Ethereum is an instructive example in which the project's brand is largely associated with its founder. Vitalik is probably the only individual in the Ethereum ecosystem with the capability of personally altering its brand identity. However, the Ethereum team has also made design choices which show an effort to "keep the identity small," such as th... See more

The unhappy truth of the matter is that it is normal for friendships to fade, even under the best of circumstances. The real aberration is keeping them. In 2009, the Dutch sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst published an attention-grabber of a study that basically showed we replace half of our social network over the course of seven years, a reality we ... See more

Illich goes on to identify three different kinds of silences as well as their destructive and degrading counterfeits. I won’t walk us through each of these, but I will draw your attention to a few portions of Illich’s discussion. The primary context for what Illich has to say here is the face-to-face encounter, and we would do well, in my view, to ... See more

But of the two worlds I’ve been witnessing, I am becoming convinced that the emerging weird world being claimed by lorecraft, with tarot cards and literal magical thinking in the mix, is actually more real, and has been all along.

Then, there are macro and tail risks.

To make things more troublesome still, it can be difficult even to notice when your outlook on life is being changed in this depressing fashion, thanks to a special problem with attention, which is that it’s extremely difficult for it to monitor itself. The only faculty you can use to see what’s happening to your attention is your attention, the ve... See more

While using a token doesn’t inherently make a community self-managing or decentralized, the benefits of (and value accrual to) the token aren’t maximized unless those criteria are upheld.However, no organization will fulfill the first 6 criteria purely on day one. Tokenized communities are progressively working to fulfill the above criteria, making... See more

Green, sustainable infrastructure as a form of resistance. Technical systems decoupled from the ‘authoritarian technics’ that Mumford warns us about. The embracing of the natural and the technical. This idea is where the solarpunk vision really comes into its own.

Instead of work as something you do for a maternalistic entity with a human face (sometimes nurturing, sometimes abusive) between you and every algorithmic process, you get a cloth mommy API if you’re lucky and a wire mommy API if you’re not.