“Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. ...That tension will not go away.” — Stewart Brand
The internet is half complete. It is able to transfer information across the world between billions of people. That’s the first half of the machine. The second—and incomplete—half is how the value system allows that information to be as free (and widely spread) as possible.
We’ve made it this far with walled gardens built out of a combination of ads, subscriptions, and paywalls. It’s important that there is a viable business model for creating and distributing information. Without that incentive there would be much less produced, reducing the amount of knowledge being widely available.
The problem is that our current business models are directly at odds with the free distribution of information. There is a real and persistent tension between the two. We need to restrict access to extract value. It’s fighting gravity.
This is the largest and most fundamental problem with the internet as it is today. We have yet to find a way to solve the tension of information wanting to be free and the fact that information is expensive to produce, distribute and consume.
What if?
What if we could have a value system that wants information to be as freely distributed as possible?
What if we could have a value system that rewarded the creators, distributors and consumers of information without any restrictions on the access to that information? And even better, what if there was a value system that created a direct and explicit incentive to spread that information as far and wide as possible?
Such a value system would be the perfect complement to information. In fact it would probably become synonymous with the information itself.
Crypto is the solution
My very important truth that few people agree with me on is that we can use crypto to create the value system for information and solve this fundamental problem with the internet.
We can do that by making it as easy as possible for anyone to coin their content (any media), making it freely accessible across the internet while creating an open, liquid, permissionless and programmable market to discover and trade its value in real time.
The more widely spread and traded, the more valuable it can become. Creators capture value in the coins they own. Platforms capture value when they show the right coins to the right people at the right time. Consumers capture value by owning the coins for the content they find important, fun and useful to them. It’s a win-win-win.
Towards a free and valuable internet
Coins unlock a free and valuable internet—one where information can be freely accessed and shared while the value of that information finds its way into all of the hands that help create, distribute, and consume it.
This is a new paradigm where information and value converge to create information markets. These markets give us a crucial new tool to help us organize and sort through an increasingly infinite sea of content in an adversarial environment. This will not only create more aligned incentives for content production and distribution, but at the highest level helps us discover the most important and valuable things on the internet. At their best, free markets are truth machines, and now we get to apply them to the internet itself. It's not just the price and marketcap, but being able to see who is doing what and with how much. These are valuable signals to help us make sense of what to pay attention to.
There's a lot to figure out, but in an internet dominated by closed algorithms that are working against us and our attention—we now have a new algorithm called the market we can start to utilize. Like how social media unlocked an entire new universe of opportunities, I have no doubt that this will unlock the same—with the added superpowers that crypto affords in permissionless and open protocols. I have no doubt what starts as a new way to create and share content on the internet will lead to new types of communities and organizations that can do things together at scales not possible before.
After five years of building, we have a working spark. But most of the work remains ahead. At Zora, that's our mission: to build the free and valuable internet.
