Part 3 — Trajectories

Fast forward a few years. Agents representing people, companies and institutions are ordinary. Discovery, reputation and trust have become infrastructure, and the digital world is increasingly operated and populated by agents and presences.

Grant that, and a question opens up. Once all of it is in place and working, what happens next?

That is the subject of the next pages. At the risk of sounding obvious, let it be clear that nothing described in these chapters exists today, at least not in the form described. Some of it is highly probable, some of it closer to a moonshot, and none of these chapters claims to settle who will own, operate or govern what they describe.

Nobody knows the future. Still, it is tempting to take the elements we already know and project what might come next.

In 1995, once you understood the Web, some consequences became difficult to ignore. A newspaper classified section had scarcity on its side: limited space, limited distribution, limited publication frequency. The Web removed all three. Anyone could publish, information could be updated continuously, and search made it possible to retrieve what mattered without scanning a page by hand. You did not need to know what Craigslist, eBay or Google would become to see that the old arrangement was unstable.

That is the spirit of the next chapters. Take the mechanics seriously. Assume they scale. Then ask what stops making sense, what becomes newly possible, and what kinds of structures appear to fill the gap.

The details will almost certainly be wrong. The forces shaping what comes next are already in movement.