The Only Way Forward: Ensuring the Next Civilization Solves What the Last Could Not
The most urgent consensus for the present internet — and the civilization to come.
What is our current problem, the one so urgent that people feel it every single day?
Are you tired that your data doesn’t actually belong to you? Every click, every search, every purchase — stored in corporate silos, monetized by others, but never fully under your control.
Are you frustrated that you don’t even have access to your complete medical record? Instead, it’s scattered across hospitals, clinics, and specialists, locked in incompatible formats that don’t talk to each other.
And what about the teenagers who live inside social media — immersed for hours, yet left more anxious, more fragmented, more vulnerable to manipulation and bullying?
These are not isolated annoyances. They are symptoms of a deeper problem: the last civilization, built on products and platforms, never solved the issues of data ownership, interoperability, and human dignity online. That failure is precisely what the next civilization must address — not with another app, but with protocols strong enough to rebuild trust, ownership, and fairness into the digital world.
Why Products Alone Cannot Fix This
When I say “product,” I mean the apps, platforms, and services we all use every day — from social media feeds to electronic health record systems, from banking apps to AI chatbots. A product is a packaged solution: it comes with a polished interface, a business model, and a set of features designed to keep users inside its ecosystem.
By design, products optimize for user engagement and profit, not for interoperability or fairness. The incentives are clear: what is good for the platform (lock-in, growth, monetization) is rarely aligned with what is good for the individual or for society.
That is why every new product, no matter how impressive, eventually becomes another silo. Your medical records live in one vendor’s system, your financial history in another, your photos in yet another. Each company builds walls to keep you in, rather than bridges to let you move freely. Instead of solving fragmentation, more apps deepen it.
The best analogy is electricity. Imagine a world where every inventor built a different lightbulb, each with its own incompatible plug, voltage, and wiring. You could marvel at the design of each bulb, but without a shared grid, the power would never scale. That’s exactly where we are with AI and the internet today: dazzled by the bulbs, but still lacking the grid.
Products, in other words, can delight and impress, but they cannot solve civilization-level problems. Only protocols — the invisible rules that standardize connection, ownership, and trust — can.
Protocol Civilization Defined
If the last era was defined by products and platforms, the next must be defined by protocols. A protocol is more than just a technical standard — it is the invisible foundation that allows disparate actors to coordinate at scale. The internet only became possible because TCP/IP created a shared grammar for communication. Mobile networks became global only when GSM defined how devices and carriers would interoperate. Electricity became universal once standards for AC/DC, plugs, and voltage stabilized.
The promise of a protocol civilization is that the very problems products could never solve — data ownership, interoperability, trust, and inclusion — are addressed at the structural level:
Data ownership embedded in protocols: Instead of handing your personal data over to platforms, ownership and control would be built into the rules themselves. Your medical record, financial history, and digital identity could travel with you, not stay locked inside institutional silos.
Interoperability as a baseline: Rather than an afterthought patched together with APIs, interoperability would be native. Systems would be built to talk to each other by design, the way email works regardless of provider.
Trust anchored in transparent rules: Instead of trusting institutions or brands, users trust the protocol — rules that can be audited, verified, and enforced without discretionary power.
Humans and AI as equal participants: Any actor that can follow the protocol — whether a person, an AI agent, or a decentralized organization — would participate under the same set of rules.
Of course, we have tried to move in this direction before. Blockchain and Web3 were early attempts to encode ownership, interoperability, and trust into protocols. They succeeded in proving the idea, but fell short of full adoption. Scalability, usability, energy cost, and speculative distraction all limited their reach. The ambition was correct — to replace silos with protocols — but the execution never fully broke through to the mainstream.
Now, with the rise of large language models, the opportunity has returned with new force. Unlike blockchain, which was highly technical and inaccessible to most people, LLMs offer a low-barrier interface: natural language. They are capable of explaining themselves, mediating complexity, and serving as translators between protocols and human understanding. In other words, LLMs not only need protocols to function as infrastructure — they are also uniquely capable of helping us build, explain, and spread those protocols at societal scale.
This is the contrast:
Product Civilization = apps, platforms, silos, engagement metrics.
Protocol Civilization = standards, infrastructure, open collaboration, and AI-enabled participation.
The first gave us convenience. The second, if we can build it, offers us a new foundation for civilization.
Real Change Requires Mass, Low-Barrier Participation
No civilization has ever been built by experts alone. Electricity only transformed society when it reached every household. The internet only reshaped culture when email and the web became accessible to ordinary people. Real change requires broad participation — not just innovation at the top, but adoption at the base.
This has always been the stumbling block. Even when we tried to build protocol-based systems through blockchain and Web3, the barrier to entry remained high: private keys, wallets, gas fees, complicated interfaces. These were never tools for the everyday citizen. As a result, the vision of decentralized infrastructure largely stayed within niche communities, unable to spread across society.
Large language models change this equation. For the first time, we have a universal interface — natural language. Anyone who can speak or type can engage. LLMs can explain protocols in plain words, translate technical rules into everyday understanding, and guide people step by step into participation. They collapse the barrier between experts and ordinary users, making protocols not just a back-end standard but a lived experience accessible to all.
That is why the rise of LLMs is such a pivotal moment. They are not only raw material for building protocols; they are also the megaphone and teacher that can carry protocol literacy to millions. Without this low-barrier entry point, protocol civilization would remain an elite experiment. With it, it has the potential to become a global consensus
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非常有洞察力的观点。打破信息孤岛，建立通信协议，仍然需要中心化的组织来完成。
Thank you for this thought-provoking article. Your argument that LLMs can solve the usability crisis that plagued Web3 is a powerful and insightful one. I fully agree that the "protocol-oriented" approach is the right direction.
My key reservation, however, is that the article doesn't fully resolve the tension between the front-end and the back-end. While LLMs provide a seamless user interface, the underlying protocols would still face the fundamental limitations of current blockchain technology—namely, poor scalability and high energy costs, which are by-products of their design.
I believe your thesis points to a more nuanced conclusion: the rise of LLMs is pivotal not because it fixes everything at once, but because it might be the catalyst we've been waiting for. By bringing millions of users to the table, it could finally create a strong enough commercial and social imperative to build the next generation of truly efficient and scalable protocols.