It’s 10:30 AM on a summer morning in 2009. I’m laying on my bed, dead exhausted, reeking of chlorine from early morning swim practice, and rapidly typing at my keyboard the names of different artists whose albums I can’t convince my parents to give me an iTunes gift card for: Green Day, Linkin Park, Kid Cudi. Between my freshman and sophomore years of high school, armed with a cheap $200 Acer laptop from eBay that I’d begged my parents for over a year to get—but was finally allowed because I was in high school now.
My parents had installed an internet governor, a kiddie lock that throttled what sites I could visit and blocked the South Park Studios website, which would have been my binge of choice at the time. But this wasn’t my first foray into digital media liberation. That journey had started three years earlier.
The Physical-to-Digital Pipeline
Back in 2006, when I was in 6th or 7th grade, my cousin Greg had shown me a software called Handbrake during one of our Christmas visits to Cupertino. Handbrake allowed you to take a DVD and “burn” it to your computer so you could have the video file. Before I discovered torrenting media, I was physically renting movies from Blockbuster, Netflix, or the library to build a library of digital media files.
This was my analog-to-digital bridge. I’d come home with a stack of DVDs, methodically ripping each one to my hard drive. The process was slow, sometimes taking hours per movie, but I was building something unprecedented for a middle schooler: a personal media archive that I controlled. By the time I was deep into BitTorrent, I already had hundreds of hours of movies and television and more than 30,000 songs in my iTunes library.
The progression from physical media to DVD ripping taught me something fundamental about information ownership: the difference between licensing content and actually possessing it. When you rent a DVD and rip it, you’re creating your own copy that no one can take away. No expiring licenses, no platform pulling content, no internet connection required.
Discovering a Different Internet
So when I found myself googling “free day n nite download” that summer morning in 2009, I wasn’t a complete novice. I’d already spent years navigating the technical and psychological barriers of digital media acquisition. But discovering The Pirate Bay through those Google searches opened up an entirely different universe.
This wasn’t like the sanitized, corporate-controlled web my parents wanted me to experience. This was something deeper, more dangerous, and infinitely more interesting. It was also more efficient than my DVD-ripping operation and offered access to content that wasn’t available in physical formats or wasn’t accessible to a fifteen-year-old with limited funds.
Learning to Navigate Digital Risk
I thought computers were these highly sensitive systems that could easily be infected with a virus—and they kind of were at that time. They could be so expensive that the thought of breaking one terrified me. Torrenting for piracy came with the risk of viruses hidden in downloads. Every click felt like a potential disaster.
But access to content was a bigger desire than my fear, and I’ve always had a huge appetite for risk. It’s not like torrenting is hard, but as someone without a strong technological background who just grew up with access, navigating this world required overcoming both technical and psychological barriers.
Eventually, I went down enough Wikipedia rabbit holes, reading about torrenting and learning about peer-to-peer file sharing and encryption technologies. Not as a technical user, but as a consumer one. But it’s the type of consumer product that scares away most users based on the appearance and illusion of technical complexity.
I was fifteen. It would be another summer before I got my first job, so I didn’t really view media piracy—a product with no physical cost for consumption—as an ethical issue. My moral compass was relative at best. Looking back, I was justifying bad behavior, regardless of my rationalizations.
The Streaming Generation Advantage
But the impact of access to that content has been profound on my life, allowing me to be one of the first members of the streaming generation—people with infinite access to information to match their curiosity at the very moments their brains are developing. And I feel lightyears ahead of even some of my peers as a result.
This advantage is embodied in my personality and perspective; it’s hard to articulate outside of that lived experience. Having my uncle as a VP at Cisco and being a few blocks away from the Apple campus certainly influenced my upbringing. Visiting my older cousins, seeing the latest game console, computer gadget, or websites, understanding what was cool—that exposure was huge.
The internet was still growing in access and very slow, not super useful by today’s standards. It took an hour to download a song sometimes, and a day to download a movie. My family living in the epicenter of global technology likely exposed me to stuff earlier than even my peers back home in Michigan. But we were well off, and so were my peers, so we had better access generally speaking.
It didn’t have significant motivation or weight or meaning to me at the time, but it did make the whole world feel accessible without much effort needed to break into it. I still wanted to be a doctor and follow my family down the healthcare path at this point in my life.
From Consumer to Student
The progression from those initial Wikipedia reads to now, where I can write some of the code, has taken about fifteen years. It involved more schooling and actually building and doing the work. At that point in time, it was just a high-level conception, but those early experiences taught me to read hard, dense technical literature and gave me confidence that complex systems could be understood and navigated.
The technology I was using represented something profound that I couldn’t fully articulate at the time: BitTorrent started as a “good will” network where participants willingly hosted and maintained a distributed library of media assets just because they wanted others to have access. No central authority, no gatekeepers, no corporate middlemen extracting value—just people sharing resources because they believed information should be accessible.
My evolution from DVD ripping to torrenting was really an evolution from individual media liberation to participating in a collective resistance network. I didn’t understand it in those terms at the time, but I was learning that information wants to be free, and that technological tools could route around traditional gatekeepers.
The Evolution of Incentives
The advent of tokenomics has now enabled BitTorrent to incentivize network participation, growing the network’s storage capacity for storing large files in a decentralized and encrypted manner. It has the ability to grow into a crucial foundational component of the new internet. Competing systems like InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and Arweave have come onto the scene and are even more popular, but they don’t have the legacy association of piracy attached to them.
This evolution from altruistic file sharing to incentivized participation is better than good will alone. Good will alone can’t provide enough bandwidth for the world to consume media on it. It’s just infrastructure, and incentivizing adoption and growth based on sound principles makes perfect sense.
Building a decentralized peer-to-peer internet requires more than just a logging system if we want to keep predatory middlemen and their hands out of the valuable assets stored in these systems. We need economic models that reward the people actually providing the infrastructure rather than extracting from them.
Permissionless Access vs. Piracy
Web3 and crypto are really about making sure artists get fair compensation, so media piracy isn’t really in the spirit of it—other than as a fuck-you to the large corporations that own the intellectual property, because the artists don’t get fair compensation anyway under the current system.
The content I was accessing was available through other channels, just not to me because of my age and financial capabilities. My intent for paying artists back is to make infrastructure for them, but I’d also like to set up access programs for all children, probably through nonprofits. Education is power.
I think there should be programs in place to compensate artists but make media free to consumers, but I don’t really have an idea for the best model yet. I think it will emerge out of a technology infrastructure that allows us to monitor these sorts of things the way a public blockchain database would—a free market approach.
Teens rebel, and my acting out came in the form of media piracy, which in this case was mostly to my socio-cultural benefit and the expense of large studios. But the technology will likely allow us to disintermediate the predatory players that make piracy justifiable in its current state.
The Infrastructure Connection
Data storage resiliency requires some level of redundancy. Peer-to-peer networks, of which all decentralized blockchains belong, involve multiple nodes maintaining data fidelity. It’s a pretty one-to-one connection between what I was learning as a teenager and what I’m building now.
We can all make money offering compute and storage to the public network, which is great because as data grows, the demand for those things goes up. Part of decentralizing the cloud infrastructure that controls our internet today requires a peer-to-peer approach.
This isn’t just about file sharing anymore—it’s about building the foundational layer for a new kind of internet. One where users own their data, creators get fairly compensated, and predatory middlemen can’t extract value without providing genuine utility.
The progression from physically renting DVDs to ripping them with Handbrake to participating in BitTorrent networks taught me something essential about digital sovereignty: control over information is control over power. The teenager building a media library in his bedroom was really learning how to build infrastructure that couldn’t be easily controlled or shut down by traditional authorities.
That vision starts with understanding that peer-to-peer networks aren’t just about sharing files—they’re about sharing power. And in a world where information is the ultimate currency, democratizing access to that information becomes a revolutionary act.
The next step is understanding how money itself can become peer-to-peer, removing the financial gatekeepers that currently control who gets to participate in the digital economy. That’s where our story heads next.
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.