Conversation

It feels both powerful and grimdark. Scarce resources being coordinated and allocated via flexible, JIT coordination infrastructure that looks neither like a bureaucracy, nor like a market, and is faster than either. Ad hoc SMS/web systems are the precursors of smart contracts.
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So many big crisis-mode innovations out of Covid: 1. mRNA vaccines 2. WFH/virtual school tech at scale 3. Ad hoc emergency IT systems 4. Last mile/delivery 5. Faster-than-market social media resource allocation responses 6. Citizen science doing QA on institutional science
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Looking past the failures, to the extent this didn’t turn into a rerun of the Spanish flu (order of magnitude fewer deaths and economic fallout) the credit goes to something unnamed that is neither state action, nor market forces, nor traditional “communities pulling together.”
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Advocates for all three are going to try to take credit, but it feels like a new layer of the civilizational stack emerged. In a messy, disorganized way, already sorta does in the present what blockchain utopians claim that tech will do systematically in the future.
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3.3 m deaths so far, conservatively. Spanish Flu was 20-50 (recent estimates have tended towards the higher end). Hard to run the counterfactual but if Covid had happened in 1918 I suspect the toll would have been about the same as SF or higher.
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