In 2024 Vitalik Buterin coined the phrase “defensive accelerationism” (d/acc) to describe a cautious yet optimistic approach to technology, arguing that technology should ultimately be embraced as a force for good.

His piece resonated with me. The mainstream view of technology as a source of dystopia and risk is deeply regressive. The quickest path to becoming consumed by technology is to attempt to reject it.

Vitalik’s “defensive” accelerationism involves steering technological development towards socially positive and pro-human outcomes. It is a good model to frame one’s individual choices and actions as a user and developer of technology, but in my opinion it skirts a problematic issue - that incentives can often steer the development and use of technology towards dark outcomes and that the force of principle perishes in comparison to the power of incentives. The Information Age has brought about unparalleled opportunities but has come with devastating costs that threaten to destroy the social fabric of western civilization and rob human beings of the conditions required to exercise free will.

Vitalik has high hopes that breakthrough technologies like zero-knowledge cryptography can solve these problems. As somebody at the forefront of developing these technologies for 8 years I agree, but I think Vitalik might underestimate the frightful level of discord and strife that will be required to definitively make a difference. d/acc is a set of good principles, but the practical implementation of good principles is a messy, ugly business. Vitalik’s articles are populated with the iconography of green, verdant optimistic spaces. I think the path to get there winds through years of conflict and conflagration.

Technology has no ideology. It is a weapon: a blunt instrument of change wielded against the status quo. If technology is being used to serve adverse ends the only solution is to arm oneself and resist.

We are the problem

Techno-optimists, when making their case, typically point to technologies that enable humans to radically transform their built environment (e.g. https://www.notboring.co/p/the-electric-slide, a brilliant article highlighting how inevitable electrification is) or provide humans with access to unparalleled information sources (“Planning for AGI and beyond” by Sam Altman).

This may be true, but misses something vital from the status quo. Our technology is no longer improving humanity’s communication complexity - I would argue it’s being reduced. Our ability to form shared narratives, to achieve consensus within groups is being fatally undermined by the attention economy. It is our Achilles’ heel and our failure to address this will lead to devastating outcomes.

Techno-optimism is unable to pierce the silicon valley bubble because everyday people don’t feel this optimism. People don’t feel optimistic when they are made redundant to make way for more gig economy workers. When I scroll through X these days I am assaulted with a barrage of awful media that makes me feel angry and enraged. I see half-truths twisted into hysterical apocalyptic narratives that contradict my lived reality. I see unending torrents of self-righteous grievances set against each other. Reading X does not make me feel optimistic; it makes me feel as if my soul has been stained with digital filth.

Our technology elites preach about abundance and go right back to fighting each other for the most finite and zero-sum of all resources - our attention. How is that abundance? Hypocrites! Predators! Parasites!

Technology is downstream of culture and if technologists cannot meaningfully improve people’s lives (as judged by the people themselves!), culture will reject technology.

There is a rotten core of nihilism embedded within the heart of silicon valley that feeds this despair. It is even imprinted into the slogan of y-combinator: “Make something people want”. The quality and characteristics of what a person wants are irrelevant - if a desire is fulfilled it is moral. Whenever I read their slogan I am reminded of the 19th century opium trade. A lot of my peers remind me of opium traders: they sell us things we don’t ask for because they know it will scratch a subconscious insecurity or desire they have derived and manufactured.

There is no dignity in technology today. There is no decency. It does not have to be this way. I am a technologist and I passionately believe that the only way for humanity to possess the resources required to satisfy its basic needs is through embracing, evolving and advancing technology. But not like this. Let me tell you where I am coming from.

When I was a young teenager I read about Malthus and pre-industrial society, and of the experiences and lives of people who were born, lived and died in the grip of the Malthusian trap - that the resources of a piece of land are finite and humans will suffer and starve if they outgrow their finite, limited resources. It was a world where 95% of people were subsistence farmers scratching a living from the bare earth - a world where enough bad harvests meant parents were given a Sophie’s choice of deciding how many children they were able to feed through the winter.

I remember a moment of awakening after visiting the Science Museum in London as that same teenager. I remember standing in the Hall of Steam and viewing the great leviathans that started the First Industrial Revolution. For hundreds of millennia human beings were cursed to live in the Malthusian trap, until a mere 300 years ago when a very small group of brilliant humans figured out how to make fire and steam perform mechanical work and sparked humanity’s greatest revolution. It didn’t just happen anywhere, it happened here, in my homeland, and those inventors and innovators were my ancestors. The machines I was looking at were the machines that freed humanity. It made me proud of my nation’s heritage and it made me proud to be a human being. It made me a technologist.

To summarise the introduction: Hello. My name is Zachary Williamson. I am a cryptographer, an entrepreneur and a technologist, and I want to kill the Attention Economy.

The cost of convenience

The original sin that has created this corruption is advertising.

Much of what is available on the internet is free, largely because early on there was no easy way to monetize anything. Even as online payment processing became more seamless, most everything still remained free to use.

However, something more valuable than cash alone emerged: data. Companies continued to offer products and services for free, in exchange for collecting limitless amounts of information about users’ behavior. Over time, their incentives shifted. Companies no longer wanted to sell us things we needed or wanted because our time and attention were more valuable than our money. It became more lucrative to sell our information and our unconscious patterns to the highest bidder, rather than create products and spaces that fostered fruitful dialogue or created fundamental value.

We have allowed a global feudal state to emerge, one where we are subjects of just a handful of corporations and governments.

We have corrupted the meaning of choice, which once meant that we could determine who may know us, and to what extent they may know us. We have forgotten that it is a privilege to know a person, that there is a process of earning trust, and the reward is the deepening of that relationship. We no longer value ourselves in terms of our humanity, but instead as commodities – because that is how we are treated.

Our salvation is being sold to us tenfold because we trust centralized for-profit entities more than our neighbor. Perhaps we do not trust them but we are left with no choice.

The incentives of the Information Age are cursed and we need new technology to create new, better incentives.

That technology is twofold: zero-knowledge cryptography and distributed decentralized transaction ledgers (aka blockchain).

A truly free economy that allows individuals to compete against tech elites and constant surveillance requires permissionless, self-sovereign money in order for people to reclaim their digital lives, to usher in a world where human beings are more than the sum of their commoditizable data. The likes of the Ethereum white paper and decentralized autonomous organizations promised us freedom from our digital shackles and true ownership over our data. However, blockchain’s inherent transparency made people even more vulnerable to manipulation and abuse. It was deemed a necessary evil in order to enforce verifiability.

Yet without privacy, the blockchain industry collectively created the most perfect dystopian piece of surveillance technology, where complete warrantless financial surveillance is not only possible, but inevitable.

Zero-knowledge cryptography enables human beings to prove statements about themselves, their property and their desires without sensitive information leaving their possession.

It is manifested in tools like zkPassport that enable proofs about your nationality without disclosing anything else. “I am Zachary Williamson and I am a British citizen” - I can prove that these days without forking over easily-faked passport scans or disclosing sensitive identity numbers. If social media used this technology it would at a stroke eliminate the disinformation and manipulation spread by bots.

It is manifested in tools like *zkEmail where you can *prove credentials without disclosing critical data. Your tax status, credit worthiness, bank balance - zero knowledge proofs enable all of it. Imagine getting a credit score from a smart contract without handing over the underlying data to data brokers. No one will be able to steal or use your personal information because there will be no need for companies to store it.

These applications, enabled and powered by cryptographic technology I co-invented expressly for these purposes, are but harbingers of a coming storm.

To tie this all together requires a blockchain to make these credentials portable and accessible.

Blockchains are already a canonical source of money - albeit flawed due to the lack of privacy. A privacy-preserving blockchain is also a canonical source of credentials, used by humans to prove who they are, what they have and what they want.

Money and credentials - these are the two pillars upon which rest our transactions and exchanges. Consider the sum of all transactions and exchanges within your country. That information alone gives you the sum total of a people’s desires and their needs, and the relationships they form to fulfill them. It is, put succinctly, society.

In this light, what is the value of a privacy-preserving distributed ledger? It enables the sum total of our transactions and exchanges without sacrificing data to the predators of the information age. It is everything.

Zero-knowledge cryptography can be used to create services that refound the internet without the predatory incentives of advertising and data brokers.

Privacy-preserving blockchain enables the business models that will allow this alternative to survive and thrive. It is quite simple - if you do not want to be a resource, milked for data, you have to pay for content.

Some of you may object that people aren’t willing to pay for content online. I would argue it has never earnestly been tried: it has never been possible to conveniently pay for content online. Online payment rails are slow and expensive. The VISA fee for micropayments is between 10-20 cents. Efficient microtransactions integrated into an in-browser wallet is what’s required - pay with a single click. Where online payments are made as fiat currency but executed on privacy-preserving cryptocurrency networks to ensure low fees and high throughput.

If people are unwilling to pay currency for their content online - my friends that *is* the cost of the content: you pay one way or another. We all see and experience the cost of the status quo, but now we possess the tools to try a different path.

Consider Acxiom, a data broker that boasts profiles of over 700 million human beings with thousands of data points per person, describing people’s debts, their shopping histories, location data and even if somebody is trying to conceive or has diabetes. All for sale to anyone who wants to enact “unilateral behavior modification”. Is it techno-optimistic to be labelled, catalogued and sorted without our consent or awareness? Is there dignity in reducing the human condition into a commodity for a behavioral futures market?

Humans are special. I think we are the soul of the universe - literal stardust that has coalesced across the aeons into beings that can observe the unparalleled beauty and complexity of the physical world. This impulse motivated me to become a particle physicist in my youth. I think it is important that the ballad of the cosmos does not play to an audience of 0. We are more than the sum of our undifferentiated attention.

The next Renaissance

We have seemingly reached the nadir of this timeline, surrendering everything that makes humans great without a second thought as to why we trust corporations and algorithms over each other. Instead of asking ourselves how we can be better humans, many have seemingly accepted this to be our fate, tapping twice to like and scrolling to the next piece of outrage or rot.

For the longest time I also accepted the parasitic status quo as inevitable. How else can one monetize the internet? And the internet has brought us so much good. I thought the costs were just what one had to pay.

That changed in 2017 when I started learning about zero-knowledge cryptography. I learned that you don’t have to fork over all your data to a server and you can instead keep your data and serve proofs about the essentials. I learned that you can connect this cryptographic engine with distributed ledgers to create an unparalleled portable network of credentials where human beings can prove who they are, what they have and what they want without divulging the slightest bit of identifying information that could be weaponized against their agency. I saw what could be done and I became a cryptographer to make it happen.

I did not create Aztec to fulfill other people’s wants. I created Aztec because I see the bridge to a brighter future is falling apart and I want to strengthen it. I created Aztec because I think people who monetize human beings’ attention are literal parasites and I want to render their skills obsolete. I created Aztec because I want to give data brokers an existential fear for their future. I created Aztec because I want billion-dollar bank CEOs to lose sleep at night worrying about the health of their institutions as they hemorrhage liquidity into decentralized organisations operating at a cost basis they cannot compete with.

Despite the odds, we built a coalition at Aztec who are determined to achieve this vision of self-sovereign digital privacy.

We want to facilitate the recreation of our financial ecosystem as a permissionless and decentralized network where humans control their data and where the original dreams of Ethereum can take flight.

We dream of an ever-expanding design space where anyone can realize any ambition. We don’t just look at the world that we have today. We see what could really be changed, what’s within our power and within the bounds of our technological capabilities.

We deserve more than slop. I had an opportunity to create Aztec because I live in an age where talented people can access networks that will fund their projects to the tune of multiple millions of dollars - this is exceptional. Twenty years ago this would not be possible, I would be a pawn in somebody else’s game. Many of us still are - and this is what I want to try and change with this technology. Human agency. Control over our resources. Control over our attention. The ability to coordinate with each other on our own terms without having our desires and wants filtered through the interests of untrusted intermediaries.

We will birth this new technology and it will be embraced and used because it is valuable and because it enables a condition that the techno-optimists and the preachers and the thought leaders and the grifters cannot provide*: human dignity*.

Social media without monetizing attention. A global programmable ledger of the world’s assets that removes the comparative advantage of Traditional Finance’s vertically-integrated information silos. A system of privacy-preserving credentials and an internet where your sensitive data stays with you and is not fed to data brokers. An internet where algorithmic manipulation and misdirection hurts the corporate bottom line because it degrades the experience of the paying consumer. This is a future worth building towards.

The future I am describing will come to pass, but initially only for a few. Those willing to be principal agents - those willing to pay the price of consumption in fiat.

For the enlightened? A digital renaissance. For the rest? Slop. Brain Rot. Digital filth. They will be fed their slop in abundance and they will choke on it. But the difference from today, my friends, is that there will be an alternative. The afflicted will flee to our safe harbour: first as a trickle, then a flood. That flood will mark the closing of our Information Age and the dawn, I pray, of something better.

We have created a technology that can meaningfully make a difference in the world. Our movement is a technological vanguard that aims to defy our corrupted existence and thunder towards an uncertain yet inevitable future.

We are here to nourish a movement of polymaths and ambitious pioneers, and unite math, science, culture, and capital into builders and patrons. We want to foster a culture that remains relevant and inspiring because it puts humanity at its core. A culture that proves what beauty and knowledge can be achieved when people are trusted to rationalize and make choices for themselves.

We aim to reintroduce forgotten values and ideals that reconnect technology with humanism and humanity. We are lighting a cultural insurgency against the nihilism and ignorance that oppress our contemporaries.

We are here to ignite a renaissance.

Whether the Information Age continues to grow into a monstrous parasite that fractures our civilization, or evolves into something more humanistic; you have a role to play as much as anyone else in this world.

We possess technologies that can be used to undermine the status quo and their quantity and quality are growing every day.

Take encrypted messaging. In the past governments did not even allow you to encrypt your data and viewed such actions as subversive. Today we have fully end-to-end encrypted messaging applications like Signal where your communications cannot be spied upon or harvested for monetizable information.

In an age where states are attempting to outlaw cash and institute comprehensive, warrantless financial surveillance regimes, the resistance to this force spawned encrypted digital currencies like ZCash and the rise of zero-knowledge cryptographic technologies that power the privacy revolution.

Today we are on the cusp of possessing a fully distributed, permissionless programmable private transaction network. From these foundations we can build decentralized systems for credentials, payments and settlements that can refound the internet. Aztec is not alone but is one iteration on a lineage of technologies that can be traced back for decades to the dawn of the Information Age.

If you are a developer, you now have a choice and can use a privacy-preserving programming language like Noir to build applications that protect user data instead of sharing it for the highest bidder.

If you are a product manager, you have a choice between harvesting user data for profit, or embracing these new technologies to pioneer new business models that incentivize treatment of the user as a customer and not a product.

If you are a writer or a cultural communicator, you have a choice between mutely complaining about the status quo, or instead you can awaken people to their lived reality and the alternatives that are now possible. Explain what we are trying to achieve and that privacy is the key that will unshackle us from the predations of the Information Age.

If you are a user, you have a choice between using products and services that milk you for information as if your humanity is a tradeable commodity, or using alternatives that protect your data and respect your dignity. These emergent technologies are novel and, for now, lack the conveniences of the toxic fruits of surveillance capitalism. Help us. Use our products and give us feedback on how to improve what we are building.

If you use a computer, go online, leave a digital footprint: you are a participant in information warfare whether you want to be or not. Our animalistic instincts are being hijacked by algorithms trained on the sum of data extracted without our consent and weaponised against our reason and judgment. You, me and likely everyone reading this article; we are all united in the fact that we are losing this war. My friends and I have crafted weapons to oppose this fate. Use them.