Pacenotes: Exit to Community and Personal Tokens with Nathan Schneider

So I think it’s really important to to just stop whenever we face problems in the digital economy and reconnect them to the rest of the economy and to history and say, okay, where else are these problems arising? So I think a lot of these problems start to become a lot simpler the moment we realise that the internet didn’t invent them.

there’s very specific things that crypto technology does well. But actually most other things, it doesn’t do so well and it introduces more trouble than it’s worth. And so we need to be really intentional about where we put the crypto as opposed to all the other stuff.

One thing is that temporal delay. Recognising that if you’re giving people constant financial feedback, you will financialise those people.

Tokenizing everything has the potential of … turning all of our behaviour into a game of financial incentives

Similarly, I think one of the challenges of some of these tokenized projects is to actually kind of put the token in the background and create experiences that people really want to have.

In my experience so far with the crypto world, a lot of the technical designs are built around the pure financial incentives. And there is a robust culture, around these technologies, otherwise they probably wouldn’t be used by anyone. But they’re really off-chain. And as much as possible, these systems are often designed to get people using these ... See more

If you look at the the work of anthropologists like Marcel Mauss [Ed: who wrote ‘The Gift’ on gift cultures]or, Pierre Bourdieu, [Ed: who coined the idea of cultural capital] they emphasise the importance of non-monetary capital, the way in which, what we call social capital only functions if it didn’t feel transactional, if it didn’t feel like eco... See more