SpaceXponential

I think we can date the fall of the tower to the years between 2011 (Gurri’s focal year of “nihilistic” protests) and 2015, a year marked by the “great awokening  on the left and the ascendancy of Donald Trump on the right. Trump did not destroy the tower; he merely exploited its fall. He was the first politician to master the new dynamics of ... See more

The biggest compliment for us is when someone describes Are.na as healthy. We want to cultivate a culture about being curious and going deeper when necessary. We think the feeling of, “I’m interested in this weird topic and I’m going to see how far that interest goes” is way better than, for instance, putting up a picture and getting 50 likes or so... See more

In a way, crypto only magnifies or exposes the historically intimate ties between art, status and money. When we are in the thick of operating in the art system, it’s easy to forget how the aesthetic value, historical value, monetary value are actively negotiated for each art object. What web3 did was simply render art as a literal currency.

“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 don... See more

I think of my friends with wild creativity and technical skills, who aren’t at all interested in participating in the conversation in the art world, with no intention to be remembered for their art, or anything. Something about the idealism of web3, its insistence on a narrative of revolution now, its urge to change the course of history right away... See more

This is nothing new in the physical social world, but it is revolutionary in the digital social world, where groups and shared messenger threads have historically always been communal spaces.

Cult leaders are their own moderators

Cult leaders need mechanisms for elevating and blessing followers, as well as mutually reinforcing power

Cults need appoint... See more

Technology, however, is creating trust between the unlikeliest of characters, even in the nefarious world of the “Darknet” – an encrypted network of secret websites that allows the exchange of illegal assets such as drugs, stolen financial data, and firearms (Reiff, 2020). The great oxymoron is that it is populated by hundreds of thousands of vendo... 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 (nationa... See more