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Among the Reality Entrepreneurs

I love the idealism of the Web3 vision, but we’ve been there before. During my career, we have gone through several cycles of decentralization and recentralization. The personal computer decentralized computing by providing a commodity PC architecture that anyone could build and that no one controlled. But Microsoft figured out how to recentralize ... See more

Tim O’Reilly • Why it's too early to get excited about Web3

Because information technology has undermined the capacity of centralized authority to project power and provide physical security for systems that operate at a large scale, the optimal size of almost every enterprise in the “natural economy” is falling. To respond to this technological change will entail a massive investment requirement (read oppo

James Dale Davidson, Lord William Rees-Mogg • The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age

A programmer, for example, instead of chugging along maintaining and updating an existing piece of software, could write a whole new piece of software, and with it create a new source of revenue.

Paul Graham • Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

We are the same people that we were even a couple of thousand years ago. This undermines a central tenet of progressivism, that now we’re all smart but before everyone used to be dumb (how convenient for us!). Some on the New Right would posit that we were smart then and that we’ve being going down the wrong road for quite a long time. Then there’s

Michael Malice • The New Right: A Journey to the Fringe of American Politics

Singularity Sky

Charles Stross

amazon.com

This pattern raises a question: is centralization just a natural tendency of all networks? Are we destined to have a "decentralization sandwich," where there's a hard-to-change set of protocols, something open built on top of that, and a series of closed systems built on top of that, which are the only ones the average person interacts with?

Byrne Hobart • The Promise and Paradox of Decentralization

John von Neumann, neo-Luddite: (von Neumann was, of course, one of the arch-technologists of all human history - contributing to the creation of everything from the digital computer to the hydrogen bomb to weather forecasting...) https://t.co/vwTqHNamjo

Michael Nielsen

x.com

The biggest risk to Substack isn’t that Gmail changes its algorithm or that readers set up automatic forwarding and share accounts. It’s that years from now, each author will have built up so much content that a reader can pay a 1 month subscription, download the archive, and be set on reading material.