Alex Wittenberg

Decentralized treasury spending lets contributors select team members they’ve worked with, allocate points to members, generate a contributor graph, and get paid based on their contributions. This is exactly how Coordinape from Yearn is designed to work. 

But to the machine we can only be an object of analysis. We cannot appear as a living subject to the algorithm; we are merely an assemblage of data and probabilities subject to the calculations of instrumental rationality in the service of ends which have little to do with us. Critically, in my view, it cannot account for the logic of the... See more

Second, if the business keeps the tokens, the company bears some tax risk. Imagine your top account executive books a $5m USD contract paid in tokens. The business pays 20% tax annually which implies a $1m tax liability on the tokens. In the subsequent two quarters, the token’s price collapses by 95%, so the $5m is now worth $0.25m. Signing the... See more

Co-ops often emerge as an attempt to respond to market failures and exploitative economic systems. They are designed to bring benefits to their members: good jobs, dignity, and collective agency. Because co-ops are motivated by serving members’ needs, rather than profit, they are often guided by racial and economic justice missions. There aren’t... See more

Take education. What a hoax. As a child, you are sent to nursery school. In nursery school, they say you are getting ready to go on to kindergarten. And then first grade is coming up and second grade and third grade … In high school, they tell you you’re getting ready for college. And in college you’re getting ready to go out into the business... See more

Silence is felt. It is meaningful. It is not mere negation. In fact, it can be, as we shall see, eloquent. But, and here I suppose is the crux of the matter, this kind of silence presupposes bodily presence. Silence, in the way that I’m encouraging us to think of it, emanates from the body taken whole. 

Never before in history have so many people been under the gaze of so many strangers. Humans evolved in small groups, defined by kinship: those we knew, knew us. And our imaginative capabilities allowed us to know strangers—kings and queens, heroes of legend, gods above—all manner of at least partly mythic personalities to whom we may have felt as... See more

One marker that I’m seeing someone clearly is when I understand how their strengths are also their weaknesses, how their genius lives right next to their dysfunction. I know that I’m further away from clarity when I am overly excited or overly skeptical. 

Except that this now began to seem to me like an astoundingly perverse way to approach spending time with a newborn, not to mention an unnecessarily exhausting thing to have to think about when life was already exhausting enough. Obviously, it mattered to keep half an eye on the future—there would be vaccinations to be administered, preschools to... See more