Alex Wittenberg

My thesis, to put it bluntly, is that from late neolithic times in the Near East, right down to our own day, two technologies have recurrently existed side by side: one authoritarian, the other democratic, the first system-centered, immensely powerful, but inherently unstable, the other man-centered, relatively weak, but resourceful and durable... See more

“If we no longer saw the world as a point of aggression, but as a point of resonance that we approach, not with an aim of appropriating, dominating, and controlling it but with an attitude of listening and responding, an attitude oriented toward self-efficacious adaptive transformation, toward mutually responsive reachability, modernity’s... See more

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

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... See more

So attention and perception are mingled because whether or not I move from mere notice to attending depends in part upon what I have perceived and what I have perceived, as Barfield explained, depends on nothing less than who I am. 

What does it mean for a community to be tokenized? Simply put, tokenization implies that a community is using a token as its primary means of coordination. The token is a proxy for some larger meme or set of values.

People know what it feels like to be on a tech platform where they are the product instead of the ones using the product, which is the case for so much mainstream tech out there. We don't want that, and our community doesn't want that. They really see the downside. We have different sub-communities, like open source people, who deeply understand... See more

“Deep liquidity” means preserved value when trading between tokens. “Thin liquidity” means loss of value when trading between tokens.

Autonomous agents are on the other side of the automation spectrum; in an autonomous agent, there is no necessary specific human involvement at all; that is to say, while some degree of human effort might be necessary to build the hardware that the agent runs on, there is no need for any humans to exist that are aware of the agent’s existence.