Responding to Cameron about the book Read Write Own by Chris Dixon:

Cameron Armstrong on Warpcast

Nice! Any thoughts so far?

Farcaster

I was big into OSS in the 2000s, and I really believed in the ethos and philosophy of it. Twenty years later, my idealism and optimism is largely gone, and I feel like OSS failed to achieve some of the more philosophical aims of Torvalds, et. al. Sure, you can fork something, but that hasn't stopped Amazon from owning an awful lot. I'm not cynical or bitter, but I'm not a puppy anymore.

Blockchain may be able to achieve some of the aims that we had for OSS, which is exciting. But I can't help but remain skeptical so far. I don't think we can use technology to eliminate, or even necessarily curtail, greed and corruption. Blockchain provides some impressive benefits (and I have only scratched the surface on understanding what all those benefits are), but at the end of the day, humans gonna human.

My speciality is team leadership and group communication. The lens through which I am examining blockchain is as a product manager, project manager, and team leader, and I'm thinking a lot about the people who are building and building on blockchain. I'm especially thinking about the problems they're trying to solve or the value they're trying to create.

BBS, telnet, IRC, etc. let us connect with people we'd never otherwise have met. Blogging let us write one-to-many and share experiences and expertise. But then came the walled garden of social networks and we were soon connected only with people just like us. We got trapped in echo chambers.

Will blockchain improve communication, or will it be more of the same? I'm still struggling to see what fundamental problems it solves that don't have existing solutions. I worry that it's being set up as a solution for problems that it doesn't, and probably can't, solve.

I also, at a fundamental level, still don't understand how it works, and I need to figure that out. Maybe chapter 4 will fill that in for me, or I'll finish this book and go learn elsewhere. I was an accidental sysadmin in a previous life/role, so I know a bit about how servers, networks, and The Cloud works, but blockchain is still an enigma to me.

I've got RWO to read, and then The Everything Token immediately afterwards. I'm desperate to spend some time with people who know what they're doing when it comes to blockchain and learn from them, because as a product manager who cares deeply about people, equality, equity, fairness, and solving problems that are really worth solving, blockchain has tremendous potential... but right this moment, I can't tell if the potential is naive optimism or true magic.