“This is a struggle for the soul of technology. We need to take bold steps to restore the public’s faith.” –Sheldon Himelfarb, President and CEO, PeaceTech Lab

More than a few architects of our digital era have confessed to some critical design flaws in our modern technological environment. Centralized networks — be they telecom, online, or financial — are not just rent-seeking but surveillance-prone. Ad-driven revenue models precipitate user experiences that are both fractured and addictive, news outlets that aren’t fact-checked, but clickbaited. Our personal data — clicks, likes, cursor movements, seemingly innocuous online behavior that becomes profoundly telling in volume — is machine-learned, sold off, weaponized. As Michael Casey, co-author of The Truth Machine, recently noted, “In the data economy that we now live in, data is a currency. Facebook isn’t a free service. We’re paying them with our data.”

Joe Lubin has said time and again that “The Internet is awesome, but it’s broken.” The idea of the Internet is awesome, certainly — a read-write environment where information can be shared seamlessly and where users can become creators and collaborators. But, as New York Magazine poignantly captured earlier this spring, somehow this “Silicon Valley dream of building a networked utopia turned into a globalized strip-mall casino overrun by pop-up ads and cyberbullies.” And still, millions are excluded from this “global” system altogether.

In her memoir Close to the Machine, Ellen Ullman describes the disconnect she sometimes felt from fleshy reality as a software engineer: “I have passed through a membrane where the real world and its uses no longer matter … The users existed only in my mind, projections, all mine. They were abstractions, initiators of tasks that set off remote procedure calls; triggers to a set of logical and machine events.” Perhaps it’s somewhere in this disconnect, and in the “rapture of discovery and innovation,” as Bill Joy has observed, that our modern technologies have lost their way. This distance from end users. Human users.

In the wake of some historic whistle blows, breaches, and letdowns, it is high time that the tech community wins back the public’s favor and proves it can build something truly global that doesn’t surveil, commodify, or marginalize users, but that aligns, enables, and ennobles them.

Beyond Silicon Valley: Web3 Underground

Blockchain technology has emerged as the flagship in the effort to course-correct — but really overhaul — our current systems. Owned by no one, and powered by whoever wants to join the network, a blockchain’s uniquely distributed architecture makes it an ideal global infrastructure for users to directly trust, transact, and collaborate with one another.

Web3, as this hyper-collaborative and rearchitected Internet is being called, is not being built by the tech community, or out of any of the old conduits (Wall Street, San Francisco, Hong Kong, London), but by pockets of forward-thinking and critically-minded engineers, entrepreneurs, policy makers, regulators, humanitarians, and artists from all points of the compass: Denver, Toronto, Berlin, Johannesburg, Kiev, Manila, Bushwick. A better word for this community is ecosystem — it is diverse, emergent, self-organized, healthily competitive, hungry for feedback, resilient, and highly energetic.

On June 1, hundreds of impact-driven blockchainers came together for the Blockchain for Social Impact Conference under the “Dove’s Wings” at the US Institute of Peace, a vaulting glass and steel structure on the northwest corner of the National Mall in Washington, DC. Their mission: use blockchain to wage peace.

Speakers and attendees alike were wary of utopian promises and attuned to the complexities of deploying new technologies in crisis areas, let alone a technology that is owned by no one/everyone. Proofs of concept are one thing. On-the-ground solutions are another.

Any technology is by and large what we make of it, and crypto, like any space, has its back alleys — lambo bros and pump and dumps and authoritarian ICOs. And so Sheldon Himelfarb from PeaceTech Lab called on the ecosystem “to get smart about blockchain,” and work together across sectors: “When policymakers only talk to policymakers and technologists to technologists and data scientists to data scientists, we will never move the needle on our shared goal of creating a more peaceful, prosperous planet.”

The conference made a few things clear: dozens of projects have gotten smart about blockchain, and they’re cutting across sectors and on the ground. While some await the “blockchain killer app,” this diverse coalition of teams and tools is proving that blockchain technology’s most compelling use cases are already underway.