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<aside> <img src="/icons/info-alternate_gray.svg" alt="/icons/info-alternate_gray.svg" width="40px" /> About Althea:
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The state of Internet access worldwide is troublesome, with significant and expected inequalities: the majority of reports on the matter state that around 3 billions people don’t have any access to the Internet, the bulk of them in the Global South. Despite this market being less concentrated than others, in every major country a handful of corporations bear disproportionate power over a Commons that can and should be a collective infrastructure for all the people.
We think that Althea Network and the broader decentralization efforts in the blockchain space are generating the conditions for an irreversible transformation of the telecom sector, presenting a positive and hopeful perspective on the systemic impact of distributed technologies.
Optimism beyond the first waves of techno-naivety
Before going into the details of what Althea Network brings to the field, we’ll provide our perspective on the context of the last decade of blockchain experimentations.
In the now eight years old Bitcoin and the Banks - Five Stages of Grief, Andreas Antonopoulos argues that blockchain technology will slowly but surely render traditional banking structures obsolete, leading to the eventual decline of this powerful oligopoly.
This perspective is still common and circulating since the first generations of blockchain enthusiasts, characterized by technological fideism and a lack of understanding of what’s actually wrong in the current system. Decentralized technologies without a change in the dominant economic logics of our society can just lead to a different form of the same destructive capitalism we experienced so far: it’s obvious when looking at the power distribution in the Bitcoin network, or how effective Banks and (their political arms called) Governments have been in co-opting all major blockchains.
Still, once this initial naivety is overcome, it’s actually encouraging to observe that some applications of blockchain and distributed technologies are setting up world-wide, anonymous and decentralized infrastructures for payments and communications, to the point where they are technically unimaginable to completely shut down (take for example Monero and Matrix); this is especially true when these technologies can be integrated with each other and dynamically adapted to the efforts of regulators, constrained by national laws and slow bureaucracies.
On top of this, movements like Collaborative Finance are enabling local communities worldwide to create their autonomous economies, connect with the others in a federated way, and basically address the majority of their basic needs without the need for large centralized intermediaries.
Ethan Buchman discusses the concept of Collaborative Finance
Ethan Buchman discusses the concept of Collaborative Finance
There is no doubt that socio-ecological collapse will bring the whole world in a decades long state of chaos and violence, but with the exception of catastrophic scenarios there are many reasons to expect the next generations to establish a better system.
Imagine 90% of the world population dying in the process: 800 millions people left is still a lot of humans! And if we do manage to destroy ourselves to that point, is it reasonable to think that society will still run on centralized capitalist systems?
The telecom industry today is dominated by a few major players; despite significant regional differences — for example, the sector in Europe is much better and effectively regulated than the US — the market is characterized by high costs, limited access, and unsatisfactory service quality, even though this is much more felt in poorer areas. In this context, small and medium Internet Service Providers companies emerged to address these shortcomings but, as we mentioned at the beginning, a third of the human population still isn’t connected to the wider internet.