*press “play” before you begin…*

It’s not very helpful to make direct comparisons between the evolution of technologies. Other than broad similarities in the way new inventions evolve and are adopted, the unique way a technology interacts with a culture at a particular moment in history is so specific that such comparisons likely miss more than they predict. But there is something resonant in analogies between the dissemination of the ‘original’ Internet (in, say, the 1990s), the social components of Web2 and the present-day rise of blockchain technologies. The commonality is *evident*. This is why crypto folks refer to those early Internet days so often. Both represent, in their own ways daunting and inspiring, a *radical* re-architecture of communications and commerce.