The Token Society

Online platforms can monetize our online interactions with people we trust. But what’s really impressive is the ability of such platforms to monetize interactions with people we don’t trust, offline.

But while users no longer have to trust each other, they still have to trust the platform itself. That’s about to change, with consequences for many different professions and society as a whole.

Facebook and even Mark Zuckerberg himself have the power to ban specific users and groups on Facebook. 2.85 billion users are at the whim of a single individual or company.

Web3 has the potential to reduce the current costs of online interactions by:

Every act of kindness will become an act of commerce. Is this a nightmare or a dream society?

Empowering users to impact how platforms are government and participate in value creation; and

Compensating people directly and automatically for the tiniest contributions without relying on expensive middlemen and time-consuming processes.

The web in its current state is like a city without public spaces. People can only interact in places owned by someone else, and a small group of landlords captures an oversized share of all economic activity.

Airbnb is the culmination of that process: the industrialization of trust itself. The conversion of personal favors and characteristics into impersonal products that anyone can buy. Dense pools of people — cities and, later, the web — enabled the replacement of “natural” human relations with a series of interactions driven by cold logic and necessi... See more

Airbnb systematized and commoditized trust, turning it from a unique personal quality into an impersonal feature that could be “attached” to anyone.