Democracy and the Blockchain

If social ideology maps to socialism/capitalism -- parties/parliament -- party members/citizens,
then blockchain probably maps to public/private -- consortium/node -- users.

Modern social ideology is a tangled, complex domain that a single person can hardly carry with mere personal opinion. The derivatives are varied, the interests are interwoven, but the starting point is the same: in the end, it was built so that citizens (individuals) would not be subsumed under royal power (social class). Concepts like humanism, hongik-ingan (benefiting all humankind), respect for life, and women's rights existed long before modern social structures we call "ideologies" came into being. In their own ways, individuals, nations, or societies managed to go on surviving -- right up until the idea of the individual, the citizen, and equality took root.
The blockchain feels similar. Look at the languages, infrastructure, and data structures that make up blockchain and web3, and you'll notice that most of these are actually pre-existing technologies. What's new is simply the arrival of an awareness of equality. How was equality perceived during the Joseon dynasty, the Three Kingdoms era, or in old European societies? Thinking about that, I find, helps enormously in understanding various phenomena unfolding now in the Bitcoin and NFT markets, and opens up a range of insights. And yet, when I look at what's shared in media or in the market, it feels overly tech-centric. The way, before people experienced the automobile, they only tried to tweak the number of horses, the number of wheels on a carriage, or its shape.

Lately the expression "--myeodeulda" (to seep into) has been showing up more often. I think technology ought to do just that -- especially in fields like AI and blockchain.
How could I possibly know Jobs' intentions, but off the top of my head: he seeped into the fields people were already interested in, then expanded from there one piece at a time. Looking at a Walkman, he didn't imagine a better-performing Walkman; he thought first about the environment for "listening to music." He focused not on WHAT but on WHY and HOW. He built an environment where people could listen to music more easily and creators could distribute it faster. More precisely, he "edited it out" -- out of already-existing tech and already-existing interfaces, even while getting tangled up in copyright lawsuits. Jobs was an editor. The only reason no one calls him a "copycat, an editor" is because he "gathered familiar things" and created new "uses."
Only now do we watch the keynotes in awe and even use them as English-study and presentation-study material. If you Google the media coverage from back then, though, you'll see there was enormous criticism and concern.


Before Apple made the iPod and the iPhone, there were PDA phones.
Today's blockchain feels that way to me. Too tech-centric, too backward-looking.




Anyway, just... that's what I think.