Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Some of the action there is on YouTube or via podcast, e.g. Rebel
Wisdom and The Stoa. 
  

    
liminal web/erik davis/doug rushkoff/happy mutant --- right, got it.
at least it's not like eve babitz, who evidently ended her days
listening to right-wing podcasts.
  

    
Interesting that amid the state of the world in terms of the
climate, biodiversity, democracy, and concentration of wealth, amid
other indicators, cryptocurrency and blockchain are the rabbit holes
we’ve largely gone down here for the past couple days.
  

    
because some ppl -like- talking about crypto? it's fun for them to
consider? rather than the intractable probs we dont know what to do
about?
  

    
#130 - A random aperçu … completely aside from anything but the
state of the world … this year has witnessed a phenomenon called
"immersive art" in San Francisco & NYC. Au contraire, rather than
delivering a sense of spaciousness - of being enveloped – 3D – the
effect is a flattening – a destruction of depth – as if translating
Van Gogh, Michelangelo, Picasso to the psychological width of a
screen, a monitor. 
  

    
I'm wondering what interesting art people found in the last pandemic
year. Not that people are getting out or travelling much, but there
ought to be some on the Internet somewhere?

I don't really expect anyone else to be interested, but I've become
somewhat obsessed with Polish revival of interwar era music. Here's
a good intro:

<https://culture.pl/en/article/interwar-music-revivalists-the-bands-singers-pla
ying-polish-music-of-the-1920s-1930s>
  

    
This is probably the best piece I've seen about why the
"decentralised" dream of Web3 is not going to happen. In fact, it's
already dead -- at least for ordinary users. 

https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
  

    
Can someone tell me what the f*ck Web3 means (and why I should care
about it), without referring directly or indirectly to NFTs or VR,
both of which exist without Web3 (I had the Google Cardboard viewer
years ago and gave it up almost immediately because it was stupid)
and largely or completely deserve to be canceled.
  

    
Oh boy. I can have a go. Basically: the idea is to decentralise the
web using blockchains to effectively replace databases, but it's a
hazy concept. Key parts of it including decentralised finances (the
use of cryptocurrencies not controlled by banks or governments), the
creation of tokens of various kinds to denote ownership, and
decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs), which are
organisations where governance rules are encoded programmatically
(again on the blockchain). 

Some of it is interesting - I think DAOs are fascinating, although
the early use of them is awful thanks to libertarian concepts of
greater financial investment = greater democratic rights (some DAOs
give more power to individuals based on how much they put in).

Others are just worse technical solutions to existing problems:
there is nothing that a blockchain can do that's not more
effeciently done by a database is one of the common criticisms (and
I've yet to find examples that prove that statement false). 

I think the name does it no favours. It's not Web3 - it's not really
the web - and it's not a replacement for the web. It's something
else, some bits interesting and some just the dreadful recreation of
monetary power structures in code.
  

    
In a recent presentation about Liminal Web and Web3 by Jared Lucas
via Stoa (viewable at <https://youtu.be/JfoHPq19Oog>), I took some
notes, including definitions:

Liminal Web: thinkers
Web3: Doers

Web1: Read
Web2: Read Write
Web3: Read Write Own

DeFi - Decentralized Finance. You can do most financial stuff faster
and without a third party, not routed through a centralized system.

NFTs - Fungible goods are things like grain, oil, water. NonFungible
- things like baseball cards, art, music.

Fungible tokens: Bitcoin etc.
NonFungible tokens: Bored Ape Yacht Club, Cryptopunks. An NFT is a
unique digital asset.

DAO: decentralized autonomous organization. Shared cap table and
bank account. Cap table is a share in ownership.
  

    
We've been hearing that the blockchain concept is worldchanging
since 2008, but so far the most obvious implementations have been
currencies, and those currencies have worked more as speculative
investments than as a actual media for exchange. So
blockchain/crypto/web3 might be relevant as concepts that eventually
will change everything, or they might be manifestations of a
conceptual fad that will eventually fade. I do know that there's
more and more buzz, more and more evident activity. I keep hearing
that DAOs exist, but I've never been part of one. I know that NFTs
exist - and Vinay was a pioneer with those instruments - but they
seem to be a speculative investment, so I'm not sure I would call
them worldchanging. I definitely defer to Vinay on that one.

Wikipedia has a list of supposed use cases for blockchain
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain#Uses>:

Cryptocurrencies
Smart contracts
Financial services
Games
Energy trading
Supply chain
Anti-counterfeiting
Healthcare
Domain names

If blockchain truly becomes the way we do all of those things, the
technology will become fairly pervasive. 

That same Wikipedia article explains what blockchain is,
structurally <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain#Structure>:

"A blockchain is a decentralized, distributed, and oftentimes
public, digital ledger consisting of records called blocks that is
used to record transactions across many computers so that any
involved block cannot be altered retroactively, without the
alteration of all subsequent blocks. This allows the participants to
verify and audit transactions independently and relatively
inexpensively. A blockchain database is managed autonomously using a
peer-to-peer network and a distributed timestamping server. They are
authenticated by mass collaboration powered by collective
self-interests. Such a design facilitates robust workflow where
participants' uncertainty regarding data security is marginal. The
use of a blockchain removes the characteristic of infinite
reproducibility from a digital asset. It confirms that each unit of
value was transferred only once, solving the long-standing problem
of double spending. A blockchain has been described as a
value-exchange protocol. A blockchain can maintain title rights
because, when properly set up to detail the exchange agreement, it
provides a record that compels offer and acceptance."

Blockchain will not fix climate change; in fact, might be making it
worse.
<https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/15/22328203/nft-cryptoart-ethereum-blockchain-
climate-change>
  

    
Via email from Paul Harrison:

I am enjoying the current State of the World discussion as always,
although this one seems to have taken a few odd turns. I'd like to
raise a lighter topic:


Speaking of rabbit holes, maybe we could talk about what Japan has
been up to with commoditized motion-capture. Hololive seems
perfectly adapted to the current state of the world, but building on
a history of technologies such as Vocaloid and MikuMikuDance and a
creative culture that completely blurs online, offline, real and
synthetic, such as the odottemita posted on Nico Nico. An animated
dance routine might be copied by a real dancer, or a real dancer
copied by a live-streamed motion capture performance, or an animated
wrestling move copied by a real pro-wrestler leading to a weird
collaboration. The technology and the casual ease with which it is
used seems to have advanced in a series of leaps in the last year.
  

    
Shebar Windstone sent an email reporting that the video referenced
in <35> has been taken down: "This video is no longer available due
to a copyright claim by Walmart."  The video showed a Walmart VR
application. I'm hiding that post.
  

    
Via email from fruitbatpangolin:

Been lots of flattening depths recently. I watched the news about
Lytton in Canada burning to the ground last June
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lytton_wildfire> and idly wondered
how long it might be before a large unprepared temperate metropolis
like London gets to experience sitting near 50 degrees Celcius for
half a week or so. London is nearly on the same latitude as Lytton.
Could be later this year.
  

    
Via email from fruitbatpangolin:

Sidney Poitier just died.

Everyone, just stop whatever you are doing and go and rewatch
Sneakers, out of reverence. It will only take a couple of hours,
then we can go all back to bitching about crypto.
  

    
Via email from fruitbatpangolin:

<avogadro>, I'll see if I can help at all -

Web3 is the fully buzzword compatible howling existential
Lovecraftean void rent in the very fabric of the global network
topology, which emerged in a freak abiogenetic spawning following
the fabled usable release candidate of Project Xanadu becoming
forever trapped in a frozen Platonic idyll of eternally perfect
vapourware, which also released some Supermen baddies.

On a related note, I suspect that the last time we wasted this much
of humanity's available mathematical resources on the double spend
problem for a monetary protocol, was back when we thought it was a
good wheeze to employ Issac Newton to find and execute coin clippers
for the Royal Mint.

And while this seems wasteful in this modern enlightened age, as a
solution to that problem, it still only scales marginally worse than
most of the crypto tokens currently on offer today.

For added comedy points, I also just went zietgeist fishing on
twitter and it seems that this has been happening -

<https://twitter.com/cat5749/status/1476813266462539779>

Also this -

<https://twitter.com/Charlie_Pyle/status/1479274941484699649>

And will somebody please go check on Marc Andreessen, he looks to
have snowcrashed and may need rebooting.
  

    
Via email from Albert Cottica:

Greetings and many thanks for your interesting thoughts to all at
SOTW2022 (and hello Tex, hello Bruce, hello Vinay, happy 2022!)

I am interested in the interplay between COVID response and risks
for privacy and civil liberties. In 2020, most of the people in my
extended network were worried about a second pandemic, one of
surveillance. We agreed that this was a huge issue, and in
particular claimed that immunity passports were an unworkable idea,
as they would turn into "a civil liberties nightmare"
(https://edgeryders.eu/t/a-surveillance-pandemic-results-of-the-community-liste
ning-post-on-risks-for-freedom-in-the-wake-of-covid-19/13183). In 2021, though, I have been using my own immunity passport daily, showing a QR code to get into the gym or a restaurant, with surprisingly little pushback. Just what happened there? Have we been pessimistic? Or have we been right, and the nightmare is alive and well but out of our sight? Do you have any comment on that?

Keep up the good work,
  

    
Ah crap. Ok, so <rips off shirt to reveal super suit> I did a lot of
the early comms and project managed the launch of the Ethereum
project. A lot of these concepts like Web3 come out of the period
when the Ethereum team were discussing how to communicate what we
had done.

Note: I divested in 2016 so I am not a multi-millionaire unlike all
of my cofounders. I feared the wrath of the SEC, and the SEc turned
out not to have any wrath at all. At which point... <shrugs> not the
first fortune I've missed out on.

I will now proceed to assign homework.

https://vimeo.com/161183966 is a talk I did about five years ago
which explains *what is happening* with blockchain at a fundamental
sociotechnical level. This is before tokens, this is before ICOs,
this is before there was any real money in the field. This is the
definitive *what this technology will do to our society* talk, from
before the ponzi scheme people arrived.

The basic story:

first databases lived alone - isolated inside of organizations 

then databases were networked between organizations using APIs, but
peer-to-peer collaboration through APIs is *extremely* difficult as
the number of collaborators scales. This is the N SQUARED problem:
50 computers in fifty companies trying to talk to each other
peer-to-peer needs 2500 successful technical integrations. The
amount of human labour involved is serious. At 100 computers, it's
10000 connections. At 200, four times that again. Large scale
machine-to-machine collaboration is impossible except for very
simple protocols.

What do we get instead? Hub-and-spoke monopolies: you connect to
Square or VISA or Intuit, and they connect to everything else for
you. You need one technical integration: "my software talks to
Google, Google talks to everything else". Hub and spoke concentrates
power in the hub.

This N SQUARED problem is utterly fundamental. If you don't
understand it, reread what I said, ask me questions, whatever it
takes. But until it *clicks* and you realize that peer-to-peer is
*impossible* because of the complexity growing as (at least) the
square of the number of diverse systems being integrated, the need
for blockchain will not make sense to you. You must get clarity
about this critical point before forming an opinion about Web3.

Now, those hub-and-spoke service providers? That's the
wealth-concentrating megamoghuls of Silicon Valley. 

Why does Facebook exist? RSS readers failed, so rather than having
everybody with their own blog, and I have my feed reader which does
not insert advertising and I pay for my own compute and bandwidth,
we have the entire social graph of an entire society owned by a
private entity.

Why does RSS fail? Different blog software outputs different RSS
feeds. Different readers may fail to render some feeds, some times.
"Oh, right-to-left unicode characters on wordpress 1.5.2 break font
rendering in FeedStorm, but only on MacOS 8.3 and above." That's a
classic N SQUARED problem: five dozen RSS-emitting blogging
platforms, five dozen feed readers on five different platforms, and
the software complexity just got more and more tangled. The system
because hard to use, understand, and (critically) expensive to
maintain.

FB comes along and is basically "right then" and has one piece of
blogging software and one RSS reader which it controls, and that's
it: you connect to FB, FB connects you to everything else.

This pattern replicates **EVERYWHERE** once you can see it: gmail,
sure, ate decentralized email. VISA ate decentralized bank card
settlements.

Over and over again, the technical complexity of keeping things
peer-to-peer rises as the peer to peer networks scale. So you get
great little subcultures of peer to peer innovation, then they
scale, then the N SQUARED problem makes them too expensive to
maintain, then a monopolist comes in and eats the P2P network and
replaced it with a hub-and-spoke monopoly which winds up owning the
entire "connectedness infrastructure" of whatever it is they just
ate.

Blockchain is the solution to this problem *for exquisitely fiddly
technical reasons which are almost never discussed in the press
because almost nobody understands them.

I will explain in the next part what that solution is, and why it
actually works. But, first, please watch the video I linked. If you
want to understand Web3 *properly* start there.

I did not coin the term, but I certainly created much of its
meaning. 
  

    
On the incels thing: many, many of the incels self-identify as being
on the autism spectrum. We should probably believe them.

"many incels have aspergers" does *not* imply "many people who have
aspergers are incels."

I don't think we can ignore their self-reports and get any kind of
real understanding of what is fuelling incel domestic terrorism. And
that's what it is: it's domestic *terrorism*, not just spree
shootings. I'm looking at this as a national security issue: "incel
9/11" is not impossible to imagine, but if we don't understand why
they are killing people, it becomes much harder to stop them.
  

    
"always listen very carefully and analytically to what your enemies
tell you about themselves and how they see the world."
  

    
2015 Ethereum propaganda - I was in the room when we made this
video, I seem to remember editing the script and talking to the
design team quite a bit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j23HnORQXvs

This is what we thought we were doing. This is what Web3 grew from.
This is where it all started.
  

    
I mean, look at this adorable little munchkin :-)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDGq4aeevgY

You have to go back to the source material! Don't read the garbage
churned out by the ponzi merchants. Go back to the original team -
Vitalik, Gavin Wood, Joe Lubin were the big thought leaders - and
look at how they were communicating about Ethereum *when we built
it*.

The carpetbaggers contribute nothing but noise. It's like asking
snake handling evangelical preachers the true meaning of the
Resurrection.

They'll tell you that they're Christians, but you should not take
what they say as Gospel Truth.
  

    
Wow, thanks for <143>, Vinay. I didn't get that before, and I
probably should have. I spent some time in the early 2000s working
for a company that marketed a translation hub for diverse services.
  

    
Yes, thanks Vinay. But am I wrong in remembering that "Web 3.0" predates
the emergence of bitcoin in the public eye?

One of the important lessons here may be the fact that the very words
we use to explain our thoughts are, in fact, changed with each retelling.
  

    
Berkeley proposed using a blockchain thingy for small-scale
bond sales, and they're getting some pushback. Bare blockchain
is not necessarily planet-wrecking like bitcoin, but for an
inherently centralized application like one city's bond sales
it's not any more useful than a regular old database. Or, given
the likely transaction rate, a ledger book.