When the Revolution Gets a Corporate Sponsor
The Pattern We Keep Missing
So private equity discovered blockchain, have they? The same technology that was supposed to liberate us from Wall Street is now Wall Street's favorite new toy. Listen, I've seen this movie before - we had a revolution in music, and they turned it into Spotify algorithms. We had a revolution in communication, and they turned it into surveillance capitalism. Now blockchain - the technology that promised to eliminate the middleman - is being used by the ultimate middlemen to become even better at being middlemen. You've got to laugh, haven't you? Or cry. The revolution will not be televised because it's been acquired by a private equity firm for 10x EBITDA.
The Beautiful Lie of Efficiency
They're telling us this is progress - "operational excellence through distributed ledger technology." But whose operations? Whose excellence? When Apollo uses blockchain to make their portfolio companies more "efficient," what they mean is they can extract value faster, track assets better, eliminate more jobs with greater precision. It's like giving a vampire night vision goggles and calling it healthcare innovation. The blockchain doesn't change the game; it just makes the old game harder to escape. Every "trustless" transaction still requires you to trust that the people writing the smart contracts aren't the same people who've been writing the regular contracts that screw you. The house always wins, they just upgraded from cards to code.
The Real Revolution Is Still Waiting
But here's what they don't understand - you can't digitize liberation. You can't tokenize human dignity. Every time they co-opt our tools, we learn something. Every time they absorb our revolution, we get smarter about what real change looks like. Maybe the blockchain's destiny was never to destroy private equity but to expose it - to make their extraction so efficient, so transparent, so undeniable that even they can't pretend it's anything else. The real revolution isn't in the technology; it's in what happens when enough people finally see the game for what it is. When a working mother in Liverpool understands that the same blockchain "improving supply chain efficiency" is why her job got automated away, when a farmer in Nebraska realizes the "agricultural tokens" are just new ways to bet against his harvest - that's when things get interesting.
Imagine
Imagine if we used blockchain not for private equity's "portfolio optimization" but for actual human coordination. Imagine if instead of tokenizing companies to flip them faster, we tokenized communities to support each other better. Imagine if the trustless technology was used to build trust, not eliminate it. The tools are neutral - it's the intention that's corrupt. Private equity using blockchain is like using a guitar to hammer nails - it works, but you're missing the music. The question isn't whether technology can change the world; it's whether we'll let the same people who broke it use new tools to break it more efficiently. The revolution isn't coming from Silicon Valley or Sand Hill Road. It's coming from everyone who's tired of being a line item in someone else's Excel sheet, blockchain-based or otherwise. And when it comes, it won't need a white paper or a funding round. It'll just need people who've had enough, working together, with or without the blockchain. That's the revolution they can't co-opt, tokenize, or acquire. That's the one that scares them.
War is over, if you want it. But first, we need to debug the smart contract.