They told me to stop talking. Then I opened this book.

Reading day: Monday, 9 November 2026. First highlight from This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee.

The passage

“ My friend Meryl Dalitz recalls me drawing the concept of the web in the snow with a ski pole during what was meant to be a peaceful day out on the slopes.

I don’t think Meryl could see what I saw. What she could see was my passion. I still have that passion more than thirty years later. Actually, I think I have more passion now than I did then. The diagram I drew in the snow melted, but my idea – the World Wide Web – is now used by more than half the world. It’s one of the most successful inventions of all time. Just as I’d hoped, it has enabled a flourishing of human creativity and self-expression, and I think we’re only beginning. In fact, I believe that the only limit to what can be created on the web is our own human imaginations.”

Excerpt From

This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web

Tim Berners-Lee

This material may be protected by copyright.

The book that waited for me

There is a pattern in my life: when I’m stuck thinking about something, a book somehow lands in my lap. Sometimes it has been sitting there for months before I’m ready to open it.

I first saw This Is for Everyone at Blossoms in Bangalore, roughly two months ago. I had gone there looking for Andrew Huberman’s Protocols. Buying that book was, for me, a way of expressing gratitude for his impact on my life. It was expensive—I remember something like ₹1,200—but I wanted to pay for something that had already given me so much. I’ve also written about him in my gratitude series, and he is part of our Moral Board.

Then I did what I usually do at Blossoms: wandered around looking for other books to buy, or perhaps find and read later. That was when I saw Tim Berners-Lee’s book. We are creating The Internet of Value. It made sense to read a firsthand account from the man who invented the World Wide Web.

I had a digital copy soon afterwards. But for two months, I couldn’t bring myself to read it. Then, a couple of days ago, it came back into my consciousness.

How many steps from chapati to The Internet of Value?

Before opening the book, I had spent eight days at a residency at Dhun, organised by Zu-Grama and Logos. I was excited to meet people working across technology, AI security, storytelling and research. New people, new conversations, new possibilities.

And I talked. A lot. About The Internet of Value.

Back in Bangalore, my friends already had a running joke: how many steps would it take me to connect any subject to The Internet of Value? Apparently, I had become a walking advertisement for it.

At the residency, the same joke found me again. Someone offered a challenge: chapati. Connect chapati to The Internet of Value in three steps.

I wasn’t sure about the number of steps, but I could certainly try. Making chapatis is a skill. Imagine a food community recognising that skill, and a system in which the person preparing your food could carry a record of their contribution and wellbeing. Could we understand something about the person behind the meal, beyond the transaction?

You see where I’m going with this. My friends certainly did.

By the final dinner, even some people who were interested in being part of the project were telling me: “Man, at this point you have to stop talking.”

I could hear the feedback. I was also beginning to wonder whether the intensity itself was a problem.

Embrace your identity. Let go of your identity.

Back in Goa, after ecstatic dance, I was talking to friends about my difficulty sitting down and finishing the current version of my own book.

Urmi said I needed to embrace my author identity. Another friend, who has known this whole journey and is hosting me in Goa, suggested that perhaps I needed to let go of my identity.

Embrace it. Let go of it.

I was sitting with both suggestions. The Internet of Value occupies so much of my thinking that sometimes talking about anything else feels like spending energy somewhere it isn’t needed. Even when I’m not talking about it, the internal ideation keeps happening.

So what exactly am I being asked to let go of? The need to explain myself? The habit of bringing a conversation back to the project? Or the devotion to the idea itself?

Those are different things.

Then I opened the book

Near the beginning, Berners-Lee recalls drawing his idea for the web in the snow with a ski pole. His friend may not have seen what he could see. What she could see was his passion.

More than thirty years later, he says that passion has grown.

That stopped me. Here I was, wondering whether I needed to become less consumed by an idea, reading a man describe a commitment that had stayed with him for decades.

What reached me was the recognition: an idea can continue living inside you long after the conversation ends. Other people may see your intensity before they can see what you’re trying to build.

And being this absorbed in something is a privilege. To have work that keeps calling you back. To wake up with questions you still want to answer.

I can talk less about it. That doesn’t mean the thinking stops.

What am I supposed to balance?

There is anger underneath this, too.

I look at the money and determination behind projects that seem willing to treat human conditions and ecological damage as secondary concerns. More data centres, more extraction, another planetary frontier. We have damaged the planet we already have, and there is so much ambition to go somewhere else. The resources follow that ambition.

Meanwhile, those of us trying to work towards something more humane can spend so much energy wondering whether we care too much.

Fuck that.

I am obsessed with the possibility of a better economic system. I want to see conditions in which people can flourish. I want a person’s skills to travel with them across borders. I want to explore whether a portable, meaningful record of wellbeing and contribution could help make that possible.

That is the future I’m working towards. It is why delay feels so heavy. Every day I don’t bring this work further into the world, I feel as though I’m depriving the world of an opportunity to build something better.

That is how the urgency feels to me. And I expect to stay obsessed for a long time.

Tell me your obsession

Returning to this reflection on 12 November 2026.

This isn’t a question of whether I’m curious about other people’s lives. What I’m talking about is an idea, a potential, a future. Make me curious about what you’re building. Show me what you’re pursuing so intensely that it keeps finding its way into your conversations.

Yesterday, I met someone who was completely absorbed in sound: sound therapy, the ecstasy of sound, experiments in what sound can make a person feel. He was living it. Every time he spoke, it came back to sound.

At one point, he said he had wanted to stop talking altogether. What was the point of talking when he could make someone feel the sound?

And I just fucking listened. I didn’t interrupt. Here was a person obsessed with bringing something into the world. I wanted to hear it.

Curiosity comes naturally to me when I can feel that someone is living their truth, or seeking it as intensely as I am. Those are the people I want around me.

Maybe you’re trying to become great at bodybuilding. Maybe you’re working through emotional trauma. Maybe you’re building a company, pursuing something inside corporate life, or trying to make money. I respect that. Tell me what has you so absorbed. If it falls within my curiosity, I’m going to listen.

But if the conversation is going to be about whether I watched Ramayana, or what some other person did, I’m not there for that right now. Not in my current state of mind.

I want to be surrounded by people obsessed with something. Whatever that something is, bring it. Let me encounter the thing you care enough about to keep pursuing.

And the same goes for me. I’m obsessed with The Internet of Value. If you don’t want to listen to that, you don’t have to be in my close circle. There are billions of people in the world. Ten to a hundred people who can meet one another with that kind of intensity would be plenty for me.

So I’m not taking this passage as an instruction to dilute my commitment. I’m taking it as recognition of something I already feel.

The diagram melted. The passion didn’t.

References

• Official book introduction.
• The Internet of Value protocol registry.
• The Internet of Value protocol stack.