I am supportive of the #occupywallstreet protest as an exercise of First Amendment rights. I too am frustrated with a financial and economic system that has made the rich richer, has hollowed out the middle class and has ever more American families living in poverty. I am, however, skeptical about the protests’ long term impact. While the protests may draw more media attention to the problematic role of very large banks, they are unlikely to contribute meaningfully to change given overall institutional inertia (unless they succeed in reaching the scale of the Arab Spring).
How then can we affect meaningful change in institutions? Growing up in Germany I was too young to remember the actual student revolts, but I had several teachers who had participated. Those revolts famously ended with the call for a “march through the institutions” - the idea being that to affect real change, protestors had to join the very institutions they were protesting and change them from the inside. A whole group of these student protesters decided to become teachers and I am grateful for it as they were some of the best teachers I had growing up.
Today though, I believe there is an even better option: use the Internet to make the old institutions irrelevant. Working in Venture Capital I have the pleasure of meeting entrepreneurs all the time. Many of them are not thinking of what they are doing with the Internet in terms of large scale social change, yet what they are creating often has the potential to be deeply disruptive to existing institutions. For some that is an explicit motivation. Whatever the case may be, I am convinced that Internet based businesses and networks that replace existing institutions will be the real source of change.
I have written about Bitcoin in the past. While I continue to believe that Bitcoin in its current incarnation will not succeed as an alternative currency for commerce, it clearly demonstrates that such alternatives are technically feasible. So if you really want to #disruptwallstreet go out and create a version of Bitcoin that isn’t deflationary (figure out how to index the total amount of currency to the amount of commerce volume). Or if that’s too far out for you, join a startup such as Covestor or LendingClub (both USV portfolio companies) or BankSimple that are working on disrupting various parts of the financial industry.
