An entire human social technology, narrative, is based on the ability to change the future by getting people to believe things about it. Think of all the religions based on doomsday predictions, and their fates after declared doomsday dates came and went.
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Most storytelling is smart enough to only make falsifiable predictions too far in the future to matter, but some dumb cults limit their potential by declaring doomsday will be next week. Politics and marketing narrative are all based on making future-distortionary predictions.
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Maybe the “killer app” of crypto is specifically to kill manipulative storytelling as a technology? Would be ironic since the whole damn sector is based on manipulative storytelling right now 🤣
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This is not new btw. The idea of “letter to be opened 100 years after my death” is old. It would be interesting to look at a bunch of these and think about the psychology of them.
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Btw not all big technologies are this way. Some are wysiwyg from day 1. Steam promised to replace water/animal power and that’s what it did. Airplanes promised bloodier war and fast civilian travel and that’s what they delivered (modulo big airliners rather than flying cars)
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Fred Pohl famously said that the job of the scifi writer is to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam. This is true of what we might call Pohlian technologies, where the automobile is the *easier* prediction. Space and crypto are non-Pohlian technologies.
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With both space and crypto (and a few more like synbio) the traffic jams are easier to predict than the automobiles. So you have to get non-Pohlian in your speculation.
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An example of this effect is DAOs. They feel like traffic lights built before cars have been invented, and now we have to use them with… engineless horses? Aka stablecoins? Don’t mean to snark, but so far I haven’t figured out how to use DAOtech to make communities better.
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Which is weird because I’m part of trying to build the which on paper looks like a perfect fit for DAOfication, but it’s a case of “you have a decentralized community problem? Use DAOs! Well now we have 2 problems.”
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I read this thread of “open problems with DAOs” and went, “errr these are the same problems we have with our non-DAO community, so if they’re open problems for you too why would I add the headache of a volatile speculation-attracting token to our list of existing headaches?
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DAO CHALLENGES THREAD
Over past 2 weeks, I've been compiling a series of 12 "DAO Problems" — key questions to ask in building DAOs.
And I've collected them below.
Use them for reference, for debate, and click through to see brilliant answers from some wonderful thinkers.
Show this thread
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Related… this isn’t Web3 until the barrier to entry is *far* lower. For web1 I could make my 1998 html geocities pages, for web2 I could futz around enough with php/css etc to make Wordpress work for me in 2007. Here 12 years in, it’s still too hard to do anything besides hodl
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I’m no hacker but I’m competent enough to be among the early adopters of any tech wave claimed to be generally democratically accessible. This feels closer to the “mobile revolution”… I never built an app because it never got easy enough. It was a specialty thing.
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This inaccessibility is in fact the reason the predictive speculations are so head-in-the-clouds abstract and all about “end of nation state” ideas, with no clear way to connect the dots to (say) using metamask or opening a coinbase accounts or buying a ledger/trezor.
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You might like near.dev
We are trying to make fiddling with web3 be no harder than previous web stuff.
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