The end of you country is coming because of internet and blockchain.
We know this because it has already happened several times in the past. Each time a new information tech appears, a new type of government appears. 🧵
Consider the Catholic Church in the 1500s
Dozens of movements protesting the Church appear over the centuries. But the Church systematically quashed them. It's easy to burn a heretic and his writings.
At the time, the Church was the most powerful entity because of it monopoly on information.
The clergy was educated, it had access to plenty of books, it could read (Latin, which most books were written on), they learned secrets via confessions, they had a monopoly on the word of God (locals spoke vernaculars), and they had European-wide correspondence.
They always knew better than anybody what was happening.
The secular power, under the feudalist system, had a strong hierarchy and a fractal system like the Church, but it didn't have the same sort of interconnected networks. The result? Less power
Then comes the printing press. Within decades, Martin Luther publishes his 95 Theses, which spread like gunpowder: now you don't publish one copy at a time. You can publish thousands. The Church can't stop it.
More generally, they lost the monopoly of information, and hence of ideas. Merchants, academics, lords... All have now access to more information and communicate more.
The Catholic Church, which had risen in power for 7 centuries, splintered in a matter of decades.
What replaced it? Something enabled by the printing press too.
See, before the printing press, in Europe there are areas spoken by Romance languages, Germanic, Slavic...
From Portugal to Wallonia, there's a gradient of change of local vernaculars. The next valley speaks a similar language, but not quite the same. And these changes accumulate with distance.
This stops with the printing press.
Books are printed in the major cities, which have the most writers and the most readers. Publishers publish in whatever will sell best, ie the most widely-spoken vernaculars of the time.
Those close-by will learn to read and understand these vernaculars. Over centuries, entire geographical areas start speaking the same language. They share the same ideas. A brotherhood sentiment emerges. A national sentiment.
So nation-states emerge to displace the feudalism that had been reigning for over 500 years, thanks to the printing press.
The same thing happened with broadcasting media in the 20th Century: they enabled totalitarian political systems, impossible before.
Before them, writing enabled kingdoms, empires, and churches.
In the next articles I'll explore the patterns of this newly-emerging type of government: taxation, decentralization, inequality, SEZ.. Subscribe to get it.
If you catch COVID, the risk of developing COVID Chronic Fatigue Syndrome are 3,000x higher than those of suffering a bad vaccine side-effect. That illness can leave you out of work and energy for the rest of your life.
The most long-lasting part of Long COVID is likely Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, which so far has no cure and can last decades.
Your likelihood of catching it from COVID is ~2-3%, and it's worse for young ppl than old ppl
Long COVID is confusing until we realize its most alarming outcome is *Chronic Fatigue Syndrome* (CFS).
What does CFS look like?
Is it like Long COVID? 🧵
This is a person with CFS. At 24, she had spent nearly a decade without putting her feet on the ground.
This is @jenbrea suffering from post-exertional malaise, from her documentary Unrest, which you can watch on Netflix (the 3 clips come from the documentary)
This is Whitney, who hasn't talked for years. His father:
“Whitney’s state is comparable to an AIDS patient about a week before his death. And that has been the case for the last six years.”
The idea is to create a cohort-based course with live lectures. I am still debating whether it should be about 1. How to solve any problem 2. Advanced product and growth mgmt
Over my career managing billion-dollar tech products with hundreds of millions of users, studying storytelling, and writing COVID and Uncharted Territories articles, I've come to think the biggest pbm of mankind is that we don't know how to make decisions.
I want to solve that.
The 3-week course would include frameworks, lectures, and more importantly, workshops so you can bring pbms to the table and we can work to solve them together, learning decision-making along the way.
A majority of the world will speak English by the end of the century. This will create a new global identity. It will be the triumph of the Anywheres.
Why? Because the same mechanic happened in the past.
Here's what happened and what will happen next 🧵
Up to the 1500s, languages were not differentiated like today. In places like Europe, there were vernacular gradients, from Wallonia to Lisbon, from London to Vienna.
That's because most ppl didn't communicate with those far away from their village.
According to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, write-ups. But I never understood it until very recently.
Bezos defends why writing is better. Ironically, his write-up has all the flaws that he complains about in powerpoints:
“The narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought and better understanding of what's more important than what, and how things are related”
Ok so his hypothesis: idea importance and interconnectedness are crucial, but write-ups achieve them better.
Why?
“Ppt-style presentations somehow give permission to gloss over ideas, flatten out any sense of relative importance, and ignore the interconnectedness of ideas.”
Ok 3 causes. W/ ppt, ppl:
-gloss over ideas
-don’t make idea importance obvious
-ignore their connection
Becoming the best in the world at some skill is nearly impossible. There's always somebody stronger than you, cleverer than you, with better genetics, who worked harder...
The more you work on standing out in a domain, the more you face these phenomenal competitors.
That's why becoming the best in the world at something takes too much work.
It's nearly impossible to be the best, but it's quite easy to be in the top 10% or so.