Over the last 25 years much of the world was uploaded to the internet in the equivalent of plain text. Real names, faces, houses, addresses.

For a brief moment everyone could see everyone, search anyone. Then the canceling began. Now we encrypt.

This is one thesis on long-term structural disruption of Google & Facebook. They depend upon indexing the semi-public internet and social graphs.

But as people rediscover the (now-validated!) concern of the late 90s about being stalked online, posting plaintext will seem risky.

It’s interesting to think about more of the world becoming secret, encrypted, and — above all — search-resistant.

Signal and crypto are early pieces of this. But we will eventually have encrypted worlds within worlds, hosted on-chain. A hidden internet.