Now there’s a fifth way: Be a part of entire large nomadic scenes with no particular geographic base, but with highly complex organizational capabilities and internal economic engines. The Ethereum ecosystem is a very good example of this phenomenon. It has the scale, operational complexity, and economic mass of a major multi-national corporation,... See more
The tech industry currently stands at a crossroads. At the twilight of social media, adtech, and crypto bull markets (bubbles?), tech workers and consumers are simultaneously exhausted by tech and starving for more. Shiny trends like Artificial Intelligence and Mixed Reality stand on the sidelines ready to transform latent frustrations into... See more
But I’m into the new kids who are trying to make the internet how they want it, like Zane with Silk. The future has to look like something, after all...
The magic of the internet is that it lets us build whole new societies on top of the existing one. These new, internet-led societies have repeatedly shown the power to evolve, push, and even overtake the physical society that created them (for good and for ill).
Le Guin and Butler use the world-building capacities of the speculative and science fictions as a cypher into the complex social, cultural, and ecological conditions of life here on Spaceship Earth[2]. In their work, Butler and Le Guin established a more empathetic kind of world-building, using the genres as a way to think critically about society... See more
According to a draft of an unpublished Substack post, his newest plan is to promote Urbit as an élite private club whose members, he believes, are destined to become “the stars of the new public sphere—a new Usenet, a new digital Athens built to last forever.”
Right now AI is fun parlor trick; it’s closer to personal tool than anything that will be deployed reliably enough to do the kind of economic shifting that its investors are betting it will.