Ian Vanagas

The “____” is the rallying cry. This is the part that makes people aspire to join the movement when the economy is still nascent.

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

When she was laid off from her role at a fintech startup in the pandemic panic of early 2020, Paris doubled down on driving traffic to her DePop store to make money. She saw TikTok as an untapped fount of opportunity, and made creating videos for it her full-time job. She posted dozens of times a day, drawing viewers in with her... See more

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

A person with this perspective is one who witnessed the more orderly society functioning, yet did not witness the building of the more orderly society , and thus does not understand the mechanics of the more orderly society. In other words, this person has a distinctive blind spot —he knows what could be reaped from a more orderly society, yet not... See more

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

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.