Dream of a new medium

I’ve been thinking about how the modern world, and the technologies we use every day, were built by laying metaphorical bricks one on top of another. The first brick might be electricity. The second could be the vacuum tube or transistor. The third could be the von Neumann architecture, the computer itself. On top of that came the internet, then the HTTP protocol. Then we built the web browser, and finally, web applications. Each layer sits on top of the last, forming the stack that everything else depends on. It’s a slow, cumulative process, where each breakthrough builds on the one before it. But what’s interesting is the freedom we have to build on whichever layer we choose to, given enough determination.

If you remove the top brick, the web application, you can rebuild it differently and end up with new types of applications or frameworks. Remove two bricks, the application and the browser, and you get to make things like cURL, HTTP APIs, RSS and web crawlers, which still operate on HTTP. Take out the HTTP layer, and you’re left with TCP, the internet itself. Working at that layer can lead to something entirely new, like Bitcoin, BitTorrent, Tor or IPFS. The more bricks you remove, the more opportunity there is to build something fundamentally new, something foundational. Quantum computing is a possibility we’ve given ourselves by removing all of the bricks of the computing stack. Each layer you peel away gives you more control and further opens up the design space of possibility. It’s harder work, but it’s also where the biggest opportunities lie — at the levels most people take for granted.

Thinking about that makes me realize how much work went into building what we have today. The modern computer took around fifty years to become what it is now. But to create something new, we don’t need to repeat that entire process. We just need a first version, an initial starting point. What matters most is that first spark — the moment something works just well enough to make people believe it could change things. When something like that appears, the possibilities feel endless, and people get excited. It probably wasn’t the original von Neumann machine that captured people’s imaginations, but maybe something that came later, like the IBM or Apple II.

That’s really what it comes down to: capturing people’s imagination. If you can do that, at any level, people will use what you’ve made, and build on it. It doesn’t have to be a finished product; it could be a prototype, a tool, an idea.

And through that you ignite a new movement, and a new medium is born.