Three major challenges facing humanity today:
- coordination at scale: e.g., dealing with climate change
- signal vs noise, also at scale: e.g., AI slop
- limits of trust, and the abuse of unearned trust: e.g., platforms growing in power and scope, beyond accountability
The global pandemic highlighted these shortcomings.
Every mainstream approach involves gatekeeping, which has always worked for humans, but carries unpleasant side effects.
For us to live healthy and fulfilling lives, in a safe and just society with modern freedoms, the old approaches (e.g., tribal leaders, mass democracy, unfettered global capitalism) need re-thinking.
We can see a blurry glimpse of how we might address this through permissionless networks, trustless substrates, and sovereign reputation. It also appears that transparency will be necessary, although the Ethereum experience highlights some of the bad side effects of giving up privacy.
Centralized approaches have gone farther: X, Substack, Farcaster[^1]. In m...
