I feel like this brings some sort of (hopefully slightly premature) closure to my life in tech. When I was a young teenager in 1983, I was lucky enough to get a

I feel like this brings some sort of (hopefully slightly premature) closure to my life in tech. When I was a young teenager in 1983, I was lucky enough to get an account on Essex MUD[1], which was (one of) the first multi-user games ever, created by Richard and Roy Trubshaw. The richness of that environment -- its lessons, ambitions, and the day-to-day experience of collaborating in a virtual game space -- had a huge influence on me. Not least were the mistakes: I remember one time, in an attempt to make it easier to manage multiple characters, the MUD developers listed any other accounts that shared the same password as your main login. Turns out that having the same password is not the same as being the owner of another account; especially with users who rotated their passwords through multiple commonly-used ones, and harvested the user accounts that popped up. By virtual of being a privileged first-adopter in Richard's MUDspace, I got to see a glimpse of a future that was, in my mind, overdetermined. I didn't know what future "MUDs" would be like, but I was absolutely sure that multi-user games would be a thing; it was just a matter of either waiting for them to appear, or working to make them arrive myself. In the meantime, the glimpse gave time to sketch out some invariants, based on experience: a rough shape of things to come. I had the same experience with the web: by engineering things so that I could access the Internet and the Web early on, I got a sense that it would be inevitable, and some insight into what that inevitability might look like. Not much, but enough to ride that wave too. Now I'm in the (waves air-quotes) crypto/web3/dweb world. I just did a demo to some non-profits of some of the tools being used in this area -- mostly IPFS, a bit of Filecoin (I work at the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web now). Unlike perhaps many in this space, I caveat the hell out of this tech, because I recognize it as being far far closer to that MUD (or 1993's Web) than, I don't know, Fortnite or Gmail. But I genuinely see this space full of technology that gives the glimpse of a direction; a thing that's not going away; and a thing that it's hard to describe and easy to miss unless you're staring straight at it. I feel like people caught in these moments often ignore the past, and overvalorize the future: I realise in retrospect I should have listened more to the people who loved amateur radio, television production, state-run communication systems, centralized publishing. But you really do have to keep listening out for the future, even when you have so much past experience to convey. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD1