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Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇 Profile picture
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Feb 6 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
People are upset about NFTs for one reason: A little bit of the stupendous wealth that had built up in crypto whales' wallets has now been dispersed to people who are more visible, and to whom the chattering classes can therefore compare themselves.
The total market cap of crypto is like $2 trillion. One hundred-thousandth of that is far more money than almost anyone will accumulate in a lifetime of hard-work - now being nabbed in an afternoon by some silly kids who drew pictures of apes!
As for me, I like NFTs because they made money for one nice person I kinda-sorta know in Japan 😊
Anyway, this is just the beginning. $2 trillion is far more wealth than most minds can comprehend, and it is still incredibly concentrated. As more of it trickles out into the world where people can see it, expect a continual upending of our wealth-based status hierarchies!
I wrote a post about that last year...maybe I should write another. 😊

noahpinion.substack.com/p/bitcoin-is-u…

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More from @Noahpinion

Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇 Profile picture
Feb 4
I've unpaywalled my post "Wokeness as old-time American religion" -- the second in my series of posts about wokeness.

In this one, I argue that wokeness is actually an American ideology that has existed for centuries and reemerges again and again.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/wokeness-as-…
In the first section of the post, I argue:

* Critical race theory is part of wokeness, but is not central to the movement, which is grassroots in nature

* The key thinkers are Black American writers, not the Frankfurt School or any European leftists
In the second section, I argue (as have many others) that wokeness has Protestant Christian roots, and that Congregationalist abolitionism was the original version of wokeness.
Read 5 tweets
Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇 Profile picture
Feb 4
The Biden Boom rolls on, powering right through Omicron
Time to go back and find all those tweets from a month ago predicting imminent economic collapse, and screenshot them wryly 😃
YOU JUST CAN'T KEEP THIS ECONOMY DOWN
Read 4 tweets
Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇 Profile picture
Feb 3
The debate over Covid NPIs is mystifying to me at this point. I was a huge supporter of NPIs in 2020. I made a website about them. And yet now it's clear that NPIs just cannot contain Omicron. And we have effective vaccines. So what is the debate about, exactly?
Is it just a thing where we got used to shouting for NPIs for so long that people are just stuck in that mode, kind of like people are still stuck bathing in hand sanitizer years after it became clear that surfaces weren't a significant vector of transmission?
Or is it a thing where people are using calls for NPIs as a way to vent their frustration at the people whose resistance to NPIs hurt our pandem control efforts back in 2020?

Or maybe to just vent their incohate rage at the whole pandemic?
Read 4 tweets
Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇 Profile picture
Feb 2
How do you say the name of that grocery store?
Wow, the results have see-sawed back and forth several times since I posted the poll
I'm a Ranch 99 man myself, sounds more like Route 66
Read 4 tweets
Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇 Profile picture
Jan 31
I've unpaywalled my post "Wokeness as respect redistribution".

It was the first of a series of posts I've been writing about woke culture's place and purpose in American society. Check it out!

noahpinion.substack.com/p/wokeness-as-…
The thesis of this piece is that by 2013, American society had become a supersaturated solution of disrespect -- an increasingly diverse populace where White was still equated with normal, an increasingly gender-equal economy where women still got harassed at work, etc.
Something like wokeness had to happen, because our country couldn't continue that way. You can't have a country that only respects a small subset of its population.

Wokeness, I argue, can be seen as a leveling movement: A socialism of respect.
Read 5 tweets
Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇 Profile picture
Jan 29
@popedum The U.S. elite becomes integrated through universities; these are where the top 1/3 of the economic pyramid learn to become one people (what the army did for the working class during WW2 and the Civil War but not usually)...
@popedum At these universities, elite Americans need something to unite them into one people. Perhaps 150 years ago, rigid ideological and identitarian conformity would have been enforced at universities, but certainly not now, and not for a very long time...
@popedum Instead, American universities teach young elite Americans to find unity in diversity -- to embrace their particular identities (racial, gender, sexual, religious, ethnic) while finding unity in the fact that they all value these same things.
Read 10 tweets

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