If someone's building another institution within open protocols—gatekeeping people's minds, capturing the incredible value of freedom for their business, wrapping centralized control in decentralization theater—they are my enemy.
The protocol gives neutral tools: infrastructure that could serve without dominating, systems that could connect without controlling, technology that could empower without extracting. But they can't see them as tools—they only know how to build institutions. They're not consciously choosing to institutionalize freedom, they're just doing what they've always done, replicating the same patterns they've internalized for decades.
They don't even realize they're building manipulative institutions on top of neutral infrastructure. They call centralized control "community stewardship" because that's the only language they know. They turn voluntary cooperation into mandatory compliance because hierarchy is their default mode. They create dependencies and call them "services" because they genuinely can't imagine people coordinating without a management layer. Look at the big conferences—always gatekeepers deciding who speaks, who belongs, who gets the stage. They can't gather without creating hierarchies of access.
This is worse than malice—it's institutional muscle memory. They're so captured by institutional thinking that they can't recognize liberating tools when they're holding them. People trained by institutions can only reproduce institutions.
I'm not here to help anyone build better institutions. I'm here to build infrastructure that works around people who can't stop institutionalizing everything they touch.
