Read Write Own
Click here to buy the book.🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
Read Write Own traces the history of the internet and offers both a vision for a better future and a playbook for building it.
The book shows how the internet has gone through three distinct eras, bringing us to the critical moment we face today.
Read Write Own is for anyone who wants to better understand the potential of blockchains and Web3 and their role in rebuilding a decentralized internet.
🧠 Key Takeaways
Will fill in after reading
✍️ Memorable Quotes
“The internet economy turbocharges networks. In an industrial economy, corporations accrue power mainly through economies of scope and scale; that is, ways of decreasing production costs. The diminishing marginal cost of producing more steel, cars, pharmaceutical drugs, fizzy sugar water, or whatever other widget lends an advantage to whoever owns and invests in the means of production. On the internet, the marginal costs of distribution are negligible, so power primarily accrues another way: through network effects.”
Network effects are one of the strongest competitive advantages a business can have. The idea is pretty simple: the more people who join the network, the more valuable it becomes for everyone else.
Take Facebook as an example. Every new user who creates a profile makes the platform more attractive. Friends (and eventually, society as a whole) join because they don’t want to miss out, and advertisers want a piece of the network because that’s where the attention is.
And once you’re on the platform, leaving isn’t easy. You want to be where your friends are, and the more connections you’ve built—and the more content you’ve shared—the harder it is to walk away. That stickiness only intensified once algorithms began tailoring feeds to your interests, giving you a personalized reason to keep coming back.
In a nutshell, that’s the power of the internet economy. Unlike the industrial era, where dominance came from cutting production costs, online it comes from networks that grow stronger with each additional user.
“The difference between a protocol network like email and a corporate network like Twitter is that email’s network effect accrues to a community instead of a company. No company owns or controls email and anyone can access it through software created by independent developers that supports the underlying protocol. It’s up to developers and consumers to decide what to build and use. Decisions that affect the community are made by the community.”
The difference between a protocol network and a corporate network really comes down to centralized power versus decentralized power.
Corporate networks, like Twitter or Instagram, are owned outright by the companies behind them. That means the power belongs entirely to the corporation.
They make the rules, they can change the rules whenever they want, and there isn’t anything users can do about it. If you’re on their platform, you’re playing by their rules.
Protocol networks are the opposite. Take email or the web as examples—nobody owns them, and nobody can unilaterally decide how they should work.
These protocol networks are built on open standards that anyone can use. Developers can build on top of them, but they don’t control the underlying network, which means they don’t own the users.
As an example: I use a company called Kit as my email service provider. They manage my subscriber list, my templates, all of that—but they don’t own any of it. And they don’t own my actual email address (ryne@retirewithryne.com).
If Kit ever started trying to dictate what I could or couldn’t send to my readers, I could just export my list and move to another provider—of which there are plenty. That flexibility exists because email is a protocol network.
Now compare that to Twitter, Instagram, or TikTok. Once again, these are corporate networks. They do own my name (@retirewithryne on those platforms), and they absolutely control my relationship with my audience.
If they don’t like what I post, they can ban or shadowban me, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I can’t export my followers and take them somewhere else since they only exist inside that company’s walled garden.
That’s the key difference here: with protocol networks, power is distributed and users have freedom of choice. With corporate networks, power is centralized, and users are at the mercy of the company.
“Software is an art form, as you’ll remember: just as you wouldn’t expect all great novels or paintings to come from people at established institutions, so you shouldn’t expect all great software to come from them either.”
It would be shortsighted to think that only developers at renowned companies are capable of creating software worth using. The same applies to any craft, really.
It’d be like saying the only people who can make real music are the ones who studied at Berklee. Or that the only people who can be successful investors are the ones who passed a Series 7 exam. It just wouldn’t be true.
In the same way, DIY developers can build incredible software. “Ordinary” people do extraordinary things all the time.
“Tokens can represent the ownership of anything digital, including money, art, photos, music, text, code, game items, voting power, access, or whatever people come up with next. Using some additional building blocks, they can also represent real-world things, like physical goods, real estate, or dollars in a bank account. Anything that can be represented in code can be wrapped inside a token to be bought, sold, used, stored, embedded, transferred, or whatever else a person might want to do with it.”
You can think of tokens as digital containers, and you can put just about anything inside one—money, photos, music, or anything else. If it can be written in code, it can live inside a token.
And tokens aren’t just limited to online stuff. They can represent real-world things too.
For example, think about the deed to your house or the title to your car. Normally, those live as stacks of paperwork at the county clerk’s office or the DMV. But with a token, that ownership could exist as a single digital record that proves you’re the rightful owner.
The blockchain that the token is built on would act like a giant public notary, keeping the record safe, transparent, and tamper-proof.
The point is, once something is wrapped inside a token, you can move it around however you want. You can buy it, sell it, trade it, store it, or use it to unlock access to something else.
In a nutshell, tokens are basically the Swiss Army knife of ownership in the digital age.
Read Write Own traces the history of the internet and offers both a vision for a better future and a playbook for building it.