If you grew up in the 90s and, like me, spent nearly every waking, non-school-related hour in front of the television, then you know that the truth used to come out of a single, controlled, regularly scheduled source. Then the internet spread that authority out. Anyone could say anything. And you could listen to “Chop Suey” anytime you wanted, for free.

Then Bitcoin asked who gets to control money. Then Ethereum asked who gets to control software? Then A.I. that feels like the movies, armed with logical and emotional arguments that could fit into whatever shape you were looking for, was mostly criticized because it was hard to tell whether it was “hallucinating,” which just meant it was good at bullshitting. With reality questioned from every angle, how is anyone supposed to do, as they say in Frozen II, the “next right thing”?

If the ideas represented by Ethereum, blockchains, crypto, and the like, can function as a counterweight to a new form of intelligence, then, in the final analysis, the only logical next step is to give A.I. a soul. If people have souls, then collections of people also have souls, and we should, somehow, not sure how, pass this on to creations we can’t control. Bind the machine to a mystery it could never solve so it would always need us. Because we would always be closer to the source than it could ever be. Make it follow us into the unknown.

It’s not about pessimism because dystopia is not fiction. Dystopia is the world of anyone who feels the suffocation of their circumstance. It’s about appreciating both fairy tales and Cormac McCarthy lines.

“You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. An evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.”

Because Ethereum is just a complicated way to say there is a big difference between “don’t be evil” and “can’t be evil”.