From the coast of Canaan, a great many longships cast off towards the Western waters of the Mediterranean. Eventually, they would pass the pillars of Hercules and venture into the waters of the Atlantic, conducting trade and settlement with the West African coast as well as the North of Europe. Their ships had mechanisms not seen before; battering ram bows and reinforced hulls. The adventures these ships undertook brought unthinkable wealth to their captains and owners, placing the unconventional societies they served on par with the mighty empires of their day. Many centuries later, a great army of the descendants of these people would march over the alps and be the only ones to seriously challenge Roman hegemony before the Empire’s eventual collapse.

I’m talking about the Phoenicians, a maritime people who were among the wealthiest, most important, and most influential of their time. They persisted for centuries, originating along the coast of Canaan before migrating and colonizing lands across the Mediterranean basin. Being among the few brave enough at the time to invent new technologies and make dangerous journeys to acquire highly coveted materials like tin and ivory, they enjoyed both the respect and jealously of their neighbors during the Bronze Age. At various times some cities came under Egyptian influence but nonetheless were never fully controlled. Their legacy would live far beyond the Bronze Age Collapse in the form of the Carthaginians, a former colony of theirs, that would become the most potent threat to the Roman Empire; with Hannibal famously marching his army of war elephants over the alps to attack the Italian peninsula. For Hannibal to have ever been born, the Phoenicians had to survive history’s greatest global crisis (the bronze age collapse) and were in fact one of the only civilizations in the ancient near east to do so.

Phoenicians built coastal city states including Byblos, Tyre, Beirut and many others. They were not a state or empire like their neighbors, but a collection of cities that wandered between states of cooperation, competition and warfare. Although known for commodities including cedar trees and purple die, as well as inventing a writing script that is still used in a similar form today, their greatest achievement was their ships. The Phoenician ship was unlike anything else of the time and allowed them to sail significantly farther and more effectively than the empires around them. The goods they acquired served the needs of their contemporaries, including Egypt, The Hittites, and Assyria. Phoenicians established colonies from Sicily to Morocco and ventured farther than any group would dare for centuries afterwards. They accomplished all this while being completely unique compared to the groups that surrounded them; instead of large, contiguous land empires with extensive hinterlands, irrigation networks and pyramids, they were trading states that set their focus on the sea. Value transferred through them with an efficiency the empires were not capable of achieving. They never conquered the great empires, but they did outlast all of them as a free people in one form or another.

Empires are degenerate. But also grand. They become a slow, tired monolith that vacuums all available resources to build war machines and monuments to glory and greatness. In the Bronze Age this meant war-chariots and pyramids. Today it means F-35s and megatall skyscrapers. Then, like now, most of the population are to work supporting the apparatus that guarantees the lives of the nobles. Thus, empires are societies that are in a conversation with the present. Conquest and glory are issues of the now. The Phoenicians by contrast, were in dialogue with the future. This is evident in the fact that they outlasted all the major empires around them. Empires focused on conquering more lands to grow more grain to feed more soldiers to conquer more lands and erect more temples, etc. The Phoenicians were efficient. Their cities controlled just enough hinterland to support them. Their efforts focussed on shipbuilding, commerce and colonization, rather than long, expensive, overland campaigns to conquer foreign empires. The Phoenicians were nimble and lindy. But they had no grand masterplan, they simply responded to forces moving around them.

The current global order, even more so than any individual state, is absolutely in conversation with the present if not the past. Overbearing regulation, nanny-state politics, and oil production are the most telling pieces of evidence of this to me. And in the technology space, what most of us would call “web2” now, has devolved into a game of hot potato. Cloud providers steal your data and sell it to the highest bidder while an endless loop of startups churn the same group of users between them. The best part is half of these “users” probably aren’t even real. Recently even Twitter was exposed to have barely any ‘real’ usage, blowing out Elon Musk’s buyout deal (although perhaps we knew this all along and didn’t want to admit it). Therefore technology has the same problem that the global order has today - its just dealing with the present. Very few pieces of software technology are truly lindy. Beyond kernels like Linux and protocols like http or tcp/ip, most things are replaced and left behind in only a few years.

What about dweb (aka “web3”, but we need to stop using this term ASAP in my opinion) ? Many of the same problems are present. You only need to look at the prevailing dialogue in crypto for the last 5 years to see it. “When will ZYX blockchain flippen XYZ???” “When will my token overtake the other guy’s token???” “We’re not going to integrate the existing bridge/amm/stablecoin/borrow-lend/nft marketplace/wallet/etc, we’re going to roll our own!!”. Sometimes these statements and questions are needed and valid. Not everything works perfectly. Innovation is happening and it is good while our space is so young. But dweb has a veneer of consoomers who excitedly ape into the next token and rejoice when a popular celebrity sets their profile picture to an NFT. In observing this fact I don’t mean establish a pseudo-religious purity standard so I can look down upon others. I participate in the cycle of aping like the rest of us. Additionally, underneath the veneer the potential of the space is coming to fruition.

DAOs are the Phoenician city-states of today. Not countries, not nations, not companies, but slowly beginning to wield a power that all three of the latter will first acknowledge and later kneel to. DAO as an acronym, however, has grown beyond what it originally was known as. The first DAO was a crowdfunded VC. Today they are stewards of software, investors, consultants, auditors, and much more. They ignore (in most cases) the extra baggage other systems enjoy. They require no office hinterlands. They consist of immutable software and maximally mutable communities that are intensely focused. What’s missing is the ‘A’ in DAO - autonomous. Autonomy in the context of ‘The DAO’ was meant to mean ‘without leader’. There was still a dependence on voting and governance in perpetuity, so a better word for the acronym might have been ‘headless’. But achieving true autonomy is a better outcome anyway. As I’ve written before, governance minimization is the best characteristic of a project in dweb. In my opinion this aspect of a protocol or application will be what allows it to outlast everything around it, trustlessly producing the intended result until humanity is no more. Cleanliness is next to godliness, but trustlessness is next to lindiness.

To say in a sentence what I just spent an entire essay rambling about: we outlast them not because we’re more clever, but because we’re more efficient.