Not talking about financial leverage here, of course, but intellectual leverage.
What a small insight & a little code can do to change lives at a large scale.
But if it doesn’t fit into the OKR & investment thesis, good luck trying to do it.
Procrustean Bed?
Why so much of this “small insight & little code” lives on the fringes of the Web in open source software, small indie shops, and early startups (before GPs’ investment theses corrupts product strategy).
It’s not “coordination headwinds”, it’s the Principal-Agent Problem.
The Principal is meant to be the user & customer, not the investor.
But we know intuitively where incentives are aligned. If the CEO wants it, it gets done. But why does the CEO want it?
Part of why crypto projects drew me in at first is the promise of how tokens & DAOs can align incentives between customers & owners.
If the user owns the protocol, the agent (the developers & designers of said protocol) can leverage a little insight and a little code for good.
But recently we’ve seen another Procrustean Bed scenario emerge with crypto products & protocols.
Once people are aware they can invest by being a user, investors started positioning themselves as users too, presenting a new Principal-Agent Problem.
Trying out multiple crypto products & protocols speculatively just so you can profit from a potential airdrop of governance tokens?
Buying governance tokens speculatively because you think price will appreciate, but you’re not a user of the product/protocol?
Procrustean Beds.
A Procrustean Bed:
“an arbitrary standard … used to measure success, while completely disregarding obvious harm that results from the effort”
i.e. The measure becomes the goal.
If investors care about “FinTech” & “Web3” and have a time horizon of 3 years, that becomes the goal
In crypto, this Procrustean measure tends to be TVL or token price.
It goes without saying that decentralization (from potentially adversarial middlemen) is the goal, not “number go up”.
But many in crypto have lost their way.
Now that we know making users investors doesn’t necessarily align incentives, it begs the question: how do we design economic systems that do?
As before, there were solutions to Byzantine’s Generals & Sybil attacks.
Could we hope for one to the Principal-Agent Problem?
Not a Procrustean Bed, but it turns out the Sovereign Individual Thesis is another one that the latest boom in crypto has falsified.
“Self-sovereignty” was the drumbeat for so long.
Now that it’s been falsified, it all feels so hollow.
As the tech industry’s recent outing with crypto has shown, making certain financial measures the goal might lead to negative externalities, but they can also lead to positive ones.
Digitally-native public goods & global commerce are net good.
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This “Gen Z is special” nonsense reminds me of the “Millennials are special” nonsense that I’d come across while growing up. Generational categories are arbitrary at best.
Every generation seems rebellious, naïve, “creative” etc when in fact it is just a product of youth.
So useless is the discourse about the “generations”, that you could look up stories about previous “generations”, when they were younger, and those descriptors would equally apply to the youth of today.
Such discourse is always (predictably) talked about in the same breath as – and misattributed to the influences of – the information technologies, media, and culture of the times.
@m1guelpf Totally. What smart contracts let us do is the “adjacent possible” from Bitcoin and so everything feels like novel mutations that haven’t found their footing yet. Give it time and problems will emerge for which these technologies will be a perfect fit.
@m1guelpf “Paradigm shift” is a bit of a hopeful prediction though, I don’t think technological shifts happen so linearly and can be predicted. We only see these shifts in hindsight.
Before iPhone native apps gained ground, for instance, everyone thought HTML5 apps would be the future.
@m1guelpf Right now, trying out web3 tech to see how they fit different domains *should* be encouraged, that’s how the technology finds its legs.
The “paradigm shift” you speak of comes after, when this knowledge is already discovered, and we mine the depths of it.
My take is that religion’s role is to provide the necessary metaphors in order for individuals to navigate complex situations where being “good” isn’t clear.
We now have science to help us navigate these complex situations, but what is considered “good” is still up for debate.
Each deity worshipped functions as a vehicle through which these metaphors are told.
Religions started out with tales featuring many deities. This has trended downwards, from polytheism to monotheism to religions without deity figures, to pop culture references, to memes.
I’m not sure why it’s trended downwards, but my take is that deities as characters in these metaphorical tales makes for an unstable configuration as to the internal consistency of each metaphor.
But personifying values helps them spread easily via oral traditions.
It’s going to be more and more difficult for nation states to continue imposing taxes on their citizens, as competition for tax havens heat up, and as leaks like this erode public trust.
Nation states that rely on taxation to finance operations will eventually be outcompeted.
Nations don’t reproduce, of course, unlike living things, but their influence is memetic and their ability to coerce citizens is a function of their ability to coerce the wealthiest of the world.
And increasingly, both are at historically low numbers.
The absolute kicker might come when it’s not just difficult to coerce the wealthiest to pay taxes, but difficult to coerce anybody, because crypto makes tax avoidance easy as pie.
Why is “taste” in something commonly framed as a linear scale?
i.e. “good taste”, “poor taste”
It’s a framing that I personally struggle with, for lack of a more fitting frame.
For example, you liked a show or a restaurant that has poor reviews. Do you have poor taste?
There is definitely a “better” ↔ “worse” dimension to taste, but perhaps a differrent dimension involves the person’s affinity to different tastes.
The people who didn’t like it are clearly more discerning than you about various aspects that you didn’t care about.
So back to the original example.
If you liked a show that had poor reviews, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have poor taste. It could mean that you don’t value aspects of it that others value, and you can accept those aspects even if they are of poor taste.