Decentralize like Gutenberg.
20 years ago the Web was an open mesh of connection. Anybody could learn anything that anybody else wished to share. Put up a website, read another one, link to another.
Information was free in the best possible sense. Not free from all costs or payments, but freely accessible and discoverable to all. Anywhere in the world with any kind of local Internet or telecommunications connection.
The Web was fully decentralized — by design — and it changed our world with nothing more powerful than information. Peer to peer information. My computer to yours and vice versa. In our electronic and visual way, we simply talked to each other, directly.
It opened our eyes to so much. The world was at our fingertips, if we treated it respectfully. Bad behavior was simply shunned by people who recognized it as such. We didn’t need help from a centralized authority. Our grandmothers taught us how to take care of ourselves. “Sticks and stones may break your bones but words can never hurt you.” Don’t quibble with me, you know what she meant.
The Web today is centralized. People like me are really missing the decentralized peer to peer information world we once enjoyed. Centralization wasn’t any evil conspiracy, it was just business, pursued by share-price-driven publicly-owned companies. Stock analysts have a name for the top winners in the game: FAANG. “FAANG is an acronym for the market’s five most popular and best-performing tech stocks, namely Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Alphabet’s Google.”
Amazon has brought great benefits to many people — delivering things people wanted to shop for on the Web — while concentrating power and wealth. The amazin’ store is on track to become the first trillion-dollar company. Perhaps it was inevitable, maybe there was no other way to do it at the time.
Information is too important to give up what the Web did for the world. I’m thinking particularly about books because, as we wrote in Publica’s first white paper, “Books are how humanity helps itself.”
Later we recast that idea into our snappier motto, Books Without Borders. (Not the bookstore chain! We mean the national borders that blockchain peer to peer networks don’t know anything about. I’ll be writing more about that in the coming weeks.) And now our newest motto is Publish Your Way, because our authors are doing just that. Look for that phrase in our future official communications. We mean it.
Let’s compare the pre-FAANG Web to Gutenberg’s Press. And may I remind you of Publica’s first video explainers.
When Gutenberg invented movable type, power and wealth were concentrated in a handful of centralized family businesses and the governments they paid for. Gutenberg’s Press decentralized information in a peer to peer way. The networks were person to person, community to community, but the principle was the same. With that came the goods that we still cherish today — knowledge, teaching, news, and eventually a global literacy that humanity never knew before.
Power and wealth followed suit. They decentralized too. Lately they’ve been centralizing again.
The Web, in all its wonderfulness, is apparently prone to centralization. Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t like it either, and he helped invent it. I particularly liked this commentary by The Crypto Insider: “The internet needs a Solid re-decentralization: Tim Berners-Lee.”
What happens to us all if books get even more centralized? We don’t need to find out! We can reverse the trend back in Gutenberg’s direction. We can re-decentralize it.
If you like that idea too, talk to us at Publica.com. This blockchain evolution is happening and we don’t think anyone can frustrate it any more than Gutenberg’s Press.
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