The internet as we know it exists for more than 20 years. In this short period the internet has changed our lives completely — although not everyone on the planet has access to the internet, those who do cannot imagine life without it.

The internet serves as the ethos of our modern society with all of its amazing features, applications capabilities, and even tragedies.

Like everything else, the internet began very optimistically — we imagined a truly free method of communications that is not censored or corrupted by the whims of the few and as a liberator for the human condition.

The internet has brought many great things to our society, but it’s inherent structure is being used to control and manipulate us. Rather than being a tool of free speech it is being used to control what information we see and to collect everything we do.

The old infrastructure that grew to become the internet of today is no longer reliable, it is being used by oppressive regimes across the planet to spy on citizens and governments decide what is legal for us to access and publish and what is not.

Add to those facts the idea that we the people who create the internet at large, the users, the writers, the content creators, are not enjoying the fruits of our labors because of the way the internet is built. Content websites like YouTube are enjoying an unending feed of content that we are creating but contributes nothing back to us except for the ability to access that content, disregarding the few superstars who get paid peanuts for having millions of monthly viewers.

Another worthy mention is the fact that due to the topography of the web we are essentially using an outdated technology that is prone to DDoS attacks and service outages when we could easily update our entire internet infrastructure to be thousands of times faster and infinitely more resilient.

Technologies evolve at an extreme speeds when they are allowed to, when the playing field is large enough to experiment and open enough to bring in new ideas. Although our internet today has created many great things, we are only on the cusp of possibilities limited by old systems such as politics, old ideas such as copyright that create bottlenecks when there should be none.

We have the technology to build a better internet. Recent technologies like BitTorrent and Bitcoin are proving that decentralization is trumping centralization by any measure feasible. Bitcoin is a network that no single entity controls and yet we all decide its fate, BitTorrent is a network that brings us content disregarding the ephemeral laws and bylaws of one state or culture or another.

In 2015, we will build the internet that will serve us for the next century, that will allow us to express ourselves without the fear of retribution, without central servers that control what content goes in or out, without the limitations of centralized networks.

We will build an internet that reduces the cost of transferring information across the planet to minuscule amounts, an internet that pays back to the users that help to create and maintain it and all that is within it, a decentralized network that is unbreakable and unstoppable that no government or business man on the planet could control.

We will liberate ourselves from the faults of our own biology and upgrade our society to be truly free.