Extending Trends: June 2029
The post examines decentralization trends across various domains, highlighting a shift towards independent journalism, decentralized governance, crowd-sourced scientific research, and community-driven businesses. It discusses the impact of polarization and cancel culture, the importance of cybersecurity in warfare, and the empowerment brought by decentralized technology. The paper also addresses the potential of preventive and personalized healthcare and the evolution of decentralized education. Overall, it emphasizes the empowerment and transparency offered by decentralization, while acknowledging the technological, regulatory, and cultural challenges that need to be addressed.
Extending Trends: June 2029
Intro
This document makes an attempt to understand the current state of the world and understand where we are headed as a human race. It doesn’t do it in a way the analysts making predictions on the likes of YouTube - the document looks at this holistically. In other words, the authors of the document set an ambitious goal to capture existing trends and understand the place where we’ll all be in five years. It’s a forecast in some ways, a state of the world captured in an arbitrary 5 year mark.
We believe this is helpful for everyone so they can make life and business adjustments and prepare for whats coming up after the next turn. Regardless, we believe, it won’t be a wasted effort. In the worst case scenario, people will have a higher degree of independence from the existing status quo systems; in the best case scenario, this will ensure prosperity and survival advantage should our doom and gloom forecast come to life.
We fully acknowledge that as the pace of our lives is progressively accelerating, it is becoming extremely hard to build some kind of forecast for the next three months, not to mention five years. However, we think it is important to at least try to jot down everything we know or we think we know today. It gives us a starting point, if you will, that we can update as we gain more information. Again, this is not an attempt to predict a future, but rather to spot trends.
We are purposefully not going to talk about the all encompassing annihilation, such as the all out nuclear war or a natural global catastrophic event such as an asteroid or a super volcano. It would render any further conversations about the future, pointless. Before we dive into the specifics, we need to call out the fact that there has been a massive decline in public trust in its most broad sense. You will observe this to be a silver threading throughout this document. There is a failure in trust in everything that relies on the authority. Be it government, science, or any “public” efforts. We are looking to answer questions like “what can I do with this information?”, “Should I acquire a new skill that will be needed in 5 years?”, “Can it help me to ensure the safety of my family?”, and finally “Can I build a business with the information provided?”.
Trying to talk about humanity at large is a fairly open-ended and a complex question, requiring books to be written. We purposefully scoped this document to a few topics we believe, act as threads to the fabric of society as a whole. Concretely, these threads are news and other legacy media outlets, democratic governments, science, culture, and corporations due to the amount of influence they exert on the population and traditional national governments. It is also out of scope of this document to seek understanding of why this is happening. What we are after is lifting a 5-year in the future curtain to grok what it all means for us on an individual level. As last words, we are not asserting that all of the below building blocks of society were working before, we are saying that with an advent of communications technology, it is very easy to observe now, even for an untrained eye.
The News and the Media
The News, historically have been an instrument of propaganda. They carried not only the informational load but also a narrative. Depending on who owned it, the propaganda varied on the spectrum of two opposite opinions. However, given this constraint, there was still a good journalism where people made an attempt to seek the truth and operated on facts. They were “left” and “right” outlets that while still being subjective, still translated factual information, more or less and differed only in interpretation. By “averaging” both sides of the story, one could get a general understanding of what happened. Starting from about 2020, and for some more observant, even in 2016, it has been becoming quite obvious that the legacy news outlets no longer served as the centers of factual information but rather as a nodes for spreading the propaganda and forming of public opinion.
Astonishingly, the “left” and “right” news outlets were now in sync on the kind of message they were relaying. They’ve started being called out by independent bloggers and podcasters such as Joe Rogan when during the pandemic, the legacy news outlets were saying outright lies and spreading misinformation. People who had any kind of professionalism left in them, started venturing out to establish their own news agencies. A few notable examples of this are the Tucker Carlson Network (TCN), Bari Weiss, the left-leaning journalist who was forced to leave New York Times and establish her personal brand on Substack. The meaning of what is being conservative or a liberal news outlet became irrelevant for the average citizen as it is no longer about the political, or the economic issues. It is simply about having access to the truth.
This is the excerpt from the Tucker Carlson’s Network page:
News coverage in the West has become a tool of repression and control. Reporters no longer reveal essential information to the public; they work to hide it. Journalists act as censors on behalf of entrenched power. They have contempt for the public. They hate the truth.
One doesn’t have to agree nor like Tucker Carlson but his claim and the information he has been communicating cannot be ignored.
This is not a single instance, this type of messaging can be found across the multitude of reporters and journalist who have gone “solo”. Now, it is incorrect to assume that they will not be translating some agenda and getting paid for that. It is however, is unlikely to be commonplace as it is their personal brand’s reputation on the line and the reported facts can easily be compared with others. As a result of these transformations, people lost trust in a well-funded legacy media and now sway into private outlets for the sources of the information. Our claim is supported by a rapid decline in a viewership of major legacy news shows. The Reuters, despite its bias, published excellent Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2023 where it supports our claim. In short the reports shows fragmentation of the news and media market into smaller agencies (often, one-person shops).
A side effect of this is of course more subjectivity in reporting, but never the less, people already know how to solve that problem - diversified news sources and no eco-chambers. We envision for this trend to continue to evolve with some modifications. People will want to be communicating with the journalists and each other in real time to discuss news and express opinions. One such example is SoundCloud, a music service with social element where people can leave comments during the composition play. We can also observe this behavior in Telegram channels where people leave feedback for the authors on their content. This real-time feedback is a great tool to gauge public temperature on various topics.
The Government
The governments, similar to the legacy News, have compromised themselves. This become obvious during the COVID pandemic, it become obvious most due to the fact that it affected everyone. Government officials, over and over, got caught singlehandedly lying to public (too many examples here but think of Fauci testimonials, testimonials around the reasons to invade Iraq, and many others). Another gross example, when government officials are not acting in the interest of the country they are representing (Blinken, making a case that he puts his ethnicity and allegiance to another country over the interests of the country he is serving). This is not to mention the quality of the politicians have dropped so much that they would not be trusted with managing their own family affairs not to mention an entire country. There are many, many more examples like this, but the point of the matter is people lost trust in those who are supposed to represent their opinions. The major distrust leads to a couple of different outcomes; in the first case, people opt-in for the populist candidates such as Javier Milei in Argentina or people refuse to vote altogether.
The question becomes what are people left with when a system of checks and balances is being destroyed? There are not a whole lot of options. A first option is what has happened in history - for the society to fall into the hands of a strong leader who is capable of resolving the chaos but later turns into a dictator. Another option is the “wild west” where there are going to be islands of prosperity and the areas surrounding it will be a somewhat controlled chaos with no law. There is another option that was being pushed for some time until recently: the Schwab’s vision from the WEF (Word Economic Forum). If succeeded, it would utterly be worse for people - a form of corporate dictatorship in a society where everyone is flat poor and a few managers that have access to all of the resources available. We will not be going into the details of why Schwab’s vision is worse as it is out of scope of this document. A lot has been written in length on this topic and curious reader can easily learn about it. We were merely indicating that in the scenarios we mentioned, there is an opportunity for building out governance tools that will ensure the survival of people in the absence of a functional government or as a parallel governance. DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) is there to counterbalance centralized and vertical management systems. Every qualified participant has the right to express their opinion. The system is flexible enough where the smart contracts can be coded in such ways that can define ways in which individuals can vote or have any other business logic rules for that matter. The rules will be determined by the groups on per needed basis. DAOs will ensure transparency in decision-making and as a result, will increase the level of public engagement.
The Science
Faith in science has also crumbled for the same reasons of public mistrust. A number of crises that started to unravel in 2020 and access to the information by people who can easily test claims made by “mainstream” scientists have caused a crack in the foundations of public opinion on science. The COVID controversy unraveling things that were considered to be conspiracy theories before but now being accepted, even by the legacy media outlets as given facts. Though it is baffling to us that there are some who still believe in the “Fauci is the science narrative. There are still very many questions to be answered through the public-held committees but is has became obvious that a scientist, even with credentials, cannot be trusted if they are financially vested in the issue at hand or if they are depended on it in some way. This has fundamentally undermined the public trust in “mainstream” science.
The important thing to remember is science is an evolving field and the findings are constantly being updated. The society has gone through a period of time (2020-2024) where any thought, not to mention, hypothesis has not been allowed to contest the alternative hypothesis on COVID treatment. It is a direct contradiction to the definition of science. The danger for science being funded by corporate interests or the political institutions is that it becomes a grant-begging establishment that optimizes for more funding and less doing the actual science. We anticipate that science funding model will evolve to become something of a public domain, funded by crowd-sourcing principles and be governed by DAO where research, is funded to solve the most acute problems. Moreover, scientists will have an opportunity to stay pseudo-anonymous or with some additional effort, fully anonymous. It will insure its protection from the retaliation and at the same time, will maintain the ability to build reputation based on public keys, or the zero-proof architecture.
The Culture
The “Woke” movement is the cultural phenomenon aggressively advocating for social justice, often employing techniques such as cancelling people, business and organizations. Pretending to be fighting the injustice, the “woke” movement causing havoc in the countries across the world. The “woke” movement with its cancel-culture is often associated with the leftist fundamentalists but in reality, the dominant (or the loudest) groups are often found guilty of this as well when the opposite point of view is simply swept under the rag. This is the easiest way to dismiss the contrary point of view.
COVID era has provided many examples. Canceling the established doctors, public figures, and notable intellectuals during COVID has become the main weapon to suppress any deviation from the public discourse. As a result, the divide has never been greater. What we find interesting is the divide has been happening among friends and family. This is an atomic level divide, if you will. This issue surfaces a somewhat hidden concept. Our society suffers from a fundamental problem of self-exceptionalism, dehumanizing others in the process. “My opinion is the only right opinion” with no viability of accepting the probability of one’s error. Having dogmatic splits on such small level as family and close circles is very dangerous as the very next, and the last line of defense is the split at the atomic “self” level. In medical psychiatry it is called schizophrenia. Schizophrenia at scale which we’ve started seeing: people with multiple pronouns, the furry fandom movement, etc. This makes our society extremely vulnerable to manipulations by external actors.
The Corporations
Corporation is a person, an inherited right from the Common Wealth Law of Great Britain unlocks a huge influence onto business, politics and society at large. This can be observed through out the western countries. The idea that the corporations are capable of casting a vote, finance lobbying and exerting other types of influence is what unlocked Corporations to grow so powerful and overcapitalized that they are unbounded internationally. With enormous resources, they apply pressure on markets and political will of already week leaderships. The consequences of punishment for people when they break the rules can be a loss of assets, an imprisonment, physical threat or even death. These, generally speaking, are effective deterrents to a lot of people who consider doing bad deeds. It is not so for corporations. To a corporation, an ultimate punishment is the loss of profit. So it is completely unconstrained from performing deeds that may hurt society, as long as it makes sense economically. The examples are many. This has happened with pharmaceutical companies, chemical factories, natural gas companies, etc.
There is very little that people can do to resist corporate influence. This is simply due to the fact that corporations have so much more resources. The influence of corporations has penetrated into every fabric of our society. Some of us have been working on developing platforms and ecosystems our entire professional lives and can attest that they provide a more efficient way to conduct business. Amazon, for example, has built an extremely effective logistics operations allowing for delivery of goods within impressive timelines. This is true in other areas of human activity as well. The problem however is the fact that these corporations are owned an controlled through private investment groups who now have control the delivery of goods or the control of server infrastructure that can shot down any application, site or a web server at will. Current state of the world today is we don’t have not alternative services that are not owned by large corporations. Another aspect of the problem is the ability of some corporations such as Meta (previously Facebook) to manipulate public opinion through algorithms, and carefully crafted content and its delivery. We are not asserting that the corporations are bad, we are saying large multi-billion corporations without understanding of clear ownership are bad and should not be allowed. If prohibiting corporations with such large capitalization is impossible, an alternative has to emerge.
The War
The all out war is in the air. Not a day goes by without some media outlet or a blogo-sphere doesn’t mention the continuous escalation and rising risks of a nuclear war. Due to the efforts of an invisible force the nuclear was is no longer a possibility but rather a probability. It is out of scope of this document to understand the “invisible hand” behind it. Although using the ancient Roman principle “Cui prodest?” (who benefits from it?), one can fairly quickly come to the right conclusion. In case of the all-out-war, all major institutions and infrastructure will be destroyed or heavily damaged. At least in a highly-dense areas or areas of military strategic importance. People will be left on their own, likely forming enclaves with minimal communication between them. Very different needs will emerge for people in order to survive, but nevertheless, we cannot ignore this risk, especially now, in a time of an unprecedented escalation.
How does all of this binds together and what it means for people
The age-old rule still holds “A power tend to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. Looking at the above, we can definitively conclude that the answer to fixing compromised authority is to make it control less. We believe that our society, and the world around us, operates on hierarchy and since the authority is its building block, we do not advocate nor we think it is possible to completely eliminate it. We are advocating for the systems of checks and balances that will control it. What makes authority so powerful? There are two key aspects to it. The authority by fear, and the authority by controlling the infrastructure, people depend on. While managing the fear is something that needs to be done on a personal level, society has options when it comes to removal the dependency on some or all parts of the system. We think there is a really good chance for this to happen. The major leap in the OSS (Open Source Software) has been made in the recent years by the enthusiasts and the improvements continue to be done. We believe the missing piece here is the culture shift in people’s mind where the collective needs to get used to the idea of paying for services, even the most basic things such as email. The form of payment can be done via a direct payment to a smaller service or a payment to the commonwealth fund of some sorts. It’s irrelevant. What is important to understand that everything has a cost. Either monetary or the loss of personal liberties.
It is important to call out that for some, it will be a much harsher world, with direct accountability for their actions, as there will be no authority to rely on. As we pointed out, the authority will likely always exist in some shape or form but the set of checks and balances we talked about before will help keep it in check. Nevertheless, we believe the better world will have no place for incompetence or allow a few to gain the powers of countries. Observing the current trends, let’s entertain various scenarios in the not so distant 2029, a random point in time, five years from now.
2029-ers
The world where we are likely to end up is the world where technology used to empower people, not make them its slaves. The enslaving part is fully dependent on the existing system of economic incentives. A way to remove this impediment is to strip the individuals and groups of interests from the ability to amass extremely large amounts of resources, be it money or a real world assets.
Free Communications: You are an average citizen who has the ability to communicate freely without fear of being de-platformed, using the decentralized protocols . Your social profile data is owned by you. It is structured in a standardized way, allowing you to render your content across different applications and services. Your data is ALWAYS encrypted. The data never sits on the application servers, unless you wanted it to. Your data is stored either on your personal servers (local and remote) or you can purchase your services from smaller service providers. Redundant backups is the key to your online resilience. There are smart-contract-backed policies that grant access to your data to your family in case you are no longer around.
Free Market: In the last few decades market infrastructure and logistics have been accumulating in the hands of large corporations. While this provides an element of convenience and generally more cost-effective, it diminishes, a free-market viability as well as it accumulates the power in the hands of those who own those marketplaces. People are at the mercy of these marketplaces to be able to transact. It is a regular day when you need to purchase some groceries and buy some household items. You use decentralized open marketplace where you order fruits and vegetables from your favorite local farmer directly if it’s in season, otherwise you buy from a farmer in another distant location. The order is being delivered by a small delivery business that uses the decentralized logistics platform for lead generation and a decentralized payment system. You, the buyer, the farmer and the logistics company each have a reputation score that grows overtime and being moderated by the community or decentralized AI algorithms. The marketplace is a platform but it is not owned by corporations. The protocol developers get paid from a foundation setup through DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) through native token which can be exchanged for another currency or be used for purchasing goods and services on the platform.
Free Finance: When I buy products and goods, I can pay using decentralized payment systems. My wallet is my bank. My balances and payments are private. Most importantly, no one can stop the payment from/to me for any reason. My wallet has multiple backups. Wallets recovery seed are spread across different parties. My money is inflation/deflation proof. I can send the money across the globe with the same minimal fees that I pay to send a payment, locally.
Human-centric Medicine: The medicine is a public good. The emphasis is done on a preventative medicine, hence, making people healthier at a fraction of the cost. The medicine is financed out of your own pocket as a recurring expense towards medicine fund. Your medical data sits in your own storage in the same way all of your data stored. You can grant temporary access to it to medical organizations and your doctors. Your private AI model analyzes your physiological data on a daily basis and provides recommendations on the most optimal nutrition and activities you should perform in a given day. This requires an extensive data collection on your activities but the data doesn’t leak as all of the IoT devices and their firmware is open-sourced and generate for you and no one else. Data collection is stored and analyzed on “locally” on premises owned by you.
Free Education: The education is a public good and is financed through the public education fund. The education is comprised of trade schools and universities. Universities function mainly as centers for R&D. They work in close collaboration with the crowd-funded initiatives sponsored by people, companies and organizations. Trade schools are separate from the universities in a sense that they can be formed by any company, professional league or any other entity, that requires a certain skill to be developed before doing the actual work. Ideally, most professions will require some sort of apprenticeship period before a person can start working independently. The apprenticeship programs will provide technical skills required for work and the universities will provide theoretical knowledge. They both should happen concurrently. It is our belief that people will require both to become well-rounded professionals.
Regular K-12 schooling have undergone a significant modernization. The most notable update to K-12 is a better support of charter schools allowing families to self-organize to educate their children in an environment of smaller groups where families and children know each other outside of school activities. This will ensure smaller class-sizes, thus, better quality of education as well as a firmer control of the curriculum. Programs that provide no value or programs that are contested today due their questionable outcome, such as diversity an inclusion programs, will be discontinued. We are not against diversity as a principle, we are against the methods which have been used to aggressively promote family-destroying practices and methodologies.
Tame the Beast: Corporations, Banks, and Other Financial Institutions: The approach here is simple - everything above a billion dollars in assets (or an equivalent of 1 billion dollars as of June ‘24) is sent towards the public wealth fund.
Conclusion
The world envisioned for 2029 is one of increased decentralized power. The public trust rebuilt through transparency, and a rebalancing of human-centric values over institutional interests. It is a future that emerges from the ongoing erosion of faith in authority figures and centralized power structures across media, government, science, culture, religion and corporations. As this analysis has demonstrated, the path forward requires minimizing institutions’ influence over critical societal needs like communications, logistics, markets, finance, healthcare and education. By empowering individuals through decentralized, open-source protocols and platforms, people can reclaim autonomy and self-sovereignty.
In this future world, your data and digital identity truly belong to you, not harvested by big tech juggernauts. Markets operate freely through community-governed marketplaces. Money flows through self-custodied crypto wallets over legacy financial rails. Knowledge sharing happens peer-to-peer without pedagogical gatekeepers. And health is preventatively self-managed through the non-invasive procedures and protocols.
This is not a radical departure, but an evolution catalyzed by disillusionment with a captured system working for its own interests over the people’s. It redistributes powers once centralized, while upholding core values like free speech, academic freedom, and market economics. It utilizes technology not for corporate profits, but human prosperity. The path will be complex, requiring upgrades to infrastructure, policy reforms and philosophical shifts. But the alternative is a continuation of the distrusted status quo that history tells us is unsustainable. With focus and willpower, we can build this better, decentralized world - one which truly empowers humans over the antiquated power structures that have eroded our faith.
