We’re all trying to realize our own versions of progress: making personal changes to be better people than we were yesterday, helping friends achieve their dreams, advocating for local causes we believe will make the world a better place.

In 1996, John Perry Barlow wrote "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace", a poetic proclamation of victory in the battle for a free and open web; an affirmation of what the internet could mean both socially and politically. It was an important piece of internet history that still resonates today. But just a decade later, platforms like Facebook began their rise to power and the vision for an open, semantic web was quickly forgotten in favor of something as benign as an easy to use "like" button within a social walled-garden.

We all have an immediate, almost visceral understanding of the distinction between the past and the future, even from our most mundane experiences. We learn from the past, and we plan for the future. We celebrate, we commemorate, we mourn, and we hope. Yet, as Feynman notes no one would wait very long for a broken cup to come back together.

Disclaimer: I’m mostly using the term “metaverse” as a placeholder here, but there’s a lot of great work happening around new terminology.

For better or for worse, we live in a world run by institutions, and where power is sticky, and systemic change is hard. But technology over the last 20 years has produced perhaps the biggest shift in power seen in generations, with large social platforms and tools influencing everything from how we share space with one another at an individual level to how we collectively govern ourselves at the level of nation-states.

Last year, Marc Andreessen famously (or infamously) wrote “It’s Time To Build”, in which he lamented the failure of our institutions to act decisively in the face of the pandemic, and more broadly to collectively imagine and build towards a better future. For many of us he argued, our complacency with the status quo traps us, and makes us reluctantly accept the world around us in place of meaningful action.