Ian Vanagas

The stories create demand and the NFTs provide the scarcity. Scarcity helps enable status.

The more I examined these efforts at sedentarization, the more I came to see them as a state’s attempt to make a society legible, to arrange the population in ways that simplified the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion. Having begun to think in these terms, I began to see legibility as a central problem... See more

Money makes games hyper realistic. More real than real. 

In the end, every single person like Nick who votes to deploy their capital into something which doesn’t produce anything beyond capital, is a vote to sit on the sidelines while every single other person works to keep the lights on, or ideally reverse the cycle.

Choice architecture (described as “Libertarian Paternalism” by its advocates) seems to merely dress up authoritarian high-modernism with a thin coat of caution and empirical experimentation. The basic and dangerous “I am more scientific/rational than thou” paternalism is still the central dogma.

Given these realities, I find the furthest extreme of the free and open source philosophy not only unethical in its own right in that it incentivizes wide-scale consumption over production and thus impoverishes the software world, but divorced from reality in that it misunderstands the economic forces responsible for the production of software (and... See more