SpaceXponential

Eventually, I began coding some rough prototypes for John Michael and Stuart. At that point, we didn’t talk about how it would be a business or even how it would function on a practical, user, or human level. It was really, really utopian.Those days we asked questions like, “How does a person be their best self on the internet?” and “How do you get... See more

This is what growing up very visibly online is like. It’s hard not to internalize the sense that you’re constantly being watched and thus everything you do demands a defensible explanation. **Granted, there are many benefits to this — incredible opportunities are unlocked by constructing a digitally consumable caricature of yourself that makes you... See more

Immutability, as it turns out, is not always well defined. In the case of blockchain, it does not mean that the records can never be changed or rolled back. Blockchain trust is immutable not in a binary sense, but in a probabilistic sense. Distinguishing untrustworthy chains from the consensus is not an all-or-nothing decision. The more subsequent... See more

In a world of perpetual data overload, [curation] implies information design and selectivity: the channeling, filtering, and organization into intelligible and usable information; the digging up of new or long ignored cultural corpora. Most of these corpora are simply sitting in storage: less than 1% of the Smithsonian Institution’s permanent... See more

The era we live in requires us to take trust leaps at a surprisingly high rate – we have jumped from using credit cards to dabbling with cryptocurrencies; from making reservations at trusted hotel brands to booking rooms from complete strangers; from public transportation to using Uber or Blablacar; from libraries and encyclopedias, to open... See more

Curation means making arguments through objects as well as words, images, and sounds. It implies a spatialization of the sort of critical and narrative tasks that, while not unfamiliar to historians, are fundamentally different when carried out in space—physical, virtual, or both—rather than in language alone. It means becoming engaged in... See more

“Trustless trust”, as an expression, conveys a trait of blockchain being inimical to trust, when in fact it is the contrary. Not only does blockchain thrive on trust, it is able to “generate” trust in circumstances where there is none, such as impersonal cases brought about by the scale of a network typically found in collaborative transactions... See more

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once commented that: “When eras are on the decline, all tendencies are subjective; but, on the other hand, when matters are ripening for a new epoch, all tendencies are objective. Each worthy effort turns its force from the inward to the outward world.”