Open Letter to Marc Andreessen (@pmarca)

I was saddened but unsurprised to observe that your recent Techno-Optimist Manifesto received more than its share of negative coverage in America and Europe.

Your armchair critics in the press highlighted how they’d read your 5,000-word manifesto “so [we] don’t have to”, and, smug in their luxury beliefs, lambasted your audacity in defending or—God forbid—promoting capitalism and free markets, the very foundations they owe their comfortable lives to.

You had surely hoped for a better class of critics, but as a self-made man in this twilight of Western civilization where could you have aspired to find them? It could not have been in the tech press, which now bears little resemblance to, say, Wired as we knew it back in the ‘90s.

No, these were the kind of journos who painted the night sky “dystopian” after Starlink redefined connectivity, and who maligned the test launches of Starship—the most powerful rocket ever built—as “failures”. Nearer to me, over here in Dubai, they called the Burj Khalifa—the tallest skyscraper on the planet, reaching over half a mile into the sky—“a frightening, purposeless monument”. Here on the opposite side of the globe from you, I for one appreciated your manifesto. Taking a less US-centric point of view, however, I do believe that the great pure techno-optimist cities—or city-states, as they may be—of Earth presently number only two: Dubai and Singapore.

Certainly, participation awards might be meted out to Hong Kong, Seoul, Shenzhen, Taipei, Tokyo, and San Francisco, for starters—but they’re each encumbered or hampered in some essential way.

Be that as it may, since you indicated you’d love to see more substantive responses, I’d like to share with you a little about my own experiences in techno-optimist Dubai, one of the miracles and wonders of the modern world and what I’ve come to consider Western civilization’s last outpost.

Call it the City of Gold or the City of Dreams, it is one of those matters where perspective is worth a number of IQ points.

@NEARProtocol Sure, I'm game 👋 Someone must be your first victim--eh, guest--and it might as well be me... @NEARProtocol Hey, I'm Arto, currently Tech Lead for the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) working group at NEAR.

In other words, I'm leading the team working on making it possible to use all existing Solidity contracts and Ethereum tooling on NEAR.

On today's weekly @NEARProtocol EVM Working Group meeting, I outlined our Q1/21 roadmap.

Things to look forward to include the use of bridged ETH as the EVM base token, for genuine 100% @ethereum compatibility, as well as ERC-20 liquidity bridging.

Find @ExonumAlex's and my presentation at:

docs.google.com/presentation/d…

In memoriam ROOM77: a thread down memory lane from my time in Berlin during the early Bitcoin boom years.

Dedicated to the freedom of transaction, and chronicling my journey to blockchain eternity and beyond!

https://twitter.com/jonmatonis/status/1317714888807059458

During 2011-2015, Berlin was a boom town for tech startups and the epicenter of the nascent Bitcoin juggernaut.

It was easy to find people willing to trade bitcoin privately for cash, and vice versa.

https://twitter.com/bendiken/status/255362093992255488

@thefrankbraun @jb55 Go without all the tooling would be 'meh' as a programming language. With the tooling--until recently unique--it was possible to put up with how primitive and imperative the language itself is and yet still get shit done. @thefrankbraun @jb55 That is, the productivity advantage from solving incidental complications in package management, build systems, cross-compilation, and deployment--not to mention social aspects of programming, such as coding conventions--outweighed the productivity loss from the language itself.

I really must tweet more screen caps from @johnmbarry's epic The Great Influenza. There is truly nothing new under the sun: "It's just the grippe!" [flu!] and "There is nothing to fear but fear itself!" A century ago, it was also just the flu, bro. #COVID19