maybe they’ll connect to Hive, or maybe I will introduce them to my farming friends in other parts of the world.
I use the internet along with the physical to connect with the people I want to connect with and I am able to move the culture, in whatever way, small or large.
I don’t take for granted that the life I’m living would have been impossible 25 years ago. I would not have been able to contact my family and so many of my ideas would have clashed with locals because they wouldn’t have been as exposed to these ideas. If i found a community of like minded people it would have had to be closed off from regular people in order to protect itself.
Now its so open that only a third of the people in my community actually speak the local language natively. The rest speak primarly English Mandarin and Indonesian but also German French Spanish and others. I’m not just talking about a single speaker of those languages. I’m talking about pockets, entire groups, sub-sub cultures. After a few years we will likely see more bi-and tri-linguals in this group
This is the decentralization of culture, and with it, the decentralization of power.
One day, and I don’t know when, we will be able to form our own nations with the people we want to form them with, peacefully and with the support of other nations. The concept of a nation will become divorced from the land itslef and we will become more free to roam about the earth. Reputation will matter more than money and it will be built through real contirbution and in millions of different ways.
We can already see a very early version of this at Hive.
I know how bad things look, its hard for me to come to terms with how much harder it is for me to have a stable livable income than my parents and I know at the moment it’s only getting harder. I know it feels like society is tearing itself about but I believe we are merely tearing off a scab.
Theae are growing pains. Old systems are not easy to change, and you get a little wackiness at times, but as people are able to work through their traumas and face the reality that things are not going back to normal and that that is ok, we will figure it out.
We still have a lot of people in the paradigm of top down power structures. They either feel that they need to elect better leaders to enact a change and that things will only change after we do, or they believe that there are evil powers that control us.
Both are right and both are wrong, depending on where you stand. There are certainly people trying to control us and sometimes they succeed. Things could also change for the better if we elected better people. But I am of the believe (and I am met with countless evidence of this) that Ghandi had it right when he said “Be the change you want to see in the world).
The guys from Nyege Nyege records probably just see themselves as afficianodos of African culture and experimental music and want to have a good time. Meanwhile, (I suspect unknowingly) they are creating a useful bridge between Africa and Europe and other parts of the world for experimental artists and musicians and fans of that music to connect.
Hive is another example of this. We’ve all contributed to an ecosystem that is an experiment in society building. We are able to transcend the traditional ideas of capitalism and socialism and toy with completely new ideas thanks to the technology, community and conversations we have here.
Even just the concept of borderless payments without a middleman (just the tip of the iceberg woth regards to blockchain, not even one of the amazing things specific to hive) allows us to form projects and work with people who we might not otherwise have financial access to.
Paypal is not available in many countries and without crypto, I wouldn’t have a way to pay 
So the internet is only just reaching it’s early adulthood years and in the meantime blockchain is in it’s teens. As messy as the world works, it’s possible that a world far better than any ofnus could have imagined is just around the corner.
It won’t be without it’s problems, it could have many pockets run by warlords and there may be new things we need to be careful of and dangerous landmines that we need to be careful of. But the opportunities for all of is to shape a life of our dreams are only increasing in the longterm. It’s very hard to see that if you expect things to travel on their current trajectories, but they rarely do, if ever.
There is going to be a major major crack in the pessimism around current events that comes with the next wave of enthusiasm around blockchain and I can’t wait. I don’t know if it’s 6 months away or 6 years away but its coming, and my gut tells me it’s sooner rather than later.
For years I’ve felt like 2024 would be the year and it could turn out that way. Some of us will feel it much sooner than others, but i imagine those of us at Hive all know the things we need to know to benefit from these changes before they hit the mainstream.
In the end I think this big change will be a culmination of all our desires and willingness to face our fears. A certain threshold will be broken where we start to see tangible differences in peoples lives. That means its up to us though. When where and how this threshold is broken is out of our control but we can always contribute to it’s momentum by gollowing our excitment and being as realistically idealistic as we know how to be.
Looking forward to seeing how the rest of this year pans out!
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