Sarah Drinkwater
@sarahdrinkwater
Knowledge beachcomber interested in the ownership economy, flourishing communities, ecosystem building, magic, and knowledge as an end to itself.
Sarah Drinkwater
- When I was at Index we would include two sections in our memos that were popularized by Larry Summers. We would write about a company's "pre-parade" and "pre-mortem." Not only a "dream the dream" scenario, but a "dream the nightmare."
from The Death of a Venture Fund by Kyle Harrison
Worldbuilding and
late stage capitalism and shifting culture
In America, our culture has become anticipation.
At some point, there was a switch, in which we became an edging culture. One rooted in “pre-”.
With AI, I suspect we’ll be able to play with the compression of anticipation with software objects well. Teasing an idea on Twitter, seeing it’s response, putting that prompt in AI to generate just enough code for the resemblance of the thing → and that reaching consumer hands much faster.
Perhaps anticipation culture is the wedded partner of instant-gratification culture. It’s the only thing that allows us to microdose the gratification of the object before we actually have it. Constantly watching trailers, or runway shows, sneak peaks, etc
I find this all lines up incredibly well to VC culture. The discussion is 90% weighted on the raise
The anticipation is lost as its material reality fails to hold any long term attention. Even if it was the exact promise. We simply love the build up. The image of the thing.
The “pre-”, other than consuming behind the scenes content of an artist’s process, is all mental. As I participate as a dancer in the audience, I can only (if I care to) construct fiction of the worked anticipation of the overall performance. But 90%+ of the audience only cares about the anticipation of the next drop or track. The loop is built in.
To bring it all the way back to the tweet that launched this post. Anticipation is exhausting. It is built around uncertainty, and the quelling of said uncertainty by the fragments of the objects chosen to be presented.
- What is Cheems is laughing off someone’s sincere ideas as self-evidently stupid, or declaring with very little knowledge about a particular field or ambition that something is too difficult/too risky to even think about further. And whenever it puts someone off pursuing what they otherwise might (consciously or not), its consequence is the creation... See more
from #1: In-group Cheems
- I found myself dreaming about designs that might satisfy my requirements, while also supporting new interactions, new ways of relating, new aesthetics. At the same time, I read a ton about the early days of the internet. I devoured oral histories; I dug into old protocols.
from Specifying Spring '83 by Robin Sloan
The Hype Cycle Giveth, And Taketh Away: Ushering in a New Business Model for Pre-Seed Funds to Survive & Thrive In The New Normal
- Millennials are less religiously affiliated than ever before. Churches are just one of many institutionalcasualties of the internet age in which young people are both more globally connected and more locallyisolated than ever before. Though many millennials are atheists or agnostics, the majority are less able to articulate their sense of spi... See more
from How we gather by Casper ter Kuile
- Celo is a carbon-negative EVM-compatible Layer 1 blockchain designed to make it accessible and usable by anyone with a smartphone, anywhere in the world. It’s unique among blockchains in many ways, including the fact that it has its own native stablecoins in different denominations and in that it plans to back those stablecoins with 40% natural cap... See more
from Celo: Building a Regenerative Economy by Packy McCormick
- GP partnerships are highly time and attention constrained, making them the opposite of scalable. Most processes are run manually, and there is rarely much use of software or automation to help source, assess, or execute deals.
from Productizing Venture by Erik Torenberg