SpaceXponential

 Attention is a finite resource, and how we choose to spend our attention online is, in some ways, a direct reflection of where human culture has gone in an era where access to information is basically unlimited. We are very much in our teenage years—that is, we suddenly have all these new capabilities and it’s really easy to just run wild. But... See more

This, I believe, is what happened to many of America’s key institutions in the mid-to-late 2010s. They got stupider en masse because social media instilled in their members a chronic fear of getting darted. The shift was most pronounced in universities, scholarly associations, creative industries, and political organizations at every level... 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

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

On a blockchain network, nothing is assumed to be trustworthy except the output of the network itself (Werbach, 2018). On any transaction, there are three elements that may be trusted: the counterparty, the intermediary, and the dispute resolution mechanism (Botsman, 2017). Simply put, blockchain tries to replace all three elements with software... See more

Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories. Social media has weakened all three. To see how, we must understand how social media changed over time—and especially in... See more

And therefore, on the collective level, crypto has predominantly encouraged creations, but not creativity. Crypto rewards popularity and suggests that popular content, regardless of its intention, is inherently more valuable and deserving of rewards – not only (sometimes ridiculous) monetary rewards, but also the rewards of being written into (art)... See more

There’s art that I consider art, and there’s other things – things that could be beautiful, but too superfluously so. The intention behind their creation is the desire to please the eyes. They want to be fashionable. But true art is disinterested. True art doesn’t care to be appreciated, obsessed over with, or owned. It holds a certain self-respect... See more