t² ( time²) is a decentralized world for publishing and reading, a metaverse of narratives. On t², time serves as the currency and curates subculture. Users read to earn and read to contribute.

From equality to recognition 

Time, gravity, love. The forces that kick ass are all invisible.

But money runs the world. No matter what we do, the money we receive tracks the recognition in the eyes of others. Without being recognized, value is hard to shape.

When exactly did we become so dependent? An influential moment in history is worth mentioning, that’s the rise of the free market. There is no proof showing we are born as economic people. Not until the 19th century, our economic characteristics are only accompaniments to other social objectives. Free markets climbed to the ruling position in society and gained social dominance much later. That’s when the Polish Hungarian economist Karl Polanyi pointed it to “The great transformation[1]”: he believed it’s the free market that increased the gap between rich and poor, throwing humanity into the endless labor and cultural vacuum.

However, free-market cannot be withdrawn. In a modern age as ours, it also incentivizes human collaboration much further, which brings high efficiency in both production and distribution. In the current decade or two, we do tend to shift our production from materialization towards information. The next question is how to form a more humane perspective in this new information market. 

How exactly will a moneyless humane value proposition play out in a world still quite old-fashioned? Before we try to answer, let's first overlook what universally values for us. 

First, time. Time is human’s scarcest resource regarding our fundamental existence, value’s potential reliance, and whatever we spend time on gains natural importance. Therefore, proactively spent time is a form of scarcity that raises fundamental economic questions. 

Second, engagement.  Engagement is when attention (value) is exchanged. Never forget, a modern person’s attention is a commodity. People exchange attention at work, at home, and in between. When attention is efficiently exchanged, engagement is generated, bringing us a sense of belonging and more obviously, money. 

In the future, the attention transactions will supersede the money transactions. The value will be utilized mainly for attracting and directing attention, and money will be slowly obsolete since it is neither efficient nor relevant.

Sadly, successfully generated engagement is not always monetized. A hobby or our cultural instinct is hard to be captured since it does not have an efficient coordinate system linked with how it has influenced other people’s perceptions.  

t² is trying to patch this gap by being the coordinate as a protocol translating successfully curated attention (time) as a cryptocurrency while providing the social space for making it happen.

While the t² currency is minted, knowledge and culture gradually get perpetuated as a happy by-product. 

Looking at the current, visioning the future

“Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the people who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.” ---- Juvenal, Satires[2]

The Modern Culture Dilemma 

Social media is the biggest dealer of the modern “bread and circuses”. The modern needs happen to be around the ephemeral and mutable information feeds which they already master in. This short-term satisfaction we gain makes our brain generate just enough dopamine to slightly unwind us, keeping us further from wider concerns or civic duties. 

If we only feed on those short-term chemicals without eating the actual meal, we don’t have a collective future. The dystopian visions from two world's greatest thinkers George Orwell and Aldous Huxley had described this fairly well. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared, on the other hand, was that there would be no reason to ban a book, since there would be no one who would want to read one. 

It’s more difficult for us to distinguish signal from noise in a sea of irrelevance and the veil of cultural ignorance seems impenetrable to overcome if things continue their way. It has never been so critical for us to seek actual means towards collectively producing true preferences, and culture can only be produced collectively. 

Blockchain technology offers accurate economic and voting tools to make information abstractable from a general pool of relevance. t² pays people to figure out what is valuable for them, which leads to a new land of decentralization in producing public goods. This approach is revolutionary. 

Problems with centralized governance models and why protocol instead of platform

In the last few years, the public starts to question the power people give to social platforms and what they have done with them. The fundamental reason why it occurred is that the centralized governance model empowered single entities in the first place. By censoring and controlling the information flow on a global basis, centralized media have created real problems affecting the global democracies, with an initial concept of achieving free speech and accessing global information. Ironically, the free internet is a toolbox we built ourselves but now it fires back at us. 

t² gives the choice back to people by introducing the concept of public curation. A decentralized model removes the risk of profit-based centralized manipulation so centralized companies get replaced by protocols and a small operation team. 

Users will be the real owners of both their data and attention choices, in return, they would take a small part in signaling what is valuable for them and participate in the community governance, with getting a fair reward.

By replacing trusts with protocol executions, t² tasks can be achieved in a decentralized manner with territory self-governance achieving transparency, immutable and precise.

t² treats users as the stakeholders rather than end receivers, allowing every contributor to share a pie with their community’s collective achievements. It translates the subjective contributions into tangible social values to cultivate long-term individual liberalization and valuable social engagements. 

The Vision

In the past 30 years, we have witnessed the development from Web 1.0 (static pages, few content creators with the huge majority of users who are consumers of content only) to Web 2.0 (participative social web). We created social giants like FB, Twitter, Reddit, and expanded the functionality of the web 100+ times.  Until limitations started to show in the Web 2.0 world and more technology at our disposal, now we are in a transition period officially entering the Web 3.0 era.

In Web 3.0, data isn’t owned but shared instead, where services show different views for the same web/data.

t² leverages the available info across the web provided by the users in a decentralized manner. Users own their privacy and data, and their positive behaviors are captured in value and returned to them.

t² focuses on the curation value users create with their attention, which helps the consolidating of content instead of only focusing on the creation of new content. t² produces relevance for every individual and the small collective group.

Attention as a curation

"Attention is the hard currency of cyberspace." Written by Thomas Mandel and Gerard Van der Leun in their 1996 book “Rules of the Net”[3]. As the Net becomes an increasingly strong presence in the overall economy, the flow of attention will not only anticipate the flow of money but eventually replace it altogether.

If we step back and consider for one second what the most stable form of value in a modern age is, 1 hour of human attention is one of the few that has the most unbiased and unquestionable form of value and much more use cases than fiat money. 

Different from commodities, the information does not have a meaning when it is exclusive. The value of information is only revealed when it is shared, broadcasted, or exchanged. Thus, information is never scarce, attention is.

The attention spent on the t² protocol is treated as a curation process for producing attention-based public goods. Eventually, users who participated in the curation and signaling will be rewarded for their contribution accordingly. 

t² is an ideology, a matrix. It both monetizes and distributes the value within a more humane free-market curated by people, and eventually, it produces featured content as public goods and perpetuates the decentralized-generated culture.

t² as an organism

t² is a rapid, hyper-efficient matchmaker for individuals to curate their cultural interests. t² has the compatibility to co-exist all these self-generated territories under protocol level, allocate them on t² world map, and eventually gamify the overall experience to generate a diversified, self-governed, profound world representing human intellect. 

Decisions on the t² world are made through proposals and voting schemes. The goal of t² world governance is to establish the most effective way to protect the integrity and stability of the t² ecosystem, align the incentives, and protect the community against undue influence from inherent biases.

t² world: An Intellectual Landscape

As a product for the public, t² curates the reading experience as its profession. It creates a world merely between readers and texts, a consolation, a web “detox manifesto”. It provides space, community, and economic choices for the public to collectively achieve shared goals. 

t² curates an opportunity for anyone, anywhere, regardless of geopolitical affiliations, to participate in a cultural & intellectual context within crypto economies, to freely explore, make subjective contributions, and get rewarded.

Eventually, t² unfolds the intellectual landscape of human beings through “time” itself.

Mengyao_ Founder@ t²

t2 _ A world of narratives curated by time

https://t2.world/

[1] The Great Transformation is a book by Karl Polanyi, a Hungarian-American political economist. First published in 1944 by Farrar & Rinehart, it deals with the social and political upheavals that took place in England during the rise of the market economy. Polanyi contends that the modern market economy and the modern nation-state should be understood not as discrete elements but as the single human invention he calls the "Market Society".

[2]  "Bread and circuses" (or bread and games; from Latin: panem et circenses) is a metonymic phrase referring to superficial appeasement. It is attributed to Juvenal, a Roman poet active in the late first and early second century CE — and is used commonly in cultural, particularly political, contexts.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses

[3]  “Rules of the Net'' Explains how to become a master of the "Twelve Essential Commandments of Good Net Behavior," learn appropriate email etiquette, how to properly converse with fellow net surfers, and become responsible cybercitizen. Original. (All Users).

t² ( time²) is a decentralized world for publishing and reading, a metaverse of narratives. On t², time serves as the currency and curates subculture. Users read to earn and read to contribute.

From equality to recognition 

Time, gravity, love. The forces that kick ass are all invisible.

But money runs the world. No matter what we do, the money we receive tracks the recognition in the eyes of others. Without being recognized, value is hard to shape.

When exactly did we become so dependent? An influential moment in history is worth mentioning, that’s the rise of the free market. There is no proof showing we are born as economic people. Not until the 19th century, our economic characteristics are only accompaniments to other social objectives. Free markets climbed to the ruling position in society and gained social dominance much later. That’s when the Polish Hungarian economist Karl Polanyi pointed it to “The great transformation[1]”: he believed it’s the free market that increased the gap between rich and poor, throwing humanity into the endless labor and cultural vacuum.

However, free-market cannot be withdrawn. In a modern age as ours, it also incentivizes human collaboration much further, which brings high efficiency in both production and distribution. In the current decade or two, we do tend to shift our production from materialization towards information. The next question is how to form a more humane perspective in this new information market. 

How exactly will a moneyless humane value proposition play out in a world still quite old-fashioned? Before we try to answer, let's first overlook what universally values for us. 

First, time. Time is human’s scarcest resource regarding our fundamental existence, value’s potential reliance, and whatever we spend time on gains natural importance. Therefore, proactively spent time is a form of scarcity that raises fundamental economic questions. 

Second, engagement.  Engagement is when attention (value) is exchanged. Never forget, a modern person’s attention is a commodity. People exchange attention at work, at home, and in between. When attention is efficiently exchanged, engagement is generated, bringing us a sense of belonging and more obviously, money. 

In the future, the attention transactions will supersede the money transactions. The value will be utilized mainly for attracting and directing attention, and money will be slowly obsolete since it is neither efficient nor relevant.

Sadly, successfully generated engagement is not always monetized. A hobby or our cultural instinct is hard to be captured since it does not have an efficient coordinate system linked with how it has influenced other people’s perceptions.  

t² is trying to patch this gap by being the coordinate as a protocol translating successfully curated attention (time) as a cryptocurrency while providing the social space for making it happen.

While the t² currency is minted, knowledge and culture gradually get perpetuated as a happy by-product. 

Looking at the current, visioning the future

“Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the people who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.” ---- Juvenal, Satires[2]

The Modern Culture Dilemma 

Social media is the biggest dealer of the modern “bread and circuses”. The modern needs happen to be around the ephemeral and mutable information feeds which they already master in. This short-term satisfaction we gain makes our brain generate just enough dopamine to slightly unwind us, keeping us further from wider concerns or civic duties. 

If we only feed on those short-term chemicals without eating the actual meal, we don’t have a collective future. The dystopian visions from two world's greatest thinkers George Orwell and Aldous Huxley had described this fairly well. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared, on the other hand, was that there would be no reason to ban a book, since there would be no one who would want to read one. 

It’s more difficult for us to distinguish signal from noise in a sea of irrelevance and the veil of cultural ignorance seems impenetrable to overcome if things continue their way. It has never been so critical for us to seek actual means towards collectively producing true preferences, and culture can only be produced collectively. 

Blockchain technology offers accurate economic and voting tools to make information abstractable from a general pool of relevance. t² pays people to figure out what is valuable for them, which leads to a new land of decentralization in producing public goods. This approach is revolutionary. 

Problems with centralized governance models and why protocol instead of platform

In the last few years, the public starts to question the power people give to social platforms and what they have done with them. The fundamental reason why it occurred is that the centralized governance model empowered single entities in the first place. By censoring and controlling the information flow on a global basis, centralized media have created real problems affecting the global democracies, with an initial concept of achieving free speech and accessing global information. Ironically, the free internet is a toolbox we built ourselves but now it fires back at us. 

t² gives the choice back to people by introducing the concept of public curation. A decentralized model removes the risk of profit-based centralized manipulation so centralized companies get replaced by protocols and a small operation team. 

Users will be the real owners of both their data and attention choices, in return, they would take a small part in signaling what is valuable for them and participate in the community governance, with getting a fair reward.

By replacing trusts with protocol executions, t² tasks can be achieved in a decentralized manner with territory self-governance achieving transparency, immutable and precise.

t² treats users as the stakeholders rather than end receivers, allowing every contributor to share a pie with their community’s collective achievements. It translates the subjective contributions into tangible social values to cultivate long-term individual liberalization and valuable social engagements. 

The Vision

In the past 30 years, we have witnessed the development from Web 1.0 (static pages, few content creators with the huge majority of users who are consumers of content only) to Web 2.0 (participative social web). We created social giants like FB, Twitter, Reddit, and expanded the functionality of the web 100+ times.  Until limitations started to show in the Web 2.0 world and more technology at our disposal, now we are in a transition period officially entering the Web 3.0 era.

In Web 3.0, data isn’t owned but shared instead, where services show different views for the same web/data.

t² leverages the available info across the web provided by the users in a decentralized manner. Users own their privacy and data, and their positive behaviors are captured in value and returned to them.

t² focuses on the curation value users create with their attention, which helps the consolidating of content instead of only focusing on the creation of new content. t² produces relevance for every individual and the small collective group.

Attention as a curation

"Attention is the hard currency of cyberspace." Written by Thomas Mandel and Gerard Van der Leun in their 1996 book “Rules of the Net”[3]. As the Net becomes an increasingly strong presence in the overall economy, the flow of attention will not only anticipate the flow of money but eventually replace it altogether.

If we step back and consider for one second what the most stable form of value in a modern age is, 1 hour of human attention is one of the few that has the most unbiased and unquestionable form of value and much more use cases than fiat money. 

Different from commodities, the information does not have a meaning when it is exclusive. The value of information is only revealed when it is shared, broadcasted, or exchanged. Thus, information is never scarce, attention is.

The attention spent on the t² protocol is treated as a curation process for producing attention-based public goods. Eventually, users who participated in the curation and signaling will be rewarded for their contribution accordingly. 

t² is an ideology, a matrix. It both monetizes and distributes the value within a more humane free-market curated by people, and eventually, it produces featured content as public goods and perpetuates the decentralized-generated culture.

t² as an organism

t² is a rapid, hyper-efficient matchmaker for individuals to curate their cultural interests. t² has the compatibility to co-exist all these self-generated territories under protocol level, allocate them on t² world map, and eventually gamify the overall experience to generate a diversified, self-governed, profound world representing human intellect. 

Decisions on the t² world are made through proposals and voting schemes. The goal of t² world governance is to establish the most effective way to protect the integrity and stability of the t² ecosystem, align the incentives, and protect the community against undue influence from inherent biases.

t² world: An Intellectual Landscape

As a product for the public, t² curates the reading experience as its profession. It creates a world merely between readers and texts, a consolation, a web “detox manifesto”. It provides space, community, and economic choices for the public to collectively achieve shared goals. 

t² curates an opportunity for anyone, anywhere, regardless of geopolitical affiliations, to participate in a cultural & intellectual context within crypto economies, to freely explore, make subjective contributions, and get rewarded.

Eventually, t² unfolds the intellectual landscape of human beings through “time” itself.

Mengyao_ Founder@ t²

t2 _ A world of narratives curated by time

https://t2.world/

[1] The Great Transformation is a book by Karl Polanyi, a Hungarian-American political economist. First published in 1944 by Farrar & Rinehart, it deals with the social and political upheavals that took place in England during the rise of the market economy. Polanyi contends that the modern market economy and the modern nation-state should be understood not as discrete elements but as the single human invention he calls the "Market Society".

[2]  "Bread and circuses" (or bread and games; from Latin: panem et circenses) is a metonymic phrase referring to superficial appeasement. It is attributed to Juvenal, a Roman poet active in the late first and early second century CE — and is used commonly in cultural, particularly political, contexts.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses

[3]  “Rules of the Net'' Explains how to become a master of the "Twelve Essential Commandments of Good Net Behavior," learn appropriate email etiquette, how to properly converse with fellow net surfers, and become responsible cybercitizen. Original. (All Users).