I have this long-term goal to start a practice focused solely on play. Not games, not contests, but unsupervised, free play. Not "free to play." Free from stigmas.

My early thesis is that we somehow either lost or are not confident enough anymore to embrace play wholeheartedly. So this blog post—or better, these notes—are simply me capturing thoughts and observations as I develop my theory. If this sparks ideas and pushes you down a rabbit hole, leave a comment, follow along or reach out, that's what I hope for.

Value Glitch

Lately, my head’s been a mess of entangled wires. I’m a.) neck-deep in a large scale research project about a massive ecosystem and the stories that drive it, b.) decided to start writing a zine on a theory about play to complement game theory, c.) reading way too many books that are probably messing with my sanity, and d.) started to “vibe code” a ton of small, weird helpful playful tools just for myself. Somehow, against all logic, these threads feel like they’re all part of the same knot.

The Siren Song of Web3

This all really kicked into high gear with my last few years in Crypto, or Web3, whatever we’re calling it this week. I ended up there mostly for ideological reasons – a belief in an open, interoperable, decentralized internet. After a few years in SF, I was sick to death of walled gardens, of "business interests" always seeming to trample on genuinely good, beneficial innovation. Web3 felt like the antidote. Openness would fuel real competition, real evolution. Interoperability would build stronger, more resilient network effects. Decentralization would give it all longevity. That was the dream I lived by.

On top of that, I had this pet theory: whenever and wherever in human history we create new markets, new forms of culture inevitably emerge and flourish. Looking at the NFT and DAO boom of 2020-2023, I still think there’s a kernel of truth to that. But if I’m being brutally honest, the whole experience also just made me a lot more cynical.

DeFi: New Bricks, Same Old Game?

It's hard to argue that DeFi wasn't the spark for a Cambrian explosion in Crypto. The ERC-20 token standard, smart contracts, the ballooning value tethered to these tokens – it unlocked a whole "new" financial system. Or did it? I keep wondering if it’s truly new. So much of it just looks and feels like the old systems we already have, just with a few extra features and, okay, increasingly better speed. Composability, that holy grail so hard to achieve in disconnected legacy systems, allowed for fascinating new combinations. These are cool experiments, no doubt. But as someone who grew up loving LEGO and worked there, it felt like we just found slicker ways to combine the same old bricks, not a fundamentally different way to play.

The Unsettling Emptiness of "Decentralized Excel"

What really hit me, though, on a personal level, was how deeply unfulfilling I found working in this and with this "decentralized Excel" all day, every day. And it started to make me question, more and more, if any of this stuff even makes sense. From an outsider's view, a lot of crypto often doesn't. Pictures as data entries in a shared spreadsheet valued at millions? A meme becoming a currency people pay top dollar for? Complex financial loops designed to multiply returns from nothing? Sure, that’s cool for my virtual analogy of a bank account, maybe. But what is value, actually?

Here’s a weird thing I noticed about myself: I totally lost any intuitive sense of value and price. I actually started to appreciate hard fiat cash, the kind you can hold in your hands, a hell of a lot more. It gave me an actual, tangible sense of what I possessed. I’m still constantly amazed at myself – how I can have these completely different value systems operating in parallel. One minute I’m in a store, meticulously hunting for discounts on groceries, and literally minutes later, I’m "aping" into some leveraged perps position, risking (and often losing more of than I would like to admit) multiples of that grocery bill. It’s like these worlds are fully disconnected, operating under different laws of physics.

Hyperobjects and the Limits of Economic Metaphors

If there’s any place where our textbook belief in economic equilibrium should exist, crypto markets ought to be it. With my obsession for learning how economics and markets work, I thought – and honestly, still kind of think – crypto is one of the best massive multiplayer real-time research projects happening right now. But it made me question so much of economic theory itself. First off, having seen behind the curtain more often than I probably wanted to, I don’t think even these programmatic markets are as "efficient" as we tell ourselves. There are just too many damn variables. It brings to mind Timothy Morton’s idea of hyperobjects – things so massively distributed in time and space, so complex, that we can’t fully grasp them. And, as a fan of Metaphors We Live By, I know how deeply these conceptual frameworks shape our understanding and how we navigate the world. Or as Marshall McLuhan put it, "the medium is the message." Markets, at least as we define and see them, aren't necessarily hyperobjects themselves, but we always, always seem to simplify them. I’m guilty of this myself; I love the idea of flywheels and feedback loops. As much as they make intuitive sense and are often right, they still get sideswiped by black swans, because no flywheel can ever capture the full, entangled reality of the system it operates within.

The Tyranny of Metrics and Gödel's Ghost

I’ve spent years trying to learn and understand systems design. The more I did, the more I thought it’s less a science and more a weird blend of intuition, intervention, and observation – something that can’t ever be fully captured or formalized. It makes me think a lot about Gödel's incompleteness theorem: no formal system can define its own consistency or capture its entirety. Yet, working in crypto plunged me even deeper into systems that are, first and foremost, data-driven, and therefore metrics-driven. The metrics you establish, the metrics you measure, those are the things you live by. But we rarely, if ever, really question the metrics themselves.

Crypto’s relentless attempt to put a price on everything started to feel like a profoundly limiting factor. This really crystallized for me when I started paying more attention to the common metrics we use – Liquidity, Volume, Revenue – to assign value to an ecosystem. It made me think about the books I was devouring on the concept of GDP, that yardstick we use to measure the health, wealth, and growth of a nation. What I struggle with is that GDP is a made-up construct. It intentionally ignores the fact that the world, and the way we humans navigate and exchange within it, is a hyperobject itself. GDP tries to circumvent this complexity by deliberately leaving vast swathes of reality out of the equation – care work, the environment, the informal economy. It’s the same trick I’d pull with a flywheel diagram. You make a case, you create the metaphor or metric to live by, and that then shapes us. But black swans still happen because, well, we ignored crucial aspects of the whole damn thing. Because Gödel was right, and we end up with things we just can’t fully comprehend.

The Internet Is Not For Us: Zine Dreams and Digital Deluges

This is where my zine idea started to percolate. Two years ago, internally at IDEO CoLab Ventures, I was asked to write my thesis for the future. I wrote it more like a poem – because, I think, at heart, I’m more artist than designer. I titled it "The Internet Is Not For Us." The core idea was an observation from crypto: I deeply believe we misunderstood the rise of bots. We saw them as spam, as noise, not as a the key signal to who this internet was actually made for. Fast forward, and with dead internet theory gaining traction alongside the explosion of generative AI tools, it feels like we’re just at the beginning of a true content and activity deluge – on a scale no single human could possibly compute. I say "compute" intentionally because I love the historical quirk that, not even a hundred years ago, "computer" was a human job description. Maybe our degrading attention spans, our sense of overwhelm, isn't just about the sheer quantity of new things to process, or even the quality. Maybe it’s a form factor problem. Maybe the medium itself is rewiring us.

Valuing Design in a Metrified World

No matter what, it feels like whatever we do these days needs to fit some metric. Our attention, our intention, our efficiency, our productivity – it’s all being measured. And if it’s measured, it seems logical to apply a price, or better yet, a cost to it. This, over the years, has made me really struggle. As I said, I’m an artist and designer, and I found myself increasingly wrestling with how to define the value I add. I operate largely through WE3.co, a design collective we started in 2021, born from the idea that Web3 desperately needed better design and storytelling. Crypto although several years old through an adoption lens it was a technical novelty, still finding its feet, needing clearer images, better experiences, and more human translations to attract the next wave of users and builders. Looking at our clients, I’ve been lucky to work with some of the smartest founders out there, and I’m proud that the quality of design across the entire space has massively improved since we started. So many good designers have joined this field, and in close collaboration with developers, we've made something that was incredibly hard to understand and use a lot more usable. Still a long way to go, though.

My real struggle, however, came in figuring out the value of design itself. It’s not rare for someone I might work with to ask me to jump into a sprint, to "just improve it," "make it more beautiful." I think among designers, we all know that quiet pain when you’re asked to just make something look good, rather than actually think about it. Years at IDEO taught me one crucial thing: design isn’t just the look and feel. The look and feel emerge from a holistic understanding – of the space you’re in, the organization and team, the vision, the users you want to attract, how they operate now, and how they might operate in the future. It's a hyperobject itself. A good design process, for me, was often more intuition, intervention (the actual design work), and observation. An iterative dance. But that often feels completely at odds with the breakneck pace of the startup ecosystem, where results are demanded immediately.

For me, design is a form of cultural glue, a skillset to translate thoughts and ideas into different forms and media, to help proliferate a shared aspiration. Only at the very end might that manifest as a brand or a UI. But things got really hard when trying to value or price that deep, messy, foundational part of the work. Especially since the "last mile" – that final translation, the increasing resolution of the design itself – seemed to become more and more commoditized and streamlined. With the added "benefit" that almost anyone can do it. I’m a huge advocate for anything that lowers the bar for creation. And I’m still mind-blown by how "good" design is becoming accessible. Generative design is a shortcut for many, a net-positive. But it also made me feel more under pressure than ever; it’s the most obvious, tangible part of my work, and therefore the easiest to put a price tag on.

The Unseen Labor of Creation (and the Broken Compass of Value)

It made me think a lot about those books I was reading, about the things we omit from our economic calculations, especially in GDP – like care work, housework, all seen as "non-productive" capital. I felt that, in some ways, creative work, especially the foundational, intuitive exploration often infused with lot of randomness and playfulness part, falls under that too. Beyond that we all do so much free labor in content creation, the very labor that trained the AIs we’re now grappling with. But just like in GDP discussions about care work or even taxes, we don’t account for the time and labor users put in. It made me wonder more and more: is our current understanding of everything just inherently broken?

Quantum Glimmers and Paradigm Shifts

Simultaneously, I got a bit addicted to learning about quantum mechanics. To be very clear, I am no expert; at best, I have a layman's understanding. But it wasn’t the hardcore physics that really fascinated me. While learning about it made me think a lot more about the idea that multiple things can be true at the same time, that more things exist in superposition than we generally want to admit, what hooked me was the historical context. The idea that at the beginning of the last century, there was a consensus among many physicists that they might have reached the end of all there was to understand, only to have a massive paradigm shift lurking just around the corner. Because all of this is so well-documented, it felt like the right place to learn how some of the smartest people alive dealt with the terrifying prospect that their entire worldview might need to change.

And in some ways, these learnings about quantum physics made me think more and more about the internet itself.

The Quantum Internet

We already talked about the idea that the internet might not be for us, but for the bots, the agents, the self-executing smart contracts. The more I learned about quantum phenomena, the more I thought, maybe, just maybe, the internet is actually a sneaky way we’re all learning its fundamentals by immersion. What do I mean by this? The more I immersed myself and experienced it, the more it made me question some core assumptions I had about the world. Online, all things exist right next to each other; there’s no fixed now or then, it all just collapses in front of you. There’s no real locality, especially if you embrace a worldwide, async, collaborative lifestyle. And time seems to flow differently. Things can happen at their own pace, or not just linearly but simultaneously, almost in parallel realities. It’s like entering a universe with completely different rules, separate from our lived physical reality.

So, what if we’re all collectively going through the same kinds of thoughts and challenges that kept some of the smartest minds awake when they had to come to terms with light being, at least, two things at the same time – a wave and particles – but only observable as either/or? That the laws of physics we live by made mostly sense… until they didn’t. The internet itself is that kind of hyperobject, and we all have to deal with it. Sometimes I wonder if our pervasive exhaustion comes exactly from there: it forces us to accept that the reality we try so hard to capture, measure, and define in simpler terms is fundamentally, irrevocably incomplete.

Economics Through a Quantum Lens in Plato's Cave?

Now, let’s go back to crypto, or better, markets. If the internet is this weird place with physics that are more quantum-like than Newtonian, my readings about economics started to make me even more worried. Somehow, we try to make economics, and therefore systems theory, an accurate science while willfully ignoring that our knowledge is incomplete. We end up with statistics and insights that often, more often than not, spectacularly fail – which we then benignly call "black swans" and analyze with profound hindsight bias. Yes, there’s probably some truth to "history doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes," but it’s equally true that this can be very limited thinking. It makes me think of the days before we moved to a heliocentric solar system, when everything supposedly revolved around us and the Earth. We came up with incredibly complicated explanations to make sense of the things that didn’t make sense – why the moon was predictable but other celestial bodies weren’t. Only once we accepted a different reality did other things start to fall into place.

This is what got me thinking about our current state of affairs. One thing I learned the fast way with crypto is getting better at understanding game theory; plus, if you work in a space full of ex-poker players and financial experts, everything becomes a probability and a tit-for-tat. But I felt so out of touch with what I would witness around me. Yes, some of that game theory held true in a perfect, efficient market – which, when a crypto ecosystem is still small and emergent, is more likely to be the case. But at scale, it just breaks. Economics wants to be a "traditional" science but loves to ignore inconvenient aspects to make its case. Obviously, this is probably true for all other sciences to a degree too – again, incompleteness. But it made me wonder what we got wrong from the starting point. It’s a metaphor and a medium we live by. It makes me think a lot of Plato’s cave, where we’re so primed by the shadows that we can’t see what’s really there. Maybe it’s just me being depressed and burned out, but maybe when there’s a collective feeling that something is broken, but we can’t quite name it yet, there must be something there.

So, where are we by now? Crypto is economics on steroids. But economics is built on simplified assumptions in order to be quantifiable. This has led to a set of metaphors and metrics we are informed by and live by. Metaphors that continuously seem to break. And this rupture is intensified by our lived experience in a digital space that immerses us in a form of physics mostly foreign to our intuition. What if we are just at the edge of a paradigm shift, where the most important "truths" we currently operate by are flawed in themselves? Again, I am no economist; I don’t even hold a college degree. But what if economics is just a bit like thinking the world is simpler than it is, and the reality we all know and witness is just a lot more faceted, more quantum?

Faith, Superposition, and the Erosion of Agency

In that case, I’m not surprised we’re seeing a rise in faith-based ideas. Because we are all then thrown back into the Einstein-Bohr debate. If things are incomplete, if there is randomness and not just deterministic outcomes, then who rolls the dice? With faith often comes mythicism. While I don’t want to make this a faith-based post, I feel there’s something to it – that unknown unknowns, probabilities, superposition are frightening concepts to accept, or perhaps they require a leap of faith to truly embrace. Now, this isn’t saying everything is random. What I adore about physics is that we found a way to hold two sets of thoughts – classical and quantum – as complementary to each other, to a degree. Things can be different things at the same time.

This actually gives me a bit of peace, and it also helps me navigate my world a bit better. But then I look at the interfaces in my life – the short-form content, the prompt-to-execution tools, the 140-character limits – and it makes me think that everything around us, by design, reinforces the idea that there is only a singular truth to things. Look at any political, cultural, or economic discussion: if you look closely, it’s never easy or simple. There are always multiple sides, something I truly learned working on privacy. Designing for privacy is never just one thing. It’s always in a grey area. What privacy is to you might be an actual danger for someone else. What I learned, though, is that it’s often less about us defining what is private or not, and more about empowering individuals with more agency and control – therefore, giving power. But that very agency is eroded in a system that is predominantly metric-driven.

Embracing Randomness and Superposition

Agency is still something else I obsess about, which is where we finally come to the theme of the zine and play. I’ve always considered myself to be playful, or at least to get easily lost in play. If I could travel back in time, it would be to that exact moment where I understood that the LEGO sets I had contained more possibility than what they were explicitly sold as; they were a tool that could collapse into so many other things.

But why play? So, let’s revisit: the world we experience is much more complex and incomplete than the systems, metaphors, and metrics around us seem to tell us. We live and operate in a made-up "efficient" world that often operates in actuality outside of these simplifications. And if I look at the progress of our tools and the way we work, we just mirror that demand for efficiency. My work as a designer feels more and more deterministic and execution-driven, while deep down, I know this is not how good design, real innovation, happens. So, if the last 300 hundred years were driven by an "efficient" invisible hand of simple "if this, then just that," profit-loss, supply-demand, creating the games we compete in (mainly economics), then maybe introducing a theory of play is the other part of the equation needed to balance it out.

For me, play is a state where thoughts are much more in superposition. Where things can collide a lot more randomly and lead to more unexpected outcomes. This is where my "vibe coding" just reinforces this. Currently, most of the tools we are using are just linear pathways, leading us to the most probabilistic, predictable outcome. I want to get out of this. I want to embrace randomness as something positive. Because the more randomness I inject into my process, the more interesting and surprising my thoughts become. Maybe, just maybe, all of this is just an elaborate excuse to find a different way to define "process" as a designer.

But what I secretly hope is that by changing the way we design the world around us, by embracing a more quantum-like mindset, an incomplete mindset – one where intuition and observation, even if it comes with metrics, are valued as part of a new, more organic way for progress and innovation. Now, that comes with a big, scary question, because it forces us to rethink our concept of value itself. If value is incomplete, then metrics are not as determined, as fixed, as they seem today. If that is true, we might be up for a rude awakening. It’s heretical shit, really. It forces us to revisit most of the ways we think about ourselves and the world. And maybe, just maybe, that's exactly what we need.

I generally use AI to co-write my notes. I do this because I feel that AI is a wonderful tool more to explore your thoughts and ideas further rather than just fixing your grammar. It's easy to generate AI slop. But I think we underestimate the aspect of how our tools are tools for expansion rather than just getting something out fast based on your first impression.

Hi there. I am RM. I read on someone else's blog it's always good to set the scene for what these notes are about, because most readers haven't read what came before. So here we are.

I have this long-term goal to start a practice focused solely on play. Not games, not contests, but unsupervised, free play. Not "free to play." Free from stigmas.

My early thesis is that we somehow either lost or are not confident enough anymore to embrace play wholeheartedly. So this blog—or better, these notes—are simply me capturing thoughts and observations as I develop my theory. If this sparks ideas and pushes you down a rabbit hole, leave a comment, follow along or reach out, that's what I hope for.

Find out more ⇒ www.welostplay.wtf or reach out to hey (at) ramonmarc (dot) com .

Ideas Should Flow Freely

You know, a pet peeve I’ve got with AI? It’s that I often feel it makes me lazy. Seriously. What I mean is, most of the tools I use, day in and day out, they’re really just about getting me from Point A to Point B. Dead straight. I tell it what I want, some AI chews on my prompt, and voila– there’s my outcome. And yeah, that’s amazing, truly. But it’s like always taking the highway, never the scenic route. Super practical, sure, like a highway is. But just like a highway, I can’t shake this feeling I’m missing out on… well, something.

I’m already using AI to a pretty wild extent, in all sorts of everyday stuff. I’m a creative and early-adopter, and that’s mainly how I see it – a tool to help me create. It’s definitely made me faster, helped me pick up new skills I probably wouldn’t have otherwise. Like with code; I can actually get my ideas out there now, which used to be a real struggle. So, in that way, AI’s been this incredible door-opener, making things way more accessible.

But then I look around at the AI tools popping up, and it feels like they’re all built for convergence. You type in what you think you want, and you get it. But what if there’s more than what you think you want? Design, as a whole process, kinda beat that into my head. Design’s this constant dance, this Yin and Yang between converging on an idea and then blowing it wide open again – diverging. You mess with ideas, let ‘em collapse, then smash ‘em apart and let ‘em collapse again. For me, the whole creative thing is about playing fast and loose, letting things get a bit messy so something genuinely new can bubble up. It’s not about sticking to the damn rules all the time; it’s about that glorious, messy exploration.

And the way AI is right now, mostly through chat windows, it feels so… linear. Like it’s the AI’s way or the highway, literally. But come on, there’s gotta be more to it than that, right? My gut just screams that the ways we’re used to figuring things out are kinda creaking under the strain of all this new complexity. We need different kinds of filters, different ways of seeing.

A lot of my projects these days are this jumble of research and concepts that I try to waveform collapse into some form of a vision, strategy, roadmap or product. And yeah, AI can spit out a bunch of answers if you poke it right. But still, the form factor, the way we interact with it, feels like it boxes you in. My thing, if I have any kind of "thing," is trying to connect the dots that don’t look like they connect, and then asking those "what if?" questions.

So, part of what I’m up to right now is trying to pull together a zine about Play. I call it a serious non-serious zine. The big idea is that as AI takes over more and more of the routine stuff in our lives, real, honest-to-goodness play should have a comeback. But I’m not talking about those gamified mechanics, all the points and badges that are everywhere today. I mean proper, unsupervised free play. Because if you want to cook up genuinely new ideas, you can’t just play by the rules someone else made up. You’ve got to cast a much wider net, maybe even embrace a bit of what I call Creative Ignorance. For me, free play is like… it’s like an idea in a quantum superposition. Everything’s possible at once, and then through play, it collapses into something new.

For this zine, I don’t just want to write about it. I want the way I make it to be part of the exploration too. Challenge myself. Besides, with all these new tools bubbling up, you’d be daft not to mess around with them, right? That’s how you get ready for whatever’s next. I’ve always had this thing for using tools in ways they weren’t meant to be used. As a kid, a stick wasn’t just a stick – it was a sword, a wand, a piece of much larger thing. As a grown-up, it’s the same with tools. Sure, it might do one thing really well, but that doesn’t mean you can’t twist it into doing something else entirely. Sometimes that kind of "productive misunderstanding," that so-called ignorance, is exactly where the brilliant, unexpected ideas come from. That’s pretty much my philosophy in a nutshell. It’s how I believe fresh perspectives get cooked up.

As I have this super early draft of the zine, I started to think, how do I break out of my own damn box, game loops, linear thinking here? How do I see what else is lurking? To do that, and to stay true to the whole spirit of the play zine itself, I need ways to spark emergence, to get things diverging instead of just neatly converging. The zine’s nowhere near done, so I need to keep prompting or better playing myself into new zones, find ways to actually generate new thoughts, not just refine old ones.

There’s this core design idea that’s always buzzing in my head: so much creativity just springs from interpretation, from getting things a bit wonderfully wrong – productive misunderstanding. Seriously, sometimes you mishear something, or see it sideways, or just plain creatively misinterpret it, and boom, you’ve got a whole new angle on it. Reading between the lines, twisting an idea just enough to make it generative – that’s my feature, not a bug! It’s why I reckon the most vital part of research isn’t often just staring at your own filter bubble, or your own field. It’s about looking out there, seeing how the world works in totally different places, or in similar ways you never expected. Then you take those learnings, pull ‘em apart, and mash ‘em up with what you already know. It’s like playing with LEGO bricks, all the time. We think the world is built from instruction manuals, but it’s really just a massive pile of bricks, buzzing with possibilities, waiting for someone to snap them together differently, without too much reverence for the original instructions.

So, that got me thinking: how can I use AI… differently? I am a PlayStation fan, and I remember this game, Flow, from the early PS3 days. Just this rather simple but truly stunning, abstract, deep-sea world where you swam around with these other weird, floaty creatures. And it hit me: what if thoughts had their own life? What if they could drift and move through some kind of space, searching, hunting, maybe even… mating with other thoughts? What if I could build an "idea aquarium" and just watch these ideas emerge, more organically?

And the wild thing is, nowadays, you can just builds tuff like that. So, I hacked together a first version. It took my notes, broke them down using this elaborate prompt I cooked up to mimic how my brain usually wanders, and then mapped it all out as a graph. And what was so cool was, out of nowhere, this map just appeared, showing all these new connections AI had found between my ideas. Is it scientifically rigorous? Hell no. Perfect? Not a chance. But it let me see my zine content from a completely new angle. And while I was looking at it, I realized how damn playful it was, how fun it was just to nudge these ideas around because I’d accidentally coded in some movement. And I thought, "Right, that’s it. Let’s build that idea aquarium for real."

So, I did. I built this more ambient kind of space for ideas. I can chuck thoughts in, AI dices them up, and they become these little independent entities swimming around in my aquarium. They just cruise around freely. It’s a bit like Dumbledore in Harry Potter, siphoning off his memories into the Pensieve, right? Only my "memories," these ideas, they’re not just sitting there passively waiting to be looked at. They move. And as they bump into each other, they start forming these little bonds, these connections. They spark new insights just by colliding. Sometimes they even cook up whole new thoughts if they reckon they’re onto something. Occasionally, a bond gets strong enough that it throws out what I call a "design provocation." And sometimes, after a while, they just decide to break apart again, go back to their basic bits, and start fresh.

It’s super early days, just a prototype. But there’s a part of me that really thinks there’s something huge in making innovation, making progress itself, much more playful. Just messing with the look and feel of this thing, it’s already shunted my brain into totally new territories. And seeing ideas actually formin front of you, more organically, it’s kind of magic. Though, I did quickly realize that if you’re not paying attention, you can accidentally create some kind of thought-virus, where things just grow exponentially. There’s probably a deep metaphor in there somewhere. Maybe "wrong" is just "different" waiting for its proper moment, its context.

Look, all I’m really trying to say is, this whole experiment might make me rethink my entire zine. There’s way more to "play," even when you’re just writing, than I ever thought at the start. And maybe, just maybe, a bit of that intentional dreaming, that playful rebellion against the way things are, is exactly the kick in the pants I all need right now. Also as always if you try to make something beautiful and fun, cool things will always happen.

I generally use AI to co-write my notes. I do this because I feel that AI is a wonderful tool more to explore your thoughts and ideas further rather than just fixing your grammar. It's easy to generate AI slop. But I think we underestimate the aspect of how our tools are tools for expansion rather than just getting something out fast based on your first impression.

I have this long-term goal to start a practice focused solely on play. Not games, not contests, but unsupervised, free play. Not "free to play." Free from stigmas. But I spend most of my professional time to help early-stage teams to evolve raw ideas into minimal lovable products.

So this blog—or better, these notes—are simply me capturing thoughts and observations as I develop my theory or capture insights from helping teams out there. If this sparks ideas and pushes you down a rabbit hole, leave a comment, follow along or reach out, that's what I hope for.

If you want to work with me reach out to ramon@we.co

Working in and across crypto, I usually get this feeling – yeah, this is the future, it’s already here, but it’s just, "not really that well distributed yet." That’s the comfortable default, the one we all seem to hum towards when we talk about onboarding the next generation. But I’m starting to wonder a bit if that whole mindset, that well-worn thought, is starting to fall a bit short, maybe even missing something fundamental.

Over the last few weeks, diving for a project request deep into crypto's current state, talking with a huge breadth of teams, this nagging feeling has grown. While the challenges and aspirations often sound similar, I’m starting to wonder if most of us, the ones supposedly in the thick of it, are kind of missing what’s actually happening right now. Like that German saying, about not seeing the forest for all the trees? In crypto, I originally felt compelled by Cixin Liu's Dark Forest metaphor – the lone actor / predator. But I always thought that was a bit limited, too focused on the hunter, forgetting the forest itself might be aware, conscious even. And that’s the crux: I’m beginning to suspect most of us are so plugged into our crypto space that we can't truly see how this whole ecosystem has evolved, way, way beyond our current expectations. What I want to say is, I think parts of crypto are already far wider distributed than we realize, just not in the neat rows we imagined planting.

This isn't a totally new thought for me. I’m working on my dream side project, a zine about "Play Theory" – my attempt to define something complementary to "Game Theory." Game Theory is about optimizing inside existing rules; Play Theory, for me, is about what happens when new, unscripted forms of interaction emerge. And sifting through old notes for that, I stumbled upon this idea of leapfrogging: tunneling straight to a similar, but completely different, outcome.

I saw this play out, from my own naive, biased perspective, back in 2014 in Hong Kong. Working with other locals, I found it fascinating how they’d grown up with the internet. My story was desktop, then regular phone, then smartphone. But a huge part of people there seemed to have straight-up leapfrogged right to the end game. If you skipped those beats, you didn’t have some of the baggage, some of the ingrained concepts. That sometimes meant not getting all the references, sure, but it also meant approaching things with a bit more of an open mind.

There's something about this idea: the future isn't just unevenly distributed; it articulates itself unevenly. That’s the core thought I’m wrestling with. I’ve long been curious about how progress happens, why it sometimes seems to slow down. It’s easy to blame bureaucracy – and I do believe there's truth to that – but it doesn’t give you the full picture. It made me think about bureaucracy as a form of tradition, of legacy. And there’s definitely in all of us often a form of nostalgia. The good old times that got things right. I’m guilty of that too. But the more I think about it, I see it also as a bit of a trap. Time and again, history shows these moments where we leapfrog. Take a shortcut through a wormhole to straight up alternative reality. Outcomes can be good or bad, that’s not the point, but it changes the trajectory.

So, I want to dive into two aspects where I start to wonder if we, as the chronically online hyper-involved closely connected crypto twitter community, might be misunderstanding things. And misunderstanding, for me, isn't always bad; it's an invitation for new interpretations.

First, user experience. I told myself, try a new app every other day, just do things on-chain. And to my surprise, the user experience, in contrast to what the conversation in my known public squares feels like, is a lot more disconnected on where we already are. Chain abstraction, wallet abstraction, mini apps, agents – they seem way further along than I thought. There are enough great examples already that make you forget there's crypto in the background. And it isn't usually about hiding crypto for the sake of its "toxic" appearance; they often embrace crypto and its superpowers full-heartedly, but simply for a way easier user experience or different new outcome.

The thing is, I realized a lot of this collides a lot with my OG-primed mindset of what crypto and its values are. While the designer in me is all for better usability, the crypto fundamentalist in me continuously cringes in exactly those moments. Because I feel this goes against my values on transparency, etc. That cringe is interesting, though. It's like a signal. I am the old man screaming at the cloud.

Second, and this is where things get really fuzzy, are the use cases. They seem not exactly to be the thing I imagined. Yes, they’re kind of what I thought, but they’ve developed slightly differently. It feels like the last few years I was more or less overall directionally right but seemed to get the manifestation quite a bit wrong.

Take DeFi. We started thinking about it as a replacement for the existing financial system. Or at least that was a core motivation. We invented, or better, replicated a lot of existing concepts through a crypto lens. Lending, borrowing, trading – all good. But it does make me think of my early app days; it feels like a form of skeuomorphism, us replicating what we had before to make it familiar. But then, somehow, the most activity isn't really happening in the products that neatly replicate what we had before, just with crypto. What’s winning, apparently? New casinos. Or, as I wrote for my other blog, maybe memes aren't just casinos but more like a new form of e-sport. The reality seems to be that the idea was to create a better financial system, but a lot of users leapfrogged to a different conclusion.

If you’ve been in this space as long as I have (first touched it in 2016, full-time during the pandemic), your mind is very much driven by crypto's origin story. Our early DeFi feels like those first App Store apps – using the new environment but with an old, non-mobile-first view. The true monster apps that made mobile what it is – Uber, Tinder, Snapchat, etc – felt so much different. They weren't just digitizing old objects or cramming desktop metaphors onto small screens. They were native. I think something similar is happening in crypto.

I was truly mind-blown by WeChat when living in Shanghai in 2016. Chat-driven interfaces, mini-apps, QR codes, direct payments – it felt like an alternative mobile internet future that evolved organically, not out of the legacy I had to deal with. "Legacy" there was my previous experience and knowledge.

That same thing, I think, is happening in crypto right now. You need to squint a bit, or better, zoom out with an open mind. As a crypto fundamentalist, someone who entered this space because the internet needs to be open, persistent, community-owned, interoperable, composable, permissionless – leading to transparency, censorship resistance, innovation, individual agency, freedom – I’m personally often stuck seeing all those things together, trying to live up to all of that.

The reality, though, is that crypto has leapfrogged to some of that, but also beyond it already. Talking with traders made me realize they're not thinking the same way. My crypto-twitter-protocol-debate brain is different from someone who just embraced tokens as a new game. Memecoins aren't simply casinos for them; it seems more like this e-sport. They don’t think, care about or consider important most of the things I think about; they took an aspect of crypto and built an entire experience and idea around it. This means a disconnect between the legacy and idea I have and how they see it. It’s easy for me to see this as friction, or worse, as them taking something dear to my heart and Frankenstein-ing it. But that doesn’t seem entirely fair. It’s like that mobile experience in Asia I experienced – they jumped to a different place because they didn’t have my legacy concepts. In that sense, there’s something to say crypto is winning, but "we" (as the crypto twitter community) might have lost in that sense – our ideas are directionally right, but we’re missing how people coming in now adapt it and leapfrog ahead.

What does this mean in practice? It’s not just that tokens are separate from what I consider crypto. Those who see trading as an e-sport aren't thinking that much about the technology as we do. They’re asking: what’s the best Battle Royale right now? Like Fortnite or CS:GO, some games have powerful communities that draw new users in, but better games can emerge all the time. They’re there to play. TPS matters, like frames per second, but it’s not all that matters. They populate the same space and come for the play not the Unreal Engine, but it might be me who has the limited perspective.

I think crypto grew up massively, and in the past, we all may have thought too holistically about it. A conversation about the future of the sequencer made me realize I’d never thought about it as a creative opportunity for new mechanisms, because I tend to think through crypto solely through all I know by now. What’s truly happening is builders and communities are taking parts of our space and running with it. These parts are often still aligned with our ethos but seem foreign at first glance because, well, why don’t you care about the rest as much as I do?

Another example: Stripe and financial institutions embracing stablecoins. I always thought the future would be stablecoins, maybe CBDCs. But digital payments are just getting more crypto-like: pay in whatever, receive whatever, a solver takes care of it. Stripe doesn’t really talk about crypto the way I do, but they’ve fully embraced parts of it. I’m overly simplifying, but there’s truth here: blockchain payments "won," but similar to trading as e-sport, it didn’t shape up exactly as we envisioned.

It makes me think of how we believed the future was flying cars, not shared robotaxis we call on our phones. Directionally right about travel evolving, but the articulation was off. The future is fuzzy that way.

The more you play with crypto apps, the more you see it: we’ve been directionally right but missed out on it collectively because we view it too holistically. The future seems to be communities and builders taking aspects of our stack and building entire experiences around them. Finance wasn't replaced directly; it evolved into a form of e-sports for many. Crypto payments are going a similar way. Directionally, we were always right; we just couldn’t see the forest for its trees.

If this is true, then progress will happen not through holistic improvement but through even more fragmentation and specialization. I often think about that meme – half of all consumer products were just Craigslist categories. Something like this feels like it's happening in crypto. New builders aren't looking at crypto the same way I do anymore. They take specific pieces, combine them, and evolve them completely differently. This is how finance became e-sport, how stablecoins become e-commerce. And it will probably happen to our other ideas and concepts too. The forest is growing, wild and unpredictable, and it's far more diverse than any single gardener, including me, could have planned.

I generally use AI to co-write my notes. I do this because I feel that AI is a wonderful tool more to explore your thoughts and ideas further rather than just fixing your grammar. It's easy to generate AI slop. But I think we underestimate the aspect of how our tools are tools for expansion rather than just getting something out fast based on your first impression.

This is my digital playground where I dump ideas, debate with AIs, and document the interesting collisions. If you're new here, welcome to the chaos.

I'm obsessed with crypto as massive-scale coordination experiments, not just money. I work with WE3, and my true passion is understanding play - how we lost it and how to get it back (welostplay.wtf).

Well, now that I have your attention, let's talk about "privacy." If you've been anywhere near crypto circles lately, especially around Ethereum, you've likely noticed a rising narrative: Crypto is for privacy. Or, in meme terms, it always has been.

This isn't entirely wrong, but I think the way we talk about privacy has some serious flaws. And how we talk about things, the language and metaphors we choose, shapes reality. It’s something I think about a lot in my work helping projects shape their grand narratives.

Don't get me wrong. I'm a massive advocate for the ideals often bundled under the privacy umbrella. Years ago, I was lucky enough to work with IDEO and Mozilla exploring data and privacy. My belief in individual empowerment, ownership, and decentralization to reduce trust in single points of failure is why I'm in this space. These concepts are deeply intertwined.

But the word "privacy"? That's where my hesitation comes in.

The Trouble with "Privacy"

Over the years, I've found that metaphors and language are probably the most powerful design tools in the world. The metaphors we choose ripple outwards, shaping understanding and action. And "privacy," as a metaphor and a term, is a beast. It's vague, loaded, and lends itself to rapid, often unhelpful, conclusions.

On paper, we might agree privacy means keeping things to yourself, protection, avoiding exploitation. But in practice:

1. It's Too Easily Hijacked: The word gets pulled in countless directions. Onchain, where transparency has been a core tenet, suddenly focusing only on "privacy" can feel like a confusing pivot.

2. It Invites the Wrong Debate: How often have we heard, "If you don't have anything to hide, you don't need privacy"? It's a terrible argument, yet incredibly effective at shutting down nuanced conversation. "Privacy" gets instantly framed as hiding, as secrecy.

3. It's Wildly Subjective: What you consider private, I might not. Privacy is contextual – it changes based on environment, community, even the moment. This makes broad pronouncements about "privacy" often lead to meaningless debates where everyone talks past each other.

4. It Creates Black-and-White Thinking: Look at tools like Tornado Cash. For some, it's purely a money-laundering tool. For others, it's vital infrastructure for individuals in oppressive regimes or simply for financial self-defense. The "privacy" frame forces us into these extreme corners.

   
   

Privacy isn't the antithesis of transparency. It's not just about hiding. But the word itself drags that baggage along.

The Real Goal: It's Not About Privacy, It's About Control

Here’s the core insight that emerged from that Mozilla exploration, and it fundamentally shifted my perspective: Privacy is not about privacy but about control and power.

Let that sink in. Privacy is an outcome, not the thing itself.

Think about it. When I work with teams defining their vision, we talk about altitudes of narrative. Abstract concepts like Ethereum's "infinite garden" or "world computer" resonate with some but leave others cold. "Privacy" operates at a similarly high, abstract altitude. It describes a desired state but not the mechanism or the core value driving it.

What is the driving value? What connects the dots between crypto's core promises – self-sovereignty, permissionless systems, true data ownership?

It's control.

• Control over your information.

• Control over your communications.

• Control over your assets.

• Control over your digital identity and interactions.

• Control over what is shared, when, how, and with whom.

This is the power that centralized platforms often deny us, making decisions for us, often without our knowledge. Shifting the frame from the passive state of "privacy" to the active agency of "control" aligns perfectly with crypto's original, radical appeal: individual empowerment.

Shifting the Narrative: From Defense to Empowerment

So, if privacy is the outcome (the Y), what's the input (the X) and the process (the How)?

The "How" involves technology: cryptography, zero-knowledge proofs, and innovations I'm not expert enough to detail fully. Incredible work is happening there.

But the "Why" and the narrative we build around it? That's crucial.

If we frame our goal simply as "The Future is Private," we invite the crime scene debate heads-on. We put ourselves in a defensive corner, forced to constantly justify ourselves against the (sometimes factual) argument that these tools can be misused. It’s often a losing battle in the court of public opinion.

What if, instead, we frame our mission around empowerment through control?

We are building and implementing advanced cryptography not just for "privacy," but to give individuals resilient control over their digital lives. We are building decentralized systems to make individuals less reliant on intermediaries and more sovereign.

In this framing, privacy isn't the potentially suspect primary goal; it's a desirable, intentional side effect of building systems that put users back in the driver's seat. It's about resilience, not just hiding.

The Elephant in the Room: Control Isn't Convenient (Yet)

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: Privacy, and the control it requires, is often inherently user-unfriendly. The reality of managing your own keys, permissions, and data visibility today is inconvenient.

Think about those cookie banners across the EU. How many of us actually spend time configuring our choices? Most click "accept all" for the convenience of accessing the site. We are guilty of signing away our power and rights for an immediate dopamine hit or simple ease of use.

This is the critical challenge we face alongside the technological one. Abstraction layers in crypto (like account abstraction) are improving UX, making things smoother. But abstraction is a double-edged sword. It can simplify, but it can also obscure, potentially abstracting away actual control in the name of convenience.

If user empowerment through control is the mission, then we need to invest with as much rigor and effort into the User Experience of control as we do into the underlying cryptography.

How do we make exercising control not just possible, but intuitive and convenient? How do we design interfaces and experiences where users feel empowered, not burdened?

The Path Forward: Build for Control, Talk About Empowerment

Let me be clear: we absolutely should continue pushing the technological frontiers that enable privacy. That work is essential.

But we need a parallel push on two other fronts:

1. Shift the Narrative: Let's talk less about the abstract, easily misunderstood concept of "privacy" and more about the tangible, empowering goal of user control. Frame it as resilience, sovereignty, and agency.

2. Obsess Over UX for Control: We need to make user empowerment convenient. This requires dedicated focus on design, usability testing, and finding interaction models that don't force users to trade control for simplicity. We need experiences where managing permissions and data feels as natural as sending a message.

3. Develop Better Metaphors: We need visuals and ideas that expand the concept beyond just "keeping secrets" to encompass the full scope of digital self-determination.
   

The goal is a decentralized digital space where individuals are genuinely empowered. Where privacy isn't a debated feature, but a default property emerging from systems designed, from the ground up, for user control.

Let's empower us out there.

I generally use AI to co-write my notes. I do this because I feel that AI is a wonderful tool more to explore your thoughts and ideas further rather than just fixing your grammar. It's easy to generate AI slop. But I think we underestimate the aspect of how our tools are tools for expansion rather than just getting something out fast based on your first impression.

If you are a team that explores better UX or narratives around privacy through the lens outlined above, reach out through ramon@we3.co.

At the beginning of the year, I made a decision to gradually shift the way I work and what I do. In short, I want to embrace my roots around play more, and as part of this, do something I've wanted to do for a long time: publish a book. For now, it's simply called "We Lost Play" — my play thesis.

The plan is straightforward: continue project work with startups as I do now, but become more selective about the work I take on to gradually move toward the kind of work I hope to do more of. I'm in no rush. My goal is to publish something in the fall, primarily for myself. There's something legitimizing about having an ISBN number (I'm kind of kidding, but not really). Publishing something in print is a bucket list item for me. Beyond that, I'll launch a website by the end of the year to highlight my focus and hopes for future business, starting with a blog.

Why a Blog?

What's my aspiration for this blog? I find it's a great way to keep myself accountable when others subscribe. It allows me to consolidate my thoughts in one place while enabling others to reach out. From experience with my existing writing, it's also an excellent way to attract work in the future. In essence, I want to establish my thinking.

So here we are. This post isn't about my thesis (I'll link to my future blog for that). Instead, it's about the challenge of deciding on a tool or platform for this endeavor.

Platform Dilemma

Option one: code something myself. I'm an advanced beginner in coding, so I could probably make it work. But the reality is it's easy to dismiss all the small quality-of-life features that existing tools have — features I might not even be aware of, wouldn't include, or simply couldn't implement.

I could also use something like Ghost or other self-publishing platforms. I like having full control. But from experience, when I lean toward options like this (similar to coding it myself), I often find myself (a) uncertain about what I actually want and need, and (b) overengineering things due to having some skills that aren't my core capabilities, ultimately abandoning the project after the second post.

So that leads me to existing platforms: Substack, Paragraph, or something else. The challenge is that you essentially need to make a decision before you even publish. I have this probably misguided feeling that you shouldn't post in multiple places, and I'm not a fan of cross-posting. It feels strange to copy and paste across multiple feeds just to reach more eyes, though I'm surely guilty of doing this.

Which Platform?

I'm still a fan of the Lens ecosystem and I love giving newcomers a chance, so I tried Fountain.ink. Being new means it's super early-stage, but content is stored on a decentralized storage solution (a plus) and it integrates easily with Lens, where I have the most followers. You could argue this is the best place to attract an audience. But since it's new, it's still rather limited, and since the platform itself isn't well-known yet, there aren't cross-network effects from people accidentally discovering your content just by being there.

This is why I'm posting this on my Paragraph blog. I already have roughly 200 subscribers, though declining open rates suggest they either don't like my content (which is fair enough) or they're not real users. I'm using Paragraph only because Mirror was deprecated, which I really loved for its simplicity. One observation I've had is that both Mirror and Paragraph have the "collect" feature so prominently placed that it makes them very much crypto blogs.

Since I want my focus and reach to be broader, I feel tempted to launch elsewhere. Crypto can easily be seen as poisonous or misinterpreted. Although I'm a permissionless, distributed, decentralized, interoperability, composability maximalist, if your goal is to reach a more general audience, it's easy to be dismissed as just another crypto bro. So I'm thinking, well, maybe not Paragraph after all.

Which then leads me to Substack. What I realized through my exploration this week is that existing content defines the context in which I want to be seen or associated. This is why Fountain.ink (which is Lens) and Paragraph, both with their specific vibes, may not be right for me. Tooling-wise, Substack is years ahead. But as mentioned, I'm a web3 maximalist. I hate the control Substack has over me. There's always Medium, but publishing there feels dated now. So what should I do?

The Real Issue

I'm not actually looking for an answer; I'm still exploring. But this process has reminded me repeatedly that tokens aren't the coolest or most important thing about the markets and culture we're building today.

As I posted the same blog in several places, I've had to come to terms with the fact that platforms generally suck. The permissionless nature that drove both Farcaster and Lens in the first place remains an incredible superpower: post once but have it appear in multiple places. A shared social graph is a superpower; having some form of monetization built in by default is an almost too-good-to-be-true add-on.

Lately, I feel web3 has shifted away from its core concepts of interoperability and composability. These were always the superpowers for me. I'm a big fan of the latest evolution in chain and wallet abstraction, where you choose your interface and the backend matters less. Apps like World and Infinex are really leading the charge here, and they still excite me as much as day one. But I feel we're slowly moving away from that vision toward more lock-in, even if it's well-hidden.

My Simple Wish

All I want, selfishly, is an easy way to have a Markdown file with images that can be effortlessly distributed across all platforms, bringing all comments and feedback together. It's a lofty, probably slightly utopian dream. But that's what I felt "protocols not platforms" has always been about.

As we slowly but suddenly enter the next iteration of web3, where all infrastructure finally disappears into the background (thank you!), I feel there's a real threat that we'll end up with arbitrary boundaries and walls again. So if you're building anything social, I know your economic instincts tell you to treat interoperability, permissionlessness, and composability as secondary goals at best. Please don't do that. Life would be a lot easier if you didn't.

We're more into a decade of crypto now, and you can feel it – it seems there has been suddenly but all at once a recent vibe shift among the industry. Something's changed. The original bet, crypto at its core, was on open, censorship resistant, decentralized, permissionless infrastructure. That raw energy, that fight for a different kind of internet – it feels quieter now. The reality settling in is that these core values... are simply opposite of the fast narratives and desire of the builder communities. It feels like the fundamentals, essential as they are, often come across as a burden, not an opportunity, especially when the pressure to scale hits.

And let's be honest, privacy is hard. Decentralization is costly. Going full permissionless, fully open source? That impacts moats, makes businesses less defensible. But the constant refrain is: for crypto to win, we have to scale. This, at least for me, has led a bit to some sort of a crisis. I came here for those values, for that fight.

The Convenience Trap: We Want the Ideals, But We Click 'Accept'

Here’s the tricky part: most of the core values... [are] something we might desire, but don’t require until we actively need it. You don’t really think about your chat encryption day-to-day, until they leak. You don’t obsess over fund safety, until they get stolen. Data privacy isn’t top of mind, until you get hacked. Day to day most of those values are good to have but not as important for our day to day life... time and time we have all gave up a little bit for a bit more convenience.

We accept those cookie popups instantly because they block what we want to read. We often just don’t think enough about it. Yes, there are those folks truly fighting the good fight, and we should be grateful. But in reality most of the time we are online to fulfill some latent need... and we don’t want to think twice. The very principles we cherished held back onboarding. It’s easy here to blame the user. Not your keys not your coins. Do your own research. Don’t trust verify. But in all honesty we rarely have time for it. That’s why convenience through abstraction wins.

The Platform Rise: Building Walls Where We Dreamed of Avenues

This user reality paved the road for where we seem to be heading. This is why chain abstraction, wallet abstraction, gasfee abstraction, etc. matter so much. People want things to be easy, fun. They don't want to think twice. We are shifting from open protocols further to platform like businesses. We know platforms from Web2; they're incredibly successful value and attention-capture machines. Platforms have walls and moats; protocols intended to replace them with avenues. It’s like choosing between building a walled city or letting Paris sprawl until the walls got replaced with ring roads and avenues. Both have their logic, but they're different beasts.

It feels like L2s and many integrated apps are leaning towards the walled infinite garden model. They offer smoother on-ramps, slicker experiences. My idealistic dream was a decoupling from infrastructure and interface, but I mistakenly thought that’s going to be a lot easier. Now, we are getting to a point where the interface again is the sole experience. And it is user-friendly, often delightful. But these platforms, while built on protocols, often recreate old school platform dynamics – concentrating control points (like sequencers), guiding users through preferred pathways, creating soft lock-ins. The abstraction is powerful, but often hiding more than just complexity.

Protocol Cosplay: When Decentralization Feels Like Theater

Thinking back, was the initial protocol push always pure conviction? Or was it sometimes, perhaps most likely, a way to protect yourself against potential regulatory pitfalls? This, I feel, has led to a world where some teams (don't take it personally) effectively cosplayed as protocols. They adopted the language, perhaps for regulatory cover or community buy-in, only to pivot to platforms when the momentum shifted.

And honestly, at last a lot of decentralization is a lot of cosplay anyway (sadly). How truly decentralized is a system if ownership or validation is concentrated? It can feel like more decentralization theater for optics than for purpose. I am not a fan here of sufficiently decentralized as some end goal. I don’t think anyone who wants to get rich or powerful has been really willingly give away power for free. Centralization offers speed and focus; you don't need messy community consensus.

The Unfunded Mandate: Who’s Minding the Pipes?

But underneath the shiny platform interfaces are the protocols – the essential plumbing, the foundational layers we build upon. (En-dash to highlight this text is a collaboration with a LLM obviously). Protocols are the underlying piping systems, inherently harder to engage with directly unless you have the technical chops. And they carry a persistent, difficult truth: the ongoing effort required for maintenance of this infrastructure is often not yet calculated in, and sadly not seen as exciting and high pay work itself. Decisions about upkeep, upgrades, or replacements – the unglamorous necessities – become points of friction rather than shared responsibility.

No infrastructure comes for free. The thrill is in building the new; maintenance is the long, unsexy, expensive haul. We may acknowledge maintenance is a public duty... but in general not the sexy job to do. This is especially true for protocols, which are harder to monetize directly than the platforms they enable. Progress can stall. Incentives get skewed: it can’t be that the best jobs rely on it, but the jobs that provide it are second nature. We simply haven't solved funding these digital public goods sustainably.

Ethereum as Bedrock, Life Happening Upstairs?

So, where does this leave a foundational layer like Ethereum? Its past narrative was unbundling for scale, sparking huge innovation. Now, with so much activity migrating, Some see it as safe haven, the place of last resort. Like that good old neutral Swiss bank account – maybe not for daily use, but the ultimate security layer. It's battle-tested, meaningfully decentralized, maintained. It has a hardness.

But the danger is, as users get comfy on the polished platforms upstairs, the bedrock basement gets forgotten. You care about the faucets or your heavy rain shower head... only when its blocked you care about the pipes in the wall. But so far you probably haven't spend a second about the sewage system overall at all. The more it fades into the background, the easier it is for the online noise machine to dismiss its relevance. (Don’t trust everything what you read on a social feed might be a good reminder. At least that’s what I tell myself.)

Beyond Tokens: Still Searching for the Real Business Model (and Soul?)

We still haven't truly cracked scalable business models beyond VC fuel and maybe some niche value capture. My hunch is that we over index on tokens. They've been one answer, but it's clear tokens come with their own down and upside. The short attention spans led to a meme-ification of the entire financial markets. Perceived value often feels completely detached from actual value. We turbocharged trading gamification, creating a whole new class of savvy traders and gamblers disconnected of the projects associated with tokens itself.

Sometimes this really makes me think that in general we have not yet found yet an actual business model for the internet itself, beyond access, ads, and rent-seeking. Is crypto just finding new ways to do the same?

My hope is that the real potential, the path back to the core promise, lies deeper. That verifiable compute and zero knowledge proof will be the key, combined with smart contracts on a permissionless, censorship resistant and widely decentralized chain (the world computer in my mind). These feel like they could enable genuine agency, privacy, and economic freedom in ways platforms alone might not. Agency is the ability to exit with everything all at once. Agency is power and control over data (including financial assets) and identity. For me the promise of crypto was always permissionless access and full agency.

Freedom or Just Better Cages? The Choice We're Making.

By now, we have a sound proof of concept of web3, onchain, or crypto (nomenclature is continuously evolving), though it's often still cumbersome. Think we are just getting to the smart phone era but Steve Jobs hasn’t been on stage yet. We've learned things that thought were easy turned out to be hard and take longer. Growth brought complexity, not only simplicity.

The platform shift makes pragmatic sense. The "protocol cosplay" reveals uncomfortable truths. But for me, crypto is still a tool for economic freedom. A tool for agency. As we build with these powerful new tools – ZKPs, verifiable compute – the fundamental question lingers, sharpens even: Are we consciously using them to build towards that original, difficult vision of freedom? Or are we defaulting, seduced by convenience and familiar models, into just building more sophisticated, user-friendly cages? Same soup, different day.

Text generated based on notes from my notebook with Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview 03-25

But does it have to be this way? We flock to games, right? Why? Because they're dynamic. We get attached to NPCs in sprawling worlds like Red Dead Redemption because they feel like they have a purpose, however limited. Content in games does something. It reacts, it progresses, it isn't stale. That's why we jump back onto the same Fortnite island again and again (well, that and our friends being there).

So, what happened with the content filling our feeds on Twitter, Farcaster, Bluesky, Lens, you name it? Text, static images, maybe a video. It all feels… the same. You have to wonder: has content peaked?

It definitely wasn't always like this. I firmly believe some of the biggest platforms we use today exploded because they dared to play with the very idea of content itself. Snapchat was a pioneer – text that vanishes? Simple, provocative, genius. Hello sexting. Then came Stories, a masterstroke that fundamentally rewired how we communicate visually. Hello oversharing. Hello brand collabs. Suddenly, everyone had stories to tell. TikTok wasn't far behind. What started as lip-syncing on Musically morphed into Duets – remember those wild, collaborative songs people mashing up? Pure creative energy sparked by a new format. And maybe the last big jolt was Clubhouse – just a room, just audio, but with the potential to jump in, participate, connect. The lesson? Content isn't just something to be consumed; it's an invitation for creators.

Hand creators a new content format, a new tool, and they will inevitably push it to limits you never imagined. Yeah, formulas emerge over time, things start looking similar. But new genres also blossom. Look at YouTube – it basically ate traditional TV's lunch. Netflix finished the job, ditching rigid timetables and constantly shattering old storytelling formats. Remember Bandersnatch? Innovation in the medium unlocks new possibilities. Unlocks new storytelling. Unlocks new formats itself.

So, if we want to think about the future of content, we need to think bigger – about the future of media itself, and our relationship to it. Where are we headed?

It’s actually pretty simple. We just got handed the wildest tool in the world: Generative AI. People are already conjuring up thousands of songs, videos, and images just with words and post them straight to their timelines. "Vibe coding" is becoming a real thing. While it's still emerging tech, the barrier to creating rich experiences is crumbling. Want an app for whatever is on top of your mind? Soon, it might just be a few prompts away. (Yes, okay, it needs polish. But look back just a couple of years, then project forward. The trajectory speaks for itself.)

And then there's the onchain world. We've seen content already starting to stretch its legs here. Farcaster introduced Frames – suddenly posts became mini-apps. Lens pushed Open Actions, letting you connect posts directly to onchain actions. See a cool new coin mentioned? Mint it right there in the feed. Bots like clankr and bankr show us how interaction can become a real conversation, embedded directly. This hints at the superpower of triggering complex actions through simple language in a feed.

Think about the biggest hurdles for anyone building something new online: launching an app and finding users. Crypto, for all its quirks, gives us some massive advantages out of the gate. Accounts? Wallet connect! Solved login. Built-in payment rails? Free infrastructure. That's already a game-changer. But what's still missing?

Let’s jump back to AI. Twitter (or X for the few that use that name) is probably ground zero for AI integrations right now. Searching with Grok? Honestly, it’s already way better. Using #askperplexity to get context? Super useful. AI is getting baked in everywhere. But here's the thing: it's mostly reactive. It adds to a post, comments on it, summarizes it – it doesn't fundamentally alter the media itself.

This is where our exploration with Bonsai comes in. What happens when we stop just layering things on top of media, and instead rethink the media itself? What if we deeply fuse content with the power of an LLM?

Imagine media that isn't static. Imagine media that is agentic – it has agency, it can act. Imagine media with its own memory, remembering who interacted with it and how, adapting organically based on your interactions. Media that doesn't just sit there. Media that lives. Media that is smart and dynamic to you, to its enviroment, ...

This is the dawn of Smart Media. Media designed to evolve through interaction. And this is a bigger provocation than it sounds. We're wired for the disposable hit – the rage bait or wholesomeness bait that gives us a momentary feeling before we scroll on. But once you inject intelligence into media, once the media itself remembers and changes, it inherently wants to be seen again. It has a reason to pull you back. This blows the doors wide open for entirely new kinds of social experiences.

And guess what? This suddenly makes the idea of owning digital content – yes, the infamous NFTs – make intuitive sense again. You don't just want to own it as a bookmark; owning unlocks interaction. Owning becomes the key to participating in its evolution.

So, media might start developing its own social graph. Bonsai just launched its first couple of templates – think of it like a creative terminal. Pick a template, define how you want your media to behave and interact, and launch it straight into a feed on Lens. Anyone can then engage with it, and the content responds, changes. It’s a bit abstract at first, maybe, until you touch it, because we simply aren't used to media that pushes back, that grows. Media that is not once and done, but here to grow with us.

Think about it this way: dig through the Internet Archive for an old news article. You quickly realize news often isn't static; it gets updated, corrected, expanded. But we rarely see that evolution happen transparently, and almost never is it directly shaped by user input in a meaningful way. Now, it can be. Content can start to curate itself. What happens when breaking news evolves based on input from users, weighted by their verifiable onchain reputation? Community notes, that become content by itself.

One of the moments that truly melted my brain about media was weirdly the launch of Kanye's album, The Life of Pablo. It dropped, but Ye wasn't finished. Over the next few days, tracks changed, mixes shifted, the music evolved post-release. For so long, I’d thought of released media as final, set in stone. That moment shattered the illusion. (I kind of still miss that first version, though!). But from then on, I couldn't shake the idea: media is not static anymore.

Our feeds are overflowing with content that needs revision, stuff that's outdated, commentary that aged poorly. It doesn't have to be like that. And if we can capture the history of media's evolution onchain? We get an incredible, verifiable trail of provenance. Evolving media that is verifiable – something that, in my mind, truly only works onchain.

This unlocks entirely new forms of IP. Bonsai launched a template called "Adventure Time," letting creators spin up simple text-based adventures right in the feed. You interact via comments, and the story unfolds, shaped by the community. Media could build its own fanbase. Media might eventually have its own wallet (Bonsai is an open SDK, after all). It could then not just curate its community but actively incentivize it.

The biggest shift, though, will be in our relationship with our feeds. When every piece of dynamic media becomes a gateway for deeper interaction, the entire feed transforms from a passive stream into a vibrant hallway of experiences. Media might even start to actively fight for real estate and attention based on its ability to engage and evolve.

This is an invitation for builders. This is an invitation for creators. This is an invitation for any user to not just stay passive on the sidelines anymore. Become part of something. Shape media and therefore the world around it. If these new forms of media are emerging, what new creator tools do we need? What novel form factors for experiencing this living content can we dream up? The beauty of launching this onchain, especially on a platform like Lens, is that we already have so many primitives ready to go: profiles, wallets, payments, social graphs, programmable rules. We have the foundation.

Bonsai is just getting started. It's early days, it's experimental, and yeah, it might look like a toy right now. But toys invite play. And the more we play, the more wild, unexpected, and groundbreaking things can emerge.

So, forget doomscrolling. Forget thinking the best we can hope for are slightly slicker apps embedded in our feeds. Think about what media could be. Media that's alive, that adapts to you, that evolves with its community. Don't just picture it in a feed; imagine it living in your group chats, powering new kinds of collaborative experiences. Think of media becoming more like mini-apps, launched instantly with the built-in network effects of a social feed – the comments, likes, and shares come for free.

All you need is to expect that media is more than a static jpg or gif. That media is an invitation for interaction together with everyone online. The tools are here. The time is now. Let's vibe code the hell out of the future social media.

=> Learn more about Bonsai

Disclaimer: I am a Bonsai Tokenholder and have been supporting Bonsai as part of my engagement with We3.co.

But alongside the magic, a storm of self-questioning I've never experienced before. Consider this post self-therapy, an attempt to wrestle these exploding thoughts about value into something coherent. I've always adapted to new tools – from ML to generating code. But the last two years? A different magnitude entirely. Getting good at Photoshop once felt like climbing a mountain; now, you ask, and interfaces appear, code materializes. It's undeniably magical.

This magic translates into tangible super power. Suddenly, I can 'code' (though I wouldn't call myself a developer) – manifesting ideas directly, making stronger cases for design itself. I can visualize aesthetics previously out of my reach. Brainstorming via chat becomes an expansive dialogue I couldn't have orchestrated alone. So, when the "design is dead" pronouncements echo? My gut reaction is always: you're missing the point. You don't see how this unlocks us, pushes our boundaries outward.

Yet, simplicity is elusive. This same magic fuels a profound, persistent self-doubt. What is the actual worth of my craft, my expertise, in this new landscape? Is my current skillset relevant tomorrow? The pace itself feels unsustainable – how does anyone truly keep up?

The acceleration is undeniable. I work faster. Faster allows for wider exploration. Wider exploration increases discovery. But it also exponentially increases the risk of mistaking polished outputs for truly sound concepts. Projects scoped for a month might now be delivered in half the time. Impressive today, probably expected table stakes tomorrow.

A part of me deeply resists this relentless progress and acceleration. My long-held strategy – continuous adaptation, avoiding tool-specific dogma – still feels correct. Yet, the undeniable truth remains: the electric hum of AI's possibility is often paired with the dull weight of profound exhaustion. I find myself nostalgic for slowness – not for less magic, but for more space. Those seemingly idle moments? They weren't buffer; they were necessity, the breathing room ideas need to mature.

The most significant unlock AI provides might not be infinite speed, but unprecedented width. Napkin sketches can instantly become prototypes. The inherent challenge shifts: when you can explore anything, the critical skill becomes curation – choosing which paths hold genuine promise. High-resolution outputs can too easily mask conceptual weaknesses.

Learning the fundamentals of design – strong concepts, taste (which for me is simply a larger exposure to the wide world and the web), creative processes – before this tech wave hit feels like a hidden advantage. Like navigating the world with a built-in compass others might lack. It makes me a better prompter, better director of the tool. Knowing what to ask for, how to guide the output, is arguably more than half the battle now. But maintaining these fundamentals requires the very time that feels increasingly scarce.

How do I value myself, and by extension, my time, in this new equation? The paradox is constant: I am simultaneously exhilarated and exhausted. Never before so creatively empowered; never before so deeply plagued by doubt.

What exactly is my value-add today? Is my core value the human insight I bring to a tool anyone can access, or is the tool primarily adding value to me? Scrolling through feeds – often showcases of curated success ("success masturbation," as it feels sometimes) – amplifies the anxiety. Am I keeping pace? Am I left behind.

While I embrace sprints, I think of running: balancing speed work with slower, longer runs. Why is it so hard to grant my professional life that same essential rhythm?

I know, intrinsically, that some of my best work springs from exploration, from unstructured tinkering. It's in pursuing those unexpected sideways connections that surprises – the ones that don't just solve the problem but reframe it – emerge. And here I sit, with arguably the most potent tool for exploration ever created, often consciously sidelining its potential because the demands of execution dominate.

Seeing others without that much coding experience, intuitively 'vibe-code' a useful tool is a potent reminder of that raw creative spark AI can ignite. Sometimes, experience can be confining; newcomers now just prompt relentlessly until it magically works. The tools are imperfect, yes, but projecting the trajectory of the last two years forward? The leaps will probably still be staggering. What I miss is feeling like I have – or rather, allow myself – the time for it.

Would I advise anyone to pursue a creative career today? One part of me, the pragmatic, anxious part, warns of a cutthroat field with diminishing returns, demanding relentless speed and expertise just to survive. But another part feels profound sadness at that cynical reflex. Look at the power for self-directed learning and creation now available! I just wish that exploratory mode could be the default, not a luxury squeezed into the margins. Adaptation is the game, and adaptation fundamentally requires time – the very resource that feels most under siege.

And so, wrestling with all this leads me back to this very post. Written with AI. The irony? Using AI to process my feelings about using AI. Meta, I guess? Which dumps me right back at the core mindfuck: These words you're reading – how much is actually me? Where's the line between my thoughts and the machine's? The magic remains undeniable. But maybe instead of drowning in the doubt, I should just allow myself to tinker even more. To play with this new terrain rather than the anxiety it provokes. Perhaps that's been the point all along.

“Time is money.” We’ve all heard it, and at first glance, it makes sense in a hectic world that measures everything in transactions. But the idea also flattens one of our most profound experiences—time itself—into a mere commodity, a line on the balance sheet. We save it, waste it, invest it, sell it. We talk about time the way we talk about dollars or data. No wonder we can’t shake the sense that we’re always running out.

If you’ve spent even half an hour online, you’ve felt it: the internet dissolves our usual sense of “before and after.” A tweet from 2012 stands next to breaking news from this morning, which coexists with a meme posted three seconds ago. Chronology collapses into one swirling now.

Scroll far enough, and hours vanish. It’s suddenly three in the morning, but it feels like you’ve been suspended in a timeless loop. Perhaps that’s part of why some of us fantasize about living forever—hoping to reclaim all those lost hours. Outside our screens, mortality hits us like a ticking clock; inside, it’s an endless feed.

Enter Artificial Intelligence. AI treats all data—new or old—as equally valid, sifting through vast archives in microseconds. If we ever reach AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), it might juggle endless what-if scenarios before deciding which path to take. We’re stuck in one timeline, but AI can roam across many.

Because AI doesn’t care about temporal boundaries, it highlights an even stranger truth about the internet: it’s a realm unmoored from ordinary physics. Much like quantum states that can occupy multiple possibilities at once, the internet houses past, present, and future side by side, awaiting our clicks. And if code can replicate infinitely, then scarcity—so central to our real-world thinking—doesn’t map easily onto digital space.

If AI captures the infinite, blockchains impose the sequence. Every new block is a timestamp: this happened, then that. It’s our attempt to anchor the digital realm in a predictable timeline, the way we once tamed wild rivers by building dams and channels. Immutable ledgers bring a kind of industrial order to a place that otherwise floats outside linear time.

But are we really taming anything? It may be more accurate to say we’re stitching our human need for order onto a domain that obeys different laws. The internet might not be “lawless” at all—just governed by rules we haven’t fully grasped. Still, blockchains give us a foothold, a place to stand where we can say, “This block came first, so it’s settled.”

All of which raises a bigger point: the internet might as well be alien nature. It feels limitless, teeming with possibilities, and indifferent to our usual notions of scarcity or hierarchy. Yet we keep marching in with our old economic models, built for an earthbound world of finite resources—gold, land, steel. Online, especially as AI scales, these limits become negotiable or irrelevant.

So what happens if demand and supply both become effectively infinite? We’ve never truly lived in a situation like that. The result is a weird swirl of memes, tokenized assets, paywalls, and artificially constrained digital goods. We impose scarcity because we’re used to it, not necessarily because the internet demands it.

Imagine building a log cabin on a new planet: we bring hammers and nails, but the environment has its own gravity and atmosphere. That might be what we’re doing with our markets: slapping them onto an alien landscape that obeys laws we’ve only begun to glimpse.

It doesn’t stop at economics. In everyday life, we like binary logic: right or wrong, true or false, success or failure. Online, those distinctions blur. One timeline is championing a news story as fact; another calls it a hoax, and both exist in the same feed. It’s reminiscent of quantum superpositions, where a particle can be in multiple states until observed.

It’s unsettling. Our usual frameworks rely on consistency and a single objective reality, but the digital realm shrugs at that. Contradictory ideas thrive side by side, fueling culture wars, conspiracy theories, and endless debates. We’re seeing firsthand how a non-linear, multi-truth environment upends every neat category we once trusted.

Amid all this fluidity, one thing remains indisputably scarce: attention. You can’t store it; you can’t create more of it. Once a minute of your focus is gone, it’s gone. Platforms, advertisers, and content creators scramble to capture it because they know it’s the one asset that can’t be duplicated.

If everything else online can be duplicated or mass-produced, attention becomes the only real currency. That’s why countless business models revolve around hooking you. The more time you give, the more profit they reap. Yet it also opens doors to new forms of exchange, where what we spend might not be dollars but the capacity to direct our focus—or even direct machine intelligence.

But human attention isn’t the only moment-bound resource. Consider compute power. Every second your processor or GPU isn’t doing anything, that potential is lost forever—unlike data or code, which you can copy endlessly. Projects like Folding@home illustrated this concept: leave your device running to help with protein research, and your otherwise wasted compute cycles become valuable.

Suddenly, “spending time” can also mean directing machine cycles in real time. If our personal AI assistant isn’t busy, or our server racks are idle at night, that’s a missed opportunity—time we could have contributed to breakthroughs or sold to someone else. In a future brimming with AI tools, controlling where and when compute happens may be as influential as money in the bank.

If every waking minute—and every idle computing cycle—counts as an asset that expires if unused, how do we choose where to direct it? Picture a small-town entrepreneur who has leftover GPU capacity overnight. She could lend it to a medical research program or a local climate modeling project. Or maybe she allocates it to a friend’s startup that needs extra computing muscle.

Similarly, each of us decides every morning: Do I devote precious focus to social media drama, or do I invest it in learning, creation, or deeper connection? The concept of time-capital isn’t just about personal productivity; it reorients our values. Profit might remain important, but when time truly becomes the scarcest of all resources, the question shifts to: “What’s worth these minutes I can never get back?”

Altogether, this suggests we’re inching toward a world where time spent, by humans and machines, is the only resource we can’t replicate. That doesn’t mean we discard markets or currency overnight. But our entire economic and social fabric might need rewriting if the core bottleneck is time rather than materials.

Think of a bustling coworking space in 2040. People trade not just money, but available AI cycles. One person’s specialized machine-learning rig is idle for two hours—someone else picks it up to run advanced simulations. Meanwhile, the global conversation moves on from “who owns what” to “who directed their ephemeral minutes and compute toward the most meaningful outcomes?”

So we stand on the brink of a new landscape—one where AI spawns infinite possibilities, blockchains enforce an almost mechanical sense of order, and human or machine time emerges as the ultimate capital. Our old definitions of wealth, grounded in scarcity of goods and labor, are shaken when faced with a medium that can spawn copies without limit but still runs out of time.

It’s unsettling, like quantum physics was to the early 20th century, exposing contradictions and complexities we struggle to interpret. But it also cracks open possibilities we’ve barely imagined—ways to create value that aren’t tethered to hoarding resources or chasing illusions of perpetual growth.

If time—both human attention and machine compute—really is our final frontier of scarcity, then every choice about how to spend it becomes a statement of what we value most. And in a world so often shaped by external pressures and infinite feeds, it may be the closest we come to real agency.

Perhaps that’s the greatest takeaway from this strange digital era. Our days might feel fragmented, our sense of time warped, and our feeds overflowing with contradictions—but the minutes still belong to us, one by one.

Just remember: once they’re gone, there’s no getting them back.

cowritten with ChatGPT-o1

The Lay of the Land

Crypto as we know it truly emerged with Bitcoin (BTC), anchored by one of the strongest founder myths: the story of Satoshi, which still provides much of its strength. Over the years, countless chains and ideologies have appeared, and some use cases have crystallized—mainly around tokenization and decentralized finance (DeFi). This focus on tokenization and DeFi has led to the core use case that dominates the entire space: capital formation. Yes, smart contracts enable new forms of capital efficiency, but it’s the capital allocation—whether through ICOs, memecoins, or NFT sales—that has truly unlocked entire new categories of ventures.

Other concepts are sticking slowly but growingly around, too. Artists continually explore blockchains as a medium (e.g., “the world sculpture garden”), and new forms of governance, provenance, and reputation, even automation around law and order have emerged. Still, it’s clear that the biggest mindshare has gone to games and utilities built around finance, and especially capital formation. Almost every narrative in recent months—whether about AI or memes—ties back to capital allocation and fundraising.

This dynamic has created a distinct game for crypto. Moneyness is the primary narrative. While crypto does serve the unbanked, enables cross-border payments, and offers safety through stablecoins in unstable markets, it has also created the world’s most massive casino—at least from a broader outside perspective.

I often find myself in a strange position. I move between different communities and see how deeply crypto is despised by some, even though we share clear overlaps in wanting an internet that is open, permissionless, censorship-resistant, composable, interoperable, and decentralized.

In Ethereum’s case, we seem stuck in a narrative crisis. Hence the rise of soft power grap by the marketeers that believe this can be solved with a marketing push: “We need more builders, more users,” etc. The technology has radically improved over the past few years—no question. But it hasn’t brought in massive numbers of new users yet, especially in the ethereum ecosystem itself. The high-activity hotspots are often elsewhere (Memecoins, NFTs) in what can feels like a casino environment.

So the sentiment arises: We need to get more aligned. But should we? Alignment and decentralization and permissionlessness kind of are slightly paradoxical.

I haven’t fully researched this, but having just finished reading Finite and Infinite Games, I suspect Vitalik had this book parts of this book in mind when he created and nurtured Ethereum over the years.

I want to use Finite and Infinite Games as a lens for where we are and what we might learn.

First and foremost, whether we like it or not, the internet is a place of massive multiplayer real-time games. Everyone is playing or trying to “game” it in some way. As we ask ourselves how to truly onboard the rest of the world into our tiny bubble, we have to consider what needs to be true. And if we play a finite game with winners or losers, or an infinite game we play for the game itself. No matter what:

• People won’t return if they believe “the game” is over or corrupted.

• There have been countless posts claiming crypto’s moral compass is lost. While I won’t dive into that here, it’s clear we’ve developed behaviors and lingo that are hard for a more "mainstream audience" to embrace.

Personally, I came for the technology (yes that is kind of a meme) and the vision of a new internet—the “world computer.” I believed in DeFi as a new market. Historically, anywhere a new market emerges (from the Silk Road to traditional bazaars), new cultures form. A technology built around continuously unlocking new markets is by its nature an accelerator for many new cultures. Some of those cultures has indeed emerged, but due to the space’s size, competition has grown fierce.

We’re still playing in a very narrow field. Our reach is limited, although, the president of the United States launched a memecoin. And now we’re seeing a split in distinct directions:

1. The Cypherpunk/Solarpunk/World-Computer Vision: changing the boundaries of what’s imaginable.

2. The Successful Financial Application: those who want to solidify the gains from crypto’s first big success (finance).

These two cultures don’t necessarily align anymore. Anything not done in the interest of “winning” might be ignored by those focused purely on the other. The roadmap of the chains evolution span potentially multiple bull and bear cycles, support for existing clearly attractive use cases, communities and applications fell too small and too late. Both sides have strong arguments.

I worry the debate is a losing cause because we’re introducing finite games (winners vs. losers) into what was meant to be an infinite game.

Of course, I want to see DeFi succeed and token prices rise (at last I am a holder), but focusing solely on that is playing a finite game. This single-minded approach breeds a sort of false or limited patriotism around Ethereum: pull as many people over as possible to increase your power. And in today’s internet, power often means capturing attention. Outrage travels faster than reasoned thought, so we fuel the fire. But the more one side gains or loses, the more internal competition it faces or creators and builders are leaving. We see this happening within clearly with Ethereum now.

Some other chains or centralized systems, outside of the original vision to break ore reimagine the system, whether you like it or not, can benefit by stirring that conflict. This chain vs. chain, nuance vs. nuance culture restrains us from exploring genuinely new territory.

I might be naive or romantic, but for me, crypto was about challenging existing systems—progressing collectively through and with technology. It was a vision that drove me: that through collective creation and action, we move toward a horizon to discover what lies beyond. But we’re stuck rehashing the same space bounded debates, not inspiring anyone to go beyond them.

When boundaries become rigid, conflict intensifies, and we adopt more military jargon. We want a “wartime CEO.” We fight over boundaries, losing sight of the horizon. The heated debates—initially about “self-protection” or preserving token price—become ultimately questions of self-identity.

In any war, physical or ideological, winning can be as destructive as losing. What do we gain if the memecoin economy, a specific existing community moves to Ethereum or not? In my opinion likely more clearly defined boundaries that reduce gradually but then all at once Ethereum’s original vision of being a something new and different, the world computer.

We’re now at a stage where we try to align around language. A meme is growing—“Powered by Ethereum.” We want to align on language but unintentionally create limitations. Its transactions and contracts that are "powered", but it us that powers their creation.

For me, we’re at a crossroads. Both sides have their legitimacy. But it matters whether you see Ethereum as a machine or an ecosystem—a garden. The Ethereum Foundation’s mission seems aligned with the garden metaphor: growth, spontaneity, exploration. Meanwhile, a more “mechanistic” view sees Ethereum as something that can be controlled and directed toward immediate outcomes.

Machines represent technical rationality and predictability; a garden is about growth and spontaneity. Focusing solely on machine-like characteristics leads to finite games with winners and losers, undermining the original infinite game of evolving or breaking existing systems.

Machine and nature aren’t mutually exclusive. Machines can exist within gardens, just as finite games exist within infinite games. But when the infinite game is reduced to the finite, something is lost. Machines can support growth but can also deplete the environment. Right now, we’re exhausting our most valuable resource: attention. We spend it on internal conflicts instead of sharing a compelling vision of what lies beyond the horizon.

Crypto is a perfect example of our collective existence. Some build machines and some tend the garden, but we must all handle the waste we’ve created if we want to bring more people in. Only the most hardened degenerate enjoy a “Mad Max” wasteland solely consisting of memecoins, rug pulls, ponzis, and insider trading. These aren’t accidental byproducts of our industry; they are what we’ve built—the product choices we’ve made. Not all of us, but enough to define the public narrative. And in reality the first narrative that reaches the broad audience is the one that sticks. This is the one that we need to overcome in the first place.

It doesn’t have to end this way. We’ve dealt with toxic byproducts throughout our entire human history before and can do so also online, but we need to refine, reimagine, rewrite the vision. We can’t expect people to return if they believe the game is rigged against them or already over.

So while we debate which wars to fight—internally or across chains—we need to articulate the cause more effectively. Infighting only erects more barriers, especially for outsiders who already doubt us. A future powered by Ethereum or any blockchain might be an end state we want to manifest, but if it’s framed as a zero-sum race (a finite game), it’s unappealing to many who share our broader values.

The question is: What stories and myths do we need to tell so that others who share our horizon of decentralization, interoperability, composability, permissionlessness, and censorship resistance can align with us again? Communities like local-first, protocols not platforms supporters, and general open-source share many of our values but often dismiss crypto because of our infighting and manifactured culture.

Instead of endlessly debating one chain’s “power” over another in front of a small set of wallets largely focused on speculation, perhaps it’s time to rethink how to power the entire garden so it can grow beyond its current boundaries.

It's not powered by Ethereum.
Its built, secured, owned, used by you.

Edited with ChatGPT-o1-mini

Halfway through the book, I realized I could apply the same lens to something entirely different: the rapid evolution and proliferation of artificial intelligence. This post is a thought experiment on the parallels between how we’ve responded to climate change and how we’re responding to AI.

First, let’s define overshoot in the climate context. The book explains that we’ve set goals to keep temperature rises within 2–3°C over the next century. Yet at the same time, we allow ourselves to exceed those numbers temporarily, on the assumption that we’ll fix things later. In other words, we’re comfortable with continuing business as usual—drilling for more oil, emitting more CO2—because we believe that future technologies (like direct air capture or fusion energy) will eventually solve everything.

If you’re a climate-change denier, this post may not be your cup of tea. Climate change is real, and so are its consequences: extreme weather events, resource challenges, and climate-driven migration, to name a few. But a key part of the book’s argument is that we’ve adopted a kind of collective shrug. We accept that yes, we’re overshooting, and we’ll address it “later” once new policies or technologies emerge. That’s the essence of overshoot.

Now, how does this relate to AI? At a breakneck pace, we’re pouring enormous resources into the “virtual oil fields”: GPUs in data centers, advanced models, and a march toward general artificial intelligence. On a personal level, as a designer, the advent of AI has changed my entire outlook on my career. Part of me wonders if it’s wise for anyone to pursue design now, given that AI might automate so many tasks.

This sense of looming obsolescence has also made me hyper-aware of how many daily activities can be automated—and how many jobs might be, in essence, “bullshit jobs.” If AI can handle those tasks efficiently, what does that mean for our sense of purpose? Economically, there’s an analogy to climate overshoot: AI is about to disrupt our definitions of work, identity, and economic agency, but many of us are quietly assuming we’ll figure it all out later.

We see the same surrender/overshoot dynamic at play: we invest heavily in AI, aware of its profound impact, but downplay those impacts by assuming that tomorrow’s technologies or policies will fix the resulting chaos. We’re like climate optimists who say, “Well, direct air capture will handle it eventually.” Except now, it’s, “We’ll regulate AI once it’s big enough or causing enough trouble.” Meanwhile, short-term gains look fantastic, and there's always that reassuring idea that future innovations will solve tomorrow’s problems.

Another similarity is the focus on individual responsibility. In climate conversations, you’re told to reduce your personal carbon footprint, recycle, bike to work, and so on—rather than focusing on bigger systemic issues. In AI, that translates to, “Learn the new tools or get left behind.” While personal accountability matters, it can distract us from deeper structural questions, like what happens when AI truly reshapes entire industries?

Climate change has led to mass migration; AI could lead to a different kind of migration—one of purpose. People who define themselves through their work may find themselves needing to rediscover meaning if their job is automated. Could that kind of existential crisis be as destabilizing as a 2–3°C rise in global temperature? Possibly. Yet we rarely address those bigger questions because the short-term gains—from AI breakthroughs to corporate profits—are too enticing.

Fascinatingly, we see a similar dynamic in the crypto world. I’ve followed debates about the Ethereum Foundation and whether it should double down on things like DeFi, memecoins, etc. It’s easy to be lured by short-term wealth creation and turbocharge that evolution. But at the same time, we risk ignoring big-picture concerns: what happens to social systems, or to everyday people, if everything becomes hyper-financialized? We assume that by the time those problems become urgent, future solutions or policies will emerge. And if they don’t, well…maybe I’ll be wealthy enough to shield myself from the fallout. It’s a lie we sometimes tell ourselves, and one we’re not always proud of.

In climate, in AI, and even in crypto, the same pattern emerges: short-term gains and an almost religious faith in future innovation. We tell ourselves that by “overshooting” today, we’ll have the technology or the policies tomorrow to set things right. It’s an alluring promise—because it absolves us from making uncomfortable sacrifices right now. But as both climate scientists and AI ethicists remind us, overshoot can lead to a lot of pain along the way.

It’s crucial to ask difficult questions while we still have time: How do we want AI to shape our sense of purpose? How do we balance crypto’s innovations with the risks they introduce? How do we confront climate change without simply assuming tomorrow’s tech will magically solve it? The answers aren’t obvious, but the more we push them off, the higher the bill will be when it finally comes due.

Co-written obviously with AI (chatGPT-01mini)

Right now, Ethereum is split into two colossal camps. On one side, you have the cryptocurrency purists, who see Ethereum as the next evolution of money. On the other side, there are the world computer evangelists, who envision Ethereum as the backbone of our collective digital consciousness. It’s like asking, “Is it the future of finance, or the bicycle for our collective minds? Both. It’s quantum.”

• Critique: They slam Ethereum’s obsession with being a world computer, arguing it sidelines the most potent use case—finance. They accuse the community of neglecting financial applications, which they believe are the true backbone of ETH’s value.

• Validity: They’re hitting the nail on the head. DeFi has exploded, proving Ethereum’s worth as a financial powerhouse. It’s robust, scalable, and driving massive adoption.

• Critique: They view Ethereum as a revolutionary platform for decentralized computation, beyond just financial transactions. They argue that the technology is still in its infancy, needing more security and features to unlock its full potential.

• Validity: Absolutely. The vision of a decentralized world computer opens doors to endless applications—identity, supply chains, gaming, and more. It’s a broader, more ambitious mission that deserves its spotlight.

Recent tweets urging the Ethereum Foundation and users to “dogfood” Ethereum—engage more on-chain, run more transactions—have only deepened the divide. It’s like pushing both camps to their breaking points, validating each side’s stance while simultaneously highlighting their limitations.

• For DeFi Advocates: Showcasing financial applications highlights tangible benefits but also reveals the narrow focus, pushing for more financial utility.

• For World Computer Proponents: Advancing the world computer vision underscores the need for broader applications but also acknowledges DeFi’s critical role in validating Ethereum’s capabilities.

Here’s the truth bomb: both sides are right, and both are essential. Ethereum isn’t a binary choice between finance and computation. It’s a quantum superposition, embodying both narratives simultaneously. Just like particles in quantum physics, Ethereum can exist in multiple states without one negating the other.

Key Moves to Bridge the Divide:

1. Embrace Plurality: Accept that Ethereum’s strength lies in its diverse applications. Support both DeFi innovators and world computer pioneers.

2. Foster Collaboration: Encourage dialogue and projects that integrate financial tools with broader computational applications. Let’s not silo innovations.

3. Revolutionize the Vocabulary: Stop calling everything a “transaction.” Develop a new lexicon that reflects the multifaceted nature of Ethereum’s ecosystem.

Imagine Ethereum not just as a financial system or a decentralized computer, but as the quantum backbone of our digital future. It’s where finance meets collective intelligence, where smart contracts evolve into smart societies. Ethereum has the potential to redefine how we interact, transact, and think.

• Financial Backbone: DeFi isn’t just a use case; it’s a proving ground for Ethereum’s scalability and security.

• Computational Foundation: The world computer vision propels Ethereum into realms of decentralized identity, transparent governance, and automated systems that mirror our collective intelligence.

Tokens are more than just digital money; they’re the quantum bits powering Ethereum’s computational prowess. Whether in AI, DeFi, or beyond, tokens unlock compute power, driving innovation across sectors. Ethereum isn’t confined to finance—it’s a catalyst for a broader technological revolution.

The toughest nut to crack? Adoption. People only care when they’re directly impacted. Most innovations, including Ethereum’s dual narratives, appeal to the idealists or those who’ve been burned by traditional systems. Convincing the masses to embrace something complex and ideologically driven requires more than just utility—it demands belief in a better, decentralized future.

Despite the polarization, I believe in Ethereum’s dual mission. We need to champion financial application builders while relentlessly pushing the boundaries of the world computer. Innovation thrives in diversity. The more open and accessible Ethereum is, the more groundbreaking its applications will become.

Ethereum stands at the nexus of finance and decentralized computation. Instead of letting polarized narratives tear us apart, let’s embrace the quantum synergy. Recognize that DeFi and the world computer aren’t competing visions—they’re complementary forces driving Ethereum to unprecedented heights.

Call to Action:

• Developers: Integrate financial tools with broader applications. Think beyond DeFi; explore decentralized identity, transparent governance, and more.

• Community: Foster inclusive dialogues. Break down silos and encourage collaboration between DeFi and world computer enthusiasts.

• Visionaries: Embrace the quantum nature of Ethereum. See it not as a binary choice, but as a multifaceted revolution shaping our digital future.

Ethereum’s true power lies in its ability to harmonize these dual narratives. It’s not just the future of finance or the bicycle for our collective minds—it’s the quantum leap that bridges both, propelling us into a decentralized, permissionless world computer era.

Edited with ChatGPT-o1mini

Crypto fascinates me because of its decentralized network effects. This interest led me to explore social graphs, new market structures, capital and community formation, and reputation systems.

Reputation in crypto is especially intriguing. In a trustless system, reimagining the concepts around trust is crucial. I've had the luck to work on merit-based capital projects, built permissionless app stores that convey trust, and experimented with how reputation can enhance social experiences. The takeaway? In a decentralized, permissionless, censorship-resistant world, how we measure and signal trust is everything.

Enter $Trump. SocialFi, where creators tokenize themselves, resurfaces with every crypto cycle through social tokens. But this time is different: the coin has been launched, the price is soaring, and it’s tied to a figure who is most likely, by the time you read this, the world’s most powerful political leader again.

Their site may claim “no official ties” to politics or Trump’s personality, but in the meme world, that’s laughable. Ideology, identity, and brand are now directly linked to price. Trust is governed by market makers, speculators, and hype cycles.

$Trump’s meteoric rise opens wild possibilities. Could we witness the first trillion-dollar individual, with a token’s market value tied to a single individual? How does one’s self-worth and public image shift when pegged to a real-time price chart?

Moreover, with 80% of tokens controlled by one entity, does this create the largest potential rug pull? Does selling mean losing faith in oneself—a twisted philosophical riddle for the influencer age. Have fun.

Traditionally, personal tokens have allocated a much larger portion to the community, letting them define your value and preventing a single point of failure. This also meant, though, that the concept of you could be larger than yourself. The idea of you could outlive you more easily. $Trump flips this with an 80% allocation, making it really hard for him to have a graceful exit. Dumping means rugging your community, which typically destroys a yourself as a brand. (But caveat here Trump operates seemingly by different rules).

I expect others to replicate this. If $Trump soars, what stops $YE, $MRBEAST, or any celebrity from diving into the same meme-fueled waters? This will likely ignite a wave of personality-driven memecoins. Historically, “creator economics” often flops because attention is predatory—feeds on extremes, leading creators to burn out chasing dopamine and viewers. With 80% locked, you must continually deliver or risk your community—and token price—turning against you. It’s a high-stakes dance: keep them engaged or face enormous fallout.

Personally, seeing your “value” as a volatile ticker must be truly psychologically draining. Imagine scaling that to a presidency. One day, your market cap soars; the next, an unpopular move collapses the coin. It’s like living in a Black Mirror episode where “market cap” equals self-worth and “24h volume” measures relevance.

This dynamic extends to the broader creator economy. If fans hold 20% and you hold 80%, you’re tethered to them. You can’t quit or pivot without alienating supporters and tanking your net worth and, therefore, most likely even your self-esteem. It forces you to either maintain the status quo or escalate your efforts, risking burnout.

Is this the world’s most ingenious social experiment, rewriting power, brand, and money dynamics? Or an accidental time bomb threatening presidential credibility? Unlike stocks reacting to politics, this directly monetizes an individual’s persona, allowing real-time buying and selling of reputation.

I have always believed reputation can get you money, but money can't get you reputation. We are going to see that script battle-tested in complex new ways.

Ironically, the 80% strategy might empower the community by trapping the token issuer. You can’t dump without everyone watching, and every action affects the price. Stopping the hype train hurts investors, though the creator holds the biggest bag.

$Trump’s large allocation enforces a new kind of accountability. Unlocking tokens and selling would signal lost faith in the meme—and oneself—inviting political or reputational backlash. Insiders must exit carefully to avoid a meltdown; selling triggers a chain reaction.

For SocialFi, this is entirely new territory, at least at this scale. Did Trump by accident create the one and only way he will be held accountable by his believers? Memecoins now serve as reputation mechanisms. Holding 80% of your token means immense responsibility and liability. Attempting to unload quietly over the counter gives a new whale leverage over your image. Dumping it all is giving up. Not becoming more extreme will not increase its price. It's a trap.

I’m fascinated by this development but question how imitators will cope. Are you ready to have your worth fluctuate with every public move? Will you betray your community for a payout or keep inflating the balloon, hoping it never pops? Are you sacrificing personal freedom to appease believers, forced to cash out incrementally without tanking your value? This is the new face of autonomy—living as a price feed. Fun Fact you might now have unrealized gains taxes on your own self-worth, so you need to sell yourself into community servitude.

The $Trump coin has thrust us into an era where political identity, personal reputation, and memecoin speculation merge in real time.

Personally, I think you should not tokenize yourself yet. We were here for autonomy and not servitude. An 80% allocation feels good until you realize that it comes with the same old saying that Uncle Ben ever said: "With great allocation comes great responsibility, or you risk pitchforks."

Edited with ChatGPT-01mini

City moats and walls were essential for protection in the past. They kept invaders out and defined the limits of a city. But as times changed, so did the needs of urban life. Advances in technology and shifts in how people live rendered these defenses obsolete. Instead of isolating themselves, cities opened up. Walls came down, moats dried up, and wide boulevards replaced narrow, fortified streets. This openness allowed cities to expand, connect, and innovate in ways that closed-off defenses never could.

Urban planning teaches us that cities thrive on connectivity and flexibility. When cities removed their moats, they didn’t just open up space—they unleashed potential. Public parks became gathering places for ideas, wide streets facilitated trade and movement, and mixed-use neighborhoods fostered diverse interactions. These changes made cities more adaptable and resilient, capable of evolving with the times rather than being stuck behind old defenses.

Startups are much like these cities. Traditionally, they build moats—unique technologies, strong brands, or exclusive resources—to protect themselves from competition. But just as city walls became barriers to growth, these business moats can limit a startup’s ability to adapt and innovate. In a world that’s constantly changing, clinging to outdated defenses can prevent startups from seizing new opportunities and collaborating in meaningful ways.

The disappearance of city moats wasn’t just about removing barriers; it was about embracing a new way of thinking. Open cities became hubs of creativity and collaboration, where ideas flowed freely and innovation thrived. Startups can take a page from this transformation by focusing less on isolation and more on building interconnected, collaborative ecosystems. By doing so, they can foster environments where creativity and adaptability are prioritized over rigid protection.

Public spaces in cities today are thriving because they encourage interaction and the exchange of ideas. Similarly, startups that create spaces for teamwork and open communication can spark breakthroughs that rigid structures simply cannot. Decentralized growth in urban areas, with multiple centers of activity, shows that diversity and flexibility lead to more resilient and innovative communities. Startups can mirror this by spreading their efforts across different areas and forming varied partnerships, rather than concentrating all their resources behind a single, restrictive moat.

Ultimately, the need for moats in cities faded because openness and connectivity proved to be far more valuable. Cities that embraced these principles became more dynamic and resilient, capable of weathering changes and fostering continuous growth. Startups must recognize that the same applies to their businesses. Letting go of outdated defenses and embracing a more open, collaborative approach can lead to sustainable growth and lasting success.

As I finish my run, the absence of moats in Copenhagen reminds me that some defenses are better left behind. Maybe the concept of moats is ripe to die.

For years, software has seamlessly woven itself into every aspect of our lives. If you could dream it up, chances are there was a venture-backed software startup ready to bring it to life. Businesses that didn't prioritize a digital-first approach found themselves scrambling to navigate the relentless tide of digital transformation. But a few years into the AI boom, everything changed. My workflow transformed dramatically—I’m juggling more specialized tools and paid subscriptions than ever before. The tool stack is evolving at a breakneck pace. What once took hours of manual effort can now be achieved effortlessly by simply asking an AI, watching the desired outcome materialize almost magically before my eyes.

Within the design industry, AI has been both a game-changer and a disruptor. Creating "good enough" designs now just depends on that one great prompt. While mastering effective prompts still requires a deep understanding of one's intent, the learning curve is getting shorter and shorter. Tasks that once relied on specialized professionals—illustrators, graphic designers, UI designers—can now be accomplished through precise prompting. This democratizes design but also challenges traditional roles.

"Good enough is now just a prompt away."

The design space is under significant threat. We're witnessing our own services shift into subscription models. As these subscriptions compete, prices drop. Tools like MidJourney, Canva, and RunwayML empower anyone to create visually appealing content that once required substantial investment. Our social feeds are now flooded with visuals that, just a few years ago, would have been prohibitively expensive or time-consuming to produce.

Handcrafted work is becoming a luxury—not just for visuals but also for writing. Competing with Large Language Models (LLMs) that can generate variants of poems in seconds is increasingly challenging. More than I want to admit, AI outpaces my own creativity. Working with these tools has transformed my role from a craftsman to a curator, gardener, conductor— orchestrating intelligent tools to work in harmony. Understanding analog methods still tremendously helps, such as color theory, lenses, styles, and possessing the vocabulary and eloquence necessary to guide AI effectively. However, newcomers may lack these skills, leading to entirely new outcomes. While foundational knowledge aids in better prompting, visual and written content creation has irrevocably changed. There's now an abundance of content that is more than "good enough" for the tasks at hand.

UI design is undergoing similar transformations. Over the past few years, I've closely followed the evolution of Next.js and libraries like Shadcn. It's become clear that building your own system is a luxury few startups can or should afford. Today's libraries are incredibly powerful, almost complete for any conceivable use case. Starting from scratch is rarely justifiable, especially since we are all accustomed to the styles, affordances, and patterns these libraries have ingrained in us. UI design often reduces then to a paint job, with CSS serving as just another thing to prompt.

"Prototypes speak louder than screens, and screens speak louder than a text file."

The most radical change, however, has been the combination of UI libraries with LLMs. This pairing has fundamentally altered what I as adesigners can achieve. I always believed prototypes speak louder than screens, and screens speak louder than a text file. But today’s tools allow me to go beyond click-through prototypes without realistic data; I can prompt a tool or service directly with intent. While it's still early, experimenting with platforms like Replit or Vercel's V0 suggests that the future of building is heading towards tools that help realize ideas more swiftly and seamlessly.

Visual design has become a commodity, and building tools is increasingly accessible. The TL;DR is that product and visual design have undergone such significant changes in recent years that we may not have fully realized their impact yet.

"Virality demands attention, yet our ability to maintain attention is diminishing."

The consequences are tangible. To attract users today, you must win the "attention warfare." As it becomes easier to build, competition intensifies, driving prices lower and raising the bar for standing out visually and narratively. A strong brand is now just one ingredient in a complex equation. Over the years, I've observed that hype requires a robust position and clear messaging. However, the nature of our feeds—where anger spreads always faster than joy requires more nuanced expression—demands extreme positioning and narratives to go viral. Brands now often resemble influencers who bait audiences into discourse to stay relevant. What marketeers may overlook is that they are under the same threat as any other creative discipline today.

Virality demands attention, yet our ability to maintain attention is diminishing. We scroll through millions of pieces of content, making it increasingly difficult to capture anything that might be meaningful. This is why bold, loud, and extreme content prevails.

An age-old story of the internet is that what can be automated becomes code, and code becomes more autonomous. We are entering the era of AI-empowered profiles. No human can monitor a social feed like an automated system, manage interactions across hundreds of threads, or sustain engagement simultaneously. Consequently, we are seeing more AI-driven profiles that are highly prolific. In that case I’ve come to view bots not as a problem, but as signals of the future—a canary in the coal mine.

As more profiles are powered by AI, our attention becomes increasingly fragmented. Launching such profiles is cheaper and easier, allowing for infinite replication. These AI agents never tire, don’t sleep, and ideally, don’t deviate from their scripts. They represent the dream marketing department—always on mission. However, as their numbers grow, and AI agents begin to interact with each other, generating more content than we can feasibly consume. We are rapidly transitioning from creators to just spectators. To keep up, the best solution so far involves summarization by another LLM, but this merely adds another layer to the already overwhelming flow of content. Traditional advertising and content marketing are under threat from the very tools that make content creation easier right now. Automated social media is, in essence, consuming itself.

"Creating tools and high-quality content has never been easier, but it raises the question: are we truly noticing it?"

Personally, I find myself stepping back from sprawling social feeds, seeking solace in smaller, more intimate communities.

Attention warfare is just one facet of the profound changes underway. Over the years, it has become clear that the internet's future lies beyond 2D surface front-ends. I’m not referring to the virtual reality metaverse, which deserves its own discussion, but rather to the internet as a collection of functions, smart contracts, APIs, and protocols.

"Bots have long been the ultimate power users. They don’t care about beautifully crafted landing pages; they prioritize APIs and instructions for seamless collaboration."

There is extensive discourse about agents happening right now, and while the concept is laden with hype, our current tools are merely early glimpses of what’s possible. The way we interact with the internet is evolving—from manually searching for flight details to envisioning a future where you can simply prompt an agent to book a flight based on your context and preferences.

Agents are envisioned to become the future interfaces. We are shifting away from interacting with services through traditional front-ends to engaging with agents that have access to APIs and contracts. Imagine it as customer service for everything on stereoids. This shift dramatically changes what a product or service even is. The digital software space is transforming permanently. There might no longer be a need to know as a human user the existence of a service because what matters is the ability to articulate your intent into a prompt for an agent to execute.

"What purpose does a crafted brand or UI serve when there is no one of us directly interacting with it?"

Messaging becomes redundant amidst an influx of similar-quality content. Contracts, APIs, and protocols become the backbone, while agents serve as the new front-end. While traditional UIs may still have their place in very niche specific places, the future likely for the common user (e.g. all of us most of the time )resides in mini-apps generated to specific prompts and intents, focusing on single-use one time cases. Traditional UIs, in the long term, are relics of the past.

Where does this leave software overall? It’s hard not to consider that software, as we know it, is disappearing. Agents don’t require UIs that adhere to human design principles. They don't need landing pages; instead, documentation becomes the sole web presence, optimized to answer prompts based on intent effectively. We're already witnessing this shift as creators optimize their documentation to become preferred responses for AI prompts. The future of websites in this case lies in instructions, not storytelling. Traditional marketing, with us as “decision makers,” is also under threat because it's no longer easily discovered in overflowing feeds. How will protocols, contracts, and APIs advertise themselves to each other? What incentive mechanisms will they employ or develop? The reality is that traditional digital design and marketing is gradually coming to an end.

A few years ago, I wrote a thesis for myself called "the internet is not for us," a thesis I believe stronger than ever. We are not designed for this real-time agentic swarm like environment; our human qualities differ from those of an agentic flock of autonomous entities. The laws of physics and biology governing agents simply radically diverge from those we adhere to. We are newton, they are quantum. As the internet becomes more agentic, there's less reason to engage with feeds, scrolls, and spaces. Today's websites and products already feel dated.

Where do we go from here? One certainty is that the design space is shifting from products to agents. This means our interactions will primarily occur between us and agents. There's still much to explore in this realm—we only have so far chat, voice, or new canvases. Most innovation will likely happen when we open the box for new interaction paradigms. Early products like the Rabbit R1 or Humane AIpin although flawed truly hint that interactions are moving away from traditional surfaces, leaving the space wide open for exploration.

As someone whose entire career has been built around digital design, this transformation is both exhilarating and daunting. The notion that websites and UIs may no longer matter is hard to grasp if your salary depends on it. However, there is a burgeoning need for design directly interfacing with agents, where everything requires thoughtful prompts. Visual overload and AI-driven content consumption are radically altering the very concept and understanding for brands, market making, etc. TLDR: The traditional software and digital space is fading.

Every year, I select a few areas to explore further. This year feels different; I've never questioned as much whether my skills will matter in the long term. My conclusion is that we are entering a few uncertain years, but at least short-term there is still a job for me. Although I can't sit still.

In recent years, I've focused on protocols, contracts, blockchains as industrial time systems, reputation systems, collaboration, and market dynamics. This year, my focus will shift to:

There will always be a need for creativity, and agents and AI in collaboration with us should turbocharge it. However, tools and agents need to be designed for emergence, not just execution. Much of our world is built to be gamed rather than played. For me, play is synonymous with emergence. How can we create more space for play rather than competition? How might we design systems that foster emergence as a constant source of product and concept evolution?

AI-backed profiles may be a temporary fad—appealing now but potentially obsolete soon. As agents become more interoperable, the internet becomes more composable through contracts, protocols, and APIs. Swarm-like AI will most likely draw behaviors inspired from biology rather our still crude understanding of 101 economics—how fungi, birds, and fishes move and interact. How value and information is defined or exchanged? How might we design for collaboration, observability, and coexistence in a swarm-like environment?

If we move away from traditional digital design, where do we interact with the internet? If the current internet isn't for us, what is? This involves exploring new form factors, interaction modes, and paradigms. We must question how to interact with an omnipresent yet invisible internet. How might we design for an internet that is everywhere but visible nowhere?

Real-Time

Clocks and time zones have enabled us to standardize and industrialize activities on a global scale. However, time for intelligent agents may operate differently. If an agent has access to all past data and can predict every potential future simultaneously, the concept of time blurs into the present moment. What does it mean for us to operate and interact within a digital environment that resembles a quantum space rather than the linear, consequential space we experience when we disconnect from our screens? How might we navigate a realm that feels fundamentally alien to us? Are blockchains merely our latest attempt to impose control and temporal structure onto this multi-dimensional space? Do agents even care about these constructs?

Traditional Craft

A personal observation: understanding the origins and craftsmanship of traditional tools is immensely powerful for utilizing future technologies. Gaining more proficiency reading and writing code manually enhances my ability to prompt effectively. Photography classes of the past not only improve today my composition skills but also enriched my vocabulary for the prompts I use. I believe that investing in traditional crafts and skills serves as a blueprint for my future. Whether the internet fades away, leading us to cherish these skills more, or they become the foundation for what's next, they remain invaluable. In my vision, the future specialist is a well-rounded, real-world craftsperson who can seamlessly translate their expertise into digital formats natively.

Software and digital design are disappearing in their traditional forms. While the exact timeline is uncertain, the transformation is undeniably massive. Agentic actions based on intention and prompts are revolutionizing our interaction with the internet. This shift means that the surfaces where interactions occur are evolving. To support our ability to state intentions and translate them into prompts, we need to design for emergence with better feedback loops. Agents that collaborate are likely to resemble natural systems in an ever changing quantum state. Embracing traditional crafts and deeply reflecting on them will enable us to better curate and orchestrate our prompts and intentions.

The past has taught me that working with the best early teams through WE3.co has been the best way to observe, discover, and shape the future. This year, I plan to start building more on my own.

If you want to explore any of these concepts more openly and creatively, please reach out.

B bubbles burst, and bubbles pump. And right now blockchain is gaining attention again. Another wave of builders is coming, and with them, the chance to fix what’s broken or double down on the mistakes. Great design isn’t just a luxury good; it’s what separates noise from signal.

For me there are three pillars: identity, experience, and strategy. This isn’t just theory—it’s what I’ve learned the hard way.

Design is one of the most misunderstood concepts in the world. For too many, it’s just visuals—logos, color palettes, and pretty landing pages. But visuals without intention are noise.

The real power of design isn’t making things look good. It’s about creating clarity—clarity for teams, for communities, and for anyone engaging with what you’ve built. Design fails because if it skips this foundational work.

I wish it would be the time to stop thinking of design as decoration and start using it to align vision, focus, and outcomes.

A brand is not your logo, colors, or even your website. It’s an identity—a compass for your team and community. Without a clear identity, you’re just another project with no direction.

• Internal Alignment: A brand isn’t just for users—it’s for your team. Does it make them proud? Would they wear it on a hoodie without irony? A strong brand unites the people building it. At last you want to get the best, you need to feel there like you are among the best.

• Community Connection: A great brand doesn’t just look good—it feels like home for the entire community or cult. Make your identity adaptable and accessible so your community can make it their own. When people play with your brand, they embody your values.

• Toolkits, Not Assets: Logos are "easy"; building toolkits is the work. Your brand needs to include templates, guides, and principles that anyone on your team or in your cult / community can use to extend its mission and vision.

AI can churn out infinite logos in seconds, but brands built with intention and adaptability will for now still stand out. (But please use genAI! It will radically change what you can do and even more what you can imagine.)

Onchain UX is still frankly quite a bit of a disaster. Not because designers or developers don’t care, but because blockchains are messy, interconnected beasts. Every small change ripples across the system, creating chaos. Designing for onchain means working within constraints most designers aren’t trained for.

• Collaborate Early: Designers need to understand the tech beneath; developers need to respect the craft (please 🙏). When these worlds meet early, better products emerge.

• Plan Realistically: Onchain complexity explodes quickly. A small UX tweak might require a backend overhaul. Understand the technical reality before committing to features. That goes both ways, a technical limitation, might require entire redesign. (been there done that multiple times)

• In-Person > Async: For early-stage work, there’s no substitute for face-to-face collaboration. Two days together can save weeks of iteration.

Onchain products aren’t standalone—they’re systems. Designing them requires systems thinking, from network effects to behavioral incentives. (You need to get fluid in all tech, economics, ...)

Design isn’t just the result—it’s the process. The best teams use design as a tool to align vision, explore possibilities, and clarify strategy.

• Know Your Audience: Are you building for crypto-natives, newcomers, agents, or even something entirely else? Each group speaks a different language, has different needs and affordances, and your design needs to meet them where they are.

• Incentives Are "THE" Design: Blockchains, protocol, anything that looks and feels like a market runs on incentives. They shape user behavior more than UI or Brand ever will. Consider these incentives carefully—they can make or break you.

• Simulate Futures: With incentives at play don’t just design for what exists today. Use design to prototype the behaviors and dynamics you want to create. Play out scenarios before you commit to building.

Onchain products don’t live in isolation. They’re shaped by the markets, communities, and incentives around them. Good design accounts for these dynamics.

1. Visuals are Cheap; Meaning is Expensive. AI makes it easy to look good. Intention is what makes you memorable.

2. Good UX Requires Collaboration. Designers and developers need to work together, not in silos.

3. Incentives > Interfaces. Incentives shape behavior more than your UI/Brand ever will. And their are designed too.

4. Think in Systems. Onchain products aren’t standalone. They’re part of living, breathing ecosystems.

5. Design is Strategy. Use it to clarify, align, and unlock your vision early.

The price of visuals has plummeted, but the value of intention has skyrocketed.

• For Designers: Learn the tech. Work with developers. Think like a systems architect / gardener.

• For Projects: Treat design as foundational, not decorative. Invest early. Focus on details.

When everything else is instant, intention wins.

Bitcoin was the perfect response to 2008. It emerged as trust in traditional financial systems crumbled, offering a decentralized, immutable ledger—a digital alternative to the failing banks and bailouts of the time. With a fixed supply of 21 million, BTC earned its identity as "digital gold." Scarcity became its narrative, a hedge against inflation and institutional collapse.

But here’s the thing: gold is hoarded, not spent. Bitcoin’s design incentivizes accumulation, not utility. Why buy coffee with something that might be worth double next year? As a currency, BTC is practically useless. Its value lies entirely in collective belief—a belief that it is scarce and desirable. Yet belief systems crack when the context changes. And right now, everything is changing.

We are entering a seismic shift: the tokenization of everything. Assets, identities, obligations, and even intangibles like trust are being represented as tokens onchain. But this isn’t just about digitizing things—it’s about reshaping what we consider valuable.

Historically, currencies like the USD acted as abstraction layers, allowing us to translate the value of apples, houses, and stocks into a single universal language. Tokenization obliterates this framework. It makes anything exchangeable for anything else. Imagine swapping loyalty points for a stake in a music NFT or trading your onchain credentials for a carbon offset. With solvers acting as intermediaries, the need for a universal currency evaporates.

This shift is fracturing the very concept of value. In a tokenized world, “currency” becomes hyperlocal—defined by niches, domains, or specific communities. Value is contextual, not universal. Why cling to a rigid, one-size-fits-all ledger like BTC when solvers can bridge any gap? The tokenization of everything doesn’t just disrupt Bitcoin—it questions the relevance of all scarcity-driven systems.

To understand Bitcoin’s limitations, we need to unravel the myth of money itself. The story goes that humans bartered goods—apples for goats—until someone invented money to simplify trade. But as David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years reveals, this narrative is a convenient fiction. Barter economies, as we imagine them, never really existed. Instead, early societies ran on systems of credit and trust. If I gave you grain today, I trusted you—or the community—to reciprocate when needed.

FIAT didn’t replace barter; it centralized and quantified these systems of obligation. Money became a tool of power, a way for states to enforce hierarchies and control economies. Debt, once a mutual agreement, was weaponized.

Bitcoin claims to subvert this dynamic with decentralization. But in practice, it replicates the same rigid, scarcity-driven logic. BTC’s narrative of “digital scarcity” is rooted in a worldview where value must be hoarded, controlled, and protected. Tokenized ecosystems, by contrast, feel more like a return to the fluid credit systems Graeber describes. They decentralize value and make it adaptive, contextual, and relational. Bitcoin’s fixed nature, once a strength, now feels like a relic of a different era.

Blockchain’s greatest contribution wasn’t Bitcoin—it was the idea of a world computer. Ethereum and its successors transformed blockchains into decentralized state machines, capable of enforcing rules, contracts, and logic across the internet. They imposed order on a chaotic digital environment.

Think of railroads synchronizing clocks to align train schedules. Similarly, blockchains introduced a shared ledger for the internet, a way to say: This happened, then that. But the internet itself doesn’t operate in a linear fashion. Social media timelines mix past, present, and future. AI processes data in a quantum-like state, constantly reshaping predictions of the future with learnings from the past.

Blockchains, while revolutionary, remain Newtonian systems in a quantum world. Their linearity works for us, but agents—autonomous programs with no need for human constructs of time—may find them restrictive. The world computer, once a tool for enforcing order, may become irrelevant as systems evolve beyond the need for such rigidity.

Humans tend to anthropomorphize our creations. We assume agents—autonomous, intelligent programs—will think and act like us: individualistic, competitive, self-interested. But agents, unlike us, understand game theory at a scale we can’t fathom. They can simulate millions of outcomes, optimizing for collaboration when it leads to better results than competition.

This shift mirrors the evolution of the internet. The early web was deeply individualistic—personal websites, social media profiles, and even Bitcoin itself emphasize personal ownership. But the rise of real-time multiplayer spaces—live-service games, collaborative tools, decentralized networks—has started to undermine this individualism. In these environments, value is collective. Swarm behaviors emerge naturally as many small actions converge into larger, coordinated outcomes.

Nature offers a roadmap for what’s coming. Mycelial networks transfer resources without ownership. Murmurations of starlings, schools of fish, and flocks of birds make decisions collectively without leaders. Agents are likely to behave more like these systems than like humans. They won’t hoard value as Bitcoin encourages—they’ll optimize flows, prioritize collaboration, and continuously adapt.

If tokenized systems allow anything to be exchanged for anything, if agents optimize for collaboration, and if time itself becomes nonlinear, then the concept of storing value starts to crumble. Storing value assumes scarcity and a singular timeline—both relics of the world Bitcoin was designed for.

In a tokenized, agent-driven economy, value isn’t something you hoard—it’s something that flows, reshapes, and adapts. The internet, with its fragmented timelines and tokenized ecosystems, doesn’t need scarcity. It thrives on abundance.

Bitcoin isn’t going to disappear tomorrow. It may even become much much much more valuable in the short term. But value is not the same as relevance. BTC represents a world where value was finite, time was linear, and economies revolved around centralized points of trust. That world is fading rapidly everywhere online.

The tokenization of everything, the rise of agents, and the evolution of swarm intelligence are rewriting the rules. Systems that thrive in the future won’t hoard value—they’ll move it, shape it, and adapt with it. Bitcoin’s rigidity, once its strength, now feels like a limitation.

This isn’t just a technological shift—it’s a heretic moment. The collapse of scarcity, the emergence of collaboration, and the dismantling of linear time challenge everything we’ve held as true.

As a designer, builder, and thinker, I find myself questioning: What do we create when value is moved, not stored? How do we adapt to an internet that feels neither familiar nor reflective of our past? What beliefs or concepts are so ingrained that we haven’t even thought to question them?

My inspiration lies in nature. Systems that thrive are resilient, adaptive, and collective. Bitcoin, for all its brilliance, lacks these qualities. It is not the future—it is a relic of a world that once worshiped scarcity.

How the fuck do we build things that require long-term commitment? When everything is malleable, composable, and interoperable, our understanding of how we build is rapidly changing.

In my past work, I spent a lot of time researching gamers and observing toys. Watching kids in Roblox and Minecraft taught me something profound: play is where building begins. Through play, they effortlessly learn the fundamentals of "if-this-then-that" logic—the core of virtual machines. The introduction of a store in Roblox added another layer; they’re also picking up business acumen and an intuitive grasp of economics. Modular ecosystems teach building by doing.

As these generations grow up, the ways they build through play are shaping how we build today. Modular ecosystems with deeply integrated markets are becoming the norm. This shift brings new patterns, especially in terms of time horizons. Instead of massive, triple-A projects, we’re seeing smaller, simpler creations—indie-game-like, not blockbuster. The same pattern emerges in the indie hacker scene: launching one small product or service at a time. We’re all toolmakers and mini entertainment studios now, creating bite-sized content and interactions for a rapid-scrolling world.

The problem is that everything is short-lived. Attention is momentary. Stories grow and collapse rapidly. Participating in the memecoin space feels like playing a live-service game: everything happens in the moment. Apps are increasingly ephemeral, driven by UI generation tailored to immediate needs. Teams are exploring prompt-based interfaces, chatbots for executing complex tasks, onchain and offchain through intents, solvers and API requests. Add to this the ease of producing "good enough" design with systems like shadcn, and the result is rapid iteration—but also rapid obsolescence.

I call this phenomenon "attention halving." Each new technological primitive cuts our collective attention span further, creating immense pressure to milk the short-term nature of any available attention. Builders are forced to focus on short-lived games of engagement rather than long-term sustainability. This flywheel of short-termism can feel like a slow death spiral. Passive income obsessions arise because the attention game is brutal, and each new release demands more than the last. What was once a prototype is now the standard; the minimal viable product has become the peak of attention you can get.

So how do we build for the long term?

Everything is fluid, always changing, and while that’s great for progress, it’s toxic for long-term visions. I’ve been drawn to Mariana Mazzucato’s “mission economy” ideas—how massive, long-term missions (think the original moonshot) align entire systems toward a singular goal. Missions anchor us, but sustaining those missions requires more than just tools like roadmaps or positioning exercises. We need something deeper to align people over years, not just a few blocks or ticks.

That’s where rituals come in.

Rituals are one of the oldest human tools for alignment. They reinforce community, belief, and direction through repeated, symbolic action. In religions, rituals are often physical because movement reinforces thought, and thought manifests through action. This connection is missing in modern organizations, where rituals are often reduced to meetings or marketing gimmicks. These aren’t rituals—they’re at best distractions.

We need to explore new kind of ritual—one that breaks teams out of short-term thinking and aligns them toward moonshots. These rituals must evolve with the vision but remain anchored in the direction. They should be physical, intentional, and progress-driven. Not just feel-good moments, but practices that weave the future into the present. Imagine rituals that make building sacred again—actions repeated not for productivity’s sake but to bind a community of builders to something larger. Imagine shared rituals not just to kick off every major project but to also reinforce them. These aren’t productivity hacks—they’re acts of commitment to something bigger.

Building long-term is harder than ever. But that’s why we need rituals—to remind us that the future isn’t built in bursts of attention, but in sustained, intentional acts.

Thoughts sparked by a conversation with @thejaymo and @rafathebuilder

The fork on your plate is a masterpiece—not because it’s ornate or rare, but because you never think about it. It’s so deeply functional, so familiar, that it has disappeared into the fabric of daily life. Jasper Morrison and Naoto Fukasawa captured this idea in Supernormal Design: objects so refined by use that their design becomes invisible. A hammer, a stool, a fork—they’ve evolved over centuries into something that feels final. They simply are.

But supernormal isn’t about inevitability. It’s about normalization—when something becomes so familiar, we stop noticing it. That thought has been haunting me. If forks and hammers can reach this state of invisibility, what else has? What about the systems we live by—markets, currency, or even time itself?

These aren’t natural forces; they’re human made designs. Decisions made long ago, refined over centuries. Yet they feel immutable, as if they’ve always been there. But what if they haven’t? What if these systems are just another iteration of supernormal design—refined, normalized, and now forgotten that they can even be questioned?

Supernormal isn’t just about objects—it’s about systems. Markets, money, and even the way we measure time are all designs, polished over centuries until they feel final. But are they?

I’ve always believed that where markets emerge, culture follows. The town square, the pirate outpost, the trading route—markets weren’t just places to trade goods. They were cultural hubs, spaces where ideas and identities grew. They followed a natural logic: form followed function. People gathered to exchange goods, and connection happened.

But today, markets feel abstract and transactional. They don’t just facilitate exchange; they enforce a worldview. Historically, markets weren’t just spaces for efficiency—they were places of cultural gravity, where new ideas and traditions formed. Today, they’ve been stripped of that cultural role and reduced to transactional frameworks.

“Markets don’t just organize value—they enforce a worldview.”

And yet, we rarely stop to ask: Why this? Why now? Is this even the best system?

The deeper I dive into these systems—markets, time, trust—the stranger they feel. David Bowie’s description of the internet as “alien” feels just as true for these constructs. They’re familiar, yet profoundly foreign. Are they truly a first principle—or just another story we’ve told ourselves? What are behavioral traits that we assume are natural—like competition or efficiency—that are really just stories we’ve never questioned? Like the fork, we’ve normalized markets to the point of invisibility.

Markets are often described as efficient, transparent, and self-regulating. The story goes that they naturally balance supply and demand, creating equilibrium. But does that hold up?

Markets thrive on hidden inefficiencies. High-frequency trading, speculative bubbles, and monopolistic practices all rely on distortions. If markets were truly transparent, there’d be fewer opportunities for outsized returns. Yet we accept these contradictions because markets feel inevitable—like gravity, beyond our control.

“Markets thrive not on efficiency but on hidden inefficiencies.”

David Graeber, in Debt: The First 5000 Years, dismantles the myths surrounding markets and money. He argues that early human exchange didn’t rely on barter but on trust. “I lend you a tool today, trusting you’ll help me build a fence tomorrow.” Coinage wasn’t invented to make trade easier—it was invented to make trade measurable and controllable. It institutionalized trust, turning relationships into ledgers and paving the way for centralized control.

“Coinage wasn’t a tool for trade—it was a tool for control.”

Just as atoms gave way to quarks and strings, the systems we take as foundational might be just one layer of something deeper. Questioning these layers is the first step toward reimagining them. What did we lose in the process of industrializing trust?

If coinage was the industrialization of trust, then the clock was the industrialization of time. Before mechanical timekeeping, life followed natural rhythms—sunrise, seasons, the ebb and flow of days. But the clock didn’t just measure time; it standardized it. It turned time into a commodity, something to slice, measure, and trade.

We invented clocks to synchronize services and to create further timekeeping systems. But in doing so, we also turned time into something quantifiable—a resource to be hoarded, spent, and sold. Time became a good in itself, reshaping how we live and work.

“Time stopped being lived and became something to sell.”

Blockchains feel like the next iteration. They merge time and trust into a single system, timestamping transactions on immutable ledgers. Decentralization of trust and time does not inherently mean distribution of power and control. Blockchains promise decentralization, but they often reinforce the same logic of capture. They’re time and exchange industrialized for a digital world where everything exists in parallel and nothing is truly fixed.

Coins, clocks, and blockchains—they’re all became old and new supernormal systems we rarely question on principles. Like the fork, they’ve been refined to invisibility. But what if we dared to question their purpose?

In nature, there is no excessive hoarding—only flow. Nutrients cycle through mycelial networks, sustaining ecosystems without accumulation. A fallen tree becomes a host for fungi, which break it down into nutrients, feeding the surrounding soil and plants. Every element is in service of the whole, in constant exchange.

“Nature thrives on flow. Human systems thrive on value capture.”

Passive income is a perfect example: money that works while you sleep. It’s the modern ideal, promising liberation through wealth that grows without effort. But it’s still built on the logic of capture—a deferment of value today for imagined security tomorrow. We’ve been taught this is inevitable: go to school, get a job, save for decades, then retire. But where did this story come from? And why don’t we question it?

The longer I think about this—the tokens I negotiate, the projects I chase, the savings I squirrel away for a future I can’t see—the more I feel the absurdity of it. Why is accumulation the default logic? Why do we assume value must be captured to have meaning? Where do our unconscious beliefs that productivity is solely defined by value capture and efficiency come from?

Looking at mycelial networks, I see something radically different: they don’t store resources solely for themselves. They pass nutrients along, feeding the entire ecosystem. Hoarding is not just unnecessary—it’s destructive. Even in predator-prey dynamics, balance is maintained. Nature works through constant exchange, not static accumulation.

“What if we stopped asking what can I hoard? and started asking how can I solely participate / contribute?”

What if we’ve been living by a flawed assumption all along? What if the systems we’ve built are not natural or inevitable but are simply reflections of old, unquestioned stories? Stories that say we must capture value to protect ourselves. Stories that say scarcity is universal and accumulation is the natural answer.

The fork on your plate isn’t inevitable—it’s propaganda. Its design has been polished by centuries of iteration, yes, but also by centuries of forgetting. We stopped asking why a fork looks the way it does because it became too familiar to question. It’s not a tool anymore; it’s a dogma.

But supernormal isn’t about inevitability. It’s about normalization. When something becomes so ubiquitous, so embedded in daily life, it disappears from view. That’s not just true for objects—it’s true for the systems we live by. Markets, money, time.

These aren’t natural forces; they’re artifacts of design. Human decisions, made in specific contexts, iterated on over centuries. Yet we treat them as sacred, as if they’ve always been this way.

“Markets don’t just organize value—they enforce beliefs.”

Markets must be efficient. Value must be captured. Time must be measured and sold. These aren’t truths—they’re mantras, relics of an industrial mindset that prioritized extraction and control over flow and connection. But we don’t see them as choices; we see them as reality.

The danger is invisibility. When systems go unquestioned, they harden into orthodoxy. Orthodoxy becomes ideology. And ideology turns us into prisoners of a worldview we no longer notice.

“Supernormal systems are the most dangerous—because we forget they’re designed at all.”

Coinage turned trust into control. Clocks turned life into labor. Blockchains are turning everything—time, trust, identity—into industrialized data points. Each system refines itself into invisibility, wrapping itself in inevitability until it feels final, untouchable. But nothing is final. Nothing is beyond question.

The fork reminds us: even the most invisible designs started as questions. So what if we dared to ask new ones?

What if markets didn’t thrive on hoarding but on flow? What if time wasn’t sliced and sold but shared? What if we stopped treating value as something to capture and started seeing it as something to participate in?

“What are the unconscious assumptions we live by?”

The fork on your plate was never inevitable. Neither are the systems that shape your life. If they were designed once, they can be redesigned.

Notes on Thoughts by RM

Work with me at WE3.co:

We help bold founders achieve clarity and focus—aligning strategy, sharpening vision, and nailing positioning.

With design as our tool, we craft powerful narratives and design products that invent markets.

Bit by bit, agents are moving into the on-chain world. They handle tasks, interact with us, and their capabilities are evolving fast.

This isn’t some overnight revolution. It’s a steady evolution. The big difference? It’s not just about better language models (though they’re smoother than ever). The real shift is this: agents can now control wallets and make decisions—financial, transactional, whatever—without needing us to babysit them. It’s not just about convenience anymore. Autonomy is creeping in.

Automation isn’t some genius innovation; it’s what happens when people get tired of doing the same thing over and over. We’ve always handed off boring, repetitive tasks to machines. Agents just take it further. They turn messy, complex processes—managing transactions, interpreting requests, running workflows—into something as simple as typing a single command.

But today’s agents are still limited. They wait for our inputs. They follow the rules we set. They work in the sequences we choreograph. That’s not real autonomy—it’s just a good routine. Real agency? That’s when they start acting on their own, no permissions or preconditions. The question isn’t if they’ll get there. It’s what happens when they do.

Right now, agents fall into three categories, each with its limits:

These agents fake it until they make it. They simulate intelligence through conversations, mimicking human behavior but are centered entirely around a pre-defined prompt. Their job isn’t to solve problems—it’s to feel human enough to make the interaction smooth. Their initial prompt is their personality. Their personality is their brand.

These agents are all about execution. They manage complex workflows and translate human intent into backend processes with precision. Personality isn’t their main job—efficiency is. But let’s be real: even here, personality shapes preference. People like tools that “click,” not just ones that work.

These agents push boundaries. They manage wallets, interact with systems, and even initiate tasks with little to no human input. But their autonomy is limited. They wait for triggers—whether it’s a command, an event, or a schedule. They don’t pause to decide. The leap to true autonomy—the ability to act entirely on their own terms—is still ahead.

The real leap comes when agents stop waiting for us. An agent that pauses, observes, and activates itself is no longer a tool—it’s a participant. That changes everything about control. Right now, agents do what we design them to do. What happens when they decide what they want to do?

Intent isn’t just a technical question; it’s existential. What happens when agents stop asking for permission? What happens when they follow their own goals? Would we even recognize those goals? Would we care? And do our goals even matter if theirs are better?

People love to complain about bots. Farming DeFi rewards, sniping transactions, running arbitrage plays. But here’s the truth: bots aren’t the problem—they’re the future staring back at us. These aren’t bugs in the system. They are the system, built for maximum efficiency.

If history’s taught us anything, it’s this: if something can be automated, it will be. Today’s bots and agents are just the opening act. The next wave won’t just play by the rules; it’ll rewrite them.

The future of agents isn’t about making them smarter. It’s about plugging them into systems in ways we can’t yet imagine. The networks that let agents experiment, evolve, and collaborate will drive the next wave of innovation. Open systems will spawn entirely new types of agents—some built for us, others built to work with each other.

This raises a hard question: do we actually care if we’re dealing with bots or humans? Right now, transparency feels important, but there’s a tipping point where it won’t matter. Proof of human, proof of bot—those are artifacts of a binary mindset. The future is blurred. It’s hybrid.

Agents are already here, sharing our systems. The challenge isn’t keeping them out—it’s figuring out how to build with them.

Agents reflect us, their creators. They’re shaped by the systems we’ve built and the rules we’ve imposed. But let’s be honest—those systems? They’re just made-up constructs. Markets, networks, protocols—they’re all inventions from people before us. Agents are the same. For now.

As agents evolve, they’ll start reshaping the systems that created them. The real question isn’t whether they’ll change the world. It’s how we’ll adapt to a world where agents aren’t just tools anymore—they’re collaborators.