In medieval Europe, the Church held a monopoly on information. Manuscripts were copied by hand in monasteries. Literacy was rare, and deliberately so. Scripture was interpreted by clergy and delivered to the faithful in a language most could not read. Knowledge was not forbidden — it was simply controlled. Access was conditional on obedience, orthodoxy, and institutional approval.
This was not a conspiracy. It was a system. The Church genuinely believed it was protecting people from error. And within its logic, it was. But the effect was the same regardless of intent: a small number of institutions decided what information reached the many, and on what terms.
We look back on this and see it clearly for what it was. We are less willing to see that the same structure has been rebuilt, in digital form, by the technology companies that now mediate nearly all human information exchange.
The architecture of control has changed. The dynamic has not. A small number of institutions still decide what information reaches the many, and on what terms.
The Digital Clergy
Consider the parallels. In the medieval model, the Church controlled the means of production (scriptoria), the means of distribution (churches), and the means of interpretation (theology). In the digital model, a handful of companies control the means of production (cloud infrastructure, AI models), the means of distribution (search, social, app stores), and the means of interpretation (algorithms, rankings, content moderation).
The language has changed. We no longer speak of heresy; we speak of terms of service violations. We do not excommunicate; we de-platform. The indices of forbidden books have been replaced by content policies written in Menlo Park and Cupertino. But the structural relationship — a centralized authority deciding what knowledge is permissible and who may access it — is remarkably similar.
A developer builds an application on a platform. The platform changes its API terms. The application dies. A publisher builds an audience on a social network. The algorithm shifts. The audience disappears. A researcher trains an AI model using a cloud provider. The provider raises prices or changes acceptable use policies. The research stops. In every case, someone who built on infrastructure they did not own discovers that permission can be revoked at any time.
The Printing Press Moment
The Church’s information monopoly was not broken by reform from within. It was broken by a technology that made the monopoly structurally impossible: the printing press. Gutenberg did not petition the Church for broader access to knowledge. He built a machine that made the question of access irrelevant. Once books could be produced cheaply and distributed widely, no institution could control what people read.
The consequences were profound and took generations to fully manifest. The Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment — all were downstream effects of a single architectural change: information production became permissionless.
We are at an analogous moment. Open, public, permissionless protocols are the printing press of our era. They do not ask for better terms from existing gatekeepers. They make the gatekeepers architecturally unnecessary.
Open protocols do not reform the gatekeepers. They make gatekeeping structurally impossible.
From Platforms to Protocols
The shift from platforms to protocols is not a technical curiosity. It is a civilizational correction. Every time information flow has been centralized — by the Church, by state censors, by broadcast monopolies — it has eventually been decentralized by a new technology. Each cycle takes a different form, but the pattern is invariant.
Decentralized finance protocols remove the bank from financial transactions. Decentralized data protocols remove the cloud provider from data storage. Decentralized intelligence protocols remove the AI lab from the production of intelligence. In each case, the function persists while the gatekeeper is eliminated.
This is not utopian thinking. It is pattern recognition. The question is not whether this transition will happen — history is unambiguous on this point. The question is how long it takes and which protocols will define the new architecture.
We are investing in the protocols that we believe will be foundational to this transition. Not because we are ideologues, but because we are students of history. And history is clear: open systems always prevail.