There’s a kind of silence I remember from childhood. It wasn’t peaceful, it was the kind of silence you learn when your parents don’t know the system well enough to explain it to you. When you grow up as the designated form-filler, the translator, the one who googles everything and hopes you’re right. FAFSA, driver’s licenses, government portals, job applications, these things weren’t just steps in a process. They were puzzles with missing pieces, written in a language we didn’t grow up speaking.

And so, early on, many of us learned that the digital world had locks we weren’t given keys to.

It didn’t matter how capable we were. If we didn’t have the “right” paperwork, the “right” access, the “right” timing or tone, we stayed locked out. Or, worse, we assumed maybe it just wasn’t meant for us.

That’s why Web3 felt different, not in a hypey, “get rich fast” kind of way, but in that quiet moment of realization: I don’t need permission to begin. No one needed to verify my credit. No one asked me for a polished LinkedIn profile or my past salary. I could show up, mint a story, participate in a DAO, and immediately contribute to something larger than myself.

For someone like me , that wasn’t just technical access. It was psychological reversal.

I grew up watching people build with what little they had, turning family kitchens into mini-businesses, remixing fashion out of hand-me-downs, helping neighbors in a way that never made it into a resume. It’s only now, in the language of Web3, that I realize we were practicing open-source thinking long before we ever heard those words. My family, like so many immigrant and first-gen households, survived by sharing code, just not the digital kind. Recipes were handed down without exact measurements, job leads were whispered across dinner tables, childcare was swapped without Venmo, and legal documents were translated by whoever knew just a little more English than the rest. We didn’t have the internet. We were the internet. A decentralized, bilingual network of aunties and cousins syncing information over landlines and leftovers. The protocols were oral, the nodes were kitchen tables, and the bandwidth was human endurance. What Web3 gives us now isn’t the invention of sharing, it’s the infrastructure to finally record it, value it, and build on it at scale.

A crypto wallet doesn’t care where you were born, whether your degree is accredited, or if your name is hard to pronounce. It cares that you showed up. That you interacted. That you contributed. And suddenly, that contribution becomes currency. That wallet becomes a new kind of record, a living archive of your effort and your experiments.

It’s not that Web3 erases inequality. The world hasn’t changed overnight. But it cracks open space. For someone who’s spent a lifetime waiting their turn, that space can feel like the beginning of everything.

I think about how platforms like Zora reward creators not just for making art or music, but for helping shape the platform itself. How Mirror lets someone like me publish without needing an agent or a publisher or a gatekeeper’s approval. I can upload a piece of my story, and if it resonates, if someone see themselves in it, that’s enough to start value exchange. Not validation from institutions, but recognition from peers.

And yes, some of it still feels clunky and strange. There are risks. Scams. Steep learning curves. But there’s also room for experimentation, for weird projects, emotional posts, new kinds of collaboration. There’s room to unlearn the silence we were raised with.

So no, I’m not saying Web3 will save us. But I do believe it can unmute us. And that alone makes it worth exploring. Because sometimes all it takes is one blog, one wallet, one messy first attempt and suddenly, you’re not just surviving the internet. You’re shaping it.

There’s a kind of silence I remember from childhood. It wasn’t peaceful, it was the kind of silence you learn when your parents don’t know the system well enough to explain it to you. When you grow up as the designated form-filler, the translator, the one who googles everything and hopes you’re right. FAFSA, driver’s licenses, government portals, job applications, these things weren’t just steps in a process. They were puzzles with missing pieces, written in a language we didn’t grow up speaking.

And so, early on, many of us learned that the digital world had locks we weren’t given keys to.

It didn’t matter how capable we were. If we didn’t have the “right” paperwork, the “right” access, the “right” timing or tone, we stayed locked out. Or, worse, we assumed maybe it just wasn’t meant for us.

That’s why Web3 felt different, not in a hypey, “get rich fast” kind of way, but in that quiet moment of realization: I don’t need permission to begin. No one needed to verify my credit. No one asked me for a polished LinkedIn profile or my past salary. I could show up, mint a story, participate in a DAO, and immediately contribute to something larger than myself.

For someone like me , that wasn’t just technical access. It was psychological reversal.

I grew up watching people build with what little they had, turning family kitchens into mini-businesses, remixing fashion out of hand-me-downs, helping neighbors in a way that never made it into a resume. It’s only now, in the language of Web3, that I realize we were practicing open-source thinking long before we ever heard those words. My family, like so many immigrant and first-gen households, survived by sharing code, just not the digital kind. Recipes were handed down without exact measurements, job leads were whispered across dinner tables, childcare was swapped without Venmo, and legal documents were translated by whoever knew just a little more English than the rest. We didn’t have the internet. We were the internet. A decentralized, bilingual network of aunties and cousins syncing information over landlines and leftovers. The protocols were oral, the nodes were kitchen tables, and the bandwidth was human endurance. What Web3 gives us now isn’t the invention of sharing, it’s the infrastructure to finally record it, value it, and build on it at scale.

A crypto wallet doesn’t care where you were born, whether your degree is accredited, or if your name is hard to pronounce. It cares that you showed up. That you interacted. That you contributed. And suddenly, that contribution becomes currency. That wallet becomes a new kind of record, a living archive of your effort and your experiments.

It’s not that Web3 erases inequality. The world hasn’t changed overnight. But it cracks open space. For someone who’s spent a lifetime waiting their turn, that space can feel like the beginning of everything.

I think about how platforms like Zora reward creators not just for making art or music, but for helping shape the platform itself. How Mirror lets someone like me publish without needing an agent or a publisher or a gatekeeper’s approval. I can upload a piece of my story, and if it resonates, if someone see themselves in it, that’s enough to start value exchange. Not validation from institutions, but recognition from peers.

And yes, some of it still feels clunky and strange. There are risks. Scams. Steep learning curves. But there’s also room for experimentation, for weird projects, emotional posts, new kinds of collaboration. There’s room to unlearn the silence we were raised with.

So no, I’m not saying Web3 will save us. But I do believe it can unmute us. And that alone makes it worth exploring. Because sometimes all it takes is one blog, one wallet, one messy first attempt and suddenly, you’re not just surviving the internet. You’re shaping it.