Central blasting: Tech panel takes aim at traditional economic thought, traditions

“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,” William Butler Yeats wrote in “The Second Coming,” the Irish poet’s famous 1919 work about civilization turning to chaos in the wake of World War I.

More than a century later, the center is again being challenged, this time by technology — specifically, the rise of cryptocurrencies, blockchains, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and other “Web 3.0” innovations, which present new, decentralized ways of doing business.