Time for a tweet thread on the blog post I published yesterday. 🧵

Our main work at @bluesky so far has been on the @at_protocol. We built an app to make sure our protocol design supports a good user experience. The app is a simple, straightforward microblogging client because our devs are currently focused on surfacing protocol features in the UX. The purpose of the app is to be a reference client for devs building on atproto, and to be a landing place for curious users.

Web3: “user-generated authority, enabled by self-certifying web protocols.” A superset of technologies that include blockchains, but are not limited to them.

Or we can just use “Self-Certifying Web Protocols” (SCWP).

jaygraber.medium.com/web3-is-self-c… Authority on the web establishes who ultimately has control over content.

Web 1.0 — Host-generated content, host-generated authority.
Web 2.0 — User-generated content, host-generated authority.
Web 3.0 — User-generated content, user-generated authority.

Bitclout will make a great case study on how badly crypto projects can mess up incentive engineering when they try to monetize social networks. Trust and reputation are key, and if you create a sketchy platform and mess with people’s reputations without their consent it is not going to go well.

NFTs are a bet on an open source titling system for virtual goods. A tokenized virtual object is infinitely reproducible on the open web - but not in the context of a virtual world that respects its ownership, i.e. a game world, social site, or AR/VR headset. People are spending increasing amounts of time in virtual worlds. However, platforms that create these worlds want to control the economy within them. This may be a race to adoption - which virtual titling systems or virtual worlds will gain mass adoption first?

Serendipity is an enchanting feature of social networks. Part of the magic of a new app is the chance encounters it enables that wouldn't have happened otherwise. Twitter found this - ordinary accounts engage with celebrities. People discover niche communities around their interests. Everyone commiserates with a guy unfortunately named Brett Kavanagh.

The tension between chaos and control: When the unpredictable behavior of fast-acting internet swarms destabilizes society, platforms will reactively attempt to exert control. Control invites more chaos, and chaos induces control. Information technology has simultaneously centralized and decentralized communication more than ever before. People can access knowledge, communicate, and organize with unprecedented freedom, but a single platform can modify or restrict this capability for billions.

Been thinking that the people who freaked out about the printing press, saying it would destroy society, were absolutely right. The proliferation of information irrevocably destroyed society as they knew it within a few hundred years.

https://twitter.com/atroyn/status/1316436211725107203

Here on the other side of that revolution, I strongly prefer this society to an illiterate one. But the transition must have been terrifying and tumultuous. A period in which the old world is dying, but a new one has not yet arisen to take its place...

A descent managed more slowly will give everyone time to build. So get busy. Build your community. Build your wild ideas that you think may stand a chance of helping us all get out of this mess. Work for the best, prepare for the worst. Tech plays a crucial role, as an industry both accelerating destabilizing change and inequality, but also the only place containing high growth ideas and practical, optimistic visions for the future.

It's Saturday night. There's nowhere to go. So my partner and I went looking for interesting things on the web. Thread of interesting sites: You can track sharks and see what they're up to. Here's a shark named David hanging out near New Caledonia
ocearch.org/tracker/?detai…

Consensus reality has fractured into hypernarratives. Narratives told through networks, narrative databases in which many threads can be followed, all spinning a strand of a worldview which may never be clearly articulated, but envelops its participants in a dense web of meaning. This sense of reality fracturing into polarized, competing factions, generating self-reinforcing echo chambers of belief, is the experience of intersubjective truth splintering as social media becomes the primary media.

This new era should be named the Heliocene, instead of the Anthropocene, for when we first directly tapped the energy of the sun. - cover story of @NautilusMag by @S_Praetorius We should reconsider the name we give our future - how it may subtly steer its trajectory. The Holocene is determined to have ended around 1950. The radioactive spike associated with nuclear testing is both global and unambiguous in the events it represents.

“How a great power falls apart: Decline is invisible from the inside” This article covers the work of Soviet dissident Andrei Amalrik, who, uniquely among his peers, recognized the system was headed for self-destruction. 🧵
foreignaffairs.com/articles/russi… Countries decay only in retrospect. The “comfort cult” is seductive. As a result, when a terminal crisis comes, it is likely to be unexpected, confusing, and catastrophic, with the causes so seemingly trivial... that no one can quite believe it has come to this.

I want a widely adopted decentralized identity standard to push user identities down the stack to make room for innovation on top. Thread: Social networking evolved as an emergent property of the web — Web 2.0. It allowed people to create and consume content easily without building and maintaining their own websites.

Purple garden: purple potatoes, purple carrots, purple beans. Pretty purple carrots.

Trying out @_slate, a new decentralized filesharing interface. Runs on @Filecoin and @textileio. Very pretty.
slate.host/arcalinea/sola… The best Dweb products won’t put decentralization front-and-center. They’ll Just Work, and the p2p aspects will fade to the background, like early Skype. With the current design direction I could see this evolving beyond filesharing into its own category.

Exploring aesthetics: Cyberpunk.

Hyperbolic urbanism. City upon city, more city than you can imagine, extending in all dimensions, physical and virtual. Solarpunk.

A balance struck between nature and technology. The optimism of Art Deco, Art Nouveau. Cities that invite the wild back in. A cybernetic forest, a living machine.

If you're under 38: Do you believe you will have social security/a pension by the time you retire, do you plan to rely entirely on personal savings, or are you betting on major societal collapse making the whole concept of retirement irrelevant by then? I expect the social security program to no longer exist, and for everyone to rely entirely on personal savings.

Ducklings really follow you everywhere 😭❤

Benefits of spending quarantine in a rural location: snuggly baby ducks for company Tried making a duck diaper for less poopy snuggles. Duckling was not amused.

Background noise before national emergency declaration, man saying "times are real here". No kidding Only in America is some guy talking about brisket and lamb chops on mic while the country is about to go into emergency mode

Wrote down some thoughts about pandemics and systemic risk last month. The past few weeks have not been reassuring. We need to bring down the cost of containment measures, or they'll always be taken too late.

reading.supply/post/41ce754c-… If leaders act quickly and proactively to successfully prevent a pandemic, people will only see the economic damage and will say they overreacted. If they act too late, the pandemic happens anyways, and people will say they acted too slowly.