Silicon Valley has gone all technocrat-poet-philosopher-buddhist-monk and it's everyone’s favorite thing to laugh at. Laugh all you want (the world is often ironic) but please don’t let it turn you off mindfulness, which will really be good for you.
If you are curious as to why all the tech people have made a hard pivot towards mindfulness, I think it’s these things:
1. Many ppl (inside & outside of tech) are experiencing extremely high levels of dissatisfaction with their lives in modern society. After being told if you just achieved you would be happy, we are finding ourselves more addicted to the hedonic treadmill & more unhappy than ever.
2. Lots of people in tech have made a lot of money. Once you’ve made money, it is easier to realize that it didn’t really do anything for you.
3. Unlike other places where people have made money (like NYC), there are many teachers and coaches here in the Bay Area whose coaching is rooted in mindfulness and consciousness.
4. Tech founders and VCs, like all people, like talking about and sharing their experiences. Tech people just happen to like doing it on Twitter.
Just because it seems like a parody of Silicon Valley the TV show doesn’t mean it isn’t worth trying. I hope you all travel the conscious path one day!
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I’ve worked on social products for a long time, and even seen some successes! Here’s why I think the take that Elon is crashing and burning Twitter into the ground is overrated, and Twitter is likely to survive just fine (and potentially thrive!)
Users are unlikely to flee the platform. There’s lots of talk from the blue check set about quitting Twitter and going to Mastodon or some other bullshit but in practice it never happens. Most users just don’t care about Twitter company drama.
When Uber and United had extremely bad press cycles and user backlash there was no lasting usage hits to their businesses. Unlike those businesses, Twitter not only has a brand but also has a strong network effect.
At @fractalwagmi, our North Star has always been to be the best friend possible to web3 games. To do that, we’ve always said we need to go to wherever games want to be.
Today, we’re announcing we are bringing all our products (Launchpad, Marketplace, Tournaments) to Ethereum.
Web3 will be the mechanic through which games create open economies. This is good for studios, who will be able to participate in a new business model; for players, who will own their digital items; & for 3rd parties, who can create apps that interact with these digital items.
But in order to build a web3 game, game studios need to make a difficult choice around which chain to support. Games can go multichain, but this is expensive and a large technical undertaking.
Fractal’s new APIs will help game devs go multi-chain without the technical headaches.
Simple case for why web3 could be an important new business model in for games:
Open economic platforms that foster an ecosystem of businesses are larger and more durable than closed ones, where value is primarily created and owned by a single party. Think free market countries (USA) vs centrally planned ones (USSR, Cuba).
In tech, there are lots of examples of open or partially open platforms. The biggest companies in tech have been powered by creating these platforms: Amazon Marketplace, Google and Apple’s mobile app stores, Facebook’s original platform.