While aging politicians argue about whether the internet needs more censorship or less regulation, a generation of rebellious youth—let’s call them “yoods”—are quietly building the alternatives that could make the entire debate obsolete. These aren’t just the bridge generation born between 1992 and 1997, though they represent the first wave. These are young technologists, creators, and entrepreneurs who see the current system’s flaws and are coding their way around them instead of waiting for permission from institutions that fundamentally don’t understand the technology they’re attempting to regulate.
The tragedy is that while these yoods are building solutions, our gerontocratic political class is creating a legislative clusterfuck by regulating consumer privacy, cryptographic technologies, and artificial intelligence systems as separate domains. They have no idea how these technologies interact, and their piecemeal approach is more likely to produce an antidemocratic, regulatory capture, technofascist corporate state than the digital democracy they claim to be protecting.
The Manufactured Division
Take Oliver Anthony’s viral hit “Rich Men North of Richmond”—a perfect case study in how media manufactures division where none was intended. Here’s a fairly middle-of-the-road guy complaining about a shared plight that resonates across political boundaries. His lyrics spoke to the frustration that both educated and uneducated working-class people feel about being manipulated by powerful elites who never face consequences for their actions.
But because Anthony included some slightly insensitive lyrics, the media immediately weaponized the song to create a left-right divide. Suddenly, instead of focusing on the shared frustration with “rich men north of Richmond” controlling everyone’s lives, we were debating the artist’s political purity. The song’s core message—that both groups are sick of rich people in control abusing their power at everyone else’s expense—got lost in manufactured controversy.
This pattern repeats constantly in our discourse. The educated working class thinks they’re better than the uneducated working class. Both groups experience economic inequality, but one focuses on their relative disadvantage compared to peers from different backgrounds, blaming the whole system and its legacy, while the other group feels actively vilified for who they are and wanting to take ownership over their life, keeping both impoverished and marginalized relative to the group their frustrated with, the corporatists.
Both groups are ultimately fighting the same battle against the same enemy, but they’re too busy arguing with each other to notice. Some are more partisan and tend to place themselves in hypocritical positions because their team loyalty is greater than their awareness of how the system entrenches their poverty. Meanwhile, the actual power structure—that tiny group of less than 100,000 people, out of billions, who have real control—continues operating while everyone else fights over scraps.
The Real Power Structure
We’re not talking about some crazy nefarious conspiracy here. Think Davos and other conferences linked to international groups like the IMF and WEF—gatherings where mostly intelligent people claim ownership over solving the world’s biggest problems when at most they’re skilled managers of single solution attempts with very deep pockets. They fund progressive science that’s science in name but not in efficacy because it’s more marketable that way, you know the profit motive ultimately in the way.
This represents neocolonialism 2.0—an inclusive but stratified system with immense gaps between the top, those just below them, everyone else, and the bottom. In the tech/AI age, there’s less room for economic disruption and thus social mobility. Winner-take-all monopoly markets mean everything devolves into speculation and entertainment. That’s the direction we were already heading, just accelerated with more pronounced stratification than the earlier version, which was arguably just earlier on in the same trend lines.
The False Binary Trap
When it comes to internet governance, like everywhere else, issues get reduced to binaries to induce gridlock and uphold the status quo. The left complains about bot spam networks propagating misinformation and conspiracy theories. The right’s concerns focus on the surveillance, policing, and suppression of speech on platforms that serve as public forums, at the request of government agencies, causing them to appear to arbitrarily enforce policy measures.
Both sides are missing the real problem: we don’t have common ground because the internet doesn’t have data origins traceability. Without knowing where information comes from, how can we have productive debates about its accuracy or appropriateness?
The blockchain enables a digital supply chain that can monitor information from its origination source, even when its literal values are encrypted. This creates accountability systems that enable both privacy and freedom—the false binary that’s been tearing apart our political discourse.
Technical Solutions to Political Problems
What we need is common infrastructure—a shared data system for various front-end tools to run on top of. That’s what composability means in technical terms. Instead of having isolated platforms that can manipulate information flows without transparency, we could have a shared common data structure that is uncensorable, but front-end applications can filter displays or choose not to allow users to engage on their platforms.
Government or public platforms couldn’t necessarily do complete censorship without having other systems in place for rehabilitating individuals, but information would remain “on chain” even if not presented in some interfaces. This protects speech, not reach, as they say today.
Fully homomorphic encryption would allow us to balance transparency with privacy. The database effectively becomes a double-blind computer—users can be tracked to establish accountability, but their specific activities remain private. A user’s affiliations and tooling would set the context for whether a database event occurred for business or personal reasons. The blockchain maintains a ledger of data states, logging when there’s a state change event. On a shared public database, we’d have that traceability to the user, publicly, but through cryptographic identities rather than exposed personal information.
Some platforms could be public, some semi-public, some private, all operating on the same underlying infrastructure but with different levels of openness and moderation.
The Trust Breach
The COVID-19 pandemic represented one of the biggest breaches of public trust in modern history. The most obvious example is Anthony Fauci funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan and then lying about the origins when lab leak theory turned out to be true. People who were deplatformed for suggesting this possibility were later vindicated, but the damage to their credibility is already done.
This pattern—where “misinformation” later proves accurate while “authoritative sources” are exposed as unreliable—has repeated across numerous issues. The Twitter Files provided documented evidence of social media companies working with intelligence agencies to censor information from the public that was later proven true several times over.
The Horseshoe Effect
Here’s what’s fascinating: if you strip away the partisan rhetoric, the far left and the far right actually agree on what the problems are, and even on what many of the solutions should be. They just describe them differently and are divided over a handful of social issues that prevent them from finding common ground. Most of these divides, while real, have their visibility manufactured by the media system, mostly because the data shows it’s good for maintaining regulatory capture on the political system.
Both extremes recognize that concentrated power is the problem. Both see that ordinary people are being manipulated by systems they don’t control. Both want more transparency and accountability from institutions. Both are suspicious of corporate capture of government agencies. Both want economic systems that work for regular people instead of extracting from them.
The rebellious yoods building alternatives understand this instinctively. They’re not interested in left-right political theater because they’re focused on building systems that route around the dysfunction entirely. The bridge generation—those born between 1992 and 1997—are particularly well-positioned for this work because they understand the pre/post digital divide. They have context for what we’re losing and what we’re gaining.
The younger yoods who followed them are more radical but less empathetic toward older generations. They don’t have the pre-digital context, so they’re less constrained by legacy thinking but also less aware of what worked before that might be worth preserving.
The Gap in the Horseshoe
I find myself positioned in what I call the no man’s gap between the feet of the horseshoe arch. I’m not in the middle—I’m on the outside looking in on the powerless masses who can’t articulate to the middle why those in the center are stuck-up pricks only concerned about preserving their worldview, lifestyle, and privilege at the expense of the planet and everyone on it in an effective manner.
The middle class wants to maintain stability and their relative position, even if it means accepting systems that are fundamentally extractive and unsustainable. They’re not evil, but they’re invested in a status quo that’s crushing the people at the bottom and destroying the environment. They’ve been convinced that any major change threatens their position, so they resist solutions that might actually improve everyone’s situation.
Meanwhile, the people at the extremes of the horseshoe—whether they call themselves far left or far right—are the ones most directly harmed by the current system. They’re the ones most motivated to build something better, and they’re the ones most likely to see through the manufactured divisions that keep them fighting each other instead of the actual power structure.
Beyond the Binary
The rebellious yoods building alternatives aren’t waiting for permission from the gerontocratic class that’s regulating technologies they don’t understand. They’re not interested in choosing between privacy and accountability, between freedom and safety, between left and right. They’re building systems that make those false binaries obsolete.
These technological solutions won’t solve every political problem, but they can remove the technical barriers that currently make productive discourse impossible. When information has provenance, when privacy and transparency can coexist, when platforms can’t manipulate what we see without accountability, then we can have the conversations we need to have about how to organize society.
The question isn’t whether these solutions will work—the technology already exists. The question is whether enough people will choose them over the convenient dysfunction we’re currently accepting. That choice will determine whether we build a more democratic future or slide further into techno-authoritarianism.
The yoods are building. The gerontocracy is regulating. The corporate middle is maintaining. And somewhere in the gap between the extremes, a different kind of future is waiting to emerge.