thanks Eric, I think the easiest way to answer is to say that I expect there will be a great deal of consternation! :)

One of the inspirations for Mattereum (I was having conversations with the founders before they launched) was the idea that they wanted to avoid a future that could be summed up as "Made in China, delivered by Amazon" - so how do you build a system of trade that's as efficient (or more so) than Amazon without it being tightly integrated and owned by a small number of people. They also recognise that the prices we (in the "West") pay for goods is kept low by actual and financial violence against other human beings, just ones that we don't generally see (and don't want to see), they talk about "you've seen what fairtrade coffee costs, now think what a fairtrade laptop or smartphone would cost"

I think we're currently seeing the unfolding consequences of the original internet - the "internet of ideas" in the chaos that surrounds news and information at the moment - what happens when you give politicians a tool like Twitter (which is a boiled down version of the thing called 'blogging')? Well eventually you get politicians who use Twitter as their main way to talk directly to ordinary people and you get a news media that mainly reports and amplifies whatever lies they choose to tell. Could we have done something about this ten years ago? Maybe, but it might have involved deeply lessening the power of blogging and microblogging technology and keeping certain people out. And that's countercultural for most of the people building the tools.

I hope that we've learned something but I'm not entirely sure.

If you've 90 minutes to spare sometime to listen to Vinay talking, this is where his thinking is right now. I'm still trying to get him to use his Steemit account a bit more :)