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Replying to
I suspect what makes Web3 *appear* extra contentious is that it divides core members of the middle class. Like artists for eg. Artists tend to be reliably anti-tech initially, taking pride in being socially middle class but economically underclass unless supported by other means.
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Artists still largely depend on patronage but now are less beholden to institutions/expert tastemakers (museums, grants, commercial art buyers like movies) or potentially tyrannical cohesive crowds based on ideological aesthetics (Patreon style). Web3 loosens the grip of both.
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Web3 is Crowds3 too. We focus too much on authority figures and institutions. Crowds evolve too. Crowd1 = geographic scene in a city that could ostracize you Crowd2 = filter-bubble online crowd that can cancel you Crowd3 = skin-in-the-game crowd that doesn’t subsume individuals
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I suspect in the long run, the empowerment of individuals over metastasized bad crowds will be a bigger effect of Web3 than anti-authoritarian effects. Institutions and experts are *already* crippled by Crowd2s. Web3 empowers Crowd3s against Crowd2s and Crowd1s.
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The reason is both Crowd1 and Crowd2 are both social proof. You’re cool if ingroup decides you’re cool and can learn to trot out the right shibboleths (=communally shared private keys). Web3/Crowd3 forces you to add material proof (“tokens”). Higher cost but more independence.
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This is a *direct* (and if it works, crippling) attack on Crowd2 forms of collective authority where peer pressure can be super-intense and force you to conform. Web3 has a) materially embodied autonomous agency that takes violence to coerce from you b) nymity-agnostic norms
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Take a Web2/Crowd2 thing like Trumpie or Wokie mob. If you’re in an online/offline geography where either is dominant, the peer pressure to conform is extraordinary because the crowd controls a lot of the value you depend on.
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You are required to be a) non-anonymous to ingroup in proportion to value you depend on b) subsume your individuality within it c) toe the party line on group action on pain of social death d) surrender political agency to the groupmind.
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Tentative radical conclusion: Web3 actually solves the culture war (Crowd2 vs Crowd2 internet of beefs, institutions and experts are peripheral). People critical/hostile to it are likely those with a big stake in Crowd2 collective action/solidarity models.
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This is why, despite cosmetic suitability, Web3 models have *not* been eagerly adopted by Crowd2s. A TrumpDAO won’t work. A WokeDAO won’t work. Web3 requires you to exercise too much individual autonomous agency. Yes tech adoption difficulty is a factor but it’s not *that* hard.
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Replying to
But don’t argue about it like you have to agree, and don’t say “agree to disagree.” If you get into a derpfest, disengage with “I guess we’ll let our tokens do the talking” Web3 makes direct democracy scalable beyond Dunbar levels (150) and delays the need for political parties
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I think I disagree with this view. Already with which could be viewed as a hybrid, I’m seeing distinct differences from the 4Chan Crowd2 model, and even r/wsb. The need to stake-in in a personal way changes the game in ways that kills the “lulz contagion”
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4chan (or a derivative) will, at some point, morph into a DAO armed with a digital bank account. If you thought the Internet was weird, it’s going to get weirder.
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One strong sign of that is… unlike Chan or r/wsb or the Seattle underground music scene, *ConstitutionDAO was not a place*. Yes we all went to a page and signed in to donate, but I literally have zero idea who the hell the rest of the crowd is beyond my handful of contacts.
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The core group that actually did the work had a Discord but I suspect most never even went there, and arguably that’s not the “place” but more like air-traffic control. I never went there, didn’t participate in whatever went on.
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Fair point, but I submit the lulz-contagion factor is both tiny as a fraction, and a weird artifact of concentrated dumb money. People with millions/billions in ether who are not used to managing money so are doing marginal crap. They’ll learn. Money eventually gets serious.
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Replying to @vgr and @ConstitutionDAO
You haven’t spent enough time in the midst of weird NFT project Discords — if your skin in the game is purely financial, and your identity is pseudonymous/anonymous, the lulz contagion accelerates
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This doesn’t mean utopia. We’ll just have new kinds of problems to replace culture war problems. For eg ENS delegation already hints at 80s style corporate proxy wars and shareholder activism++. Instead of Trumps and AOCs we may see a generation of Carl Icahn, Ralph Nader types.
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Charismatic Authority may be replaced by Operator Authority. People who master a due process theater. Every DAO a potential Senate-like zone where LBJ type operator-leaders win. Ones with a taste for the procedural mechanics. What charismatic leaders dismiss as boring detail.
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In the Industrial Age economy there’s a saying: “money is for poor people.” Real power and wealth is controlled by the crony-communism of the wealthy (why do they call it crony capitalism when it’s clearly crony communism?). In Web3, money is for latecomers.
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Yes, I’ve changed my mind. The problems are the same, the tech introduces genuinely new was to attack them. They’ll have different failure modes and effectiveness levels.
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Replying to @BillSeitz and @vgr
Does this change your earlier tweet? Your optimism still feels a little magic/handwavey compared to that earlier pragmatic perspective. twitter.com/vgr/status/144
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There is a great analysis in Joel Mokyr’s Lever of Riches about the difference between manias (fast, boom-bust) and critical adoption (slow diffusion accompanied by trial and error). Fake innovations only have the former, real ones have both, and in the long-term latter dominates
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Mokyr’s core example of manias is the “plank road” craze in the US in the 1800s. A poor road construction technique that spread like wildfire as cities threw money at it. Thus is why so many US cities hace streets named “Plank St.”
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Failed because it was a bad technology that didn’t last as long as promoters claimed. Fell apart in a few years instead of the promised decades. Monorail of its time. The “tell” was adoption required little to no local due diligence/trial and error.
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His core real example is the spread of agricultural innovations over centuries. It was slow because every farmer would learn if it from neighbors, try the idea on an experimental plot fir a couple of years, see how it worked locally, adapt and tweak, and *then* commit.
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One reason I’ve gotten more bullish on Web3 through this thread is that it’s literally forcing me to do a lot of local trial and error to make it work. There are few dumb cookbook recipes. It’s far more “new agriculture technique” than “plank road.”
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I have higher hopes of Gen Z frankly. On the dark side, it disappoints me that they’re generally more trad/conservative (but not actually reactionary except ironically) than Millennials. But on the hopeful side they strike me as a lot more pragmatic somehow.
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There’s a class of reactions I’m getting that are all versions of “how can you call it open when it’s pay-to-play?” I think this is a genuine confusion, not bad-faith trolling because people aren’t stopping to think about illegible access costs. Opennes and cost are orthogonal.
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Web1 wasn’t open. You had to pay for a computer and ISP. Those costs have now plummeted to near zero. We had a decade of political agonies around digital divide, OLPC etc. Now: cheap phones/notebooks, free WiFi in many public places.
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Web2 wasn’t “open” either in cost terms. Not even the non-FAANG part like self-hosted Wordpress. You had to pay in time for freemium services or learning curves of janky open source. Plus opex of cloud use, which was pennies-by-the-sip instead of millions by the rack-year.
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Claiming Web1 was “truly open” because the access costs were hidden upstream of browser sessions is a bit like European countries claiming progress by outsourcing heavy manufacturing to coal-burning China. Openness and low/free cost of access do not have a simple relationship.
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Openness is a function of who *controls* access, not what it *costs* to access. National parks are open to the public. Even when they don’t charge entrance, you pay for roads with taxes and cars with private $. The ocean is free. You can swim there. I recommend paying for a boat.
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I don’t think people are setting out to make flawed comparisons. Unless you’ve been in tech for long enough that parsing illegible cost pictures becomes second nature, you’ll miss things and fall prey to sloganeering.
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I still think “if you’re not paying you’re the product” was a deeply disingenuous attack on Web2 by a privileged bunch of Web1 early adopters who acted like everybody should have the technical and financial ability to oat for ad-free Mastodon servers.
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I ran a Mastodon server for a couple of years ( runs it now). It was non-trivial work+cost. I’d rather “be the product” and click on the occasional ad (odd btw how a Web2 virtue, paying do you’re not the product, is suddenly a Web3 vice?) for bigger public spaces.
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