The internet was supposed to decentralise access to information. It briefly did, then consolidated into five companies that discovered that capturing people’s attention, then surveilling their behaviour, and selling that information to others equals virtually infinite money; and now those five companies have a combined market capitalisation larger than the GDP of every country on earth except the United States and China.¹

Social media was supposed to democratise voice, and for a moment, at least, it did; then the platforms discovered narcissism and outrage drive more engagement, engagement tied to profiles creates psychographic models, and psychographics enables micro-targeted advertising, and optimised accordingly. What was ostensibly designed for community and connection became infrastructure for polarisation and manipulation.

Cryptocurrency was supposed to decentralise finance; to perform, as its loudest advocates continue to claim, “the greatest wealth transfer in human history”. It raised $20 billion from people who believed that — and then became little more than a casino that the same individuals and organisations who dominate traditional finance have positioned themselves to run. Because the house always wins.

And now artificial intelligence is somehow supposed to democratise productivity and intelligence. Yet three companies control the frontier models, and their training data was extracted from all of us without attribution or reward. The business model is subscription access to a capability that will become as essential as electricity, and that you won’t own, charging you rent to get your own intelligence back, while they build upon your interactions to sell it to others. But unlike every previous loop, this one doesn’t just capture your economic activity or your attention. It captures your cognition. It shapes what you think is possible. Centralised AI trained on centralised data doesn’t just extract from you, it learns to predict you, eventually to precede you, and in many cases, is jockeying to replace you.

Cory Doctorow memorably calls it enshittification — the predictable trajectory from serving users to serving advertisers to serving shareholders.² He’s right that it’s structural, not accidental. We’d go one step further: it isn’t even a trajectory. It’s the architecture working as designed. The entities at the centre always extract from the periphery. This is not a law of nature. It’s a consequence of building systems with centres.

There’s a manifesto that makes the ideological case for this order explicitly. In October 2023, Marc Andreessen published his Techno-Optimist Manifesto³ — 5,200 words declaring technology, markets, and growth as the supreme goods, and listing as enemies: sustainability, tech ethics, social responsibility, and risk management. The manifesto calls for an “intelligence takeoff” led by a self-selected elite of builders. It dismisses concerns about inequality and social cohesion as the whining of decelerationists. It wants to destroy centres of power, and by that it means it wants to become the largest, wholly unconstrained one.

This is not a blog post from the lunatic fringe. It’s the operating philosophy of the people who now control the AI stack, who funded the crypto casino, and who have moved — as they’ve accumulated sufficient power to stop pretending otherwise — from libertarianism to something that looks increasingly like high-tech feudalism.

Andreessen is not alone. Alexander Karp, co-founder and CEO of Palantir — a $400 billion surveillance and defence software company — published The Technological Republic in 2025,⁴ arguing the opposite case for the same conclusion: that Silicon Valley’s duty is to put its most powerful technology in the service of the state — because, in his telling, the state is the guardian of the Western, liberal-democratic values worth defending — and that building AI weapons is part of meeting that duty. One wants the state out of the way so capital can capture everything. The other wants technology fused to the state so it can project power through software. Neither has any interest in infrastructure that distributes agency to those of us at the periphery. They are arguing about who sits at the centre, not about whether there should be a centre at all.

The convergence of centralised AI, surveillance infrastructure, platform monopoly, and concentrated capital into a single system of control — documented in detail by Prof. Francesca Bria’s research project, The Authoritarian Stack⁵ — is not a future risk. It’s a present reality.

Vitalik Buterin, whose credentials as a co-founder of Ethereum require no introduction, named the counter-position precisely:

He calls this “sanctuary technology” — free and open infrastructure that allows people to live, work, communicate, and collaborate in ways that are resilient to external pressure. Not financial freedom alone. Structural resilience. The architecture of a world where no single actor — person, corporation, or state — can gain total control over others.

This is what Holochain was built to deliver.

And in the face of the mounting centralisation of power and wealth (that “decentralisation” has ironically perpetuated), we keep asking the same question we’ve been asking since the beginning. Not because we’re stubborn (although we are), but because the problem we set out to solve has gotten worse every year, and nothing else in the market seems structured to address it.

The question we continue working to answer is:

Most of the industry asked a narrower question: how do you get a network of untrusted strangers to agree on a single version of the truth? That question leads, inexorably, to global consensus — and to the capturable centre that comes with it. We asked something different: how do living systems coordinate at massive scale without a single version of truth — how does a body, a forest, a language stay coherent with no central ledger and no one in charge? The answer is not global consensus. It’s local coordination that scales globally. That changes the architecture. And the architecture changes everything.

This paper is written by the people building that architecture — the teams behind Holochain (the peer-to-peer application framework), Holo (the bridge that makes Holochain apps reachable through an ordinary web browser), and Unyt (the accounting engine behind HoloFuel and other mutual-credit currencies). It describes what exists, what we got wrong, what we got right, and what becomes possible now that the infrastructure is shipping. It’s not a fundraising document. Nor is it a whitepaper promising a revolutionary yet unknowable future. It’s an honest account of where we’ve come from, where we are, and where we’re going next.