Building the Next Era of the Internet. Discover the secrets to becoming a successful writer with Chris Dixon’s insightful book, “Read Write Own.” This transformative guide offers invaluable strategies and techniques to help you hone your craft and captivate your audience.
Dive into this comprehensive summary and review to learn how “Read Write Own” can revolutionize your writing journey and take your skills to new heights.
Table of Contents
Genres
Technology and the Future, Entrepreneurship, Education, Writing, Self-Help, Non-Fiction, Reference, Publishing, Creativity, Personal Development, Language Arts, Authorship
In “Read Write Own,” Chris Dixon presents a roadmap for aspiring writers to improve their skills and achieve success in the competitive world of writing. The book is divided into three main sections: reading, writing, and owning your craft.
Dixon emphasizes the importance of reading widely and analytically to develop a strong foundation in writing. He provides practical exercises and prompts to help writers hone their skills, experiment with different styles, and find their unique voice.
The book also delves into the business side of writing, offering guidance on publishing, marketing, and building a professional brand. Throughout the book, Dixon shares personal anecdotes and insights from his own journey as a writer, making the advice relatable and inspiring.
Review
While “Read Write Own” offers some valuable insights for aspiring writers, it falls short in providing groundbreaking or innovative advice. Much of the information presented can be found in other writing guides, and Dixon’s approach may not resonate with all readers.
The book’s strength lies in its emphasis on the importance of reading and analyzing successful writing to improve one’s own craft. However, the writing exercises and prompts are not particularly unique or challenging.
The section on publishing and marketing feels somewhat superficial and may not provide enough practical guidance for writers navigating the complex world of publishing. Overall, “Read Write Own” is a decent resource for novice writers, but more experienced authors may find the advice repetitive and lacking in depth.
Introduction: Learn how the blockchain can put power back in your hands
Read Write Own (2024) shows how blockchain can revive the democratic promise of the early internet. It examines the internet across three eras: the early democratic but read-only age of the web, the “read-write” age, centralized under corporate control, and now the “read-write-own” movement, occasionally termed web3, whereby blockchain networks empower user communities, not just big tech firms. With lucid prose and tech industry expertise, it provides historical context and an inspirational guidebook for a more open, equitable digital future.
When computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989, his vision was a network for sharing information and collaborating across continents and affiliations. In the early days, mavericks, hippies, entrepreneurs and iconoclasts of all stripes flocked online to create this new digital society that was free and empowered.
Fast forward to today, and Google knows more about you than your mother. Facebook and Twitter decide what ideas you can share. The web promised decentralization but delivered us surveillance and nonstop ads.
But what if there was another way? A new generation of blockchain-based networks offers precisely that. These networks allow new forms of digital ownership, exchange, and governance beyond anything seen before.
So let’s look beyond the crypto hype at blockchain applications that just might change the world.
Setting the stage: two eras of internet
In today’s era of social media titans, it’s hard to imagine, but the internet began as a wild frontier – a decentralized network where anyone could innovate and create, without permission. You didn’t need to own a television station or a printing press; anyone could create a webpage which was instantly accessible across the world, by anyone. Early internet pioneers saw this openness as the basis for a new, more empowered, more democratic society, immune from centralized control and censorship.
But the dream didn’t last. Over time, big tech companies gradually began to take over the internet, imposing their rules and extracting value from popular use of their platforms. Facebook, Google, Amazon and a few others dominate the internet today, stifling competition.
The author calls the first internet era the “read” era – and it lasted roughly from 1990 to 2005. It was driven by the development of internet protocol networks that democratized information sharing – allowing anyone to access content on websites.
The author calls it the “read” era because the main empowering capability the early internet provided was allowing regular people to easily read content online from websites. Even if someone didn’t publish a website themselves, they could now access and consume information published by others on this new medium.
Next came the second internet era: the “read-write” era – lasting roughly from 2006 to 2020. This is when corporate networks like Facebook and other social platforms flourished by enabling anyone to write and publish content that reaches mass audiences.
In contrast to the initial “read” era, where people accessed online information in a read-only or consumption mode, this second era provided average internet users with simple yet powerful tools to become publishers and creators themselves. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others allowed anyone with internet access to not just take in content made by others but also to share their ideas, perspectives, creations, and more with the world – by commenting, uploading, or publishing, directly through user-friendly interfaces. But this new functionality came at a cost. These “read-write” services were part of a centralized, corporate-controlled model – extracting the ownership and economic value created through all this user-generated content.
Like an empire annexing autonomous villages, these Big Tech platforms have swallowed the vibrant ecosystems that nurtured early online life. The spirit that animated the web’s early days threatens to flicker out.
But the game’s not over yet. There’s an emerging technology that could turn things around: the blockchain. Truly participatory networks require something that the walled gardens of app stores and social media platforms lack – shared ownership and governance. The blockchain offers this – a power shift away from centralized chokepoints and back into communities.
Let’s find out how.
Here comes the blockchain
What if there was a way to own things online the way we do in the real world? To hold assets securely without intermediaries, trade them freely, and carry them wherever we go across the internet?
Blockchains arose from a paper published in 2008 by the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto. He described a decentralized network of computers that could transfer value without central authorities. To accomplish this feat, Nakamoto introduced blockchain: a shared virtual computer running on many devices that maintains a canonical record of transactions. Cryptographic techniques ensure all participants agree on the state of this virtual computer.
Unlike traditional centralized networks, blockchains have no single owner. The software protocol itself is in charge, running immutably according to hard-coded and transparent rules. This tamper-resistance makes blockchains ideal for building open networks and makes the commitments they enable more reliable. These qualities pave the way for features unavailable elsewhere online — such as digital assets that users actually control.
Enter tokens. Tokens are like Lego blocks for the digital world – simple building blocks that developers can snap together in novel ways. Just as a skilled Lego artist can construct elaborate castles and cities from small plastic bricks, skilled blockchain developers can use tokens as the basis for organizations, virtual worlds, marketplaces, and perhaps one day entire economies.
Two types of tokens deliver this breakthrough in digital ownership: fungible and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Fungible tokens are like currencies – interchangeable units that can be swapped back and forth, allowing the secure and anonymous transfer of value solely via software. The most prominent example is the cryptocurrency Bitcoin.
But fungible tokens’ uses extend beyond payments. They can represent anything from airline miles to computational resources on a cloud computing network. Blockchain software is built to automatically track balances of these fungible tokens, enabling such novelties as decentralized finance, user-run marketplaces, and collectively-managed insurance pools, to name a few.
Whereas fungible tokens are replaceable and tradeable with one another, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are irreplaceable individual units; they’re more like collectibles. Each NFT represents a specific asset, like a visual work of art, a piece of music, a video clip, or even a plot of virtual land.
Limited editions, auction markets and royalties can be coded directly into NFTs. Rare virtual goods, unique digital identities, and exclusive membership tokens are some examples of NFT applications. Platforms have arisen for trading, borrowing against and even fractionalizing ownership of NFTs.
Savvy developers are realizing that NFT ownership can mirror physical property rights. Just as a house deed can be freely transferred, conferring rights to use a dwelling, NFT deeds can convey usage and commercialization privileges over digital assets. Music NFTs, for example, can automate licenses for remixing tracks or distribution.
These twin building blocks – fungible and non-fungible tokens – are facilitating an explosion of novel digital assets within the blockchain. As standards emerge, tokens built for different systems will interoperate, enabling exciting combinations. Maybe tokens representing a piece of NFT art could unlock new powers in a blockchain-based game. Or a token attesting someone’s credentials might give them discounts across many decentralized applications. The possible permutations are endless. They form the basis to govern decentralized virtual worlds, user-governed social networks, and fluid token-based organizations and much more.
According to the author, we are currently entering a third age of the internet: the “read-write-own” era. In contrast to the “read” and “read-write” eras, this era is characterized by broader ownership of digital goods on distributed platforms – spreading economic benefits and governance rights to communities of users themselves.
In the next section, we’ll explore some of the ramifications of this new development.
Disrupting the disruptors
The year was 1994. Jeff Bezos, a hotshot dot-com founder, was gearing up to launch his new online bookstore. Bezos’ philosophy for this new business was as simple as it was defiant: “Your margin is my opportunity.”
Behind these words was a strategy to leverage the internet’s lower cost structure to systematically undercut the competition. Physical bookstores were shackled by significant overhead expenses – rent, utilities, employee wages. This left little room to trim margins. Meanwhile, Amazon existed only online, unencumbered by these cost constraints.
So Bezos did exactly as promised, kicking off a ruthless price war. Books that sold for $30 in stores, Amazon listed for $20. Bestsellers went from $25 to $15. For every rate cut, Amazon sacrificed profits for market share, calculating that they would compensate through scale.
It was like stripping their competitors of oxygen. Incumbent book stores had no means to retaliate. By the time they woke up to the mortal threat, it was too late – Amazon had become an unstoppable juggernaut, the new king of books.
This story illustrates a classic dynamic of internet businesses: leveraging the absence of brick-and-mortar expenses to pursue what is called a “deflationary business model”. This is a model that provides the same or greater value to users while cutting costs. Craigslist did it to newspapers. Google search did it to the media. Airbnb did it to hotels.
But this strategy hasn’t yet reached its end point. Blockchain networks are poised to take it to a whole new level. Their sights are set on the giants of corporate America; the “soft underbelly” ready to be exposed. In particular, their target is “take rates”, which is how much revenue these companies make from enabling transactions on their platforms.
Take Facebook. Its core revenue comes from advertising. But the content is created by its billions of users, voluntarily. When you post content that goes viral, enticing millions of impressions, how much of that advertising value do you receive? Zero. Facebook pockets virtually all the profits generated – a 99% take rate. Other social media empires operate similarly, with only a few exceptions.
Looking across centralized social networks and other platforms, we see a similar pattern. The author calls this pattern “attract and extract”.
In the early days of a platform, the developers focus almost solely on growth. This is the “attract” phase. A social network is only as valuable as its user base. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram aren’t worth anything unless people are using them, right? This stage is all about attracting users, at all costs. And during this stage, the platform tends to be generous, open, and permissive – offering the best possible deal to users.
Once this growth curve starts to mature, and a user base is established, the company moves to the next phase: “extract.” Now with a captive audience, the strategy changes to squeezing out as much revenue as possible from users, by erecting paywalls, charging for features, or ramping up the amount of advertising. All of this so that users can access the content that they themselves created!
Here, new blockchain-based social platforms are emerging with fundamentally different economic designs. These networks allow value to flow directly to content creators, not corporate middlemen.
Audius, for example, is a decentralized streaming protocol where artists upload songs and get paid directly by listeners. Since payments occur on the blockchain, artists receive virtually all of the revenue, minus a small transaction fee. Audius doesn’t extract value through advertising or paid promotion. The company behind it focuses solely on network development and takes no cut of artist earnings.
LBRY offers a similar model for video sharing. Creators post footage to the LBRY blockchain network and set prices per stream. Viewer apps then connect directly to LBRY to stream videos, while making payments behind the scenes. There is no corporate owner claiming advertising or data revenue, just a direct exchange between creators and fans.
By aligning incentives in a new way, blockchain networks like Audius and LBRY encourage innovation and creativity. They exemplify an emergent generation of community-owned platforms, leaving less room for monopolistic middlemen to extract disproportionate profits. In other words, they slash the exorbitant “take rates” of Big Tech – pulling an Amazon on Amazon, so to speak. Why toil on Instagram for likes that fund Mark Zuckerberg’s next yacht, when you can post content on a blockchain network that gives you the lion’s share of revenue?
The same story exists for financial networks. By allowing communities to create token-based financial systems, networks like Ethereum and Uniswap codify self-governed forms of peer-to-peer exchange. Value generated from transactions flows directly to those creating it, not corporate coffers. Leading decentralized networks charge less than 3% fees on payments sent over their networks.
Incentives are changing—and developers are taking notice. In the last year alone, over $30 billion was invested building financial applications on Ethereum. While the future is never certain, the rise of blockchain-based platforms could represent a major challenge to the dominance of Big Tech, and a historic opportunity to build a more open, inclusive, and value-aligned internet.
Conclusion
The internet began as an open frontier for innovation, but over time has consolidated under the control of tech titans. These powerful centralized intermediaries attract users with platforms that are open initially, only to later exploit their audience to extract disproportionate profits.
Blockchain technology offers an alternate future for online economies and social structures. Blockchain networks empower users through direct ownership of digital assets and shared governance. Money flows not to distant corporate coffers but into the pockets of creators and contributors themselves.
The seeds have been planted for web 3.0 and beyond: a fertile soil where users can read, write … and own.
Chris Dixon is general partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and an early investor in companies like Oculus, Coinbase, Kickstarter, Pinterest, Stack Overflow, and Stripe. He also founded and leads a16z crypto, Andreessen Horowitz’s division dedicated to crypto and web3 technologies, which has grown from $300 million to over $7 billion since 2018. Dixon has an MA in philosophy from Columbia and an MBA from Harvard Business School.