Both Fat Protocol and Fat App Thesis are wrong.
“Technological revolutions cement their legacy in the slow consolidation that follows the fever pitch of their inception. From the print revolution to contemporary artificial intelligence, transformative innovations undergo an installation period of exuberant experimentation and capital inflows, followed by a deployment period wherein common standards, infrastructures, and institutions harden into place. This essay charts five historical and contemporary case studies – early modern printing, industrial manufacturing, the internet, blockchain-based finance, and modern AI – to illustrate how durable “fat” forms emerge only when coordination becomes structurally unavoidable in deployment, rather than at speculative peaks during installation. Drawing on Elizabeth Eisenstein’s insights on print’s epistemic scaffolding, Carlota Perez’s model of installation/deployment cycles, David Lang’s view of standards as coordination rails, Klepper and Hounshell’s studies of industrial consolidation, Adrian Johns’s work on trust regimes, histories by Janet Abbate and others on internet chokepoints, and analyses by the BIS and technologists like Joel Monegro and David Phelps on blockchain dynamics, the essay develops a “stabilization stack” framework.”
https://npcmemo.substack.com/p/eisensteins-spine-and-technology