Status Monkeys - By Packy McCormick - Not Boring by Packy McCormick

In our conversation, Nadia mentioned the classic piece “Status as a service” by Eugene Wei that details how Twitter functions (or functioned) as a giant status-seeking engine. This piece, Nadia proposed, crystalized the era of the internet when people were optimizing for likes and cultural cache in a game that felt novel and exciting. Something ess... See more

In retrospect, this is an obvious extension of the social Internet. Social networks made social capital -- that is, popularity and influence -- scalable and quantifiable. We went from vaguely knowing who were the most admired kids in school to knowing who exactly are the most admired people in the world. In doing so, social media commercialized the... See more

Using the so-called “platform internet” isn’t always an investment, in an explicit monetary sense. Crypto can turn some of those passive efforts – scrolling, exploring, socializing – into financial transactions. What would it mean to live in a world where every single image, song, health record, Twitter “like” and blog post has a discrete token att... See more