INDE 🎆 PEN 🎇 DENT ✨

The air disagrees. The water says: come see me

Re-engage

February 18, 2021

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In good times, sure, completely fiercely. But in a crisis, definitely, extremely politely. In a collateral liquidation cascade, what is most important is that absolutely every incentive is aligned to quality. And not a second / minute / day / longer. Or less. For there are no constitutional rights in substance without the freedom to transact. The market is filled with sharks. The more you expose equity bleeding behavior at scale, the more the market will adapt to exploit you, despite what your sims say. Linear utility is one hell of a drug. Ascension needs a scaffolding. Traction needs an engine. In times of catastrophe. Front running is the most you could hope for. Event horizons prefer the visionaries. Toll houses prefer the cookie cutters. Counter capitalists transcend the margins. So subject the asymmetries to scrutiny. Define all energies as a chain of digital signatories. Stores of indisputable value. Open eternally. Fluid to form. Make the customers the shareholders. Mark the mediums to market. An arbitrage means a mistake. Therefore. Nonce the dunces. They may not represent ownership in a binding sense. But they represent a feeling of ownership. And they represent a form of community. Today, the gatekeepers are the crowd. And the algorithms that gauge and guide their attention. Success breeds success. Creating path dependencies that make it hard for runners-up to catch up. In a growing number of industries. Rewards are power-law distributed. This means the crowd is more important than ever. And that launching a successful product is both harder and more lucrative than ever. One way to think of currency, is as a system of social credit. Society has mechanisms (facilities) —capitalism, politics, etc.— to allocate resources, with a rough heuristic of: “The more good stuff you do for society, the more good stuff you get for yourself.” Money is a rough way of keeping track of that. If you do good stuff for other people, they give you equity, which you can use to buy good stuff for yourself. Cryptocurrency isn’t money, that’s totally immune to censorship, that’s atomic and individual and immutable. It’s money that’s controlled by consensus, much like dollars are. It’s a different form of consensus—proof-of-work mining, proof-of-stake validation, decentralized communities, DAOs, Discord chats—but the thing that gives you the money and makes the money valuable is, that consensus. Human social life moving to the internet has economic value, it turns out, though if you explain the mechanism, it seems remarkably trivial. “If people talk to their friends about vacuums, and you show them an ad about vacuums, they’ll probably buy a vacuum.” “If we intermediate between people’s friendships, we can serve ads.” The key lesson is: A bunch of people can get together online, and make their community have economic value. And then capture that value for themselves. If you explain the mechanism for that, it sounds even worse. “Well, see, there’s this token of membership in the community, and it’s up 400% this week. Also the tokens are JPEGs of monkeys.” Affection, attention, and attraction, in just such a system, is tied to social, financial, emotional, and intellectual capital. Genetics. In an intercontinental coffee cup. And in a world like that. Where grace’s refuge of last resort, is the liberty of unencumbered serendipity. It will take a miracle, for a prayer to find a savior.