Review: In ‘Read Write Own,’ venture capitalist Chris Dixon makes a serious case for crypto in wake of FTX debacle

This is hardly surprising given the mind-boggling number of scams cartoon-like villains the industry has spawned. Yet the crypto industry persists and so does blockchain, the technology underlying Bitcoin that still has the support of influential advocates.

Those advocates include Chris Dixon, who is well known in Silicon Valley circles as an entrepreneur turned venture capitalist whose firm made early bets on firms like Facebook and Twitter—and, yes, a large number of crypto companies. A long-time blogger, Dixon’s debut book Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet offers a concise history of how the web evolved and makes an impassioned case for blockchain as its logical future.

Whatever your views on blockchain and crypto, it’s hard to disagree with Dixon’s premise that something has gone wrong with today’s Internet. For proof, you can look to examples from the book, such as the fact the 10 most popular apps on our phones are all a decade or more old. Or you can just reflect on your own experience—you’ve probably noticed Google’s increasingly lousy search results or watched young people develop crippling anxiety from toxic social media algorithms.

To explain how we got here, Dixon says, requires understanding the power of networks and who controls them. In the early days of the consumer Internet, the web was an open place thanks to protocols like HTTP (for webpages) and SMTP (for email) that were created by academics and designed to be free for anyone to use and beyond the control of any corporate gatekeeper.

This early Read era of the internet was limited but free. Contrast that with the…