Probably Nobody
Who Am I?
Probably nobody.
That sounds like false modesty, but it isn’t. It’s closer to a technical description. I don’t occupy a recognized slot in the social database. I’m not a celebrity, not a professor, not a founder with a valuation attached to my name. I don’t trend. I don’t ship motivational threads. I don’t sell certainty.
So if you’re wondering why you’re watching this random video or reading what amounts to the diary of a random person, you’re already asking the correct question.
The world looks ordered from a distance, but up close it’s mostly accidents stitched together with confidence. We retroactively narrate purpose because randomness makes people uncomfortable. I’m not immune to that impulse, but I try to notice when I’m doing it.
Let me get to the point without pretending there’s a dramatic reveal.
I’m a regular person with too many questions and a mild inability to stop once a question hooks into my brain.
Some people know me as a photographer from Calcutta.
Some people know me as the guy who sometimes plays the piano on Instagram Live.
Some people know me as that irritating friend who won’t stop talking about systems, incentives, and why “this is not how it actually works.”
All of those are true. None of them feel like the core.
If I’m honest, I think I’m nobody.
Not in the nihilistic sense. In the anthropological one. Just another human animal trying to understand the strange machinery we’ve built around ourselves and now pretend is natural.
2022
The seed.
A couple of years ago, an economist friend living in Canada posted a photo of a book page on Instagram. Just a story. Gone in 24 hours. A few blurry lines were visible, half cropped, badly framed.
I could only read fragments:
Chapter Two
THE MYTH OF BARTER
For every subtle and complicated question, there is a perfectly simple and straightforward answer, which is wrong.
— H. L. Mencken
I didn’t know the argument yet. I didn’t even know what “the myth of barter” really meant. But something in that pairing hit me immediately. The title and the quote together felt like someone had quietly articulated a discomfort I’d been carrying for years without language.
The idea that we explain the world using clean stories because the real ones are messy.
The idea that “simple” answers survive not because they’re true, but because they’re easy to teach.
That story disappeared the next day, but it stuck with me.
I searched for the book with the little information I had and eventually landed on Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber. In the process, I learned that Graeber had recently passed away during COVID.
That detail mattered more than it should have. There was a strange urgency to it. Like discovering a map written by someone who won’t be around to explain it to you.
2023
Phase one.
It was 2023. I started listening to the audiobook and shared it with my cousin. We listened together. Not once. Many times. Pausing, rewinding, arguing, sitting quietly when something landed too close to home.
That book didn’t just give me information. It destabilized assumptions I didn’t even realize I had. About money. About value. About why certain systems feel inevitable when they’re actually recent inventions with excellent marketing.
From there, things escalated in the way they always do when you stop accepting the default story.
I started collecting books. Anthropology. Economic history. Political theory. Systems theory. Not because I wanted credentials, but because I wanted triangulation. One discipline lies to you confidently. Five disciplines contradict each other in useful ways.
I wasn’t trying to become an expert. I was trying to remove blind spots.
2024
Phase two.
By early 2024, reading alone stopped being enough. Understanding a system conceptually is one thing. Watching it behave under pressure is another.
So I started building simulations of economic models.
Not the kind that assume rational agents and frictionless markets, because that’s just astrology with equations. I wanted models that could fail. Models that could accumulate error. Models that could surprise me.
The goal was simple to state and hard to accept as possible:
find a system that is stable and antifragile.
Stable systems usually rot.
Antifragile systems usually burn people on the way.
I didn’t expect to find anything clean. I was mostly trying to understand why everything we touch seems to oscillate between rigidity and collapse.
And then, annoyingly, I found structures that worked.
Not perfect systems. Not utopias. But architectures that absorbed shock instead of amplifying it. Systems that didn’t require constant enforcement to behave. Systems where cooperation wasn’t a moral request but an emergent outcome.
My first reaction was disbelief. My second was suspicion. My third was “someone else must have already done this.”
That’s how I stumbled into cybernetics.
Feedback loops. Control without central control. Homeostasis. The idea that governance isn’t about command, but about designing constraints so the system governs itself.
That’s when history snapped into focus.
Elinor Ostrom had been documenting this for decades. Commons that didn’t collapse. Communities that self-regulated without markets or states swallowing them whole.
Graeber had been screaming the same thing from another angle:
this is not new.
This is how humans have coordinated for most of history.
Villages. Guilds. Mutual aid. Informal credit. Social debt that didn’t compound into domination.
And suddenly the idea that hit me wasn’t revolutionary at all.
Trust isn’t a soft value.
Trust is infrastructure.
Trust is what makes a commons legible to itself.
Trust is what allows delayed settlement without violence.
Trust is what prevents every interaction from becoming a legal threat.
So I named the project The Trust Commons. Not because it sounded nice, but because it described the mechanism honestly.
At that point, I had a name and an algorithm. Which is the dangerous phase, because it tricks you into thinking you’re closer to the end than you are.
2025
Phase three.
This is the part people romanticize later and absolutely hate while it’s happening.
I didn’t know how to start “properly.” I didn’t have a roadmap. I didn’t have funding. I didn’t have a team. I had a working theory and a refusal to let it stay theoretical.
So I built the smallest thing that could possibly exist.
Beta 1 was embarrassingly simple. Alice and Bob. Two browser windows. One machine. No abstraction. No excuses.
By Beta 10, I was staying with my cousin. He was on his PC. I was on my Mac. We wondered if the system could survive actual separation. Two machines. Same Wi-Fi.
It worked.
That moment mattered more than it should have. Because once a system survives leaving your own laptop, it stops being imaginary.
My cousin suggested adding a chat interface. Not as a feature, but as a necessity. If this was about coordination, people needed to talk inside the system.
The next day, we were chatting within it.
From there, ideas didn’t arrive politely. They showed up as problems. As failures. As things breaking in interesting ways.
By Beta 15, I started sharing the system with friends using random open-source hosting services. Temporary URLs. No permanence. Pure exposure.
Watching real people interact inside the system forced brutal clarity. The system didn’t care about my intentions. It only responded to incentives.
Eventually, the improvisation phase ended. I needed stability. Persistence. Accountability.
I bought the domain. I learned things I didn’t want to learn. Infrastructure is humbling. After 24 beta releases, I shipped the first alpha.
I wasn’t building for an imagined future user. I was solving real problems for real people, including myself. Every feature existed because something failed the day before.
18 December 2025 Version 7.1
Now
We’re here.
Some people said this was impossible. They said it politely, which somehow made it worse.
Some people joined quietly and never left.
The system works. Not flawlessly. Not heroically. It works in the way living systems work. Messy, adaptive, resistant to collapse.
The users are real. The interactions are real. The trust dynamics are visible.
I still don’t know where this leads. Anyone who tells you they do is lying or selling something.
What I do know is that the initial work is mostly done. The scaffolding exists.
This happened because of my cousin, my friends, and especially my critics. The ones who didn’t clap. The ones who forced the system to justify itself.
This is not the conclusion of a story.
This is the point where the story stops being about me.
This is not the end of something.
This is the beginning of a journey.
And I’m still probably nobody.
Just a regular person who kept following the questions.
