Alex Wittenberg

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

There’s another thing cooperatives have in common: They tend to unite around a shared set of principles. The Rochdale Principles are a set of cooperative ideals developed by the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers. Nearly two centuries later, cooperatives around the world still use them as a foundation.

The Catholic legal scholar Cathleen Kaveny has argued that the reason so many of them are so unhappy—despite being generally very well paid—is the convention of the “billable hour,” which obliges them to treat their time, and thus really themselves, as a commodity to be sold off in sixty-minute chunks to clients. An hour not sold is automatically... See more

Being intentional with the details here is key: what kind of language and terminology is used to introduce new members to the DAO? How many steps are there to the onboarding process, and do they involve Discord bots or wallet transactions? How does the onboarding process hold up against someone who doesn’t have a lot of time or prior interest,... See more

In traditional accounting, we measure the decision-usefulness of financial reporting in two ways: relevance and faithful representation. Relevance refers to whether the financial reports include line items that are material, comparable between periods, and verifiable. Faithful representation refers to the financial information being complete, free... See more

In summary, Bitcoin's shifting brand results from three main characteristics: 1) Bitcoin is headless, completely lacking a centralized entity which attempts to control its brand presence; 2) its defining protocol design decisions are immutable; 3) its users are financial stakeholders and workers in the network, both of whom stand to gain from... See more

For all its chilled-out associations, the attempt to be here now is therefore still another instrumentalist attempt to use the present moment purely as a means to an end, in an effort to feel in control of your unfolding time. As usual, it doesn’t work. The self-consciousness you experience when you seek too effortfully to be “more in the moment”... See more

The permissionless quality indicates any entity can enter and exit the organization according to public criteria.