The internet is oxygen to our society. From transportation and communication to food and energy, government and business, to art and entertainment, it is foundational to our contemporary lives. As the internet becomes essential to our very nature, are we capable of assuming the responsibility for its continued survival? How do we navigate the incomprehensible system of interdependencies when they only surface as tense trade-offs between economics and ecology; efficiency and equity; cooperation and innovation? If we are to become fully reliant on the internet, can relating it to a living being clarify the moral choices we have to make? To put it simply, can envisioning what a healthy living internet looks like enable us to reconsider the social, technological, and environmental conditions that help it – and us – flourish?

Let’s say you want to lay the groundwork for a society run on the blockchain. What would that look like? How would that work? What kind of consequences should we expect?

Silicon Valley orthodoxy would have us move fast and break stuff. Wing it, basically, and hope we learn enough from our failures to make incremental improvements in the next release.
But we have thousands of years of data about decentralized economies. The use of Wampum among the Iroquois functioned as a decentralized, distributed ledger of contracts, and it helped us govern our society for centuries.