Jordan Hall published an essay a few weeks ago called "The Coming Great Transition v2.0." Read it if you haven't. His thesis is interesting. The old world is done, distributed AI networks will outcompete legacy institutions, and the only question left is whether humanity ends up in the "Kingdom of God" or the Matrix.
Unsurprisingly, he's right about most of it. I have first hand experience.
Last spring I was sitting on the grass at Return to The Source. We had spent the morning learning how to fall. Someone had put a stack of books on the table at lunch and everyone started picking them up. Thumbing through. "Oh I've read this one." "This one's been on my list forever."
I looked at the titles.
The Master and His Emissary. Plato's Republic. Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius.
These were the same books my friends in Hats Protocol, a web3 company, had been talking about for years.
I've been in crypto for longer than I'd like to admit. Before Luna. Before FTX. Before meme coins ate the culture alive.
I stayed because of the dream. The dream was slaying Moloch.
If you know Moloch, you already know why web3 matters. If you don't: Moloch is the demon of coordination failure. The reason companies pollute even when their executives care about the environment. Good systems producing terrible outcomes because nobody can afford to be the one who stops first. The metacrisis is downstream of Moloch.
Web3 and DAOs and decentralization were the most serious attempt I'd ever seen to build the infrastructure that could route around it.
There's a tweet I keep coming back to: "blockchain was supposed to be 100 professors arguing for 20 years." Moon boys brought it to the forefront too fast because there was money to be made. The technology got way ahead of the understanding. The culture got hijacked by people whose actual goal was number go up.
Web3 didn't fail. It's taking its time. The ideas are still there, the learnings are still there, waiting for the next cohort who can take them seriously.
But here's what I've come to understand. What I actually loved about web3 wasn't the technology.
It was the people.
The Hats Protocol, Bankless DAO, Gitcoin. The people online at 2am arguing governance models when the price is down 80%. Two bear markets and they never left. They all wanted fuck you money. Not the regular kind. Not fuck you to a boss. Fuck you to the whole thing.
That's not greed.
About a year ago I was at ETH Denver, and oh by, the energy was the worst I'd felt in years. Meme coins were everywhere. Prediction markets were everywhere. Ethereum was sitting 60% below its all-time high while Bitcoin printed new ones. People were disillusioned in a way that went deeper than the charts.
I was pretty down.
A friend pulled me aside and told me to watch "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis" by John Vervaeke.
They recommended a 50-hour lecture series. I assumed they wanted me to go away.
I watched all of it in 3 months.
Hall knows Vervaeke. They share stages and podcasts. You can feel the resonance between Hall's "Great Transition" and Vervaeke's "Meaning Crisis." Different entry points, same end goal.
The Vervaeke spiral led me to Return to the Source. Back to that lunch table. Back to a stack of books I'd already seen.
The people at that retreat were wilderness practitioners. Movement coaches. Philosophers. Parkour instructors. People who had organized their lives around embodied practice and intentional community.
The people in my web3 world were technologists. Governance nerds. Economists. Builders.
Same books. Same questions.
How do we build systems that don't defect by default? How do we coordinate without centralizing? How do we live like humans again instead of cogs in a machine that doesn't know we exist?
I've been sitting with this for a year. The wisdom community, the meaning community, whatever you want to call it, is not one thing and it's not in one place. It's scattered across dozens of fields. Crypto Discord servers and wilderness retreats and philosophy departments and movement practices and intentional communities. The people in it don't share a religion or a politics or a technology stack. They share a set of questions.
And most of them have no idea the others exist.
That's the whole problem.
Hall's analysis is sharp. The society of scarcity is built on assumptions that AI is about to detonate. Legacy institutions are slow AI. Slow AI loses to fast AI. Distributed networks will outcompete centralized ones. The coordination layer we actually need is built on real trust, earned trust, not the formal substitutes we've been using because we couldn't afford the real thing.
He calls this pistis. Embodied, reality-indexed trust. The kind that scales past Dunbar's number because AI makes every commitment traceable and every promise legible.
Hats Protocol was trying to build this. So was every serious DAO governance experiment. Distributed trust infrastructure that routes around Moloch. Hall is arguing that AI finally makes it achievable in a way the blockchain alone couldn't. On that I don't disagree.
Where he loses me is the prescription.
He spends the whole essay building toward a destination that could be reached from a hundred different starting points. And then he arrives at Christianity. Which is true for him, and which immediately cuts off half the people who most need to hear the message.
The wisdom community doesn't need a single door. It needs to recognize itself.
A parkour instructor at a wilderness retreat. A governance nerd in a DAO Discord at 2am. Someone who watched 50 hours of Vervaeke in a dark bedroom. Someone who held through two bear markets because they believed the technology could change the world. All working on the same problem. No shared language.
Hall ends his essay with a question that sounds like a sermon. Can you choose to enter the promised land?
That's not my question.
You're Being Recruited
My question is simpler. Do you know you're not alone?
You already know which community I'm describing. You're in it, or you're right at the edge of it and you can feel it. The questions that keep surfacing. The specific weird constellation of books and ideas that somehow found you. The sense that the people around you in your field are optimizing for something you stopped caring about.
What you might not know is how many of you there are. And how many fields they're scattered across. And what happens when they find each other.
That's the piece Hall doesn't quite see. Not the Kingdom. Not the Matrix. A million people in improbable places reading the same books, asking the same questions, building toward the same thing without knowing the others exist.
The window is small. The need is real. The people are already here.
You're being recruited.
