The Next Big Thing: Welcome To The Proof & Presence Economies
This essay updates and significantly expands on the initial version from đź’‹ Pinecones & Satellites: Ashes & Laughter (vol. 5).
The next BIG thing in tech just might be fixing the mess created by the current BIG thing in tech.
-Ted Gioia from a recent piece
From Rubble to Reckoning
When World War II ended, the guns and tanks fell silent but the devastation was total. Europe lay in ruins. Warsaw and Stalingrad were obliterated. In London, entire neighborhoods were smoking shells. In Germany, Hamburg, Cologne, and Dresden were gutted with millions forced into the streets. By 1945, nearly sixty million people were displaced, wandering bewildered across a European and Asian wasteland of broken bridges, cratered railways, collapsed water systems, and hollowed-out cities.
The parades that marked the Allied victory over fascism and tyranny ended the fighting but not the work. The real work was just beginning. Reconstruction took decades, billions, and a collective will as immense as the wreckage itself. Whole nations would have to be raised back to life brick by brick, institution by institution. It was slow, costly, unglamorous work, and yet, in many ways it was this patient rebuilding that defined the future more than the battles ever did.
A Different Kind of Wreckage
Seventy-five years later, we're staring down the barrel of a different kind of wreckage. After decades of digital "progress"—smartphones, social feeds, algorithmic outrage, and a flood of AI-generated drivel—we're standing in our own smoldering rubble. This time the ruins aren't cathedrals or factories but scorched attention spans, fractured communities, suffocating loneliness, unraveling mental-health, and an information ecosystem so poisoned it's becoming harder and harder to know what's true.
"Breaking news" clips of bombings that never happened. Millions of fake five-star reviews flooding Amazon. Elderly people conned out of their life savings by scammers. Violence and pornography fed directly to prepubescent children. Social media algorithms tuned for rage and incitement. The fever dream of dystopia is coming fast. And if that sounds like hyperbole, Gioia reminds us the unraveling is already here and the worst is still to come.
At the current rate of technological advance, all reliable ways of validating truth will soon be gone. My best guess is that we have another 12 months to enjoy some degree of confidence in our shared sense of reality.
-Ted Gioia
What Rebuilding Looks Like Now
So what does rebuilding look like when the thing collapsing isn't a factory or a water system but our shared sense of reality itself?
The next great reconstruction won't be built of steel and stone. It won't be measured in bridges, skylines, or brass bands marching through rubble. What's needed now is a Marshall Plan for the human soul. Proof to make truth verifiable again, and presence to make life livable again.
This is the work of return. Finding our way back to the two things humans cannot live without: truth and each other.
We need innovations, institutions, and movements that affirm life, reclaim truth, and rebuild a more human ground. The scale of the work ahead is enormous. It will demand vision, courage, and a deep sense of mission. But for the founders, innovators, and cultural stewards who answer the call, the opportunities will be as immense as the need itself.
Doubters will scoff. They always do. They'll say this future won't be as lucrative as mobile, as frothy as social or cloud, or as game-changing as AI. But that's the nature of vision: "when they call you crazy, you're early; when they call you obvious, you're late." And late is exactly what we can't afford.
Look around. The seams of our reality are already splintering, and everyone knows we're sliding toward worse. You see it everywhere you look. Fear curdling into desperation, anxiety spreading like smoke, certainty unraveling thread by thread. Now imagine the tip over point: a world where nothing we see, hear, or read can be trusted, where loneliness hardens into suffocation and rage, where even the air we breathe feels engineered.
Orwell feared lies.
Huxley feared distractions.
Neither imagined we’d inherit both.
As we near the edge, people's thirst for solid, real, and true will erupt. Not as convenience or preference or luxury, but as a primal necessity. Our hunger for proof and presence will come roaring back, storm-force and merciless, tearing through the lies and illusions we've been force-fed for years.
Enduring futures are born from reckoning with past wreckages. Reconstruction will be slow and costly, but it’s the only work that lasts. The Next Big Thing will be finding our way back to verifiable truth, and to each other.
Welcome to the Proof and Presence Economies.
The Proof Economy: A Return To Truth
For centuries we leaned on institutions—newspapers, libraries, universities, courts—to hold the record. You didn't have to like them or agree with them, but you trusted that facts could be checked, traced, verified. You trusted that you could count on truth as the bedrock of our shared reality. But you can't. Not anymore. That bedrock has crumbled, leaving us with an enshittified internet, a hollowed-out media landscape, a global mental health crisis, AI deepfakes, predatory chatbots, and partisan hot takes that prove everything and nothing.
Civilizations don't survive long once the record-keepers fail. The archive goes, then the trust goes, then everything else follows. We can't build or maintain anything—not markets, not democracies, not communities—on quicksand. Without proof, nothing holds.
The Proof Economy is the counterweight. A reconstruction project as big, as deliberate, and as demanding as Europe hauling bricks to rebuild its bridges and power lines after the war. Only this time, the worksite is information not infrastructure.
We will need anchors of fact as durable and trustworthy as books and archives. Images and text stamped with cryptographic signatures that make fakery expensive and verification cheap. Provenance trails built on standards like C2PA to track creative work from the moment it's made. Technology to certify content at the source. Watermarks baked into AI-generated media so we'll know instantly, what's synthetic. And most important of all, networks of trusted human arbiters—call them notaries of reality—who combine the rigor of archivists with the credibility of scholars and the courage of journalists to do the slow, unglamorous work that every industry, every democracy, every relationship of trust will ultimately rest on.
The builders of the Proof Economy will be the new masons of reality, pouring the concrete and setting the informational rebar beneath society's foundation. On their work will rest the question of whether the floor holds or gives way because without truth, nothing stands.
Civilizations cannot grow, societies cannot cohere, economies cannot endure, and democracies cannot function without a shared sense of what is real. Proof is the only foundation that holds. And as truth grows scarce, proof becomes the rarest, most vital resource on earth. The one inheritance no empire, economy, or generation can live without.
The Presence Economy: A Return To Each Other
If the Proof Economy is about making information verifiable, the Presence Economy is about making life unmistakably real again. A defiant and long-overdue return to IRL culture and the pulse of unmediated human presence and connection.
Even before the flood of AI-generated content, the cracks were obvious. Mobile phones captured our attention, social feeds splintered it into a thousand blinking fragments, and slowly, human presence was hollowed out. Families and friends still gathered, but the connection between them was thinning with more eyes locked on glowing rectangles than on each other. Presence, once the default setting of life, had become fragile, almost exotic.
That unraveling was by design. Every notification, scroll, and targeted feed was engineered to pull us apart, isolate and atomize us, trap each of us inside a personalized channel of memes, news, outrage, and ads. Connection became optional. Intimacy negotiable. The shared fabric of being together frayed away for profit.
Despite it all, a counter-hunger for human connection is breaking through. Young people are clawing back toward rooms that hum with laughter, real-time moments that can't be faked, lives lived in time instead of on feed. They're ditching the internet, deleting social accounts, slowing down with flip phones, taking up analog hobbies like gardening or cooking, and experimenting with digital minimalism and neo-luddism. They're chasing '90s-shaped nostalgia in concerts, comedy shows, and gatherings where presence can't be faked, streamed, or scrolled. Slowly, insistently, they're rediscovering the ground truth of being alive together. And soon, they'll demand a full-scale return to it.
The human spirit is reawakening and it's a beautiful thing to see. In a world where everything can be faked, modified, or simulated, what still feels unmistakably real is US together—people connecting, resonating, cooperating. These are the core components of the human operating system, how we evolved to live, to love, to survive. Not likes or feeds, but eye contact across a table, dancing with strangers at a concert, laughter that can't be clipped or auto-tuned, the small rituals of touch, play, and proximity no algorithm can mimic.
Our longing for connection is reshaping what we value. In an era overflowing with bullshit, presence—and the way we carry it—may be the most reliably human thing we have left. We crave temporal realness: "the turning cultural tide toward the personal, the finite, the IRL… toward real-time, human person-driven interactions." But presence isn’t only about the clock or the room you’re in—it’s also about the force you bring to it. Trend strategist Anu calls this charisma capital: “a form of value beyond what you own, what you know, or who you know, defined by how you move through the world.”
Rizz is the new intelligence. Personality, presence, texture—the ability to make others feel undeniably there with you—is the new human currency.
And this isn't theoretical. The presence economy, and the growing demand for it, is rising from the wreckage of two global health crises: the mental-health crisis gutting our inner lives, and the loneliness and social-isolation crisis hollowing out our shared ones.
The promise of the Presence Economy won't be measured in concerts or dinners. It will mean reimagining the infrastructures of belonging as enduring as any bridge. It will require schools, neighborhoods, and public spaces built around the rituals and habits that bind us together.
In the end, it wasn't more screens we hungered for, but more of each other. Presence and connection are the raw materials of belonging, the last inheritance we haven't squandered, the one resource still beyond the reach of machines. And it may be the only treasure left that grows richer the more we share it.
Reality, With Receipts
Together, the proof and presence economies, one to make truth verifiable again, the other to make life livable again, sketch the outlines of the Next Big Thing.
The proof economy will need builders, doers, thinkers willing to take on the slow, unglamorous work of making reality verifiable again. The presence economy will need IRL-specialists—promoters, restaurantuers, event planners, urban planners, and entrepreneurs—to lead us back to temporal realness. To rooms and meals and moments that can't be edited, scaled, or faked.
These are the two great reconstruction projects of the twenty-first century. One for truth. One for life. Forget the sugar highs of past booms; what’s at stake now is the very ground beneath us. Without these, there will be nothing left to stand on, nothing to build. Call it a Marshall Plan for the human spirit. Call it the Proof Economy and the Presence Economy.
This time, the product on offer isn't another gadget or app. It's not control or surveillance. It's not an algorithm playing you like a slot machine, a platform demanding your attention, or a feed engineered to keep you scrolling. It's nothing less than reality itself. With receipts.