When Satoshi Hit Enter

If every innovation is an act of subversion, what is being subverted? And to what degree?

Markus Spiska

We don't much care if you don't approve of the software we write. We know that software can't be destroyed and that a widely dispersed system can't be shut down.
— Eric Hughes, The Cypherpunk Manifesto

Just before Satoshi Nakamoto published his 2008 whitepaper on the rudiments of Bitcoin, it must have been a bit like holding a lit match over dry forest underbrush.

Did he linger for a moment before hitting enter? 

Maybe in that moment, he closed his eyes and saw flashes from the future: of a thousand pimply geeks becoming millionaires overnight. Of Ross Ulbricht, Silk Road’s Dread Pirate Roberts, being led away in handcuffs. Of mutant strains, copycats, forks, and tokens—all competing in an ecosystem of cryptocurrencies as a digital coral reef. Of booms, busts, winters, and troughs of disillusionment.

One thing we do know about Satoshi Nakamoto is that he hit enter.

A coder strings together lines of instruction. Once he publishes his code, there is a potential butterfly effect. Technological change, happening from moment to moment around us, adds up quickly.

Just as millions of anthozoan polyps create, willy-nilly, a coral reef, so do thousands upon thousands of individual acts of insubordination and evasion create a political or economic barrier reef of their own.

Before you know it, people everywhere are taking rides with strangers. Bangladeshi women are plying their trade on smartphones. Every butterfly’s wingbeat is a potential gale of creative destruction. A billion lines of code, created by millions of coders, represent innumerable wingbeats. Some are amusements. Others are bold experiments in social transformation. 

Innovators’ work reorients us by changing our incentives, which change our behaviors. The work of subversive innovators changes the game.

By the way, subversive innovation is not the same as disruptive innovation—though we doff our hats to Clayton Christensen. Where disruptive innovations “make products and services more accessible and affordable, thereby making them available to a much larger population,” subversive innovation goes into the headwinds of entrenched power.

Banks.
Universities.
Governments.

These may also be disruptive but carry the potential to replace long-accepted, long-assumed mediating structures. So, subversive innovations should also probably be more disruptive.

These are the hierarchies we trust and accept as a given. They are now vulnerable.

In other words, subversive innovation can eliminate middlemen that are no longer functionally needed or spiritually wanted. When we consider all the needless mediating structures in the contemporary world, the implications are staggering.

But let‘s not get ahead of ourselves.

It’s not enough to imagine the end state. In the present moment, every step is the first. Think of Satoshi Nakamoto, not as a person or group who created something you half-understand and may not like.

Think of him as a symbol.
As a catalyst.
As you.