Companion to The New Common Sense https://paragraph.com/@jonathancolton.eth/the-new-common-sense.

Every revolution starts the same way: someone sees a new truth and can’t go back.
Copernicus looked at the sky, and the Earth stopped being the center.
Einstein bent time, and Newton’s clockwork universe cracked.
In Kathmandu, a QR code opened a Discord server after the government banned social media, and a generation realized their digital rights were not a privilege—they were a necessity.

Once you see a truth that clearly, the old world no longer fits.
Maps are wrong. Power is misaligned.
Behavior starts to shift—fast.

New truths don’t politely wait for consensus. They arrive, undeniable, and demand new distribution to carry them.

This is the ignition point.
It is as true for political uprisings as for scientific breakthroughs, and it is happening again now on-chain.

In 1776, Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense—short, plain-spoken, impossible to ignore.
Its power wasn’t just in the prose; it was in the distribution of a new political truth:
that ordinary people could govern themselves.

Cheap pamphlets, a dense network of colonial printers, and a postal system that reached every tavern and church turned this radical concept of self-rule into a continental movement.

This was the moment they saw a new truth they could not unsee.

Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, showed that science doesn’t simply accumulate facts—it jumps between worldviews.
For long stretches, “normal science” refines the reigning model.
But anomalies—observations the model can’t explain—slowly pile up.
At first, they’re dismissed as noise.
Eventually, they become impossible to ignore, and the old framework collapses.
What follows is a paradigm shift: a sudden reordering of concepts, methods, and even language.

These leaps are rare but decisive. They redraw reality itself:

Each of these revolutions began when someone saw a truth the old model couldn’t contain—a truth that made existing explanations feel not just incomplete but wrong.
And each spread until reality itself was redefined: textbooks rewritten, institutions restructured, and entire industries born.

Kuhn’s deeper lesson: paradigm shifts are as much social and linguistic as they are technical.
A new theory wins not only by being correct, but because a critical mass of practitioners adopts a new language, a new way of seeing, and teaches it to the next generation.

The same pattern is visible far beyond science.
Technological, cultural, and economic revolutions follow this rhythm:
long stability, mounting anomaly, sudden break—until the world itself feels different.

If science reveals new truths, technology scales them into daily life.

Economist Carlota Perez shows how every 40–60 years, a cluster of technologies reorganizes the world economy. Each cycle follows the same heartbeat: installation → turning point → deployment.

Every cycle begins the same way: someone sees a new truth about what machines and networks can do—and can’t unknow it.

The sixth cycle is starting now.
On-chain protocols and wallet-native networks are converging with large AI models and autonomous agents to form a programmable global economy—where money, code, and culture interoperate by default.
When you can send money around the world for pennies without asking a bank’s permission, or watch an AI agent write and deploy code, you realize the old economic, cultural, and institutional arrangements are temporary—and a new architecture for how the world creates, trades, and governs is already underway.

The pattern isn’t history—it’s alive.

In September 2025, Nepal’s government banned 26 major social platforms, trying to force them to register under new rules. For a nation where more than half the population is under 30, it was an overnight cancellation of digital rights and freedom.

And as every builder knows, attention and money flow to pain.

Within hours, that pain concentrated attention across Nepal’s Gen Z. They built instant distribution using Discord servers as a virtual parliament, social media leaks and memes, QR-coded flyers, and VPNs to circumvent the ban.

For Nepal’s Gen Z, the instant a QR code opened a Discord parliament was the instant they knew digital freedom was non-negotiable—a truth they could never unsee.

In less than a week, they forced the government to repeal the ban and the prime minister to resign.

How the government miscalculated:
They applied a factory-era fix to a network-native society—flipping a legal switch and expecting silence. Instead they amplified the signal of pain and triggered the fastest distribution event in the country’s history.

Leaderless yet organized, decisions emerged from the swarm.
Discord servers and social feeds weren’t side channels—they were the revolution’s bloodstream.

Seeing a new truth is the spark.
Moving an entire society requires ignition—an engine that fuses mental clarity and emotional urgency.
Heads and hearts aren’t metaphors here; they are the mechanism by which ideas escape the lab and reshape the world.

Heads — mental clarity

• Chris Dixon’s Read → Write → Own explains the next internet.

• Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations shows how a new truth travels—first through innovators who experiment, then early adopters who validate and broadcast it—until the early and late majority tip society into the new normal.

• Carlota Perez shows how infrastructure cycles unfold.

Hearts — emotional urgency

• John Kotter shows that lasting change starts with emotional ignition, not spreadsheets: people see a new truth and cannot return to the old story.
  That shock of clarity creates urgent action and a shared vision, the fuel that moves early believers.

• Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm explains the next hurdle—turning that early surge into mass adoption by bridging the gap between early adopters and the pragmatic majority.
  As visible wins mount and the idea proves itself across that chasm, the new way hardens into norms, institutions, and default expectations—until it becomes how the world works.

When heads and hearts align, distribution doesn’t just spread ideas—it rewires institutions.
That is how Paine’s pamphlets seeded democracy, how Einstein’s equations bent reality, and how a QR code helped topple a government.

Seeing the truth is the spark; moving heads and hearts is how the spark catches and the old order gives way.

That same moment is happening now on-chain.

When you can move money across the world for pennies in seconds—no bank, no gatekeeper—or watch an AI agent write and deploy code on its own, or reach a global audience and monetize that attention with no middleman or high take rates, you’ve seen a new truth you can’t unsee.

This is the early stage of an open global economy—an inflection on the scale of the printing press or the Industrial Revolution.
Builders and creators who start now aren’t just participants—they’re founders of the systems that will govern how value, culture, and freedom flow for generations.

Start building today on the open global economy. What you create now will become the foundation for billions tomorrow.