I have been giving this a lot of thought lately, and watching the US close the Strait of Hormuz is a terrible sign of things to come. This is an engineered economic catastrophe in the making, and the US will not be unscathed. Medication, fertilizer, and all plastic are petroleum products, not just fuels. As dozens of refineries around the world are mysteriously being destroyed by fires, this makes the coming catastrophe even worse.
On top of this coming economic nightmare, countries all over the world are turning the internet into a surveillance tool as bad as cell phones.
"... WEB3 allows the user to generate more value than they expend when following the rules of the protocol."
That will not be true when every word we say is permissioned because our use of the internet requires KYC. I've been reading that people are pushing for operating systems to be KYC, which means even using a computer will be dependent on permission from overlords. You mentioned Goolag banning people on a whim, and this actually dramatically understates the problem that is social credit scores are going to be applied to everyone, and if we don't say the things the Big Tech gods want to hear, we will be silenced and cut off from not just the internet, but computing devices themselves.
I am unwilling to tolerate such tyrannical oppression, and have begun an initiative for Community Association to Manufacture consumer Products (CAMP) and I intend to enable us to crowdfund producing products from shampoo to cars, without being dependent on our benevolent overlords largesse, because I don't think they have any. I think they're deliberately crashing the economy to do us dirty, and I think we'll have to make an economy that works for us whether they like it or not.
Highwaymen used to kill travelers and take their money. I think Big Tech are planning to kill most of us and take our wealth from our cold, dead fingers. I am making moves locally to get some industrial production going, and expect that things will get a lot worse economically very soon. Things like fuel, electricity, medicines, food, and every product that requires fuel to make - which is all of them - are going to become, first, much more expensive, and second, far less available at any price. The lack of fertilizer is causing a catastrophe for farmers right now, as many cannot get the fertilizer they need to plant crops now, and this means that a lot of food will not be available this fall. I live in dairy country, and it's impacting people here today. I also paid $.20 more per gallon for gas today than I did one week ago, and if that keeps up, things are going to get desperate, because trucks that can't get diesel can't ship goods. Diesel is ~$7 a gallon now, and that adds to the price of every item shipped. While they are still being shipped.
If the KYC requirement for even booting up a computer becomes law, I expect censorship and social credit score managed by AI to eradicate free speech completely. These are fatal to entrepreneurial development, and we will not like the Web3 Palantir may allow us to use, if we're good enough in their eyes to participate.
Hedge. Plan B, C, D, and so forth may be necessary to have any quality of life if the Strait of Hormuz stays closed, and alternative communications may be necessary very soon, for everyone that has ever said anything Peter Thiel doesn't like. They've been harvesting our data for a long time, and I don't think that they won't use what we've said against us. I'm pretty sure that's why they spied on us and kept the files until now, so they could use our words against us.
I hope I'm completely paranoid, and nothing at all bad happens to anyone ever. But I wish in one hand and work with the other, and the only hand that ever turns up anything worth having is the working hand.
Thanks!
Edit: I thought to share this video about what's going on in the ME as a result of the war and blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, such as the total collapse of Dubai, the desperate situation of the UAE, which is exiting OPEC as of Friday, and the larcenous avarice of the Trump empire. A pic from that video:
