January 4, 2018.
1 Hacker Way, Menlo Park, California.
A state-of-the-art campus in the heart of Silicon Valley, the headquarters of one of the biggest companies on earth.
One might imagine a brightly lit corner of a vast, open floor of cubicles.
A boyish man edging toward his midthirties. An expressionless face beneath a mop of slightly curly, auburn hair, caught in the glow of a laptop computer. A gray hoodie, flip-flops, shorts.
A vast room, inside the headquarters that he had built on top of an idea that began as a revolution and morphed into something else, something worth many billions of dollars, something huge and omnipresent and, as of late, controversial, maybe enduring another mere “speed bump” in its never-ending quest for total, worldwide adoption and domination, or maybe, finally fraying at the edges.
His back to the vast room, the man, still boyish, though he was married and the father of two, might have begun to type.
As with every year at approximately this time, there was a mission statement to write: looking back on how far he’d come since the year prior, telling the world what he had planned for the year ahead. Why he was writing such a thing was not a question that anybody would ask. As the CEO of the juggernaut that had connected the world, changed how it interacted, he was one of the most powerful people on the planet. His words mattered.
“Every year I take on a personal challenge to learn something new,” his statement began. “I’ve visited every U.S. state, run 365 miles, built an AI for my home, read twenty-five books, and learned Mandarin.…”
It was an enviable bucket list. As he continued typing, he moved from accomplishments to history—how he’d begun chasing these experiences in 2009, when the economy was faltering, before his company was profitable. Because things suddenly felt similar today:
“The world feels anxious and divided.…”
It wasn’t just the world that felt disjointed; many felt his company was feeding that anxiety. Mistakes had been made, lines had been crossed. Fake news spewed and targeted to millions of unwitting eyes. Election interference that seemed so profuse, it just might have altered history. Egregious amounts of user data packaged, given away, hacked. A business model built on the commodification of private lives …
“This may not seem like a personal challenge on its face, but I think I’ll learn more by focusing intensely on these issues than I would by doing something completely separate. These issues touch on questions of history, civics, political philosophy, media, government, and of course technology.…”
Somewhere in that vast room, one of the many dozens of computers in one of the many dozens of work spaces may very well have been open to a screen showing the current price of bitcoin. At the moment, the virtual currency sat at a little over $16,000 a coin. Incredible by any measure—considering that in 2009, the early days that he had just referred to in his letter, Bitcoin had just been starting its journey worth well below a penny a coin.
No doubt he knew that history—because that was how he approached everything. He studied, he learned, he consumed. He must have known that the price of a single bitcoin first reached parity with the U.S. dollar in 2011. Had continued to rise, but was mostly unknown, until the events in the tiny island nation of Cyprus in 2013 caused the price to run above $250 a coin. More volatility followed, but by the end of 2013, the price had hit $1,000.
And then it had crossed $10,000 in November of 2017, then doubled over the next month to $20,000—before sliding back down to where it sat today. It was impossible to know where that price would go from here, or even what, at the moment, Bitcoin really was. A commodity in the midst of a bubble? A new currency? The future of money? A new system, one that would usher in a new, more decentralized world?
Whatever it was, it had been something for a few years now, since 2009, and he hadn’t seen it happening, or he hadn’t taken it seriously enough, or he had simply chosen to stay on the sidelines.
But other people had seen it happening and had taken it seriously. Certain people had not only been accumulating bitcoin, but they had also been instrumental in its incredible rise.
He began to type again.
“One of the most interesting questions in technology right now is about centralization vs. decentralization. A lot of us got into technology because we believe it can be a decentralizing force that puts more power in people’s hands.… But today, many people have lost faith in that promise. With the rise of a small number of big tech companies and governments using technology to watch their citizens, many people now believe technology only centralizes power rather than decentralizes it.”
Ironic, how fast technology could turn on its head, how a revolution could suddenly become what it was supposed to be fighting against—the Establishment—a centralized monopoly, a data cartel, holding the world’s data hostage.
“There are important counter-trends to this—like encryption and cryptocurrency—that take power from centralized systems and put it back into people’s hands. But they come with the risk of being harder to control. I’m interested to go deeper and study the positive and negative aspects of these technologies, and how best to use them in our services.…”
Encryption and cryptocurrency—the type of counter-trends, digital barbarians at the gate that could dismantle empires.
But the truth was, revolutions were a lot like entrepreneurial ideas. They could spring wholly built from a creative source, a brilliant mind: maybe a boy genius in a hoodie and flip-flops. They could be co-opted, borrowed, changed just enough to seem unique. They could be subverted—on purpose, for reasons of profit—or involuntarily, a victim of their own growth, their cells becoming cancerous. Revolutions could even be stolen.
There was no way to know what would come next; whether he was just writing a mission statement to try and mollify his growing number of detractors, tacitly acknowledging the sound of digital tumbrels rolling in, declaring something, or just contemplating.
Either way, he hit a few more keys and posted the statement to his blog, instantly sending his words to more than one hundred million followers, a fraction of the 1.5 billion people who logged into his company every day.
Then he turned off his computer and watched the screen as it went dark.