Read Write Own, Reviewed

Chris Dixon's Read Write Own has a few problems. And the biggest problem is Dixon himself.

There’s a revealing passage on page 80 of Chris Dixon’s new book, Read Write Own. Dixon is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), in charge of their crypto fund. He has been the single biggest funder of blockchain projects, and also Web3’s most significant evangelist.

On page 80, Dixon writes: “The concept of ownership is so deeply embedded in our lives that it’s difficult to imagine how the world would look if that were taken away. Imagine if the clothes you bought could be worn only in the venue you bought them in. What if you couldn’t resell or reinvest in your house or car?” (emphasis added)

Ah yes, who can imagine living a life where you cannot resell your house? Where you paid rent to a landlord, and housing was a necessity rather than an investment vehicle?

It’s a noteworthy passage because it points to the gaping blind spot in Dixon’s vision of the internet’s future. Dixon is a billionaire tech investor. The dust jacket cover of Read Write Own brags that “in 2022, he was ranked #1 on the Forbes Midas List of the world’s best venture capital investors.” He is surrounded by money. Cocooned by it. His social world does not include many people who live paycheck-to-paycheck.”

I’m not pointing this out to be mean. It is, I think, the heart of what’s wrong with his vision for Web3. Read Write Own is essentially the same book that Dixon would have written in 2022, at the height of the crypto boom. (It is an extension of the blog posts and viral Twitter threads he wrote back in those boom times.) Dixon has learned no lesson from the crypto crash. He still thinks “tokenomics” is the one true path to building a better web.

He tries to explain away the crash by drawing a distinction between “two cultures” surrounding blockchain. He says there is a speculative “casino,” (which is all the bad stuff that failed) and a collaborative “computer,” (which is the good stuff he invested in. It has a bright future and, of course, it’s still early).

He repeatedly references Google’s old motto, “Don’t Be Evil,” insisting that blockchains are superior because they hard-code rules into the system so it “can’t be evil.” All the scams, rug pulls, and hacks of the past few years go unexamined. They were part of that other blockchain culture. Or else they weren’t really blockchains at all.

(At one point, he insists, “When you hear about alleged blockchain hacks, these almost always refer to attacks on institutions that use crypto, or else refer to old-fashioned phishing attacks on individuals. They don’t usually refer to hacks of blockchains themselves.” Ah, okay, so the *blockchain* is perfectly secure, it’s just all the companies *using* it that are absurdly vulnerable. That’s comforting.)

And anyway, he grouses, the media is way too focused on the casino and doesn’t shower nearly enough praise on the transformative potential of the still-nascent-after-all-these-years blockchain industry.

The FTX scandal gets one sentence. (He thinks it was bad, and regulators should have stopped them sooner, through imaginary regulations that would have caught all the bad practices without encumbering any of the good companies that a16z has invested in.) The collapse of Axie Infinity, goes unmentioned. Helium gets only a paragraph, and he uses that paragraph to insist the company is doing great (no mention of all those fraudulent marketing claims.).

Much of the book is instead written in the conditional future tense. Dixon has invested over $7 billion in blockchain startups over the past few years, but he doesn’t have any successful use-cases to celebrate. So he busies himself instead with crafting analogies for how blockchains work in theory and why properly designed blockchains are the future of the internet.

And what he finds so appealing about these blockchains is how they align people’s incentives through financial stakes. In the future, everyone will be an owner and investor, and so everyone will share in the fruits of success.

It’s investment opportunities all the way down. What could be better than that?

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The trouble is that we’ve heard this all before. We heard it nonstop in 2022, as the blockchain bros crooned over their speculative success and chanted “have fun staying poor” at all the critics. And, even though Dixon tries to cast the argument in an optimistic, hopeful, serious tone, all the underlying problems are still there.

On page 130, he celebrates how, “[Blockchain networks] get outside developers and software studios to do the work. Jobs held captive in corporate networks become external, market-based tasks in blockchain networks.”

On page 207, he imagines how Hollywood could be revolutionized by NFTs: “what if fans really could be owners, and media companies could harness their energy to help create and evangelize original stories?” (Ah yes, let’s turn fandom into multi-level marketing. Sounds like paradise.)

On page 222, he writes "Everyone using the internet should ask themselves, if I'm doing something valuable, am I getting paid for it?"

I can see why this is all so appealing to someone whose entire world is composed of investment schemes — someone who doesn’t face any material consequences when those investments don’t pan out.

But consider each of those examples from the perspective of someone who has to make rent next month. Instead of good, well-paying jobs for coders, he’s talking about creating a gig economy where developers are paid in tokens. If the project succeeds, you can pay your rent. If it fails, I guess you’ll just move back in with your parents? Increasing that type of precarity is a bug, not a feature.

Likewise, imagine being part of the MCU fan community in a world where fans have a financial stake in the franchise. You don’t just like the films and Disney plus shows. Liking them is part of your livelihood. And this isn’t a magic money fountain. If your tokens can increase in value, they can also decrease in value.

Now imagine you watch Secret Invasion and are left with the sinking realization that it isn’t 1/10th as good as the source material. That’s not just a bummer for you as a fan. It’s a problem. Because your capacity to make rent is now downstream of someone else’s artistic taste, skill, and execution.

That sucks. That’s a dystopia. It’s a shit future.

What Dixon never seems to wrestle with is that the “casino” and the “computer” are not distinct cultures. Axie Infinity wasn’t just a speculative shitcoin. But it was a grift. Axie got people to spend thousands of dollars on a video game, on the promise that they’d be able to make a living off of it. The game economy collapsed, as all ponzi schemes do. The people who bought into the game lost everything. Chris Dixon just stopped pumping the investment in his slide deck.

Helium wasn’t a shitcoin either. But it was based on fantasy economics that look good on a pitch deck but were never going to come together. It was ultimately pretty damn grifty. The Number-Go-Up culture of Bored Ape Yacht Club (in which Dixon is also a major investor) was made possible by the speculative mania. You don’t get the one without the other.

(Also, side note: Blockchains aren’t computers. If a blockchain is a computer, then a pen and paper is also a computer. Words mean things. When the big VCs declare its time for a rebrand, its probably because people got wise to the scam.)

If we get paid for everything we do that has value, then it also means everything becomes our job. That’s how you end up neck-deep in hustle culture, with passive income bros recording TikTok videos about the latest way to make it rich with 15 minutes of work per day. That is the blockchain casino. Dixon’s “blockchain computer” is just the respectable-looking establishment out front.

It reminds me of that quote from Dumb Money (2000):

"Can everybody make money simultaneously?" [Joey Anuff] asked, trying to see if I lived on the same mathematical planet as Dayne did.

"Yes," Dayne said firmly. "Every day there is a new IPO."

The lie underlying the financialization of everything is that everyone can be a winner. That lie is easier to sustain if you live in a social world that never intersects with people who need, and lost, money on these financial schemes.

Chris Dixon can’t even imagine a world where most people are renters, not owners. Of course that warps his vision of what the future of the internet ought to be.

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Here’s the one positive thing I’ll say about the book: I do think Chris Dixon truly believes what he’s writing. He isn’t just trying to pump up an underwater investment portfolio by telling the suckers what he believes they want to hear. That makes him different from figures like Sam Bankman-Fried. I think Chris Dixon is terribly mistaken; I also think he means well.

Dixon sees real problems with the internet as it exists today. Platform capture is bad. Meta, Google, Amazon, and Apple have too much power. They charge exorbitant take rates. Creative professionals live by their algorithmic whim. (This also, incidentally, leaves venture capitalists with too few exciting investment opportunities. There is a hefty dose of “won’t someone please think of the bored VCs” in his rendering.)

But there are a couple of deep problems with his analysis. First, the history: His story of how we got to now is almost comically incomplete. Second, the prospective blinders. It’s like he can’t imagine any challenge to Big Tech except through VC-backed competition from startups. It’s as if, in his mind, regulations have simply never existed or yielded any results.

Dixon is a good capitalist. He sees some problems with the Internet that venture capital helped build. The only solution he can imagine is more venture capital. It reminds me of an old Twitter joke: “Guy who has only seen The Boss Baby, watching his second movie: Getting a lot of ‘Boss Baby’ vibes from this…”

The history issues are worth digging into a bit. I’ll be brief here, since I’ve already written a 3,000-word essay on this topic (Web3’s fake version of web history).

Dixon insists that Web 1 went from 1990-2005. It was the “Read” era of the Web, and it was based entirely on open protocols (HTML and email being the main examples). That’s nonsense. First of all, the Internet of 1993 had barely anything in common with the Internet of 2003. The dotcom boom and the dotcom crash did, in fact, have impacts (his sole note on the subject is that the crash left a bunch of fiber optic cable behind, so it was kind of good, actually). He’s also editing out the role that big corporations played in the era — especially Microsoft and AOL. These are not exactly tiny omissions or obscure companies.

The other important factor that he conveniently edits out is that, until 1995, the whole damn Internet was closed to commercial use! Those protocols that he celebrates were built by scientific networks, back in a time when no one was getting rich off of the project. Everyone was collaborating, not competing, because they were working in networked computer labs, not trillion-dollar companies.

He’s also ignoring the important role of competition policy/antitrust enforcement in the history of the Internet. The reason Bill Gates had the opportunity to create the marketplace for software from scratch was that IBM was operating under a DOJ consent decree to, in effect, stay out of the software game. You can tell basically the same story about Bell Labs and hardware in the 1970s.

One too-simple-but-not-entirely-wrong explanation of how the internet of the 1990s was captured by the Big Tech platforms in the 2010s is that the Department of Justice basically stopped enforcing antitrust policy after George W. Bush’s DOJ essentially walked away from the Microsoft case in 2001. Active antitrust enforcement played a major, shaping role in the computer industry throughout the 20th century. Then we stopped enforcing antitrust, and voila within a decade we had giant corporations buying up all potential competitors.

Basically Chris Dixon is presenting an altered history of the web in which government regulation and federal funding either don’t exist or are irrelevant. This is typical of the Silicon Valley ideology. And the function of this storytelling approach is that it renders presumptively inoperable a ton of levers that we could use to reshape the internet.

Maybe we could counter the Big Tech platforms by enforcing antitrust/competition policy! Or by passing data protection laws, like the EU has done with the Digital Services Act! Instead of enforcing adversarial interoperability via blockchain startups funded by tokenomics (but only the good kind of tokenomics, he swears!), we could also imagine creating a legal infrastructure that requires adversarial interoperability.

(And look, I hear you: “But Dave, Congress is broken and the Courts are deconstructing the administrative state!’ Yeah, I know. It’s a big problem. But those are problems we need to solve anyway if we’re going to live in a functional society. And rebuilding the administrative state is at least as likely to succeed as Chris Dixon’s musicians-keep-all-the-money-because-blockchains daydreams.)

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There are some other glaring flaws in the book. At times it almost has camp-appeal, like watching Morbius or Madame Web. Here are a few of the passages that left me wheezing with laughter:

• pages 51-52: Dixon notes that most other VCs have started to get excited about AI and the metaverse. And, as a proper techno-optimist, he readily agrees that they will be a big deal. Ah, but!, he notes, “These are the consensus bets—the conventional picks—for what’s next in computing. Almost everyone agrees on their significance. Blockchains are different. They’re a non-consensus bet. While plenty of people recognize their potential—including me—much of the establishment disregards them.”

Chris. CHRIS! Chris? Were blockchains ever previously, a, uh, “consensus bet?” Maybe two years ago? Did anything happen to dampen peoples’ enthusiasm?

This passage reads to me like a long monologue from a guy about how “some people don’t believe in the institution of marriage any more, but I think marriage is great and I’m willing to keep fighting for it.” And then the camera pans wider and we realize the guy is saying this during couple’s counseling. And the reason they’re in couples counseling is because he was caught nailing his secretary. Again.

…And look, again, I really do believe that Chris Dixon believes the internet as it currently exists is a mess, and that blockchain technology is the best way to fix it. But Dixon was also the single biggest promoter of gaudy NFT projects and play-to-earn games during the latest crypto goldrush years. Web3 isn’t the cool indie band that the record labels haven’t signed. It’s the band that had one hit single four years ago, signed with the biggest label on the planet, then got dropped after producing three albums that no one listened to. Web3 isn’t non-consensus because it’s unknown. It’s non-consensus because it’s too-well-known.

• Page 54: “Hobbies are what the smartest people spend time on when they aren’t constrained by near-term financial goals. I like to say that what the smartest people do on the weekends is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years.”

This passage does a nice job of capturing the broader vibe of the book. It… isn’t even faintly true. What does this even mean, really? What part of our weekday in 2024 was “the smartest peoples’” weekend hobby in 2014?

Dixon spends much of his time explaining blockchain through analogies. None of the analogies are particularly good. He doesn’t do anything compelling with them. They’re just things he enjoys saying, examples he likes to give.

I absolutely believe that he “likes to say” this smartest-peoples-hobbies line. But what that mostly tells us is that he lacks a single friend or editor willing to say “Huh. What… what does that mean, Chris? What are you talking about, man?”

• I lost count of all the times he declares “some critics say blockchain suffers from [some problem that it absolutely has suffered from]. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

He doesn’t refute any of these criticisms. He doesn’t unpack them, or provide any counter-examples. He just disagrees, and insists that no true blockchain would suffer from such problems. There’s a real no-true-Scotsman element of his thinking. Blockchains cannot fail. They can only be failed.

• The entire “take rates” chapter left me with some big questions about what Chris Dixon thinks isn’t a take rate.

A take rate, as I understand it, is like the rake in a poker game. It is the rate that an intermediary takes from a two-sided transaction. As an example, Dixon mentions Substack taking a 10% cut of all subscription revenue. Dixon thinks that’s appropriately low. (a16z is a big investor in Substack, which he fails to mention.) The NFT marketplace OpenSea has a 2.5% take rate, which he thinks is also appropriately low. (again, he’s a major investor.) Apple has a 15-30% take rate in its app store, which he thinks is offensively high. Okay, fine, sure, I’m with him so far. But then he says that Facebook has a 100% take rate because it doesn’t share ad revenues with users.

Wait. What?

The thing that everyone has always said about Facebook is “if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product.” Everyone pretty much knows this by now. (Certainly everyone in the buys-books-about-potential-futures-of-the-internet community.) Well-intentioned advocates keep trying to educate the public on how much they are the product. Legislators hold hearings and debate the safety standards for product protections. The FTC issues fines over illegal resale of the product. But the basic deal is that Facebook is free, they show you ads to pay for it, and that ad money is theirs, not yours. I don’t expect to be paid for my time reading Facebook. That would be weird, and also bad.

We’ve also been undergoing a little social experiment on just how it would be bad: X/Twitter’s paid bluecheck fiasco. That’s the type of user community you end up with if every poster expects every post to make them money. It has not gone great! It’s all clout-chasing and engagement bait, peppered with misinformation and hate speech. (Turns out “Financialize everything” sucks as a solution to community-building.)

But, more to the point, how is Facebook keeping all its ad revenue even a “take rate?” OpenSea has to have low take rates, not because of the immutable power of the blockchain, but because no one would trade on their website if OpenSea took a 15-30% commission every time. (As the saying goes, “you can shear a sheep many times, but skin it only once.") Facebook isn’t an intermediating a financial transaction. It’s providing an algorithmically-amplified platform for social sharing. It provides a free service. It sells ads. It keeps the money from the ads.

I just… I dunno. Chris Dixon graduated from Harvard Business School. I most certainly did not. But I do not see how “take rates” can be a meaningful concept while applying equally to everything he applies the term to.

• I am not a coder. But neither is Dixon. And there are a number of things that he is confident that blockchain can do which, um, seem dramatically unlikely to me based on a basic functional understanding of blockchain technologies.

1. He thinks blockchains can work better than federated networks, because federated networks have too much friction in them. (Ah yes, the famously frictionless experience of using blockchain technologies…)

2. He says that software code is like LEGO bricks, and once you’ve written a piece of code and submitted it to Github, other people can snap it into their projects without even having to understand the thing. (That sounds great, but, uh, I’m pretty sure technical debt is still a thing.)

3. He insists that the whole Metaverse could be run on blockchains — not just NFTs, but all of it. One of the most basic things everyone learns about blockchains is that they waste a ton of energy by distributing a database through a whole network. (Now I’m just a simple country political scientist, but it seems to me that you maybe wouldn’t want to exponentially increase your processing demands when trying to render a collective spatial computing environment with zero latency.)

All of these struck me as evidence that pitch decks cause brain rot. They are all claims that sound compelling when delivered by a fast-talking, confident, charismatic founder. None of them sound as impressive if you had to spend a day with subject matter experts, working through all the technical details of how they’d actually work.

Chris Dixon grew a16z’s crypto fund from $300 million to $7 billion in the past six years. He should absolutely understand every facet of the blockchain industry better than I do. I’m just a social scientist who reads old magazines. But it seems from the book like he does not. How embarrassing for him.

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It’s a shame that Read Write Own isn’t a better book. Chris Dixon has been the single biggest thought-leader and funder of Web3 projects. It’s 2024. Web3 has lost the sheen of futurity, but there is still a lot of money and technical expertise pointed in its direction.

Dixon could have spent the past year taking a step back, examining how projects like Axie Infinity and Helium failed to live up to his heady expectations. There’s a lot he could have learned through introspection. And then he could have shared it, and charted a new path forward.

But ultimately he wasn’t up to the task. Dixon looked through his old Twitter threads and blog posts and said, effectively “Boom. Nailed it. No notes. People just need to hear what I have to say.”

He’s a venture capitalist who lacks the capacity to imagine a problem cause by Silicon Valley’s techno-capital machine that can’t best be solved by Silicon Valley’s techno-capital machine. I don’t doubt that he means well. But there are no new ideas in this book. It’s just a rehash of the applause lines he formulated during the last crypto boom.

Read Write Own is really only a book that should only be read in order to be ridiculed. It has the confidence of a blockchain booster circa 2022, with nothing new to tell us.

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Bonus notes:

-Molly White reviewed the book a couple weeks ago. One should always read Molly White.

-Casey Newton and Kevin Roose interviewed Dixon on the Hard Fork podcast. This was a particularly satisfying interview, because both reporters were basically like “hey, remember a couple of years ago, when you pitched me on Web3 and I believed you? And then I took it seriously, and reported on it as though it was credible? That turned out terribly! Why the hell should I believe you now?” Dixon’s answers basically amounted to “geez guys, why is the media always so negative?”