The current global economy incentivizes organizations to hoard data for competitive advantage. Although everyone thrives when valuable ideas circulate, competition rewards exclusive control over valuable knowledge.
This manifests as network effects, which create a compounding advantage for existing platforms, cementing internet monopolies. The implication of this is reduced competition, which ultimately stifles innovation.
Platforms tend to lock in user-generated content in data silos. In the process, they limit portability and interoperability. We need to figure out how to unlock the value in these private data silos; not just in Africa, but across the entire world.
Today’s internet favors winner-takes-most platform economics. Users are forced to rely on the arbitrary goodwill of big platforms.
But platforms are set up to index on metrics like EBITDA. Sometimes they focus on these metrics at the expense of the user.
For example, social media platforms implement algorithms that enable them to maximize revenue and user engagement, sometimes at the expense of user experience.
Platforms tend to favor pushing viral or triggering content. Internal teams can manually “heat” or demote content for strategic or commercial reasons.
TikTok employees’ secret heating button is one proof (https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/20/23564242/tiktok-heating-view-boosts-creators-businesses)
Amazon’s brands often ranked above better-reviewed competitors until antitrust lawsuits forced a retreat (https://www.theantitrustattorney.com/unpacking-the-implications-of-the-ftcs-antitrust-case-against-amazon-for-online-marketplace-competition/).
Government organizations create elite hierarchies and centralize power. Companies also create these hierarchies through managerial capitalism. Managerial capitalism naturally leads to the principal-agent problem. Power concentrates. In extreme scenarios, this results in slave driving.
We can address this problem in many ways.
- Incentive structures: Stock options, salaries, and bonuses tied to performance.
- Oversight: Systems to ensure power is checked and remains decentralized.
But the problem is never eliminated, just managed.
When power concentrates, inequalities worsen. Power loves asymmetry.
As we see in the world today, the majority of power and economic benefits are concentrated at the top of the evolving global hierarchy.
In January 2025, billionaires added $10 billion to their fortunes each day, more than the combined wealth of the poorest 2.8 billion people.
Half of the world’s wealth is owned by the top 1%.
A healthy economy is more balanced. The current knowledge economy can be better.
We can use code to automate a lot of things and enforce a lot of things that can solve a lot of problems, like wealth inequality, capitalist exploitation,
https://library.fiveable.me/key-terms/ap-euro/capitalist-exploitation
What if we could invert the current global economy?
I mean, create a delicate blend of socialism and capitalism thriving side by side, and enforce many things in code and cryptography.
Doing this requires a rethink of how we value and reward knowledge and output, and how societies relate with each other as they collaborate.
Stay with me…
The world runs on knowledge.
And while technology may be our starting point, real progress will mean tackling social, economic, legal, and cultural fronts.
So, how do we unlock the value in this private, siloed data?
Well, it is important to maintain (automated) legal frameworks that protect intellectual property on the internet and guarantee value attribution for this private, siloed data. It is also important to harness sustainable economic models for licensing and pricing intellectual property.
There are tons of other problems. But if we can figure this out collectively, we can unlock immense value for everyone. Literally, everyone. Because we all have unique knowledge. Something we know better than most people, or a combination of things we know better than most people.
Our unique knowledge is manifested in artifacts: a document you wrote, a dataset you compiled, a piece of code you wrote, an AI agent you trained to do something well, an API, an MCP server, a music file, an artwork, the list is endless.
We all have these artifacts littered across the internet. They encapsulate what we know and what we can do.
What if we envisioned the internet as a semantic web of human and machine-readable content?
A kind of decentralized graph housing a vast web of meaning. That is what the internet was always meant to be.
In a sense, we are already building this knowledge, this semantic web scattered across the internet.
But the knowledge is siloed, locked behind walled gardens.
Twitter is like a repository of your thoughts. Instagram is a repository of your pictures and fun captions. Google Docs, Notion, Confluence, etc. We all use different apps daily. At work or in our personal lives. In the course of using these apps, we are creating content all over the internet.
But with the current Saas model, platforms become the source of truth for user state. The content is housed within their infrastructure and processed by their compute. With this model, platforms will always rent-seek.
This is not always bad. Saas has brought us quite far and yielded true value.
But I believe the internet can further thrive on improved economic models. New ways that people, organizations, and platforms create, exchange, and capture value online. Many things can be enforced in code, cryptography, using tools and systems like smart contracts, smart licences, tokenized assets, programmable royalties, decentralized autonomous organizations, automated compliance.
These technologies exist today, are being developed, and are in motion. They just need to mature, scale, and combine in ways that yield value.
But first, we need to flip the internet and restore power to the edges, to the people. Most people don’t really care about this, but I think as a people, we should all care.
Inversion of Control, Dependency Inversion, Dependency Injection. These are all related concepts in software engineering.
When I say flip the internet, I mean inversion of control and primary custody or ownership of content on the internet.
If you look at it, we already own our content. It’s just housed in platforms that seek rent from us to interact with our content on their infrastructure. This is what Saas has basically done over the past couple of decades.
If we flip the internet, the user’s local device becomes the source of truth for content on the internet.
This is the whole idea behind the local-first movement (https://rxdb.info/articles/local-first-future.html).
Software should be local-first, because compute and storage have progressed rapidly since the dawn of the internet.
Today, there’s a lot more we can do on a user’s device. There is a lot of compute and inference we can offload to the edge; to the user’s device whether it’s mobile, or PC. As hardware continues to improve, this will only get better.
Cloud should be relegated to only compute-heavy workloads that are unrealistic to run locally, or workloads where centralization provides better benefits or user experience.
Local first is about maintaining privacy. But also creating frameworks for guaranteed individual rights on the internet. You can say some of these thoughts are inspired by the cypherpunks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk
The Cypherpunk philosophy is deeply libertarian; but the whole idea is individual sovereignty and guaranteed fundamental rights for people on the internet.
We can use code, cryptography, and real-world systems to guarantee fundamental rights for everyone on the internet.
Imagine if an LLM could generate text in a chat session, and the entity (or entities) that provided that knowledge in its response could be compensated in a transaction, maybe a smart license. Or imagine an AI agent accomplishes a task, and the entity that provided relevant context for that task can earn in a transaction.
This compensated entity can be a human, an organization, an AI agent, or even a machine. Sustainable economic models around this will drive huge network effects and unlock value from private, siloed data.
What if private data can be safely exposed and monetized on the internet? To do this, we must respect privacy and adhere to user rules. Privacy is the default; the network is optional.
Information has value, but to evaluate it, you must know it; once you know it, you’ve consumed it, and the knowledge provider can no longer control access. You don’t need the provider anymore. This is called the arrow information paradox.
But providers incur costs in learning, research, and knowledge discovery; they need to recover these costs.
To resolve this paradox, we can engage systems like:
- Licensing & IP law (you reveal the info, but they owe you royalties)
- Nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) (they make a legally binding promise not to steal it)
- Partial disclosure or demos (tease just enough value)
- Cryptographic commitments / Zero-knowledge proofs (show something is true without revealing it)
- Homomorphic encryption (Let the buyer run computations on data they never see in the clear)
- Smart contracts, escrow
Each of these has its trade-offs, so we may need to combine them in creative ways.
No matter how advanced artificial intelligence becomes, data (knowledge) will always play a part in intelligence. Every human and organisation has unique knowledge. Every human and organisation can own their piece of knowledge (data) on the internet. Data is encrypted locally in trusted environments before it travels over these networks.
This is a highly collaborative enterprise. No one entity will build this. Instead, different entities will provide different resources: knowledge, storage, compute, datasets, AI agents, etc. The emerging network will reward participants according to the protocols governing the network.
It will start with friends, then local communities, then organizations, then networks, and even governments. People building composable, interoperable networks will naturally align. There is mostly collaboration and healthy competition.
I envision a version of the future where technology ushers an age of abundance. Where we have solved world hunger and poverty. I truly believe this future is possible.
I hope we all get to build this and set ourselves free.