Severin Matusek

When I first saw this, I thought “Did anyone read this?” That’s always the question when encountering something that you think is god awful. But in the AI era, I found myself asking a follow-up question: “Did anyone write this?”

I’d describe my time from 2015-2020 (when the book will be published) in three distinct phases:

• Phase I: 2015-2016: Discovery, exploration, initial research, hypothesis generation (funded by the Ford Foundation)


• Phase II: 2016-2018: Experience, experimenting, hypothesis testing (working at GitHub)


• Phase III: 2018-2020: Refining, summarizing,

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There's a very brief window of time. In this moment, right here and right now, some folks are eagerly starting projects, building assets and creating values. Others, in a pattern we've seen again and again, are waiting, fearfully, ignoring what's happening and hoping for the best.

The TV show The Wire had a phrase about how people navigate the risk of failure inside more traditional institutions: “You can’t lose if you don’t play.” In the tech world, the logic reverses. The drawbacks of a collective fallacy are smaller than not participating in the next innovation, so the rule becomes, “You only lose if you don’t play.”

Put simply, a network state is an online community that materializes in the physical world with the goal of achieving meaningful collective action.

The New Economics Foundation found that 82% of Uber customers would use a more ethical alternative to the ride hail service and 54% would pay more for their journey to give drivers better pay and conditions.

See, the good news about the culture war is the values did change. You can be trans, gay, etc. The bad news is not everyone has to like it. Wanting legal protections is one thing. Wanting consistent representation in the media until your group or lifestyle attains universal acceptance is childish. You know that will never happen.

Once, we made sense of the world with sweeping narratives that provided a comforting sense of mastery. Now, with those narratives shattered beyond repair by a reality too complex for us to fathom, a new kind of coping mechanism is emerging—one where we make peace with the limits of our agency rather than pretending to overcome them. The task is no... See more