🚧 This website is under development. Chapters are still to be written in depth. 🚧

Chapter 10: The Political Internet

May 5, 2025

“Technology is never neutral. Every protocol is a political act.”


🧠 Introduction

In 2019, I was deep into AI.
I believed intelligence was the frontier.
But something felt off.

The deeper I went, the more I saw what AI was really doing:
centralizing power, extracting data, and amplifying control.

It wasn’t that the tech was bad.
It was that the incentives behind it were deeply political — and largely invisible.

That’s when I made a choice.
To leave AI behind.
And to build onchain instead.

This final chapter of Project Voyager 03 (v03) is about that choice — and why the internet we build must be resistant by design.


🔍 The Problem: Neutral Tools, Political Outcomes

We like to think of tech as apolitical.
But the internet we live on today was shaped by decisions that were anything but neutral:

  • Centralized data for “efficiency”
  • Ad-based models for “growth”
  • Blackbox algorithms for “engagement”
  • Surveillance for “safety”
  • Control for “scale”

These values weren’t inevitable.
They were chosen.

And the result?
A world where most of what we build depends on platforms, permissions, and power we don’t control.


⚙️ Why Blockchain is Political (and That’s Good)

Blockchain is often seen as financial infrastructure.
But it’s more than that — it’s a new substrate for governance, coordination, and resistance.

It offers:

  • Censorship resistance by default
  • Ownership as a primitive, not a permission
  • Transparent rules, not invisible moderators
  • Programmable value, not extractive middlemen
  • Exit over loyalty — if you don’t like it, fork it

Every smart contract is a political document.
Every DAO vote is a form of governance.
Every wallet is an identity, free from platform lock-in.

That’s not just technical. It’s radical.


🛠️ Experiments We’re Running

At v03, everything we build carries this political DNA:

  • Creative ownership systems (like Celluloid) that resist AI scraping
  • Personal data vaults (Carbide, HashHeal) that reject surveillance capitalism
  • Protocol-based social (Farcaster, Jezero) that replace corporate algorithms with public infrastructure
  • Internet infra (Orbital) that resists censorship, outage, or monopoly

We’re not building apps.
We’re building alternatives.


💡 The Bigger Picture

The next 10 years will be defined by two competing visions of the internet:

  1. A hyper-efficient, AI-powered, closed platform world
  2. A messy, human, permissionless, decentralized protocol world

One optimizes for control.
The other for sovereignty.

If we want agency, expression, and freedom online —
we have to choose the second.

Not by talking about it.
But by building it, protocol by protocol.


🚀 Takeaway

In the end, Web3 is political — and that’s exactly why I’m here.

Because behind every line of code is a set of values.
Behind every protocol is a worldview.

v03 is my vote for a different internet.

One where power flows down, not up.
Where ownership is default, not earned.
And where freedom isn’t a feature — it’s the foundation.

Let’s build that world. Together.