I recently saw several photographs, taken in the past few days. I won’t go into graphic detail, but let’s just say that looking at these photographs was a painful experience, that my idea of faith or trust in humanity has not grown in the process. But feelings don’t really tell the whole story.

Zooming out, there’s a few contemporary trends in our timeline, which I will briefly list:

• EVM-based networks are collectively accumulating massive amounts of value at an accelerating pace. This is against the backdrop of a disrupted traditional world, one where many instruments have not performed consistently (e.g. copper in the LME or geopolitically controlled release of strategic reserves like crude oil). In fact, there is a cultural movement underlying the continued explosion of DeFi, an devil-may-care attitude where capital risk no longer matters, because loss is already perceived as a certainty. Across this spectrum, there is an aging generation that has accumulated the wealth of the past few decades, and now a transference is slowly moving to the most risk-friendly and most lackadaisical actors that the system can tolerate. This is manifesting as larger, perceptibly more severe exploits and points of failure.

• An old political guard is imploding. Two obvious examples are the war in Europe, and the rash of technically & societally illiterate policies that mainly try to enforce a panopticon approach to keeping control over the economy and perceived rule of law. This is happening in Europe, as it is also happening in the United States. The only way forward is continuing to focus on censorship resistance, decentralization, and privacy. Any protocol that faithfully upholds these principles will continue to get cheaper to enforce, and for any policy to the contrary (or any tyrant who acts against the interests of the public) will progressively get more expensive to maintain the same status quo.

• Social media and classically incorporated technology has catalyzed and destabilized our minds. One major aspect that is constantly described is the mediocre UX of well-used and publicly supported apps like Twitter and Discord. For more streamlined applications like TikTok, the perception is that they are scarily effective at behavioral modification. I believe both go hand in hand. There will not be an effective, painless application if a user’s experience is the main focus, so long as the distributing entity cares about extractive behavioral modification. For contemporary web3 social applications, so long as they are designed as public goods, there may be a hope that we can continue to catalyze interactions while also exploring guardrails for more polarized behavior.

• Adversarial culture is more normalized and more celebrated. This is unfortunately a headwind, as we can see with the 4pool developments, and the minor schisms (and resulting mass censorship) on social media. This is a dangerous trend, and I for one am not going to obey some writ of attrition just to explore and experiment in a nascent space. Ostensibly, some of the public goods we enjoy are non-exclusionary, but with strings attached, this is not actually the case. Beware the overtly positive and utopian figure or group that repeatedly declares purity tests, ethical boundaries, or prerequisite social capital without the caveat that everyone should be free to form their own values or make their own choices in life, as individuals or as independent groups. They may not have your best interests in mind, but they will make a point of saying that they do, no matter what.

So, this is chaos. Not always destructive, not always malicious, but there are clear contemporary examples of destructive, malicious events and figures. On one hand, more tragedy manifests, but on the other hand, more social evolution can respond What about our legacy?

Two main examples in this year have given me hope: MoonDAO and the Merge (along with the resulting Shanghai hardfork). MoonDAO could be described as just another social group formed over the Juicebox substrate, but I like to say that what they’ve already accomplished as a prelude is enough momentum for the main act. As a global civilization (and make no mistake, it is farcical to say on the Internet that we are not), we are growing at an accelerated pace. The supply shock pains we’re feeling now is, for those of us that living in affluent areas, only in our wallets. This will not remain the same if we do not scale out our extraction of natural resources, our supply chains, or our means of production. At this point in time (April 2022), we are an extraterrestrial species, with robotics deployed to multiple planets and asteroids. MoonDAO is but the first of many spacebound experiments, fueled by web3 capital. The Merge and the following network upgrade operate within the same constraint. We have limited network resources, and while in the short term it may make sense to juggle multiple security tradeoffs, it is not sustainable. We will not only need the switch to PoS for ecological consideration, but we will also need the remaining Ethereum roadmap to maximize the codified legacy that following generations inherit, without running out of resources and forcing an impoverished world to tolerate a purported public good that only serves the interests of the few. We need these upgrades to continue pushing efficiency boosts to the real world, because if we choose to remain where we are, the resulting Malthusian catastrophe will predictably end in humanity going out with a bang or a whimper. I do not believe in the Great Filter, I think that’s the shock of a human fully realizing the scale of the universe after looking at the Drake equation. But this is moot if we remain an adversarial, destructive species. Time will tell what chaos we can use, and what legacy we leave.

(testing the crowdfund out of curiosity, do not contribute to this)