SpaceXponential

“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

Gurri is no fan of elites or of centralized authority, but he notes a constructive feature of the pre-digital era: a single “mass audience,” all consuming the same content, as if they were all looking into the same gigantic mirror at the reflection of their own society. In a comment to Vox that recalls the first post-Babel diaspora, he said: " The... See more

Every good cult leader needs a stage - Perhaps the most distinctive thing about the Clubhouse chat-room model is that it provides a stage where leaders can talk while followers listen as part of an audience—and sometimes wait to be called on.

These two extreme groups are similar in surprising ways. They are the whitest and richest of the seven groups, which suggests that America is being torn apart by a battle between two subsets of the elite who are not representative of the broader society. What’s more, they are the two groups that show the greatest homogeneity in their moral and... See more

Again, as I noted above, Facebook made the 2013 decision to increase the value of newsworthy links for a reason, and in the time since, BuzzFeed in particular has proven that there is a consistent and repeatable way to not only reach a large number of people but to compel them to share content as well. Was Krugman wrong because he didn’t appreciate... See more

In our reality, Ted Nelson served as a muse rather than the Internet’s architect. Legend has it that he conceived of Xanadu as an antidote (or amplifier) for his attention deficit disorder. He dreamed of a word processor that allowed users to surf through and freely explore associations, related material, and alternate contexts of any given piece

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Whereas the modern university segregated scholarship from curation, demoting the latter to a secondary, supportive role, and sending curators into exile within museums, archives, and libraries, the Digital Humanities revolution promotes a fundamental reshaping of the research and teaching landscape. It recasts the scholar as curator and the curator... See more