While I was at Runa and later at Quintype, I had the opportunity to work closely with some of the largest traditional retail, e-commerce, and media companies in the world. It always baffled me that these large and successful organizations were unable to fix the messes they found themselves in. They seemed to have gotten to their level of success through riding on prior years' laurels, and were struggling and quite unable to to weather the storm of digital disruption.
I had always imagined that the Internet would come to the rescue of these beleaguered folks. That was the promise, and I was eager for it to be delivered. I explored this notion of digital transformation and explored what the gap was, why even in a country like America which is considered an advanced economy, why businesses small and big were unable to successfully navigate this digital gap.
From the physical world to online to mobile to social to now crypto and beyond, if many folks are still struggling to figure out digital, what is about to happen to all these businesses and jobs and people, as this notion of disruption truly accelerates and whips through society already stressed by so many wide ranging issues? There is the concept of creative destruction but there is also the reality of not being ready for change in a way that the affected folks can be transitioned without severe imbalance in general harmony needed for functional markets and functional peace.
And now there's more headwinds for the normals. In the name of privacy and things, big tech companies are killing 3rd-party cookies on the Internet, tightening their grip on the user data within their systems. Not that I'm a fan of cookies, but this is just going to tilt the situation so much more in favor of Big Tech.
Oh, and the metaverse and web3 are here now also. As though it wasn't enough having to deal with the existing tech and integrating all of it and trying to get a semblance of understanding of all that so called data, now people and small and medium businesses have to also deal with a whole new class of concepts, processes, and technologies.
But I recalled reading, technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.
Today's internet just seems like a box of ingredients, very far from indistinguishable from magic, my dad often needs to be a systems integrator to make sure things work right at his house. And I often remember the words of Alan Kay "the computer revolution hasn't happened yet", and I know how very close to the truth they are.
The Internet is based on HTTP, and this open protocol has given us websites and social networks and apps but has also given us interconnectedness across these various islands, this is why you can share a Tweet on Facebook or email yourself an Instagram post or forward a Snap across to someone via a text message. So if all this is interoperable then why is everything so complicated?
When you get an Internet connection, what exactly do you get? What does "the Internet" mean if it doesn't automatically work for everyone, it just isn't very functional, it just sits there, totally inactive, just a vast expanse of empty cyberspace. I had a vision to create something different, something real, a more functional internet, a complete Internetwork that functioned for the user and did things for them. I had visions of an Awake Internet.
What would happen if your Internet connection itself became smart?
Instead of buying an Internet connection from Comcast or AT&T, one would buy an Awake Internet Connection, from any participating ISP that understood various Awake Internet Protocols. Instead of buying an inert Internet connection, an Awake ISP would deliver a live connection to AI that would help users.
An Awake Internet would be able to act on behalf of users, powering agents in the cloud that would be authorized to perform various tasks for users. These agents and the ambient decentralized AI network would understand more than just raw HTTP, they'd coordinate amongst each other by speaking various protocols, each at various levels of abstraction so as to exchange more or less power and more and less specific concepts and data with each other.
Ultimately, the Awake Internet would be the perfect ground for the singularity to occur, as machine and human intelligence converge into augmented automatic meta-cognition. In such an Internet, humanity would be elevated, and machines would serve the needs of mankind, empowering an altogether different type of human-in-the-loop economy and planet.
Most things I envisioned in the beginnings of this journey were just too abstract for most people to grasp, and despite that, I became obsessed with this idea, and began to write and to design the system.
One day, I had sketched the core of Awake Market Protocol on the back of a napkin, and it was a functional meta-network protocol design inspired by the meta-object protocol, and my design was a thing of functional beauty. I called up Kasim Tuman, my friend and lead engineer back in the Runa days, and I said I had something to show him. That late afternoon, sitting in a nearly empty mediterranean restaurant in San Ramon, over a glass of hot tea, Kasim gazed at the napkin in silence for a few seconds. Then he exclaimed, like he had figured me out, "hey, this is a Lisp!". I knew I had found my CTO.
I also knew I would be starting Shoptype that evening, and that I would convert this design into reality. We would create a new Internet that would work for everyone right out of the box, a functional Internet, an Internet that would deserve to be called Awake.
PS - Read the whole book at Beyond All Clouds.
