Great Protocol Politics

In a real sense, these tech companies are more modern regulators than the paper-based models of the 20th century.

6. Property rights have become encryption. The state’s conception as the legitimate guardian of private property extends back to at least philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. But cryptocurrencies challenge this view as they establish a full-fledged theory of digital property rights outside the state.

About 75 percent of the world’s population, more than 60 percent of global GDP, and around 50 percent of all billionaires are neither Chinese nor American. Those two superpowers may well fight, but it’s not obvious if the rest of the world will want to align with either party. Indeed, with the rise of decentralized protocols, we anticipate that man... See more

8. Web3 is addressing global inequality by sharing the reward—and the risk. Put another way, if the roughly $5 trillion total market cap of Alphabet, Meta, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft were split across a billion users to give them around $5,000 each, they’d be much more supportive.

In other words, it’s short-sighted to think technology will remain indefinitely confined to the digital realm.

1. Network proximity is now on par with physical geography: Within this cloud continent, the unit of distance between two people is not the travel time between their positions on the globe but rather the degrees of separation in their social networks.

the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was set up to regulate Merck and Pfizer, not 1 million biohackers; the Federal Aviation Administration was built for Boeing and Airbus, not 1 million drone hobbyists; and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was created to go after Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, not 1 million Web3 developers.

2. National currencies will face digital monetary competition: We are about to enter an age of global monetary competition, where national currencies must earn their place in someone’s wallet portfolio every hour of every day, even among citizens of their own countries. The digital version of the Japanese yen will be plunged into head-to-head globa... See more

In a pair of recent essays, political scientist Ian Bremmer contends that Big Tech companies will reshape the global order, while FP columnist Stephen Walt’s friendly rejoinder is that states will remain predominant. We take a third view: Not only has technology already changed the global order, but it is also changing the nature of both companies ... See more