Alex Wittenberg

So here we are, our chins pressed into the metal holster between the fennec-fox ears, the constant flitting words and images of strangers entering our sensory system, offering our poor desiring beings an endless temptation—a power we should not have and that cannot make us whole.

We have now all been granted a power once reserved for totalitarian governments. A not particularly industrious fourteen-year-old can learn more about a person in a shorter amount of time than a team of K.G.B. agents could have done sixty years ago. The teen could see who you know, where you’ve been, which TV shows you like and don’t like; the goss... See more

By now it should be obvious that tokens aren’t a magic bullet — there are no shortcuts to building a network. Networks that just need passive participation from users can use tokens as one tactic to overcome the cold start problem. But networks with active participation can be harder to bootstrap. In these cases, token rewards can incentivize behav... See more

Budget funds should be held in a multisigAt least 4/7 signers to avoid any central point of failure

When people talk about identity they usually mean one of three related but quite different scopes: (a) a unique identifier, (b) a holistic view of an entity, or (c) a specific piece of context about an entity.Unique identifiers are critical in any social setting. Names are an adequate ‘identifier’ amongst friends, family, or small tribes (under Dun... See more

What Rosa calls resonance is a way of relating to the world such that we are open to being affected by it, can respond to its “call,” and then both transform and be transformed by it—adaptive transformation as opposed to mere appropriation. “The basic mode of vibrant human existence,” Rosa explains, “consists not in exerting control over things but... See more

Things could totally fall apart. But if history is a guide, we’ll wake up a decade from now to a market full of much higher numbers than we can reasonably wrap our minds around today. Some of the new market cap will come from today’s public companies, some will come from today’s private unicorns, some will come from existing startups that aren’t ye... See more

If you're a developer building decentralized applications, you have been faced with uncomfortable tradeoffs in choosing how to manage data. The two available options available have held back Web3 apps:Option 1 has been to use a smart contract (blockchain-based) backend and a static frontend. The downside of this option is that these apps are not ve... See more

It does seem as if the primary work of attention, so to speak, is done not by the person but the machine, and this qualitatively changes the experience of being noted and attended to. Perhaps one way to say this is that when we are attended to by (or through) a machine we too readily become merely an object of analysis stripped of depth and agency,... See more