The most important thing in life is to understand yourself and your purpose in the universe. Most people do not figure out what they want to be when they grow up, and indeed most people never manage to grow up at all. I was lucky in that my life took me on a journey that showed me my true nature and showed me that my path was purposeful despite what it looked like and felt like many times.
In many ways, the idea for Awake was a long series of dots that all connected one day in early 2019. I had wrapped up a tour in Prague and Bratislava where I spent much of 2018, helping a friend run a venture studio focused on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. In early 2019, I had taken a few weeks off to figure out what I wanted to do next and had been thinking about my next adventure.
I had always looked at the big tech companies with mixed feelings, I always wondered why they couldn't do so much more to solve the problems plaguing society, in fact, they are likely to have the clearest vantage point and access, and the means to make meaningful change happen.
Ever since my weeklong trip to Burning Man in 2015, I had been seeking clarity about the nature of reality, trying to understand what had transpired there. I had written about my feelings in a post right after the events. Ever since that experience, I had been seeking the meaning of all things; I had discovered and voraciously consumed all I could about Buddhism, spirituality, and non-duality, finally arriving at the Vedas, and falling headlong into the rabbit hole they call Vedanta, where instead of understanding things, all things came to an end, which was actually the same as the beginning. This process was fundamental to what I am today, and I have only my Guruji to thank for this transformation.
One afternoon, I was meditating upon the problem of the Internet, what some people call the "Facebook problem" and others call the "network effect". Where are these things, this problem with social media, and this network effect? Where exactly do they arise?
And the answer, I realized, was that networks do not exist at all, only people do. It is only because we believe in the ephemeral acknowledgment from other people that we crowd any platform. It is only because of our own doing that we get trapped in particular ways of life. And I discovered the way out was to simply wake up to this fact, that if I chose a different option, there is a path that leads out, not further inwards. I had to share this simple epiphany with everyone.
After all, what was the point of my existence, I realized, that if I did not help the people I could, within my family, my friends, my community and my peers, and also the people I didn't even know yet, but who shared my planet. In other words, I was talking about my own extended network. And I also realized everyone had their own extended networks, and they crossed boundaries such as countries and cities and certainly they crossed over across various Internet platforms. In other words, everyone used these platforms to access the Internet in various ways, what if we could access more of the underlying Internet directly? What if we could directly access each other as the original Internet had promised? By that, I meant, without the 30% plus charged by all these so-called gateways to the Internet. Gatekeepers, more like, is what I felt they had become.
And this insight became one of the key design aspects of the Awake Internet Protocols, the first of which, the Awake Market Protocol, we are now finally launching into the world. Think of it like a universal market built ground up for the Internet. It allows anyone anywhere to connect and not just buy and sell, which is common enough, but it allows one to share fairly in the participative economy that is a natural part of all communities and networks. It works for any product or service and works with any currency. It makes it easy to connect without any complex technology and makes it possible to do actual social commerce, not the Facebook variety.
This was the missing link. If the Internet was to deliver on the promise of equity and social justice, then everyone had to win. How to build a win-win network became the intensity of my focus and my obsession. Why do I need to win and others lose? Why can I not build a machine that ensures I win when others win? Then all I would have to do is to help others win, and not worry about myself or feel any anxiety, because my success was guaranteed through the success of my extended network.
This gap in time, this space to think about the space between networks, this ability to see that if we built this missing network between all the other networks that exist now, as a new open Inter-network, if we built it for everyone that is today struggling with all the complexities of technology and big corporations and their insular and greedy ways of viewing the world as a zero-sum game, we could solve all that, we could build the connecting tissue, the missing actual Internet, we could make that accessible to everyone including my mom, that became the clarity.
In fact, I discovered that creativity has a source, the same source that spawned this universe. That trove of infinite knowledge is available for anyone that seeks it, one has to just focus on oneself, and not on things that one has no control over. I discovered that if I were to just build my vision and become my own customer, I would be able to manifest all that I saw. That is where it became plenty clear, the meaning of "eating your own dog food" or as our COO likes to say, "eating our own shit sandwich".
So here goes, a very visceral experience of eating our own produce, there can be no excuses, only hyper-fast learning and application and the rinse-repeat process of failing fast. And the goal is clear and simple: empower 10M entrepreneurs so we can together co-create 100M jobs. By the end of this decade. Join us, become Awake.
PS - Read the whole book at Beyond All Clouds.
Deleted user
Commented 07 Nov, 2021
I enjoyed the clarity of your thoughts.