Ian Vanagas

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.

Create something, anything—write a line of poetry, doodle an image, hum a melody, take some objects near you and arrange them into a sculpture, do a dance move. Now destroy what you created, physically if you can, but also mentally. Forget it completely. The world is changed. You are changed. The idea will return in one form or another, in your... See more

All the mental energy that you use to elaborate your misery would be far better used trying to find the one, seemingly impossible way out of your current mess.

DOOM embraced the idea of shared creativity. Rather than requiring the user to start from a blank slate, DOOM provided the structure and tools which allowed people to re-combine and add things to an existing system. This lowered the barrier to entry, not only in terms of the required technical skill (since it was not necessary to learn to write... See more

Vitalik famously said “even a billion dollars of capital cannot compete with a project having a soul.”

An accurate definition of an internet “creator” would have to be: someone whose income is determined by a platform’s algorithms.