Alex Wittenberg

NFTs are not securities, and thus perfectly legal as commodities. They are more like artwork or souvenirs, whose prices also fluctuate. Just because a signed photograph of Kanye West gets more valuable if West is more famous doesn’t mean it qualifies as a stock. But $APE is much closer to a security, because it’s not an artwork; it’s money. It’s... See more

Illich was not a romantic, and he is often explicit about the futility of romanticizing the past. But even more importantly, the apparent severity, from the perspective of consumerist assumptions, was, in fact, a pathway to the experience of life-giving community, environmental health, meaningful work, social solidarity, and personal well-being.... See more

But what’s wild is that that’s what the current $300 billion in venture funding is investing into -- things funded today might not be public for another decade. The $2 trillion in hypothetical 2031 funding, which would need to return $4.25 trillion per year, would feed into the following decade. By 2041, at the same CAGR, the world’s public... See more

And, of course, the margin differential means that ad revenue that’s a small percentage of the top line might have much larger impact on the bottom line. At least, until everyone else tries the same…

There seem to be two distinct concerns for Illich. The first is that we lose the commons of which silence is an integral part and thus a measure of freedom and agency. The second, concurrent with the first, is that you and I may find it increasingly hard to be heard even as we are given more and more tools with which to speak. Alternatively, we... See more

Unfortunately, the patterns of our techno-social order tend toward the fracturing of community and the isolation of the person. We are offered an array of tools that promise to assuage the resulting economic and psychic precarity, but, more often than not, their real aim implicit in their design is to perpetuate and accelerate social fragmentation... See more

I've worked in a lot of "non-hierarchical" organizations, and management or leadership do not go away. You don't succeed in that space by removing them and leaving a vacuum. You succeed by reinterpreting things like management and leadership into distributed processes, transparent roles that can rotate and are accountable back to the community at... See more

Then, there are macro and tail risks.

They are a vehicle to express the values of a DAO and increase its longevity.