SpaceXponential

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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+ Mutual appreciation — Risky moves are applauded by the group, subtlety is appreciated, and friendly competition goads the shy. Scenius can be thought of as the best of peer pressure.

What we need most are temporal structures that stabilize life. When everything is short-term, life loses all stability. Stability comes over long stretches of time: faithfulness, bonds, integrity, commitment, promises, trust. These are the social practices that hold a community together. They all have a ritual character. They all require a lot of... 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

“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

The main thing crypto challenged me to consider was the definition of art itself.  What I consider to be art is different from what the crypto world calls art. To me, art is more than an aesthetic image. Inputting a prompt, generating an image with a style transfer, for example, isn’t enough to be art. Drawing, and then generating, a thousand... See more

Perhaps the most admirable part of Bohm’s theory of dialogue—and one that influences how we think of Are.na as being used—is that he conceived of a very simple structure that allowed for emergent possibilities to develop. It’s so easy to treat technology as though it can prescribe a solution to a particular problem (now more than ever). Software

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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