Gen z is the first generation of which a significant % of the population has more internet friends than ‘irl’ friends. This population is as or more engaged with internet communities as our grandfathers are with their ‘trad’ communities (church, neighborhood, sports clubs…).
The way this paradigm plays out is the emergence of a new plane of culture. Internet native communities will have distinct value systems, relationship graphs, leaders, governments, and economies that will, from time to time, intersect with the irl plane of culture. Families, local communities, broadly “touch based” cultures will remain irl while intellectual, media, broadly “idea based” cultures will spill online.
I see three obstacles that will need to be overcome before this paradigm becomes dominant:
- UX: the internet experience must be as responsive as the irl experience; watching a football game should produce similar quality stimuli in the stands or from your computer.
- Security: internet systems must be able to operate safely; the same way we can go to work each day without fearing for our safety
- Coordination: internet systems must be able to form “truth”; the same way in real life I can show you a gold coin and you can affirm I have a gold coin.
UX is, I think, the most developed. So I’ve started by building a hyper-responsive workspace for high operating remote teams.
Coordination is the new world. Lots of opportunities to win and to lose. This is a space of active exploration to me, as I’m writing this on a decentralized publisher to be posted on a decentralized social network.
Security, from my limited knowledge, is where the most blood is or will be shed. The internet is the wild west (as it should be) and it needs to be really easy to make systems really hard to hack. If UX turns out to be too competitive a market, security where we will establish ourselves