The Future is Here: Where my head's at right now on crypto, surveillance, and free speech

For every person lifting you up, there is another rooting for your demise. Some might call it balance, others might call it human, others still might say that that's just life. Regardless of whether this is just the way of things, tension and pull between such polarities can be destabilizing if you let it. So how do you not let it?

The crypto markets might be relatively newish in the grand scheme of things (cryptocurrencies have been evolving for nearly almost a decade now), but they really are just the latest iteration of a larger social experiment - the free flow of the human experience. The social media chorus, favoring the spectacle of the carnival, obscures what is ultimately a planetary revolution.

What happens when value can be transferred almost instantaneously across the globe securely and for free without middlemen? What happens when billions of individuals are empowered with that ability? Everything changes. Ancient priesthoods and kingships of all kinds are overthrown, political borders are exposed for the illusions that they are, and we are free to engage with one another once again at a deeply human level.

These newfound planetary capabilities shrink the world, illuminate the dark, and water deserts; they enable us to feed the multitudes, free the captives, give sight to the blind, all at an unprecedented scale. Evolution is painful and growing up is hard to do, but we're here. The planet has evolved itself via the human mind, the human heart, human hands, the human spirit.

However, as author William Gibson famously once said, "The future is already here - it's just not evenly distributed." Despite Pharaoh's priests being exposed and humiliated by plague after plague, he still sent his army to chase after the Israelites, only for it to be swallowed whole by the sea. As the future distributes itself in a material sense, spreading the awareness and acceptance of its arrival is just as important. The future is here, it is weird, and that's okay.

Our own pharaohs' priests will continue to be humiliated and their armies will be swallowed by the seas if they forget to accept what is already apparent to so many of the rest of us. All regimes rise and fall, and they are always temporary.

^{Josh Peterson is a writer living in Denver, CO. He is a 2016-2017 Robert Novak Journalism Program Fellow for The Fund for American Studies, studying the impact of artificial intelligence on democracy. He is also an advisor to PassageX, a blockchain startup tackling the secondary event ticket market, and the founder and publisher of The Coin Dispatch, a news and opinion site covering cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and artificial intelligence.}

^{Image Credit: Pharaoh's army engulfed by the Red Sea, oil on canvas, by Frederick Arthur Bridgman (1900) - Public Domain}