To anyone paying attention, it appears we’re at an interesting moment in the history of the Web. On the back of ~60 years of Moore’s Law, the Web is now astonishingly responsive and high-resolution, and where >5 billion people (and growing!) are increasingly spending their lives. As remarkable as the Web is, though, it has — for reasons social, economic and technological — become concentrated in the hands of a very small handful of actors whose interests are proving highly misaligned with our broader interests as a global community. Where it was once hoped that the Internet would bring the world together, to enlighten and empower, it’s now effectively breaking things instead. Fortunately, as if just in-time, we’ve happened upon some new ‘technological primitives’ — blockchains, smart contracts, tokens, new forms of cryptography — that seem to offer the promise of a more enlightened Internet. These new primitives we refer to collectively as “crypto”, and the alternative financial system it’s given rise to as the “cryptoeconomy”. And yet, at this point, one would be hard-pressed to argue that the cryptoeconomy, as it stands, goes any real way towards solving the fundamental problems of today’s Web. While NFTs are providing artists and content creators with new economic possibilities and interesting notions of digital identity abound, as citizens of the Internet, we remain overwhelmingly stuck in the ‘Web 2.0’ paradigm, where surveillance capitalism remains the economic engine powering the logic of our increasingly online lives.

If one takes a step back for a minute, it ought to be relatively easy to appreciate the source of the hope and optimism that characterises the cause we’ve come to call ‘crypto’. First, we need only appreciate that the perversions of the Internet are primarily the result of a misalignment of incentives between the provisioners of Internet products and services — Facebook, Google etc. — and their users (that is, the world of humans). As is now well understood, the ultimate source of this misalignment here is advertising, and the logic of lock-in, surveillance and extraction it implies.

It’s critical to appreciate here that nowhere is advertising implicit in the design of the Internet — that is, the core protocols that comprise it — or the hyperlinked structure of the Web. Instead, it was something grafted on, haphazardly, in accordance with entirely predictable commercial incentives (as early dot-com tech companies scrambled to find a business model). That advertising would come to dominate the logic and structure of the Web, to the degree it has, was never inevitable — though nor was it accidental. It was, as with so much of the world, a function of straight-forward incentives playing out *more or less* straight-forwardly.

Although incentives are key to understanding our present equilibrium, it’s equally important to appreciate that advertising became the default business model of the Web — in large part — because of a lack of viable alternatives. Building out the core infrastructure of the Internet / Web was expensive and necessarily required a deep source of funding. Advertising was simply the low-hanging fruit in the room, a quick and cheap economic fix. Of course, if there was an obvious and compelling alternative to advertising, at the time, things might have played out differently. But alas.

Fortunately, the show isn’t yet over. While today’s Internet is evidently corrupted by the influence of advertising, as the world’s most powerful social technology, we should expect it to evolve. Indeed, if the Internet is in fact the defining technology of our time — a reasonable enough proposition, it would seem — we ought to take the view that we’re still amidst the very first inning of this whole thing. So, yes, the Internet may, as of right now, lack an appropriate business model — but it’s not too late to invent one!

With that dose of optimism, let’s now consider what crypto actually amounts to: collectively owned distributed infrastructure, magic internet money, programmatic and internet-native political economies, digital sovereignty. When viewed at this level of abstraction, crypto is almost jarringly the Web’s missing piece — the socioeconomic substrate it both requires and deserves.

At least conceptually, crypto is the obvious fix the Web needs — the building blocks of a more humane Internet society. At this point, however, the fix remains just that: conceptual. In the abstract, we sure appear to have the relevant concepts at our fingertips, and increasingly, the technologies by which we may practically instantiate them. But here is the challenge and where Reality inconveniently imposes: taking the concepts and ideas — and the broader yearning for a better Internet — and building them into actual functioning systems. That is, taking the abstract and making it real.

Fortunately, this is precisely the promise of computing: the ability to take any and all abstract concepts — so long as they can be expressed logically — and instantiate them in physical machines (i.e. computers). And while crypto contains multitudes, the high-order bit is this: we now have the means by which we can express economic incentives in a decentralized and digitally-native context. That is, of course, the context of the Internet. The question is, How?

Before we go any further, it should be acknowledged that crypto — as a technology stack — is today rife with imperfection and inadequacy. There are performance and scalability challenges that will inevitably constrain the scope of what’s possible. Before we constrain ourselves with the practical limitations of the Present, however, let us permit our imaginations and intellects to roam freely. Once we have some notion of the ideal, let us then come back to Earth so that we can attempt to actualise it.

In attempting to reconfigure the fundamental economics of the Internet, we are necessarily attempting to impose a new kind of value system upon it. This might sound a little fluffy, but it’s really just another way of framing the very same problem in question. That is, how might we revalue the Internet and the human activity that takes place upon it? The first thing one should appreciate here is that this is already quite the challenge — and we haven’t even considered how we might actually instantiate such an ideal! Indeed, it’s really not clear — and never is! — how things ought to be valued. Presently, the thing that’s ultimately being valued is attention, the raw commodity being sold onto advertisers. However, ‘attention-as-commodity’ would appear to be a fundamentally problematic principle. Even if we could devise a protocol that, say, cut out the current intermediaries such that people were directly remunerated for their attention, we would still have, on our hands, something of a weapon aimed directly at our minds.

Taking attention to be the optimisation function of the Internet is problematic in precisely the same way as would be organising the world solely around the principle of pleasure. Of course, we want our world to reflect the best of us, not only our base instincts. No disrespect to our base instincts, of course, it’s just that the quality of civilisation depends on the expression of the loftier parts of us, too. Ideally, whatever incentive mechanism we instantiated in the Web would therefore encourage the expression of these ‘better angels of our nature’, just as much — and hopefully more — than it tickled the bottom of our brain stems.

With advertising as the underlying business model, the Internet is effectively an attention-maximization machine — a system geared towards the exploitation and expropriation of human experience. To be sure, the Internet is many other things besides, but this is the dominant logic of its current economic programming, and from this logic, so much of its current dysfunction follows. So again, we ask, how might we reprogram it instead?

The trouble with reprogamming the economics of the Internet, besides the obvious stranglehold existing platforms have on it, is that the atomic units of the digital — the humble “file” — are almost inherently resistant to financialisation. That is, of course, because they’re infinitely and effortlessly replicable. In economic terms, their ‘marginal cost of production’ is zero. Of course, this is part of the digital’s charm, and what was once-upon-a-time a source of immense idealism, the idea and rallying cry that “information wants to be free”. For this reason, the early Internet was held by its early evangelists to be the realisation of some kind utopian, post-scarcity ideal — a world of superabundance for all.

“Information wants to be free… Information also wants to be expensive… The tension will not go away.” Stewart Brand, 1985

Unfortunately, as we’ve discovered, when you reduce the marginal cost of information to zero, you don’t so much remove economics from the picture, so much as you merely move the economics elsewhere. In the case of the Internet, the economics of information have shifted away from those who produce it in favour of those who simply control its distribution. Naturally, with less money going towards the ‘production of information’ and more going towards the pipes that manage its flow, the quality of information invariably declines. More than that, though, the sheer volume of information we’re now subjected to — indeed veritably drowning in — also radically alters the way in which we interface with the world of media. Even if we aspire to engage with ‘quality media’ — however we might define such a thing — we no longer have the bandwidth for it. Exhausted, we thumb our way through endless 5 second shorts instead.

Disclaimer: None of this should be read as a denial of human agency, or a concession to our apparent hopelessness. Of course, we must exert our fullest effort, in spite of the various facts of the matter, to engage with the world — and the world of information — in a way that brings about our individual and collective flourishing. Tempting as it may be, we can’t simply wait for a better state that may in fact never materialise. But just as critical as the exercise of agency to the world as-it-is, is the design of systems that tend, by default, towards better outcomes. That is to say, we ought to work hard to transcend circumstance, but we should also work hard so that — one day — we don’t have to.

The challenges of the Internet are thus many and vast. Attention is its current source of economic value, the only real extractable commodity, but what commands our attention is hardly synonymous with what we ought to value. In valuing attention we’re valuing, above all, our lowest common biological denominator. And yet, the only obvious alternative to monetising attention is to somehow value information itself — a most ethereal entity that insists on being “free”. Thus is our dilemma.

Now here the concept of an NFT becomes relevant. At a high-level, NFTs can be thought of as a technology for modifying the functional properties of a given file/s — a kind of socioeconomic wrapping. By embedding a digital file within a “smart contract”, we can imbue said file with additional properties and behaviours, including provenance, scarcity, economic value and various ownership rights. Even though the file/s contained within the smart contract are still entirely ordinary, infinitely replicable files, the NFT — which includes the file — is something Other and unique. Something ‘non-fungible’, as it were.

Without the properties conferred by NFTs — namely, provenance, property rights and scarcity — digital media is almost inherently worthless, economically speaking. Unlike in the physical world, there is no notion of an “original” file. Instead, every copy of a file is a good as the next. In such a context as this, the only way to capture economic value is by proxy (i.e. attention). However, with NFTs — or any other acronym that serves the same function — files can all of a sudden become direct objects of value; “digital assets”, “cryptomedia”.

Having become entangled in the current culture wars, NFTs have been the subject of immense public criticism. Some of the arguments attack the very foundations of the concept, such as the coherency of “digital property rights” or the legitimacy of “digital scarcity”. Others push back on what they consider to represent the “hyperfinancialisation” of things, the expansion of the capitalist machine into the deepest recesses of the digital. Most of the negative reaction is, however, more instinctive than intellectual, borne of a visceral distaste for the culture that currently surrounds NFTs and crypto more broadly. And while it’s true that the current NFT / crypto meta leaves much to be desired, it surely represents a move in the appropriate direction; that is, towards an Internet economy that values content over its attendant consequence — attention.

As of today, NFTs have been responsible for > $20B in economic activity. While critics will claim this number is misleading — a function of a market failure, irrational speculation, or a Reality-distortion of some other description — it’s nevertheless a fundamental development in the economics of content on the Web. For the first time in the history of the Internet, content itself is capturing value. Sure, the majority of the activity has so far been geared towards a very particular class of content — namely, visual art — that is itself unlikely to positively reconfigure the economics of the Internet. Nonetheless, the development of an open and permissionnless marketplace for digital media is profound.

With NFTs as a foundational primitive, we can begin to imagine a new Internet economy, based on some kind of cryptoeconomic protocol, where the underlying commodity is content rather than attention. Instead of a global marketplace for attention — ala social media as it exists — we can envisage a global marketplace for content. Now how might such a system actually work?

Let us conjure a simple construction. Imagine a protocol that took content, represented as NFTs, as its raw input. Now imagine each of these NFTs being bought and sold freely, in accordance with whatever rules were prescribed by the NFT (initial purchase price, royalties etc.). Moreover, imagine that each time an NFT was called / viewed / otherwise interacted with, some amount of reward were issued, by the underlying protocol, to the original creator of the content. What we’d effectively have on our hands, with such a system, is a global marketplace for digital content, as well as a protocol-level incentive mechanism for its creation and contribution. Creators could make money from the initial sale of their content, as well as royalties and protocol rewards, while collectors of content could profit from any increase in the content’s market value. What’s more, the nature of open protocols being what they are, one could also envisage such a system giving rise to a global marketplace for content curation. For if each piece of content existed in an open repository — a kind of global content commons — anyone could provide their own curated view / feed onto it.

Indeed, if we could actually build out such a system, what it would likely amount to is the inversion of the existing relationship between content and the platforms that facilitate its production and distribution. Instead of a few platforms owning and controlling the majority of the Internet’s content, we could well imagine a new equilibrium where a healthy and competitive marketplace of platforms are built around an open content standard / marketplace.

The difference between this conception, and the current NFT status quo, is largely in its scope of application. Where NFTs are today mostly employed in a rather limited set of contexts — i.e. art, collectibles, membership — this imagining recasts NFTs as a kind of general file format for ostensibly all digital content. Hence an “Internet of NFTs”. This might at first seem a little radical, outlandish even. However, if we take files to be the atomic units of digital culture, it stands to reason that there ought to be some kind of economic rights associated with them. And since it’s not practical to enforce traditional IP rights in the digital context, it would appear to make sense that these rights were programmed into the very DNA of the content itself.

Interestingly, the most powerful aspect of the ‘Internet of NFTs’ vision isn’t even the economics of the content itself. Rather, it’s the model of computing it necessitates and the kind of open economy it implies. The logic here is simple. In order for an Internet of NFTs to work, it must necessarily be supported by a vast distributed computing infrastructure. And for this distributed system to work, it must necessarily have its own supporting Internet-native economy. After all, all this content must live somewhere, and be served up and computed on somehow, all which require computing resources — and computing resources cost money.

Thus not only would an Internet of NFTs positively reconfigure the economics of content on the Web, it would also seem to imply a radical rearchitecting of the world’s computing infrastructure. In a world where content lives in the open, instead of the walled gardens of a small handful of companies, the business logic that causes computing power to concentrate in those same hands is greatly undermined. Indeed, a world of open content is almost invariably a world of open computing — a world where anyone with access to the Internet can contribute to the core infrastructure of society, and in doing so, participate in its economics.

So if an Internet of NFTs is as desirable as this analysis would suggest, why doesn’t it already exist? Well, firstly, there’s the obvious issue of the platform oligopoly and the tyranny of network effects. Since the majority of people and content currently live within the context of the existing platforms, that’s where the majority of people and content will continue to live, until such time as a sufficiently compelling alternative comes along. While ‘Web3’ already offers something of an alternative to such platforms, the majority of Web3’s demand is driven either by financial speculation, ideology, or technical interest. In order to cross the adoption curve, new kinds of fundamentally social products and applications — built around NFTs as a primitive — will be needed. While financial speculation is an important part of the adoption equation, so long as it’s what’s driving the adoption, Web3 shall remain a fringe phenomenon, a blip on the Internet’s radar.

Of course, there are also fundamental technical challenges inherent to the paradigm presented here. Most obviously, a world where effectively all content is tokenised would require a blockchain computer with much better performance and scalability properties than those of today. In order to realise the future here envisaged, it will necessarily require systems with vastly different architectures. Certainly the most naive constructions, where “everything goes on-chain”, won’t suffice.

In contrast to the existing blockchain construction paradigm, where NFTs are something of an afterthought, it’s likely that whole systems will need to be designed specifically with this much broader NFT use case in mind. That is to say, rather than designing systems that just so happen to enable NFTs, systems will need to be designed with NFTs — i.e. content — and their provisioning as the primary object of focus.

While the future here envisaged will surely require substantial technical advances, and the exploration of wholly new design directions, the cultural and economic impact of NFTs is already highly affirming of the general concept. For even in the context of the present infrastructure, which is far from ideal, the market has finally found a mechanism for valuing content. And it seems to be having a blast!