Sam Liebeskind

Structural power isn't always a problem, for instance there is no reason to complain that a game designer will pick the rules of their imaginary world, but there is a large set of cases in which this structural power gives corporations " coercive powers like the state but (...) not subject to the kinds of democratic constraints and accountability t... See more

On the time YC cofounder @jesslivingston tore me a new one and changed the future org structure of Ramp: At YC, we attended weekly office hours where every startup shared 1/ their weekly growth %, 2/ their biggest problem, and 3/ what they were doing to solve it. That week in summer 2015 our startup Paribus had grown 20% w/w, our biggest problem ... See more

What's the "essential" non-fiction book about your city?

people fail to anticipate how much learning happens in conversa-tions with strangers. In a series of studies, Atir and colleagues [9] brought strangers together for 10-min conversations. Compared with how much participants expected to learn from a conversation prior to having it, they consistently reported learning more inter-esting, useful, and ge... See more

Global mega-platforms under capitalism are structurally incapable of handling the business of civilization: of governance, of providing genuinely public infrastructure, of making knife-edge decisions about the balance of liberties and securities. It’s not what they do or what they want to do, and in many cases it’s in opposition to their actual int... See more