In this talk, Jordan Greenhall outlines a sweeping transformation of economic, social, and technological systems from legacy hierarchical, control‑centric models toward networked, protocol‑driven, community‑focused structures. He first contrasts old themes—hierarchy, creator‑audience, transaction, profit—with new themes—networks, flexible protocols, community, co‑creation, relationship, purpose. He then identifies four fundamental drivers that act like physical laws: (1) Digitization and information dynamics, where anything that can be encoded becomes information, reshaping markets via network effects and Metcalfe’s law; (2) Decentralization, which pushes power to the edge and requires participants to possess a broad toolkit; (3) Liquefaction, the need for fluid, adaptable organizations as change accelerates; and (4) Empowered individuals, whose growing capacities demand systems that channel rather than suppress their initiatives. Greenhall illustrates these forces with concrete sector examples—decentralized currencies reshaping money, energy moving from centralized grids to distributed models, water‑efficient agriculture, autonomous, software‑defined cars, bespoke manufacturing, and the evolution of ride‑hailing from Uber to even more fluid, edge‑empowered platforms. He then discusses macro‑level challenges and opportunities: entrenched interests that resist disruption, sense‑making problems caused by echo chambers, information overload, and propaganda; solutions such as trust‑based reputation networks, an emerging attention‑management economy, and innovative governance. He warns of the obsolescence of legacy organizational models and highlights the rise of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) like Backfeed as a new economic substrate. Finally, he stresses that accelerating information growth (doubling every nine months) creates unprecedented complexity, requiring intelligence amplification—through collective intelligence, personal development, or transhumanist enhancements—to survive the future landscape.
Chapters
All right, so now I'm going to drop down one more level into some more concrete stuff of how does this play out. So let's make some predictions about what kinds of things in the world we might be able to actually do something about. I'm going to start with themes, and then look at drivers, and then go through some actual examples. So themes— these are kind of the rules of the old legacy model. It was dominated by things like hierarchy as ways to get things done, and audience was the creator-audience relationship. And we've got some new themes, right? So obviously, and these are pretty obvious, I hope everybody here gets them. The new models are gonna be built on networks. Control is gonna be replaced with flexible protocols with in-out opt-in. Processes can be replaced with flexible principles that drive and create parameters but don't actually control inside boundaries. Audience is gonna be replaced by community. Customer is replaced by community. Everything moves to co-creation. The idea of transaction is replaced with relationship, which is to say that goes into extremely high complexity. Transactions are simple and tend to be one-off. Relationships repeat over and over again and have extremely high complexity. And profit is replaced with purpose, which is to say that we are now proliferating many, many, many different reasons why we might be doing things, and to integrate and get to a single solution is gonna require a completely different way of doing it. And then major drivers. I'm coming at it from a different direction now. So major drivers that are happening, kind of like, think of it at the level of the laws of physics. that are happening in the world that push stuff that doesn't want to get pushed. Digitization and information dynamics. It's obviously a pretty good rule of thumb that anything that can be turned into information will be turned into information, right? Remember when the RIAA said you wouldn't download a car? They had no idea that they were actually predicting the future, that of course you're going to download a car, right? As soon as we can figure out how to turn a car into information, we'll download it. And we are going to turn everything we can into information. And information has fundamentally different dynamics than material, than energy, right? Network effects, Metcalfe's Law, accelerating returns— understanding what those dynamics are and how they apply, and how when you move a domain from more material into more information, is a key strategic insight. Next is obviously decentralization. We've seen that happen all over the place. Decentralization fundamentally is 2 things. The first is pushing power out to the edge, empowering different components in the environment. And the second is a generic toolkit, which means that every element in the network has to have the capacity to play most different roles. Hierarchy simplifies. You do marketing, you do engineering, you don't need to know how to do software, you don't need to know how to talk to people. Go. Decentralization doesn't work that way. Everybody has to have a relatively complete toolkit. To a greater or lesser extent, and the authority then gets pushed out into the, into the edge and communication through protocols. Liquefaction, right? Liquefaction here has to do with fluidity, right? As the world changes and as it changes, the pace of change accelerates, things that become solid, things that require that they stay stable for a long period of time, just get swamped as disruption waves come through. So things need to be very fluid, very flexible, right? You've already talked about this, I'm sure, a lot in just business planning. And when I started out, the notion of doing a 10- or 15-year business plan was still pretty standard. I can't even imagine right now colorably trying to do a 15-year business plan. It seems insane and impossible. What you have to do now is you have to start thinking about models that are responsive to changing environments right now, and organizational models responsive to changing environments right now. And then this notion of empowered individuals. Human capacities can continue to increase, and so structures that are premised on the ability of preventing people from doing what they actually want to do are going to fail, and structures that are designed around the notion of taking advantage of individuals doing what they want to do and maybe flowing them into better ways of making choices will be successful. So let's look at some examples of what that means. On the— too bad, fidelity is not high enough. This is a model of our current monetary system, how money is made. And this model on the right is my effort to represent the notion of decentralized currencies. You'll have lots and lots of them. They won't be controlled in the way that they're controlled. But the fact that money itself is in that process, and there will be some significant innovation, like on the order of 10 times where we are right now, and a major shift that follows, they'll open up a huge number of different business models because a decentralized currency system changes the power relationships between different institutions. Power, energy. Energy is also moving from highly centralized, concentrated, capital-intensive, hierarchical systems into increasingly decentralized models. Agriculture, right? You're going to see agriculture is also moving for lots of different reasons. Remember ecosystem disruption? We're going to need to take real responsibility for water. And it turns out this stuff here on the right is a lot more water efficient than the stuff here on the left. It's also better for you. Cars, right? We downloaded that car. We're going to be moving away from those sets of functions. Oh, and by the way, cars are also going to get smart and are going to drive themselves, right? We're all aware of that. That's obvious. But we can now start making some plans about what does that actually imply? What's going to happen as that begins to unfurl? Manufacturing facilities, you know, we're going to work— go away from extremely large-scale, huge industrial concentrated facilities. Either they're highly automated facilities, which take, you know, functions and turn them essentially into information, and then highly customized bespoke facilities. In this case, I just wanted to take a 2-step, right, because these things tend to go through waves. And so there's one wave that's going on right now, In this particular industry, taxis, where Uber essentially is now somewhere in the middle of that curve. It's clear that they're gonna win. It's not a question of exactly when and how, but it's also clear, if you understand what I've been talking about, that they will then die and they will be replaced by something that is even more fluid and decentralized, and empowers the individuals even more at the edge. My guess is we're probably talking about 12 to 15 years, maybe 10 on the inside, depending on other things that go on. So, you're saying that Uber on, is the first assuming Travis doesn't drive it into a cliff. Okay. So what are the challenges and opportunities at the big picture, right? I'm not bringing this down to a low level, but big stuff, right, to keep in mind. The first is entrenched interests. And I mentioned this in terms of intellectual property companies. You may be able to predict the wave coming, but be aware of the fact that the folks who are in the process of being disrupted are going to fight it, and they will do their best to prevent themselves from being— going into the dark night. So what do you do? So the solution is, first, disrupt. You just hammer away at the foundations all around, whatever it is that they're protecting, and they will eventually lose their energy and their capacity to defend will go away. If not, route around. Just do something better, make what they do obsolete, and ignore them completely. And then also co-opt. Create opportunities in the new model that the old legacy institutions can slide into and feel good about it, right? Essentially give them a way to save face and save resources. A big one here is going to be, in fact, innovating governance. The last refuge of scoundrels is control of government, and they're all crawling in that direction right now willy-nilly. So I look to see significant governance innovation kicking off somewhere in 2016, actually. I think you'll see a lot of that happening, particularly in peripheral areas. The second, as I mentioned, was sensemaking. One of the big problems that we're all running into right now is that all the legacy models for understanding what's going on in the world are either breaking down or have been largely captured. So we're going to run into problems around echo chambers, noise— like, what do you pay attention to— overwhelm— there's too much to pay attention to— distraction, and propaganda manipulation, right, which has reached epic levels. So the solution there are trust networks, what are called files and reputation, right? New mechanisms for re-establishing the level of trust that people have if they spend time with each other. And there's maybe mediated digitally, they may be mediated through actual grassroots environments. Think about how human beings are wired to form trust and to create and create and build relationships that are based on trust. But that's going to be a big part of the solution, is getting away from a model where you trust an institution like a newspaper or a television program or a website and begin having more and more capacity to feel more nuanced and subtle trust. And the big opportunity here is going to be the attention management economy. Dear God Almighty, if any of you could tell me what I should be paying attention to on a daily basis, like really what information is relevant and what person is giving me the insight that I need to have, I will go to you with all that I've got. The amount of overwhelm and distraction right now is insane. The obsolescence of the existing model. This is a big problem. I don't know about you guys, but all my startup companies are dealing with it right now. You either struggle with the fact that the old model is really inefficient and breaks down pretty quickly, Or you're trying to build a new model in real time, like poor Tony over at Zappos with the Holonic model, which is equally difficult. So these things are maladaptive. We know they're going to fail, and they're going to fail pretty badly. But in the meantime, what are we going to do? So we need to figure out how to build increasingly decentralized and ad hoc organizing structures. One of the groups that I funded recently and I've been working with pretty closely called Backfeed is focused exclusively on that. decentralized autonomous organizations. But decentralized organizations more broadly, I think, is going to be a major piece of disruption. And I'm really interested in the decentralized autonomous economy, which I'd be delighted to talk about. Next, and almost last, increased complexity and uncertainty. That's just the nature of the beast. Information is doubling— what is it now— every 9 months. And information doubling leads to vastly larger amounts of stuff. More scale, more scope, more pace of environment. We had a great question about you're trying to deal with customers in different countries. What do you do? Fifteen years ago, that would have been barely a question for almost any entrepreneur. Only a very small subset. Now everybody instantaneously has to deal with that. Right? Just bigger scale, bigger scope. So the solution is intelligence amplification and personal development. People are going to have to get a lot better at dealing with uncertainty, or going to have to get a lot smarter. Whether we're doing that through collective intelligence mechanisms, or through individual intelligence enhancement, or various flavors of applied transhumanism. And I'm not kidding. I mean, the reality is, as the world becomes more complicated— just think about, like, computers. The higher your bandwidth, the higher your processor, the more you're able to deal with intrinsic complexity, which means that you're going to be more fit to survive in that landscape. Thank you.
