Forward Guidance
Tech Can Rescue Us From Big Brother
We’ve placed our trust in institutions, and now they’re abusing it. There is a better way.
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Information used to be a localized affair. Before the internet, bank accounts were confined to physical ledgers in a filing cabinet and took so much work to copy that they rarely left the building.
IBM mainframes entered the office in the 1960s and ’70s and introduced the era of digital centralization. It wasn’t a conscious shift as much as a convenient one. Computers were good at managing information, so we kept giving them more. Bank checks, bond coupons, and stock certificates soon disappeared in favor of electronic record keeping. Today it would be unthinkable to rely on a paper bearer instrument of significant value.