Written in 2018 while building Tradeshift, and finished in 2026.
We didn’t create language any more than language created us, and we didn’t create technology any more than technology created us.
1The birth of language and trust in strangers
To understand what we are building we need to understand where we come from: the history of commerce and technology is the history of humanity.
Commerce flows like a river through history, connecting the dots or moving our societies on when stuck, and what opens each new stretch of the river is a language. Language does not conform to the world it finds; it pushes, provokes and changes it, and every jump in this story starts with people saying something to each other that could not be said before.
It all starts with language itself. As our societies grew from a few hundred individuals to become larger and more diverse, we needed a way to coordinate our groups and the actions of individuals. This became the trade of skills: you hunt, I will create fire. Language was humans’ first real technology, and the first use case implemented was trade. Without it we would never have built a society larger than the largest chimpanzee groups in nature, which stay in family groups, strongly hierarchical and with little to no specialisation of skills. Language enabled us to trade our time and abilities, making larger tribes possible by creating specialisations within the tribe and societies larger than just families.
“You hunt, I will create fire” is a sentence about something that has not happened yet. A promise is the first abstraction: a future action given a name, so that it can be exchanged before it exists, and no other animal has one.
With the trade of skills, something scarce grew to become the norm: the trust of strangers. When we trade, we trust. I trust that you will do your part and you trust that I will do mine. This trust, inherent in commerce, is uniquely remarkable in humans, because with it we began to choose trade over fighting each other.
As humanity grew, so did the practice of trade, first inside the tribe, then between the hunter-gatherer tribes that met as they left Africa and populated the continents, and later between settlements, until we could anchor our wealth to cities and land on the back of a complicated system of exchange between farmers and city dwellers, between cities and ultimately between states.
Commerce also became the basis for law. When Hammurabi had his code cut in stone around 1754 BC, the rules of trade were in it, down to the paperwork.
“If a merchant give an agent corn, wool, oil, or any other goods to transport, the agent shall give a receipt for the amount, and compensate the merchant therefor. Then he shall obtain a receipt from the merchant for the money that he gives the merchant.”
Hammurabi Code, Law #104
The next law is harder: an agent who is careless and takes no receipt cannot count that money as his. Almost four thousand years ago the written word already outranked the man’s word. For a species that had trusted faces for its entire existence that was a violent idea, and it is the price strangers pay for being able to trust each other at all.
Commerce had become more than the trading of goods and services. With it came the trade of languages, ideas and systems. The ancient world was no paradise and conflict was the norm, but commerce was the ever-growing alternative, and whenever commerce prevailed over conflict, societies grew.
2The spread of ideas on the Silk Road
By 1200 AD commerce had become the primary exchange of ideas across the world. Kublai Khan had inherited from his grandfather Genghis the largest land empire the world had seen, stretching from Mongolia and Southern China to Syria. Genghis had been a conqueror in classic Mongol tradition, a warrior genius with little love for bureaucracy. Kublai realised that to keep the land they needed to govern it, because armies take a territory and a language holds it.
The mechanism he used to find that language was commerce. The ancient Silk Road had been reopened and secured by his grandfather’s expansion, creating a continuous trade route from Europe to Eastern China under one rule of law, as important then as the trade between the West and China is today, with the Mongols playing the role of the West. Kublai knew that by rewarding traders richly they would bring a constant stream of new ideas and concepts from all over the world. In the 1260s that stream brought him Niccolo Polo, a Venetian merchant and the father of the famous Marco.
Kublai had heard that the Europeans were able to govern a huge population through religion, and he made Niccolo the shocking proposition that the Pope should send a hundred learned men to teach Christianity to his people and at the same time educate him on their form of governance. It was the largest order for ideas ever placed. The Pope sent two friars, and they turned back in fear soon after setting out.
Niccolo had travelled home on the northern Silk Road with a golden tablet from the Khan, a foot long, that declared him a direct emissary and entitled him to horses, lodging and food across the empire. It was a sentence cast in gold, and it carried a stranger safely through half the known world, through cultures and peoples who had every reason to rob him. It is a testament to the power of language, trade and trust.
To do that Kublai could not rely on his armies alone. He had built a vast system of trade, linking every country and region along the way, with his tax collectors covering the length of the Silk Road and horseback and paper as the communication channels. Commerce was the power that knitted his empire together and kept rival cultures and factions from tearing it apart.
3The current moving the world
The Silk Road carried more than silk. It introduced paper money, letters of credit, banking and finance from the early Islamic banking system in the Middle East, which in turn had learned these early forms of capitalism from 8th century China. With the inflow of ideas culture itself started to change. We started looking for meaning in art, science and philosophy, not just religion, and the Renaissance was born, first in Florence, which took in the classic thinkers arriving from Greece and the Ottoman Empire after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, a former hub on the Silk Road. It was this combination of new economic and cultural models that gave birth to modern science, modern art and modern capitalism.
Capitalism had a language problem. Silver and gold had been used for coins since ancient times, but there were few fixed exchange rates, and the trade with China and the East drained Europe of silver, as China had little use for European goods. In England the shortage met a crime. Clippers shaved the edges off silver coins and melted the shavings, until the average coin held about half the silver its face claimed. A shilling no longer meant a shilling, and a currency whose words have come loose from their meaning is a language no merchant can trade in.
John Locke, the philosopher who had spent his life on how words hold their meaning between people, made the case for a recoinage, and his good friend Isaac Newton was brought in to solve the problem. Isaac, regarded at the time mostly for his Principia, which had established the laws of motion and gravity, was famous, tired of Cambridge and looking for a post in London. To everyone’s surprise he did not take his appointment as Warden of the Mint as a symbolic one. Armed with science he recoined the money of a kingdom in three years, prosecuted the counterfeiters himself and sent them to the gallows. The new coins were struck by machine, and the large ones carried words around the rim so that a clipped coin would show its wound: decus et tutamen, an ornament and a safeguard. Later, as Master of the Mint, he set the exchange rate between gold and silver and moved England onto a gold standard.
From then on a pound was what the state said it was, stamped, edged and defended by the hangman. The value of money had been separated from the metal that happened to carry it, and that separation solved the oldest problem in commerce, the reliability of the value used in trade. Just as language was humanity’s first great technology, Newton’s recoinage separating physical and abstract value was another great technological jump. It began with a crime, because the clippers forced a kingdom to decide what its money meant, and the answer became the foundation of every modern currency. The word we still use for it came into the language of money in those years, from the pen of Locke himself: currency, a running, a flow, the word we also use for a current.1
With money that could be trusted, marketplaces all over Europe grew into deeply specialised ecosystems. Just as language had evolved us thousands of years earlier, creating specialisations, cities and the growth of the human population, our new language of finance and contract law would evolve us again. The new currencies provided the liquidity for commerce to move faster, and at the same time the currents of the oceans opened up new trading routes.
Imagine Amsterdam at its prime, from 1600 to 1700, one of the biggest marketplaces in Europe with traders coming in from all over the world. The new southern route around Africa to India and the Far East was wildly expensive, driven up by pirates and shipwreck, and the Dutch East India Company needed a way to share the risk. The creation of the Bourse, the world’s first major stock exchange, let investors each hold a small part of the financing and the risk of a voyage, and proved again that distributed trust among strangers is one of the most powerful creations of humanity. The share was a new word, and the first people fluent in it abused it. Within a few years a founder who had been pushed out of the Company was selling its shares forward, betting on a fall and feeding the fall with rumours of sunken ships. The directors called these vile practices and had them banned. Selling short and trading forward are the daily business of every market on earth today.
Around the great squares of the city grew the specialised vendors that let commerce flow: the banks, exchanging between the currencies that had emerged all over Europe and financing merchants and producers; the tool-makers, building the wagons, containers and stables; and the lawyers, turning agreements into contracts. Behind the marketplace grew an even bigger system, enabled by the unlinking of physical value from abstract value. Middlemen created warehouses and commodity trading, shippers moved the world’s trade from horseback to ship, and insurers spread the risks further. The modern supply chain and marketplace were born by linking a huge decentralised system of value and risk through currency. Modern currency, commerce and the financial system became the current that moves the world.
4The crushing success and weight of industrialised commerce
From the wealth generated by the new global trade and the exchange of ideas came a wave of innovation like never before, and its most important product was the steam engine. Steam engines had existed all the way back to the Romans, but never at scale. The steam engine was an accelerator. For the first time humankind could increase its power beyond the physical limits of ourselves and our animals, and just as language had accelerated human development, the steam engine did it again many times over. Trains linked all parts of Europe, navies of steel ships sprang up, production capacity increased exponentially, and farming industrialised to feed larger cities.
As the scale of commerce grew, so did the bureaucracies powering it. Capitalism itself was becoming industrialised and with that centralised. The new companies and nation-states brought real benefits: the first welfare systems, huge drops in child mortality, enough food for everyone. They were also unwieldy and fragile, and centralised failures in governance threw the world into two wars that killed millions, both started by unpredictable Black Swan events. It was commerce that stopped a third, when the leaders of Europe realised that linking their economies would create so much interdependence that war would be impossible. The European Coal and Steel Community was born, and with it an unparalleled 60 years of peace between its members.
Then came the computers. Centralised computing arrived, followed by the first networks and the rapid growth of the internet as those systems became standardised and open, and just as currency had connected the world centuries earlier, computers were reshaping it again. Companies grew even larger to manage vast global supply chains, tracked in massive centralised databases, and the first business software companies grew with them. IBM, and later SAP and Oracle, all started by replicating the bureaucracies and processes of these giant organisations from paper to data. They did not invent a new language; they froze the old one in software.
The new industrialised commerce came with risk as well as benefit. The players that reached the largest scale and the best efficiencies also became vulnerable to the fragility of any centralised system. We had traded a smaller decentralised risk system for a larger centralised one, increasing the value but also the global volatility when things go wrong.
The search for optimisation had a second consequence. Where commerce through human history had been a search for value, it became an elimination of cost. The elimination of cost meant the elimination of family-owned suppliers that had existed for generations, as when GM outsourced its supply chain in the 80s. The Fortune 500 changed from producers and manufacturers into banks and brands, managing a global network of production powered by a global hunt for lower cost.
The way they implemented the cost reduction was standardisation, since outsourced tasks could not be differentiated and needed to be alike. Being non-differentiated became a business value, nowhere expressed better than in SAP’s idea of blueprints for industries, where all players within an industry use one template to run their business. A blueprint is a language in which every company says the same sentence.
Companies are living, breathing systems, and these theories worked like a harsh treatment of antibiotics, killing off all the bad bacteria and all the good ones too. The resulting organisations were streamlined and lower cost, though this was very rarely measured afterwards, and they were almost impossible to change or to draw newer, more valuable products from. They were stuck. In organisational sociology the identity of an organisation is what it produces, and where the Dutch East India Company had produced value through commerce, the new Fortune 500 produced cost reduction, because that had become their sole process.
The damage did not stop at the companies or the people within them. It eroded societies and local communities. Thriving Midwestern industrial towns became shells of themselves, because the jobs could move and the communities could not. No similar communities were created in the industrial hubs of China and India, which were built as industrialised mega developments, for efficiency and not for community. This is what happens when a language is forced to conform: it stops pushing, and everything it carried stops with it.
5The birth of post-industrial commerce
We like to see ourselves as the creators of these systems and structures, when it is the systems and structures that shape us and at best we tweak and push them in return. Systems and technologies reproduce themselves once put in place, as the large companies did when they replicated themselves as cost-reduction machines.
The German sociologist Adorno asks what it does to us when the hand-crafted objects around us, something as simple as the doors of our houses and cars, are replaced with mass-produced low-quality ones. His point is that while we think we create technology, it imprints back on us, on our culture, our expectations and our society, and nowhere was that more true than in the mass-industrial era. The values that were imprinted on the large companies were imprinted on us. Cheap, discount and deal became values of their own, in place of the inherent value of the objects themselves.
Globalisation, which has been a current through history, is now industrialised. The industry that used to create jobs removes them through large-scale market optimisation, and it is trade as a whole that is being optimised with one goal, to lower cost. The fault lies with how we have executed globalisation in the age of industrialised commerce and not with globalisation itself, as many activists seem to think.
Whenever a paradigm shift pushes against a value system, resistance forms, and this time it took two forms: the techno-utopians, who believe that any technological progress is a positive and nothing bad can come from technology, and the disenfranchised middle class powering Trump and Brexit. Neither is a fad of our times, because both are a direct consequence of the industrialised commerce replicated all over the world.
I am positive the solution is technology and commerce together, as it has been before in humanity’s history, and it will look nothing like the techno-utopian libertarian dream. We need technology that reconnects community with commerce and brings local wealth as well as global wealth.
Meanwhile technology powers forward to the unyielding beat of Moore’s law, which contrary to frequent predictions shows no sign of dying. The industrialisation of computing has taken us from vacuum tubes to chips at the 8nm scale with a billion times the transistors of the first generation. The first phase of that growth increased the capabilities of our machines and with them the size and reach of nation-states and companies. The second phase is decentralising the power of computing.
With cloud computing we are remaking the world yet again. In our private lives we have in a few years moved from desktop applications to the first cloud software such as Picasa and Flickr, and on to networks of data such as Facebook and Apple’s ecosystem. The force behind it is the removal of friction. As we move our applications from individual physical hardware to abstract systems in the cloud, we decouple physical and digital computing, the way Newton’s currency decoupled physical value from abstract value. With the decoupling comes a dramatic drop in the cost of connecting data, and with that came the world’s first truly global marketplaces, Amazon and eBay for consumers and Alibaba for companies. They are direct descendants of the markets of Venice, Amsterdam and Kublai Khan, at a scale previously thought impossible.
We are standing on the ledge of the system that was, looking into an uncertain future for our politics, our values and our global stability, and we are also poised to jump further than we ever have. Technology and commerce can propel us to greater prosperity than ever before, but what prosperity do we seek and on what terms?
6A dream of commerce for a better world
This is where we enter the story. As Facebook, Amazon and Alibaba were emerging, Gert Sylvest, Mikkel Hippe Brun and I had just met, coming from different parts of Denmark and different companies, pulled into the Danish government by a visionary leader who was recruiting people from all over the private sector to build the next generation of e-government. None of us had any real background in the public sector. Mikkel and I had both done startups before.
Denmark was facing a problem since shared with most of the developed world. The population was aging fast, the aging generation was the largest ever, and more than a third of the workforce worked for the welfare state, with around 30% of them retiring within 10 years and the smallest generations arriving to replace them. One of the areas the government targeted was its supply chain and payment processing, where more than 50,000 people worked across many institutions, most of them in the retiring generation. Programs were approved to digitise it.
There was very little innovation in how this was set up. EDI networks more than 30 years old would connect the government with its suppliers, and scanning bureaus would receive paper, scan it in huge batches and convert it to electronic data, which was no great improvement on what existed. One battle had been won, and Mikkel had fought hard for it: all data interchange between government and companies would happen in a global open XML standard for trade, in place of the existing proprietary and binary EDI standards.
The standard Mikkel had picked was called Universal Business Language, or UBL, and it was controversial. No major standardisation organisation had approved it, and the founder of the effort, Jon Bosak, one of the co-creators of XML, was at odds with the organisations behind EDI. Jon’s mission was a bigger one. XML had done to data what the internet did to content, decoupling the hard bundling of binary code and information into separate layers and increasing the liquidity of information, as Newton’s currency had done for value, and he wanted to prove that this could change a major area like business. Mikkel, one of the early pioneers of XML in Denmark, knew Jon well and suggested that Denmark become the world’s first real large-scale use case. It was early days. Jon and the team were still working on version 1.0, so a country moved its public purchasing onto version 0.7 of a language that no standards body had approved.
The Ministry of Finance accepted the language and refused the network. They were not convinced the exchange of data could be open too, so they chose the older proprietary and closed EDI networks over the internet, which had huge cost implications for most companies and locked out most smaller vendors. We had won the first battle and lost the second, bigger one.
When Mikkel, Gert and I met we started discussing a bigger idea: the new platform for trade should be available for the entire country and not just for government. The prime minister had just put forward a new strategy, Denmark in a global economy, and was asking for proposals that would increase Denmark’s competitive position. We felt that government could function as an accelerator and platform for the economy instead of running closed proprietary systems of its making.
We spent nights and weekends working out what the solution should look like, and we took the architecture from Napster. The most notorious piracy machine of its day, which the music industry was suing out of existence, had shown how millions of strangers could exchange files with each other with almost nothing in the middle, and that was what a trade network needed. We proposed it to the prime minister’s office under the name EasyTrade, NemHandel in Danish, with one central argument: letting all companies trade electronically, free and without barriers, would lower the friction of the overall economy, and releasing the infrastructure as open source would make it a platform for the smaller software companies who wanted to build the network into their solutions.
This is cultural remixing at its finest, and it is how the current has always moved. A crime through one lens is the foundation of the next generation through another. The clippers gave us modern currency, the short sellers of Amsterdam gave us modern markets, and the file sharers gave a government its trade infrastructure. Many years later the idea would resurface once more as blockchain, with a brilliant mathematical solution for removing the last central servers, doing the job EasyTrade did: an open, decentralised, peer-to-peer platform for commerce with no need for middlemen or service providers.
To our surprise EasyTrade was accepted into the strategy and funded. One year later we released the first version and started building a community program across Danish business to advocate the open platform. Small business associations picked it up and advocated it to their members, and the smaller software vendors supported it because it was open source. Within 12 months of launching almost 74% of Danish companies had accepted and started using EasyTrade, which easily made it one of the best deployed government supply chain projects in the world.
Fast forward to today. The closed EDI networks lost, and the network that won is Peppol, an open network with no owner in the middle, where a company connects once through a provider of its choice and reaches every other company on it, and the language it speaks is UBL. More than a million companies are on it. Belgium made it mandatory for every invoice between companies in January 2026, France’s tax authority joined it ahead of the French mandate that started in September, and from 2030 the European Union requires structured electronic invoices for trade across its borders. Denmark is retiring its national dialect to join it.2 The language no standards body would approve is written into law, and the battle we lost in a ministry was won twenty years later across a continent.
7Language does not conform
The jump in this history is always the same one. Speech let us trade our time and abilities, and with it came the trust of strangers. Writing turned a promise into a receipt, and law followed. Currency separated abstract value from the physical metal and gave commerce the liquidity to move faster than any army. The share separated risk from the voyage, XML separated information from the machines and formats that held it, and each time something that had been locked to a physical carrier was given a name and set free to flow.
None of these languages asked for permission. Each was an offence against the order it found: a Khan asking a Pope for teachers, a philosopher and a physicist rebuilding a kingdom’s money, a government building its trade network on the blueprint of a piracy service, a country adopting version 0.7. Language does not conform; it pushes, provokes and changes, and when we force it to conform, as industrialised commerce did with its blueprints and its one word, cost, it stops carrying anything at all.
Commerce has been the current moving the world for as long as we have had language, and currency is the name we gave it when we learned to trust it. The newest machines we have built speak, so the oldest technology we have is about to push again. The mission has not changed since 2018: keep that current open, and bring forward the best possible world from the many choices facing us.