A Five-Year Entropy Shift: From “The Internet Has a Bug” to a Network That Feels
“The internet has a bug. Don’t worry though, I am writing a patch for it.”
1 | The Original Bug Report (2019-2020)
Five years ago the A New Internet manifesto opened with a simple diagnosis:
“The internet has a bug. Don’t worry though, I am writing a patch for it.”
The bug was secrecy-powered centralisation: data locked in silos, algorithms optimised for profit, and negativity acting as friction that “loses energy” in every social exchange. The cure it proposed was a Human API—people owning their data, sharing only with trusted peers, and rewarding cooperation over competition.
At the time, entropy on the web looked like:
| 2019-20 | Source of “randomness” | Net effect |
|---|---|---|
| Ad-tech click-streams | Rage-bait & doom-scroll loops | Negative entropy (signal drowned in noise) |
| Platform RNGs for crypto & games | Abstract, trust-me numbers | Detached from real problems |
| Social metrics (likes, RTs) | Popularity ≠ value | Recognition compression |
2 | Complexity Inflation & the Recognition Gap
By 2024 complexity inflation—LLM upgrades every quarter, multi-chain apps every week—had outpaced human attention. Traditional org charts could no longer credit who fixed what. Contributions blurred into dashboards, creating a recognition gap that the manifesto had foreseen when it warned against “social networks for people, instead of by people.”
3 | New Research, New Entropy
Since that manifesto three research pillars have landed:
- Memetic Economics — positions recognition as the universal primitive of value creation and lays out the four-layer Recognition Stack (identity → contribution → evaluation → amplification).Network Relativity — models time as emerging from information-processing speed inside subnetworks, suggesting tokens can map onto different “time streams.”
- Temporal Crypto — converts manifestos themselves into entropy beacons: every verifiable problem report becomes a micro-packet of uncertainty that fuels trust-weighted sub-chains.
4 | The Entropy Graph: Then → Now
| Year | Entropy Input | Processing Layer | Output |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Clicks, ad impressions | Closed algorithms | Attention extraction |
| 2023 | Hardware RNG + oracles | Smart-contract VDFs | Secured but abstract randomness |
| 2025 | Problem-shaped manifestos | AI compression → trust weighting | Actionable uncertainty that steers capital toward real world pain points🧭 Introducing Temporal… |
Entropy no longer lives in silicon noise; it lives in documented human problems. That pivot is only conceptually possible because the manifesto framed personal storytelling as a permissionless economic act, not a vanity metric.
5 | What the New Internet Looks Like
| Manifesto Vision (2019-20) | Implemented 2025 Components |
|---|---|
| Human API—users gate their own dataA New Internet.docx (1) | ZK-guarded data vaults + revocable access tokens |
| Eliminate negativity (friction) by rewarding understanding | Recognition markets that pay in social or token stakes for verified helpful feedback |
| Automate success so humans can fail & learn | Continuous-integration style demo parades in online communities; failure logs are first-class artifacts |
| Replace money-optimised competition with cooperation | Trust-weighted entropy pools where communities compete to cooperate—first to surface a problem wins reputation and flow of capital |
6 | What Couldn’t Have Been Built Without the Manifesto
- Manifestos-as-Entropy — The manifesto redefined personal essays as structured signals; Temporal Crypto turns that concept into an economic primitive.
- Human-Centric Data Ownership — The Human API idea predates today’s ZK-vault tooling and anchors its why.
- Recognition-First Metrics — By spotlighting happiness over profit, it paved the way for recognition dashboards that now calibrate growth across teams.
- Failure-Positive Culture — The call to “reward failure even more” legitimised storing negative results, which are now high-entropy learning assets.
7 | Why Now?
Cheap AI compression lets us strip PII while preserving problem “shape.”
Public ZK proofs let us audit contribution trails without doxxing.
Decentralised trust graphs let online communities shard attention and verify each other’s recognitions in real time.
Together they resolve the manifesto’s core blockers: secrecy, information overload, and misaligned incentives.
8 | Call to Build
The blueprint is on the table:
- Publish your micro-manifestos; each one seeds the entropy pool.
- Join recognition-native communities; become both contributor and auditor.
- Prototype Human API endpoints; treat access like a revocable capability, not a data sale.
- Help spec the Problem-Shape Ontology and Entropy Calibration curves still open in the Temporal Crypto repo.
Five years ago we diagnosed a bug. Today we have the patch set, the test suite, and the distributed dev team. All that remains is to merge—one verifiable contribution at a time—until the internet can finally feel the world it was built to serve.