Working notes for Summer of Protocols

I’m mostly here in Edge Lanna on a mission myself: To help run a week-long event called Protocol Worlds, a part of the Summer of Protocols program I help run. The event is a simulation focused on the idea of holographic cities — digital city-like social realities (ideally crypto-flavored of course, and preferably Ethereum-flavored) projected onto p... See more

What Here Comes Everybody has me thinking about in 2022 is whether or not the dynamic era of organizational experimentation that flourished in the 2000s was way shorter than we predicted it to be, and if it is now effectively over. The apparently open-ended organizational possibilities of the 2000s web resolved in practice to a limited handful of q... See more

Today, we’re in web3’s Usenet era. Open protocol development, exponential user growth, compounding excitement, and — perhaps most importantly — the permeation of mainstream awareness without fully understanding it. Of course, there are many collateral impacts of this shift. The one I am focused on today is, selfishly, personal to my own experience:... See more

This work is less about what was happening in the 2000s and more about what those early signals suggested about seemingly endless possibilities in the future. What was to come — even if we weren’t quite sure what that was — was a bigger deal than what had already happened.

The first thing I’ve come to learn is that pursuing something as open-ended as internet reform requires intentional scoping and goal-setting. The New Internet was never a single thing. It was fractured and messily connected from the jump. This messiness was used as feedstock to accelerate its consolidation under what became the crypto industry. It ... See more