The Human Infrastructure Layer: Why Community Becomes the Scarcest Asset in a Decentralized World

In January 2022, my friend Marko Papic and his strategy team published a report that should have changed how institutional investors think about the next fifty years. It was called “Metaverse Ante Portas”, the Metaverse at the gates, and it was, without exaggeration, one of the most intellectually ambitious pieces of investment research I’ve ever read because of it being from a Geo-Macro strategist about the Metaverse. If you do not follow Marko regularly, you should.

Almost nobody noticed the piece. I have never brought it up to someone and had them say, “I loved that.” Maybe people in crypto were too focused on something else. Or rather, everybody noticed the wrong thing.

The paper dropped at the absolute peak of the crypto and metaverse mania. Bitcoin was already rolling over from its highs. Decentraland and Sandbox, the virtual worlds Marko’s team flagged as investable expressions of the thesis, were about to lose 90% or more of their value. The Goldman Sachs Metaverse index that was recommended would crater alongside everything else in the speculative blowoff of 2022. If you read the paper through the lens of “what should I buy,” you got destroyed. I am sure Marko likes to forget the piece based on the timing but as he knows, I loved it and it has been part of my brain.

But that’s because almost nobody read the paper for what it actually was: a political philosophy thesis disguised as an investment report. And buried inside it was a framework that I believe explains the single most important non-financial consequence of the AI revolution, the crisis of human identity and community that is coming, and what replaces it.

I remember the exact detail in Marko’s paper that planted the seed for everything I’ve been thinking about since. It wasn’t the Benedict Anderson framework or the geopolitical analysis, those came later. It was a throwaway example on page six: Filipinos were earning $300 a month playing Axie Infinity, a blockchain-based game. That was more than the country’s monthly minimum wage of roughly $200. In Venezuela, players were gold-farming in RuneScape and earning more in two days than the $6.70 monthly minimum wage and the activity was essentially untaxable by the state. I referenced Axie Infinity in a recent post and if you have not yet spent an hour with your favorite LLM rabbit holing it, you should.

Marko used these examples to argue for the Metaverse’s commercial TAM. But what I couldn’t stop thinking about was something else entirely. Those players hadn’t just found income. They’d found community. They’d found guilds, teams, and Discord servers full of people who shared their daily reality. They had status within those groups. They had reputation. They had belonging. Their nation-state institutions had failed them, hyperinflation in Venezuela, stagnant wages in the Philippines and they’d rebuilt economic and social identity inside a decentralized game.

That was the moment the thesis started forming for me: what happens when the structures that gave people default meaning, the job, the institution, the nation, start to dissolve? Not just in the developing world, where the collapse is dramatic and visible, but everywhere? When I went back and read the rest of Marko’s paper through that lens, it hit me like a thunderbolt. Not because of the metaverse stuff. Because of Benedict Anderson.

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The Manufactured Nation

The intellectual backbone of “Metaverse Ante Portas” wasn’t crypto or VR headsets. It was a 1983 book called Imagined Communities by political scientist Benedict Anderson. Anderson’s thesis, which Marko’s team deployed brilliantly, is that the nation-state is a constructed identity. It’s not natural. It’s manufactured through education, shared language, print media, and institutional infrastructure.

French peasants didn’t wake up one morning feeling French. The state made them French through schools, roads, railways, and a deliberate campaign to replace regional dialects with Parisian vernacular. As historian Eugen Weber documented, this project of turning “peasants into Frenchmen” took decades of intentional infrastructure building.

Marko’s insight was that the machinery of community manufacturing was breaking. The parent-state duopoly over young minds, the partnership between families and institutions that shaped identity for centuries, was being severed by screens, gaming, and virtual worlds. Five-year-olds spending three hours a day on devices, choosing their own content, and interacting with strangers in gaming environments. The state couldn’t manufacture imagined communities if it couldn’t reach the minds of its youngest citizens.

He was right about the diagnosis. He was just early on the vehicle. It wasn’t VR headsets and virtual land parcels that would break the identity-manufacturing machinery. It was AI.

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AI as the Identity Solvent

Three years after Marko’s paper, the metaverse is largely a punchline. Facebook’s rebrand to Meta looks like a $10 billion detour. Decentraland is a ghost town. The Goldman Sachs Metaverse basket is a relic. But the forces Marko identified didn’t disappear, they accelerated, powered by a technology nobody in January 2022 was talking about.

AI is doing what Marko predicted the metaverse would do, but faster and more pervasively. Consider the three pillars of nation-state erosion that Marko’s team identified.

First, the subversion of imagined communities. Marko argued that virtual worlds would break the state’s monopoly on identity formation by capturing the attention of children before schools and parents could shape their worldview. AI is doing something even more profound, it is breaking the identity formation of adults. When AI can do the analysis, write the brief, generate the code, and produce the design, the occupational identity that took a lifetime to build becomes unmoored. The nation-state manufactured community through shared institutions. The corporation manufactured community through shared work. AI is dissolving both simultaneously.

Second, the subversion of sovereignty. Marko’s team argued that blockchain protocols would obviate John Locke’s classical liberal premise for the state, that humans organize politically to protect private property. In a world where property is defined by a public ledger, the role of the state diminishes. Today, AI agents operating on stablecoin rails are creating a parallel commercial infrastructure that doesn’t need institutional intermediaries at all. The disintermediation isn’t happening through virtual land deeds. It’s happening through autonomous systems that transact at machine speed, across borders, without asking permission.

Third, the subversion of communication infrastructure. Marko noted that the internet remains a physical construct, fiber optic cables that governments can sever. He pointed to Starlink as a potential game-changer. Three years later, satellite internet has proven its strategic importance in Ukraine and beyond, and decentralized compute networks are distributing processing power across jurisdictions in ways that make state control increasingly difficult.

Every force Marko identified is in motion. The vehicle changed. The destination didn’t.

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The Speed of Trust

But here’s what Marko’s paper didn’t fully explore and what I’ve been wrestling with ever since: if the machinery that manufactured community by default is breaking, what replaces it? This is where I think the investment community, including Marko’s analysis, has a blind spot. We are very good at identifying what gets disrupted. We are less good at identifying what gets built in the wreckage.

We have seen this movie before. In the early 1800s, industrialization didn’t just change how things were made, it severed the link between skill and identity. A master craftsman wasn’t just employed. He was somebody. The village blacksmith, the cobbler, the weaver, these weren’t job descriptions; they were social positions. The factory destroyed that. A machine tender was anonymous, interchangeable. The economic logic was overwhelming but the human cost was a generation-long crisis of meaning.

The social consequences were staggering. Alcohol consumption spiked. Family structures buckled. Crime surged in industrial cities. What followed was one of the most remarkable periods of institution-building in human history. Mutual aid societies, trade unions, fraternal organizations, social clubs, and eventually the corporate cultures that defined the twentieth century. The Elks, the Rotary Club, the union hall, the company town. By the early 1900s, America had more civic organizations per capita than any society in history.

Here is what is critical: the economic transition took about twenty years. The social reconstruction took fifty. Technology moved at the speed of capital. Community rebuilding moved at the speed of trust. We are at the front end of that same gap. AI is compressing the economic transition into years, not decades. But the community reconstruction will still move at the speed of trust. That gap between the speed of disruption and the speed of rebuilding is where the crisis lives. This is the dystopian place where we all have to adapt.

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The Question: “So, What Do You Do?”

Every cocktail party in America runs on the same protocol. You meet someone, you shake hands, and within ninety seconds comes the question: “So, what do you do?” That question isn’t really about your job. It’s a sorting mechanism, a compression algorithm for identity. It tells us where you fit, how much attention to give you, and whether we share common ground.

AI is about to make that question unanswerable for a lot of people. And what happens next matters more than most investors realize. This isn’t a soft concern. If you think about it the way an infrastructure investor would, the picture clarifies. Every technology transition creates a constraint migration. GPUs were the bottleneck, then it was power, then interconnects, then cooling, then transformer capacity. The bottleneck never disappears, it moves to the next layer.

Human society works the same way. When AI removes the productivity constraint, the bottleneck migrates to meaning. When institutions fragment, the bottleneck migrates to trust. When geographic community dissolves, the bottleneck migrates to belonging. Community is the infrastructure layer that routes all three.

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Epistemic Communities as the Template

This brings me back to something hiding in plain sight in Marko’s paper. He described finance professionals as an “epistemic community”, a collective bound by shared beliefs, frameworks, methodologies, and initiation rituals. He used the concept to explain why Wall Street could see crypto but couldn’t see the metaverse: the financial epistemic lens filtered the virtual future into familiar shapes (currencies, yield-farming, DeFi protocols) and rejected the unfamiliar ones (virtual sneakers, digital land, avatar culture).

But epistemic communities aren’t just a cognitive bias. They’re a template. They are exactly the kind of intentional community that replaces default ones when institutional identity breaks down.

The crypto ecosystem figured this out years ago, mostly by accident. When you leave traditional finance to work in an industry that most of your former colleagues think is a scam, you lose access to the old status markers. What replaces them is community, the people who share your conviction, who understand your language, and who validate your choices through shared participation rather than institutional authority. I feel that community as I straddle the traditional macro world I know and the crypto community who has embraced me.

Bitcoin maxis who held through an 80% drawdown weren’t held together by a trade thesis. They were held together by shared conviction about what sound money means for human freedom.

This is why I have been rethinking NFTs lately. When I first mentioned it in a Substack, I was attacked by many in the community. I was surprised. The popular narrative is that NFTs were a speculative bubble that came and went. That is true of the price action. But it completely misses the social function. The most durable NFT projects, the ones that survived the 90% drawdown, survived because they were community tokens, not art. Holding a specific NFT was membership in a specific tribe. It was identity infrastructure. The JPEG was a flag. The Discord server was the town hall.

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The New Architecture of Belonging

The communities that matter in a decentralized world won’t look like the ones they replace. They will be organized around three things:

1. Shared Conviction: As AI strips away occupational identity, people will increasingly organize around what they believe rather than what they do. Your tribe won’t be “fellow analysts at Goldman.” It will be people who believe AI should be open-source, or people building sovereign identity infrastructure, or people who think physical communities need to be rebuilt from scratch.

2. Mutual Contribution: The factory gave you a role. The corporation gave you a title. In a decentralized world, your place in a community is determined by what you contribute to it. This is already how open-source communities, DAO contributor networks, and content creator ecosystems work. The answer to “what do you do?” becomes “here is what I have built, here is what I have contributed, here is the community that can vouch for my work.” Contribution replaces employment as the organizing principle of identity.

3. Authentic Connection: This is the one that technology cannot replicate and scales the worst which is exactly why it becomes the most valuable. In a world where AI can simulate expertise, generate content, and automate interaction, the premium on genuine human connection goes vertical.

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Conclusion: The Final Bottleneck

The irony is thick. We spent two decades building social networks optimized for engagement and designed for scale and managed to produce the loneliest generation in recorded history. The thing we called “community” online was actually a marketplace for status and outrage. What we need now is the opposite: structures that are small enough to create accountability, durable enough to build trust, and purposeful enough to replace the meaning that work used to provide.

Marko’s paper warned that the Metaverse would sever the sinews tying nations together as imagined communities. He was right, but the word “Metaverse” was the wrong label. What is actually happening is broader and more consequential. AI, crypto, and remote work are simultaneously dissolving occupational identity, institutional belonging, and geographic community.

But if communities can be imagined, if Anderson was right that they are constructed through shared infrastructure, shared language, and shared belief, then they can be re-imagined. They can be built again. Not by the state. Not by the corporation. By people who choose each other.

AI will handle the productivity. Crypto will handle the transactions. But community handles the question that neither technology can answer: Why does any of this matter?

The bottleneck always migrates. And it is migrating to us.