Alex Wittenberg

When you’re taking someone from one ecosystem to another, changing their context, you have to try to see the water in both. It’s disruptive and risky to take someone out of the setting in which they’re thriving, since there are a lot of subtle things going on in the original that may not be immediately obvious. How much of their success depends on... See more

In Illich’s view, modern institutions—including, for example, education, transportation, and medicine—had the (possibly unintended) consequence of deskilling the person and generating dependence on professionalized services. “Deskilling” is my word. Illich talked about a loss of competence and autonomy (always, though, in the service of mutual... See more

Philosophers have been worrying about distraction at least since the time of the ancient Greeks, who saw it less as a matter of external interruptions and more as a question of character—a systematic inner failure to use one’s time on what one claimed to value the most. Their reason for treating distraction so seriously was straightforward, and... See more

Basically, enterprise customers would rather pay a fee to get a premium SaaS type model of the product that has the security and privacy functionality they need, rather than doing the work of using the open source version and building that functionality themselves. Red Hat was acquired by IBM in 2019 for 34 billion and generates billions a year in... See more

The treasury’s purchasing power should be maintained or grown after accounting for expenses.Diversified asset allocation: The assets in the treasury should be diversified and aligned with the goals of the community.

You start to lose someone’s attention at around 20 minutes. Longer meetings should be reserved for all-hands and other more passive, information-sharing type meetings.

Projects like Anata are an interesting next step in that direction. I think as we level up our expectations for NFTs, projects that are trying to give their owners a sense of identity will need to move in the Anata direction to compete. A landing page, roadmap, and profile pictures won’t cut it anymore. I’m excited to see how far these VIDs go. 

You might also be aware that all this is delivered by means of “persuasive design”—an umbrella term for an armory of psychological techniques borrowed directly from the designers of casino slot machines, for the express purpose of encouraging compulsive behavior. One example among hundreds is the ubiquitous drag-down-to-refresh gesture, which keeps... See more