The Internet's Missing Coordination Layer

Humanity faces an array of existential challenges that we know how to solve. We have the technology to address climate change, the resources to end global poverty, and the scientific knowledge to eradicate numerous diseases. What we lack isn't solutions—it's the ability to coordinate effectively at scale.

This coordination deficit isn't just about politics or institutions. It's about the digital infrastructure that ties our world together. The internet promised to revolutionize human coordination, connecting billions of minds and enabling unprecedented collaboration. Yet today's internet, built for simple information sharing rather than trusted coordination, has become a landscape of declining trust, rampant misinformation, and increasingly sophisticated deception—all of which are getting worse with the rise of generative AI.

At the root of this problem is a cascade of infrastructural limitations. It starts with how the internet handles identity. Every critical internet function—from email to social media to financial transactions—requires some way to verify who users are. Yet the internet was built without a native identity layer, leaving each service to implement its own imperfect solutions. The result is a fragmented landscape where users juggle dozens of accounts, identities are easily faked, and reputation doesn't persist across platforms. This foundational flaw undermines every attempt to build robust coordination systems on top of the internet.

To understand what could be possible with better infrastructure, consider ocean pollution. The Ocean Cleanup project has already extracted over 206 tons of plastic from our oceans with approximately $50 million in funding. Their estimates suggest that using their novel approach with floating barriers cleaning just 50% of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch would cost about $500 million to 1 billion over five years. Cleaning the world's oceans entirely? Perhaps $100 billion.

This figure reveals something important about coordination challenges. The resources exist: the U.S. alone spent $4.5 trillion on healthcare in 2022, while global environmental spending reaches into the trillions annually. Our existing systems can mobilize massive resources—but only within established institutional boundaries. The moment we need to coordinate resources and action across those boundaries, everything breaks down.

Current institutions fragment and bottleneck global coordination in predictable ways. Nation-states can mobilize resources effectively within their borders, but they're optimized for local interests and electoral cycles. Even if millions of Americans care deeply about ocean cleanup, their collective will gets diluted through political systems designed for different problems. Non-profits and NGOs attempt to bridge these gaps, but they're constrained by traditional organizational models that don't scale. They fragment into separate legal entities across jurisdictions, creating bureaucratic overhead and limiting resource mobility. 

What we need isn't just better organizations—we need new coordination infrastructure. How many people in the world do you think care deeply about environmental crises and ocean pollution? If it's even 5% of the global population—around 400 million people—we'd have a distributed community roughly equivalent to the entire U.S. population but spread across all borders. This globally distributed force could be vastly more powerful than any single nation or organization. If each member contributed just $250 annually¹ (less than a premium Netflix subscription), we'd have $100 billion for ocean cleanup in just one year.

But this kind of coordination requires infrastructure we don't yet have. We need systems that can:

• Find and connect aligned people across borders while filtering out bad actors

• Enable millions of participants to build trust and pool resources

• Facilitate collective decision-making that remains responsive at scale

• Ensure transparent resource allocation across jurisdictions

• Maintain consistent coordination without requiring central control

Building this infrastructure starts with self-sovereign identity (SSI), providing a way for humans to prove they're real and unique without sacrificing privacy or ceding control to central authorities. This foundation enables cryptographically verifiable reputation systems, allowing trust to scale across borders and platforms. Zero-knowledge proofs let us verify claims without exposing personal data. Blockchain technology ensures transparent resource allocation and governance. AI can help find patterns of aligned interests and optimize coordination among millions of participants.

With this new infrastructure, tackling global challenges becomes possible in ways we can barely imagine today. A global ocean cleanup community could continuously evolve and scale, using secure voting and quadratic funding to direct resources based on collective intelligence rather than institutional limitations.

This isn't just about ocean cleanup. Every major challenge humanity faces—from climate change to poverty to disease—becomes more tractable when we can effectively coordinate interested parties across borders. By building this missing coordination layer, we can transform the internet from a source of growing distrust into the engine of human progress it was meant to be.

It's time to upgrade the Internet for coordination. 

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At Human, we’re working to build this missing infrastructure layer and lay the groundwork for a more coordinated and trustworthy internet. If you want to chat about these ideas—human to human—you can always find me on X.

1. If $250 for one year and 5% of the population sounds too much, consider this: 10 years and 1%. Also, consider the amount people pay their governments in taxes today to see the flexibility of this method.