Last decade gave us our individual voices with social media. Now, it’s time to take the control back from the big platforms and take ownership of our content, audience, business, finances, and the rest of our property.
Intermediaries are valuable but when they can deplatform you at their whim it’s time to reverse the process. Fortunately, the technology advancements enable this now.
Blockchain, DeFi, edge computing and other technology solutions make it possible to take direct ownership and control without relying on any external party.
This is a huge paradigm shift in our societies. It will take years but it’s a necessary move. Incumbents are not giving up their position and leverage voluntarily. The only way to turn the tables is to create something better and make them irrelevant.
In some cases, this is rather easy. Facebook’s Whatsapp created the perfect gift and opportunity for its competitors by announcing its change on the terms and services. We are lucky to have better alternatives immediately available such as Signal.
In other fields, the choices are more limited. It’s harder to stop using USD if your trading partners, salary or other dependencies make you still to use it. Yet, it’s unsustainable when a currency is printing money at the rate what the US is doing at the moment. They are deplatforming the rest of the world and ending their global currency domination by their very actions.
When everyone is only 100 ms away, it’s easier to start to ask questions that were much harder to consider when we tended to think more locally. Now, much of what we do happens online and the physical boundaries are irrelevant.
This mental shift will disrupt a lot of old ways of doing things in the coming years. Your business is no different. Customer expectations are shifting and leapfrogging. What was acceptable a few years ago is totally out of order now.
When you have tasted the freedom and control of your own affairs in one aspect of your life it becomes harder to keep up the reverse ways in others. Individual empowerment is starting to penetrate areas that were incomprehensible earlier.
Public sector and central governments have started to feel this disruption. Expect more turmoil and redefining of all the ways of doing things. We are recreating, rebooting and questioning a lot at this point.
Change is good. We just hate the uncertainty. Enjoy the ride and build something better.
