What could it mean to liberate the web?
A vision behind Tonk, articulated
Over two years ago, I embarked on an innovation project alongside my wonderful co-founder,
. Along the way, we’ve absorbed mountains of data and levelled up in various skills, but something that took me by surprise was the cadence at which our motivation for Tonk comes into clarity, and the occasional need to state and re-state our vision for a new and open internet.Here I state it once more.
Tonk’s mission
We started Tonk to liberate the web from platform overhead.
In this quest to tear down the internet and build a better one in its place, we are not alone:
Decentralised social media projects (Bluesky, Mastodon, Farcaster, even Substack) are pursuing an open, neutral infrastructure for digital communication.
Crypto teams, blockchain projects and “web3” more generally are pursuing a new financial universe liberated from institutional overhead.
Experimental scenes under various monikers “local-first”, “hyperstructures”, “autonomous worlds”, “programmable cryptography” and Vitalik Buterin’s notion of a “decentralised stack” are pursuing decentralised computing in various forms.
What does the mission mean to us?
You can model “the internet” as the set of all digital actions on TCP/IP infrastructure. This includes:
Websites you visit
Music you listen to
Reels you comment on
Things you buy
Information about these actions flows around the web, but the flow is tightly controlled. To us, “liberating the web” means reorganising the flow of information to achieve the best possible internet.
Today, the flow of information is controlled by platforms.
What you notice about this pattern:
Each platform creates a high-quality service to get you into their system
Once inside, they learn more about you. This data is really valuable - it helps teams figure out who you are and what you like. This creates a positive flywheel for creating more innovative products, and more efficient value capture mechanisms. Over time this data becomes so powerful as to become a competitive moat.
As such, it’s not in the platforms’ interest to share information about you. Your digital behaviour is siloed into each of these ecosystems. Whenever you join a new service or platform, they have to “get to know you” all over again. There’s helpful information about you stored all over the web, but most of the time it’s latent, redundant and needlessly replicated across multiple systems.
Similarly, it’s so economically valuable to hold information about their users that platforms suck up as much data as they possibly can. At the extreme end this creates an adversarial information relationship and exacerbates privacy concerns. One can understand why regulation - like the EU’s GDPR, or COPPA in the USA - is invoked.
But now imagine a new world, in which the flow is controlled not by platforms, but by individuals.
What you noticed about this pattern:
Digital behaviours are streamed continuously to your “digital twin”. This is a rich, nuanced description of you, and it’s controlled by you, not a tech company. The more philosophically-inclined may call this pattern “self-sovereign”.
When services, apps and platforms want to interact with you, you decide which part of your digital twin to share. In each interaction, you can share as much or as little as you like.
If a smart person comes up with a good idea for an app, you can share information directly with them. They don’t need to be a part of the “Google ecosystem” or whatever - you can just take your activity from one platform and prove it to whomever you like.
Why isn’t this already happening?
Partly, it’s timing. ln many ways, the 2010s was the golden age of platforms. The internet was still in its adolescence and innovative platforms like Uber and Airbnb provided an awesome service while creating powerful companies. However, the overhead inherent to platforms (of which there are many forms - see below), has recently exacerbated - hence the various projects chasing post-platform alternatives.
But there’s also a technology blocker on projects that want to deal with consequential communication between strangers. In particular, there’s an affordance of platforms that’s really hard to recreate with post-platform technology: cheap trust, on demand.
Most useful communication requires evidence - that someone is who they say they are, or have done the things they claim to have done. This is particularly important over the internet, the whole point of which was to connect us with strangers - people we wouldn’t otherwise meet. These factual claims are more often than not, a necessary precondition that makes other kinds of communication possible.
In this respect, platforms are a useful because they are a central point of trust - a trusted third party. There’s only one company to sign a T&Cs with, one company to regulate and one company to sue. How is anyone suppposed to trust your digital twin when they claim to have bought X, read Y or messaged Z? Central platforms act as ministries of truth for consequential communication.
That is, until recently. Early cryptographic technologies like zero-knowledge proofs, attested TLS and simple signed web data mean that you can get cheap trust, on demand, without the platform overhead. Many smart teams recognise the value of these technologies and are investing as such - they are getting rapidly cheaper, more expressive and more powerful.
So who does this actually help?
When proofs are the vessel of information (rather than platforms), the world starts to look a whole lot better for a whole lot of people:
*don’t technically need proofs since many interactions are between people who already trust each other, or the communication is on trivial matters.
The biggest possible future
Some of the most infuriating problems we face as a species do not stem from scientific boundaries, but the mere inability to effectively coordinate with each other by building trust and making credible commitments.
If we can keep on accelerating towards the open web of proofs, an incredible outcome would be that we create cheap, effective coordination machines that solve our species’ biggest problems, from abundant local public goods funding (more AFC Wimbledons!) to management of existential threats like climate change and ASI.
Why it’s really hard to stop
In the early days of the internet, Jeff Bezos noticed that the number of people joining the web for the first time was growing at an incredible pace each month. The growth was there, even if the absolute numbers were low, and that there were few reasons to use the internet other than goofing around. However, he could see that more people would fuel more demand for more applications, which in turn would drive innovation to reduce costs of onboarding, which in turn would fuel more demand, and so on.
Our thesis at Tonk is that we are currently seeing a similar flywheel with (a) the expressibility of our digital twins and (b) the applications meeting that increased demand. This makes the open web of proofs small today, but hard to stop in the long run.
The highest-possible impact we can have is the chance to accelerate that flywheel towards an open future.
Where does crypto come in?
Crypto is helpful for a few reasons:
Programmable money rails are useful. They’re cheap and flexible, compared to the traditional financial system. For people surfing the web of proofs, there’s a good chance money rails will make applications more useful.
Crypto has sponsored most of the cryptographic innovations that make an open web of proofs possible. This means that crypto users are the likely first builders and users of the new internet.
Blockchains are an open, permissionless substrate. App builders can access any onchain information they wish, leading to innovation explosions like DeFi summer and the Curve Wars. As such, they are an early indicator of behaviours in an open web of proofs.
The new, nascent financial system is a helpful disruptive foothold in which to incubate a revolutionary technology like the web of proofs.
At the same time, the crypto industry is hampered by the limits of onchain data. An open web of proofs changes all that. It’s one - but by no means the only - promising start for our nascent ecosystem to find its feet and build from there.