Sam Liebeskind

Wrote up some thoughts on structures and tactics for gathering people together in low-stress, high-payoff ways. Learned some of these lessons the hard way. Picked up others by being part of beautifully designed events with thoughtful... See more

So we might all have the same needs, but the superficial markers for how we achieve these desires look very different. This is where people start misunderstanding one another, fighting. But these little big differences, our individual personality phenotypes, is where things get interesting.

But the internet’s history suggests that, if these products succeed, they will follow what Ben Thompson calls the 90/9/1 rule: 90 percent of users consume, 9 percent remix and distribute, and just 1 percent actually create. In fact, as Scott Galloway has reported, 94 percent of YouTube views come from 4 percent of videos, and 89 percent of TikTok... See more

The fact that the digital and the analog are interwoven is not the problem. Not only is it to be expected that all human activities connect to one another, but the mutual encroachment of different governance systems with one another is, under normal circumstances, highly desirable because it makes the resulting system polycentric .9 A polycentric... 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... See more

The key transformation that needs to occur is from a logic of open source development to a more complex logic of commons-based governance.