Conversation

A general pattern of question I’m getting as in every tech futures conversation I’ve ever had, is “How is Web3 thing X different from obvious analogical old thing Y?” Anchoring on the most obvious analogy tends to minimize distinctions and magnify similarities.
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The snark form of this is perversely self blinding, as in “X, you invented X” “Rideshare with published routes”… “public transit you invented public transit” (treating app based failing as a rounding error). Thing is *you choose your anchors, you choose your blindness*
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This is why I don’t engage “how is it different from X” whether motivated by sincere curiosity or bad-faith trolling. You chose your anchor. I don’t have to. I may offer alternate anchors, but I don’t have to correct the invisibilities of your frame. That’s a futile battle.
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In general, I try to understand a thing on its own terms. You can never avoid metaphors (unpopular opinion: there is no System 2; there is no ‘first principles thinking’, there’s only conceptual metaphors too subtle to notice), but you can pick one that highlight the differences.
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Replying to
I was responding to a class of comments I’ve been getting, not to yours in particular. But yeah, I used DRM as a convenient pointer but it’s not synonymous with copyright to me. To me the essence of it is encryption. Managing access to bits with encryption = drm.
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Simply by encrypting a document and not sharing keys I’m asserting and managing digital rights, regardless of whether big companies or governments or copyright regimes even exist
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I actually don't think you can control access to information even with web3 drm, you can just make participation in certain systems conditional on some transaction the problem is that, as those systems grow in importance, so does the penalty of non-ownership
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