Ian Vanagas

Games have 1. variable outcomes, 2. frequency, and 3. sense of control. These create addiction, not flow.

Information bankruptcy is a common problem for communities to have. When there is too much information to absorb, members often give up on absorbing any of it at all. It’s a play off of email bankruptcy, where someone ignores or deletes all emails beyond a certain date.

Literal access: Either you have access to what is behind the NFT or not. Psychological access: a signal of crypto interest, creates opportunities, ingroup.

I should be able to scroll through the history of my browsing as an enormous branching graph that I can annotate, travel around, share with others, and version.

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