Culture

The output matters, but the intention, the struggle, the care is what makes it count — what gives it weight.

Coming back to our LeBron James example, let’s say you want to trade the attention of LeBron. To construct an Attention Oracle for him the first step would be to take in (or create if they don’t exist) many binary prediction markets for topics about LeBron, such as “Will LeBron James have over X million followers by the end of the month?”, “Will... See more

Is sex inherently traumatic and dangerous? Of course not. But also... of course it is. So is any other foundational part of the human experience. Love, friendship and family all come with the potential, maybe even the guarantee, of some sense of loss and devastation. Nobody gets through life unscathed. Nobody should want to.

The traditional asset issuance process is slow, expensive and has a high regulatory bar, restricting what assets can be issued. Attention Assets must operate at Internet speed to keep pace with the global zeitgeist. The combination of permissionless tokens issuance, clever pricing mechanisms like bonding curves, and DEXs practically let anyone... See more

The goal of an equities research analyst is to determine the price of a stock. There are established methods to calculate the DCF component but what about the memetic component? As more assets trade off of their memetic value, it will become necessary to develop methods to model memetic value. Sophisticated investors already use things like... See more

It’s far more convenient to worry about the sex life of some abstract other. But it is not, despite their claims, a matter of jealousy. It is a matter of evasion. It isn’t that Gen Z has a sex problem, it’s that we all do — whether we want to make it about loneliness or politics or whatever else is more digestible than making it about sex itself.... See more

Light things shape culture, but rarely shape us.

Creation isn’t just about output. It’s a process of becoming. The best work shapes the maker as much as the audience. A founder builds a startup to prove they can. A writer wrestles an idea into clarity. You don’t just create heavy things. You become someone who can.

Peter Turchin calls the driver of today’s status pressure elite overproduction. When a society creates more elites and elite aspirants than there are elite positions, competition intensifies, instability rises, and status conflict spills into politics and culture.

The unusually prosperous boomer decades produced more elite aspirants than legacy... See more

One observation of UGAs is that their prices typically start at zero. This is a feature rather than a bug because if you invent a new meme from scratch, the attention of that meme is zero at the time of creation. It intuitively makes sense that you can enter at a low price. This also allows people who are good at spotting trends early to monetize... See more