Designing with delay *is* used in industrial tech but is a rare pattern. You see clocking delays in chips, optics delays in interferometers… but the sort of “delay engineering” you see in blockchain tech is inherited from human trust patterns, not physical phenomena.
Conversation
It’s no accident that speed-obsessed projects tend to be VC-funded private things solving for Industrial Age metrics and aesthetics. They’re still solving for old-economy measures.
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Not a bad thing. Speed and convenience are still valuable, and pragmatically trading off pure-paradigm blockchain performance by injecting centralization/TTPs is fine by me, so long as you don’t promise one tradeoff point and deliver another. That’s a kind of bait-and-switch.
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The moxie Web3 article mostly left me feeling I was watching a debate between old vs new decentralization utopians fixated on different fetishes (servers vs private-key self-custody) but I’m not personally invested in either god.
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But the one dark pattern the moxie article flagged for me was promising one level of decentralization and TTPness and delivering another. You get all the coordination overhead and inconvenience of pure-paradigm Web3 with the vulnerabilities of Web2. Worst of both worlds.
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(the inconvenience if trust jams that is, not the transient UX jankiness we face now).
A bit like promising the independence of cars, and delivering the expected traffic jams, but really you’re putting users in a subway system wearing VR glasses and with fake steering wheels.
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Stephen Covey jr. wrote a book called the “speed of trust” which I haven’t read but the title stuck with me. Web3 tries to remove TTPs to varying degrees (depending on tradeoffs) and varying levels of success, and lets society run at natural speed of trust
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Viewed that way, if there is a natural “speed of trust” for a social system that’s something like the design frequency of a CPU, you could say industrial tech stacks “overclock” societies by introducing TTPs and cashing out speed, convenience, and scale, apparently for “free.”
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But as with chips, overclocking is not something you do casually at no cost. And the results of overclocking trust for 250 years now manifests as a range of social externalities. Too big, too fast, too convenient = fragile, carbon-debted, overconsuming societies.
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I think it’s no accident that despite the incredible hype and vast amounts of money involved, in-paradigm communication and marketing are the least efficient parts of Web3. For eg., I replied to a tweet with my ENS just to receive a satirical “NFT ad” 🤣
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All advertising has exactly the same message, a TTP telling you “trust me, delegate a bunch of decisions to me that I can automate for your speedy delight and convenience”
That’s why adtech is the sine qua non of late-stage industrial tech, up to and including Web2.
Replying to
I sorta backed into the main thesis of this thread and it’s all out of order. But the tldr is:
Speed is an affordance of TTPs and Web3 wants to be slowtech operating at the natural, non-overclocked speed of trust, trust jams and all. Beware anyone selling speed and convenience.
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