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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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Web2 replaced Web1 because it genuinely created more openness for more people at lower cost than Web1 ever did. All while weathering criticism from Web1 mavens fetishizing USENET and The Well. Now Web2 mavens are doing it to Web3. Eventually Web3 mavens will do it to Web4 🤣
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This thread is now too big and unwieldy. I might stop it simply because it's too big, and start a new thread with a clearer Chapter 2 quest to it. Open to suggestions on what to do with it. I don't have the energy to transform it into longform rn.
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This thread is formally done as of this tweet. We’re now officially in the after-party portion of this thread. Any further tweets should be considered 2x more shitposty and 3x more drunk.
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Drunk thought 1 We need a Web3-native word like “operator” that’s not operator. It seems to mean all the wrong things in Web2 mode. So something more procedural and less guanxi-cronyism. Less FAANG alum with sketchy “2x exits” bio, more Humphrey Appleby. Nominations open
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My candidates Token whisperer Non-fungible player Whip (my favorite, as in party-line vote rustler in legislatures) Whipperer = whip + whisperer Stonecarver (cf immutability) Blocktackler (as in block-and-tackle pulleys buy also blocking and tackling)
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🤔 Maybe it's time to stop sandboxing Web3 poasting with polite qualifiers and prompts to skeptics to mute/unfollow. It's a bit tedious to deal with open reactions to unhedged tweets, but it's also annoying to tiptoe around the sensitivities of skeptics
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For those treating this thread as a half-ass 101 thread, be aware there are key topics I've learned about but not touched: defi degens, yield farming: boring people doing boring things L2 stuff: don't understand tech yet Discord culture: feels privatish, explore on your own
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There's also the tribal subcultures emerging around identity-NFTs (punks, apes, various ripoffs that nobody is buying...). It feels kinda important but in a fork-ish way. Some largish fraction of the Web3 energy will be organized by those tribes, but they strike me as meh.
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And finally, technical things that are being prematurely politicized (basically everything Vitalik writes about). There will be time enough to argue the politics of the asymptotic features once they settle enough that the innate politics of the technology acquire some stability.
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The purpose of every generation of Web is to create the frustrations that trigger the next generation of Web while solving the frustrations created by the last generation. Web3's purpose is to aggravate people into creating Web4. While solving the culture war created by Web2.
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To work, Web3 will require humans to be very effective chain runners. But of course humans are mostly bad at anything involving procedural discipline, so most chain runners will suck and create problems of various sorts. From lost keys to hacks to voting screwups.
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