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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The role of public intellectuals will also change. Corey Robin’s “how intellectuals create a public” model will be dead as an influential cultural force along with TED and Davos and NYT op-ed section. The new way to create a public is tbd.
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It only looks like an “entrance fee” if you buy in with cash late in a game. Most agency is earned not bought. Get a wallet (free), put in effort in the critical early days (time), get tokens that reify earned authority (“local money”) that you can then sell out to entryists.
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Replying to @vgr
Did you just say "my gated community's entrance fee keeps the riff raff out" ?
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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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Replying to
so you endorse this then - you're enclosing the commons for the gentry who 'work hard':
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the closest handle I can get on web3 is that it's an expression of a socio-economic tendency that thinks enclosure was great and we should do more of it, except it's lying to itself about holding that belief
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Replying to
You can choose to look at it in a reductive way loaded with historical baggage. That frame is your preferred hostile-interrogative one, not mine. The mere fact of you using it doesn’t automatically make it a valid mental model. You’ve clearly already made up your mind.
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Replying to
No, I'm responding to your own metaphors. You're repeating a 'get in at the ground floor' narrative, and saying Rank Hath Its Privileges. To say that money is for poor people when the entire external narrative is about the exchange value of tokens into dollars is disingenuous.
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Replying to
Nope, you’re drawing on historical analogies. I’m trying to just describe mechanisms and trying to see how they function without immediately damning them by association.
And this tech is NOT the same tech you might have gotten into in 2009-11. I got in then as well. This is new.
Replying to
I didn't say I stopped in 2011. I built a coin in 2014, spent significant time with the DWeb people from 2016, went to the Dubai blockchain summit in 2018. I have kept up with the tech as well as the hype.
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