Welcome to my little corner of the internet. I haven’t had anything remotely resembling a blog since the Geocities era, which, if you’ve never gone spelunking through the archived ruins, I highly recommend. It’s a trip. Tiling backgrounds, visitor counters, embedded MIDI files autoplaying the Zelda theme. Unhinged. Charming. A chaotic monument to people just… putting stuff on the internet because they felt like it. We’ve come so far.

Anyway. Brief introduction.

My name is Kasey. I’m the local webmaster here. I grew up in the nineties and had an overwhelmingly positive experience with the internet as a kid. It was great: weird, scrappy, full of passion projects and fan pages and people sharing things because they wanted to, not because an algorithm would reward them for it. Fast forward: I became an engineer, studied computer science, started a family, and somewhere along the way the internet quietly transformed into a machine designed to extract as much value from you as it possibly can.

What used to be useful information is now an SEO-optimized landing page for a product you don’t need. Engagement is farmed by an algorithm so opaque it may as well be magic, and that algorithm is optimized not for your benefit but for your continued presence. Safeguards exist, sure, but at this point we’re basically reading the warning label on a pack of cigarettes while the cartoon mascot waves at us from the corner and the company solemnly insists it does not market to children.

Needless to say, I’m a little pessimistic about how this all turned out.

I want my kids to have access to the shared collection of human knowledge. What I don’t want is for them to receive a curated drip-feed of opinions and half-truths from content creators and comment bots, optimized for engagement and delivered by a system that profits from outrage. It’s hard to sell “technology is great, actually” when the technology you’re advocating for is constantly trying to sell you snake oil.

So. What’s the plan.

I Have An LLC And A Half-Baked Idea, Let’s Go

I’m a moderately technology-literate person. I like identifying problems and building solutions. I also happen to have an LLC I started a few years back for some contract engineering work on the side, which means I have a legal entity and a business checking account, which basically makes me a tech founder at this point.

Now. You remember the blockchain thing? Imaginary internet money. Monkey JPEGs. The conviction, somehow, that everything, including a picture of a rock, needed to be tokenized and sold for six figures?

Turns out it wasn’t entirely a scam.

I mean, most of it was absolutely a scam. But under the monkey JPEGs and the rug pulls and the celebrity shilling was an actually interesting idea: what if you could coordinate untrusting parties (cloud providers, compute nodes, strangers on the internet) to produce high-assurance, verifiable computation without any single middleman who could interfere, lie, or cheat, provided we were all playing by the same ruleset? Resilient systems. Trustless infrastructure. Real engineering problems with real solutions.

Now, I know it’s not all perfect. The internet is a pretty horrible place, remember? And greed is the root of all evil, right? Yet still, somehow, someway, these machines are able to work with one another in an interesting way that effectively causes auto-executing self-exclusion for anyone trying to break the rules.

So here’s the pitch, and I’ll try to make it more compelling than “come join web3 where you pay for everything with dumb-coin.”

Step 1: Pay The Damn User

Right now, you browse the web. Big tech tracks your every move, builds a profile on you, and sells your screen to the highest bidder, who is hoping you’ll buy their gadget, their supplement, their whatever. The bidder pays the platform. The platform keeps it. You get an ad for a standing desk you looked at once, six months ago, forever.

Here’s a thought: why doesn’t the bidder just pay you?

You are already generating value with your attention and your data. The only reason you’re not seeing any of that money is because there’s a very large middleman standing between you and it, and that middleman has strong opinions about keeping things exactly as they are.

What I’m building, called datum, is step one of this masterplan: remove that middleman. Users own their data and their interest profiles. When a user participates in an ad campaign, the advertiser pays directly, and the user and the publisher split it. No platform taking the lion’s share. No opaque auction. A user voluntarily submits a claim saying “yes, I saw this ad” and receives magic internet money in exchange.

And if a user decides they don’t want to submit a claim? That should be fine too. No coercion. No dark patterns. But the incentive is there for those who want it, and the incentive actually reaches the person who earned it.

Step 2: Give The Tokens Somewhere To Go

You’re probably thinking: okay, magic internet tokens, great, what am I supposed to do with them, and that’s a fair question. Tokens only have value if there’s something worth spending them on, and “you can trade them on an exchange” is not a compelling answer for anyone who isn’t already deep in this stuff. Besides, if you’re still thinking about these things in USD, then you’re still living in USD with extra steps. Hardly the hacker ethos of yesteryear.

Besides, the cool thing about these magic internet tokens is that they are extensible. You can add functionality to them and expand their range of value. What they can do. Don’t think of them as dollars. Think of them as arcade tokens in an ever-expanding arcade. And its not just to play games, but maybe the food court starts accepting tokens. What if the local ride-sharing system started accepting tokens? What happens when you can pay your rent in these arcade tokens?

So we need worthwhile things to spend them on. The obvious thoughts are DeFi and memecoin casinos, which, look, I’m not here to judge, but I’m thinking bigger.

What do people actually use? Food delivery, peer-to-peer, no platform skimming thirty percent. Ride sharing with payment vaults that don’t require trusting a corporation to hold your money. Geolocation with zero-knowledge proofs and reputation scores so you can verify someone is who they say they are without them handing over their home address. You could schedule deliveries with whoever is willing to sign a transaction between the sender and the recipient. Someone could build a business entirely on this. Local parcel delivery. Set their rates. Build a trusted reputation. Settle completely independent of any banks. It all becomes permissionless platforms to connect people directly together through open commerce.

Another idea. Second-hand software and music licenses. You bought something, you no longer want it, sell it to someone who does and the creator gets a royalty. All those games sitting in your Steam library? Lend them out, sell them to others, collect rent on your software. Fight piracy by making sharing legitimate and financially fair. I like old games and despise the fact that half of them don’t work because the license servers went offline in 2009.

And it doesn’t stop at consumer apps. Entire supply chains can run on this infrastructure. Your smart light bulb reaches end of life, detects it, prompts a replacement order, books a manufacturer, schedules delivery, and it shows up at your door, funded entirely by your browsing activity. Self-driving cars become a revenue stream you actually own instead of a service you subscribe to through some eccentric billionaire’s latest venture. All of the build conformance and validation data for your car, computer, TV, furnace, lawnmower can be composed into an asset tracking sheet as an NFT. From the factory, all components are serialized, validated, and saved. You can know the entire history of the things you know. These systems already exist in the walled gardens of business enterprise software. That data might be useful to travel with the customer. Consider if your alternator is replaced after 150,000 miles. This event and the new serialized alternator is appended to the build manifest of the vehicle you own years after it first left the car lot. This becomes the Car Facts native to the assets themselves. This is all possible.

The future is wide open.

The Part Where I Admit I’m Making This Up As I Go

I don’t know if this is viable from a business perspective. I will figure that part out as I go. I’m still working on the segmentation and revenue streams. And at this point, I’m not leaving my day job. I’m not going to stand here and tell you I have a five-year roadmap and a series A and a go-to-market strategy, because I don’t, and I distrust anyone in this space who claims they do.

What I can say is the tools are in place, the problems are real, and I’m motivated to do something about them. I’m not afraid to try things that might not work, and I’m not asking anyone’s permission.

I hope you’re as excited as I am. Or at the very least, entertained enough to come back and see what happens.

— K