Have a Highly Trustless 2025

Blockchain, accelerating obsolescence and the perils of writing near-future science fiction

Lately, I’ve heard from several new readers of Stealing Worlds that they like the book and all but are a bit disappointed that so much of the ‘super-cool’ tech it describes is just blockchain. This reaction is both understandable in hindsight, and ironic, because there’s a lot more going on in the novel—and with blockchain and related technologies—than the staggering corruption, greed, environmental waste, and naked profiteering of the tech’s current generation might lead you to think. The story is in fact about how to avoid all of that and reap the benefits from the technology.

In short, blockchain and the broader category of trustless systems it belongs to are still important. Here’s why.

“Never Write Science Fiction Set in the Near Future.”

Or so my late editor, David Hartwell, told me. He wasn’t the first, nor the last to give me this advice; in fact, one of the earliest lessons the SF-publishing community drums into you is the danger of near-future extrapolation. If you write a story set, say, five years from now, you risk everything being obsolete by the time your tale is published. This is supposed to be bad because it signals that the author ‘got it wrong.’

I don’t buy that.

About a decade ago I realized that we were entering a historical period when everything everywhere would be changing, all at once. It’s no longer just narratives about the future that are out of date the moment they’re written; anything we write about the present is immediately obsolete. A moment like this exposes the central lie in science fiction, namely that it can in any way predict the future. If we can’t even predict the present—i.e. tell from day to day what’s real and what isn’t—then our view of what science fiction does has to change. ‘Getting it wrong’ is no longer a bug. It’s got to become a feature.

So, when I wrote Stealing Worlds, which is set in or about the year 2030, I knew the story might feel dated by the time the book came out. This would be a problem if I were trying to predict the future, but not if I wanted to build a mirror image of now that people could use to make crucial decisions about which of several paths society could take. I failed to see how thoroughly the financialization of blockchain would corrupt its original spirit (or rather, I focused on a different way in which it could be corrupted). It doesn’t matter. I stand by Stealing Worlds’ central vision and message. Much of that message has to do with forks in the road when it comes to how we use blockchain.

2018, and An Award

On February 15, 2018, having been flown to Paris by Netexplo, I was awarded the Blockchain Innovator of The Year award in the auditorium of the UNESCO building. This award came in recognition of my reframing of what blockchain was and what it could be used for. These insights are systematically set down in Stealing Worlds.

Me with my spiky trophy

What I’d been pushing was the idea that blockchain is a way of giving otherwise ephemeral, infinitely copyable and changeable, digital objects some of the same properties as real, physical things: persistence, uniqueness, and immutability. If this is what the technology does, then the most important question isn’t ‘how do I make a quick buck off it?’ It’s how does the presence of a parallel world of fixed, unalterable digital objects impact the world of physical objects we humans inhabit? As I’m writing this, that question remains unanswered. It still hangs over us, overshadowing the grotesque scam culture of bored apes and Bitcoin speculation. Those are sideshows. The real drama has yet to begin.

With that award in hand, I was riding a high as 2019 arrived, and Stealing Worlds was poised for publication. I spent 2018 running my own promotional campaign for Stealing Worlds. I hired a Virtual Assistant and spent a lot of time and scarce money to position the upcoming publication as a special event—as a vision for the crypto community to take up and run with. Critical technologies such as non-fungible tokens had yet to find a purpose in the real world, but the book included a Utopian proposal for what could be done with them. I never used the acronym NFT in the text because it was a technical term at the time, known only to coders working on Ethereum and related chains. But Stealing Worlds is largely about NFTS—about what they could be.

Then the book came out and my publisher marketed it to console gamers.

The Missed Opportunity

Without commenting on the book’s general reception, or even how good it is (I can’t be the judge of that), I can say that it missed its intended audience. It was precisely the coders who were playing with NFTs at the time, trying to figure out something new and exciting to do with them, who I wanted to reach with Stealing Worlds. I wanted them to think of NFTs as a kind of digital twin that could be used to give physical objects a presence in virtual worlds, and conversely, provide a kind of embodiment of digital objects on the physical side. The example used in the book is the ‘frameworlds,’ where LARPs contain both real-world and virtual objects and people and—this is the key point—they have equal reality in the LARP. Serious LARPs that deal with issues such as homelessness are supercharged this way; one of the characters in the story has an apartment in her ‘inventory,’ stored just like swords and apparel are for your character in games like Horizon Zero Dawn. The thing is, she can ‘pull’ the apartment out of her inventory if there is an available real-world one that is participating in the game and is empty. It becomes hers until she puts it back into her inventory and moves on. That example’s on the extreme end, so it may make more sense to picture a bag of groceries whose contents exist both in reality and as NFTs that register their reality in a parallel gameworld. As tokens in a game, they can acquire value outside of our monetary economy. The NFT digital twin enables alternative economics.

If this is still hard to picture, check out what Tomorrow Lab did when they built such a system based on the frameworlds. They actually made a usable frameworlds artifact, the Courier Commons, and they put up a great piece describing it on YouTube.

So some people got it. Unfortunately, the influencers in the crypto community didn’t take the lesson that NFTs could be digital-twin tokens that could enable a socially-driven (not socialist) economic system. Instead, they perceived that NFTs were a way to create artificial scarcity. Once something is scarce, you can monetize it, even if it’s nothing but a crap picture of a bored ape. This was definitely taking the low road, but they took it because it was a fast and nearly frictionless way to make money in the traditional economy.

Oh well.

The fact is, the frameworlds are still possible—they’re experimentally confirmed, even. And blockchain still has vast possibilities. I’ve written several stories describing what I call a potlatch currency, which is a cryptocurrency that measures how much of it you have and, if have a lot, starts giving it away. Money flows from bulging wallets to empty ones not because some government authority is imposing its will on the market, but because the money redistributes itself. It therefore fits in nearly any political system, except for plutocracy and oligarchy, which it suppresses.

Once we get past the corruption of the cryptocurrency craze, blockchain still has great potential value. We might have to wait for that whole edifice to burn itself down, to discredit itself utterly by revealing itself to be the bubble that it is.

Then maybe we can get down to some serious innovating.

The Promise of Trustless Tech

Blockchain is just one kind of trustless technology. Samantha Marin has a good summary over on Medium; the takeaway is that we want to live in a world where critical transactions, such as purchasing a mortgage or investing funds, can be done without needing to trust anyone. This is what “trustless” means—it means you don’t need to trust any third party or intermediary, such as a bank, a notary, or a government, to guarantee that a transaction has happened. A transparent, incorruptible computing system is your guarantor.

While blockchain is one way to implement a trustless system, it’s not the only one, or even the most interesting.