The blockchain revolution will happen -- how can we make sure it is good?

I try to be pretty skeptical of utopian visions promising to change the world. As much fun as it is getting swept up in the excitement of thinking about how Blockchain technology will change commerce, finance, identity, and how IPFS could redistribute the internet, it is mentally healthy, I believe, to constantly challenge your assumptions. Which, admittedly, doesn't need to be done too often in the crypto world, since those of us involved are constantly being scoffed at, and usually find ourselves on the defensive.

But every day, that begins to change. People increasingly understand the opportunity we have to reopen democracy using new technology. The opportunity to tear down the companies that own our data, the Facebooks and Google's, that use our connections to advertise and milk 'clicks' out of us. To restore the internet to its earlier ideals of being an open system, that we can use without being preyed upon. Increasingly, the blockchain revolution looks inevitable.

So I want to ask -- how can we make sure that it will stay good? The internet is a great system, but its democratic beginnings have been eroded over time. And some ideas, pure in intent, can go very awry. Communism, for instance, seemed like a good idea to a lot of people throughout the 20th century, but in implementation, was unsuccessful. Certainly, it was disastrous from an economics perspective that considers the allocation of scarce resources to be a an important measure of society. The name I took for Steem, NoTrueScotsman, deals with a logical fallacy that was used to defend communism after it had been shown to be a total failure. "Ah", people would say, when confronted with the failures of the USSR or Mao's early China, "yes that failed but that was not true communism."

The dreamers of today don't put their hopes in social systems -- they put their hopes in technology. And with good reason -- virtually all social progress, I believe, has been driven by technological progress. Equal rights for women were driven by industrialization, and so was the abolition of slavery. Humans didn't morally pull ourselves up from our own bootstraps -- once an institution or lifestyle was made irrelevant by technology, we invented the ethical foundations necessary to remove it from our society.

This is less cynical than it sounds. It means, effectively, that humans can have any type of society that we want. We just have to get the technology right. We have to make sure we understand that the impact of the technology we bring in the world is enormous.

Let me bring up Daniel Kahnemann's ideas from Thinking Fast and Slow. Humans have two systems of thinking, type 1 and type 2. In type 1, we make instinctual decisions. We take heuristic models of the world and we apply them without thinking. We get ready for work and make our morning commute without thinking about it. That is Type 1.

Type 2 requires conscious effort. That is the type of real thinking required to solve a complex problem. If there is a roadblock on your way to work, and you need to find a different route, well, you will probably have to activate your type 2 thinking. Most interestingly, neuroscientists have shown that most of our decisions are made via type 1 thinking before our type 2 thinking is activated -- meaning that we make decisions before we are aware of them. We rarely come to decisions through some rational process, but rather, we make decisions instinctually and then we create a fortress of logic around these decisions.

We can take that idea and apply it to how humans think in a group. Once technological progress helped create equality in the workplace, women began to assert their economic power and ultimately gained equal political rights in western countries. Morally, it became obvious. But for thousands of years of human society, before industrialization, it was very non-obvious that this is how a just society should be structured. Human social structure has been, and remains, a reflection of the technology available to us. Recognizing how this pattern plays out through human history is essential to recognizing that humans need to activate our type 2 style thinking in areas we don't typically apply it.

So, back to technology. The blockchain, as a method to restructure digitized human interaction, has massive potential. It is common to mock social media platforms, largely due to the general distaste we all feel when using them. (Yet most of us do use them!) But it is important not to underestimate, for better or for worse, the importance of what these systems have done for human society. Social organization is what enables humans to create, to distribute knowledge, to allocate resources, and most importantly, coordinate decisions as an entire species. It is easy to misunderstand how important this technology is. Sometimes the most profound innovations are the most mundane. SpaceX's true innovation, for example, was simply built around cost savings by re-using rockets. It was taking existing technology and first improving the financial basis, so that real innovation can continue.

By extension, the internet, by enabling humanity to come together, will determine how we are able to work together to solve the most difficult challenges of our day. You know what these are. Climate change, pollution, war, authoritarianism, religious intolerance, disease, troubling demographic trends, the future of space travel, etc.

But if we don't get this right, the consequences will be dire. Already, the failure of the current internet structure, of siloed data centers that use human interaction to push advertising, is contributing to, instead of combating, both social and ecological decline. The collapse in political discourse, the ineffectual response to climate change -- I believe that the de-democratization of the internet has been a major cause. Ten years ago, the internet was considerably more open. Now it is just a handful of websites and phone apps. Amazon. Google. Facebook/Instagram. Snapchat.

The oft-quoted Peter Thiel line about Twitter, "We were promised flying cars, instead we got 140 characters." Thiel's complaint is taken too seriously. Social innovations like Twitter, and the human data that gets generated by them, is, I believe, more important, and has more potential to alter human destiny, than an improved transportation system. It may not have the same 'wow' factor, but getting digital human interaction right is the biggest challenge that exists before us today.

The technology exists.

But how can we make sure we get it right?