Sunday Edition #17 - Too Much Information and the Loss of Dynamism
Also: Rifts by Hashrunner, Hades 2, and Metalcore Shoegaze
Welcome to the Sunday Edition where I share interesting articles and links alongside what I’ve been up to!
The Loss of the Middle
While this imbalanced system does provide significant material comforts (albeit distributed rather unequally) and some limited feeling of agency, it has led at the level of the individual to feelings of disconnection, alienation, loneliness, and cynicism or pessimism about the ability to influence future events or meet major challenges, except perhaps through the often ruthless competition to become wealthy or influential enough to gain, as an individual, a status comparable to a small or even large organization. And larger organizations have begun to imperfectly step in the void formed by the absence of small communities, providing synthetic social or emotional goods that are, roughly speaking, to more authentic such products as highly processed “junk” food is to more nutritious fare, due to the inherently impersonal nature of such organizations (particularly in the modern era of advanced algorithms and AI, which when left to their own devices tend to exacerbate the trends listed above).
Hard agree here. Beyond that, even the facsimiles of manufactured connection have been reduced to brand-driven experiences. Early Facebook was great. Early Instagram was great. Early Twitter was great. But they all devolved into enshittified slop. It feels cozy until people retreat from the dark forest of social media or only become public-facing personas of their own life. It sucks.
I do believe though that this realisation, that we’ve given up community to larger organizations isn’t a death knell. You *can* rebuild smaller orgs when more people recognize and understand what tradeoffs they have to make. We got people to stop smoking indoors. We can also convince people to treat online social as one way to connect alongside fair trade organic connection.
Prices and Dynamism
Speaking of… I found this chart quite interesting as it related to pricing when phones were introduced.
The corresponding paper argues that with the introduction of phones, consumer *and* producer welfare increased.
Excess price dispersion across markets can arise, and goods may not be allocated efficiently. In this setting, information technologies may improve market performance and increase welfare. Between 1997 and 2001, mobile phone service was introduced throughout Kerala, a state in India with a large fishing industry. Using microlevel survey data, we show that the adoption of mobile phones by fishermen and wholesalers was associated with a dramatic reduction in price dispersion, the complete elimination of waste, and near-perfect adherence to the Law of One Price. Both consumer and producer welfare increased.
But… and this has only been a pet gut theory… I’m sure there’s research that might back up my points (I’ll have to go on a ChatGPT rabbit hole to find it). I always wondered to what extent the introduction of the abundance of information and the very low cost of distribution of it, absolutely destroyed dynamism in general. For example, with a global information market, we’ve also lost the value of more local status games, which I, in part blame for the rise of nationalism. If that price chart was a heart-beat, you’d rightly diagnose that it’s getting closer to terminal decline. A variable and responsive heart rate is healthier than a flat and predictable one.
In other words, too much information is actually a bad thing because it increases competition among information and results in super flat societies. It’s why you see the entire world get black-holed into US politics.
If I ever had a Grand Theory of the 2000s+ onwards (cultural, geopolitical, societal), it’s that the web caused the collapse of smaller information markets (from dating to culture to finance) into bigger ones and that’s why everything feels unwieldy. Too few anchors in a system that used to have far more.
Rifts by Hashrunner
Rifts by Hashrunner is a great, novel onchain art project.
The art *is* the bytecode of a deployed smart contract. Love it. An NFT wrapper takes this bytecode and formats it to SVG.
I *love* this comment. // the art happens here.
Didn’t manage to snag an edition of it during public launch, but collected one off secondary. 🎉
Vitalik Buterin’s Take on Low-Risk DeFi
Most of my usage of Ethereum these days are using DeFi for collateralized leverage and loans and collecting fun and unique art that uses the native format of the medium. In DeFi, it does feel magical that these days, protocols exist that simply allow you to borrow against your assets without getting approval from a mediator, globally available. Vitalik talks about the value of this:
Who are the “non-ouroboros” users for whom all this makes sense? Basically, people and businesses who want access to a global market within which they can buy, hold and trade mainstream assets, but for whom there are not reliable traditional finance channels for getting those things. Crypto does not have magic secret sauce for sustainably creating much higher yields. But it does have magic secret sauce for making the economic opportunities that already exist globally and permissionlessly accessible.
With the proliferation of more stablecoins (eg, CloudFlare’s NET Dollar), this ecosystem will continue to expand. I hope in time that it expands to other assets too. Earning on depositing a TradFi ETF would be great.
Overhead Lighting?
Thought this was an interesting take.
After I moved recently, I took to buying more lamps (both in my living room and bedroom) and try to avoid overhead lights in these relaxation spaces. Sometimes you realise you are just a space monkey and there’s tricks you can pull off to make you feel better without doing too much lift. It’s like living next to an ocean, among greenery, or perhaps, that overhead lights trick our brains into believing we have suns in our rooms. 😅
What I’m Up To
✍️ Writing - Novel #2 Revisions
Making really great progress on revision to my second novel. Super happy with the changes. Hoping to finish it in the next month.
🕹 Gaming - Hades 2
One of my most anticipated titles since Tears of the Kingdom came out. It’s release date caught me by surprise. Really enjoying it. What I hoped for and more! :)
📺 Watching - Adolescence
Wow. What a phenomenal show and all the Emmy’s are extremely well deserved. It’s a really hard watch, but succeeds both in telling a great story at the same time it’s providing commentary on the life young boys (and girls). There’s a particularly poignant moment where the father and mother thought they were doing the right thing by having their boy be at home (which unfortunately led him to further descend down the manosphere alt-right pipeline). It’s a sad and depressing show and I absolutely respect parents who are able to navigate this era of the world with their children. For you if: you enjoy political commentary about masculinity and parenting in the modern age & enjoy incredible acting and directing (each of the 4 1hr episodes are one takes).
📚 Reading - Ocean Vuong - On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
🎶 Listening - nightdive - Diviner
Absolutely phenomenal tones in this track. A mix of shoegaze and metalcore tones. Sounds like guitars from metalcore, but it’s mostly shoegaze in its soul. Massive enveloping sound. (Originally a ht to Plini and then a ht to Niel for forwarding the new track. :))
Have a great sunset this week, friends.
See you next week!