AI is an unasked for tech looking for a problem to solve. It uses an incredible amount of energy.
Blockchain was an unasked for tech looking for a problem to solve. It uses an incredible amount of energy.
Pursuit of endless growth is pursuit of a cancer.
Moore's Law is dead and we have reached a happy plateau. We dont need more computing power. We can do so much now. If you need something to chew on, work on making it more efficient. Make the code smaller and faster and lighter.
In the recently resurfaced debate about #solarpunk (or lunarpunk) aspects of #web3 and #blockchain I'm intrigued by one aspect:
Why do we accept being given a solution without outlining the problem in the first place?
Why do we listen to #DAO pitches instead of asking ourselves how we want to run our communities, how do we want to make decisions, vote, discuss things?
Just stating the problem first would make it very clear that there are multiple technical solutions, not just the Web3.
Every time I encountered someone pitching a DAO or a Blockchain to an organization, they specifically bundled several things together to make them indistinguishable - the culture with the technology, the way a community is organized with the tools they use. With that, there fewer footholds for any kind of question, insight into what is really happening.
This is what I mean by saying that the technology is transparent and it's not always a good thing, because it makes us unable to discuss it.
Moreover, Blockchains, with their tokens, enforce financialization of your communities, where the way ledger is implemented does not correspond with any kind of gift economy, with communalism, but with the harshest capitalist market traditions. Whoever has the [money/tokens/votes], rules.
We spent thousands of years working on different law systems, putting transparency, equality before the law at their core, and Blockchain wants to replace them with a web3 engineer being a priest/judge.
I’m a marketing guy, so this is the key takeaway for me:
“The entire investor case for AI is ‘companies will buy our products so they can do more with less.’ It’s not ‘business customers will buy our products so their products will cost more to make, but will be of higher quality.’”
This ^ observation struck me because I’ve wondered about this situation with non-AI enterprise software that automates mundane tasks.
Kickstarter's bizarre blockchain announcement in December 2021 makes so much more sense now that we know Andreessen Horowitz secretly promised them $100 million to pivot to a blockchain-based product built on the also-a16z-backed Celo blockchain.
At the time, I wondered why COO Sean Leow was so insistent on the move despite being apparently very confused about the whole concept.
Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet by Chris Dixon
A potent exploration of the power of blockchains to reshape the future of the internet—and how that affects us all—from influential technology entrepreneur and startup investor Chris Dixon
The company I work for is part of an Innovation Network. In the year 2024 they start out with an event titled "New economy - will #Blockchain and cryptography make intermediaries redundant?" and for job reasons I can't just answer "No. And 2021 wants its false narratives back."
Review: In "Read Write Own", the Andreessen Horowitz general partner and web3 superfan Chris Dixon lays out an unconvincing argument that blockchains are what it will take to fix the web.
@molly0xfff I recognize this genre of literature - this is the kind of book that hardcore Christian writers write for other hardcore Christians to read so that everyone involved can feel comfortable knowing that they're right and everyone else is wrong. It's not intended to convince an outsider to believe as it is to shore up the belief of a believer who is starting to doubt.
New Review Essay on @lmesseri tremendous new book, ethnography & tech, social hopes, & false dreams of tech solutionism. Also discussing work of Andrew Brock, Zeynep Tufekci & Kelsie Nabben on Black Twitter, Twitter & ethnographies of DAOs.