Alex Wittenberg

These being tail risks, there are countless definitionally unimaginable things that might happen. Perhaps the next global crisis won’t be such a boon for innovation. Unknown unknowns abound. 

To forget the body is to forget our dependence, our frailty, our limitations. To forget these is also to forget the value, indeed the necessity of humility, generosity, care, patience, and mercy. These and other like them are what MacIntyre called “the virtues of acknowledged dependence,” and they were, in his view, grounded in a recognition of our... See more

Share information — cascading information to others, answering questions, and providing new knowledge.

“We believe that journalistic content has intrinsic value and that it doesn’t have to be given away for free. We believe that what you read matters. And we believe that there has never been a better time to bolster and protect those ideals. Now, more than ever, publishers of news and similar content can be profitable through direct payments from... See more

In short, technology made it much easier to clean a house to 1890s standards. But by mid-century, Americans didn’t want that old house. They wanted a modern home—with delicious meals and dustless windowsills and glistening floors—and this delicious and dustless glisten required a 40-to-50-hour workweek, even with the assistance of modern tools.

Indeed, the power of the dream lies in its ordinarily immersive quality, and, while virtual reality is often touted as an immersive media experience, it remains still, as far as I can tell, a comparatively inelegant, awkward, and sometimes disorienting experience. Additionally, of course, you potentially encounter other people in virtual worlds,... See more

Shopify’s big strategic question is how it can build network effects. It wants to sell higher-margin products to merchants for the money, but it might be more important in the long term that those products build a network, pull more merchants and users into the system, and make the core business more sticky. Shop Pay is one building block, but an... See more

DIDs could preserve a user’s reputation across multiple DAOs. Porting over credentials from one DAO to another reflects the reputation portability that we already enjoy in the physical world, preventing active contributors from having to start from zero. Furthermore, other Web3 contexts, such as participation in Gitcoin, publications to Mirror, or... See more

However, although the city state is very progressive in terms of its green aesthetic vision, its politics as a whole are certainly not in line with the solarpunk ethos. Singapore’s government has often been described as authoritarian and anti-democratic by a variety of different measures. Indeed, despite topping the Smart City Index, Singapore... See more