Sir Tim Berners-Lee, computer scientist, inventor of the web and an all-round good guy, wrote some words in The Evening Standard earlier this week, arguing that polarization, conspiracy and mental health crises online stem from design flaws that must be corrected — even if that requires regulation. 

The piece draws directly from chapter 13, “Design Issues,” of his recently released book “This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web,” which I encourage everyone to read.

I agree with Berners-Lee’s diagnosis. But regulation is not the cure. The web’s decline is not merely a design failure; it is also an economic one. Design choices follow incentives, and those incentives have been distorted by fiat money and the advertising model it props up. Cheap credit from the fiat-fuelled venture capital system pushed Silicon Valley away from hacker-led engineering and toward surveillance-driven profit extraction.

To fix the web, we need open source protocols and open source money. 

The internet can be fixed without regulation. But we cannot engineer a solution while ignoring the monetary headwinds that shape design. The economic system — quarterly shareholder primacy and fiat inflation — pressures companies to prioritize engagement, outrage and surveillance advertising. Bitcoin changes this equation. It removes inflationary pressure, potentially breaks the ad model by enabling new forms of monetization that align with user interests rather than exploit them. Combined with open protocols, Bitcoin is the enabler of a freer, more ethical web.

What Went Wrong With World Wide Web

Berners-Lee highlights two main symptoms: polarization and mental health damage. He’s right. 

1. Polarization and Collapse of Shared Reality 

Berners-Lee says:
“The most egregious symptom is polarisation. Social media, as currently built, leads users to take extreme political positions and demonise the opposing side. This makes constructive engagement difficult, allows outlandish conspiracy theories to flourish, and promotes demagoguery over deliberation.”

Polarization is real. But amplification cuts both ways. The same algorithms that surface conspiracy theories also amplify truths that the mainstream media suppresses. In an age of censorship and propaganda, this amplification has sometimes been the only way truth surfaces. 

The deeper issue is that people no longer share the same reality. A breaking story fractures into irreconcilable narratives depending on whether it spreads via Twitter, TikTok, Bluesky or Reddit; whether filtered through left-leaning fact-checkers or right-leaning commentators; whether summarized by Grok or ChatGPT. Each tribe outsources “truth formation” to its own authorities, who are incentivized to deliver emotionally convenient facts. LLMs can also generate synthetic personalities to disrupt discourse at scale. Regulation will not restore trust here — because the problem is not just what flows, but how trust is established in the first place.

That said, algorithms are optimized for outrage because outrage is profitable. Regulation will not change this, as it’s as much an economic problem as it is a technical one.

As Neal Howe and William Strauss describe in “The Fourth Turning,” we’re in a crisis era: Consensus frays, power realigns and old arrangements give way. In practice, that means more friction online — tribal feeds, narrative knife fights and rising coordination costs. In other words, we should expect to see some of the carnage we are seeing today, and we can do something about it. 

2. Mental Health and Addictive Algorithms 

Berners-Lee says:
“Many social media users report suffering mental health issues after prolonged usage. The catalogue of ills related to social media is alarming: anxiety, depression, jealousy, inadequacy, feelings of isolation, body image issues.”

I agree, social media is liberating and destructive in equal measure. Search queries for anxiety rise in parallel with usage, and the catalogue of harms is long: depression, inadequacy, body image issues, isolation. This is certainly something that needs fixing. 

Berners-Lee says:
“Social media companies are using machine-learning techniques to make users addicted to their platforms. These systems are designed to be addictive, feeding people more and more extreme content, making them alternately angry and sad.”

This is not accidental. Twenty-plus years ago, Silicon Valley execs and engineers were taught how to design addictive systems at BJ Fogg’s Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford (his book, for anyone interested, is called “Persuasive Technology”), with some even attending retreats at his home where these ideas were explored further. The *Like* button, infinite scroll and red notification badges all came from his teachings and were engineered to hijack dopamine pathways. 

Jack Dorsey, speaking at the Oslo Freedom Forum in 2024, spoke about the damage caused by the algorithms designed by these companies: 

“The real debate should be about free will. We are being programmed based on what we say we’re interested in, and we’re told through these discovery mechanisms what is interesting — and as we engage and interact with this content, the algorithm continues to build more and more of this bias.”

Dorsey has previously spoken about how Twitter began as a protocol vision before venture capital steered it toward growth, control and ad monetization. Having seen the corruption of that vision, it’s no coincidence that Dorsey now backs open source protocols like Nostr, Bitchat and previously Bluesky. His investments are a confirmation that platforms cannot be reformed from within. Only protocols, open by design, can protect free will from algorithmic capture.

Berners-Lee has suggested that algorithms could be rebuilt to maximize joy rather than outrage. It’s a noble vision, one I wish were realistic — but under current incentives, it is not. Research shows that high-arousal emotions, especially anger, spread faster than calm or positive emotions.

Attempts to pivot have proven costly before. For instance, when Facebook adjusted its News Feed in 2018 to reduce harmful content, users spent 50 million fewer hours per day on the site and publishers saw traffic collapse. More recent audits confirm the same pattern: Platforms that downrank divisive content see measurable drops in engagement and revenue. (You can find related studies here, here, here and here.)

As long as companies are bound by their fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value, regulators cannot force them to deliberately make less money so long as outrage remains more profitable than joy.

Regulation of the Internet

Berners-Lee has long been one of the web’s strongest defenders. He fought for net neutrality, encryption and decentralization. He warned of surveillance long before it was fashionable. He has stood on the side of open participation and user empowerment.

So it comes as somewhat of a surprise when Berners-Lee concedes that regulation might be necessary. He even quotes bad-faith actor Yuval Noah Harari to support this case: 

“If a social media algorithm recommends to people a hate-filled conspiracy theory, this is the fault not of the person who produced the conspiracy theory, it is the fault of the people who designed and let loose the algorithm.” 

While I begrudgingly agree with Harari in this instance, let’s not lose sight of who we’re dealing with. He is a World Economic Forum favorite, a consistent advocate of technocratic solutions and someone who has described bitcoin as a currency of distrust. His worldview defaults to centralization, surveillance and state power. His arguments are dressed in reason but advance less autonomy and more control.

Berners-Lee admits: “While I generally oppose the regulation of the web, in this instance I agree.” I’m sorry, but regulation is a slippery slope that we should do our utmost to avoid.

It’s because Berners-Lee has been such a defender of the internet that his concession to regulation feels a little defeatist. Has the relentless rise of algorithmic capture, misinformation and addictive design worn him down? Perhaps. But regulation is not the answer.

Another word on regulation… When governments regulate, they entrench incumbents and weaponize “safety” to justify censorship. They are also hopelessly incompetent — the EU’s cookie law is a perfect example: It protected nobody, achieved nothing and left users dealing with annoying pop-ups.

True democracy online should be crowdsourced and built with open protocols — rules without rulers.

The Economic Headwind of a Free and Flourishing Internet

Now let’s get to the crux of the matter. The biggest issue is fiat money. Its full implementation in 1971 marked a fork in the road: productivity kept climbing, but wages stagnated in real terms. WTF Happened in 1971? shows the divergence clearly — inequality, debt, housing costs and social decay all accelerating after Nixon severed the final tie to gold.

Before 1971, prices and wages remained relatively stable. For centuries, under hard money, there was equilibrium. During the short-lived classical gold standard, the Belle Époque delivered a golden age of invention and relative prosperity. Prices stayed stable, and by most accounts, life flourished. That stability vanished once fiat money became the norm.

Since then, and at an accelerating pace, people have had to work harder for less. Companies have been forced to extract more productivity while becoming less ethical. Remember Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto? This is likely the malevolent force that caused Sergey, Larry and Eric to lose their innocence.

Speaking of Google, its ad model killed traditional media’s business model, leaving it dependent on state subsidies and corporate sponsorships. Governments now use media as PR machines, which is a large part of the polarization problem we are witnessing online. 

The venture capital model, fuelled by cheap fiat credit, warped Silicon Valley incentives from hacker-led engineering to surveillance-led profit extraction. Centralization and monopolization are hallmarks of easy credit and the Cantillon effect. 

Jeff Booth estimates technology applies a natural deflationary force of ~5% per year, while Saifedean Ammous argues that real inflation — not CPI, but monetary expansion — runs closer to 15-16%. Governments offset deflation with money printing; companies respond by extracting more from users in an ever-increasing race to the bottom. 

The outcome is visible in equity markets: the Mediocre 493 firms listed on the S&P 500 are structurally failing, and the S&P, powered by the Magnificent 7, basically mirrors the money supply.

And layered on top of fiat, fiduciary duty and quarterly reporting locked companies into a head-on battle with inflation. Fiduciary duty, codified in 19th-century U.S. law, simply required directors to act in shareholders’ best interests. But the SEC’s 1970 mandate for quarterly 10-Q reporting — combined with Milton Friedman’s 1970 essay in the New York Times proclaiming that the sole responsibility of business is to increase profits — hardened the culture of “quarterly capitalism.” 

This convergence — fiat money, shareholder primacy, quarterly reporting and venture-funded adtech — created the perfect storm. Companies are structurally incentivized to fuel outrage, addiction, and mine user data. Regulation cannot change this so long as the underlying money system is broken. Until we change course and return to sound money, design fixes will always fail under economic pressure. 

Tim Berners-Lee, Bitcoin is the Panacea!

Bitcoin is both a cure for broken money and a foundation for new business models online. It is not an app or a company — it is a monetary base layer that resets incentives at the root. 

I don’t know where Berners-Lee stands on Bitcoin specifically. Publicly, he’s dismissed crypto as a speculative casino. On that, I agree. Bitcoin is different: no insiders, no venture fund, no foundation, no mutable rules. If he sees that distinction, good; if not yet, maybe soon.

Fixing money

Bitcoin combines the best properties of gold — durability, scarcity, uniformity, unforgeable costliness — with the best properties of fiat — divisibility, portability. The result is unequivocally the best money ever designed: It’s also borderless, censorship-resistant, decentralized, openly programmable, bound by thermodynamics and internet-native.

In contrast to Bitcoin, it’s becoming clearer with each passing year that the fiat system is crumbling beneath our feet, as bitcoin monetizes in its shadow. Bitcoin offers a way to diffuse the global debt bubble rather than let it implode, correcting the course of monetary history by placing global money back on a sound footing.

The implications are enormous, if/when bitcoin becomes fiat’s successor. For the first time in living memory, society would no longer have to swim against the tide just to stay still. With sound money, the natural deflationary benefits of technological progress can accrue to all, not be siphoned away by those closest to the spigot.

Jeff Booth, in “The Price of Tomorrow,” makes the point that technology is inherently deflationary, i.e., it delivers more for less. But under fiat money, this deflation is papered over with inflation, debt and growth targets. Bitcoin harmonizes money with technology. Its fixed supply means the gains of technological deflation accrue to everyone, rather than being siphoned away. 

Fixing incentives online

“If you consider the internet to be the equivalent to a nation state, it will have a currency native to itself, and there is not going to be any one party or institution that makes this happen, and there’s not going to be any one party or institution that can stop it from happening.” – (Jack Dorsey, Quartz)

Now that we have an internet native currency, the question is… what can it enable?

Well, first of all, bitcoin can reshape incentives online. It can do this by enabling micropayments, streaming sats and peer-to-peer monetization, meaning users can support creators directly. Platforms can earn money without selling their users’ data to advertisers. This could lessen the effect or even do away with an ad-driven, data mining model that forces platforms to optimize for outrage.

It will also upend the venture capital model, as presently those who are closest to the money spigot benefit in greater proportion. As Bitcoin has no central bank to create more money, everyone has a relatively equal footing, and thus investment should become more decentralized, once again.

From there, entirely new dynamics can emerge. Protocols and applications won’t be beholden to growth-at-all-costs models dictated by venture funds; they can scale organically, funded by the very users who rely on them. Value becomes the metric, not quarterly growth or ad impressions. Developers can ship products that solve real problems, and be rewarded directly in sats. Communities can pool capital without intermediaries, seeding projects from the bottom up rather than waiting for approval from the top down.

In this environment, the internet can finally align with its original ethos — open, interoperable and user-driven — because the monetary layer itself is open, interoperable and user-driven. Bitcoin clears the ground for that alignment. 

Bitcoin is not limited to fixing the web — it is upstream of it. Without sound money, design fixes will always be bent back toward exploitation. With sound money, platforms can adopt models that are ethical by default. With internet-native money, creators can be paid directly. Bitcoin is the fulcrum where broken incentives give way to healthier systems — online and off.

“The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen.” – Julian Assange

Fixing this does not require government regulation. It requires realigning incentives — with open protocols and Sound Money.

Open Source Solutions

Berners-Lee points to open source tools like Polis, Mastodon and Fora as promising experiments in healthier online discourse. Building on these efforts, a new wave of protocols combines the same open ethos with a native internet money, aligning incentives in ways that advertising-driven models never could.

With Bitcoin as the economic base, protocols can address the design layer. These systems are live, early and need broader adoption and a killer application — but they already show how to realign incentives without regulation.

Mastodon demonstrates what’s possible with open source federation and timelines built from people you choose to follow, rather than engagement-driven algorithms. And while its refusal to rely on advertising is a strength, the absence of a native payments system is a limitation.

Enter Nostr

Launched in late 2019 by Fiatjaf, Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) is a simple protocol that decouples identity and content from any single app. Keys identify users; relays transmit signed events. Multiple clients (Damus, Amethyst, Primal, Iris, Alby) read and write to the same social graph, delivering real interoperability — the kind of cross-client, cross-app portability Berners-Lee calls for.

Users pick relays and shape their own feeds, putting algorithmic choice firmly in their hands. This echoes the idea Harvard professor Jonathan Zittrain proposed — and which Berners-Lee spotlights in his book — for fine-tuned controls to steer content away from conspiracy rabbit holes. Unlike that platform-driven vision, Nostr empowers users directly, with its algorithmic flexibility limited only by the protocol’s young age.

While payments aren’t part of the base design, Lightning “zaps” are now common — native, instant tipping and payments tied to posts and profiles. That pairing — open communication plus open money — enables bottom-up coordination and rapid iteration without gatekeepers. Deletion is advisory (clients/relays may honor it), so there’s practical permanence and accountability across the network.

Read more: Nostr: censorship-resistant communication

Protocols, Infused with Bitcoin

Chaumian Mints

Cashu by Calle brings Chaumian eCash to Bitcoin — private, bearer-style tokens that can run alongside Nostr or standalone. It enables fast, private micro-flows; Calle also co-founded BitChat with Jack Dorsey, taking these ideas into a user-facing chat context.

Reputation Systems

Community Notes proves cross-faction context can slow misinformation. Add transparent weighting, DIDs and Web-of-Trust primitives and you get a durable, portable reputation. Put sats as skin-in-the-game (bonds/slashing for dishonest signals) and the mechanism strengthens without central censors.

Spam Resistance

Spam isn’t new, and it isn’t purely online. Usenet has handled floods for decades as a decentralized, user-run network with no central regulator. Adam Back’s Hashcash showed the core principle: attach a small proof-of-work cost and abuse drops. The same economics apply now with bitcoin — sats-priced frictions via Lightning (or Ark Protocol) make bot farms and propaganda expensive while keeping honest participation cheap. 

Spam is basically a numbers game: When it’s free, it scales; add cost and you restore the signal. Think refundable per-post/per-DM deposits, PoW stamps or rate limits priced in sats— good-faith interaction stays sustainable while mass manipulation becomes uneconomic.

In Conclusion

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is right about the symptoms. Our opinions differ regarding the cure. Regulation cannot reverse centralization engineered by states and corporations; it merely entrenches governments into the problem it partly created.

The drift didn’t start with bad UX. It started with broken money (and all the problems therein) and the end of sound money (1971), in addition to shareholder-primacy dogma, bent incentives toward short-term nominal gains and surveillance advertising. From there, outrage paid the bills, while integrity fell by the way.

The remedy is Bitcoin returning the world to sound money, which will enable open protocols to better power the web.

Screw the regulators.

Fix the money, fix the world.