Something wicked this way comes down the Telegraph Road.

During a recent interview with the team at Breaking Banks Europe on Web3, Crypto & DEFI, I was reminded of a comment made by Appscore's chief Architect Luke Housego regarding a parallel between the film Arrival and these emergent these technologies. 

In "Arrival," a central element of the story are the strange and cryptic glyphs of the arriving aliens that are haunting and somewhat mesmerizing with a reveal midway through that it is a manifestation of completely alien technology that underpins a profound difference in how the aliens perceive and experience time as a non-linear experience. This difference then unlocks a fundamental change that ultimately leads to a better future for humanity.

Sometimes, truly disruptive technologies require a profound step change in the understanding and frameworks needed to perceive, navigate, and leverage them without which we can be effectively blind to something we don’t understand.

Taken in this light, Crypto, Defi and Web3 and indeed other emerging technologies such as AI can be considered not in simple terms of just being ‘game changers’, but rather as technologies that require new reference models with the potential to fundamentally alter how we experience the world, how the world ‘works’ and indeed our economic, social and cultural destinies.

Money has always been a trust based token system underpinned by some form of centralized monolithic structure, a king, a reserve bank, a cartel of banks, someone, or a small group who gave the token an agreed value. With Crypto & DEFI we see this structure decentralize, become a ‘fabric’ of contracts and consensus agreements, it becomes democratized and without a singular king, head of state or reserve bank necessarily controlling it. The presumption of singular trust is dissolved and needs to be reassembled as a distributed fabric.  

The implications and changes to these technologies might seem subtle at first, as indeed the alien technology in Arrival was initially not fully appreciated, but the implications grow and the initial experiments give rise to mainstream innovations. Mash multiple emerging technologies together DEFI, Crypto, Smart contracts and AI and you start to widely open a new doorway to semi or even fully autonomous commercial entities. AI driven payment fabrics, AI driven construction services, decentralised services unions, semi sentient, semi-autonomous life coaching health fabrics, semi-autonomous privacy proxies, personalised education, coaching and employment services fabrics with smart collaborative skill development and semi-autonomous mentoring programs and much more.

Down the Telegraph Road

It’s a 14 minute ride home at night from my old Melbourne Office, and a preferred track to play has always been Dire Straits Telegraph Road.  An epic song that runs for over 14 minutes, getting me from door to door, it begins with a 'dusty dirty old track', a frontier that is full of hazards, uncertainty but almost unlimited potential. The pioneers that walk that track, don’t always make it back. There are hazards, the attempts don’t work, there are bandits and rogue actors.. but over time the experiments provide the pathways for others to follow, to build upon,

..then came the miners, 
then came the ore. then there was a hard time.. 
then there was a war
Then came the trains and the trucks with their loads
And the dirty old track was the Telegraph Road..

It’s an epic song, with a killer guitar solos to narrate a journey of change, progress, setbacks, learnings and the cycles that we follow, the dirty old track becomes a six lane highway and ultimately a legacy of its own to escape and re-invent.

Organizations looking at all this must be thinking, 'So when do I get involved here?' This might seem to be alien technology to me or my business, it might even seem inscrutable like the glyphs of the Aliens in Arrival, or downright hazardous, but there is potential, the frontier has form and substance now and to paraphrase Eliot ‘No great deed was achieved by those who faltered or asked for certainty”  

The tracks are there for others to follow, the alien glyphs are starting to make sense and things are starting to happen down the Telegraph road.