More a general question, what is your strategy for working on topics/technologies that seem to be quite "counter-culture", internet, cyberspace from within an 'established/establishment' academic institution?
But more seriously, it is indeed difficult to work on CyberPunk 2.0 topics within a university. Solid question! As an academic you critically rely on incoming grant money, so my strategy for past decades have been to discover what the real problems are before they become hype.
That means you need to need to run your research team as a startup. Very few academic thinkers. We discover what is hard using our deployment-first methodology [1]. We have 2.3 million downloads of our distributed system. Our "Bandwidth as a currency" used a ledger in aug 2007 [2]. That became a big hit in jan 2009 with Bitcoin. Gave us a few years headstart for funding on others. In 2012 we had Internet deployment of fully decentralised machine learning (SGD) [3]. This showed the need for a global web-of-trust.
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.04508 [2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6971904.stm [3] http://www.kl.csko.hu/projektek/msc_thesis.pdf
Peer-to-peer training of the next big LLM when? :)