In 2018, IBM and Maersk launched TradeLens: a blockchain platform meant to digitise global shipping, replacing the paper trail that follows a container from a Vietnamese factory to a Rotterdam warehouse with a single, shared, tamper-proof ledger. It had the backing of two of the largest logistics operators on earth. By 2023, it was dead.

Ask most people when farmers started cooperating and they will picture the grain co-op down the road, or a barn raising in a period drama: something quaint, something that grew up alongside the tractor and the telephone. The real answer is older than writing. For most of the roughly nine thousand years since people first settled down to grow food, cooperation was not a value farmers held. It was the machinery. A shared irrigation channel, a shared plough team, a shared calendar for who grazes which pasture and when: none of it worked without a standing agreement among neighbours about who did what, when, and what happened if someone broke the rule. Take the agreement away and the technology stops functioning, not because anyone lacked the tools, but because nobody had a way to run them past the scale of a single household.