SpaceXponential

Most of what the crypto world calls art is entertainment, or fashionable assets. They snatch your attention. They care more about making a tweet or a headline declaring they SOLD OUT, they set a HISTORICAL RECORD, and they tell you this is the art’s value. But the value of what? Monetary value is not a good indicator of the aesthetic value, the... See more

The metaphor of risk management uses financial incentives to empower our nobler epistemic instincts.

While the metaphor of Facts excuses us from the responsibility of exercising personal judgment, the metaphor of risk management uses financial incentives to empower our nobler epistemic instincts to overcome our lazier ones.

... The employment of

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This is hardly a profound observation. It has been clear for many years that the Internet made it possible for new communities to form, sometimes with astonishing speed. The problem, as Zeynep Tufekci explained in [Twitter and Tear Gas](https://www.twitterandteargas.org/), is that the ease of network formation made these communities more fragile,... See more

A university museum worthy of its name must become at least as much a laboratory as, say, a university library. An archive must become a place of teaching and hands‐on learning. The classroom must become a place of hands‐on engagement with the material remains of the past where the tasks of processing, annotating, and sequencing are integral to... See more

The upshot is this: Communities and cults are both valid and reasonable ways to organize social structures. Flat communities worked well in the early internet of high barriers to participation and limited people and content. Hierarchical cults work better today, when the internet has a plethora of content and people, and all those barriers have... See more

+ Local tolerance for the novelties — The local “outside” does not push back too hard against the transgressions of the scene. The renegades and mavericks are protected by this buffer zone.

It is possible that art is nearer to the heart of creation than philosophy. It is therefore capable of letting something entirely new begin. The revolution can begin with as little as an unheard-of color, an unheard-of sound.  

But gradually, social-media users became more comfortable sharing intimate details of their lives with strangers and corporations. ... They became more adept at putting on performances and managing their personal brand—activities that might impress others but that do not deepen friendships in the way that a private phone conversation will.  Once... See more