“It’s a post-Snowden and post-WikiLeaks generation that throws its hands up in the air and says, ‘we don’t care about the Chinese spy, everyone has our data,’” Elizabeth Ingleson, an international history professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science told Semafor.
For headless entities in particular, the whitepaper plays key role in setting the tone and narrative direction for the project's continued development.
At one point I was struggling to connect the dots and our moderator, the science fiction scholar Sherryl Vint, made the very astute observation that what seems to capture my interest is the gap between models and reality.
This means we can think about our approach with steadier footing instead of vacillating in response to the hype, whether it comes from the top as LinkedIn posts by prepper CEOs or from the bottom by the hustleheads on X.
When it comes to meme culture, I would say Elon is a Level 1 Crook or a Level 3 Street Thug at best, but he seized a moment of shared dread to engineer timeline hysteria that went on for days.