Given the vitriol around this subject in the past decade, I’ve been hesitant to elaborate on why it’s not only an inevitable development, but a necessary part of human evolution. In all honesty, I’m writing this now not to convince anyone, but to gather my thoughts about several observations and really substantiate the personal conclusion that to this point has felt unshakeable.

Is the iPod a phone? No, but by now we understand that the iPod has been a monumental precursor to a daily life PDA.

Here’s the famous iPhone reveal:

Here’s the first preview of an Android smartphone:

The key takeaway, for obvious reasons, is Steve Jobs explaining that not only would one device would contain all of these capabilities, but the “leapfrog” component would be a revolutionary UI upgrade. There could be some argument about the finer details, but look at whatever phone you have now: they all contain elements of this UI revolution. In a poetic sense, this UI was custom-fit for one’s preference for personal effects. In the present, when you leave your home, what do you bring with you? Typically, internet-native generations do not carry around briefcases. The same vibe can be felt at the lockscreen and the main page.

Now, let’s consider the recent Solana Mobile Stack & Saga reveal:

I think most of the backlash is unwarranted, but in all sincerity, is this the leapfrog platform? What is it about Saga that will change everything we do on the blockchain, on our phones? Personally, I compare the announcement of Saga with the iPod. The clear parallel is that the problem being solved is economic, primarily that we as mobile developers and users are bound to a duopoly of distributors: the Apple App Store, and the Google Play Store. Additionally, while much of web3 is exactly that, webapp-centric, most of us are still looking for a smoother, more secure, and mobile-first access. But I also think that there will be a common mobile stack for OSS devices, which will force a universal logistical understanding of OSS hardware, all the way down to the source of silicon.

Unfortunately, we’ve been siloed by dopamine hacks. Most popular web and mobile apps tend to be addicting by design. Are we going to leapfrog the mobile experience of today by eschewing or embracing that quality? As an optimist and a pragmatist, I fixate on the natural serotonin/dopamine experience: repetitive accomplishment and socialization. The problem with social media is that it is cherrypicked & microcosmic; that we receive a warped sense of achievement and belonging. However, for the next generation of mobile devices, augmentation of the natural experience will be imperative. Additionally, the leapfrog moment will happen when there is no primary device swallowing the market share of your daily life. We should be chasing a dopamine-free interface that connects us to whatever we want without demanding that we stare at a screen or constantly pull a mini-tablet or an earpod pack out of our pockets.

The point is, you shouldn’t sleep on mobile-centric blockchain development. It will change how you perceive enjoyment, how you find motivation, and how you choose to interact with a universal economy.

Personally, I was looking forward to AR to the point of obsession. There were two major broadcasts that captured just how powerful this might have become, were there not ethical concerns (will expand on this further below):

Notice the visible discomfort of the people who notice they are being recorded. There was also this applied “bionic supervision” contact lens, which I still believe has not been popularized enough to evaluate. Since then, the technology has improved somewhat, but our main source of nontraditional display with wide adoption has been the Oculus. Now, it’s a major component of Facebook’s transition into Meta. The point to this subject is that we as humans love to invent and use tools, and AR/VR has been a cultural obsession for quite a few decades.

The key idea of these interfaces and our pleasurable experiences has been a “shortcut” through KBM/screen interfaces. For a time, there was a PC revolution, and much of the sci-fi revolved around interacting digitally from the comfort of one’s home.

Now, we’ve acclimated to the reality of mobile UX being more EV from a service provider’s perspective, and the hardware constantly hits inflection points like the earpod and RFID implants. There’s even a cyborg pioneer in Ethereum:

A lot of IRL use cases become a lot more real, like a cashless society or more secure building/container access. In the metaverse, this translates as a more convenient & spontaneous “login”. Consider the experience of joining a Twitter space. I would describe the technological advances as an increasingly more usable schizotypal experience. It doesn’t need to be more specifically articulated, the focal understanding of the metaverse is that it is powerful enough to divorce us from physical reality. With respect to stacking this on top of cryptoeconomics, all of a sudden the privilege of constantly capitalizing personal experience in both realities become the same dimension; all of a sudden we have a paramount, unadulterated source of truth that can both anchor and uncouple us from what we need to observe in order to believe. This is mobility of an existential nature.

This section is going to be controversial, because it takes a lot of alarming mechanics for granted. For example, we’ve known for many years that modern society and exposure to consumer electronics have involved a panopticon surveillance network. There are also private service providers of the same nature. So when something like Google Glass comes along, it’s more than fair to criticize how invasive it is, and where Alphabet is extracting data from. However, we have developed a culture of accountability through these technologies, like mandating police bodycams. The imperfections and failures of this culture is not mandating the full, transparent disclosure and access control of the public. If there was an analogue bodycam that upheld the standard of self-sovereign data, or the flow of information was constricted to tamper-evident hardware in verifiable events and participants in public settings, this would be different.

Without good policies, they risk becoming just another police surveillance device—and one with very real potential to invade privacy. Especially important are policies governing when the cameras are turned on, and who has access to the footage and under what conditions. -ACLU

Ethics aside, what does the future look like? Firstly, I’m not going to say with any degree of confidence that we will have unbreakably tamper-evident hardware. There is possibility of quantum key encryption, and we’ve seen experiments where on-chain endpoints have been constructed with fewer hypothetical insecurities.

https://creators.mirror.xyz/5heGuW5JIkDp67D4j4DtRpAi4ToiJzCeNFunU4cjkBw

But none of it matters. We can already assume that so much of what we intend to keep private is already exfiltrated by entities with enough resources that already exist. The question isn’t “what privacy concerns do we have about this consumer/opensource technology”, it’s actually “what marginal capability of abusing privacy will this consumer/opensource technology grant bad actors, given the preexisting disabuse of privacy by persistent threat actors?”.

In order to be a truly mobile society, we have to be a truly free society. One might argue that personal surveillance devices with verifiable public hardware limiters is a balancing force, so long as the public is fully knowledgeable.

I suspect most of the technology that will manifest a mobile society is the technology that negates uncertainty. Deepfakes are a lot harder to produce if there is a common standard for secure & private verification metadata. Physical locations are harder to silently break into if the locks are not only tamper-evident, but also require some temporary allowance from multiple parties that cannot collude. Personally identifiable information, like health or purchase metadata, is a lot harder to exploit if there’s no middleman or server-based data storage. These things in their current iterations need improvement, and they won’t be perfect for a long time, but we can imagine the tangible end result.

Consider the cutting edge for microchip implants. (btw, keep an eye on biohacking forums like Dangerous Things). There definitely are fundamental insecurities in this sort of hardware, however microchip implants that one might find in their pet are physically short range, meaning that in order even read what’s on the chip, one has to be in very close proximity. This means that one has to be physically detained by, or within an unusually close proximity to, one’s attacker. There are also other limitations like physical fragility & read/write capabilities, but these things are no more a limitation than what we currently use, like smartphones or smart tags (which are already being abused by bad actors).

With microchip implants come biometrics. We already have a very intense commission for personal health, but with these devices, the body of medical knowledge would increase at an accelerated rate. We may have preventative medicine that is so effective that the resulting windfall in falling healthcare costs might spark a renaissance in unrelated industries. However, with the illegality of certain biological processes, this can go very wrong, very quickly. Just because it’s bound to happen, doesn’t mean we need to learn to be helpless in the face of it. Now is the time explore how these health implants evolve our fitness, how they break, and how we secure the data they produce.

This extends to our globally connected economy. With a suspension of disbelief, consider the possibilities:

• all supply chains, public and private, go through facilities where a member of the public can verify that security guards are on-premise & incapable of collusion.

• personal or public belongings of any kind can be stored in any connected location without risk of theft, and reputational cost if abused by a member of the public with access.

• any member of the public can permissionlessly work in any publicly connected (private or public) premise with implied reputational costs & get compensated by a free, open labor market by the quality of their labor (“skilled” or not). Without invasive surveillance.

• any member of the public can receive a p2p education in any vocation and immediately apply it in practice.

• collegiate environments where there are no more letter grades or GPA, only a high-resolution record of a student’s conduct, without need for admission to that environment.

• a world where physical prisons and dedicated police become obsolete, or home arrest is publicly verifiable and instantaneously turned on & off by a constrained public decision-making process that is extremely costly to abuse or collude against.

• blind ballots in democratic votes are not only orders of magnitude more secure, but orders of magnitude more costly to delegitimize.

• everyone carries around more ergonomic, workhorse PCs, and securely plug into any grid to get paid for any digital workload.

• people get paid throughout a casual day via the wealth of public data they collect & produce.

• ad agencies become obsolete because word-of-mouth advertisement can be quantified and compensated without leaving the conversation or succumbing to collusion.

Can these technologies be abused by the public and turned into a dystopian future? Absolutely, and there’s no time like the present to be aware of the problem and expeditiously reinforce the better outcome, especially in the context of our present society. With the current dystopia and the optionality of the future, we can become more mobile individuals and still benefit a collectivist good. We don’t have to succumb to the inevitable abuse of technology by the few behind the curtain.

In conclusion, I see a lot of inevitable technological shifts that will happen within most of our lifetimes. It is not prudent to discredit or dismiss these trends. Many of these improvements are leapfrog technologies, changing the way we physically or digitally interact (earpods being a recent and powerful example), but the main impact is changing how we think about transactions and our rights. There’s quite a bit to disintermediate commercially, but this is more so a fundamental and existential shift. History will be recorded differently and be more granularly “true”, our sense of logistics and economics will change dramatically, the sensation of pleasure will come from completely novel sources that we can certifiably comprehend as more beneficial than getting a social media notification. There’s too much to imagine, but the focus in the present should be centered on what might have gone wrong already, what will go wrong if we’re not cautious, what changes we need to anticipate, and most importantly, how we improvise with the tools we have now and further on. Do not sleep on the experiments that will change the fabric of our mobile society.