Strong Narratives Drive Inevitability
The best compliment for a narrative is one where the right segment of users click with it. They think to themselves, "That just makes so much sense. Why didn't I think of this before?"
The reason inevitability is important because it raises the bar appropriately to weed out the "wishful thinkers" who put weak framing and narratives out there.
In some ways, inevitable narratives may not be the most popular in the beginning. And that's largely because it's easier to make loose, obvious connections than to dig deeper.
Bitcoin is a classic example.
The "inevitability" is easier to grasp now that the primitives of the narrative are better understood: scarcity, immutability, decentralization.
But it only gained more traction as people saw proof around them of the underlying phenomenon -- the impact government policy to effectively introduce more money into the system had real-life impact on people.
This potential of a central bank always existed; but that "inflation" narrative needed to take root, and it was largely hidden from view for the popular culture.
As a result, the narrative didn't have a foot hold, because that critical foothold, for those who needed personal experience to reach that "just makes so much sense" threshold, was too abstract.
However, there were many early believers who didn't need that personal experience. The content of the Bitcoin whitepaper was enough.
Now that people can reinforce the imputed narrative around Bitcoin's design to a more accepted review of central banking and "money printing", the narrative has a level of inevitability about the necessity of Bitcoin.
Like all narratives that start from a difficult to grok place, it needed goo story tellers to amplify it. Michael Saylor, for example, has such a skill and the ability to Be a Good Story Teller is tightly coupled to strong narratives.
A good narrative without a good story teller can still gain ground.
A good story teller with a bad narrative could potentially also gain ground.
But the winner combination is of course having both.
So let's consider another way to drive inevitability: returning to what doesn't change.
One project that has the potential for an amazing narrative is AO and Arweave.
The Arweave story, which enables permanent storage without an ongoing recurring cost, had an interesting bet: the cost of storage will always continue to go down. Therefore, based on this assumption, the protocol envisioned the concept of "permastorage."
The narrative didn't have what I would say is a "hook" -- and the best hooks are those where the narrative has direction and impact.
AO gives them this.
Now, the project leaders have not articulated the narrative in this way, so I could be wrong.
But from my understanding, they are a retelling of the story of AWS, which was a retelling of the history of computers. They are introducing change that combines both newness and inevitability.
What do I mean by this?
Arweave/AO introduces newness because it is taking to the max decentralization. One of the properties it inherits has been permanent storage with a fixed initial cost via an incentivized endowment.
The newness is both in the implementation, decentralized storage providers, and the business model, pay a fixed initial cost instead of the subscription model currently used.
But there's familiarity: tackling one of the three core pillars that has been the center of the IT revolution: storage, compute, and networking.
Similarly, AO provides a familiar service: compute.
But it does so in a new way, different from both AWS's virtualized compute services and the current decentralization model of permissionless nodes which run a given job atomically.
Its model seems to harken back to a much earlier model of extremely large centralized computers, the kinds that took up entire rooms, so is not only wildly different from our concept today, has a retro feeling of old made new.