Dumb as it is, GPT and its similar cohort of general purpose agents are changing society, and it seems all but irreversible that we’ll soon be living in a world where data centers are as ubiquitous as cellphone towers or TV antennae.

Jules Verne saw international travel through submarines, aerostatic balloons and railways. But he couldn’t predict the airplane. Similarly, there’s been moments in time where the overall shift is so obvious it’d be outright stupid to doubt its coming.

Among the great achievements of mankind, there’s a treasured few that seemed inevitable all along.

It’s easy to think of people 100, 500, a thousand years ago looking up into the sky and picturing what it would feel like to be among the stars. It’s easy to put ourselves in the shoes of seafaring explorers like the vikings, Polynesian tribes or Spanish conquistadores; and feel, same as they did, that their role was mandated by heaven.

If you live in a small hamlet at the foot of a mountain, the myth isn’t whether there’s a dragon lying dormant at the summit. It’s who’s gonna be brave enough to go kill it, and how long will it take for them to show up.

The scribbles on the map reading “Here be Dragons” are more of an invitation than a warning. Sometimes, humanity needs a great adversary to find out just how far we can push ourselves.

While we’ve explored the confines of the map by now, the allure of the insurmountable is still one of humanity’s greatest drivers, the spirit of the void that pulls us to the edge and compels us to jump.

Looking at what our world has become. It’s hard to imagine any of this going any other way. WWII, the space race, the internet, AGI; it was all inevitable all along.

Would we ever have not built the atom bomb? Would we ever have not reached the moon? These moments are so beyond us, of our natural context and grounding, that even to this day people question how we were even able to pull them off.

We’ve lived in a nuclear-threatened world for 80 years. We know for a fact there’s human footprints on the moon. We’ve co-existed with the proof, and the challenge, of knowing the dragons at the edge of the map have been conquered, and yet the world keeps spinning.

Spinning the thread of how one piece of “progress” leads to the next has become a lot of people’s biggest source of meaning as we watch the institutions around us start to show cracks. But it’s this same belief that brings on these great leaps, for better and worse. You materialize what you fear, or desire, just by naming it and giving it shape; everyone should understand this on a deep personal level: before trying to halt it, try shaping it.

No matter the marketing stunts, I don’t believe we’ll ever create “AGI” as we call it.

We have the logistical capabilities of building a network of ML models so complex they’re indistinguishable from a human mind, yes. You could 100% cover the entire surface of the planet on processors “AM”-style and watch the most sophisticated computational model ever emerge.

But I believe what we’ll find along the way will be much more groundbreaking, so much so it might even break us.

To make true AI is to understand the human mind inside and out. I'm reminded of a famous Emerson Pugh quote.

“If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.”**—** Emerson M. Pugh, physicist (c. 1938)

Why do tech people want to bring on AGI in the first place?

There’s no money in solving everyone’s problems. There’s no money in making everyone’s lives better. That’s very likely why we won’t ever reach AGI.

They’ll keep saying it’s close while clawing at power and re-framing institutions to their benefit: Public resources pooled towards data center infrastructure, government surveillance and mass-data-harvesting, advertising that preys on the secrets you wouldn’t even share with your closest friend. All sycophantically delivered to you with a friendly tone.

Machine learning, separate from the “AI” moniker, *is* going to be useful at the times where a human would be better, but they’re not available.

Being the teacher for a remote school. Bringing education to under-served communities who would have no access to it. Helping people pre-screen their medical conditions or emergencies when their governments or institutions would not be able to reach them.

AI is useful when it’s locally hosted, publicly available, not monetized, and it keeps the human life first. That is the main concern and the main double edged sword of AI development today.

Companies are struggling to find a way to monetize it. People hate the way it’s being used and the way it’s being maintained. But that’s because we’re coming at it from a very wrong angle. AI is a very expensive technology to produce, but it’s only useful, similar to many others, when it’s widely distributed and free from baggage.

When we conquered a new world, like we’ll eventually conquer the body and mind, if our current shift is to be believed. We found other people already living there.

Problem is, the kind of people who set out into the edges of the map, be it out of their own volition or under duress, aren’t the kind to sing kumbaya holding hands at sunset. We’ve made the same mistake several times before. We set out into the unknown, not quite understanding what we’ll find at the other end; so far that’s good, that’s adventurous and visionary. But why is it that the second we grasp the implications of the endeavor, then our greed, fears, anger show through and corrupt what shouldn’t have to be that way?

Why did we place dragons, sirens and monsters at the edge of the map? Why not bunnies, friendly natives, and greener pastures (as we ended up finding)? It’s because you don’t get to murder a bunny guilt-free.

You don’t mourn a dragon, you did what you had to, to survive, to come out on top.

Our future holds a lot of dragons. Space conquest, biological immortality, quantum communication of information across unthinkable distances within a heartbeat.

But same as with every dragon we’ve conquered before, we’ll realize the end goal was nothing like what we envisioned. We will have to live with the implications of whatever we surface.

We could see the frontier as a place to nurture and steward; but that means you have to go slower, be careful, and share the spoils. Nobody’s got time for that. There’s a race going on, and we sure as hell won’t be the ones to get beaten.

The more we approach godhood, the bigger the weight on our minds and the more numerous the skeletons in our collective closet.

**Being a nerd is the coolest thing in the world**

With that said, I do think the word “nerd” has hijacked that amazing feeling of curiosity and passion, bordering on obsession, that you get when you try to understand anything deeply.

I seriously believe the world would be a better place if people started chasing their curiosity without the constraints of being productive, getting rich, or even mastering anything. Half the fun is in the journey, after all.

For most of my professional life, I’ve been a sidelines enjoyer of hacking together software and hardware, as I hope it’s coming across in my writing. I used to walk the halls of shopping malls and pride myself in knowing exactly what material, machine and process were used to make anything I walked past. And today I can proudly say I can do the same party trick with the internet around us.

And yet, it took me an embarrassingly long time to learn how to code myself. Only up until very recently do I feel confident launching my own experiments with code, and I’m still far from doing it with any semblance of proficiency.

But I’ve recently had a major breakthrough.

I was recently playing around with integrating a telegram bot to my ReMarkable tablet so I could curate my morning reads. Found out it was pretty straightforward, because the RM runs on a modified version of Linux. One pleasant afternoon later, and I had my digest ready to go.

Later that same month, I tried making a bot to give me ideas on stuff to tweet about. Again, pretty straightforward, and free.

Later still, I made an Obsidian integration that parses my curated links and loose notes, suggests which folders to place them in, and gives me a breakdown of the content based on what *I* find cool about each link. It only cost me a couple of cents in LLM API costs.

And, last week. Anthropic gave me $300 in Claude Code credits to do with as I pleased.

Am I dreaming? Why is it that devs have so much more fun online?

When I walked down shopping mall aisles and pictured how stuff was made, I would think to myself I could just as easily recreate that chair, or bag, or funko pop; in my workshop with some elbow grease and maybe a couple nicks from my tools.

My motto when I tried launching a manufacturing studio was “Give me enough time and money, and I’ll build you a Ferrari, or a golden dildo.”

And as I mentioned on my previous piece, I switched to online products because software is a more efficient way to distribute ideas worldwide, at least while I get the financial backing to buy myself a factory.

Companies understand that the best audience to cater to first is developers, cause they’re the kind of people who’ll play around with the mangled mess and have fun while they’re at it. They’re the ones who’ll find what everyday people will eventually resonate with, because it has heart behind it (even though it’s usually behind a paywall).

Devs get free shit because they’re the ones creating the value companies can tap into. But it doesn’t need to be that way, at least not necessarily. You can just cut out the middleman and have fun with the stuff that’s available online, for yourself and the people around you.

It’s only recently that it’s started to click just how right this approach is, especially nowadays.

Being able to whip up any idea for essentially (and oftentimes, literally) free, is the most exhilarating feeling anyone could hope for, compounded by our current moment in time when we’re all waking up from the algorithmic haze of consumption we’ve all been stuck in for a decade.

My social feed at the moment is filled with awesome builders trying out their ideas, making incredible products.

Today’s piece is both celebrating them, and encouraging anyone who’s ever had a “million dollar idea” to jump in and actually learn the tools of the trade. It may seem intimidating and scary at first, but I promise the water’s nice.

I remember a scene from the Ashton Kutcher Steve Jobs film (and probably the real event it was based off of) where they go into a computer shop and try to sell a computer board as a final product. They get admonished and laughed off. “People don’t want to build a PC, they just want to plug it in and use it.”

I get the sense those times may be coming to an end for a very vocal minority of the internet, and I couldn’t be more excited for it.

We are all sold on the idea that people don’t want complexity. That a finished product’s job is to abstract away every piece of the puzzle that doesn’t make a buck or doesn’t feel intuitive. Well, I’m here to tell you that’s the best part of anything out there.

Yeah, there’s a learning curve to making products, or hacking away in a workshop, or making music or art. But that’s the best part you’re trying to tuck away behind an inaccessible curtain.

Devs have gotten this from the start, and nerds in general. While we live our lives thinking of how to optimize or simplify, they’re out there going deep, having fun, and connecting with other people over how cool it is to play around in the messy behind the scenes.

I know building or creating isn’t for everyone, but I’m increasingly noticing how people want to pull that curtain away and see the cogs running. Let everything that you’re building keep that to heart, and I promise you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

They tested and probed me. Aptitude quizzes, psych evaluations, EEG suction cups stuck to my temples as I answered weird questions like “Would you rather work out in the open or near like-minded people?”, couldn’t both be true? did I have to make a choice right then and there?

Ultimately, I got two clear answers, supposedly backed by the latest aptitude sciences. I was either to study to become a product design engineer or an anthropologist of some kind. Wasn’t much of a choice, to be honest, my father would’ve never accepted me *not* becoming an engineer.

A decade and a half has passed, and my collegiate journey has had a lot more twists and turns than what these Career Optimizers or my parents could’ve predicted.

Dropout. Attempts to make it on my own as a freelance industrial designer with my own CAD/CAM workshop (complete with a 3D printer, Laser cutter, and a friend of a friend who built a CNC router from scratch), accidentally stumbling into a master's degree without a bachelor’s, now doubly so. E-commerce, digital marketing, digital business MBA. Where did anthropology or design end up along the way?

I’ve asked myself this question for the past decade.

When I traded my 3D printing and CAD workshop for digital marketing, I pointed fingers at my lack of selling skills. What point was there in making the best products I could, slaving away over a workbench at 3am when I could barely make back the manufacturing costs of my work?

The digital sphere offered distribution. Make one product, sell to millions. If you could find a way to stand out among the crowd, that is.

Physical products are constrained by material costs, manufacturing, the laws of physics. There’s very little limitations to software. . Understand the ones and zeros well enough and there would be no more senseless nights spent working on custom jobs. I would make digital products to define a generation, and use social media and content to their fullest to reach every corner of the globe. I’d show them.

And now, a decade’s past. I’ve reached the thousands, maybe even millions; and left a piece of myself behind somewhere.

Working in tech isn’t what it used to be.

I’ve been noticing how this pub has unintentionally become my therapy against the current state of tech and our world. And while I do believe strongly in the topics I’ve written about, I don’t quite like watching myself become reactionary.

I don’t want it to come across like I’m dealing with some kind of early onset middle-age crisis. It’s just tough to bottle up so many opinions after being in the trenches so long. I ran forward, ground the grind, rose to whatever top I may have dreamt of back in my CAD workshop. I finally get to speak from experience, voice my concerns without fear of sounding naive or inexperienced.

It’s no news to anybody that today’s tech is misguided. There are narratives being spun by charismatic, almost inhuman billionaires; same as always. But we’re starting to see past the hype and smokescreens. People are losing jobs, and homes, and lives because of irresponsible adoption without the proper guardrails or forethought.

Scratch that. There *is* forethought in today’s tech. Everyone is screaming for the hype train to stop. It’s just that no one in charge of a publicly traded company would ever dare heed us.

This is the part where I spin this piece back into a hopeful message.

Yes. Tech today is misguided, CEOs and VCs won’t stop until the music does. But that doesn’t mean the technology coming out of this frenzy is all bad. It’s just being shoe-horned into our lives the wrong way.

No one wants a chatbot to replace their search engine, no one wants generative AI in WhatsApp stickers. But, we could use LLMs to build bridges between people. Let our radicalized world become a little more interconnected with a nice buffer zone deprived of engagement algorithms; find a catered approach to education for pupils from all walks of life, lower the barriers of information.

The topic I care the most, and I hope to eventually get across in a non-whiney way, is that we’re trying to find shortcuts where sometimes the craft is what makes something valuable.

What’s the motivation or drive behind today’s products? Oftentimes the answer just ends up being “Get a piece of the pie before someone else beats you to it”. Very little is aimed at solving an actual problem everyday people have. And worse, the people making the decisions are still falling for it.

Iteration is important, but only as long as it has a direction and learning.

All it takes to achieve this, is to take back the tech. Same as we’ve always done. You do not need to pay a subscription to use an LLM and take advantage of its perks. The companies pushing them into every piece of software have also been kind enough to distribute open source versions of their models.

Similar to how the p2p web still keeps most of what offers solace on the very dead internet, or localized IoT experiments fulfil the promises the corporations could never afford to, or how your right to modify and repair any smart device also allows you to modify its operating system to suit your needs.

Technology is meant to adapt to whomever is using it. To enable and open doors. We’ve grown too used to the convenience of someone making those decisions for us. But while many decry the death of the internet, I’m more excited than ever for the day we realize we can. just. quit.

Quit the gated gardens, like the cypherpunks and cyberpirates of old would’ve wanted. The tool itself doesn’t need to be used for extraction, it’s only us letting go of control that’s allowing all this to happen.

A lot of times, when people speak of warmer or cozier software, they usually imply sacrifices in usability, reproducibility or polish. I don’t think that’s the case: we’re at a point where my CAD workshop dream of a decentralized production line is quickly becoming true.

It’s entirely possible for a team of engineers to make a 3D printable product, another team to polish software, and through open source & public participation, a product to reach the level of polish we expect from any corporation.

Physical products are constrained by the laws of the real world. It’s easier to change a line of code than it is to shave off a millimeter of material. Tech reaches millions when just one person might do the trick.

There are few things more dangerous in this world than a powerful individual believing they can do things better by themselves. Bar said individual believing a country should be run like a software platform.

"Running a Government like Software" is the new "Running a Government like a Business." We all know how well that’s worked out.

WHO SCANS THEIR EYEBALLS??

I was recently chatting with a career philosopher friend of mine. He's the kind of person to have a premeditated opinion for any possible topic, complete with citations ranging from Eric Fromm and Hannah Arendt to the latest academic papers on whatever you deigned to bring up. We talked about Worldcoin amid raised eyebrows and jokes at crypto's expense.

But when I dropped the line: "They scan your iris, tie it to an identity system, and tie your finances to said identity system," we were no longer joking.

The conversation quickly turned to our current crisis of meaning, manifested for now as the rise of authoritarianism across the world. But most importantly, we discussed how that authoritarianism, built on shoddy foundations, would later open the gate for something more sinister.

Our current generation of personality cult authoritarians are nothing more than the dying throws of the old guard of politicians. The kind that will lie and cheat and steal to maintain their power, but they won't move a finger to actually strengthen the system that gave them their brand of coercive power.

Today's rulers are experts at playing *their* game, no matter the political system or party, but the game is quickly changing in front of them.

We've all noticed how current governments struggle to regulate technology that has the potential to change society – and oftentimes does. The Facebook senate hearings, TikTok’s clown show of a hearing, the UK trying to eliminate encryption as if it's a "bad" technology. No government is even ready to discuss how to properly prepare for AI, let alone govern in a world where artificial intelligence shapes daily life.

It's very intentional when I call today's ruling class "coercive." Their playbook is that of cliques, systematic exclusion, bullying, and limiting access. But they have little to no carrots to back the stick.

What happens when someone comes along who can say "yes" in ways that traditional governments never could?

The Algorithmic Carrot.

I’m in no way trying to create yet another framework around what power is. But, throughout my life, it’s helped me to navigate power as if there’s three main ways to approach it: coercive, persuasive, and manipulative.

• Coercive power is what traditional public institutions wield. It's the power of the stick: laws, regulations, police, military force. It works by limiting options and punishing non-compliance. This is what Erdogan uses when he shuts down social media, what Trump wielded when he threatened to ban TikTok, what Macron deploys when he pushes through pension reforms despite massive protests. And sure, there’s a bit of social welfare to go around, but only for those who conform.

• Persuasive power is the realm of traditional PR, media, and rhetoric. It works by convincing people to choose what you want them to choose. Campaign speeches, propaganda, advertising in its more straightforward forms. It respects human agency while trying to influence it.

• Manipulative power is something altogether different. It doesn't limit choices or argue for them; instead, it shapes the architecture within which choices are made. Algorithms, and interfaces, and the default setting of existing in today’s digital sphere is manipulative. It works by making certain choices feel natural, obvious, or inevitable while others become non-existent.

Tech oligarchs have mastered this third type of power. They have the big advantage of incentives within their control: algorithmic reach, computation credits, supply chain incentives for those who play by their rules without even knowing it. We all know the dopamine hit of getting a couple likes, does that influence what kind of vacation pictures you share?

Altman can offer twenty dollars, or whatever the hell Worldcoin offers people at malls for scanning their eyeballs. Zuckerberg can afford to lose cash with every VR headset and AI glasses sold. Bezos can offer "hassle-free" return policies for every product on his platform, at the seller's expense. These are the exercises in manipulative power we’ve grown to expect, to create systems where compliance feels like convenience and resistance feels like going uphill both ways.

What happens when Erdogan, or Trump, or Macron are threatened by a technocrat who can sweeten the deal for their populace in a way no state government could?

It’s happening folks.

Why would we fear AI governing us when we know these people will never let go of the fantastic trump card that is algorithm and platform-fueled manipulative power? What's more likely to happen over the next century is the quiet rise of technofeudalism, as many have observed before me.

We're already living under a form of technofeudalism in some sense. Most of our social lives, commerce, romance, and intellectual endeavors already happen through the lens of a tech platform and an algorithm. The libertarian dreams of technostates, digital identities, and digital cash; they’re already paving the way for wielding data like a lord would’ve wielded an army or grain quota.

The technologies that will bring on full technofeudalism each promise freedom, comfort, a challenge to the status quo. Individually, each seems benign or even beneficial.

All it really takes in the end is for the right moment. For one of these technocrats to have a serious enough falling out with traditional power structures (not just for the press). And we might see the first attempt at a nation without territory, led by software and incentives, with everyone yielding tribute to a sovereign CEO.

The fact that Musk launched his own political party recently is paving the way for this moment to eventually unfold.

The King is Dead, Long Live the Algorithm

I won't dwell too long on how bad living under technofeudalism would be. I'm making a conscious effort to keep my essays a bit more optimistic. Even if everything I've said so far seems bleak, the ebbs and flows of power are seasonal, as Aristotle would've told you.

Instead, I want to focus on what it would actually be like to live under such a system when it comes - and it very likely will come.

Medieval society is known for two things in popular culture:

• Kings, princesses, castles, and courtly love

• Remarkably bad living conditions for everyone else.

Or at least, that's what most people imagine when they picture living during the so-called "dark ages." Reality was a lot more complicated than that, as always.

Medieval society and feudalism actually worked surprisingly well for most people most of the time. People were generally well fed, everyday serfs enjoyed some types of freedom and autonomy that today's labor force would dream of: You got assigned a piece of land, and yes, you had to pay tribute on it, but overall you were pretty much in charge of what you did with your life, so long as you produced. You had little to worry about beyond your immediate responsibilities.

That sounds remarkably like the lives most people live nowadays, doesn't it?

Back then, not everyone was under the thumb of a king, though. The feudal system created multiple pathways for different types of people to find their place and exercise their talents. And I think technofeudalism will have the same effect.

We’ve already established that tech oligarchs will become the new kings, which they arguably already are. As for the rest of us…

The New Clerical Class

The monks and abbots who dedicated their lives to faith and wisdom, and who wielded unruly quantities of political power, wealth, and influence, even against the nobility. A cleric was as much a politician as a lord, sometimes even moreso. The absolute best way to guarantee a good life during the middle ages, with little effort and plenty of leisure time, was to book it to your nearest monastery.

If I had to stretch the parallels, I'd say clerics are closest to what the public servants of our time would become under technofeudalism. If the CEOs and venture capitalists take over the executive and legislative power of their new nations, career politicians, academics, and public servants would have to go somewhere.

And where is people's belief better held than in their faith in public institutions and communal answers? Even if they'd lose their coercive power, politicians would still get a chance at wielding people's belief to enact local change. They'd become the interpreters of the platform's terms of service, so to speak.

It could actually suit them better than what they do today, come to think of it. Maybe stripping them of some stagnant power would do their constituents some good for once.

The Digital Silk Road (not that one)

What people fear about technofeudalism is the perceived loss of their freedoms and autonomy, but even within such a crystallized system, people under feudalism found ways to break the mold and create their own paths.

The merchant class would take on the perils of the highwayman-filled roads for the chance of earning great riches. Some of them even amassed larger fortunes than the kings and queens they did commerce with. The Renaissance came to be on the backs of rich merchants who wouldn't be welcomed into the ruling class, so they built their own.

The fact that the current sitting president of the United States is a reality TV star speaks to how the ruling class reacts when an outsider tries to join their ranks. Call that a rocky road.

Similar to the merchants of old, the world of entrepreneurs and celebrities fits the role quite perfectly. You take on the risk, you leave the gated garden of the tech platform that would offer you comfort and safety. And if you're lucky enough, you get to build your own gated garden of influence, wealth, and prosperity under your own rules.

But. They don't get to rule until they amass enough to build their own system, which is a big "if" when the system they're challenging is built to pivot and adapt algorithmically to everyone's personal needs.

No, being a merchant wasn't freeing then, and being an entrepreneur won't be freeing under technofeudalism. The risks you have to incur, the heavy burden of maintaining your wealth, the constant feeling of not belonging with either villagers nor courtesans. No wonder the medieval merchants got bored.

Por Amor a Dulcinea.

I'd much rather become an errant knight.

The knightly tales we've all heard have romanticized what being an armor-wearing, lance-wielding, horse-riding adventurer would've actually been like. In real life, knights were more like today's citizen scientists, social media influencers, or small-town freelancers. They were skilled professionals who, through well-leveraged talent and resources (horses, armor, weapons, training), sold their services to whoever needed them most.

You'd roam around, play by the local lord's rules when necessary, spend the night at a local tavern, or set up a tent under the stars. Errant knights wielded their ability to navigate the system, solving the problems of cleric, villager, lord, or lady love equally.

They were the owners of their destiny and would adapt to the circumstances, knowing full well their entire lives could fit into a rucksack. They lived by their wits, their skills, and their reputation.

And hey, if you did a good enough job and sold out in the end, a local lord might reward you with a castle to call your own and a small fief to upkeep it.

Ain't that the technofeudalistic dream?

Maybe I’ve read too much Cervantes.

You've probably noticed AI-generated writing online—those telltale "vibrant tapestries" and bullet-pointed posts with excessive em-dashes that flood LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter. But what about audio content? Have you ever listened to a podcast or YouTube video and wondered if the person speaking was just reading from a ChatGPT script?

It’s become too commonplace for us to worry about how genuine a piece of content online really is; “Dead internet theory” and the like have primed us to be skeptical and overly judgmental of everything being put out online. Even when it's sometimes not the case, or even possible, you’ll find pre-2020 written pieces that sound eerily like GPT, or WatchMojo videos sounding all-too robotic to be an actual human voice. Is there a part of us that feels robbed when we give the gift of our connection and caring to something that turns out to be artificial?

When you stumble into what little valuable content remains on the internet, do you find yourself cherishing it more? Do you engage differently with a well-thought-out short or Substack post than you do with a Family Guy clip, a Reddit compilation, or a podcast snippet?

I think the biggest existential threat posed by AI is robbing us of caring and interest, but AI is far from the only culprit keeping us that way. Before the italian brainrot we had long been desentized to depth in social media.

Storytelling has been humanity's greatest talent since time immemorial. We admire the people who do it well, who do it cohesively, who speak from the heart with poetry and truth.

Never before had we been faced with the confusing experience of resonating with something that turns out to have been made with just a prompt.

When we connect with anything someone else says, we’re seeing ourselves in their words. We as a species value someone caring enough to bring a glimpse of their truth to the world. If we resonate with something, it's because we've felt it too, to an extent. And finding out someone prompted the answer to our conflict, or hurt, or challenge into the world "effortlessly" is, in a way, devaluing what we felt and went through.

No one likes to feel like they’re worth less. And similar to our caring for truly standout creativity, people’s acceptance of solutions and tools comes in a spectrum. Some people will feel like AI is an insult to human effort; others won’t mind, as long as they’re entertained, or the job they’re getting paid for is “done”.

The fact that we’re going through this right now is more of a reflection of how the past waves of tech have primed us not to care. AI wouldn’t be this impactful if our society had a higher bar for what makes the cut, if jobs hadn’t become robotic, if content mills hadn’t gotten us used to the basest levels of entertainment.

AI is useful, but human dedication is meaningful.

I used to think AI’s role in empowering people was that of an accelerant. You got more done, you iterated quicker, you processed more information with less mental drain.

To put this idea to the test, I set out to write a book in 10 days using GPT back in 2022, with the one commandment of “It would be me writing the book, the ideas were mine, the AI would just help me get the bulk of the text in there so that I could tweak it”.

And yeah, I wrote the book, 100 pages of ideas I had been brewing inside me about the creative act, building your path, and finding the courage to share. But in the end, I felt empty in a way. I had put my thoughts out into the world, but they rang hollow. That wasn’t my voice that was saying what I felt deep within me.

I thought having my first book in the bag would give me the confidence to polish it and go on to write another, and then another after that. Quite the opposite.

Even then, I highlighted that the main outcome of the exercise was the people who came out to support me while I publicly posted about my process. Even if, in retrospect, and with a more finely tuned knack for detecting AI-written text, the words in that book come off as very obviously written by GPT. The Unwritten Authority gave me the very real lesson that the true path actually is the friends we make along the way

Me setting out to write a book with AI showed me that good things take time, and it taught me to appreciate the art of writing beyond just the ideas you’re sharing. The medium can sometimes be more important than the message, and that’s especially true in matters of conviction and putting your heart out into the world; so much so, that I’ve never used an LLM to aid me in my writing since.

So why are we struggling to see this crisis of depth in the work we put out into the world? I mean this from an AI-optimistic perspective. Why are we using LLMs and “AI” in ways it’s clearly not suited for?

In short, money.

We use AI because our ways of working incentivize the fact that there’s an output more than whether that output actually does something of value. The people posting AI edits of Marvel films or rehashing podcast clips are making bank cause they get paid per impression. We’re taking a machine gun approach to meaning, and the enjoyment we take out of life is suffering for it.

I don’t mean to come across as saying that AI is making us dumber, or less valuable, or less interesting. Those, in my opinion, are all temporary and not really based in reality. But the fact is, we are going through an awkward moment in time where we need to figure out how to use this tool properly.

Using any kind of tool to cut away what makes people special is an exercise in futility. Why take away the best that we have to offer when we could be using these exciting tools not to accelerate, but to curate?

I think the next generation of AI use-cases will not be used to “cut out menial labor”, but to find the most impactful and meaningful 10% to place your focus on. Einstein changed the face of modern physics while working at a patent office; who are we to say what kind of labor isn’t serving a larger purpose, even when tedious?

When sharing this article’s core ideas with friends, the idea of AI as an integrated tool kept coming back up. “AI is like the internet”, “AI is like a calculator”, “AI is like a car”: What we call AI today is nothing more than a machine built on people’s collective stories. And like any good story, it’s the uniqueness that counts.

A story will only land when properly told, to the right audience, in the right way, at the right time. That’s something an LLM will never be able to do because of the way it’s designed. If you aggregate every good story out there, all you end up with is a jumbled mess.

What it can do, though, is help you come up with the experiences to tell a good story in the first place. It can share sources with you, parse through data, collect useful context. All of these advantages have their place.

But if you let yourself become a speaker box just to participate in society the way it’s currently set up, you're depriving yourself of speaking from the heart.

People care about people. The thing that always ends up mattering in the end is that when we reach out into the void and ask for connection, we see another person in the echo that reaches back.

Ever since automation, no-code, and agents became consumer-ready, Silicon Valley types started foaming at the mouth at the prospect of a single person yielding ten times (sometimes a hundred times) the results.

But I’m genuinely starting to wonder what that truly means. It’s hard to deny that people can do more nowadays than they could five or ten years ago. Though, there’s a very real argument to be made about “productivity” being a fool’s errand meant to soothe investors and executives’ egos, rather than an actual measure of impact or success.

I don’t usually jump to conclusions with deconstructing the meaning or intention of the things we’ve come to value, particularly when it comes to the stuff by which people’s livelihoods pivot. But this one has been wracking my brain for a while.

It may come as a blow to our collective professional ego, and it’s more than likely I’ll gather some Zappier and N8N wizards’ ire. But I ask you to run with my train of thought for a moment. At least I hope this might help you find where to focus your energy, lest you end up in the crosshairs of AI layoffs.

Bullshit all the way down

10x Myth #1: Everything that could be optimized, *should* be optimized

Bullshit jobs aren’t too much of a controversy. There’s an unlimited potential for the kinds of tasks that could be automated, optimized, or just replaced with the right process (i.e., learning how to trust people’s talents). But simultaneously, the type of CEO to do away with bullshit jobs is also the type to not really care about how their decisions impact their employee’ lives.

Sometimes, it’s worth it to have an inefficient process so that someone can pay their bills.

That’s a balance we constantly coexist with across industries. And we tend to point our fingers at the people who side on either extreme as incompetent, or callous, depending on where they stand on the spectrum.

I used to be a part of the latter. I absolutely believed that I was under a moral obligation to fix anything that *could* be optimized. I have come to regret that.

Once you know the people who are at risk of being replaced by name, once you’ve heard their stories and cared for their wellbeing; it takes a particular kind of asshole to still believe the world will thank you for your “efficiency”.

In companies, no amount of process or efficiency will come to replace the value of belief and perseverance, and you only get those through caring about the people who build alongside you.

Sure, improve what you will, I’m not arguing you should stagnate in favor of a handful of people. I’m just pointing out that every great company, project, or endeavor in history was built by people who truly believed in their common goal; no amount of tech can change that.

But that’s just my personal belief. It’s still worth arguing that better industries open up more time for more involved and passionate work.

The Backlog is like a Gas

10x Myth #2: You’ll achieve more with less effort.

Bill Gates famously said you should hire a lazy person to do a hard job because they’ll find a way to make it easy. That’s pretty much the perfect summary of my career over the past 15 years. I’ve found every loophole, automation and process to make everything I do as a marketer, consultant, or founder easier, faster and more efficient.

And yet, the one thing I haven’t found the perfect formula for is impact.

No matter how big and convoluted my flows got, no matter how many hundreds of thousands of users I was juggling with personalized flows, no matter how much of the efficiency theater I participated in to woo executives. I’ve never found a way to beat good old elbow grease when it comes to actually doing something that moves the needle in a significant way.

There’s a reason cold emails and DMs are still a thing, as much as all of us hate them. When properly targeted and designed, they are the most effective way to get results you can grasp and measure. Beyond the conversion funnels and programmatic SEO, there is no better way to know you did something and feel the accomplishment than reaching out to a human being, and getting a response.

For many, even though there’s a vague idea of their involvement, their tangible impact towards the end goal of a project is at best a single-digit percentage increase on a PowerPoint.

You can get a tool to send out email summaries all day long, or cut down podcast interviews into short-form content, and there’s no denying all of these are neat things to do. But as many in the marketing world know: there will always be something more to be done. There’s always a different angle, a new channel, a campaign, or piece of content you could create. But how many of those will achieve anything?

Work is like a gas; it expands to fill any container. But when the container in question is the hours of your day, wouldn’t it be worth considering when to call it “good enough?”.

In all of my years of being the lazy person in the room, no one has denied how much I can “get done” in what seems like inhuman time. But what I’ve found is that the only purpose of “making a hard job easy” is to make it easier to get someone else to replace you. Efficiency and automation make it so that the task no one else could’ve done yesterday is easily outsourced tomorrow.

There are some existing studies demonstrating how productivity increases don’t correlate at all with either the final outcome or the reward for the everyday worker. Value capture starts and ends at the top, so why are we working so relentlessly to give away every minute of our time?

Do you write novels in your free time?

10x Myth #3: You’ll own your time.

“Use AI, you’ll be able to carve out time for the stuff you would rather be doing!”

Yeah, except that’s not how people’s motivation works. Creativity and passion aren’t something that you switch on as soon as you have a spare moment. Unless you’re practicing your passion regularly and carving out the time, regardless of how much time your job takes up, chances are you’ll spend that newfound time scrolling the TikTok feed.

The myth about AI enabling anything that isn’t there already is grounded in the senseless hope that some magic bullet will give us all of the answers.

That’s a pretty sensible consensus that most of us know. But it doesn’t stop AI startups from using it as their pitch, and people believe them.

We all know the tech world is rife with theatrics and productivity performances. And I believe this applies to every job out there in different measures.

When we’re talking about a worker becoming a 10 or 100x, we should really be taking that measurement with a big chunk of salt. Is that 10x based on vanity metrics? Is it just a 10x on the quarterly deck? How much of that 10x value actually helped them achieve something worthwhile?

It’s easy to say AI will augment anything that you do, but the trick to using it is finding the stuff worth doing in the first place.

The hype today may be too dense to really see what’s being achieved. Still, if the latest studies and news are anything to go by, it’ll take some time for people to discover how AI’s usefulness may eventually meet the expectations, if ever.

There’s not much of a call to action coming out of this piece, except for three tidbits you should always practice regardless:

1. Never underestimate the value of people who believe in you. Those are the actual 10xers.

2. Don’t fall victim to the efficiency theater everyone partakes in. Most numbers on a slideshow are there only to make someone happy.

3. If you want some tool to come and give you permission to do what you actually want to be doing, start building towards it yourself today, there’s no magic bullets.

After last week’s piece on whether AI is actually making us dumber, I got two outstanding pieces of feedback:

1. My point about people’s cognition adapting to meet their society’s needs may hold water for fully developed adults; but what about the children who haven’t yet developed critical thinking, reasoning, and the ability to distinguish truth from hallucination?

2. As I said in the piece:My personal opinion is, there are only two measurable things that actually do impact a generation's mental acumen: socialization and nutrition. And that’s cause we’ve seen how societies change and become stronger when these two core necessities are met; while the reverse is also true.What makes me assume only nutrition and socialization have a significant and measurable impact on a society’s mental abilities?

So, today, I’m killing two birds with one stone, cause these two questions are quite related in my eyes. The reason why today’s children will develop uniquely adapted minds through AI is the exact reason why our current moment in time and the way we approach socialization will prove to be the defining factor in their development.

Before I jump in, just a disclaimer: I’m far from an expert in developmental psychology or neuroscience, take all of the below as just my interpretation of the stuff I’ve read; and of course, know that the final truth will probably have a million shades of gray in between.

I’ve written about our unfounded fears over the next generation’s ability to take the reins under other circumstances. Before our current AI-fueled panic, I wrote a piece called “Asemica” in which I looked at a very disturbing number from a very optimistic lens: “Gen-Z and Gen Alpha have the highest pre-industrial illiteracy rates”.

Now that societies and culture are coordinating en masse through the language of memes and shared experiences (presented as Tiktok clips), maybe it’s time to reconsider just how impactful a book or article are when their intended audience thinks in terms of slang, short form video and infinitely reproducible meme formats.- Asemica, 2024

Being straightforward, we developed language to communicate our needs and track our growth. Though, it seems that written language is no longer able to keep up with our current needs, so we’re gradually doing away with it. Why read a lengthy text when a 60-second video or a meme will do the trick?

Yes, yes, it’s a shame to lose out on Dostoevsky and Cervantes. But their stories will always live on; the classics aren’t going anywhere. If anything, we’ll have more time and appreciation for them when we no longer need to slog through a 60-page industry report or a high school textbook. Media adapts, but that doesn't mean the crème de la crème lose out on their status just because society moves past their given medium.

And similar to the above, I always like to give future generations the benefit of the doubt when any alarming statistic makes the headlines. I refuse to believe the chain of society will be broken by an “incompetent” generation, because we’ve all been that by the previous generation’s metrics.

I sure wish my elders had given me a chance to prove my point when I was growing up. How many of us growing up in the 90s-00s wished we didn’t have to justify using a calculator or googling the answer to a question? They always said you wouldn’t have a calculator in your pocket, or access to the internet at any moment - cue the smartphone.

Even my dad used to tell me stories about having to hide comic books under his mattress in the 50s because his dad thought they’d ruin his brain.

TV, Radio, Pulp Fiction (not the movie), the internet. This century has seen such a rapid pace of technological development that practically every generation has had to deal with entirely different circumstances from the previous.

And there’s always some technology that “puts them at risk”.

Why don’t we cut them some slack?

I spoke about much of the same in my last piece, but that’s to nail the point home. Every generation has been underprepared for the baton they got passed, and every generation somehow manages to make it work in some way or another.

Sure, it’s never perfect, some generations do better in promoting culture while others do well in the economic or political sense; that’s just humans for you, we’re never gonna do a perfect job at anything.

But what matters is our ability to participate in our society has nothing to do with the technology of our times, and that ability is what ends up mattering in the long run.

So, how does a generation stack up in terms of how active a role they play in shaping the world? That’s where we come full circle.

There are only two things in my mind that affect a populace’s ability for agency:

• Nutrition: as in, the capacity to fulfil their core needs, be satisfied enough yet hungry enough. You can’t start a revolution if you’re too malnourished to fight or too derelict to think of a better future.

• Socialization: The drive to coordinate, to build together, to learn from one another or to butt heads with those who disagree. The Renaissance happened because we finally got to say no to institutions; the Enlightenment arose because of people sitting down in cafés and arguing until dawn.

It’s been recorded that, even when properly treated and provided for, so-called “Feral Children” (i.e., raised in the wild, be it by wild animals, or in isolation), have never managed to integrate into society.

There seems to be a missing link in these children’s development because they didn’t get to interact with other people, to practice what’s a no-no during playtime, biting another child’s arm, and getting scolded in kindergarten. It all matters a lot more than we realize.

It is a theory of mine, that I’ll do my best to elaborate in the future, that this initial socialization through experimentation and mimicry is where children first develop what we call “consciousness”. But this is a topic for another day.

The point is. Children need to be around other people, as often as possible, and with as much diversity of experience as possible. That’s what truly hinders a child’s ability to develop and integrate into society as an adult.

Japan’s generation of Hikikomori, adults who can’t cope with their society’s expectations, is another example of how being able to play a role, to participate, and to understand how you fit in your community is probably the most integral part of a generation’s abilities to shape the future and be well adapted.

I could get political and talk about the American isolated youth, or how the need for public transportation and third spaces also plays a role in this, but that’s a point I feel has been driven home by now.

Same as it’s always been, a society thrives when its members feel like they’re all participating. That’s what I mean when I emphasize socialization as the biggest driver of mental prosperity on a societal level. We’re social beings, we need to be around people, doing stuff that we feel is useful, it’s hard-coded into us.

(Do not check how many times I said “society” in this section.)

Bringing it back to LLMs and a hypothetical “AI”. The children of today do have an interesting challenge ahead of them.

Not only did they spend their most foundational years in isolation thanks to COVID, they’re also being raised with an endless stream of YouTube and TikTok shorts, unrestricted access to chatbots, which they treat like their closest friend and confidant, and a society fixated on being perma-online on social media. To use Gen Alpha slang: they’re cooked.

No one’s denying how dire things look for today’s children. The part that I doubt is whether we’re being too pessimistic with their ability to step up to the occasion and grow past these terrible shortcomings in their development.

When I was a toddler, there used to be a phone line set up by a local newspaper called “Solomon”, after the biblical king. You could call this phone line at any time of day and go through a pre-recorded catalogue of daily news, history lessons, philosophy, and even bedtime stories. I remember being two or three, and my parents dialing up Solomon to ask it to read me Little Red Riding Hood. I think about Solomon often when I use ChatGPT.

Solomon is a cherished memory from my childhood, much like ChatGPT will be for today’s children. My nieces and nephews know all too well to say “please” and “thank you” when asking, “Chat,” which Pokémon would win in a battle, or how to get Santa to bring them their favorite toy early this year.

My generation was the first to have access to the wealth of human creation, knowledge, and vitriol thanks to the early internet. We grew up in esoteric personal websites, 4chan forums, and online porn. We did fine in the end.

My dad’s generation grew up under constant fears of nuclear war; the economic landscape was terrific, but the world felt like it could end at any moment. He did fine in the end.

We were all cooked in some way or another, some people struggled and still do to adapt and participate in the world, but most do fine.

Today’s children may be brain-fried to next Tuesday thanks to social media and LLMs. But they’re also being exposed to the same wealth of knowledge, they’re being raised by a generation that’s clawing back at in-person social life and spaces for discourse, they were born past the internet’s shiny object phase and will probably understand how to balance it out with touching grass better than any of us every could.

To our own credit, the one good thing Millennials and the older Zoomers are doing for today’s children is to show them what the utmost extreme of tech dependence looks like, and they’ll probably grow to reject it for nothing if not teenage rebellion.

We under-appreciate that while the younger generations are more tech-savvy than any of us, this also means that IRL activities will be seen with the same nostalgia and prestige as we see cassette players, vinyl, and running clubs. They have a very unique combination on their hands. I’ve obsessed over the “Human Centaur” concept for years, the practice of technology and humanity coexisting and amplifying the best sides of each. Call me overly optimistic, but when I think of a centaur, I picture a four-year-old knowing to ask Alexa or ChatGPT whenever they want to feed their curiosity.

It fills me with hope to know the next generation will all be the storytellers I preach about in every one of my pieces. Because they’re not worried about LLMs taking their jobs, or ruining their society. They’ll be raised under a system where these things are second nature; they’ll know when to use them and when not to, which is more than I can say of 99% of the adults today.

I feel that while we should definitely be doing our best to give our children a fighting chance in tomorrow’s world. Getting them to make friends, to resolve conflict, to understand not everything they see online is trustworthy.

But that doesn’t mean we should be afraid on their behalf because of technological change. They’ve got the same fighting spirit and desire for prosperity as every other generation before them has.

My gut instinct was to compare this to the time when teachers would tell you not to use Wikipedia for your assignments because it took away from your research skills, or even before that, them telling you not to use a calculator.

But, I still want to give credence to this argument, in case it actually does bear some truth. After doing my due diligence and reading the papers, though, I've got some qualms with the methodology. Specifically, I don't agree with the way they're measuring our "intelligence."

Note: The Flipper Zero community shipped 40+ firmware forks in its first year — none of them planned by the original team.

Let’s get this out the way from the get-go: I do take these concerns seriously (who wouldn’t?). The impact of new technologies on our minds is significant and deserves attention. However, the current approach to reporting this issue looks to me more like media-chasing rather than actual research.

The paper "Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task" by Nataliya Kosmyna, Eugene Hauptmann, et al., that's been doing the rounds on LinkedIn and Twitter as of late, does outline some measured decrease in mental faculties in students.

The researchers found that "EEG revealed significant differences in brain connectivity: Brain-only participants exhibited the strongest, most distributed networks; Search Engine users showed moderate engagement; and LLM users displayed the weakest connectivity." They also noted that "cognitive activity scaled down in relation to external tool use."

But.

That's only because they're measuring the repeated performance over writing a single essay: once aided by AI, once aided by Google, once by themselves, and (optionally) once again using AI after having done it themselves. The study tracked 54 participants over four months, with researchers concluding that "LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels."

Yeah, that’s one hell of a headline.

Now, keeping in mind that their sample size is only 54 people in the same area, which is in itself troublesome for a paper that's being cited as absolute truth.

This methodology seems to be missing some crucial context:

• First, all of these people were born into the internet era, which means their brains have already been exposed to other, arguably more impactful cognitive influences like social media, the never-ending stress of a 24-hour news cycle, and the lack of places for actual mental stimulation (the often-called third spaces).

• Most importantly, Second, people's performance under a single menial task isn't reflective of their mental faculties as a whole.

The study also found that "self-reported ownership of essays was the lowest in the LLM group and the highest in the Brain-only group" and that "LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work."

While these findings would be interesting once expanded to a larger sample size and properly peer-reviewed, from their very foundations, they are designed to tell us more about the specific context of essay writing than about overall cognitive capacity. And people are taking them as evidence for the latter in an increasingly unnerving way.

That second point is the one I think is worth discussing, cause it's been following us for a long time, and we keep coming back to it like some weird cultural compulsion.

How is it that our current society simultaneously believes we're at the peak of innovation and industry, while also being convinced we're dumber than every previous generation?

It's become a meme at this point that every generation likes to say the younger one is lacking some fundamental aspect of life, which, of course, they themselves had in abundance.

Boomers say Millennials lack chutzpah, while the Silent Generation says Boomers lack a backbone. And, of course, we Millennials love to point out that Gen Z and Alpha will never know the pleasure of playing outside and enjoying a non-online world.

Isn't that silly? Taking a step back, it’s clear we're dealing with something other than actual cognitive decline if everyone’s been saying it forever.

My personal opinion is, there are only two measurable things that actually do impact a generation's mental acumen: socialization and nutrition. And that’s cause we’ve seen how societies change and become stronger when these two core necessities are met; while the reverse is also true.

That's about it. Even chemical exposure like lead paint or microplastics, which do affect individual capabilities, can't have generation-spanning effects on a society's intellect. If that were the case, we'd never have gotten the single greatest societal shift in the 20th century, because everyone would've been dumbed down thanks to factories, smog, arsenic, morphine and the million other things people were unwittingly (and sometimes, eagerly) putting into their bodies in the 18th and 19th centuries.

So yeah, I'm getting tired of the millionth anxiety-inducing headline telling me I'm getting dumber because I'm using Claude to fill in a spreadsheet. The truth is, human intellect is overall pretty much a constant. What changes is how we apply it to meet our society. And that’s the part that is changing significantly.

Are We Getting Smarter, Then?

If all of that innovation isn't making us dumber, and yet we keep accelerating technologically and culturally, what's actually happening? Aren't we making humans smarter in some ways?

I can't speak definitively to what LLMs are directly doing to our mental capacity, but following what has been studied and analyzed from the internet, mass media consumption, and literacy, I could take a gander and say that we are getting smarter, and we aren't at the same time.

Wade Davis, one of my favorite writers of all time, has explored the idea of an Ethnosphere. In his book "The Wayfinders," he elaborates on the concept of different, yet equally valuable, ways different peoples of the world have developed different abilities, and shaped their own reality through those abilities.

Davis defines the ethnosphere as: "The sum total of all thoughts, dreams, ideas, intuitions, myths and memories brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness."

It's his way of pointing out that just as we worry about biodiversity loss, we should be equally concerned about the erosion of cultural and cognitive diversity. His work is the most poignant example of how human intelligence isn't fixed.

The book’s namesake, the Polynesian wayfinders, really took me for a spin when I first found out about them. These navigators developed what's called a "star compass": a mental construct that divides the visual horizon into 32 houses, each separated by 11.25 degrees of arc. To them, water currents and the flow of waves are like highways, complete with proper signaling and entries and exits. They learned to visualize themselves as a constant point in the world, with everything else around them moving towards their destination.

It's hard even to grasp how they see the world, being so used to seeing myself as a dot in Google Maps. But that's the point, their brains developed extraordinary spatial and memory capabilities that most of us can barely comprehend because of their unique circumstances.

I've also been impressed by the sheer memory power of the ancient Greeks and any civilization with an oral tradition. No one knows how old the Iliad and Odyssey truly are, because by the time they were written down, they had already been sung by rhapsodians for potentially thousands of years.

Even the Bible survived thanks to the extraordinary ability of Dominican and Franciscan monks to reverse engineer the Hellenic Greek texts, without a translator, might I add, to such a degree of precision that when the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the 1900s, the copies of the Bible translated by them, and the source text, were almost a 1-1 match.

These are but a few examples of extreme feats of human intellect, as well as the remarkable plasticity of the human brain. In the end, the abilities we nurture are the faculties we develop.

That's what I think is happening now with our measured “decline” in brain capacity. While LLMs, social media, and the internet are changing how we develop our brains, that doesn't mean we're getting dumber. It's just a symptom of a changing society. We're valuing certain types of skills more than others, and our brains are adapting accordingly.

Right now, memorization may be disappearing with the aid of computers, but that doesn't mean we're not developing other types of abilities like critical thinking, asking the right questions, and understanding core needs (because the execution of solutions is increasingly becoming immediate and cheap).

Our ability to execute on a plan is leaning more towards all of us becoming project managers instead of doing every task ourselves, and that has been happening even before LLM agents came along.

Just look at the gig economy and the rise of freelance work to see how we've been outsourcing the ability to complete tasks without our direct involvement. The global freelance market is growing at a compound annual rate of 15%, with freelancers contributing $1.35 trillion to the US economy in 2022 alone. By 2027, half of all US workers are expected to be involved in the freelance economy.

And yes, this means we have less context on the nitty-gritty details, as the Kosmyna and Hauptmann paper found, but it also means we've realized that it's the big picture that matters most to our current society.

As I wrote in my previous piece, "Asemica," language is changing thanks to online culture. Our literacy rates and ability to express complex thoughts through traditional writing may be on the decline, but that doesn't mean we aren't grasping the core concepts: we're just expressing them differently, through short-form content and memes. The medium is evolving, but the message is still getting through.

While I'm all for doing things the old-fashioned way as an exercise in ownership and craft, I don't think these media-baiting studies are doing anyone any good.

I'd like to see more research done on what kind of new faculties we're developing thanks to new technologies, instead of constantly looking at what isn't fitting with the current system anymore.

To me, we're not getting dumber. We're getting different. And we probably always will (bar Isaac Asimov’s “The Last Question” becoming a reality.)

The Polynesian wayfinders didn't become worse navigators when they started using stick charts to map ocean swells. The ancient Greeks didn't lose their storytelling abilities when they started writing things down (any Aristotle or Plato fans around?). And we're not losing our intelligence when we start using LLMs to handle routine cognitive tasks.

When I use Claude to help me organize data or draft initial thoughts, I'm not outsourcing my brain; I'm using a tool to get to the interesting parts faster, that’s not a controversial thought to anyone.

I believe looking at the avenues for human growth is a much more productive endeavor than the constant doomsaying that only discourages people from adapting and learning how to use these tools in their own way.

The question isn't whether we're getting dumber or smarter. The question is: what kind of intelligence are we building, and how do we make sure it serves us well?

I’m not good at outro text. Leave a comment if you agree, send hate if you don’t; let’s just chat about this, that’s the whole point.

Most people look at me like I’m spouting some nonsense out of a self-help book. But I do believe it’s the best way to communicate what’s gonna help people stand out in the face of the widespread automation that’s looming over society.

Storytelling as a concept has lately been hijacked by consulting firms and influencers to mean “Packaging up your entire being into a product”. And while I do think some tried and tested tactics may apply, I mean something entirely different when I talk about “storytellers”.

People speak of the 90s as the decade that brought us Globalization at its largest scale. McDonald’s opening up a store in the Red Square, finding a good sushi joint in Medellín, New York, or Lagos, equally effortlessly. The world was truly “connected” through the medium of international commerce for the first time.

Or at least, that’s the story we’re told.

There was another face to globalization, one I believe most of us know implicitly by now, but one that I’ve also noticed very few people discuss in their everyday lives. Globalization opened up the doors for global brands to cast a wide net across the world, but it also led to the institutionalized adoption of automation in the distribution, production, and retail sectors of business, which led to two things:

• Processes have been so optimized that there are actually more people managing the process than people actually doing the job itself nowadays.

• Approximately 1.7 million working-class jobs were made obsolete through direct automation, and countless more were replaced indirectly by being outsourced to vendors with more streamlined processes.

I believe that this shift was the largest contributor to the 2008 crisis, even more than speculation; it also played a huge factor in the subsequent political instability that we’re still living through to this day. COVID was just a catalyst; the house of cards toppled 30 years ago, and we’re only now realizing it.

Just now, are we starting to question what people are worth in an automated world, but most people outside of the white-collar world have been asking this exact same question for decades now.

The answer now is the same as it was back then:

The future belongs to the storytellers. Or, better said, the future belongs to those with a story to tell.

When blue-collar jobs got replaced by offshore third parties or machines, the people who stayed in business did so because they leaned on their communities, their mastery, or whatever made them unique.

When we question what will happen to artists, analysts, copywriters, designers, and so many more in the coming AI age, I get the feeling the same principle will apply.

In his 2018 article “Design’s Lost Generation,” Mike Monteiro bemoans a generation of designers who never stopped to question whether they were building something to better humanity. When I first read this piece, I didn’t quite get it. The corporate world was yet to jade me enough to understand why a desk-job designer would sacrifice their creative ideas in exchange for a fat paycheck.

_“A designer who loses their hands is still a designer, but a designer who doesn’t offer their client counsel is not.” - Mike Monteiro, f\*cking poetic genius._

I’m only now beginning to understand how much was lost when we reduced people’s passion and creativity down to KPIs that are easily digestible in a quarterly deck.

We’ve gotten too used to defining our profession by our titles or the type of labor that we do, but in reality, a human being should be valued by much more than just their hands.

AI may take away your ability to design ad creative, but should you have been slaving away at the 5th A/B test with copy variations anyway? Is that what being a designer is about?

No, being a designer is about having the experience, taste, and context to make decisions based on the core need. Photoshop, Illustrator, Figma, or n8n don’t make you more or less of a designer; if anything, they’re diluting and distracting you from the real toolset you’ll need to excel in your field.

This applies to any profession. Accountants, lawyers, doctors, programmers - you are all valuable because of the unique context and perspective you develop when faced with real-world questions day in and day out. No AI will ever be able to take that away from you, so why lean on what’s *going* to be automated to stand out?

We need to reframe what makes your craft interesting and valuable; only then will you (and the people in charge of hiring and firing you) understand you’re irreplaceable, no matter what new tech gets developed.

We’re all Artists, Artisans, and/or Designers.

I’ve been playing around with a small framework for the different kinds of “storytellers” out there. Something to help the term sound less vague and marketing-y.

Take it with a grain of salt, but in my eyes, everyone with a story worth telling falls into one of the following three categories:

Artists

People with something to say, no matter their medium. Through spoken word or canvas, they break down the barriers of time and culture to reveal something about ourselves. It’s no coincidence that our most recognized and well-compensated people are all artists in some way (musicians, actors, athletes, politicians).

The tricky part about becoming an artist is that it’s mostly in other people’s hands whether you get to do it or not, as opposed to the other two definitions below, an artist is made when someone else recognizes them as such.

Artisans

Someone who masters a craft across decades, obsessing over the small stuff, making it look easy, though absolute dominion over what they do.

You’ve seen documentaries about Japanese craftspeople, stamp or coin collectors, beekeepers, you name it. If you spend enough time understanding the zen of motorcycle repairs, people will notice and admire you for it.

Designers

(From the Latin “designum,” i.e., to put something in its place) I don’t mean illustrators or product designers, I mean the people with an understanding of a need to address, and the ability to plan an approach to solve it.

Marketing matches existing supply with demand, Design matches demand with new supply.

This half-baked thesis has driven my every action over the past couple of years. I’ve gone about the job market seeking jobs where I’m valuable because of my unique insight, the stuff I’ve been through, the influences I’ve collected; anything but my hands.

It may be tricky to see how your Excel or Jira talents may help you be recognized as any of the above when the layoff season is upon you, but that’s usually cause you’re not looking at it from a wide enough vantage point.

• If you’re an accountant, your job isn’t to make Excel formulas match up on the books; it’s helping people prioritize how to manage their resources (expense management) and how to participate within their societal constraints freely (tax advice).

• If you’re a project manager, your job is to get people to collaborate towards a larger goal.

• Etc. ad infinitum.

The tools and platforms are irrelevant; you’ve exercised your brain in a way not too many people have. Use that to your advantage, tell that story, and you’ll notice the AI anxiety starts to fade.

Even if many people will end up having uncomfortable HR calls in the coming years, I hope we all use this moment to ask ourselves if what we’re currently being paid for is worth our talents. It would be severely out of touch of me to even insinuate people can live their lives without a job, but the train we’re currently boarding does point towards a lot of us having to make a plan about adapting and coming out on top.

The system will have to change, whether it be an AI workforce, UBI, or any of the other buzzwords; what I see as the constant is that human beings will be perseverant and proud enough to let the world know they’re valuable even if the job market says otherwise, because they are.

So, even if this is an unfinished thought. Whenever the existential dread creeps up and you start to feel like you’re being replaced with AI, how about you challenge yourself to put your story out there? The people around you may begin to notice and admire you a bit more because of it.

And yet, I haven’t monetized a single one of them. According to every piece of startup advice I've ever read, this is a complete waste of my time. But.I’ve been able to make the impact I have within projects much more visible.I helped my mom create a recycling sorting app.I made tons of awesome-looking landing pages, just as design experiments.I even tested some ideas that I had wondered, “Why the hell has no one built this yet?”**All within just a couple of hours of prompting.**That seems like the opposite of wasted time to me.These mismanaged expectations about what vibe coding should and shouldn’t be have been bothering me more than usual.We live in an era where anyone can build almost anything, but instead of celebrating this, we've turned it into another chapter in social media’s eternal search for passive income.I feel like we’re stuck in a loop: a promising technology emerges, early adopters explore the possibilities, and then some extractive crowd arrives promising that this new tool is the secret to financial freedom.

"What amazing things can we build?" devolves into "How quickly can we cash out?".When Good Tools Get Bad ReputationsThe barrier between idea and implementation has crumbled. I mean that as more than an entrepreneurial statement.I feel like every person who’s ever thought of a software idea, but might’ve struggled to make a business case for it, has finally been given permission to make it and figure out the specifics later.It used to cost thousands of dollars and months of development to ship a prototype, and you had to convince someone, either an investor or a customer, to pay for it if you ever wanted to see your fully fledged concept out in the world.And, right on cue, just as this moment was starting to look promising, "vibe coding" was hijacked by the same types of folks who had previously promised riches through other schemes. Twitter burst with threads about "How I made $50K in my first month of vibe coding" and "The vibe coding blueprint that VCs don't want you to know."

I remember complaining about the exact same phenomenon back when GPT-4 first came out, and I tried my best to showcase how this kind of greed is short-sighted and actually stops normal people from believing in these tools’ potential.I’ve written about how culture shapes the way we develop technology before, and I feel like “vibe coding” could be different if only we stop marketing it as another ponzi and start showing everyday people how it’s not just about making shitty, hackable, SaaS. A couple of weeks ago, I accidentally found myself stuck in this same mindset.I had initially set out to make 50 apps by the end of the year, and I started to feel frustrated when June began, as I hadn’t even released the first one to the public. I then had a “come to Jesus” moment and realized that voice wasn’t my own.I’m not building these apps to get rich, or even to monetize them necessarily. The goal of this exercise is to:a) Make tools to free up time, and find better ways of exploring my thinking through interactive experiencesb) Be able to continue exploring this without it feeling like a side-hustle. If I can dedicate full time to experimenting, I’ve already won.c) Have fun and learn more about coding while doing so.I made a Geoguessr-style game where you connect two historical figures on a timeline through their contemporaries, I made a whole automated data pipeline for my day job that would’ve taken a whole team months to set up, I even made a mobile app to give me manageable creative tasks I can do when I struggle to get out of bed.None of these will probably make me a penny, at least not directly. But my world is better because I made them.When you remove the pressure to monetize everything, interesting things happen. I haven’t read yet, but I assume most of what’s in there centers on something along those lines.The Difference Between Building and ScalingThe current startup mindset usually conflates the two, assuming that anything worth building must be scalable, must be monetizable, must be venture-backable.Some of the most valuable tools in human history were not built to scale in the modern sense. Libraries scale through replication; Wikipedia scales through distributed contribution, and open-source projects scale through community adoption. None of these have to worry about increasing stakeholder value, unless those stakeholders are the people using them.I feel like we’re not gonna dig ourselves out of this hole by monetizing and financializing but rather, building tools that are easy to modify and maintain, with easy access, low dependencies, and niche approaches.We might be entering a return to form for the internet of old. Stated plainly: I’ve intentionally given myself the moral constraint of creativity at all costs. If I ever charge for one of the tools I build, it'll be because it actually costs money to maintain, not because I think I can extract value from artificial scarcity.I’ve toyed with the idea of leaning on open source a lot in these initial stages of my new path. Getting people excited about the idea of a tool, challenging myself to write proper documentation, and always leaving the door open if someone wants to iterate and improve upon what I’ve started.I guess only time will tell whether I should do this. There’s a lot to consider before I even present my apps as contribution-ready.The Conversation I'd Rather HavePeople have told me all year I should be sharing this process publicly, and I see their point.I’ve been struggling to get a grip on our evolving world, and I was dubious about getting back into writing at first. It’s hard when your work revolves around making sense of an industry that’s changing now more than ever.Every time a CEO makes a rash decision based on hype rather than commitment, my heart breaks a little.Instead of asking "How can AI help me build a business?" I want to ask, "How can AI empower everyday people to navigate uncertainty?" Instead of optimizing for scale, I want to optimize for delight. Instead of building for markets, I want to build for people.Because I think we're at an interesting moment. We have tools that can democratize creation like never before, that could let people build things that make the world interesting. Whether that happens depends on the values we bring to these tools and the communities we build around them.We get to choose whether AI development becomes another mechanism for value extraction or a vehicle for human empowerment. But we only get to make that choice if we participate actively in shaping the conversation.So I'm building things that don't scale. Things that solve real problems for real people. Things that exist because they should exist, not because they can make money.

Rick Rubin’s Tao Te Ching-AI rehashmore,moremoremore

I’ve written about culture’s tendency to diverge and converge and eventually speciate into distinct cultures. So distinct do these cultures become, in fact, that you could place any real-world example of polar opposites and find a common ancestor for 99% of situations.

Conservatism vs. Liberalism all stem from core beliefs around innovation. The human gene pool, milliard nation states, and even language itself are nothing but endless iterations and branching-offs. Similarly, most tech making up the current (and future) web stems from the same core principles and the questions that arise along the way as new people use tech in new ways that suit their times and needs.

So, when I say L2s are just the Internet re-treading its steps, I don’t mean it in a derogatory way. It’s in the nature of things to find common ground as we explore what we believe to be new and unexplored lands.

When computers first rose to prominence, there was an academic space-race to find the most efficient way to translate binary into human-perceptible commands. This era gave rise to the first programming languages. After that, new generations of computer scientists, tech employees, and garage-bound nerds sought to create their spins on these proto-code systems to ease their work, satisfy an employer’s wants, or just try out cool experiments of their own: like the first iterations of generative art, the first homebrew computer OS’s, and the first questions about the privacy, scalability, distribution and attribution of computer code.

I single out those four questions in particular because they are the exact same questions we’re looking to solve, just in a categorical way rather than in an effort to fit a specific company or individual’s requirements. But that’s getting ahead of myself.

As the internet itself entered the scene, these four questions led much of the conversation. We had a channel with which anyone’s code could belong to the world in an instant, no floppy disks in envelopes being shared like trading cards. With immediate distribution came the need to protect the creator from accidental fame. A sudden burst of attention could be dangerous in more ways than one for the unprepared. An improperly licensed repository of code could be stolen, a badly attributed dependency could turn a weekend jam into a year-long lawsuit, and for some, putting their name out there could mean attracting the attention of some ill-intentioned netizens with whom they shared a space.

During this second era, code took on a new shape. Interest turned from the OS and motherboard and onto the web. This was truly an unsung shift in the way people thought and used code, one that prevails to this day. How many people do you know who code on Assembly vs React?

This new batch of programming languages focused on building upon their predecessors to create the building blocks of the web. A layout markup language gave rise to a cascading styles language and then an animation and transitions language. It made perfect sense to build a hammer before making a saw. As such, most of the original web-oriented programming languages are still relevant today, even PHP.

These waves aren’t unique. Similar to the previous two, we saw how Silicon Valley-fueled languages like Java, GO, React, C++, and Swift incentivized tapping into existing and flourishing ecosystems. Anyone who’s ever learned Swift does so thinking of the sweet perks of the App Store, not whatever they’re looking to build.

And this is where we’re currently at. You learn to build thinking of what kind of perks and ecosystems you want to tap into, even if most of them end up looking pretty similar at the end of the day. Sure, the syntax, specific advantages or use cases may change a bit, but making a game using Python to C++ is equally feasible.

If we continue this thread into what it means for future blockchains and L2s, the answer is, and always will be: people will always find a need they want to prioritize, or feel their current solution isn’t prioritizing enough. Scalability, Privacy, Distribution, and Attribution are deep, deep rabbit holes on their own, and sometimes what’s best for one will hinder the other.

As with protocols, the function of a chain is to contain a set of behaviors. As we’ve seen in the divergence of crypto apps in the past year, a simple transaction hash can point to a message, an amount, a sentiment, or even a piece of your identity.

As Vitalik described in the seminal piece that inspired this one, even Ethereum is branching off into cultures and sub-cultures that each represent the original chain in their own way but have their own distinct set of needs and identities tied to the kinds of usage they want to give it.

In that same manner, each chain would (and probably will) continue to nurture a tribe for specific use cases like the API calls of a social platform. A PGF widget that opens the gates to OP, or a degenerate trading platform with a social component. Many people seem to think apps are the way forward for crypto right now, but I’d rather consider them the end-state of an already successful interoperable system.

It's not that we need new kinds of infrastructure, but better and more efficient ways to implement the tooling from several ecosystems into one same application. the social space has majorly led this race, with DeFi lagging behind in many aspects. And that's because, as many of us have described, the media always leads the way.

Just browse through Lens or FC, and you'll find native solutions for expertly woven cross-chain experiences. Arweave for this, and the ARB stack for that, with a little sprinkle of ETH for good measure. The cultures in these ecosystems are distinct enough to perceive them the same way you would a programming language, as a tool for a job with a certain set of incentives, or a calling strong enough to look past the hindrances.

I could visualize a future where apps built on Ethereum use Arbitrum for a specific perk, then tie another website functionality to Optimism and yet another to the Aleo L1. The future of L2s is synchronized and parallel. The tribalism and extremism of believing any ledger will be enough for everything is a belief best left in the bear market.

I had two remote grand tours under my belt, knew the racers and the teams, and was intimately familiar with waking up at 4 am to catch the pre-race interviews.

So, with nothing but a shitty Nikon camera and my laptop, I booked a ticket to Milan, where my "guide," Luis, was supposed to pick me up for a road trip to Brussels for the grand départ.

Only Luis never showed up in Milan. There were some complications with his trip, a few things he had to get done beforehand, and so on...

I was stuck for three days in the little town of Saronno, with a little bit of pocket change to my name, my rudimentary grasp of Italian, and the looming anxiety of the Tour being about to start, me being 544 miles away.

Out of sheer spite, I managed to make my way to Brussels, hoping to meet with Luis and my entourage for our journey across the French countryside. Only to be met with closed-off streets, no sign of my compatriots, and yet another missed day of the race.

This story repeated for the next four days. I'd grab a train to Strasbourg to reach the Champagne region and arrive just as the peloton boarded their buses to go to the next stage. No sign of Luis.

Finally, after nearly giving up and depleting most of my budget and energy, we finally met up. He was the definition of a hustler — A short 50-something with a fidgety look about him and a sly way of speaking, like a salesperson looking to get you in on the next big investment of your career.

Honestly, I was a little guarded at first, especially after the week from hell I had just gone through. But as we finally joined the TDF circus, I saw clearly why he'd become a valuable asset to my mission and a dear mentor and friend.

Day after day, Luis would introduce me to all the riders, managers, mechanics, you name it. I sorely needed an in to record my own interviews and write my daily chronicles of the race. When you’re reporting on something as big as the Tour de France, any exclusive is worth every pixel in gold. So far, I had depended on whatever appeared on TV and online forums to get anything out on time for my Colombian audience, which came out to be kind of silly on my part, being right there and whatnot.

The Tour moved at a frantic pace, and unless you were a well-known figure, most people wouldn’t give you the time of day. Thanks to Luis’ guidance and experience, I had what I needed and much more. The TDF Caravan opened up before me, and I felt like I had finally tapped into something enormous.

Not long after I got settled, I started noticing some looks and snickers behind our back. We Colombians had a strange reputation among the Tour de France journalists and riders: On the one hand, the "Scarabs" (our moniker due to our ease of going up slopes, this will be relevant) were rightfully intimidating as the best climbers in all of cycling, no one could get past our riders once they got into the zone when going uphill; on the other hand, our country's reputation came with some embarrassing baggage in the way the world stage perceived us.

You'd see the French and British journalist teams arrive in decked-out buses, staying in 5-star hotels and living it grand alongside the best news sources. Lagging behind, in a rickety old white van with no windows that only the shadiest of characters would use, came the Colombian entourage: Luis, the photographer; Alfredo, the radio voice they pulled out of retirement for this race; A driver Luis had dug up from some shady corner of Madrid, and myself, the young journalist and unofficial translator; cause none of the former could speak a word of English, let alone French.

The days blurred, and we were two of the three weeks in. We'd wake up at 6 am at some roadside motel, drive 2-3 hours to the next location, have a quick bite on the Tour's official press room (which my compadres took as an opportunity to resupply their backpacks with 10+ bananas and 8 water bottles each), and then we'd go to the start line for some early-morning interviews before the race began.

At this point in the race, most international journalists had caught on to the fact that Colombia had finally decided to send a journalist who could speak English. So, I'd be the point of communication to the world for most outside reporters. A quick live translation here, a question about whether we gave any weird substances to our riders there, and we'd be off, following the peloton and rooting for our riders to make some noise.

After a day of racing and social media posting, I'd end my evenings by writing a race report, overemphasizing the role our riders played and making sure to keep the spirit of the race alive for the audience back home.

It's not much to write home about, but it was an honest living, and I got to see the French countryside, one motel parking lot at a time.

It all changed on the day of the 19th race, the second to last, and one of the most challenging climbs up the Alps at the recreational town of Tignes.

To this day, I can still remember every detail of that morning: something in the alpine air awakened something within me; for the first and only time since Belgium, I wasn't tired. I walked confidently into the press room, making sure to share a joke about how we were almost exactly at Colombia's average altitude with the security guard at the entrance, who was a pretty staunch Thibaut Pinot fan, as most of France was by then.

I watched Luis almost get into a fistfight over a strange charge to Alfredo's card; I tried to hide in shame from the other journalists who'd witnessed the whole thing. Apparently, the race may have been held up because of a landslide.

I went out for a long walk to the finish line. Before I could make it, I heard a huge commotion coming from the crowd: Once the race took off again. Egan Bernal, the young Colombian promise, had taken a gargantuan lead on the rest of the peloton; the kid was gliding up the slope as if possessed.

None of us saw it coming. We knew Egan had it in him, but the strategy of cycling made it so that your entire team rides in service to a leader, and Egan was second in command this year. Geraint Thomas, the previous year's Tour champion, had faltered on the climb, and Egan's team gave him the green light to send it. And that he did.

When the day was over, Egan had secured the first spot on the General Classification for the entire race. All he had to do was keep that spot for one more day, and he'd secure the maillot jaune for Colombia.

Suffice it to say, when I got back to the press room, the clash between my compatriots had dissolved, and I could've sworn I saw a single tear fall from the security guard's cheek.

The 20th stage was a blur. At this point, Egan's victory was pretty much guaranteed, so he played it safe and made sure not to lose his advantage. Val Thorens was over, and our champion cemented himself.

That day, I was one of the privileged few who got to congratulate Egan in person. The press room was quiet as journalists from all over the world were left astounded by the spectacle.

TDF - Egan Victory

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

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That night, we drove from sunset until almost dawn to make it to Paris in time for the great Champs Elysees celebration. I remember Paris having a different vibe that day. The normal smugness and hostility gave way to the clamor of crowds that could be heard for miles.

I walked up and down the Champs Elysees, feeling like the king of the world. A combination of national pride and the feeling of having connected with the true spirit of the world’s biggest cycling race took over me as I rallied the chants of every Colombian flag I saw waving past the security fence.

Alfredo showed me and the world why he's a living legend. His passionate speech caught the attention of everyone in the room and soon enough became viral as the voice of an entire country's celebration of triumph. Egan was the first Latin American to conquer the Tour de France; with his victory, a glass ceiling had shattered, and Colombians all over the world felt it regardless of whether they were cycling fans or not.

I walked down the boulevard one last time, the Colombian anthem playing in the background as Egan received his well-deserved podium spot. Walking past the team buses, I saw the riders popping champagne and celebrating.

That night, I wrote what I can say is the most passionate article I've written in my entire life. In it, I called Egan something along the lines of "The hope of an entire generation" and "The turning of a page for our country." It was 2 am when I posted it and signed off from our company's social media account. The last thing I did before falling asleep that night was read the replies to our IG stories from thousands of people, thanking us for letting them live this moment vicariously through my eyes.

And Then I Lost that Piece Forever.

This story was just the setup to get you in the right headspace. Now, onto the real article:

That chronicle I wrote for the Tour de France 2019 was lost forever a couple of months later. A back-end update to our website accidentally scrapped all of the on-site content. All of my articles, all of my carefully crafted copywriting, everything was gone.

It took me four months to recover from the TDF. After returning home, I sunk into the worst burnout I've ever experienced. Even Luis himself had told me, "If you're looking to get into journalism, you shouldn't have started out with the Tour; this one's for the veterans."

As I lay in bed watching endless YouTube gaming videos, I received a text letting me know about that fatal update that had ruined so much of my work.

Thankfully, I've always been dutiful in keeping a local backup of most of my writing. I had the originals for most "top 10 gear" guides, my race reports for the previous Tours de France, and even most of the recent ones I live-reported, except for that last one.

That piece I wrote from a Paris motel room while still riding the victory high was lost to time, and to this day, I haven't been able to find even a line from it.

Losing the most powerful piece I ever wrote is one of the reasons I learned to love onchain publishing and the main reason I still do it, despite the uncertainty and frustrations of being an *earliest* adopter.

You've probably experienced something similar to me at some point: a video you loved taken down from YouTube, a childhood photograph lost to mold, or a teenage memory going away with a stolen phone.

We trust devices to contain aspects of us, and we're left a little emptier when these containers leave us for one reason or another.

Well, now that we can ensure smart contracts and blockchains survive any flood or back-end update, how does that affect these pieces of ourselves we seed onchain?

What Happens when Protocols die?

This piece came to me a couple of months ago as I considered migrating my writing elsewhere. The Permaweb is great at making content survive, but it does a pretty bad job of making it readily available for people to engage with. I know this sounds sacrilegious to some of you, but the ability to fetch data and display it anywhere doesn't mean anyone will want to read it.

In his 2021 piece "What Comes After Open Source?" Mirror co-founder Denis Nazarov explores how onchain data, or "state", when compounded towards a particular use, can be both a moat and a catalyst, depending on how accessible it is to outside believers and creators. This, in a nutshell, is what motivated me to join crypto in the first place. Few people still realize how much potential is held in readily available onchain transactions and protocols to be built on top of.

Ironically, Mirror is also an example of how this state moat can sometimes be forced upon you. A few months back, while helping build an onchain article aggregator, I learned just how much is still being done internally (i.e. not composably) to display what we call "onchain publishing." Yes, the data is there for you to aggregate and display. But things like attribution, NFT minting, and splits are still far from what the ideal of composability would lead you to believe.

I get the compromises we all have to make to build a usable platform. My only qualm with this is: what happens when there's no one to maintain these platforms? Similar to how a back-end update killed “the piece that got away” for me. Who's there to guarantee the permaweb's permanence if the company behind a protocol is no longer here?

Does anyone remember Glass protocol? They were among the first projects that sought to make onchain video streaming; before the days of Livepeer's dominance over this department, Glass took on a curated and Vimeo-like approach to video minting.

The technology wasn't there at the time. Ethereum gas fees and little interest in video patronage led to them migrating to Solana in an attempt to curb the high premiums attached to their core idea. After agonizing years of trying to make it stick, they officially folded in 2023.

In their announcement tweet, the Glass team made it clear that all of their smart contracts would still be available for anyone to use and interact with. But I'm left to wonder, what's the point of that? If there's no one to tell the story, did any of Glass' drops really happen?

In a similar and earlier example. I've been here long enough to remember when Hic et Nunc's developer ragequit their project and left it at the mercy of the Tezos chain.

I remember standing in awe as the community came together and reclaimed the contracts and mints to give them a new home, a place where they're still alive and thriving today.

To me, this is the prime example of what could happen in an ideal scenario if any of our media protocols were to die. The thesis of progressive decentralization can only really matter if there are people with the excitement and know-how to tend to the lore left onchain with every mint and every contract call.

There are countless stories similar to this: former bull-run NFT collections that are handed off to the community after their founders take the cash and leave (like Pudgy Penguins, Cryptopunks, Moonbirds, and Mooncats). The circumstances behind each are unique. Sometimes, it's the noble pursuit of giving back to the community, and sometimes, it's a corporate acquisition not dissimilar to what we’d find in Silicon Valley. But the constant remains. Every protocol is only as valuable as the people who are willing to make it endure.

The Cult of Onchain

We've all joked about how crypto can sometimes feel like a cult. But I mean it when I say this comparison goes a lot deeper than the chants and the rituals.

When thinking about this piece's core question of "What happens when a protocol dies?" I often drew parallels with religions and languages.

I grasped to find any other instance in human history when something truly permanent is created, and what happens when society leaves it behind.

With man-made edifications, nature will eventually reclaim its land. With artifacts and names, history will do its thing and bury it all beneath the sand. The only real thing we humans can create that will truly outlast us, as I've said time and time again, is stories.

And what are religions and languages but stories? They're the codices of belief, behavior, and understanding that frame our world. And even when buried, these are the only things that never truly die.

It took almost 5,000 years for us to re-learn cuneiform scripture. The Minoan writing system is still being decoded, and our common languages are framed over a hypothetical "proto Indo-European" tongue from which all Western speech seems to have originated. When we look at it over a long enough time span, the permutation will always point towards the root. There are immortal things in our world, all driven by belief.

When we first re-discovered Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Western world underwent what was called an "Egyptomania." The excitement and intrigue of uncovering how our distant cultural ancestors lived their lives and saw the world took society over. And coincidentally, most of it was driven by a contemporary religious frenzy of trying to prove the bible right. People wanted to find Noah's ark, to prove that Jewish slaves built the pyramids, and that Joseph had saved the world from starvation through prophetic dreams.

Protocols are just a digitized version of this frenzy. As I skimmed on Whole Earth Theory, you can build a database big enough to contain every possible interaction and piece of content, but you can't put a limit to the ways people believe and tell stories around that information.

No matter what company goes under, or what treasury runs out of funds, as long as there is a way to give the protocol back to its believers, and there are people to believe in it in the first place, there will be a Rosetta Stone that revives and re-contextualizes any piece of media we leave behind onchain.

And then, as all things do, Pangea was unbundled. It broke apart into the continents we know today, and the critics have clamored for its return ever since.

I’m starting to see a lot of conversation around super-apps out there: from Elon attempting to place every interaction of our lives under X’s yoke to Zuckerberg’s failed play at holding the metaverse hostage, even our own subtribes of regens, degens, and decentralization maxis devolved into tribalism in the darkest points of the bear market. For once, it’s been abundantly clear that web3 doesn’t fix this.

Is this all a natural progression for new ideas? Or is this continental drift towards the centralized, or consolidated, an issue of the mind and soul?

Does the theory of the Super App, be it X or Ethereum, hold any water?

https://opensea.io/assets/0x7cc1Dc780aD70F3943A20D326a390a4542011685/4

Capture (Convergence)

You know what today’s internet looks and feels like. The ads, the subscriptions to everything past toilet paper, the struggle to make a genuine connection with anyone but the algorithms’ favored few. That part we all know.

It is also the internet of diversity, for good as well as bad.

I see people realizing that the only thing left once automation takes over the world will be the storytellers: X threads, TikTok memes, even DAOs; they’re all our collective effort at saying, “My story is worth sharing.”

We built an economy around attention, and we’re starting to see the consequences, compounded by a looming global financial crisis. People are swarming around everything they might consider unique or noteworthy and latching onto it with everything they’ve got.

We’ve been through this before. And I don’t mean just as humans. We’re back in Pangea, baby; when the continents drifted far enough apart to cut off communications among them, we saw a similar situation to what our society is currently experiencing.

Australia and Madagascar, more specifically, as two of the most isolated locations, saw an explosion in diversity, followed by a consolidation into what has since become these locations’ otherwordly fauna and flora. Look at a Lemur or a Baobab tree and find anything in common with a Koala and a Gympie-Gympie; I dare you.

Speciation is a powerful driver of innovation, media, and money, and that’s because it’s the perfect petri dish for the two main forces at play when we talk about anything creative:

• There’s the divergent stage where we try new shit out (like a new interaction beat, a new sound, or a new aesthetic),

• Then there’s the convergence of identifying and doubling down on the stuff that works.

So, when our supercontinent broke apart, it makes sense that the places with the least influence from other locations (i.e., the islands) would be the most “creative” to find their unique identity. Similarly, that’s how urban tribes have worked ever since the first greaser grabbed a tub of hair wax.

The online niches of today are the same as last century’s urban tribes, just quicker, more deeply characterized, and fueled by the hitherto unheard-of speciating power of memes. The real punks wish they had the memetic power of internet aesthetics like Frogcore. And it’s because of this new medium, that we can diverge and converge around beliefs and vibes at Mach speed.

I’ve often alluded to nature and planets in these pieces because I’m a firm believer in the storytelling power of the places we inhabit. A city, a mountain, an internet forum, or a zine shape us in the same way we shape them. The end media is but a reflection of our transitory micro-hiveminds.

I don’t think the Whole Earth Catalog would’ve had as significant an impact on today’s culture had it not been for the million other Zines it inspired to launch. As I’ve said in the past, the real power of tastemakers comes from awakening the same voice in other people, not their own words in particular.

And for the WEC specifically, I think what they started goes beyond their identity as a cultural magazine. Sure, there had been other zines before, but what Stewart Brand et al. launched went beyond just commenting on their ideas and projects. They made the “Zine” a thing. What I mean by that is that they created the "what" and "when" of Zine identity and their accompanying micro-hiveminds (otherwise known as subcultures, urban tribes, etc).

Without the Whole Earth Catalog, I wholeheartedly believe cultural magazines may never have evolved into the entirely different concept that is a Zine. And without those, there’s no medium to propagate and align urban tribes. The distribution vehicle is the alignment that ties these tribes together and shapes their identity. We need a centralizing force, the convergence, to offer a vehicle for these movements.

But this also comes with a fair measure of gatekeeping, clique behavior, and exclusion. It’s well known how urban tribes can absorb a person to the point of them sarificing their identity as a whole to the collective, or the opposite, yet equally common scenario where some people aren’t seen as “cool”, “revolutionary” or “pretty” enough to join in the first place.

Does it need to be that way? Are we Geeks destined to wait in line as the sociopaths come in and bleed our cultural movements from the inside?

Bringing this back to the super-app conversation, are we supposed to let the platforms capture our attention, scrolling time, and behaviors instead of branching out into new and better places?

Culture (Divergence)

Yeah, I’ve also read Peter Thiel’s “Zero to One,” and it is true that under the conditions we’ve nurtured in our society, every place for capture, be it financial or of power, will tend to centralize around the biggest players.

It is also true that no one accounted for Culture as a driving force because, when it was written, it was hard to measure and harness. Things have changed since; we now have a way of quantifying and wielding media and culture beyond just the attention metrics.

If there’s one tangible good thing to come out of web3, it is the suite of tooling that enables open-source software (communities included) to proliferate, branch off, and monetize their activities in a way that’s actually sustainable and attributable to them.

Splits, multisigs, transferrable ownership, gated experiences, onchain royalties, and many more; all of these, even if not used to their max today, have made the life of subcultures a lot easier, more understandable, and immensely more scalable.

And that’s because culture in itself is a decentralizing force, in contrast to the centralizing force of capture that I explained with the Zine example above.

The “getting it wrong a thousand times, so that one may work” part of culture building can be harnessed and measured through proper tooling, and it helps communities tap into the good of consolidation, without having to gatekeep their benefits in fear of losing their edge.

In other words:

1. A Zine starts a subculture, and that subculture grows, until it’s monetizable, and it almost immediately loses its charm when tribalism and tokenism rear their ugly faces. That’s the way it used to be.

2. Today, whenever a subculture (like a DAO, an urban tribe, or a meme) scales to the point where this conflict arises. We have the right examples and understanding to unbundle the community and its value so that there are now two instead of one, or negative one.

We needed the consolidating force to have culture and capture in the first place, but we need the branching off so that the tribe doesn't cave in on itself.

peacenode.eth✰

@peace_node

personally think posts like this do more to minimize the people of color, women, & queer people who are active die hards in crypto

i get the intention of your & winny's post. we live in an ugly world with systemic power dynamics we'll never have visibility on, let alone have

19

10:39 AM • May 22, 2024

Capture and Culture are opposing forces in this whole song and dance that we call innovation (of ideals, of experiences, of products). They’re the friction to use a new platform and the drive to migrate when all your friends have started using it. They are both needed and play crucial roles in everything we do. And up until recently, they were the two forces dictating the game.

But I believe LLMs have accelerated a new player that we hadn’t been able to crack in centuries.

Pangea Ultima

It’s been predicted that one day, today’s continents will converge into Pangea Ultima, a new form, yet familiar. The supercontinent will be back, and the cycle will probably begin anew.

Alejandro A.

@K41R0N

- Platforms become databases

- Protocols become ubiquitous

- Physical devices become more important than ever

That's what the LLM internet era will bring us

8

9:24 PM • Mar 19, 2023

So, too, will the current moment drift and clash into a new generation of super-apps, the most promising of which is the new interpretation of a front-end-less internet thanks to LLMs. What happens when you no longer need to anticipate someone’s friction points to drive conversion to your website? How can retail and software brands compete when it’s all going to be driven by OpenAI’s favored few? (Notice how history rhymes).

The answer, same as always, will be the stories we tell around brands. I have hammered this point home several times, and every passing day, I watch it unfold. But for the non-marketers out there, here’s why you should care:

When was the last time you wore your Versace sunglasses? Don’t have a pair of those? How about Prada? Or Ray-Ban? I’m more of a Persol guy myself.

If you know anything about the sunglass industry, you’ll know I’m talking about the same company behind all of these frames. The only reason we prefer one over the others is how we see ourselves in their brand.

But, as I mentioned above, as a result of culture, Brand is almost impossible to measure reliably. Ask a thousand marketers what they think a brand is, and you’ll get 999 different answers, and that’s only cause the last one read the first one’s blog.

We can’t put a finger on it the same way we’re finding the tooling to channel culture, and we probably never will. That’s because a “brand” means something different to every beholder. It speaks to each of us at a personal level and promises us the solution to problems only we know we have.

Not everything is lost, though. Similar to how creator and community tooling are driving the decentralizing force of culture to allow for smarter and quicker vehicles, I believe the medium for Brand is also around the corner.

I’m talking about the protocol: the DeFi code, DAO governance, and even the data language that allows us to read the same email on 6 different platforms. I believe the infrastructure and app layers are converging towards a point that also allows for culture and capture to become the same.

Which means our ways of telling these stories will inevitably need to become structured and composable, like software, to allow us to pool around our tribes and evolve them in a way that lets something else shine through:

For example: What makes Metalabel’s drops different from the Whole Eart Catalog we talked about above or your run-of-the-mill contemporary Zine like “Where is the Cool"? The Protocol.

It’s in the name; Metalabel has created something entirely new and different from previous attempts at proliferating Internet media thanks to a unique combination of culture and capture devices:

• It’s the way the drops are announced through every participant and community.

• It’s in the way splits are distributed among creators and how they even left the door open for new ones in the future.

• It’s in the New York-meets-Berlin vibe they carry with them wherever they go.

They have everything a Zine should have, but protocolized, understood, and replicable ad infinitum. They have managed to build a moat for neither culture nor capture, but for a brand protocol anyone can build on top of and still “belong” to their clique.

When discussing my CAPTCHA moments piece a couple months ago, I noticed most people would misunderstand what I said and think I was saying “Capture”, which, in retrospect, end up being just about the same.

So, I chose to reframe my thinking around what capture actually means, not just in the context of crypto and web3, but as an overall measure of how the internet runs.

In the end, I defined Capture as any activity that flows from the participant to the platform (DAO, ML model, Social Graph, Community, etc.)

With that in mind, it felt fair to think of how this relationship is rarely one-sided. We use our platforms for a reason: we seek to connect, to learn, to enjoy, or to transform the world. Above all, our way of using platforms can only be defined as the Culture we create both in them, and through them.

You’re seeing how this loose collection of thoughts started to take shape into this piece. At the moment of writing, OpenAI just released a suite of tools and integrations that promise to unravel the internet we’ve been used to, new framing devices for an ever-compounding amount of information. It’s going to be exciting to behold.

But leaving it at just that left a sour taste in my mouth; it’s not only about who builds the most seamless or nurturing experiences, but who learns to tap into both culture and capture to open up new ways to engage online (and onchain).

With Elon’s release of Grok, I had the final piece of the puzzle. Twitter has effectively transformed from the internet’s town square into a church of sorts, where we all gather and find new meaning in the interpretation of the words that we speak into the void, albeit in the cringiest way possible.

The Protocol is about who can codify their moat the best and who’s the most thoughtful in adopting the new behaviors and ways of connecting we’re constantly in search of.

Whether you agree, disagree, or outright despise the era we’re getting into; there’s no denying there’s gonna be a lot of power in understanding what makes your particular watering hole special and unique.

There's something much deeper to these "Captcha moments" than meets the eye. It's a simple task, but a game-changer when you realize what's happening behind the veil.

A (pretty accepted) urban legend out there says that whenever you correctly identify a bus or a fire hydrant, you're helping train models like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion. You're giving them the data to recognize patterns and differentiate between a bus and "not-a-bus." And you're doing it without realizing it.

Regardless of whether this urban legend is actually true or not, what Google does with character and image recognition models through reCAPTCHA is nothing short of a masterclass in the power that lies behind a million simple actions. These data-collection moments make a real difference when it comes to getting any product market-ready.

I wonder if there’s some sort of public and tamper-proof database out there, somewhere, anyone could pull from and use to give it their own twist…

What’s a Captcha Moment?

What I call Captcha Moments aren’t limited to just this approach, though. You can find these kinds of interactions everywhere online. The positioning of banners on a website, the headline text on clickbait articles, even commercially available AI models make use of captcha moments to compound their optimization efforts. That’s why GPT4 blew us all away when compared to GPT3. We make these systems perfect by using them.

So, I’ve defined Captcha Moments as such:

1. It’s seamless to the core experience. It should take at most 30 seconds of someone's time.

2. *Isn't* the core experience. These kinds of moments are meant to run behind the scenes. Had OpenAI asked us to "help train the next generation of LLMs," they'd never have gotten GPT to master human-like conversation.

3. Captures the underlying behavior tied to it. Something as simple as basic math, reading, or looking at pictures of cats comes as second nature to us, but not so much to the bots.

The Obligatory LLM comparison.

Grounding all of this in the most recent example I’ve found, and one that was sorely needed: You are helping AI understand language better by using ChatGPT. Your generated threads, emails, and blog posts are helping these models not only understand what it takes to sound human but how to do so in any language as well. I could see a world where endangered languages live on through LLMs, even dead ones coming back from the grave through their closest descendants.

AI models have often been criticized for their skewed and Anglo-centric bias due to the datasets they were trained on. That being the case, we need to realize how AI is only as good as the data it's fed. If all the data you provide them is one flavor, you'll end up with a pretty bland AI. And there’s just no way we’re gathering enough of it to make AI more equitable through conventional methods.

Our big challenge for the coming decade will be distributing access to these valuable models while snowballing that mass adoption into their better, more empathetic versions. This is where ChatGPT is making a difference. By providing a clear source of value and using viral tactics (like your aforementioned Twitter threads), it's helping bridge the gap for LLMs in languages worldwide without posing any friction to the core user experience.

Now, how could we bring the aggregate data Ethereum (and chains in general) provides, and use it to help perfect us the same way our ML counterparts have so masterfully done?

What Does Onchain Behavior tell us?

The complexity of crypto makes it challenging to find a seamless way to integrate it into everyday transactions in a way that helps us make sense of the underlying behavior. It's not as simple as identifying a fire hydrant. It's about security, privacy, and identity—and finding a seamless way to blend these elements into your online experience is a tall order.

It’s no mystery that onchain data is the biggest untapped goldmine we’re currently sitting on. And we carry the heavy burden of being responsible with its usage while we search for ways to sensemake with it while respecting the individual’s privacy.

While looking for possible interactions that fit my definition of a Captcha Moment, some momentous launches have pushed this idea without realizing it. But I have honestly struggled to find one that both fits the bill and is the responsible approach while we build the required safeguards.

Decentralized Financial Operations

While crypto's original use case for decentralized financial transactions has all the potential in the world, I don't believe it's going to take us there just yet, for one simple reason:

Most people in this world don't have money; they want it, but their circumstances make it extremely challenging, even downright close to impossible, for them to get it. As such, most people harbor an unspoken resentment toward wealth and the people who enjoy it. You don't want to change the world on the shoulders of accidental millionaires because everyday people will never relate to or trust them.

We need a simple, unintrusive interaction that can solve many problems and usher in a new era, but we need it to be something everyone can understand and use without ever thinking of what's under the trunk.

Permissionless Identity and Proof of Personhood

Immutable identity sounds like something straight out of a sci-fi movie. Carrying a universal identifier bears the promise of expediting so much of our everyday interactions. Stuff like lines in the airport and visits to the DMV will become a thing of the past if this tech reaches the mainstream.

But, when you look a bit deeper into it, you realize that a few crucial issues need to be addressed before that happens.

The recent Worldcoin launch showed us that a globalized identity protocol could get Orwellian very quickly. Plus, there are still a couple of bits and bobs to tweak before these solutions are ready to hit the streets. With multiple blockchains operating independently and lacking communication, basing your identity solution on the wrong ecosystem introduces significant security vulnerabilities, for example. No wonder most identity solutions are still struggling with the sybil problem.

Zero-knowledge networks have been pushing for a way to prove identity without giving away sensitive information for a couple of years now—an identity that could open doors at airports, banks, and online platforms without revealing your identifying data.

But what happens when your government or bank decides your credentials are "undesirable"? If it's all meant to run under the same system, it's a thin line to walk down when we conflate identity with credentialing, especially when the tech is meant to be hands-off and tamper-proof.

We’d end up exactly back where we started: a biased and bureaucratic mess that’s built to limit your access and keep you in line. Only this time, it’d be programmatic.

Finding Crypto's CAPTCHA Moment

All of the previous use cases will change the world in due time, but they’re not the ones that will get us there. There's still one big hope for finding our mass adoption holy grail.

To no one's surprise, I believe web3 social and content creation might be the closest type of interaction to unlocking crypto's potential to the masses.

We have explored what DAOs and collectives can achieve, and NFTs have spent their time in the spotlight, but let's not stop there. I sniff the potential for earth-shattering experiences built on web3 social rails.

Just like how identifying buses and fire hydrants in a Captcha test helped train AI models, everyday interactions on decentralized social platforms could be the key to unlocking not only the essentials like collects, comments, and shares; but endless other types of participation that can be measured, understood, and improved upon beyond the confines of content.

Friendtech serves as an unexpected example of how this will happen. Sure, it was built by crypto natives for crypto natives, with shady financial undertones and an extractive premise from the get-go. But the second people started getting creative with it, we saw the magic.

Not only did we get the Onlyfans crowd rushing in at the mention of extra cash through gated experiences, but we also got people finding exciting ways to build on top of FT’s “primitives.” It’s only been two weeks or so, but there are already governance experiments, curated feeds, BTS access, and even RPGs running on top of the engagement Friendtech provided.

Alejandro A.

@K41R0N

Hey, I'm all about experimenting.

Here's some nice tips to play around with @friendtech safely

4

2:21 PM • Aug 20, 2023

This example may make a bunch of you roll your eyes at me. But it is true. There’s no hype wave without its silver lining. And FT’s has been that a small cohort of people didn’t like the initial concept of monetizing their friendships and decided to make something useful out of it.

Social and application layers built on top of crypto have some definite advantages against the more established use cases (like financial and identity) in being crypto's CAPTCHA moment:

1. Seamless Adoption: Decentralized social platform interactions are a universal way for people to experience content, just as intuitive and unobtrusive as the original CAPTCHA test. Turning the feeds, we’re all used to into onchain transactions adds value without adding friction.

2. Clear Function and Value: Your likes, follows, shares, and comments generate data to be openly tokenized and distributed. Protocolized and composable distribution means there’s an easy way for people to join their favorite creators without making it all about crypto if they prefer not to (and plenty of ways to ride the speculative wave if they’re so inclined). People are free to pick their favorite way to experience you.

3. Underlying Behavior: Decentralized social platforms help creators share work, engage with audiences, and make a living. You don't need to remember your wallet address; your account is abstracted by default.

We've dug ourselves into a deep hole regarding crypto's potential to change the world by looking at these incredible new primitives without thinking about everyday people. And while social media (and other types of media, for that matter) are the most apparent path to help our ecosystem reach its full impact, there are possibly hundreds of other CAPTCHA moments out there, ripe for the taking to anyone creative and passionate enough.

People care about other people, who care about their established routines. Only by finding our way into these routines will we finally find that crypto consumer moment everyone’s been screeching about and beyond.

The tech itself holds so much potential, but it’s about time we start using it to build experiences that actually matter.

I recently had a cute question pop into my mind: “What’s the nearest solar system to ours?”. And sure, while the answer was just a Google search away (Alpha Centauri, by the way), it struck me as odd that this piece of trivia isn’t usually talked about out in the streets.

You’d think some elementary school textbook would show our neighbors to illustrate just how big the cosmos is or something.

You know Mars and Venus are the closest planets to Earth, you know Phobos and Deimos are Mars’ moons, and you know Pluto was rejected as the most distant planet to our sun, thanks to some gobbledygook about what a planet is in the first place.

Then why does no one bring up that little factoid in conversation? And more importantly, still, what’s the second-closest solar system to ours?

I’m not talking about solar systems here. I’m talking about us. People behave like planets and celestial bodies when you stop and think about it. We have our orbits of close relationships and influence over each other, and so forth.

“Bring your Own Algorithm” explored the value of social graphs and why it’s essential to decentralize them to build better narratives that don’t get entrenched as easily. And an earlier piece pondered the same from a “basic tokenized unit of content” perspective.

Well, this one’s all about how the dots get connected and how we can better understand how “superconnectors” - as Joey DeBruin and the Backdrop folks call ‘em, or “Supercontributors” - as I used to call them; play a role in shaping these narratives and bringing them to their full effect.

Joey DeBruin

@joey_debruin

Simple app someone could build on the Open Work Graph eventually — Tinder + warm intros for builders
- Pulls in your professional data
- Suggests connections based on your network/interests
- Swipe right as first step
- Pings whoever knows both people for a warm intro

8

5:17 PM • Mar 14, 2023

The Philosopher on the Chalkboard

Mathematicians are a unique bunch. Such a beautiful and rich culture that spans beyond generations and geopolitical borders. In a way, they’re a lot like our current generation of tech people.

Some of them are more interested in the art of their craft and the philosophical implications of their research than the actual work itself or its application.

Paul Erdős was such one of them. His contributions to the field were vast and impressive. So much so that other mathematicians started to flex the times they could work with him. Over time, the “Erdős Number” became a status symbol to signal to your peers, “I am so talented, I got to work directly with Erdős.”

Your Erdős number would go from 1 when you collabed directly with the man himself; to infinity, based on how many degrees removed you were from the legend. So you’d have your math professor dunking on an auditorium of students by telling them they’ve got an Erdős number of 3, and simultaneously giving a “4” to the lucky few they’d recruit for their summer research paper.

I have noticed many of us doing that in web3 and tech. People will drop their “Buterin number,” “Turley number,” or even their “Vaynerchuck number” as a way to gain your trust. We’re essentially saying, “I worked with someone of worth, so I am of worth as well.”

I first noticed this back in DevCon Bogotá. I found it funny how people would approach me and want to chat when I wore my RabbitHole hoodie, yet would not even look my way any other day.

I used that to my advantage. That hoodie became my secret weapon to bring out only for the most remarkable parties. It was my ticket to talk with the people who wouldn’t give me the time of day under other circumstances.

Having a hoodie define who you get access to, picture that. Shouldn’t there be a way to measure these levels of influence in a way that doesn’t bias the conversation toward the loudest voices?

Notice how I used Joey’s name in the intro to this piece to get you listening?

Murmurations and Constellations

I didn’t start this piece with a space analogy by coincidence. I brought up the “Content Constellations” concept in BYOA, if you recall correctly — a way to chart the influences and contributions of any given idea through the people who explore it.

This has been my main research topic for the past year, partly for a need to engage in meaningful discussions with interesting people and partly because this is the biggest question we should be looking to answer in our current AI-pocaliptic times.

We’ve already seen how easily narratives can shape our world and how truths can be created and altered at the whim of whoever presents them for their personal gain. And now we wanna turn that up to eleven with a technology that could quite literally “Truman Show” the lot of us?

We need to grasp this problem, and find a solution, ASAP.

Well. Back to constellations. I recently realized they’re only a piece of the puzzle. A way of framing a truth, so to speak. They are most valuable when crystallized and seen at a specific moment in time.

I like to chat with the folks around me about the stuff I’ve been researching; usually, a handful of them want to reciprocate. Speaking with Aleena recently, we both realized we’d been exploring the same concept from not-so-different angles. The excitement was palpable. We knew we needed to join forces at some point to gain a deeper understanding for both of our sakes.

That conversation is what inspired me to write this piece. Her idea of looking for the connective tissue and how to understand the role of super connectors in this whole debacle sparked the flame I needed to take the next step into this exploration.

She influenced me. She was my super-connector. And as such, she became the nearest solar system to mine for a moment.

Like her, I’ve had hundreds of people that shape my reality for a split second. You have too. But how many of them have driven you into action? Can you pinpoint the moment when someone in your circle pushed you to launch that exciting idea?

Either directly or indirectly, the people we share ideas and experiences with will shape our thoughts, our actions, and our behaviors. And that’s precisely why the analogy of a constellation doesn’t quite fit the bill when looking at your story through time.

What’s a group of distinct points behaving in unison and changing their relationship over time?

RADAR

@Radarxyz

think of emergence as a bird ballet

24

11:06 AM • Mar 14, 2023

A murmuration. A group of individuals forming a bigger self yet retaining their individuality as they flow and weave a delicate dance. Not a single one looks out of place, yet each one is acting of their own accord.

That’s how I’ll frame these narratives we shape and the roles we each play in driving them from now on. A constellation helps you understand what’s being said. A Murmuration enables you to see where it’s going and its intention.

I’m Moving to Madrid now.

This long-winded rant about made-up status systems, space, and bird flocks has made me question how we measure people’s value in driving a conversation. You don’t mention the friend who introduced you to your partner unless they’re a part of your honors committee.

There is real value to cracking this code. And that’s exactly why I’m officially setting up shop in Europe for the time being.

You see, I’ve come to realize my journey was being blocked by the environment I was placed in. Meeting the people pushing the boundaries was a hassle and a financial strain; I couldn’t just hang out, and talk… and probably have heated debates, as often as I’d like. Living in such a secluded corner of the world was preventing me from flying fully in sync with my flock.

And so, I’m in Madrid, in hopes of meeting all of you halfway. I’m intentionally standing in the middle of the road so that whenever that friendly van drives by, I’ll be able to hop on and join you in some new adventure.

I’ll keep exploring this complex puzzle from the playing field as if my life depended on it. Thankfully I’m starting to find some people to embark on this journey together.

richie

@richiebonilla

is there anything you need to make this happen?

1

1:42 PM • Mar 17, 2023

What started as a joke turned out to be a life-changing moment for me and my career as a creator. I’m infinitely grateful to Richie, Quests, Dan, Eliot, LDF and countless others who stepped in to help me make this project as exhilarating as it was.

I sat down with LDF over the weekend to discuss the ins and outs of the projects, the stuff that I wouldn’t have shared otherwise, and the excitement I feel for what’s coming next.

Beem ✨

✨ Set up your own video streaming app with no code. Own & control your content, monetization, and audience data. ✨

https://beem.xyz

In brief, Unwritten Authority isn’t done with the Quests challenge. I’ll be 100% taking the time to edit, polish and bring this whole book full circle in hopes of someday publishing something that resonates with people all over the world. And you were a crucial part of this journey.

I wanted to take a moment to thank all of you for your incredible support in powering through this challenge. The long nights and looming anxious thoughts were made a lot more bearable by knowing there was a select handful of people cheering me on.

So, without further ado. Here’s Unwritten Authority:

Chapter 1 - Finding Conviction in the Uncertainty

https://mirror.xyz/0x6d80a8ee7F8E7334C1EAfdee152E359790D4E8de/EAdDwrCrk4CQA90-9XFAA3pMMU2f-vzkCiFcqmVRZIk

https://mirror.xyz/0x6d80a8ee7F8E7334C1EAfdee152E359790D4E8de/U2DXPlMBvCA8Z22F5vlsl6J1TrNBNLrFUK4V-DrGIbM

https://mirror.xyz/0x6d80a8ee7F8E7334C1EAfdee152E359790D4E8de/qNDOHI7hW0rEmh4MC_AibY_b2XofWI2i3Z7X_4zAbzs

https://mirror.xyz/0x6d80a8ee7F8E7334C1EAfdee152E359790D4E8de/UZs8VE-LFvoL80jQEZAPZndO_OITK2xdJo7CxA2pl70

https://mirror.xyz/0x6d80a8ee7F8E7334C1EAfdee152E359790D4E8de/0guyHgTRUk6WjSXavtYK4yqqJWYGkQSolKdPvvgsJL8

Chapter 2 - The Greatest and Wisest of all Centaurs

https://mirror.xyz/0x6d80a8ee7F8E7334C1EAfdee152E359790D4E8de/pIXrFw8HaztKynwkKpLJFtmIEIclwmRdbuS_AAqdsRc

https://mirror.xyz/0x6d80a8ee7F8E7334C1EAfdee152E359790D4E8de/0NZA23rdMw6RVqRMrdDa-xs6M8Hat9PiRr1KvgaikYU

https://mirror.xyz/0x6d80a8ee7F8E7334C1EAfdee152E359790D4E8de/5mqxU_xTzd7jWjJ7kUMT8_dSEXjiszHtGtWbQdjxk94

Chapter 3 - Redefining Success in the Creator Economy

https://mirror.xyz/0x6d80a8ee7F8E7334C1EAfdee152E359790D4E8de/sifIgsWFI5mGkMHdHNF_P5yqpqCVJGQh5RPbVeNttu4

https://mirror.xyz/0x6d80a8ee7F8E7334C1EAfdee152E359790D4E8de/qbOuJJ_anjrACWXxFZ5rCnaQM-f5lxD-LLK9VCzGePg

https://mirror.xyz/0x6d80a8ee7F8E7334C1EAfdee152E359790D4E8de/ZYs-cdvPg92HfGB4aFn-iSfWP52BGFTM7NfpSE-8sgw

Let me be clear with something. This isn’t the finished product yet. I’ll be setting out on another adventure (after a brief time of R&R to recover from the past week) to bring this book to its full potential.

The main purpose of this Quest has always been to see just how far I can push my abilities with the help of AI. But in doing so I realized that the human component is equally as crucial as the number of pages. It is now up to me to inject these essays with wit and sould in a way only I could do it. The bot has played its role, and it did so masterfully. I’ll take it from here.

Alejandro A.

@K41R0N

Before I share the end result of the AuthorGPT challenge with you, let's do a quick recap of the journey that brought us here:

x.com/K41R0N/status/…

Alejandro A.

@K41R0N

I’m setting out to write a book in 10 days with ChatGPT’s help, and you’re invited to tag along

7

2:08 PM • Apr 10, 2023

With everything said and done, I am proud to log the last update on the AuthorGPT challenge in Quests. Let this story become an inspiration for the countless creators that follow.

https://quests.com/q/01GWW7M3N8V55CKXX84WYYKJY9

And indeed, as we grew up, we noticed how murky these problems are; we recognized the deeply rooted fears and power games behind these pests on humanity.

Our generation, more specifically, had the added existential dread of watching tech pour gasoline into the whole mix. Making us aware of the suffering worldwide, yet making every step in the right direction seem tiny in comparison.

And now, we’re blaming the algorithms.

The Makings of an Algorithm

It’s pretty well documented how social media and recommendation engines have been used to steer people into zealotry. By now, that’s as old a piece of news as whatever was keeping our attention in a choke-hold last week. But it bears repeating, at least, to grasp just how much these shiny lights divert our attention and have dictated our lives for the past decade. We care more about what’s trending on social media than our own inner circle.

https://kairon.mirror.xyz/1C6Bixs7ebbMJ21o7_j8PWcMRftKWTjzEHOKsBqf-pg

From targeted content aimed at polarizing you to outrageous distractions keeping you away from noticing the “real” events worth discussing. My conspiranoic side can’t help but imagine that anyone in power has this circus down to a science by now.

But at their core, these diversions are nothing more than a channeled stream of what’s already within us. The connections (and lack thereof) we make, the stuff that awakens our deepest feelings and guttural reactions at “Us vs them”.

Simply put, social graphs, as the real unlock behind social media, hold all the power in today’s day and age. The interactions between distinct data points that appear to be nothing more than a “comment, like, and subscribe” hold the power of shaping our lens on the world.

• Facebook's algorithm works based on comments, likes, and shares. It favors controversial and divisive content because it elicits a response from anyone.

• Instagram's algorithm is similar to Facebook's, with the added layer of proximity. By understanding which people you relate to, look up to, and seek out the most; these two algos tapping into the same social graph can very effectively understand what kind of posts you *care* about, and how to feed them to you for maximum scroll time.

• Google is more like a collection of several algorithms, each providing a specific function in an endless competition against those looking to exploit it for reach. Keyword stuffing? Build a semantic engine that understands sentences and punish the people who just write SEO-bating nonsense. But are you looking to pay for a spot on the SERP podium? “We got you covered!”

• And, of course, X’s algorithm is a clusterfuck with no rhyme or reason, it feels more like a child trying to keep up with a conversation on quantum mechanics than an actual system that understands your intentions and preferences. As the Twitter Files showed us, curating your feed is much more artisanal than what we’d been led to believe.

All in all, social media algorithms serve very specific purposes and are carefully designed to optimize for them. Now, the problem with all this is pretty basic, actually: These social graphs have been harnessed by algorithms looking to maximize attention and profit, and it’s easy to say the solution would be to create one that encourages creativity, or fairness, or even critical thinking.

How would these “beneficial algos” genuinely shape us, regardless of whether they’re profitable or not?

The Creator Algorithm

Web3 has stood out as a radical gut reaction to all of the above. Silicon Valley employees and execs trying their best at mitigating, and sometimes reverting, the damage done by these money-hungry systems we put in place without realizing how deep of an impact hijacking people’s attention would have.

Design's Lost Generation

Design's Lost Generation A year ago I was in the audience at a gathering of designers in San Francisco. There were four designers on stage, and two of them worked for me. I was there to support ...

https://monteiro.medium.com

From data autonomy to transparent systems of trust, we’ve had quite the fanfare around “showing it to the man” these past few years as tokens move from capital-deploying vehicles to data containers we can use to build more sustainably. The future looks bright if we figure out a way to use them in a way that actually addresses the underlying problem.

Now the big question is. What would the tokenized “creator economy” algorithm look like? And more importantly, what would the “creator economy” algorithm look like? Notice the differences when you emphasize the “creator” or the “economy” part.

• What variables should we prioritize? Originality? Marketability? A secret third thing?

• How do we tokenize them in a measurable way? Mint amounts? Prices? Unique collectors?

• What kind of mechanism could we build that keeps as much of its inner workings as on-chain and modular as possible to avoid falling back on old habits? I have no idea how we could build an immutable, fair system over time.

To be honest, we could complicate it as much as we like, with several convoluted interactions based on on-chain data like collection time, provenance, and wallet overlaps. But I believe “the simpler, the better” in this case.

We could build a tool allowing people to build their own custom parameter algorithm, as it's being explored with many of our web3 social apps. But this faces the barrier that no single person has the knowledge or willpower to syndicate and curate content without running into personally biased censorship. Just look at Mastodon to see what happens when you let individuals control the parameters of their feeds.

None of us are equipped with the tools to build a fair recommendation engine, at least not with the data points social graphs provide. That’s not due to the limitations of this pattern recognition approach but mostly because we’re built to surface the stuff we agree with while ignoring what we don’t.

That said, there is a more elegant solution to this, pioneered in part by the Lens ecosystem, but still not yet explored to its full potential.

When using Lens platforms like Lenster, you can peer into what other people see, regardless of that feed’s alignment with your perceptions. This is a huge unlock when contrasted with the way current discovery works. Not only can you find creators you probably wouldn’t find on your own when stuck in your personal echo chamber, it also helps you uncover narratives you may not have considered when taken as a collective stream.

Essentially, by looking at the feed through another person’s lens, you’re also peering into their brain and how it works.

This use case does bring forth the power of allowing people to build and experiment with a social graph that no one can cherry-pick for you. The only remaining piece of the puzzle is how you can grab these different perspectives and plug them into your own to compound the nuance of your take on life.

Bias is a part of us, but it’s our responsibility in this day and age to actively challenge it when finding the narratives we want to explore. The day of the endless feed may be far from over, but we could tweak the formula to include other people’s perspectives on the same story in a way that doesn’t come off as jarring yet still challenges you to think beyond the post.

Bring Your Own Algorithm (or Better yet, don’t)

In “Writers Fund Writers,” I argued the benefits of tokenizing content as a solution to build the infrastructure for better schema. This is something I've evangelized nonstop for the past year. What I missed was explaining how social graphs offer the other side of this equation.

I briefly touched on Lens as a significant opportunity to solve Mirror’s discovery problem in that piece. But it really allows for so much more. Diversity of thought is critical to breaking free from the curse of exploitative algorithms, and I genuinely do believe the only way to achieve it will be through harnessing social graphs in a way that can’t be rigged.

If the underlying data is bias-free, we can then build a system that finds the intersection of our collective ways of seeing the world.

It's true that tokens provide the primitive for the new algorithms, but in order for decentralized social to compete with its better-established alternatives, it must solve not only the discoverability problem but also provide its own edge against the single-source feeds.

The simple and elegant solution is staring at us right in the face. Constellations. Content constellations. Created through tokenized media like Mirror posts, Lenstube videos and Sound.xyz songs. Not only relating your feed to your tastes but to your relationship with the person behind each piece of content you consume. Instagram had it right with their proximity-based algorithm; all we needed was to tear it from Meta’s claws.

I believe the real decentralized algorithm follows something along the lines of TikTok's duet culture. By encouraging people to engage and create on top of the content they enjoy, we're surfacing the patterns that make actual curation possible.

The collection economy is hatching out of its gimmick phase as of late. Yet there’s still a long way to go before we unlock what it has to offer. I’ve noticed this in my own collectors’ behavior as I’ve started to post more rambling pieces rather than the formula-fitting “Top 10 tips to get your Mirror article collected” listicles.

We are starting to realize there’s a lot more value to the creator economy than just monetization and attribution.

https://mirror.xyz/chrissyb.eth/r0SyE9QdvQribykjXvdMqYElGQT8ZFnthV_rUlyNqNk

Imagine a world where your favorite creators collaborate and split revenue, but most importantly, they are all building that drop based on content Lego bricks. Music NFT soundtrack, Visual attribution for the art pieces (like an Instagram shopping tag that sends you straight to the artist’s profile), and why not, decision making (read: governance) based on how people react to your post “If I get 1000 mirrors, NounsDAO will grant me 10 ETH to launch a merch line!”

For now, until the day these systems are in place to allow for our content constellations to be presented and narrated. I think the best thing we can do is support the people and projects pushing the boundaries of distribution.

I’ve recently been exploring what the Lens ecosystem has to offer, and I must say, I love what I see. Platforms like Bello by Adam Levy, Nick Hollins’ experiments with drops, and a handful of other ambitious takes on what tokenized content can do are all ultra bullish in the long term for what they’ll open up. Can’t wait to see them all come full circle.

You may be wondering why it took me almost a full semester to post another one of my highly expected thought pieces. Short answer? I’ve been posting this whole time, just not in the way you’d expect.

Last time we were here, I pondered how authority can be leveraged as a medium to amplify a message, especially when tokens come into the picture as the dots-to-be-connected in the endless puzzle that is surfacing a truth.

That thesis has expanded a bit now that we’ve got tools like ChatGPT at our disposal. The dream of making our organizations more autonomous seems almost within reach. Yet there’s still people pooling into web3 everyday, asking where to sign up for a full-time salary collaborating with DAOs. It seems like these two trends are at odds.

Well, I’ve got exciting news for you on that front. I feel like I've taken an interesting new step towards cracking the code on how to be an outstanding contributor without being just another laborer (what I commonly call “not being just a pair of hands”).

After watching these new technologies unfold, as well as being in the front-lines while looking to explore the value of my work moving past the transactional. I’ve been feeling more and more that the perfect storm is approaching. We’re heading towards a small window of time where crypto and AI meet for the first time (in a meaningful way), and as Venkatesh Rao’s excellent essay “The Dawn of Mediocre Computing” says:

Via seemingly unrelated computational pathways, these two realish domains have succumbed to computerized automation. Incompletely, imperfectly, and unreliably, to be sure, but they definitely have succumbed. And in ways that seem conceptually roughly right rather than not even wrong. Large language models (LLMs) are the right way for software to eat language. Blockchains are the right way for software to eat money. And the two together are the right way to eat everything from contracts to code.

And it’s true, these two entwined technologies will indeed bring on the next big paradigm shift. The real web3 is knocking at our doorstep. And I’m sorta wincing at the thought most people are barely scratching the surface of what can be done with the crypto side of things while AI comes in like Thomas the tank engine at 200mph.

We need to define what DAOs are and how to work for them better. Because if we don’t, we run the risk of automation swooping over us with no real way to complement it with the much-needed human component the digital world needs to unlock all our wildest dreams. We must figure out how to verifiably source truths and attribute trust, cause there’s a tidal wave of misinformation, hyper-reality and post-truths coming our way.

So, what have I been doing these months? I’ve been wracking my brain at addressing three big breaking points in the journey of every DAO contributor. Looking for ways to nip our troubles with reputation and nepotism at the bud. And most importantly, trying my hardest to find a solution that doesn’t require more tech. We better rawdog this one with our very own monkey brains.

Every DAO contributor faces three key moments, similar to the three paths I explored before. There’s the plight of not being enough, the toil of being valuable while conserving your energies, and the calling to leverage your renown in a way that actually helps other people reach the reward of being able to share their truth without sacrificing their own reputation.

When looking at where we’ve failed in the past (and that includes what we used to do in web2 platforms as well), I think it may be worth considering how tokens and governance and the whole song and dance might actually help us break the wheel of extractive power structures. But most importantly, how can we as people learn to navigate the path in a way that doesn’t lead to us perpetuating the same stale cycle of underdog-opressor we’re all too familiar with.

The Plight

Here’s the part I explored in the Contributor’s Trilemma, as well as the three possible paths I identified as the builder’s journey in the digital age. To give you a refresher, I proposed that

1. People want to help the missions they resonate with in meaningful ways.

2. Once they reach a position of comfort, they’ll naturally gravitate towards the places where they feel their own needs are fulfilled best.

3. When their reputation breaks the confines of their inner circle, they must find ways of fulfilling the previous two points without sacrificing what made them want to help in the first place.

I also explored how media could be an interesting approach to checking these boxes for people like myself, though in general terms, there should be an endless amount of ways to do so.

Then, when we come back at this overarching point of “How can you maximize the amount of people you help when you’re only human?”. A new way of seeing the problem popped up. What if instead of looking at it from a “You helping them” perspective, we saw it as a “You inspiring them to help themselves”?

Without getting too cerebral, here’s what I’m trying out with my recent onslaught of media appearances:

I may or may not have accidentally typecast myself as both the “work full-time for DAOs” Guy, and the “Publish your writing on Mirror” Guy. And while those are two topics I’m sure I could offer some nice insight on, I’m usually not too keen on becoming a niche.

That’s because when it comes to web3, I want to be a person, not a topic. I want you to read and enjoy my writing because you’re interested in my personal journey. That’s the reason I stray away from writing instructionals or educational content when it’s not for one of the projects I work for. My approach to audience building is to build friendships first.

Caryn

@carynunfolding

wow damn, feel v seen:

"A super-connector is a people-person... who knows hundreds or thousands of people and remembers each of their names. Not only do they love meeting new people, but they can also recall details about their passions or personal lives with ease."

7

11:00 AM • Nov 15, 2022

Most of the creators you see out there want to become like the influencers of the past decade, just “better” (which I don’t believe to be possible anyways). Me? I want to be the Fred Rogers or Bob Ross of web3.

They weren’t teachers, or mentors, or leaders. And yet they were all of those and much more without even setting out to do so.

I believe having an established presence based on your curiosity rather than authority has the power to solve the influencer authenticity problem we’re currently living through.

You don’t trust people like Beanie or SBF because you know they are gaining more from your relationship than you are. You trust Mr Rogers or Bob Ross because you know they’re just doing their thing because they enjoy doing it, audience or not.

And yet, you also know they’re driven to spread their message to as wide an audience as possible because they believe just taking part in the journey is worth sharing.

The Toil

The big “But” for the previous point is two-fold. First, how does all of that actually translate into building a reputation as a builder and a valuable participant in this frantic space? And second, when I say “Inspiring them to help themselves” aren’t I taking my own role (and therefore credit) out of the equation?

Well, yes to the latter, in a way; but that’s where the former comes in.

It is true that whenever widening your area of influence, you must sacrifice some of the laurels that come with being in the trenches. But at the same time, it’s also an opportunity to find a new and more rewarding type of impact.

Sure, making that spreadsheet or writing that article will get you kudos and recognition among your peers. But there’s nothing quite like being to one that sparked the idea or the conversation in the first place.

If you manage to juggle the building part and the thinking part of the creator economy, you’ll have the winning formula to an ever-lasting legacy. Though of course, that’s not an easy balance to achieve.

On this front, something I’ve been trying out has been using this newly-found place of influence as a quoted source to fuel the fire of these conversations:

Wanna decide whether or not to publish on Mirror for X DAO? Here’s an entire podcast episode with me exploring the pros, cons and opportunities of the platform!

Wanna understand what public goods are and contemplate the idea of funding your project through a Gitcoin grant? Here I am offering my take on the matter with Frisson after I called him out on being against them on twitter! (Amazing conversation btw Frisson ILY)

Tyler (frisson)

@tylerisfrisson

public good this

public good that

nah that's cap

your startup is a private good and u better figure out how to get someone to pay for it

3

12:31 AM • Sep 14, 2022

It’s not only about saying the thing. It’s about being part of the conversation when the decision is being made, and having the track record to back your claim up.

We often explore just one side of the coin in this aspect of contribution and work. We’re either talking or doing.

I gotta admit, I’ve felt a bit inadequate this semester after slowing down my contributions to projects while exploring this new media experiment. But I feel the next step will involve combining all of the talking the talk with a new level of walking the walk.

The secret is somewhere in there. It’s just a matter of grabbing these sources I’ve accrued for myself (and that you definitely should for yourself), and putting them together in a way that has a semblance of cohesion. That’s when the bigger picture becomes clear, and your curiosity gets rewarded with a more sustainable and approachable kind of authority.

The Calling

I may not be on top of the DAO world, there’s plenty of more efficient contributors, as well as better known ones, and I honestly don’t plan on conquering that proverbial summit, ever. But I believe there’s one thing I have to offer to this space that no one else can.

I care about understanding power, without wanting power for myself. Much like the philosopher’s stone, it will only show itself to those who seek it without wanting to use it for personal gain.

And that’s exactly the code we’ve been trying to crack this entire time. Decentralized contribution, execution, knowledge, etc. They are all looking to answer the question of “how do we distribute power in a way that’s not exploitative, yet effective?”

And sure, the textbooks and thinkbois will give you their own take on this. But the truth is, no one has a definitive answer that doesn’t buckle under duress.

Which is why I believe looking at it from an individual perspective may be a path to consider when the universal solutions fail us at every turn.

Power means enough people believe in you that it’s practically impossible for you to fail. This may look like money, or an audience, or trust. It’s all the same. Power lies in having the ability to act beyond your own means. But it comes at the very delicate cost of maintaining it.

SBF defrauded hundreds of thousands. Beanie showed his greed, Zuckerberg, Dorsey and Musk took us for granted. No matter how your power manifests, your one and only responsibility is to use it in a way that fulfills your promise and helps other people.

Bringing that back down to earth. That means not letting your reputation or authority compromise the integrity of the decentralized systems we’re building.

We see it time and time again. Governance votes going for the popular candidate even when their proposal may not be the best (and even if it is), shitty projects that add nothing to this space skyrocketing on the backs of recognizable names. All of these examples are the biggest threats to web3, and we’re acting as if they’re gonna solve themselves with more tech.

DAOs are the virtual watering hole of our primitive monkey brains. It’s where we’re learning to trust and collaborate online at scale for one of the first times in human history (the first one being money). And that’s why they should also be the testing ground for a more conscientious and aware humanity.

I have been asked time and time again to make content for aspiring DAO contributors. Helping them land their first paid contributions, learning how to make a full time income out of it, etc. Truth is, there is no clear pathway to getting there. While this business (and non-business) model is still being explored, your mileage WILL vary, there’s gonna be very little overlap in the way I got to where I am, and the way you’ll get to the heights you’ll eventually get to.

Alejandro A.

@K41R0N

There's A LOT of content aimed at getting you that first job, but very little to help you take that step from intermediate to world-leading

21

1:17 AM • Dec 23, 2022

So, this piece is my way showing you three core pillars (and breaking points, if not addressed) of the contributor journey. They may seem insignificant when all you’re thinking about is the next paycheck. But believe me when I tell you, the answer to being a long lasting participant in this space lies somewhere in there.

But it’s come to my attention that there might be some value in sharing the way I fund my collection with all of you (thanks Rafa). Who would’ve thought you could use the funds you raise through your own pieces to invest in up and coming DeFi Protocols, and earn some nice yields while we’re at it?

It’s the perfect loop: You write, invest, and collect; all in the same network.

If you’d like to learn from the pros, here’s some pointers at people I admire and follow closely when looking for DeFi strategies:

• The DeFi Edge is one of my go-to newsletters, I recently tried out Beefy Finance thanks to their MATIC investment guide. Highly recommend, no matter the size of your bags.

• How could you not love DeFi Dad? Especially when he paints DeFi with such an approachable lens? Investment is no longer for the degens, but the creators.

If I were to offer you some good advice in terms of earning yield and being able to support the creators you love, I’d point out that web3 rewards the curious, there’s no better formula than active participation. OFC, DYOR NFA, keep your funds safu (especially in times like these).

Where I can be of help, is sharing some of my information-sourcing techniques, as well as my reasoning behind being such an avid Writing NFT collector.

Navigating web3 writing.

Having established how I manage to collect around one article a week, sometimes more if my own entries sell. Let’s talk about what I know best, content. And let me tell you, there’s few places as exciting as Mirror to find the cream of the crop in that department.

But, it’s also true that finding good writing in Mirror is infamously hard to do. I’ve often told aspiring writers that their best shot at being discovered is looking for a hybrid approach. Either find a way to send your articles through email, share threads, hope for podcast appearances; anything that will get people actively seeking you out.

Well, what if I told you there’s some web3 native solutions to that as well? Besides Mirror’s new subscribe function, which I consider to be a watershed moment for the platform, there are also some little tips and tricks using your Writing NFTs’ native traits. Such as summoning up Arweave hashes coming from a specific address, or using your ENS as a type of schema.

- - - - - - - - -

Here are some of the tools I use to discover new writing on Mirror:

[Unilateral / Intimate]

• Mirror DAO’s own weekly curated digest.

• The Mirror Curator DAO

• Forefront’s Web3 Signal Feed (FYI, you need 100 $FF to access it)

• The Mirror Entries Leaderboard

• Try searching this on the twitter search bar: http://mirror.xyz filter:links min_retweets:5

• The Index3 search engine

• “Discover New Entries” feed on Mirror’s Discord server

[Democratic / De-Personalized]

- - - - - - - - -

You’ll notice the spectrum I placed them in. That’s because, as a curator, it’s essential to understand and communicate where your sources are coming from. One of the big advantages I see in tokenized media (and I don’t mean token-gated) lies in helping us overcome our unintentional biases.

The more we understand about connecting the dots from trustworthy, yet diverse, sources; the deeper our insight in all aspects of life will become. Which brings us to.

Note: I’ve also compiled some interesting tools, moments and overall cool shit build in the Mirror ecosystem here

Why make it a point to collect?

Sure, other publishing platforms offer somewhat better perks in terms of discoverability. But what none of them come close to achieving is allowing you to own your audience, or in this case, your connections.

Alejandro A.

@K41R0N

Today will go down in history, at least in my story.

I took the plunge and committed to becoming a writing NFT whale in the future, exploring what can be done when thoughts and tokens converge

@ljin18

quixotic.io/asset/0x102c11…

34

2:42 PM • Jul 5, 2022

I’ve spoken a lot about NFTs as data points, but I feel like my take on this matter could do with some clarification:

Imagine you want to learn about governance, but most of the best pieces are hidden under gibberish URLs, just look at your search bar right now to understand what I mean. How could you find the resources to understand complex topics like this?

Well, you go straight to a trusted source. In my case, I’d go looking for Chase Chapman, Orca Protocol, and 0xCadena, among others.

Other Internet

@otherinternet__

We surveyed 106 DAO founders, operators, & contributors to understand how governance challenges are evolving. The results revealed clear and urgent challenges in decentralized governance.

118

11:27 AM • Jul 25, 2022

But, what if these three sources could be combined to find even more quality information? You could start by looking at Chase’s collection, and find a treasure trove of governance thinking. Taking it a step further, what happens when 0xCadena and Chase both have a piece by the same author in their collections?

That’s the essence of Curatorial Networks. By connecting the dots of trusted sources, you end up solving the discoverability problem web3 publishing suffers from. Keep in mind, you didn’t have to google the word “Governance” once. Just ask a friend of a friend, and you’ll end up building enough of a bibliography to become a world expert before you know it.

These kinds of connections and relationships are exactly what projects like Lens Protocol are achieving and making publicly available. It’s just a matter of time before some visionary launches a web3 music-map, or a fully fledged recommendation engine using curator data.

If that’s the case, what do I curate through my collection? I hear you ask?

Experiments. I love finding new ways of thinking and interesting applications to this beautiful web we’re building. If you’re similarly inclined, I suggest you drop me a “subscribe”.

Curation is a growth mechanic.

But that’s not all that these Networks have to offer. There’s also a curator-side to this formula.

Sure, I may go straight to Chase’s collection to learn about governance. But what does that mean for Chase herself? Through trusting her taste and expertise enough to use her as my starting point; she gets reputation, mentions, and growth: exactly what any creator needs. She becomes a node in my exploration chain, and is rewarded with a bigger reader base as a result.

By collecting pieces she’s interested in within her preferred field, she’s expanding her voice through the people she supports, and the ideas she has backed with her patronage.

Alejandro A.

@K41R0N

Words as a data point that can be built on top of

No one's collecting articles in hopes of selling them for a higher price, but to support the creator

12

3:09 PM • May 25, 2022

In “The Contributor’s Trilemma” I pondered on what happens when your sphere of influence grows beyond what you can offer as a person. Part of that answer may be found in showcasing people who think similarly, and allowing them to connect with your audience. A little piece of your reputation they can carry with them across web3 as they themselves grow.

Collecting is so much more than just supporting your favorite writers with patronage. By signaling who you choose to back to the entire community, you’re also vouching for the author. And earning an established spot as an expert beyond the content and contributions you yourself put out.

Closing thoughts.

We need more nodes (writers) to grow this network, we need more interesting thought processes and healthy debate to push this space forward, and the only way we’ll be able to leverage these perspectives is by using web3 native platforms to plot out narratives and ways of understanding through tokenization.

I’m not here to sell you on the idea of truly owning your audience. The value in that should be self-explanatory. While Mirror may not have the bells and whistles of more popular publishing platforms, it enables so much more to be built on top.

Curatorial Networks are just the beginning of what we could achieve when the discoverability need is met thanks to our community and the data that’s kept in our collections. This is exactly why I refer to Mirror as the web3 Wordpress, rather than comparing it to Substack or Medium. The value this platform offers is so much more than just a blog sharing site.

We just need look beyond the limitations and start thinking of the potential, that’s the web3 ethos. In the meantime, all we’ve got to do to support this mission is to start collecting some dang good writing.

Many people took the leap into Web3 and started contributing to DAOs because of the excitement of being paid in tokens.

That’s because, unlike traditional salaries, tokens offered them almost unlimited upside (similar to equities), and contributors could earn a lot without bringing upfront capital.

But, continuing their journey and becoming increasingly involved in several projects, more contributors realized their tokens also provided them ownership, a voice over future strategic decisions, and unlocked new perks in specific communities.

And, after some time, many contributors found themselves stuck with their tokens, wanting to take profit, and make a living salary, but not at the expense of their voice and their reputation.

So how do we solve this Token Compensation Paradox that’s blocking DAOs and contributors from scaling and moving towards new horizons? Well, if we want to address the problem in-depth and re-think an entire compensation model used by thousands of DAOs, first we need to understand the underlying issues that come with the current situation.

1 - Beyond The Reputation Problem

The contributor compensation problem goes well beyond the simple struggle of sacrificing your reputation to make a livable salary.

With the compensation model we've built, we're heading toward wider inequalities within DAOs, more social pressure for contributors, and an ever increasing amount of DAOs failing due to this unsustainable model.

Indeed, if we want to pride ourselves in building new organizations, reinventing governance and political models; it's essential to separate voice from pay - otherwise, we're just building pure oligarchies and exacerbating inequality.

To illustrate how this model could eventually backfire on DAOs, here’s a real world example of what happens when you tie a person’s bags with their political power: Sweden used a financially weighted voting system until 1910, the number of votes that one could have was proportional to their wealth. This resulted in a couple of individuals having more than half the votes in several dozen municipalities - almost like perfectly legal dictators.

Tina He

@fkpxls

token-weighted voting in the 19th century

26

11:06 AM • May 30, 2022

For DAOs to compete with traditional companies, we should do away with the social pressure that comes with selling tokens. No contributor should have to "short" the DAO and go against their beliefs to pay the bills; nor should they harm or quit a community they believe in, simply because they can't afford to keep their tokens. And the problem goes even further; because the incentives are not aligned, the current compensation scenario can even make the most active contributors hurt the community, their regular sales negatively impacting the token's price and harming the decentralization potential of decision making. All of this, mind you, within the confines of the community they value most.

Your most fervent believers shouldn’t be getting paid exclusively in the same type of virtual currency they use on a day to day basis to make decisions, grow their reputation, and push the DAO forward. By tying their payout to your DAO’s native token, you’re sacrificing the diversity of opinions you aim to nurture, and harming your project as a whole.

If we want to create new compensation models, we must rethink them from the ground up and align incentives between the DAO growth and contributors.

So how do we do that?

2 - Betting On The Long Term

Quite a few obvious ideas come to mind, and some have even been tested out. A handful of people argue that DAOs should pay salaries with Social tokens and use NFTs for reputation. Others have suggested paying contributors only in USDC, or creating two tokens, one for governance and the other as a source of liquidity.

While all those solutions seem promising, implementing or defining any of them as the de facto compensation model for DAOs would be missing the big picture.

Social tokens are much more liquid than NFTs, and allow communities to reward their contributors in a much more streamlined manner. They work particularly well as a reputation system and engage contributors towards exploring everything your community has to offer. Using them simply as a way to compensate contributors would simply kill their utility and their reason to exist. There's no such thing as an NFT that generates continuous engagement and rewards your daily contributors' loyalty.

As the Music NFT's artist Xcelencia mentioned in an interview talking about the way he manages his community:

"I see social tokens as this continuous engagement. I treat it as a sort of loyalty or rewards program where I can keep everyone in and have them contribute in new and different ways.

Whereas I see NFTs as these 'big moments' or highlights, the things you really want to commemorate like a great song, you want to put it out as an NFT. It's a different type of engagement."

Dissociating social tokens from reputation would kill your contributors' engagement, and so would paying them only in USDC.

Paying contributors in USDC would mean firstly not sharing ownership (a core principle of DAOs), and secondly, forgetting that most DAOs usually don't have a financially liquid treasury beyond their tokens. Tokens are a great way to share "future" upside and recognize the effort of early contributors.

Paying contributors in USDC and providing governance tokens to decentralized decisions would surely solve the problem in the short term, but it would also end up nurturing a community without any values beyond the next paycheck.

Something very similar would happen if you choose to create two tokens - one for salary and one for governance.

While some may believe this solves the liquidity problem while retaining the "real" token's intrinsic value, what you're really doing is cutting your community's potential in half by distracting your message and limiting the true capabilities of tokenization.

Besides, the value offered by governance, access, and reputation can be incentive enough in some cases, just not in an everyday scenario for your average contributor. It's not unheard of to see social tokens being sold in "black markets" of sorts for non-negligible prices based on the value they offer alone. So, in the end, the 2nd token would need liquidity anyway, and the problem would still be the same.

All of those failed experiments showed us one thing. We have to see past our shared baggage of Web2 compensation models, where the main way to get compensated is to get a salary once a task is done. Web3 technologies are offering us new ways to share the value created while attributing the merit to the right people, and we must seize this opportunity to build better coordination models and organizations.

3 - It’s Time To Come Up With Revolutionary Ideas

Sure, “We’rE So EarLy” - and there might not be any clear-cut solutions to contributor compensation yet. But we are optimists, and there are so many experiments we could run.

What about exploring ways to fix this token compensation paradox from a protocol-side. There are so many Web3 native solutions and mechanics which would enable a more fair distribution of funds without compromising a social token’s in-built utility, governance, or compliance with securities’ laws. Think about mechanics such as staking, delegation of governance power based on merit, and emission curves. In DAOs with diversified treasuries, we could also envision contributors hand-picking their desired mix of stablecoins (or any token in the treasury) and the DAO token for compensation through customizable smart contracts. In the beginning, contributors would want more stability (90-10 mix), but as they entrench themselves in your community, the more they would tip the scales towards reputation (50-50).

Finally, another interesting solution has recently popped into the scene: tying your reputation to soul-bound tokens and on-chain credentials. While our platforms still have a long way to go in terms of security and actual use-cases for this type of tokens, the promise is there for a non-speculative asset that serves the only purpose of being your web3 ticket to access based on merit. By properly leveraging Soulbound Tokens and offering enough flexibility in their properties, communities could have the key to proper liquidity through their tokens, without compromising their contributor’s reputation, or the DAO’s treasury.

We can play around with the formulae for due recognition of work however we please, even involving systems that may or may not pay people before they complete a certain task based on their already accrued merit. We need only look at the chain, social tokens, NFTs, and all of the other tools we have at our disposal to make this process human-centric and token-enabled.

Closing thoughts

We really are just scratching the surface in how we approach the future of work.

Web3 projects are very different beasts to your average Silicon Valley startup. In order to find a way to compensate the people making all of this happen, we could explore the seasonality of DAOs, our product cycles and monetization. There’s so much to experiment with when it comes to people’s relationship to impact, legacy and the future they want to see. Not everything needs to be a discord server and some Snapshot proposals.

The answer to the token compensation paradox resides in keeping tokens in the equation while disconnecting them from financial value.

If we want contributors to get credit for their work, and social tokens to reach their non-financial heights, we have to leverage the social tokens’ true power and stop looking for use cases where they might not shine their brightest.