Zyaku Founder Publishes Essay Arguing The Internet Was Built Without PrinciplesRohit Kashyap, founder of Zyaku Inc., has published an essay arguing that the internet became global infrastructure before any shared principles governed it, and outlines what that means for how technology should be built going forward.
By: Zyaku Inc. The essay argues that unlike libraries, courts, or road systems, all of which were built after societies agreed on the principles they were meant to protect, the internet became one of the largest infrastructures in human history without a comparable process. According to Kashyap, the internet grew incrementally through individual technical solutions such as ARPANET, TCP/IP, DNS, and the Web, each answering a narrow practical question rather than a broader question about what digital society should become. The piece describes how every digital product teaches its users what matters through its incentives rather than its stated mission, citing notifications that reward interruption and ranking systems that reward whatever they are tuned to elevate. Kashyap writes that many public disagreements about technology are actually disagreements about incentive structures that were never discussed openly before they began shaping behavior at scale. The essay also addresses what it describes as the internet's uneven handling of context, noting that information such as screenshots and quotes frequently spreads without the surrounding conversation or argument that gave it meaning. It argues that trust is increasingly something people place in systems rather than only in other people, and that most technology products still treat trust as a feature added after launch rather than a structural decision made before a product is designed. The piece closes with what Kashyap describes as a single additional question builders should ask earlier in the design process: if a large number of people used a given product every day, what behavior would it quietly encourage over time. In a closing note, Kashyap connects the essay to his work at Zyaku, a creator platform he has been building over the past year, stating that the question has shaped product decisions ranging from creator payouts to content moderation. He states that Zyaku does not consider the underlying problem fully solved, but believes it deserves more attention across the technology industry. The essay is available on Medium, with further information about Zyaku available at zyaku.com. LINKS
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