Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder (PDF)

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A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE MONTH FROM THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: “Nothing Mr. Gilder says or writes is ever delivered at anything less than the fullest philosophical decibel… Mr. Gilder sounds less like a tech guru than a poet, and his words tumble out in a romantic cascade.” “Google’s algorithms assume the world’s future is nothing more than the next moment in a random process. George Gilder shows how deep this assumption goes, what motivates people to make it, and why it’s wrong: the future depends on human action.” — Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies and author of Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future The Age of Google, built on big data and machine intelligence, has been an awesome era. But it’s coming to an end. In Life after Google, George Gilder—the peerless visionary of technology and culture—explains why Silicon Valley is suffering a nervous breakdown and what to expect as the post-Google age dawns. Google’s astonishing ability to “search and sort” attracts the entire world to its search engine and countless other goodies—videos, maps, email, calendars….And everything it offers is free, or so it seems. Instead of paying directly, users submit to advertising. The system of “aggregate and advertise” works—for a while—if you control an empire of data centers, but a market without prices strangles entrepreneurship and turns the Internet into a wasteland of ads. The crisis is not just economic. Even as advances in artificial intelligence induce delusions of omnipotence and transcendence, Silicon Valley has pretty much given up on security. The Internet firewalls supposedly protecting all those passwords and personal information have proved hopelessly permeable. The crisis cannot be solved within the current computer and network architecture. The future lies with the “cryptocosm”—the new architecture of the blockchain and its derivatives. Enabling cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ether, NEO and Hashgraph, it will provide the Internet a secure global payments system, ending the aggregate-and-advertise Age of Google. Silicon Valley, long dominated by a few giants, faces a “great unbundling,” which will disperse computer power and commerce and transform the economy and the Internet. Life after Google is almost here. For fans of “Wealth and Poverty,” “Knowledge and Power,” and “The Scandal of Money.”

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: About the Author George Gilder, one of the leading economic and technological thinkers of the past forty years, is the author of nineteen books, including Wealth and Poverty, Knowledge and Power, The Scandal of Money, and Life after Google. A founding fellow of the Discovery Institute, where he began his study of information theory, and an influential venture investor, he lives with his wife in western Massachusetts.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐In his 1990 book

⭐, George Gilder predicted that the personal computer, then mostly boxes that sat on desktops and worked in isolation from one another, would become more personal, mobile, and be used more to communicate than to compute. In the 1994 revised edition of the book, he wrote. “The most common personal computer of the next decade will be a digital cellular phone with an IP address … connecting to thousands of databases of all kinds.” In contemporary speeches he expanded on the idea, saying, “it will be as portable as your watch and as personal as your wallet; it will recognize speech and navigate streets; it will collect your mail, your news, and your paycheck.” In 2000, he published

⭐, where he forecast that the building out of a fibre optic communication infrastructure and the development of successive generations of spread spectrum digital mobile communication technologies would effectively cause the cost of communication bandwidth (the quantity of data which can be transmitted in a given time) to asymptotically approach zero, just as the ability to pack more and more transistors on microprocessor and memory chips was doing for computing.Clearly, when George Gilder forecasts the future of computing, communication, and the industries and social phenomena that spring from them, it’s wise to pay attention. He’s not infallible: in 1990 he predicted that “in the world of networked computers, no one would have to see an advertisement he didn’t want to see”. Oh, well. The very difference between that happy vision and the advertisement-cluttered world we inhabit today, rife with bots, malware, scams, and serial large-scale security breaches which compromise the personal data of millions of people and expose them to identity theft and other forms of fraud is the subject of this book: how we got here, and how technology is opening a path to move on to a better place.The Internet was born with decentralisation as a central concept. Its U.S. government-funded precursor, ARPANET, was intended to research and demonstrate the technology of packet switching, in which dedicated communication lines from point to point (as in the telephone network) were replaced by switching packets, which can represent all kinds of data—text, voice, video, mail, cat pictures—from source to destination over shared high-speed data links. If the network had multiple paths from source to destination, failure of one data link would simply cause the network to reroute traffic onto a working path, and communication protocols would cause any packets lost in the failure to be automatically re-sent, preventing loss of data. The network might degrade and deliver data more slowly if links or switching hubs went down, but everything would still get through.This was very attractive to military planners in the Cold War, who worried about a nuclear attack decapitating their command and control network by striking one or a few locations through which their communications funnelled. A distributed network, of which ARPANET was the prototype, would be immune to this kind of top-down attack because there was no top: it was made up of peers, spread all over the landscape, all able to switch data among themselves through a mesh of interconnecting links.As the ARPANET grew into the Internet and expanded from a small community of military, government, university, and large company users into a mass audience in the 1990s, this fundamental architecture was preserved, but in practice the network bifurcated into a two tier structure. The top tier consisted of the original ARPANET-like users, plus “Internet Service Providers” (ISPs), who had top-tier (“backbone”) connectivity, and then resold Internet access to their customers, who mostly initially connected via dial-up modems. Over time, these customers obtained higher bandwidth via cable television connections, satellite dishes, digital subscriber lines (DSL) over the wired telephone network, and, more recently, mobile devices such as cellular telephones and tablets.The architecture of the Internet remained the same, but this evolution resulted in a weakening of its peer-to-peer structure. The approaching exhaustion of 32 bit Internet addresses (IPv4) and the slow deployment of its successor (IPv6) meant most small-scale Internet users did not have a permanent address where others could contact them. In an attempt to shield users from the flawed security model and implementation of the software they ran, their Internet connections were increasingly placed behind firewalls and subjected to Network Address Translation (NAT), which made it impossible to establish peer to peer connections without a third party intermediary (which, of course, subverts the design goal of decentralisation). While on the ARPANET and the original Internet every site was a peer of every other (subject only to the speed of their network connections and computer power available to handle network traffic), the network population now became increasingly divided into producers or publishers (who made information available), and consumers (who used the network to access the publishers’ sites but did not publish themselves).While in the mid-1990s it was easy (or as easy as anything was in that era) to set up your own Web server and publish anything you wished, now most small-scale users were forced to employ hosting services operated by the publishers to make their content available. Services such as AOL, Myspace, Blogger, Facebook, and YouTube were widely used by individuals and companies to host their content, while those wishing their own apparently independent Web presence moved to hosting providers who supplied, for a fee, the servers, storage, and Internet access used by the site.All of this led to a centralisation of data on the Web, which was accelerated by the emergence of the high speed fibre optic links and massive computing power upon which Gilder had based his 1990 and 2000 forecasts. Both of these came with great economies of scale: it cost a company like Google or Amazon much less per unit of computing power or network bandwidth to build a large, industrial-scale data centre located where electrical power and cooling were inexpensive and linked to the Internet backbone by multiple fibre optic channels, than it cost an individual Internet user or small company with their own server on premises and a modest speed link to an ISP. Thus it became practical for these Goliaths of the Internet to suck up everybody’s data and resell their computing power and access at attractive prices.This tremendous centralisation is the antithesis of the concept of ARPANET. Instead of a worldwide grid of redundant data links and data distributed everywhere, we have a modest number of huge data centres linked by fibre optic cables carrying traffic for millions of individuals and enterprises. A couple of submarines full of Trident D5s would probably suffice to reset the world, computer network-wise, to 1970.As this concentration was occurring, the same companies who were building the data centres were offering more and more services to users of the Internet: search engines; hosting of blogs, images, audio, and video; E-mail services; social networks of all kinds; storage and collaborative working tools; high-resolution maps and imagery of the world; archives of data and research material; and a host of others. How was all of this to be paid for? Those giant data centres, after all, represent a capital investment of tens of billions of dollars, and their electricity bills are comparable to those of an aluminium smelter. Due to the architecture of the Internet or, more precisely, missing pieces of the puzzle, a fateful choice was made in the early days of the build-out of these services which now pervade our lives, and we’re all paying the price for it. So far, it has allowed the few companies in this data oligopoly to join the ranks of the largest, most profitable, and most highly valued enterprises in human history, but they may be built on a flawed business model and foundation vulnerable to disruption by software and hardware technologies presently emerging.The basic business model of what we might call the “consumer Internet” (as opposed to businesses who pay to host their Web presence, on-line stores, etc.) has, with few exceptions, evolved to be what the author calls the “Google model” (although it predates Google): give the product away and make money by afflicting its users with advertisements (which are increasingly targeted to them through information collected from the user’s behaviour on the network through intrusive tracking mechanisms). The fundamental flaws of this are apparent to anybody who uses the Internet: the constant clutter of advertisements, with pop-ups, pop-overs, auto-play video and audio, flashing banners, incessant requests to allow tracking “cookies” or irritating notifications, and the consequent arms race between ad blockers and means to circumvent them, with browser developers (at least those not employed by those paid by the advertisers, directly or indirectly) caught in the middle. But there is a fundamental problem with “free”—it destroys the most important channel of communication between the vendor of a product or service and the customer: the price the customer is willing to pay. Deprived of this information, the vendor is in the same position as a factory manager in a centrally planned economy who has no idea how many of each item to make because his orders are handed down by a planning bureau equally clueless about what is needed in the absence of a price signal. Further, when the user is not the customer (the one who pays), and especially when a “free” service verges on monopoly status like Google search, Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter, there is little incentive for providers to improve the user experience or be responsive to user requests and needs. Users are subjected to the endless torment of buggy “beta” releases, capricious change for the sake of change, and compromises in the user experience on behalf of the real customers—the advertisers.The fundamental flaw in Karl Marx’s economics was his belief that the industrial revolution of his time would produce such abundance of goods that the problem would shift from “production amid scarcity” to “redistribution of abundance”. In the author’s view, the neo-Marxists of Silicon Valley see the exponentially growing technologies of computing and communication providing such abundance that they can give away its fruits in return for collecting and monetising information collected about their users (note, not “customers”: customers are those who pay for the information so collected).The centralisation of data and information flow in these vast data silos creates another threat to which a distributed system is immune: censorship or manipulation of information flow, whether by a coercive government or ideologically-motivated management of the companies who provide these “free” services. We may never know who first said “The Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it”, but it’s profound: the original decentralised structure of the ARPANET/Internet is as robust against censorship as it is in the face of nuclear war. If one or more nodes on the network start to censor information or refuse to forward it on communication links it controls, the network routing protocols simply assume that node is down and send data around it through other nodes and paths which do not censor it. On a network with a multitude of nodes and paths among them, owned by a large and diverse population of operators, it is extraordinarily difficult to shut down the flow of information from a given source or viewpoint; there will almost always be an alternative route that gets it there.But with the current centralised Internet, the owners and operators of these data silos have enormous power to put their thumbs on the scale, tilting opinion in their favour and blocking speech they oppose. One might restate the original observation about the Internet as “The centralised Internet treats censorship as an opportunity and says, ‘Isn’t it great!’ ”This pernicious centralisation and “free” funding by advertisement (which is fundamentally plundering users’ most precious possessions: their time and attention) were in large part the consequence of the Internet’s lacking three fundamental architectural layers: security, trust, and transactions. Let’s explore them.Security. Essential to any useful communication system, security simply means that communications between parties on the network cannot be intercepted by third parties, modified en route, or otherwise manipulated (for example, by changing the order in which messages are received). The communication protocols of the Internet, based on the OSI model, had no explicit security layer. It was expected to be implemented outside the model, across the layers of protocol. On today’s Internet, security has been bolted-on, largely through the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocols. But because it’s bolted on, not designed in from the bottom-up, and because it “just grew” rather than having been designed in, TLS has been the locus of numerous security flaws which put software that employs it at risk.Trust. As indispensable as security is knowing to whom you’re talking. For example, when you connect to your bank’s Web site, how do you know you’re actually talking to their server and not some criminal whose computer has spoofed your computer’s domain name system server to intercept your communications and who, the moment you enter your password, will be off and running to empty your bank accounts and make your life a living Hell? Once again, trust has been bolted on to the existing Internet through a rickety system of “certificates” issued mostly by large companies for outrageous fees.Transactions. Business is all about transactions; if you aren’t doing transactions, you aren’t in business or, as Gilder puts it, “In business, the ability to conduct transactions is not optional. It is the way all economic learning and growth occur. If your product is ‘free,’ it is not a product, and you are not in business, even if you can extort money from so-called advertisers to fund it.” The present-day Internet has no transaction layer, even bolted on. Instead, we have more silos and bags hanging off the side of the Internet called PayPal, credit card processing companies, and the like, which try to put a Band-Aid over the suppurating wound which is the absence of a way to send money over the Internet in a secure, trusted, quick, efficient, and low-overhead manner.So, is it possible to remake the Internet, building in security, trust, and transactions as the foundation, and replace what the author calls the “Google system of the world” with one in which the data silos are seen as obsolete, control of users’ personal data and work returns to their hands, privacy is respected and the panopticon snooping of today is seen as a dark time we’ve put behind us, and the pervasive and growing censorship by plutocrat ideologues and slaver governments becomes impotent and obsolete? George Gilder responds “yes”, and in this book identifies technologies already existing and being deployed which can bring about this transformation.At the heart of many of these technologies is the concept of a blockchain, an open, distributed ledger which records transactions or any other form of information in a permanent, public, and verifiable manner. Originally conceived as the transaction ledger for the Bitcoin cryptocurrency, it provided the first means of solving the double-spending problem (how do you keep people from spending a unit of electronic currency twice) without the need for a central server or trusted authority, and hence without a potential choke-point or vulnerability to attack or failure. Since the launch of Bitcoin in 2009, blockchain technology has become a major area of research, with banks and other large financial institutions, companies such as IBM, and major university research groups exploring applications with the goals of drastically reducing transaction costs, improving security, and hardening systems against single-point failure risks.Applied to the Internet, blockchain technology can provide security and trust (through the permanent publication of public keys which identify actors on the network), and a transaction layer able to efficiently and quickly execute micropayments without the overhead, clutter, friction, and security risks of existing payment systems. By necessity, present-day blockchain implementations are add-ons to the existing Internet, but as the technology matures and is verified and tested, it can move into the foundations of a successor system, based on the same lower-level protocols (and hence compatible with the installed base), but eventually supplanting the patched-together architecture of the Domain Name System, certificate authorities, and payment processors, all of which represent vulnerabilities of the present-day Internet and points at which censorship and control can be imposed.As the bandwidth available to users on the edge of the network increases through the deployment of fibre to the home and enterprise and via 5G mobile technology, the data transfer economy of scale of the great data silos will begin to erode. Early in the Roaring Twenties, the aggregate computing power and communication bandwidth on the edge of the network will equal and eventually dwarf that of the legacy data smelters of Google, Facebook, Twitter, and the rest. There will no longer be any need for users to entrust their data to these overbearing anachronisms and consent to multi-dozen page “terms of service” or endure advertising just to see their own content or share it with others. You will be in possession of your own data, on your own server or on space for which you freely contract with others, with backup and other services contracted with any other provider on the network. If your server has extra capacity, you can turn it into money by joining the market for computing and storage capacity, just as you take advantage of these resources when required.This book provides a breezy look at the present state of the Internet, how we got here (versus where we thought we were going in the 1990s), and how we might transcend the present-day mess into something better if not blocked by the heavy hand of government regulation (the risk of freezing the present-day architecture in place by unleashing agencies like the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, which stifled innovation in broadcasting for six decades, to do the same to the Internet is discussed in detail). Although it’s way too early to see which of the many contending technologies will win out (and recall that the technically superior technology doesn’t always prevail), a survey of work in progress provides a sense for what they have in common and what the eventual result might look like.Gilder’s books have a good record for sketching the future of technology and identifying the trends which are contributing to it. He has been less successful picking winners and losers; I wouldn’t make investment decisions based on his evaluation of products and companies, but rather wait until the market sorts out those which will endure.

⭐I have had a long appreciation for George Gilder. We might have been friends, having the same sort of eclectic interests albeit from entirely different set structures. This reminds me of Doug Hofstadter’s Gödel Escher Bach, The Eternal Golden Braid, which I read back in the early ‘80s just to keep myself sane whilst seeking an engineering bachelor’s at the wrong end of a fire hose like Harvey Mudd. Accordingly, in 1985 I wrote my senior humanities thesis on the psychological archetypes making a potential union between human mind and computer a catastrophic singularity appropriately titled MANIAC.I had run across Mr. Gilder’s work at the Discovery Institute some 20 years ago while writing my first book proposing a system of free-market environmental management to which, as a libertarian, he is predisposed. So I was really pleased to see Mr. Gilder showing up on various talk shows centering on some of those same objections I’d had about where AI was going as a student, specifically for those who consider their own minds to be information processing machines seeking deterministic outcomes. Anyone with the humility to respect mightily the depth of human ignorance should shudder at such a GIGO-to-Google prospect as a human brain subject to an infinite processor and database open to groupthink, hackers, crooks, and politicians (but I repeat myself). Alpha to Omega indeed.So I bought this book with great anticipation, expecting to be a big fan, and for substantial fraction of its chapters, it delivered upon those hopes and then some, particularly when Mr. Gilder confines himself to his lucid and entertaining histories. So I’m writing this out of a weird synthesis of love and frustration. I don’t think I’ve ever written a review so self-reflective. It just came out that way.The book is part history, part critique, part introduction, part hype, and part projection on (or plea for) the future of computing, the cloud, blockchain technology, and artificial intelligence. Gilder’s first hundred pages is a historical review of the developers and theory behind computing and artificial intelligence that is alone worth the price of the book. It is both information-rich and from the kind of detached perspective of parallel involvement by which to support his pending thesis. His criticisms of the power freaks of the world building what should be regarded as illegal information monopolies are entirely justified. His observations of the perils inherent to The Cloud are well considered. Yet the moment the book arrives at its remedial central principal, it breaks down completely, not so much as an analysis or exposition, but as a book in support of an idea. Mr. Gilder, I really expected better of you.Yes, just as I was about to get euphoric that I was really going to learn something new from someone sufficiently familiar with the computer architectures and having broad historical and philosophical perspective, Mr. Gilder gets to the blockchain and fails completely to define it properly for his presumed target audience of retiring yuppie investors. Its greatest weakness in that respect is lack of a diagrammatic pedagogy, failing to take advantage of multimodal learning by which to impart the series of overlaid abstractions integral to the rest of the book. I want to know where the data go, how accurate replication is validated, how they are maintained, what happens if a node gets hacked, how in the hell one is going to motivate procurement of all that storage, not to mention the necessary fiber optic cabling to make it all possible… all of those basic details that would give me sufficient understanding of a technology and its necessary infrastructure with which to have any confidence investing in it. I want to know how people will make money producing useful tools with it beyond rendering for video games. Why should they pay for all that cabling if it’s going to choke no matter what? The explanations are not in there, nor was there specific reference to a text I would have been happy to read before going farther.Worse, the book then devolves to a discussion of entrepreneurs and companies that reads more like trolling for investors than it does an objective assessment of the benefits and hazards of a world-changing intellectual singularity. Nor does he really show how these corporations stitch together into a world-changing synthesis of services that will bring real benefit to most people not directly involved. He enchants the reader at the prospect of riches. He does a pretty decent job of it too. Yet he glosses over how one of these ventures into what is supposedly an inherently secure exchange modality lost a mere $150 million due to hackers.Then he goes on a weird ‘search for Satoshi’ with an “interview” one strains to determine if it is real or allegorical. Nuts and bolts please. Show me a flow diagram for the information. Tell me about the rules under which this distributed and replicated ledger information is stored and retrieved. I was raised on hexadecimal parity codes. How does the error detection and correction work with this system? If one node replicating the entire blockchain contains an error, how does that get fixed?Indeed, even his use of jargon is suspect. An example would be his discussion of the seven key principles of the “Blockstack” (p174). The first of these is the “Distributed cadastre.” Now, there’s a twenty-dollar techno-term designed to impress any reader lacking insatiable curiosity and too overwhelmed with techno-inadequacy to look it up. For most, by the time they get this far in the book, they are well into “looking up” fatigue. Yet given that he is holding this first principle as central to a whole industry, this term must be really important to a lot of people! So I did look it up as a literal. Eight hits on Google. Three on Duckduckgo. Waow! I gets to be cuttin’ edge now!!!In reality, Mr. Gilder has a penchant (I share) for coining terms, but he doesn’t tell you that. Please. This is really disappointing. It reads almost as the flimflam of a road-show hawker and I KNOW it’s better than that. But one should expect its real-world employment would yield a bit more collaborative refinement before giving a term that kind of billing.I’m a nuts and bolts guy. If it doesn’t make something or do something better, it may make money, but I don’t think of it as a source of wealth. But one shouldn’t be so callow as to blow off soft tool-making as a way to make more things people want. Yet to any responsible money guy, “mining” Bitcoin doesn’t qualify as an increase in wealth. It’s a tool all right, but without any handles, and a lot of the people wielding it are engaged in anything but wealth building. I get it why commodities with productive value shouldn’t be the base for a currency, and why it is important to build trustworthy media for exchange, a store of value, and a unit of account, but instead of focusing upon one commodity, why not base a currency on a massively averaged but absolutely finite good, such as soil productivity instead, actuarially calculated risks included? To increase the money stock, simply make the planet more productive by all its various metrics and/or reduce those risks. This isn’t simple, but at least we might do a better job of managing it than we’re doing now and we wouldn’t have to worry about somebody inflating the planet. Besides, it would induce a monstrous market in sensors and communications by which to validate productivity by an array of metrics (anybody who doubts that there is a great deal of thought and hands-on habitat management experience behind this idea should go to Wildergarten.org).As to rendering specifically, I can’t think of a more appropriate term than “virtual reality” (VR) for it is the hunger for reality that has people wallowing in its cheap imitations, a positive feedback loop of empty gratification. So it would seem that a market for actual reality (such as the native grasslands I’m developing) as foundational to agricultural topsoil would have value as an archetype to be rendered. People find value in knowing that these things are REAL. Yet there is no effort in the book to connect real products to something sufficiently frustrating as to sate or to validate the difference between that and specifically rendered reality. How in the hell are we going to make real stewardship a service product that way? Who would do the validation? If you don’t like the weed infested landscapes we’ve got, invent one! Oh, virtually nobody knows what the real thing looks like anyway…I just don’t get how this technology is going to prevent somebody hacking reality. We’re already nearly to the point that we can render any politician saying anything we want, thus rendering digital video worthless testimony. One could even start a war that way. Remember the Maine? How about the Gulf of Tonkin? In this mad rush to please renderers, are we thinking of where this goes? I’m not seeing it. Life 3.0 could be deadly. So there really is a different realm of security that will be absolutely critical to the productive potential of these technologies that is not being addressed. Indeed, Mr. Gilder argues against the need for its existence.“Consensus truth” won’t cut it any more than does “consensus reality,” as it can’t distinguish “the mad scientist” from the “fool on the hill,” never mind the garage tinkerer (as an aside, I was absolutely delighted at Mr. Gilder’s recounts confirming that this very kind of activity still exists; I was wondering…). But to the point: this concern about validation is just as, if not more critical, in the cloud than it is in the “blockstack,” fascism being what it is. ‘Google, Google uber alles…’ and all that, because this point cuts back to what distinguishes a human being from a decision-making computer. In that respect alone one would hope the blockchain succeeds as envisioned. On the other hand, one can see the blockchain devolving into global groupthink. Aren’t you glad I didn’t mention “Climate Change”?In other words, watermarking can prove the originator, distributed computing can bundle and analyze data according to premises, but neither can validate that what the originator of the data portrayed is real or true. The blockchain is still an enormous, but closed and dissociated reality because it is computing, not actual physical reality. How then can one use this technology to conclude a stewardship contract for example? It seems to me unlikely that the blockchain as a technology can make that distinction when the scientific reality is that we are (thank G_d) astonishingly ignorant about virtually everything. That takes me back to the principle of validating the discounted risk of error. When it comes to integrating individual ecological niches that would suck up all the computing power one could dream.The benefit of the blockchain is to allow the property owner to create products and conclude contracts at lower cost. Then there is the reputation factor, that what I say I deliver with my property is true, a form of validation that will require sensors, systems integration, and software to become a real thing of tradable value. How does the blockchain deal with differences in jurisdictional laws, such as sales taxes on a basic attention token? Those jurisdictions provide the infrastructure and rule of law that allow the chain-gang to play. They are not something to just blow off if what you want is to have any semblance of representative government. Deal with it, please, however distasteful it might be! You might just gain a few very powerful allies.Commodity, security, currency, property… answer both all and none of the above, because crypto currencies aren’t backed with anything. Hence, the great unbundling will remain virtual until it begins to demark real things that people perceive and compare in terms of stable blockchain pricing (something that goes unaddressed). Oh but such grand ambitions as to displace national currencies, absconding one of the only ways that natural law can impress itself peacefully upon a foolish electoral majority. The blockchain is too small to amount to anything yet, in part, suffering from the very infrastructural constraints that suppress its prospects. What Gilder sees as “otiose” (economically unnecessary) currency trading is in fact inherent to local governance representing intangibles. Without that sovereignty, there is no representation of those local interests. People’s cultures, resources, and histories vary Mr. Gilder. They want their interests defended. This ‘system of the world’ imposes its’ ‘great equalizer’ with no means to respect those collected preferences as expressed by their local representatives. It is in that respect, an enemy of liberty.In any business, it is the accountant that validates statements, it is the bank verifying funds, it is the guarantor of performance that makes a transaction among those with no connection workable. Why not automate third party verification as integral to the blockchain? Your argument that it is a needless cost, belies the micro-scale of marginal cost when that validation is automated, particularly when the cost of bandwidth to handle all this is so huge by comparison. What is the problem with a third party in principle Mr. Gilder? Verification by a disinterested party builds trust into any transactional system. Even dueling politicians had seconds. He talks reverentially about “reputation” but what is that without reliable source data? Even double entry bookkeeping effectively involves a third party when the need to balance functions as a check. Resistance, indeed opacity to independent oversight, is yet another of the blockchain’s growing number of Achilles heels. There is NOTHING that requires third parties to be agents of Leviathan. Why resist this accounting? The contractual participants are their customers, while they too have a reputation to protect or they don’t have a service to sell. After all, stolen crypto-currencies now amount to nearly a billion real dollars.Then comes this bald-faced ruse attempting to equate money with time (p249) that goes by WAY too subtly. This is a world changing idea that, once a premise, deserves a lot more than a couple of paragraphs depth when first introduced in the book. It is an idea so fundamental that to wrap it in hand-wave of nothing more than a couple of vignettes is way beneath you Mr. Gilder. It shows that you and your friends, in this mad dash for money, haven’t thought this through. Time is no more fixed than any other variable once convolved with the filter of subjective perception. A good example is retrospective time, in which we perceive two separate events, one with massive change as having been farther in the past than another with little focus of attention. Then there is the reciprocal of wages. One could even look at that relativisticly in a manner similar to time shells with focus being the “gravity” that accelerates the reference frame. Attention tokens indeed. It is an immature idea. There are better sources of scarcity with capacity to grow only with effort, as I said before. It would then be a good thing that dust thou art. And it’s a good thing for we remnant bio-beings that all dust is local, the respect for which returns sovereignty to local jurisdictions representing the interests of their citizens within the global braid. VR won’t mitigate handcuffs on the wrists or the line in front of the ditch, speaking of which.Doesn’t it seem curious to you the reader of this floppy review that the author never really addresses the mechanics of how this technology is going to displace the centralized cloud? It touches on Brendan Eich’s basic attention token, but show me how people are really going to prefer it when they can already filter all advertising? An example would be me… I downloaded the Brave browser simply because I don’t like all the corporate spying going on. But once that’s done, why do I then want to plunk down hard cash for poker chips like the BAT? Altruism as a motive seems a shaky bet when I already know what I want to buy.That’s right, I’m trying to help. Too bad techies are just as bad as academics in their insular infatuation with the exercise of collectivist power… and that should sting Mr. Gilder. Being a rainmaker in that market (and a lover of Torah), you should know better. As I contemplate the power of virtual reality for teaching, I shudder at the prospect of such tools in the hands of propagandists: the kind of people who blame “climate change” for forest fires with but a couple of degree change in a century when tree growth has been accelerated 65% by the carbon dioxide enrichment over only the last 30 years. These guys can’t even get their lies straight. What can they do when they control access to VR as a teaching tool by its cost? I shudder to think. I may be lucky to be done before that tree bears fruit. Hopefully the media conglomerates will go bust before then. They certainly so deserve.Anyway, I’m really glad I bought and read it. I’m a little frustrated that I can’t afford to play in that pool. But I felt the need to tweak these titans into getting them to step back a bit over Shabbat. There is more than one side in a pole equation. The higher we go, the easier it is to flip out. Better to have ideas that are fully grounded. It can be done.

⭐George Gilder is one of the big thinkers on our planet right now. In this book he argues that we are leaving the world of google ‘big data’ and entering the world of ‘blockchain’. That is, we are moving away from the world where all our data is centrally held by the technology companies, in favour of our data being held by the individual. Blockchain provides financially-secure, crypto-currency technology that hands back power to the individual, while allowing all financial transactions to be transparently evidenced on the internet.Gilder refers to Sir Isaac Newton as developing a ‘system of the world’, which not only accounted for the laws of physics but also for developing a gold-standard. It led to the wealth of the British Empire. Google and other tech companies have developed a second ‘system of the world’, which has led to the rise of globalism and invested power in the hand of organisations such as google. This has been referred to as ‘Google Marxism’.Block chain technology fixes the faults in an internet that was never constructed to handle financial transactions securely. It also puts ‘Individualism’ rather than ‘collectivism’ back on the map.

⭐George Gilder describes in great detail how Google and “Big Tech” control global data and why decentralization using blockchain will return control of data back to the people of the world instead of the tech leviathans such as Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft. Very interesting read and highly recommended !

⭐A really engaging book that raises serious questions whilst discussing them fairly with both sides, written by a qualified and experienced author

⭐Brings one up to speed with current trends in technology. For someone who has heard of jargons in AI, block chain, etc. but wants to understand how these things are going to shape up the world, this is an excellent read.

⭐Some interesting points but althogether boring and uninspiring.

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