| Hello, and welcome to this week’s installment of the Future in Five Questions. This week I spoke with Chris Dixon, the Andreessen Horowitz general partner and author of blockchain treatise “Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet,” which I covered in Wednesday’s edition of DFD. Fielding our weekly questionnaire, Dixon defended what he calls the “productive use of blockchains,” discussed why he thinks that a correctly arrayed set of incentives can power a better internet, and argued for clearer blockchain legislation from Congress. This conversation was edited and condensed for clarity: What’s one underrated big idea? The thesis of my book is that the productive use of blockchains, as opposed to the speculative use, is underrated. The internet has become increasingly consolidated, there are roughly five companies that control 95 percent of the money, traffic and flow of the internet. Using blockchains, it's possible to build a new wave of internet services that can credibly fight that consolidation. You can build anything from social networks, to games, to financial services in a new way where the money and power is shifted back to the edges of the network, to the users, to the creators and software developers who use these systems as opposed to the gatekeepers in the middle. Some new technologies are disruptive in that they first appear like a toy and are dismissed by many incumbents, but they present a fundamentally new model that is misaligned with the incumbent business model. To contrast blockchains and AI, they're both important, new technologies, but with AI a company like Google can layer in AI and keep their existing business model. Whereas saying, “I'm going to create a social network where the money doesn't flow to the center” is very hard for Facebook or Twitter to respond to, because it fundamentally undercuts their whole business model. What’s a technology that you think is overhyped? In the book, I have this distinction between the “computer” and the “casino.” The other side of blockchains, the side that has been very visible with FTX and financial speculation, and the focus on gambling, scams and everything else, does exist. It’s settled in a lot of people's minds that that’s the sole purpose of crypto and blockchain when in fact it's only part of the story. It only represents one community that is the “casino” community. What book most shaped your conception of the future? Clay Christensen’s “The Innovators’ Dilemma” is still the most important, influential tech book to me, after almost 30 years. He tries to answer the question of why, in technology, does it so often happen that, for example, Xerox misses the commercial application of the very thing they invented, or how Google surprised Microsoft, and how again and again you see this pattern of new things coming along to surprise people. The interesting answer he had was not that the managers are incompetent, but actually that they're very competent, and they're trying to please their best customers. But the nature of technology is new things come along, there are low-end new products that look kind of silly or toy-like, but they get better and better over time, and surprise people. What could government be doing regarding technology that it isn’t? A lot of the current approach to technology regulation I would describe as reactive, meaning there are these regulatory actions followed by litigation, as opposed to legislation. We’re seeing this in blockchain and crypto, where the Securities and Exchange Commission will go after somebody, and then it'll go to court and that will take five years. We're seeing it with copyright and AI. Maybe five years from now we'll get a court ruling, as opposed to what I think is the better way to do it, which is to have a public conversation about the pros and cons of these new technologies. I try to make the positive case for blockchain in my book. We've seen the negative case in the headlines, and with AI, clearly it has its own benefits and drawbacks. It takes jobs. The right way to do this is to look at the technology in its fullness and then through the democratic process come up with smart policy that tries to maximize the good and minimize the bad. What surprised you most this year? With respect to blockchain and crypto, I am surprised the market has come back this quickly. Bitcoin had an all-time high around a month ago. I work in the space and manage a fund in the space, so I obviously believe in the technology long-term. But I am a little surprised by this after we had a very, very bad set of incidents two years ago, with FTX and some others, when I thought it would take longer to bounce back.
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