Settlers
Protocols, Markets, and Mythical Golden Ages
👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week's remarkable stories at the intersection of #technology, #business, #design, and #culture.
📚 Reading
Protocols and Creator DAOs:
On the crypto map, the most successful protocols are like that bend in the river, the perfect point for value to flow in both directions. A locus for value creation and trade. And when the protocols granted ownership, they went from being purely transactional to communal. They became settlements [..] The inevitable next step is the development of culture around those settlements..
🧐 Seeing like a protocol (paraphrasing)—Trends, Analysis, Lies and Statistics
Market-Making on the Internet:
Web 2.0 assumed that your one identity would connect together the different pieces of your web existence. However, just as the future of social networking is about different identities for different contexts, interoperability via markets is about linking together distinct user bases in a way that is appropriate for different services, all under the control of the user who is paying for the privilege.
🤔 Markets are settlements, too—Stratechery (and a follow-up)
Why We Keep Telling the Myth of a Renaissance Golden Age and Bad Middle Ages:
[W]henever you get a combination of (A) increasing wealth and (B) increasing instability, that’s a recipe for (C) increasing art and innovation, not because people are at peace and have the leisure to do art, but because they’re desperate [..] The fruits fill our museums and libraries, but they aren’t relics of an age of prosperous peace, they’re relics of a lived experience which was, as I said, terrible but great.
🤭 “Terrible but great” covers many sins—Ex Urbe
🎧 Listening
Questioning Everything:
Change, and becoming an adult, is making your own choices. But to make your own choices, you have to start observing your own programming and your programming is your belief structures. I think we should bear down that path [..] Very few people examine what they believe in.
Daniel Jeffries—Infinite Loops
Doge, Bitcoin, NFTs, and Capital Gains:
There is this idea that, in the tech industry, of 25 year old billionaires. In the past, getting rich meant to slowly work your way up and then, at a certain point, you would achieve financial stability or even success. The way the tech industry has developed, is that getting rich quick is a very feasible goal. And this does contribute to this "..and why aren't I".
Ranjan Roy, Can Duruk—Big Technology Podcast
A Not Boring Conversation:
Part of what became really interesting to me is: technology is just moving faster than the infrastructure can keep up with. That’s very clear, and so the question that became interesting to me is: how do you empower storytellers to own and create value for themselves at the speed of technology?
Clint Kisker—Not Boring
👷🏻♀️👷🏻♂️ Other Work
Every month, we will update an index of all editions to see what stories they collectively would tell. Maybe have a look?
📬 Suggestions?
Please, feel free to send tips, comments, and ideas for the next issue by replying to this email. Or, send them directly to hello@futuring-architectures.com 🙏