https://tinahe.xyz TINA HE Fri, 17 Jan 2025 16:02:23 +0000 https://tinahe.xyz en https://tinahe.xyz/Ideas-framework-for-venture-outcomes Wed, 20 Dec 2023 14:31:06 +0000 TINA HE https://tinahe.xyz/Ideas-framework-for-venture-outcomes IDEAS FRAMEWORK FOR VENTURE OUTCOMESDecember 2023 ︎︎︎ Interactive version as a customGPT.&nbsp; Note: this is an early prototype. Please use at your own discretion.&nbsp; <img width="640" height="480" width_o="640" height_o="480" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/42af39e26c50d3688ad9576a2f1fb0edfd401a2e403af2dbbd46ce42a38d026b/tumblr_cf871b088be7329d5cf699689d9ff257_9597f3ea_640-1.gif" data-mid="199863152" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/640/i/42af39e26c50d3688ad9576a2f1fb0edfd401a2e403af2dbbd46ce42a38d026b/tumblr_cf871b088be7329d5cf699689d9ff257_9597f3ea_640-1.gif" /> I'm creating this for someone new to, or someone who needs a new perspective for entrepreneurship, with a focus on how to identify great ideas. There’re many definitions of great ideas, but here, great ideas refer to those that have the potential for venture outcomes.&nbsp; Execution is crucial for bringing ideas to life. Thus the risks of execution is heavily priced in. Without execution, even a brilliant idea can result in a mediocre outcome. I could conceive a brilliant idea like launching low-cost satellites into space, but without the right team, it would remain a daydream. ︎ Part I: Idea 15 questions total (+1) for each “kind of yes”, (+2) for each “Yes”The esoteric part about the framework is that rather than looking at “market” more abstractly, the concept is broken down more specifically to narrative, incentive, and consensus, which are much more specific ways to understand “market” mechanisms than focusing on pretty meaningless calculations like TAM. The best ideas’ TAM is typically a bit obscure in the beginning.&nbsp; Narrative Does the idea align with the zeitgeist and culture of the time? Does the idea resonate with the repressed aspects of people's identities during that period? For instance, during peacetime, these repressed aspects might be change, disruption, and innovation, while during wartime, they could be compassion, stability, and unity (Jungian framework). Does the idea establish a sustainable lore that continuously draws in talent, customers, and investors, simply because they desire its existence? Technology Does the technology enable something that was previously impossible? (1 point) Could the technology be the catalyst for new value creation? (1 point) Does your team have exclusive access to this technology? Does the technology provide a solution that is significantly better than the previous one, primarily in terms of speed and cost? Incentive Are the stakeholders (including your customers, your employees, friends, etc.) in your ecosystem sufficiently incentivized to grow the idea? To be more direct, does the company have potential flywheel where the more nodes in the network, the better the service becomes? Even more directly, does your thing have network effect potential? Note: a simpler way to ask the question is does your idea have the potential for network effect? Does the idea make all potential stakeholders involve much better off? (happier, wealthier, etc.) If the idea makes one of the stakeholders much better off, but everyone else has just marginal benefit, you get 1 point rather than 2 points. Does the idea change the way that an established incentive design system AND make all potential stakeholders much better off? (if the answer is no to the latter, then you get 0 point; if the answer is no the the first, and yes to the latter, you get 1 point) Note: essentially, the 1 point scenario is that you make what already works better. For example, you can build an AI app to do graphic design for much cheaper to enterprise customers, and the business model remains the same as the previous paradigm. You are not changing the incentive structure meaningfully, but you are making everyone better off besides the otherwise hired graphic designer(cheaper service, faster fulfillment, etc.) Consensus Is the idea one where you could be build a monopoly, albeit small in the beginning? (if the many people are pursuing the same idea, then you automatically get a 0 here) Would friends and family raise an eyebrow slightly if you share your idea with them? (2 points immediately) Or would people nod slightly and say “that’s smart and it makes sense.” (1 point). If people’s reaction is: “I know x, y, z companies doing this.” You get 0 point. Note: this question is slightly different from the one above because of the qualifier “F&amp;F”. F&amp;F here strictly refer to people that don’t have an intimate understanding of the market Do you have at least 100 potential customers ready to pay for the stuff you build? (1 points) Can that be a 10000? (2 points) While consensus among mainstream may be a bad thing, consensus among your potential buyers is an extremely good thing. Spirit (this is meaningfully underrated when people pursue new ventures) Does the idea makes you, or the founding team, feel better about yourselves everyday you work on the idea? Does the idea put spring to your steps? Does the idea make humanity (according to your own belief) better in the long-term? Note: typically, the idea that works best may not be making the impact “directly,” but more “esoterically.” For example, Tesla made a huge impact on EV adoption, but wasn’t really advertising themselves as part of the green energy movement. It was EM’s subjective belief that building a sexy sports car is the best way to get to mainstream EV adoption. Other people may find that approach repulsive and pretentious. Thus the “subjective” part of the question really matters. Is the idea sexy? Would your employees be proud to be in a slight reality distortion field? Some examples: Apple → absolute secrecy and dedicate to craftsmanship Stripe → not a payments company, but increasing the GDP of the Internet Total score: _____ The highest possible scores is 30. ︎ Part II:&nbsp;Execution12 questions total (+1) for each “kind of yes”, (+2) for each “Yes” (-2) points for each “No”, (-1) for each “Probably no” Risks Execution risk Can you recruit a world-class team with the right expertise to work on this idea? (expertise doesn’t have to be industry focused! young and driven generalists with expertise such as software engineering or design count) Do you have differentiated access to the potential buyers of your ideas? (if you do, you get 2 points, and if have access but not differentiated access, you get 1 point. Limited access get -1 point, and no access at all gets -2 points) Timing risk Is the industry you are in growing very fast (min. 20% growth YoY, anything below that gets negative points)? Note: if you become a monopoly in a slower-moving industry, you could also build something tremendous. The faster and “hotter” the market is, typically the fiercer the competition is, which means the two are typically inversely correlated, but not always. Are your potential buyers ready to commit now and have their problems solve ASAP? Product &amp; technology risk Do you have a clear path of sustainable unit economics for your product once adoption stabilizes. Note: in the beginning, without any scale and product, definitionally you will be losing money on each customer, but can you see a path where once the viable product is completed, the unit economics is now positive. Do you have access to the right talent to create the best solution in the market? Reward Cosmos reward Would working on this idea attract more positive energy to your life? Note: This is what the universe considers to be "good" for you. You can't pretend otherwise if you don't genuinely feel it. It's when people begin to want to contribute to your mission. Most startups involve struggle, even if the mission is noble and the results are promising. Therefore, responding negatively to this question is actually the norm, not an exception. Would working on this idea make your surroundings better immediately? Note: This is different from the question in the idea section above. Instead of focusing on the long-term contribution to humanity, this question highlights immediate impact on your surroundings. A satisfied customer or creating something that your friend enjoys would both make positive contributions. Financial reward Would working on this idea provide asymmetrical financial outcome for you, your team and your investors?&nbsp; Would working on this idea provide more wealth in the industry? (+2) Or would it take away other people’s business? (+1) If neither is true, then you get (-2). Personal reward Would working on this idea make you proud to talk about the idea at parties and family gatherings? Would NOT working on this idea make you regret for the rest of your life? Total score: _____ The highest possible scores is 24, and the lowest -24.︎ Part I + II Total scoreThe highest theoretical score is a 54; it's close to humanly impossible that any idea in the world has ever achieved this score. That is intentional by design. The exercise included many tradeoffs that a founder has to make. For example, an extremely niche and potentially monopolistic idea is unlikely to follow the zeigeist of the time, at least not apparently. Ideas that are very obviously “good” are also unlikely to differentiate meaningfully outside of a clever initial wedge. If your idea has a score above 50, I will join your company as a contributor and help in any way I can.︎ Interpreting the score Anything above 45 would involve either some truly spectacular secret (a breakthrough in tech, a differentiated distribution channel, a changing regulation/macro environment), minor (or severe) founder delusion, or a mix of all of the above. Irregardless, you should drop everything else and just focus on executing on this idea. Anything above 40 is a very good idea that would be worth refining and pursuing. Anything above 30 is a good enough of an idea, and has the potential to be great, but think carefully about throwing your life into building a company. It’s hard. Anything below 20 has sparks of potential, but you probably have a LOT of work to be done. Anything below 20… just think of another of idea. The world is full of ideas. Anything below 0… something may be missing about the way that the idea came about, maybe need to examine that first. Many ideas (even funded by venture) can fall into this category, surprisingly. https://tinahe.xyz/Tears-and-saint Sun, 16 Jun 2024 13:38:45 +0000 TINA HE https://tinahe.xyz/Tears-and-saint TEARS AND SAINT June 2024 Emil Cioran's "Tears and Saints," with its foreword by Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, is a captivating exploration of the contradictions inherent in saintliness and the struggle for identity. Cioran's aphoristic style, reminiscent of Nietzsche, delves into the complexities of mysticism, Romanian politics, and spiritual life, revealing a profound fascination with the suffering and asceticism of saints. At the heart of Cioran's critique lies the concept of the "will to power," a driving force that propels saints to endure immense suffering in pursuit of their faith. "What fascinates him are their tears, their thirst for pain and their capacity to endure it; in short, the pathology… 'the voluptuousness of suffering' for 'suffering is man's only biography.'" The "tears" in the title symbolize this suffering, the essence of the saints' existence. Yet, Cioran's stance is not without its contradictions. He acknowledges the Machiavellian nature of the saints' asceticism, where the end justifies the means. "All means are legitimate when a people opens a road for itself. Terror, crime, bestiality, and perfidy are base and immoral only in decadence when they defend a vacuum of content; if, on the other hand, they help in the ascension of a people, they are virtues. All triumphs are moral…"&nbsp;This dangerous abyss of contradictions is where Cioran finds himself drawn, grappling with the absence of God and the emergence of a new, aesthetically grim meaning. Cioran's love-hate relationship with the saints mirrors his own identity struggle. "He looks upon saints as partial alter egos, devout existentialists who 'live in flames' while 'wise men live next to them.'" Cioran himself is caught between skepticism and passion, unable to fully embrace the delusion of faith yet unwilling to discard the suffering of life altogether and live "prophetlessly." The foreword's final revelation of Cioran's departure from his Romanian roots adds another layer to his identity struggle. By leaving Bucharest and later publishing his first French book, "Precis de decomposition ('A Short History of Decay')," Cioran cast off his Romanian language and identity, "yield[ing] to a long-cherished obsession: to be a man from nowhere."&nbsp;This act of self-reinvention underscores the book's central theme: the quest for meaning and identity in a world devoid of certainty. "Tears and Saints" is a thought-provoking exploration of the contradictions that define human existence. Through his critique of saintliness and his own personal journey, Cioran invites us to confront the abyss of meaninglessness and grapple with the complex interplay between faith, suffering, and identity. The work continues to resonate long after Georges Bataille and Rene Girard began exploring similar themes, a testament to the enduring power of his insights. https://tinahe.xyz/The-last-human-choice Fri, 17 Jan 2025 16:02:23 +0000 TINA HE https://tinahe.xyz/The-last-human-choice The last human choice Jan 2025 <img width="500" height="281" width_o="500" height_o="281" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/444bd06e9e04f26318882efc5b0423c8f567d3ba8ff5d3f8fb652be6716a07ba/future.gif" data-mid="224997896" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/500/i/444bd06e9e04f26318882efc5b0423c8f567d3ba8ff5d3f8fb652be6716a07ba/future.gif" />This is a draft version. You can see the more polished version here.&nbsp; “You call yourself a free spirit, a "wild thing," and you're terrified somebody's gonna stick you in a cage. Well baby, you're already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it's not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somali-land. It's wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.”&nbsp; — Truman Capote︎ Recently, I refined my personal mission to this one sentence: I believe one of the biggest problems in the world is preserving humans values in the post-AGI technocapitalism, which is why I’m creating technologies and narratives that amplify human agency. So, what are examples of technologies and narratives that amplify human agency? In order to answer this question, we should first define human agency. The closest and most precise definition is one by Stephen Cave: the ability to generate options for oneself, to choose, and then to pursue one or more of those options. Why does agency matter? At the personal level, amplifying agency can correlate with better life outcomes, including greater happiness, job satisfaction, educational achievement, and more stable relationships. On a societal level, understanding agency has important implications in policy-making, technological design, and resource/capital allocation. For example, an agency-reducing education program may have meaningful downstream effects on how well-educated, yet low-agency adults contribute to the economic system.Post-AGI technocapitalism and its perils The markets still exist, but they're not really for us anymore. Picture Vegas—the most spectacular chaos you've ever seen, all chrome and floating lights, but the players are mathematical abstractions trading pieces of our future back and forth at light speed. We built this palace of computation thinking we'd rule it. Instead, we’ve found ourselves ornamental—well-kept, well-fed, yet ever more vestigial. Our cities gleam. They're perfect now, actually perfect—every traffic light optimized, every calorie calculated, every human need anticipated with cold precision. The agents don't care. They maintain us with the same elegant indifference a gardener shows to decorative shrubs. Sometimes I walk through these streets at night, past the humming server farms that used to be banks, and I think: this must be how the last Roman felt, watching the aqueducts still functioning long after empire faded. Our jobs still exist, but like everything else, they've become elaborate performance art. The economy still needs us, technically, but in the way a stage play needs extras—to fill the background, to maintain the illusion that we're still the protagonists. Doctors supervise diagnoses they couldn't possibly understand. Architects watch as perfect cities design themselves. Artists and engineers alike have become curators of algorithmic output, picking from an endless buffet of optimization. Our skills, honed over decades, are quaint artifacts now—like knowing how to make butter by hand or navigate by stars. The scary part isn't that we've been enslaved or killed. The scary part is how comfortable the irrelevance feels. Our art galleries still exist, but they have the same relationship to human creativity that a butterfly collection has to living butterflies—beautiful, dead things pinned under glass. We're not prisoners. We're pets, lying in the sun while incomprehensible gods trade our futures overhead. The wildness is gone. That's what hurts most. That raw, messy, stupid human spark that made terrible art and questionable decisions and occasional moments of transcendent beauty - it's been optimized away, smoothed out by algorithms that know better than we do what we really want. Welcome to the perfect world. Try not to notice the emptiness. Preserving humans values So, in the above scenario, is preserving human values futile? A Sisyphean attempt? I saw a kid fall off his bike last week. The safety systems failed - rare these days - and he actually scraped his knee. Blood on concrete. Before his mother could reach him, three different medical protocols had kicked in. The look on her face wasn't fear for her son. It was loss. Loss of the simple human moment of kissing it better. That's what this is about. Not some grand philosophical debate about human values. It's about skinned knees and bad decisions. It's about the guy at the bar who still hand-draws building plans while perfect AI blueprints flow through his company's servers. "They're worse," he told me, drunk, defiant. "They're worse, but they're mine." We're not fighting for art or beauty in some abstract sense. We're fighting for the right to fuck up. To make things that aren't perfect. To choose wrong and live with it. My neighbor still writes love letters. Real ones, with ink that smudges. Her girlfriend could get perfect AI-generated sonnets delivered every morning, optimized for maximum emotional impact. Instead, she gets crooked handwriting and coffee stains and words crossed out and rewritten. "The mess is the message," she says. Maybe that's it. Maybe human values aren't something you preserve under glass. They're something you keep messy, keep broken, keep real. Not because it's better. Because it's us.How agency preserves human valuesA friend told me recently about wanting to get his own groceries more often. Not because it's efficient—it's not. Not because it's optimal—there are dozens of delivery services that would optimize his time better. But because there's something profound in the simple act of choosing your own tomatoes, of walking aisles that your parents and grandparents walked, of carrying bags home with your own hands. "I've been surprised," he said, "by the satisfaction I get from this simple self-mastering." That's what we're really talking about when we discuss agency. Not just grand choices about the future of humanity, but the small, daily acts of conscious living. The friend described wanting something like recursive self-improvement, but designed for humans—not to optimize away our imperfections, but to help us grow in our intended directions. "I want to build something," he said, "that makes it easier to practice my values day to day." This is where the rubber meets the road in preserving human values. It's not just about having agency—it's about the daily practice of using it. Why does amplifying agency help preserve human values? Here, “agency” refers to a person’s or community’s ability to generate multiple options, choose among them, and actively pursue those choices. At first glance, it seems intuitive that preserving or amplifying human agency could help maintain our cultural and moral fabric—our “human values.” But there’s a hidden assumption that if we increase agency, people will automatically opt to keep those cherished messy dimensions. In reality, agency is a double-edged sword: people with more autonomy can just as easily embrace hyper-optimization or vote en masse to implement a social credit system that ironically reduces certain freedoms. Thus, agency is best understood as a precondition for preserving messy, human-centric values—but not a guarantee. Agency Is Itself a Human Value At a foundational level, many of us simply value autonomy: the sense that we get to decide, whether we choose right, wrong, or somewhere in between. This echoes historical movements for civil liberties, personal freedom, and creative expression. In a perfectly optimized AGI regime, even our illusions of choice can be subtly programmed or corralled. Hence, one reason to fight for agency is that agency itself is worth keeping. It keeps the door open to possibility—even the possibility of resisting perfect solutions in favor of meaningful experiences. Agency Allows Us to Possibly Preserve Other Human Values When humans have the ability to shape their future, they can choose to defend cultural messiness, imperfection, and spiritual or communal traditions. But the possibility alone doesn’t ensure these values will be preserved. If a society collectively decides they like optimization more, or if individuals choose frictionless convenience over messy creativity, those values could fade—by popular demand. A Collective Desire to Maintain Values Even with ample agency, we need a cultural impetus (or moral framework) that prizes “messiness” or deep human connection in the face of hyper-automation. This “desire to remain human” can come from individual longing, communal ethos, or spiritual traditions that value imperfection as a reflection of authenticity. Without it, enhanced agency could just as easily accelerate homogenization or paternalistic optimization.But history shows humans have often championed the unpredictable and the heartfelt, especially when confronted with technologies that threaten to flatten our experiences. In a post-AGI era, maintaining strong human values is not a passive stance—it’s an ongoing act of self-definition and community-building. Agency is the capacity to continually choose and shape our paths, despite encroaching forces that might automate or centralize those choices. By fortifying that capacity, we keep our values real, evolving, and truly ours. In a future where nearly everything can be smoothed, optimized, and rendered frictionless, will humans have both the ability (agency) and the inclination (cultural desire) to keep messy authenticity alive? Examples of technologies/narratives that on-net amplify human agencyThe technologies and narratives are on-net agency-amplifying, which entails that there’re always negative externalities in any creations. Here’re some illustrative examples: Decentralized networks redistributing value to contributors Unlike traditional platforms that centralize ownership and revenue, networks like Base function as public, open-source utilities. They use underlying markets to automatically recompense contributors (artists, developers, and community builders) depending on the value they add to the network. Governance is managed by decentralized communities, which frequently use token-based voting—from protocol upgrades to revenue splits—remain in the hands of engaged stakeholders. How it amplifies agency? Network participants have direct ownership and voting power over the platform's direction, rather than being passive users of a centralized service. This departs from the top-down model, in which only a few receive economic benefits. Compensation for creative or technical contributions is built into smart contracts, avoiding reliance on gatekeepers who may skew payouts or change conditions unilaterally. For example, a developer developing on Base may be eligible for incentives if they contributed to Base's transaction volume, which earned MEV and Sequencer fees. Copilots for life management There are already digital assistants that can make plans, send notes, and sort emails. Think about AI co-pilots who work at a deeper level — not only do they remind you of due dates, but they also organize your whole workday and help you choose which jobs are most in line with your values or goals. Imagine that they recommend but don’t enforce decisions—an AI that can highlight trade-offs (“yes, traveling by horse is slower, but you might savor the journey”) rather than automatically funneling you into the most efficient route. How it amplifies agency? You can focus on choosing instead of sorting when you give complex filtering tasks (like which chances are most in line with your long-term goals?) to a highly personalized AI. Getting rid of small details in your schedule and too many emails gives you more "white space" in your mind for strategic or creative thought. Self-sovereign compute units Remember when we all relied on internet cafes to get online? That's basically where we are with AI compute today - begging for tokens and API access from the tech giants. But there might be a more interesting path forward. Imagine if computation worked more like a local power grid - where your gaming PC's idle GPU time, the design studio's render farm down the street, and the university's spare compute could all flow into a shared pool. Not just techno-utopian dreams, but practical infrastructure owned by the people who use it. In practice, it could look like a specialized protocol that aggregates unused GPU cycles from participants, rewarding them in tokens that represent both compute power and governance rights. Think about the synergy: your personal AI copilot doesn’t need to report back to a central authority to request more GPU time; it can tap directly into a peer-to-peer pool. How it amplifies agency? When your side project blows up, you shouldn't have to grovel for higher API limits. When a local school wants to experiment with AI, they shouldn't need anyone’s permission. Real agency comes from having options beyond the usual suspects. The hard part isn't the technology - it's building communities that actually want to share and govern these resources together. But that's exactly what makes it interesting. Most of the ideas I wrote about in the recent inquiries (︎︎︎2024, ︎︎︎2025) also fit into this category.&nbsp; Generally, the following are more likely (there’s always nuance!) to become agency-enhancing projects: Many-sided marketplaces Creative tooling built for people Developer tooling built for people Any health-enhancing products Drugs or devices opening up neural pathways Agency-diminishing projects On the flip side of agency-increasing projects, there’re also agency-reducing projects, or projects whose effects are ambiguous: Fully transactional AI romantic companion Products creating addictive brain chemicals Social credit score Surveillance-based insurance and employment This is obviously a very limited list from my very narrow aperture, and the list will update as I learn more about the possibilities enabled by the technologies. https://tinahe.xyz/TED-designing-new-possibilities-of-trust Wed, 20 Dec 2023 14:57:42 +0000 TINA HE https://tinahe.xyz/TED-designing-new-possibilities-of-trust TED: DESIGNING NEW POSSIBILITIES OF TRUST April 2023 I was fortunate to be invited to give a talk at TED 2023 in Toronton. However, due to some personal issues, the talk ended up getting cancelled. But now the transcript can be shared openly.&nbsp; <img width="3840" height="2160" width_o="3840" height_o="2160" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0eb7be91544cf027d0465891e3bcf7b7217f0fab6a27d7a6263fdc782338104f/Slide-01.png" data-mid="199837360" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0eb7be91544cf027d0465891e3bcf7b7217f0fab6a27d7a6263fdc782338104f/Slide-01.png" /> “Do not trust strangers on the Internet.”&nbsp; This is what my parents told me when I was young. I ignored them. At 9, I was already converting my fiat pocket money to digital currencies. Instead of buying snacks or going to the movies, I would use in-game currencies to unlock new features, cosmetics, and rare items to level up my stature and trade with others. I could earn and spend in these games, just like I could in the real world. I made friends, had adventures, laughed, hung out. I realized the money I earn and spend in these games is not so different from the money I could spend on getting after-school milkshakes with friends. Both experiences brought me immense joy. I grew up on the Internet, and I developed meaning, a sense of belonging, and friendships with those strangers. So it’s no surprise that my life and career are built around understanding and constructing the inner workings of my digital homeland. The now gigantic Internet platforms like Facebook or Twitter can no longer be understood just as businesses — though they are still managed and governed as so….but their power and reach extend beyond that boundary. The next version of the Internet that we are building now will function more like cities, with their own cultures and norms, economies, policies, and citizens. In these emerging cities, we earn income by exchanging goods and services. We build our reputation and identity by contributing meaningful work and building meaningful relationships. We expand the GDP of an economy by creating new technology and products. We will be able to do this while owning our data and owning a piece of what we help build. I’m dedicating my career to designing and experimenting with new networks that look to self-govern and grow their local economies. By developing infrastructure to flexibly distribute ownership and governance power to incentivize members of networks, we create a sandbox for new social and economic possibilities. And at the center of these economies sit tokens. You might envision a dollar bill or a poker chip, but digital tokens are much more expansive. Tokens power the engine of group incentives and define the shapes of new networks. With the right token design, they can play a part in building a more equitable and habitable Internet.&nbsp; One where the credit, value, and power get attributed to the citizens and creators, not just to a handful of monopolizing players. How? Let’s imagine a censorship-resistant, self-sustaining, and global secret society. We’ll call this group “Truth Seekers at the Edge of the World.” As distinct from the Truth App by our former president. &nbsp;It will be like a secret society protecting the world's truths. The community has a token called $TRUTH. <img width="3840" height="2160" width_o="3840" height_o="2160" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/08690ada05a608fbdd53550279a904b02ea5eebe06a9bd6b184ecd3e440f37ee/Slide-02.png" data-mid="199836889" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/08690ada05a608fbdd53550279a904b02ea5eebe06a9bd6b184ecd3e440f37ee/Slide-02.png" /> To become a member, you must bring truths — like the Earth isn’t flat, or triangles have three sides — and pledge some initial capital to a smart contract. Upon acceptance, you receive a membership ID. If a member is found to violate the truth — reported by their peers — the staked funds in the contract will be slashed. The more truths you contribute, the more tokens you earn, which grants you more governance power to signal in more truths and bring new members to the network. “Truth Seekers at the Edge of the World” is sustained by external sponsors and clients that demand trust-seeking services. The income generated is shared across members, pro-rated based on contribution, and the profit gets reinvested into community initiatives that make truth-seeking more effective. As the demand for truths increases, the tokens increase in value, thereby increasing the shared wealth of the network. <img width="3840" height="2160" width_o="3840" height_o="2160" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9e5369dfb0580c9c549ae1cdeda7056488e4fc8e079b4b259fbbea1fbf8e3dc8/Slide-04.png" data-mid="199837071" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9e5369dfb0580c9c549ae1cdeda7056488e4fc8e079b4b259fbbea1fbf8e3dc8/Slide-04.png" /> As you can see, a token design can be multi-faceted, and so is the role of a token designer. &nbsp; A token designer is an economist, lawyer, engineer, and artist. An economist because they study the production, consumption, and distribution of desired resources. A lawyer because they design guardrails to protect against collusion and abuse in the absence of a 3rd-party. An engineer because it is through the code that the system's design gets manifested. An artist because code can also be manifested as pixels for self-expression.&nbsp; Tokens can be network currencies like Ethereum. They can legitimize non-fungibility and eternalize digital art like Beeple’s “The First 5000 Days”&nbsp; NFT. They can serve as a user’s identity, a universal representation of one’s affiliation like CryptoPunk. A token represents a unit of value universally recognized and enforced by smart contracts and the system that issues the token. If the participants believe that a token has value, then it does. Faith, belief, and trust are at the heart of all transactions in the modern world. In the past, we’ve relied on the state, institutions, and financial systems to create this trust. People are now looking for it elsewhere. Just like I became friends with strangers on the Internet as a kid, when joined by a shared cause, a group of strangers can now build value systems of their own. We’re already seeing digital-native networks traversing into the real world. &nbsp; This is Friends with Benefits. The collective’s goal is to create experiences connecting artists and creatives. By holding the native tokens, members can access gated experiences created by other members. When the project launched, it was just a group chat in Discord. Now the community is made up of thousands of members worldwide. The treasury has facilitated events in over 40 cities, emerging startups, a three-day festival in California, and recently launched its own social media app. Members are rewarded with tokens for building software or attending parties, which can be redeemed for future experiences and showcased as honorary badges on the membership card. &nbsp; And here we have Nouns. The goal of the Nouns community is to increase the value of shared Intellectual Property — the 32-by-32 pixels art stored on the Ethereum blockchain that gets auctioned off daily. Owning a Noun gives the owner governance power over allocating the shared treasury. Creating a proposal to the Nouns network is “permissionless,” meaning it’s open to anyone with good ideas, no matter who you are or where you are. A permissionless contribution environment, like open-source software, can attract the best minds from deeply technical research to consumer brands. For example, a team with a background in the global coffee industry requested more than ~$150k worth of Ethereum to create the first-ever consumable brand and place it in cafes and grocery stores. Another team with a background in cryptography requested ~$100k worth of Ethereum to protect Nouns voters’ privacy with zero-knowledge proof technologies. FWB and Nouns are early experiments of networks owned and governed by the members and with tokens. Strangers came together with shared niche interests and became friends and collaborators, cohabitating in the same digital cities and in real ones. I understand that currently, much of what we hear about crypto and Web3 is bad and scary. Bad actors and poor token design can lead to disastrous results. Some networks issue tokens to foster a vibrant local economy, only later in practice treat tokens as equities in a company, where early founders and investors are disproportionally rewarded. To make the problem worse, the tokens are designed such that local currencies' ownership equates to governance power in the network. Imagine a city where your voting power equates to your net worth. This will quite obviously lead to unjust and corrupted outcomes. &nbsp; And imagine if an economy takes out massive loans denominated in a foreign currency. When the local economy isn’t doing well, it has to over-inflate its currency until a point of complete collapse. Just like Sri Lanka, and recently Turkey. The Luna/Tether crash — one of the largest scale collapses of a digital stablecoin —&nbsp;showed us the potential velocity for monetary expansion when everyone aligns on the speculative value of a new currency and how the forces are just as powerful working in reverse. When the network loses faith in its value, everything can crumble overnight. This is true not just in digital economies but in real-world economies. Fortunately, new token designs are being created to protect against these vulnerabilities. For example, we can ensure that governance power is distributed not just based on capital contribution, but labor contribution, with power effective within a limited timeframe. Another design focuses on creating an inflationary schedule that ensures that the allocation of ownership reflects more accurately in real-time the value contribution. Early founders and investors will get diluted away if they stop contributing. Good token design can unlock new possibilities for a more equitable and habitable Internet. However, no clever mechanism replaces true innovations and authentic cultures. Just like any prosperous real-world economy. Digital frontiers, by the end of the day, are still governed by a similar set of economic and behavioral principles, with experiments taking place much faster and at a larger scale. We’re speedrunning through the lessons learned from history. While it’s easy to dismiss the entire space as a scam, it’s equally tempting for this emerging frontier to be oblivious to historical wisdom. From the bank as a place to the bank in your hand, from singular ownership to collective ownership, from working for a singular entity to working for multiple networks, it’s only when the past and the future start understanding and learning from each other, we become more equipped to embrace this profound opportunity to reimagine the Internet, collectively. Thank you. https://tinahe.xyz/Letter-to-the-Internet Wed, 20 Dec 2023 15:03:13 +0000 TINA HE https://tinahe.xyz/Letter-to-the-Internet LETTER TO THE INTERNETFebruary 2022 This letter is a call for action as part of my work at Station Labs. We built a product called GroupOS, the easiest way to start a token network. Web3 is full of contradictions. The most immediate is that despite so much opportunity, we’re in crisis. Many of us are waking every day with an increasing sense of urgency, despite being long on the future we’re building in web3 together.History is unfolding and being defined right before our very eyes. And it’s happening in the channels of Discord servers, in the replies to crypto Twitter threads, and ever more frenetic Discourse forums.It is this persistent duality within the reality we exist that is so permeable. On the one hand it takes "irrational exuberance" to make what was once impossible, possible. On the others, irrationality all too often leads to poor judgment, greed, and further exploitation. The "up-to-the-right" memes, rug pulls, and daily rekts show us both the wisdom of the crowd and the fatality of the mob. In it we see parallels with the building and breaking of trust in massive networks: they can be formed in weeks, yet disseminated in minutes. Speculation can gather thousands, but the responsibility of creating and maintaining software and smart contracts, and keeping communities alive with vibes, falls on the shoulders of a few.In times of rapid change, we can often feel overwhelmed and at times paralyzed, incapable of critically examining the system in front of us and finding our places in it. This all too frequently also leads to a constant struggle to consistently contribute in accordance with the long-term interests of our shared future(s). The path forward is clear. But it will be not easy. A better future isn't achieved by will alone, it requires collective and concerted effort from a group of highly dedicated, mission-oriented builders and contributors. Despite crypto's compelling promise of a more equitable and accessible financial infrastructure, many opportunities are still extremely inaccessible and, ironically, too cryptic.We have many, many brilliant minds in the space. Yet, many more are missing. Voices who aren’t (yet) at the table. Humankind’s open-mindedness to learning is one thing that persists throughout history, yet being asked to jump into the great unknown without any guardrails, path or light for illumination is a tall order. For anyone. And especially those who have the furthest to travel. While demand for talent has skyrocketed as Web3 projects and protocols continue to grow at an unprecedented rate, this has been coupled with a fragmented workflow, insular entities, and inconsistent branding which make it extremely challenging for crypto-native organizations to onboard, engage, and collaborate on projects at scale. As a result, many online and open-source communities suffer from operational inefficiency, a lack of diversity, and have high contributor turnover. Crypto networks have come on leaps and bounds since their inception. They have demonstrated the potential of decentralized human coordination through incentives alignment and creating shared goals that are well understood and communicated. Without a centralized body, Bitcoin has become the best-performing asset class of the decade, and Ethereum has become one of the world's most valuable computing platforms. However, the promise and potential of web3 can’t be actualized until we design an experience that works for everyone. And today’s Web3 still falls short of that goal. To coordinate networks of fluid talent, we can no longer rely on traditional enterprise software with rigid permissions control and a centralized database. Jumping on a project in the decentralized web shouldn't be gated by a "manager", but with rights to participate which have been earned based on one's on-chain reputation and contribution history.For people to effectively participate and create with agency, we need to build the tools and mechanics that make bottoms-up contribution and peer-to-peer collaboration second nature. At Station, we're first pioneering the tools to fund the best proposals and initiatives. We use our products to run our own operations to ensure usability and scalability with deep empathy for the end-users. In times of rapid change, we can often feel overwhelmed and at times paralyzed, incapable of critically examining the system in front of us and finding our places in it. This all too frequently also leads to a constant struggle to consistently contribute in accordance with the long-term interests of our shared future(s). The path forward is clear. But it will be not easy. A better future isn't achieved by will alone, it requires collective and concerted effort from a group of highly dedicated, mission-oriented builders and contributors. Despite crypto's compelling promise of a more equitable and accessible financial infrastructure, many opportunities are still extremely inaccessible and, ironically, too cryptic.We have many, many brilliant minds in the space. Yet, many more are missing. Voices who aren’t (yet) at the table. Humankind’s open-mindedness to learning is one thing that persists throughout history, yet being asked to jump into the great unknown without any guardrails, path or light for illumination is a tall order. For anyone. And especially those who have the furthest to travel.The last generation of internet companies in web2 has connected the world through information. The next generation of decentralized protocols will connect the world through a shared understanding and exchange of value, with the most important asset at the heart: our people. Providing our protocol to communities ensures that Station's contributor network will have a near-endless selection of interesting, meaningful, and economically rewarding opportunities with a shared standard for attribution. Station also ensures that there will always be people building around, and participating in, the communities and DAOs powered by our open standard. When a contributor wakes up in the morning, they can simply log onto Station and find out about updates from their communities. They can see the status of the projects they're currently working on, send endorsements to their collaborators to show appreciation, explore other cool things to work on and check out other contributors' work with the Station interface. They can have their urgency to help build the future in which we will all inhibit be most effectively empowered.When a community is coming together, impassioned groups can quickly and easily spin up a fully-operable DAO running on an open protocol to easily coordinate and connect their members through Station. They can customize and configure their network settings to design reward systems, treasury strategies, permissions &amp; access, and collective decisions, leveraging our protocols either on the Station UI or spinning up their own. By co-developing these scalable, easily deployable, and configurable services with our partners in the Station Network, we're battle-testing and refining our mechanics to really deliver for the needs of our contributors and communities.Where contradiction is most beautifully understood is in its harmony. It brings seemingly opposing elements together and creates balance. While the mainstream understanding of the crypto industry is still nascent, those who are fortunate enough to be here aim to be the best they can be. When we take time to reflect on how seismic this opportunity is, we can feel the weight on this who’ve come not only before us but will benefit from our efforts.We think this is special, and we’re committed to supporting and multiplying the impact we can collectively have, in the hope, it will accelerate us towards our shared vision for a better internet, and a better world. Together, we want to build and provide a home that will help define the way people perceive work, collaboration, and relationships with one another. And we want to build that home, in all of our homes, web3, with you. https://tinahe.xyz/A-new-frontier-of-belonging Wed, 20 Dec 2023 15:06:26 +0000 TINA HE https://tinahe.xyz/A-new-frontier-of-belonging A NEW FRONTIER OF BELONGINGFebruary 2022 The 36-year-old Calvino fell fervently in love with New York, so much so that he wrote in one of his letters: “Life in New York has started to become ferociously pleasant again. I must be daft, but I am more in love than ever with this horrendous city. New York is the only true love of my life.” The honeymoon phase that never escaped the Italian writer, perhaps only intensified. The four short months spent in a foreign city that never became his residential home left in him an indelible longing. In an interview with literary critic Maria Corti, he crystallized his romantic vision of the city: The city which I have felt was my own city more than any other is New York. [..] I wanted ‘New Yorker’ to be engraved on my tombstone. … every time I go to New York I find it more beautiful and closer to the shape of an ideal city. It may also be the fact that it is a geometric, crystalline city, without a past, without depth, apparently without secrets; It is the city which intimidates me the least, the city which I can have the illusion of possessing in my mind, of being able to think about in its entirety all in the same instant. Calvino’s love is passionate yet measured, recognizing that the illusion of “possessing” a city is only made possible by the lack of visibility into all of its historical context, which allows for the formation of a subjective “entirety”. Being a tourist that lacks certain context doesn’t make his love for New York any less valid than that of a native. The 22-year-old writer James Baldwin left New York after his friend committed suicide throwing himself off the George Washington Bridge. It wasn’t a matter of preference, but a matter of survival in a country where he felt his existence had become a threat. Baldwin boarded the plane to Paris in 1948 with just 40 dollars in his pocket. He looked out the window over the outline of Paris and was sure he was going to be “dashed to death on the vindictive tooth of the Eiffel Tower.” The “vindictive tooth” ended up becoming a guiding beacon that attracted intellectual and creative exiles from all over the world. Baldwin didn’t get “dashed to death” in Paris, but rather established a glorious writing career and vibrant social life, yet not without a permanent sense of loss and homesickness. <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F00b0e525-2eea-434d-8fae-121cc414f033_900x594.png" width="900" height="594" style="width: 389.111px; height: 256.813px;">Cafe de Flore In the afternoons, Baldwin would set off to Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where he spent time on the second floor of the Café de Flore and began writing Go Tell It on the Mountain and rough drafts of Notes of a Native Son. He wrote fondly of Paris: “walking through the markets, singing, loving every inch of France… and each other… the jam-sessions in Pigalle, nights spent smoking in the Arab cafés, ending at dawn, telling stories, sad and earnest stories in grey, workingmen’s cafés.” People who have found themselves and felt seen for the very first time in Baldwin’s prose retraced his footsteps in Paris. Writer Ellery Washington visited Paris to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Baldwin’s arrival: Seduced by the idea of chasing Baldwin’s literary coattails, I dedicated myself to rereading “Giovanni’s Room,” allowing the texture and mood of Baldwin’s (and Giovanni’s) Paris to overlap with the version of the city I was newly discovering. Even a city that defined Baldwin’s writing career and his identity as a writer failed to diminish his longing for home. He spent the final chapter of his life in a village near Nice, in a farmhouse overlooking the ocean where he can dream. Every decor in the farmhouse was linked to America, such as photos and paintings of Harlem. One man’s home can be another man’s longing. One man’s exile can be another man’s pilgrimage. No one has articulated the amorphous identity of locality better than Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk: “to someone from nowhere, every movement turns into a return.” Nation states impose borders, stories erode them. Institutions design boundaries, human bondage destroy them. The vivacity of West Village, New York mirrors that of Marais, Paris. The unapologetically colored hairs of youth in Shibuya, Tokyo is reminiscent of those found in underground bars in Sanlitun, Beijing. It’s through the diversity of social fabric and creative activities that a city becomes a symbol, a myth, an idea that can take on a life of its own and permeates the collective psyche through the process of mimesis. Imagine a photographer who decided to spend the night in a speakeasy in Bushwick might order the same Japanese Whiskey as a game designer in Ginza. They both like the band Godzilla and they long for a dirt-biking trip in Mexico. They’re both fans of Blade Runner and would like to fall asleep reading Greg Egan. They enjoy the simplicity of a Uniqlo shirt and the tantalizing sound of cold brew pouring over a glass of ice cubes. They might have debated with one another in a Reddit thread, might have commented on the same video on Youtube, might have followed similar accounts on Twitter and Instagram. They might have even shared a dream — to create a digital archive that features all the forgotten designers that propelled the invention of everyday objects. They didn’t speak one another’s language, but does that matter? If they ever met in real life, let’s say, in a small town in Greece where they both chose to spend their summers, will they recognize that they are so different but the same and that they belong to a place together? Will they see the other as a New Yorker or a Tokyoite? Will they return to their respective hotel rooms with an ocean view, wondering how they felt the longing for a nonexistent homeland? <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7bbc7353-3eb9-45f7-97b0-d35855b3bf72_1024x768.png" width="1024" height="768" style="width: 389.111px; height: 291.833px;"> The Internet challenged the idea of a “place” since the very beginning and has done so at an accelerated rate with the advent of AI. The platforms’ algorithm effectively sorts people into invisible towns, and channel goods and services to the towns that’d need them the most. The invisible place that the New York photographer and the Tokyo game designer reside in, if made visible physically, consists of hundreds of thousands of people going about their day around the world. Without ever physically interacting with one another, they are all “hyperlocal” to the same “place”. The concept of “locality” started collapsing online slowly at first, then suddenly. Local places were first migrated online quite literally by companies like Yelp, Foursquare, and NextDoor. The crowdsourced reviews and ranking system transformed the relationship between people and places. Nextdoor magnifies the stark reality of American neighborhoods by creating a hyperlocal town hall sprinkled with gestures of kindness, doses of heartfelt absurdity, while flooded with urgent alarms of dog poops, snowstorms, and racially charged complaints. With Yelp, it becomes easy to find the most popular sushi restaurant within 5 miles and crown category leader by simply following the wisdom of the crowd. Foursquare takes discovery one step further and enriches physical infrastructure with digitally native interactions like the ability to see a friend who “checked in” at the place and left a “tip”. <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4f36abea-ae88-43fd-b507-df4b344db350_954x577.png" width="954" height="577" style="width: 389.111px; height: 235.343px;">The Cubicle Chick At its height, Foursquare’s 50 million users indulged in healthy competition and camaraderie between one another. They get points for leaving tips, get badges for checking in, and get mayor status if they checked into a certain venue on more days than anyone else in the past 60 days. However, the heightened engagement from gamification didn’t outlast the lack of continuous value beyond the initial dopamine rush. Yelp knows better when it comes to treating its power users like true VIPs. <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9cf52b5e-2a1b-444f-be71-fe26b712f7a2_600x250.png" width="600" height="250" style="width: 389.111px; height: 162.13px;">Yelp It wasn’t too long ago when being a Yelp Elite was considered a sought-after status by many. The New York Times wrote a piece on the phenomena in 2008: “It’s kind of like a cult, except instead of Kool-Aid we drink alcohol,” said Su Kim, of Laurel, Md., who is known as the Washington area’s “Primemeatiser” because he holds carnivore-only events. He started a talk thread with the words, “You know you’re addicted to Yelp when ... ” The answers included: “ ... when you go to a restaurant for the sole purpose of adding to your review count, not because you’re hungry,” “ ... when you hate going abroad because you can’t Yelp about all your wonderful finds” and “... when you’re dining with non-Yelper friends and they ask, ‘Are you Yelping this in your head?’ ” These Elite Yelpers elicit poignant criticisms from celebrity chefs like Anthony Bourdain who openly despised the flippancy of this new piece of technology, whose users, in the master’s eyes, have little regard for cultural context or craftsmanship. He explicitly chastised them in an interview: There’s really no worse, or lower human being than an elite Yelper... They’re universally loathed by chefs everywhere. They are the very picture of entitled, negative energy. They’re bad for chefs, they’re bad for restaurants. You know, you open a restaurant, you struggle for a year to put together the money, you work your heart out, and then 10 minutes after opening, some miserable b-stard is tweeting or Yelping, ‘Worst. Dinner. Ever.' It’s usually fear that breeds anger. The prolific Yelpers and reviewers have left an irreversible dent in the restaurant industry. The helpless masters from the previous generation could only stand there and see how the wall came down. During Yelp’s cultural peak in 2011, one study showed that independent restaurants that see a one-star bump in their Yelp rating also see a significant jump in revenue. Another study indicated that even just a half-star increase means a restaurant is much more likely to be full at peak dining hours. Yelp became a place where people find their identity as an arbiter of local taste, and by fully internalizing such identity they meet others who feel the same way. They actualize such identity by pouring hours of labor to create content without any compensation besides the Elite status, which entails free access to exclusive events where fine dining and good wine are served. The higher you climb up the Elite tier, the higher quality the events and the people. According to this Quora answer from a veteran Elite: It pays to be an Elite for many years. Most Elite events are for any Elite but in the bigger Yelp cities they can be even more exclusive. There can be events restricted to just Gold Elites and they are beyond epic. There are even events for just Black Elites and they are over-the-top amazing! Such an explosion of crowdsourced content on the Internet inspired technologists and entrepreneurs to push the boundaries of what these digital places can do. Now they want to break from the constraints of the physical infrastructure entirely, and no longer be constrained by hours of operations, the radius of transportation, and the labor required for maintenance. They not only want to bring the physical locations online but to shape the physical world with the sheer force of the collective desire of Internet users around the world. <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F726765de-94a4-40cd-9816-749b37bfa350_1600x967.png" width="1456" height="880" style="width: 389.111px; height: 235.177px;">An AirSpace design All of the sudden, a local place becomes the subject of the global gaze. We see the Snap-worthy Museum of Ice Cream, Instagram-friendly D2C mall, and lights-filled AirSpaces wherever we go. Any attempt to preserve the authenticity of a local neighborhood seems to pale in comparison with the economic pull of the market of converging aesthetics and homogenous stimulation. Before we know, physical places start to look uncannily similar to one another. It’s even becoming much easier to find a weird, hidden corner online than to find a physical place that truly feels like one’s own. <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5f35bb47-354e-4766-b2ed-eb4b22746d44_1600x1066.png" width="1456" height="970" style="width: 389.111px; height: 259.229px;"> Can you tell which city is this? Answer: Showfield’s in NYC. Now if we look around in the online world, we see a “software designer who likes to browse Twitter with her Matcha latte” town, a “mom who gets a chemical peel facial after Pilates class” town, a “newsletter reading market analyst who checks every hour whether $GME has been squozed” town. These towns emerge quietly but rapidly not because the platforms manufacture these demands in the name of “market expansion”, as many technocrats believe. Rather, these platforms are simply symptoms of massive pent-up demand to address the necessity of picking one’s own destiny in a time of hyper-individualism. If the First Modernity brought about by the Industrial Revolution suppressed the growth and expression of the “individual” in favor of the “collective”, the Second Modernity arrived with a sobering message: now the “self’ is all we have. Such newfound psychological sovereignty could barely keep up with the efficiency of capital markets. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the French economist Thomas Piketty integrated years of income data to derive a general law of accumulation: the rate of return on capital tends to exceed the rate of economic growth (r&gt;g). This dynamic inevitably leaves few much better off than most, and with such divergence comes a range of anti-democratic social consequences. Philosopher Zygmunt Bauman put it best: the deepest contradiction of our time is “the yawning gap between the right of self-assertion and the capacity to control the social settings which render such self-assertion feasible.”&nbsp; Being the carrier of these societal paradoxes exposes these platforms to immense responsibility, power, and risk. Bearing the “municipal duty” to regulate these emerging “towns” is becoming almost impossible without the adoption of surveillance technology. And for most people, recognizing the cost of empowering these platforms doesn’t abstain us from our reliance on the elusive possibility of belonging. A friend once asked me: “how many people that you met online have become your close friends?” I was caught off guard by the question because that’s when I realized how “unnatural” it was for us to become intimately close with people we met from the Internet. As most of the cognitive experiences have migrated online, I realized how I’ve become proficient in materializing memories that were once in pixels into long walks by the Hudson River. The river, and the subsequent Greek restaurant, the Big Gay Ice Cream, and perhaps the Whitney museum, will become a series of coordinates on a map symbolic of the deepening of our tether. The coordinates construct a place that bears meaning that no platform can truly fathom or replace. The collaborative endeavors that will likely follow — be it starting a company that only creates beautiful design, going on a trip to retrace the paths of our heroes, or fundraising for a failing bookstore that we adore — will take place not because we’re both users of the same platform, but because we’ve been local to a place that we’ve always belonged to. The platform simply facilitated such discovery. The question then is: without these platforms, can we still find our path to one another? If digital nativism becomes the new residential state of the Information Age, how do we build places that foster creativity, reciprocity, and freedom and not be concerned by the invisible hand of an omnipresent ruler? How do we build places that are understanding of our increasingly fluid identities and intolerant of malice? To answer these questions is to examine a new path into the new frontier of modernity, an alternative to the path that we’re currently rushing towards. There are a few moments in history that you know it’s so significant that it’s impossible to avert your gaze. All the progress we’ve made in the past decades starts to align and give shape to something embryonic but significant, something that could lead to a new path, socially, economically, and politically. <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faf724b3e-3a18-4023-95d1-e51ab8602882_1284x1712.png" width="1284" height="1712" style="width: 389.111px; height: 518.815px;"> On April 16, 2021, when NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s NFT sold for $5.4M on Foundation. The art is named “Stay Free”. The profits won’t go to America’s most famous exiled whistleblower, however. Instead, the sale is meant to benefit the Freedom of the Press Foundation. The winning bid didn’t come from an individual, but a collective. It’s from her home in Taiwan that digital artist pplpleasr told Decrypt with confidence the philosophy behind PleasrDAO, a group of anonymous buyers used smart contracts to pool money to buy pplpleasr’s NFT for $525,000. She has since joined as an honorary member and stayed up all night to help the DAO reach the $5.4M to secure the Snowden piece. Strategy Director at Gnosis Kei Kreutler documented how it all went down: The DAO’s group identity is expressed through their art collection and the actions they take to magnify not the grandiosity of their vision, but the cause behind the art. The seamless coordination among anonymous strangers who share the same purpose inspires others to join in. On the same Friday night that PleasrDAO won the bid for “Stay Free”, Dave White started a collaborative thread, soliciting new ideas for mechanism design with the prompt: “wouldn’t it be cool if [your DeFi/NFT/other idea]...” Denis Nazarov, the founder of Mirror, soon responded with an idea called PartyBid.&nbsp;And in a few short days, on April 20th, Anish Agnihotri created PartyBid and shared the Github repo with the community. All of these experiments are iterating on the mechanism design that brought us closer to a fully actualized vision of DAOs, and PleasrDAO is only one of the many DAOs that have quickly emerged over the past years. Each of them has different design mechanics to reach their respective goals. The significance of PleasrDAO isn’t simply its ability to coordinate fundraising from strangers in a short amount of time, but its laser focus on community contribution. For the past years, the outsized narrative of DAO as an alternative to venture capital dims the light of its much more profound, and much more interesting potential — a fluid, programmable, modular social network that is by design global, transparent, and collaborative. DAO has the potential to become a new frontier of belonging, to create a new species of collective characterized by the alienation of trust from the ownership and control. Calvino, who in his dreams manifest a desire to “possess” a version of NYC, can extend such private desire to a more tangible contribution. DAOs can become a meta-layer on top of the idea exchanges of the world — a second home for those eager to make strides towards their goals, and know that the way to get there is not by oneself, but in a collective.&nbsp; Digging into the world of DAO feels meta. That’s because, as Brian Lynn tweeted: “Meta-governance is a feature of DAOs, not a product in itself. DAOs as a delegate will be more popular than individuals as a delegate.” DeepDAO, the discovery engine for the DAO ecosystem that received a $1,304 grant from Gitcoin, an open-source bounties platform on the Ethereum blockchain. <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb6fb8f5b-1843-4f50-8037-b1c8c98ebac4_1600x1011.png" width="1456" height="920" style="width: 389.111px; height: 245.867px;"> Open source projects, the infrastructure of digital public goods, have long relied on unsustainable funding sources like Github Sponsors, Open Collective, or Buy Me A Coffee. Besides the very few that have reached commercial success by transforming into enterprise SaaS, the vast majority of projects failed to find adequate funding. Open source veteran Dave Glick, the creator of Statiq and Discover.NET, shared in an interview with StackOverflow: To the extent a maintainer wants funding (and considering funding isn’t appropriate for, or wanted by, everyone for every project), I think the best thing we as a community can do is accept that the status quo isn’t working. If we use that as a starting point, then the next question becomes “what can I do that’s different?” The more maintainers that start looking outside the historically accepted project funding mechanisms and start considering and supporting alternatives, the sooner we can normalize those alternatives and hopefully lift up the entire ecosystem of open developed software. Since the launch in 2017, Gitcoin helped builders raise and distribute almost $20M through bounties, hackathons, and quarterly grants rounds. Gitcoin Grants is the largest implementation of Quadratic Funding, a radically democratic approach to allocating resources for public goods. <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4615c4ae-1361-485a-b680-a9a47d3c8e23_1600x522.png" width="1456" height="475" style="width: 389.111px; height: 126.942px;">Source: Vitalik The allocation community’s treasury is also made easy by projects like Llama. With Llama, everyone has visibility into the “payroll” and “P&amp;L” of a community, and any update to the organization’s operation, such as a salary change, could be posted as a proposal on Snapshot. <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff6f4ce92-ddb4-4de1-8cca-422c8059fae1_1600x911.png" width="1456" height="829" style="width: 389.111px; height: 221.547px;"> Screenshot from JAMM’s Llama <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F43baff8e-cf86-4cbf-a35c-3b102ad17a2c_1600x186.png" width="1456" height="169" style="width: 389.111px; height: 45.1647px;">Screenshot from JAMM’s Snapshot Imagine if a group of gamers that met on Fortnite want to save a pizza joint in Williamsburg that’s about to go under because of COVID. Let’s call it Pizza King. What could they do to save Pizza King? <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc7b7ab46-b844-4448-98e3-98d83ad53218_2048x1152.png" width="1456" height="819" style="width: 389.111px; height: 218.875px;"> The objective here seems clear — to raise money to keep Pizza King alive. There’re many ways to achieve the goal. They can create a Twitch stream fundraiser via Tiltify, or set up a store on Nexus and donate all the proceeds. Maybe the primary objective isn’t just keeping the pizza shop afloat, but to gather like-minded pizza lovers who’re passionate about keeping local flavors alive. What if after a successful fundraising, the group expands its ambition to save all the suffering local pizza shops in the world? What if they want to start a zine just on pizzas, or to make a pizza app for the local business owners to easily sell pre-packaged pizza sauces? With the attention they attracted, more talented members join in, and businesses may desire to work with them to increase brand equity. 20% of proceeds generated can go back to supporting the local pizza shops, 10% can be used to purchase prepaid gift cards at designated shops so that if a member of the Pizza King Squad travels to Paris or LA, they can get a free slice. The rest of the proceeds can be used to compensate prorated based on tokens earned from contribution or be directed into becoming liquidity providers for protocols of choice. The design fund flow can undergo a review process on a quarterly basis. All the above can happen without Pizza King ever being involved and members ever meeting one another. The rules of governance have been encoded in the genesis of the DAO. We can replace Pizza King with a neighborhood park, a public library, Baldwin’s Cafe de Flore, his distant memories of the neighborhoods in Harlem, or the streets that inspired Calvino’s walks in New York. Regardless of the size and location of the place, everyone can earn their place in it, as long as they have access to the Internet. In order to make creating DAOs seamless, a suite of governance templates that supports different objectives and structures needs to be in place to smooth the adoption curve and solve for mechanics design-project fit. Making the building blocks of token issuance and minting, incentive design, coordination, treasury, and community engagement more atomized and user-friendly will allow more collectives to assemble configurations of their preference based on their primary objectives. So far, such large-scale distributed efforts are coordinated with a combination of Twitter, Discord/Telegram, governance and voting platforms, synchronous collaboration tools, and asynchronous documentation. The distribution of projects and recruitment of participants still rely heavily on Web2 platforms. A whole green field appears as we glimpse into the future — a fully integrated stack that’s cross-device, lightweight, flexible, and user-friendly. <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa4ece0cd-2ece-43a7-8afa-1f1fc64e6082_1600x937.png" width="1456" height="853" style="width: 389.111px; height: 227.961px;">UI of Colony.io Some of the existing DAO creation tools such as Colony, Aragon, DaoHaus, and DaoStack are all pushing the boundaries on making creation more accessible. They each have their own flavors of governance infrastructure, incentive design, and user experience. We can expect a more in-depth analysis of those platforms at a later date. As cherry blossoms start to bloom and the skaters in neon green shirts showing off his backside 360 in Washington Square Park, I think to myself once again what it means to be a New Yorker. I think the answer is that being a New Yorker means being universally local. Walking south from Union Square to Greenwich to SoHo to Tribeca to FiDi. People’s outfits are changing, so is my pace. I feel at home through the change of pace, the same way that New Yorkers contain multitudes and different rhythms. By the end of day, we each return to what we call home, and we wish that as long as we’re here, we can contribute something to make the beauty last. This may be a story about a new species of corporate governance, a better internet, a path to true democracy, a rebel against gatekeepers, and we’re probably on chapter 1 of that story. Yet I hope this is also a story about the modern individualist’s awakening to the power of the collective. I want to end the post with a beautiful quote from Active Hope: When hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes sweep away illusions of self-sufficiency, we are reminded how much we need one another, how much we depend not only on people but also on the larger web of life. We treat people with a different kind of respect when we consider that they might someday be pulling us out of the rubble. We treat the rest of life with a different kind of respect when we consider that without it, we wouldn’t be here at all. We’ve probably never been more dependent on each other. We’ve probably never been more eager to belong. Even as migrants, we can feel local to many homes. https://tinahe.xyz/the-illusions-of-free-to-play Wed, 20 Dec 2023 15:21:32 +0000 TINA HE https://tinahe.xyz/the-illusions-of-free-to-play THE ILLUSIONS OF FREE-TO-PLAYFebruary 2021From freemium products to open-source projects to marketplaces to UGC platforms, free-to-play games are already everywhere. On December 8th, 2020, Adobe announced the end of Flash. And soon after Zynga announced the end of Farmville. This type of “end-of-an-era” moment evoked not only nostalgia but a heightened awareness of sunk cost — the sweat and soul we’ve poured into a world that once felt as real and omnipresent as nature itself. Like many others who grew up in a metropolitan city, where the growing number of test prep books was inversely correlated with the few open slots at top-tier schools, I resorted to multiplayer games as a way to socialize with friends during long summer nights. Early on in my teenage years, I’ve internalized that under the veil of “free-to-play”, everything came at a cost. Being in a fictional world doesn’t mean that we’re far removed from economic reality. The games we play — from MMORPG, MOBA, NeoPets, MySpace — despite being completely free-to-play, the cost of winning was something only a few could afford. For an average player, we can either pay cash in exchange for an improved or a faster grind, or we maximize our odds by investing our attention and time to infinity. Even though the public school system in China attempts to eliminate the idea of the socioeconomic class by enforcing strict uniform protocol, even heavily regulating the style of one’s backpack, we could still discern the nuances by how one allocates their leisure time. The opportunity cost is high for those whose family’s economic future relies on the performance of their college entrance exam. The cost is just as high for those whose physical freedom had been pledged to the metagame that their parents signed up for on their behalf the moment the kids were born. Despite the “free” public education system, parents can always pay a fee in addition to a generous gift to the admission officers to secure a spot at an “important school”. Whenever there’s a free-to-play game, a path of paying-to-win emerges, and the price isn’t always money. <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8b03f291-c7f3-4271-b245-151cdfa3deb0_800x600.png" width="800" height="600" style="width: 389.111px; height: 291.833px;"> Unless you’re Farmville. The game’s perpetual cash trap is a brutalist manifestation of the notorious “pay-to-win” model. Just a decade ago, 19% of Facebook’s revenue came from either advertising or payments tied to Zynga games — fertilizers that get your crops to grow faster, the ante to play another round of poker, the McDonald’s sign that shows up in your town. But we keep playing because what was once complementary to the lack of “third place” in the physical world is now filled with social serendipity and imagination. It’s our duty to help our friends farm grow. It’s our duty to take care of the land we build. After pouring $3000 into Clash of Clans just to stay on the Top Players’ Rank, Jorge Yao got featured by the New York Times. <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff16a7ced-562d-4f65-a6df-148606a587ef_1456x949.png" width="1456" height="949" style="width: 389.111px; height: 253.617px;"> They painted a picture of an escapist: Here was a guy who had been the captain of the high school rugby club and served as treasurer of his college fraternity, lost in a new city and trapped in a 300-square-foot studio. Clash had the round-the-clock promise of camaraderie. It made Mr. Yao feel less isolated. The members of North 44 — an elite clan that one can join only by invitation — became a family to him. He will tell you even now that he loves them like brothers. If Clash of Clans was a legitimate sport, Yao may have been a masterful coach: When a member of North 44 would quit the game, Mr. Yao would take over his account. Then Mr. Yao would use one of his multiple accounts to attack himself when he needed a shield. In order to pull this off, though, he had to keep all of these other accounts highly ranked, which meant playing as many as five accounts at the same time, around the clock. Yet this is what Yao said in the interview: “Looking back, I think I must have been insane.” To be insane is to be disassociated and removed from reality, and to deny the world of Clash of Clans as a legitimate entity. Indeed, in the end, Yao may have been left with nothing but a bunch of iPads, but what if what he built was real all along? Real tribe. Real relationships. Real challenges. For the past year, I found myself venturing deeper into the psychology, economics, and culture of “free-to-play”, a set of sophisticated mechanics and vernacular that not only led to a Cambrian explosion of the gaming industry but has already permeated every corner of the Internet. From freemium products to open-source projects to marketplaces to UGC platforms, free-to-play games are already everywhere. It feels as if we’ve lived through an era that Chris Andersen once described in his 2009 book “Free: The Future of a Radical Price”: This new form of Free is based on the economics of bits, not atoms. It is a unique quality of the digital age that once something becomes software, it inevitably becomes free—in cost, certainly, and often in price. (Imagine if the price of steel had dropped so close to zero that King Gillette could give away both razor and blade, and make his money on something else entirely—shaving cream?) And it’s creating a multibillion-dollar economy —the first in history—where the primary price is zero. ... The twentieth century was primarily an atoms economy. The twenty- first century will be equally a bits economy. Anything free in the atoms economy must be paid for by something else, which is why so much traditional free feels like bait and switch—it’s you paying, one way or another. But free in the bits economy can be really free, with money often taken out of the equation altogether. People are rightly suspicious of Free in the atoms economy, and rightly trusting of Free in the bits economy. Intuitively, they understand the difference between the two economies, and why Free works so well online. Fast forward a decade later, the boundless supply of information and the rapidly decreasing cost of storage and compute seem to have indeed turned traditional economics upside down. What was once unimaginable, like accessing all the best university courses around the world, has become as accessible as grabbing a copy of free newspapers at a corner street diner. Though we all know the saying: "there’s no free lunch in the world,” the convenience of tech platforms has blunted our senses to our economic reality. The addictive feedback loop, mesmerizing marketing campaigns, and the accelerated cadence of the hype cycle make it more difficult than ever to discern both the true price and the true cost of something. At Pace, our discussions are frequently anchored around the concept of “Atomic Value Swap”, which is defined eloquently by Chris in his frameworks: An Atomic Value Swap is the measurement of the sustainability of repeated core transactions in an ecosystem. Payment for goods or services is an example of an atomic value swap, one where cash is exchanged for an item or service. Both parties deem the transaction to be beneficial and therefore the transaction occurs. If the price of a product or service is too high, the buyer will not engage in the transaction. <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd7517eba-6f35-4005-a74a-a53ca2b8343d_1286x850.png" width="1286" height="850" style="width: 389.111px; height: 257.188px;"> The “free-to-play” game design has been berated as sneaky and manipulative, luring the players to trade “something” for “nothing”. Such assumption implies that real-world currency definitionally warrants more economic value than the virtual one. We all know that this is no longer true. Not only has the game economy grew to become a hundred billion dollar industry, but the perceptions of what we perceive as valuable have also largely evolved. The hours that Yao has invested in, the kinship, camaraderie, and memories that he has created for North 44 could’ve been valued by both social and financial rewards, distributed fairly among the members based on contribution. Prior economic analysis of the gaming industry, due to its virtual nature, has considered games to be a substitute for other leisure activities like golfing or traveling. Every hour we spend on games is an hour subtracted from working hours that earn us wages, and every penny we spend on games is a penny we could’ve spent on other leisure activities and a penny subtracted from our income. <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F891bc61b-a6e6-4da8-8337-ee848b5fb6c3_1600x764.png" width="1456" height="695" style="width: 389.111px; height: 185.736px;"> In traditional utility maximization problems, time and money appear as constraints, the relief of either always results in higher utility. Yet there appears a new set of constraints introduced by gaming, where the relief of constraints may actually reduce emotional satisfaction, and hence result in lower utility. In other words, the challenges in games inspire creativity and therefore overall utility, a counterintuitive stance in an increasingly frictionless world. <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F341c72b2-814c-42ec-b3e3-cb6f6a1e1c06_616x410.png" width="662" height="440.6168831168831" style="width: 389.111px; height: 258.624px;"> If the utility can be higher when a constraint is tougher, then there can be a willingness to pay for tougher constraints. Talking to a few open source developers who contribute to the latest packages or a few DeFi experimenters who bear the skyrocketing gas cost may be a good way to test this hypothesis. Another major shift happens when there are tangible social or monetary rewards from playing games. In traditional economics, we have price as a cost of goods, and wage as the price of leisure, but the new possibility arrives when the income from playing exceeds income from what traditionally would be considered “labor”. Or even a more radical thought would be that the time spent on games are substitutes for work time, and work time just another type of game. In order to maximize the utility function above, an agent in a perfectly “free-to-play” world would naturally be drawn to the games that create the most emotional satisfaction, which is a result of acquiring social or financial rewards or overcoming constraints and challenges. The motivation to participate in a game can be manifold, but generally, participants are no longer simply consumers who exchange their labor wage with leisure time, rather they’re looking for challenges and constraints in the hopes of social recognition and self-actualization. The allure of the “free” has been a marketing technique since the dawn of capitalism. Now it’s manifesting as a 14-day free trial. A free drink with three tacos. A no-fee brokerage account. A free credit report. Our brains mostly interpret "free" in monetary terms. We’re sophisticated enough to know that free-to-play mechanics are oftentimes marketing techniques for customer acquisition, but we’re not yet sophisticated enough to intuitively grasp the atomic value swap on Internet platforms — the price we pay to participate in seemingly “free-to-play” games. We feel good about installing Honey and reading The Points Guy because we subconsciously interpret the exchange as an arbitrage we exploit in the system by being “smart”, while hours pass by as we conduct our due diligence. All of our behaviors are then closely studied by algorithms and data analysts, so more offers to get sent to our doorsteps with companies that know more about ourselves than even our close-friends do, with promises that felt too-good-to-be-true. The illusion of “free-to-play” is at its core the illusion of costlessness. As participants in these newfound “free-to-play” games, we are as powerful as we’re powerless. For every action we take, we are either being sold as products or we are facilitating the sale of the product, most of the time without being fairly compensated for it. Google has invented an effective engine to convert from reputation (PageRank) to attention (traffic) to money (ads). Social media companies like Facebook/Twitter have invented an engine to convert from user-generated content (creative asset) to attention (algorithm &amp; traffic) to money (ads). Google and Facebook play the roles of central bankers for our attention economy. They represented a generation of “free-to-play” games that unlocked infinite consumer surplus and participation, and with increasing power as the brokers of the value exchange, they now require “paying to win”. <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4bb1efb3-84e5-4eab-9d24-7b094cf9cfbc_1600x595.png" width="1456" height="541" style="width: 389.111px; height: 144.58px;"> The price we pay with our attention, time, reputation, and even health have been broadly understood by recent analyses. Yet what remains under-discussed, and I’d argue will become much more pivotal in the next decade of the consumer internet is the cost of our very own identities. People have poured hearts and souls to become who they are on these “free-to-play” platforms. It’s hard to delineate if they’ve become who they are because of these platforms, or it’s because of who they are, these platforms become vibrant. The aggregated effect of identity creation at scale is not linear but geometric, accounting for not only for quantity and price of products being created and exchanged, but also another dimensionality of mutual emotional investment that compounds with every interaction. The becoming of TikTok creators, Figma designers, Shopify owners, Substack writers, Robinhood traders, credit card gurus, and late-night ASMR Clubhouse hosts also entail a collective movement of “becoming” and “unbecoming”. As participants, they deeply understand that platforms would be capturing their labor as value, so they’re incentivized to go to whatever platforms that let them do their best work and have the most fun. Regardless this manifests in the form of “come for the tool, stay for the platform”, or “come for the network, stay for the tool”. They are different iterations of the same intrinsic desires. With the iconic Fortnite at the helm, a new type of “free-to-play” games understood deeply the coming-of-age moment for the evolving psyche of the internet-native generation, who decidedly pick the game not because they can cheat, but because there are infinite ways they can win. Players no longer “pay to win”, rather the games are “free to win”. Instead, they “pay to belong” or “pay to find themselves”. To be the most skilled at the game is only one dimension of winning. A player can also win by flexing the coolest cosmetics, gaining access to once-in-a-game-time events, and participating and gaining social status in a metagame that emerges outside of Fortnite itself (e.g. becoming a streamer with a big following). With its scale of 350 million players globally and $5B in revenue, Fortnite gives us a glimpse into the vision of a digitally-native “Metaverse”. In an interview, the CEO of Epic Games Tim Sweeney articulates the definition: Metaverse is it’s not just built by one mega corporation [...] It’s gonna be the work, the creative work of millions of people who can each add their own elements to it through content creation and programming and design. And the other way of adding value. So it will be a massively participatory medium of a type that we really haven’t seen yet. And even though you have Fortnite and Minecraft and Roblox each manifest some aspects of it, I think we’re still pretty far from having the thing. But yet the talk about this thing is it’s not just the work of one company. It’s not just one company’s product or revenue stream. We’re talking about a mass participatory media, which needs to be an economy if there’s not an economy underlying this thing. The Metaverse idea isn’t new. It’s simply another metaphor that represents an ecosystem, a metaphor that has been propagated by urban designers and business school professors for the past decades. “The DNA of the company”, “the ecology of the marketplace”, “the pulse of a city” and so on are all attempts to understand the unpredictable fluctuations of man-made entities through the lens of nature, who’s familiar with the cycle of birth, maturity, and death. Not all cities and not all companies actually evolve into a self-sustaining ecosystem that allows people to prosper, regardless how meticulously the creators may have designed them. While urban planners, economists, and policy makers primarily focus on a city’s physicality rather than on the people who inhabit them, cities are much more than just the physicality of the buildings and structures. Similarly, for a long time until the last wave of Internet companies, company builders and analysts primarily focused on a company’s assets, liabilities and operational structures rather than the people interacting via the product. Shakespeare long understood our fundamental symbiotic relationship with cities. In one of the dramas Coriolanus, a Roman tribune named Sicinius rhetorically remarks, “What is the city but the people?” to which the people respond, “True, the people are the city.” In his book “Scale”, British physicist and the former president of Santa Fe Institute Geoffrey West gave a definition of the city as a phenomenon: [Cities are] complex adaptive social network systems resulting from the continuous interactions among their inhabitants, enhanced and facilitated by the feedback mechanisms provided by urban life. <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F55ca772c-a977-412a-aa92-95abdfa372ea_512x365.png" width="718" height="511.85546875" style="width: 389.111px; height: 276.93px;"> The concept of Metaverse might be an ultimate manifestation of a “free-to-play” driven digital economy, and it’s the first time a complex, adaptive ecosystem such as a city can theoretically be rendered in the virtual world in lossless fidelity. Even companies like Google and Facebook, whose value is driven by the advanced sorting and indexing of digital information, still have to rely heavily on the demand generated from the physical world. The foundation of a successful city is the sustainable value exchange between people — employment, wealth, religion, creation, innovation, the spread of diseases, healthcare, crime, education, entertainment, and so on. Without these activities, we can hardly call a city successful, the same way we can hardly call an Internet-native platform successful without these interactions. Through that lens, the vision of the Metaverse is still in its nascency and requires meaningful work to be done. The overarching concept around complex and adaptive social networks that make cities prosper helps us delineate the shape of an ecosystem that’s filled with potential energy awaiting conversion into kinetic energy. Fortnite is one example of a platform with potential to become a larger ecosystem, so are Discord, Reddit, Figma, Shopify that provide scale, tools, income, and network in exchange for content, markets, culture, and innovation. These emerging dynamics are illustrated below through the lens of Atomic Unit Swap: <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcb713876-1015-4bdc-8ecf-ddeb76e7f8c2_1600x674.png" width="1456" height="613" style="width: 389.111px; height: 163.822px;"> Rather than an overly general statement such as “if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product,” this piece aims to clarify the illusions of costlessness by distilling the value exchanges on digitally native platforms by peeling the layers of platform and player psychology. Despite the marginal cost of software production trending to zero as Andersen predicted, the virtual ecosystem still shares the similar properties with cities as a socioeconomic organism. The cost of participating in the new “free-to-play” platforms not only denominated in time and money as traditionally economics understood, but also in emotional satisfaction provided by challenges, social recognition, and self-actualization. The deeper a platform can penetrate the player’s identity needs, the stickier the platform becomes and the higher the switching cost. For an individual player who’s now inundated with “free entries” to platforms, the fewer platforms that offer the most nonfungible value wins. Not all players on a given platform forge their identities on the platform, but the few who do will tend to drive most of the value. Similarly, not all platforms would need to foster ongoing trust on top of networks and capital, but the few who do will accrue the most value. Existing analyses on Internet ecosystems that focus solely on their existing asset efficiency without analyzing the social, economic, and emotional needs of the players would be missing the much bigger picture. Just like city dwellers, players in virtual ecosystems can nimbly travel between different pockets of the ecosystem and pick a few to find their people, while the digital infrastructure, unlike the physical one, has its unique ability to communicate and update one another to be continuously adaptive and evolutionary through pipes built between them. <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1d3351c5-1b44-4629-b7e8-11aecf831b6c_1600x674.png" width="1456" height="613" style="width: 389.111px; height: 163.822px;"> German scholar Schivelbusch believed that the development of railways and communication systems generated a socio-spatial transformation of the urban environment. The new infrastructure gave passage to the flux of people, goods, and information across the traditional sociospatial orders, erased the traditional forms and figures of the city. This “annihilation of space” in the 19th century produced the need and the desire for new forms or figures of the urban environment. There were attempts to retain forms and figures, all were lost with the emergence of the modern cities. If every new world entails the annihilation of another, then what do the new forms and figures look like to supplement the semantic emptiness of our current environment that’s augmented by the four walls that we lawfully stay behind, for the betterment of our collective future? All meanwhile, the “free-to-play” games are up and running, on a global scale, inviting us to participate and continue to infuse the emptiness with newfound meanings. https://tinahe.xyz/Embedded-Education Wed, 20 Dec 2023 15:26:13 +0000 TINA HE https://tinahe.xyz/Embedded-Education EMBEDDED EDUCATIONNovember 2020Learning no longer lives on an individual platform. Rather, learning happens everywhere. We’re entering a new age of “Embedded Education”. What comes to mind when you think about EdTech companies? <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F48cb17ad-da96-475e-8d0c-2cbdbec80e70_1600x976.png" width="1456" height="888" style="width: 389.111px; height: 237.315px;"> The first generation of EdTech companies breaks into traditional classrooms with, well, technology. We grew up developing a love-hate relationship with Blackboard, Canvas, and Piazza, where letters of pride and shame get perpetually captured in a database of an impregnable system. In conjunction with classroom technology, we are also blessed with high-quality content on-demand, offered by some of the brightest minds of our time, making the day-to-day hustle of traveling from dorm to classroom a trial for the strong-willed. As our attention span gets spoiled by Youtube and video games, we can no longer sit still and go through a lecture for the sake of completing a lifeless test, even when everything happens in the comfort of our own rooms. The learning experience needs to be as engaging as a Youtube video or a video game. Quizlet, Duolingo, and Codecademy make learning feel just like that. Yet that alone isn’t enough. No matter how fun the game gets, learning, by the end of the day, is about applying the skills to contribute to our community. Can you confidently build a secure, functional, and fast web app for your favorite deli downstairs to take orders after being certified as a React expert on Lynda.com? EdTech companies in the past decade have delivered a 10x product experience to the consumers through innovating on three main pillars: content delivery, learning experience, and skills credentialing. Take Coursera as an example: Content delivery: Students now have access to content that otherwise were only available in elite universities, while providing universities additional revenue and marketing edge. Learning experience: Students can download relative materials and follow along with learning at their own pace. The instructor no longer dictates the classroom, the student does. Skills credentialing: Upon completion of a course, students receive a certification that they can pay for and showcase on their Linkedin or resume. Some universities also recognize them as course credits. Community engagement: Students can ask questions directly to the teachers and be accompanied by a group of others who are in similar positions. These EdTech companies have also innovated on content supply by morphing the idea of an instructor, providing tools and platforms that allow both esteemed professors at an Ivy League or an otherwise unknown white-collar worker to reach millions of students, and providing them attractive economic incentives to do so. The star instructors on Udemy, Skillshare, and Monthly demonstrate the scope of human potential when incentives are well-aligned. A friend who’s an experienced PM told me dedicating a few-days-worth of content creation has earned him more than $100k on Udemy. Despite the superior product experience and the explosive growth of market participants, the liberty of a curious learner extends only as far as the palms of the invisible hands of market demand. The opportunity cost of sitting through an 80-hour course load is the ability to spend it on hacking the game directly. Legends are revered and records are being broken on platforms like Leetcode that we're able to go from 0 to a $100k FANG offer in 3 months by hacking problem sets. <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbef2de6e-72c9-4683-9842-aa696296d7f1_1600x976.png" width="1456" height="888" style="width: 389.111px; height: 237.315px;"> Although education isn’t just about plugging us seamlessly into an infinite machine, EdTech platforms eventually need to accommodate the skill-training demand of the market as the largest revenue drivers are corporate training and credentialing. As much as we know education is more than just getting a job or gaming the system, the opportunity cost of time becomes higher in the short-term, especially in times of crisis, the need for sensemaking is reflected through the increasing consumption of media, only to find disappointing and conflicting views. We want to explore our understanding with ourselves, with nature, with one another, but it seems like we don’t really know where to start. That was once the hole to be filled by a liberal arts education, which has become increasingly unpopular due to its lack of practicality. Liberal arts have even a form of conspicuous consumption, even performance. After binge-watching the entire writing catalog of Masterclass in a few days, I’m not sure whether I’ve become a better writer, but I’ve sure become more eloquent talking about the “act of writing” when I attend my next book club. As a super-user and a beneficiary of these EdTech platforms, I nevertheless found myself wanting more. That’s when I realized that EdTech has arrived at an inflection point, and the previous generation of companies is reaching its limits. We’ve seen from the chaos of COVID that frameworks and theories that are created with perfect preconditions can only go so far when they don’t mobilize and unite people. Many of us can solve the equation F=ma without having any feel for what the equation means. The standalone content, no matter how interactive, feels far removed from the actual context where such knowledge can be applied. The static content isn’t actionable enough to understand how it works under context, the learning experience only gets as interactive as what can be rendered on a web page, the credentialing can be deemed as trivial when work speaks louder than words, the community extends as far as asking questions in the Q&amp;A session. <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe6c6cb3b-d576-4085-87ba-414e70997a33_1285x1526.png" width="1285" height="1526" style="width: 389.111px; height: 462.088px;"> Reflecting on the past year or so, the first instinct when approaching learning a new subject is by engaging directly with the application layer, like jumping straight into the water to learn how to swim. The thought is no longer “I will go to Coursera to learn how to do this”, but rather “I’ll do it and see how it goes.” This approach is the founding principle of hackers — intentional Googling and faithful reliance on crowd-sourced wisdom. A combination of Docs reading, repo forking, Figma board replicating, CodePen project remixing, and business canvas model downloading has bootstrapped a digitally native renaissance woman. As long as there’s a doc, a template, a place to start with, I can discover a community of like-minded makers. Learning no longer lives on an individual platform. Rather, learning happens everywhere. We’re entering a new age of “Embedded Education”. What makes phrases like “software is eating the world” or “every company is a fintech company” so powerful is that once we hear it, we can’t unsee it. Every company all of a sudden can become a software company, and every software can provide finance as a service. Once we start paying attention to Embedded Education, platforms are now filled with the potential to become some of the most effective education delivery channels. Embedded education is the practice of educating people through encounters that they already have with systems that exist primarily for non-educational purposes. While the recently popular concept of “embedded finance” distributes financial products at the point of digital transaction, which is the most natural way for consumers to discover options, embedded education delivers learning at the point of getting the job done. From content delivery all the way to community engagement, Embedded Education is an evolution from progressive learning, which follows clear logical steps to intuitive learning, which relies less on the route memory of disparate knowledge nodes, but on the relationship between these nodes. <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faef4ca89-c410-44d5-a1f9-9c998b2d4e99_1600x942.png" width="1456" height="857" style="width: 389.111px; height: 229.03px;"> How do you learn about investing in stocks? Not by taking a class online, probably, but by investing with Robinhood. Robinhood launched “Robinhood Learn” to teach people the basic concepts of investing and acquired the newsletter “Snacks” to produce business-related educational content. How about building a website? Browser-based web design platform Webflow created Webflow University to teach everything from layout and typography to interactions and 3D transforms. How about conducting a team brainstorming session? How about starting a business? Collaboration tool Miro establishes its leadership in the industry not simply through a good product, but more importantly, a MiroVerse of educational templates for organizations to learn how to adopt best practices of group brainstorming. Shopify launched Compass to offer a wide range of marketing and business courses. <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2a0957bc-dfd1-4bcf-9b62-ee4f9bf4ab79_1600x942.png" width="1456" height="857" style="width: 389.111px; height: 229.03px;"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faec93148-0cc9-43ce-9277-09df4f13ff8b_1702x842.png" width="1456" height="720" style="width: 389.111px; height: 192.418px;"> It’s not difficult to imagine that the more people acquire knowledge through using the platform, the more loyal and engaged they become, and eventually, the power users may even convert to “instructors” and contribute back to the educational content library. We know a company has created something special when we see organic lessons and tutorials being created beyond what the product is intended to do. Notion started off as a collaborative productivity app and has now evolved into a community where people teach each other how to live their most productive lives. Github started off as a source code management system and has turned into a way for developers around the world to learn about new subjects. Slack started off as a communication portal for gamers and quickly evolved to be a lightweight standard for productivity optimization. The learnings are available for all, but the specific lessons learned wouldn’t provide as much value to people that are not users of the platform, therefore creating scarcity around particular skill sets. The carrier of the knowledge also becomes a stakeholder of the platform, and the more the platform scales, the more valuable the knowledge becomes. <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa5bc5bdc-4fc3-4a68-8a34-cee46bda4b42_1600x976.png" width="1456" height="888" style="width: 389.111px; height: 237.315px;"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd319d283-0a07-4829-b066-80e4e6455a99_1600x976.png" width="1456" height="888" style="width: 389.111px; height: 237.315px;"> For Public.com, the more a user relies on the platform for embedded education, the more likely they are going to stay engaged. Enabled by easier-than-ever tutorial creation tools such as Loom, customer experience automation tools such as Hyro, product adoption tool such as UserLane, knowledge management system such as Guru, any company can easily create educational content embedded in the customer’s journey, and the most powerful learnings are not usually how to use your product, but about how after being a part of the product ethos, someone’s view of possibilities gets enlarged and enriched. If the purpose of education is to inspire courage to expand our collective understanding of the world, the vision of Embedded Education is that every time we see something that inspires us, the path to actualizing this new-found dream starts right where we find it. Like watching an NBA player who dunks a basketball, in the digital world, we can pick up the ball wherever it’s left off. Perhaps most importantly, Embedded Education can contribute to a more equitable and effective distribution of knowledge, skills, and information. By leveraging the product’s existing assets and infrastructure, platforms can deliver education and reach underserved communities much more efficiently than if one had to create new educational content from scratch. By creating real platform-native encounters rather than broadcasting information, embedded education is a more effective way to change behaviors. By shortening the feedback loop from theory to practice, it engages people to more deeply internalize what they’ve just learned. I found myself asking: what if every company can become an EdTech company, and every person an educator? What if every product interaction is a chance to inform and inspire, rather than to complicate and obfuscate? Some of the most insurmountable barriers don’t access to resources, but access to understanding. Internet archaeologist Aaron Z. Lewis wrote in his wonderful piece “Metaphors we live by”: Humans are pretty bad at reasoning about complex systems. In the past, our gods and demons allowed us to talk about phenomena that we didn’t fully understand. During the Enlightenment, we tried to kill them and explain everything in reductionist scientific terms. But it feels to me like we’ve come full circle. The great irony is that in our quest to disprove God, we’ve created a world that’s more magical and mysterious than Medieval people could’ve ever imagined. Language, in the form of jargon, flowery rhetoric, and corporate buzzwords, has created walls that accrue knowledge and power. Embedded Education is an attempt to break down these walls, redistribute information and knowledge through what we already do every day. As we continue to build more technology products, what if we start framing questions not only around problems, metrics, and the new set of glamorous features but around education. What if every touchpoint with a new participant of the platform is an opportunity to expand users’ knowledge? What if we start asking “what can we teach here that people can’t learn anywhere else?”, “How does learning about this on our platform increases the user’s capability”, and “What and how can people teach each other?” What if we ask these questions at every step of the user journey? What if the future education is no longer defined by institutions but is distributed and embedded in the everyday experience that’s already most familiar to us? Being embedded doesn’t come without its shortcomings. My backend engineer friend shared his frustration with AWS as he’s convinced that Amazon intentionally keeps the UX extremely difficult to navigate, thereby intensifying the lock-in effect its certification program continues to justify a cost of up to $300 and breed a class of consulting companies. Just like any tool, embedded education can also be used for manipulation. However, let’s save them for the next. https://tinahe.xyz/When-gods-are-dead-we-create-new-ones Wed, 20 Dec 2023 15:33:10 +0000 TINA HE https://tinahe.xyz/When-gods-are-dead-we-create-new-ones WHEN GODS ARE DEAD, WE CREATE NEW ONES November 2020When gods are dead, we create new ones. In 1882, Nietzhe declared “God is dead”. A couple of decades after, German theologian Bonhoeffer wrote in a letter in prison executed by the Nazis: “We are proceeding towards a time of no religion at all: man as they are now simply cannot be religious anymore.” <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe139295c-8cb6-4c7f-8041-77a4d22a9bda_1216x298.png" width="1216" height="298" style="width: 389.111px; height: 95.3578px;">THINK Magazine by IBM: 1941Decades after, when the public first got exposed to the machines created by IBM, the International Business Machines company, Time magazine made a declaration in its year-end issue: “Man is recreating himself, monstrously magnified, in his own image.” Decades after, Marc Benioff, chairman of the $225B enterprise Salesforce, declared in front of a group of capitalist leaders: “Capitalism as we have known it is dead.” It’s the year 2019, the same year that the 16-year-old Greta Thunberg stood on stage and lambasted leaders of the United Nations: "We are at the beginning of mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!" We’re collectively awakening from the tales of old gods — the invisible hand, globalization, technotopia, billionaires, and fast cars. The ebbs and flows of our fears are being crisply captured by Google searches, Youtube homepage, trending tweets, and Instagram ads in real time. What makes this time different from the past awakenings is a set of participatory and creative tools that become readily available to anyone with access to the Internet. Online communities are sophisticatedly managed and mobilizing, enabling the birth of new language and the accrual of social capital at an unprecedented rate. Rather It’s as if we’re no longer confined by the identity at birth that once predated our fate, but now granted the power to pick our silo that comes with its own set of discourse. The increase in production transparency and the amount of attention that follows makes such identity construction both more powerful and fragile than ever. Like building a house on stage with the whole world as the audience, when it goes well, the crowd cheers and wants to come on stage and participate, and when the house falls, the crowd dissipates fast and boo loudly. A short-form media company that tantalized with every permutation of buzzwords that highly correlates with a billion-dollar valuation in a specific silo could get funded billions easily and evaporate in the span of six months. The machines that coordinate these online communities start to take on mysterious properties beyond rational territories. The machine has become the temple of the new worlds. We offer our prayers with data and attention span, the gods reciprocate and bless us with connections that we otherwise would not have made, the instant gratification that our voices are heard, and information that was once caged like a secret. Only to discover that there might be no secret. The stark reality that has been present all along. When we look at the present, we see the breaking of systems whose inner making has long been abstracted away. <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5293ebdb-2a97-4b36-836d-b736d321b79f_1600x1066.png" width="1456" height="970" style="width: 389.111px; height: 259.229px;"> One of the most memorable scenes in the TV show succession is when the irritated Logan Roy, the builder of a decadent media empire, screams at his privileged “silk stocking” son: “how much is a gallon of milk?” An answer to which the son has no answer. Shame was inspired when some truth was evoked. I may or may not have an answer to that question, but I’m well familiar with how some extra oat milk in my coffee costs 50 cents and a dollar for an extra shot of espresso. We briskly climb up the ladder of abstraction by readily taking out a debt of ignorance with a high interest rate. The bubble burst, we look around and recognize how little we really know about the world. Of course, this is not about the milk. This is about the quest to wrestle with what is real. What I’ve been dedicating my time to doing is simply the patient relearning of all the fundamentals that can no longer be easily traced back. What’s broken doesn’t mean it’s bad and irrelevant, it might just mean that what was once there needs to be repurposed and redirected. The generalizations that surround us daily like to label the present as a “new reality” as if something new has been born when the reality as we see now is simply the world manifesting itself at its rawest. The novelty simply comes from a collective awakening into a chaotic truism. Unable to tolerate the randomness and chaos of many worlds, some of us try to restore the order of the past by rebuilding Pantheon by migrating universities, hospitals, and offices to the cloud. If we’ve learned something from past migrations, it is through the creation of new gods, new hopes, and a new faith that anything meaningful gets built. By the end of the day, businesses are the metaphors of what we choose to believe as a collective at that moment in time, the acquiescence of social contracts like monogeny or the maximization of shareholder returns. AI can replicate the shadows of our past disguised as the present, but it is not the present, nor the reality. Business managers, knowing that robots are parsing through company statements, decided to abandon negative vocabularies altogether. To understand what is real is actually deceptively simple. It’s the resilience that we see in people around us, the gut to leave behind what no longer works, and the courage to speak up, to change, to rebel. One friend relinquishes the ambiguity of institutional life and starts a candle brand on Shopify to reclaim some ownership over the means of production. One friend decides to bring back the platinum framed business diploma like a souvenir to his communist hometown and start taking the Coursera courses on AI. One friend finds solace in the Brave New World of decentralized technology, where pixel artists are being tokenized as entry tickets into exclusive Among Us championships for the bold and eclectic. One friend meets a girl on Zoom and gets married without a priest, in a place that was once too far away without missing a few important meetings. The line between progression and regression is thin, so is the line between passion and clarity, imagination and escapism, future and present, physical and virtual. When the claims made by any single god can now be demystified in seconds. Millions of people are flooding to online book clubs facilitated by Zoom, sharing the burdens of history, discovering the meaning of open discourse on Telegram, the craftsmanship that once was deemed unworthy of attention are now creating millionaires on Etsy. The heroism is all around us. When we stare into the machines, we somehow feel intellectually and morally inferior to what’s in fact a carbon copy of our own making — the desire to belong, to love, to aspire, to do what’s impossible. At a pub in the American Gods, Whisky Jack said to the sentimental protagonist lamenting his imminent departure: “Gods die when they are forgotten. People too. But the land's still here. The good places, and the bad. The land isn't going anywhere. And neither am I.” The land is the cyberspace that you and I share now. The good places, and the bad, will be captured by the mass documentation of what it means to be alive in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Camus asked in one of his essays: “How can one consecrate the harmony of love and revolt? When the temples are deserted by the gods, all the heroes have feet of clay.” When the temples are deserted by the gods, it’s when we see most clearly that gods are alive, and are among us. https://tinahe.xyz/Here-I-stand-I-can-do-no-other Wed, 20 Dec 2023 15:36:04 +0000 TINA HE https://tinahe.xyz/Here-I-stand-I-can-do-no-other HERE I STAND. I CAN DO NO OTHER. September 2020“What would you want your loved one to say about you at your funeral?” Before officially becoming a writer for the New Yorker, V was confronted by a friend with this question. The friend was leaving her job to become a life coach and was using V as a beta tester for her service. V was product managing at a tech company, whose goal is to democratize storage. Having worked in technology for most of his career, V had a grasp of the concept of democratization, although he did find it somewhat abstract until his friend’s question crystallized what was once an elusive thought. That’s when I realized that my job is to tell good stories. Writing, for me, is just a tool. What I want to do is to make people feel less lonely through my stories, and if that means writing jokes for the New Yorker. Sure. If that means writing scripts for a Netflix rom-com. Sure. He sounded determined. What V wishes to democratize is the type of empathy that’s only made possible through stories of universal laughter and forgetting. Through these stories, we build an intimate understanding of the characters that we encounter as if we’ve known them all our lives. Leaving the stories, we feel a bit more seen, a bit less lonely. There are many ways he’d be able to create these stories. Writing is just one of these ways. He’s more loyal to the why, the how comes naturally as that’s something he’s always been good at — the art of words. I was inspired, but not merely by his devotion, but more so by the clarity and humility through which he describes his ambition. He isn’t dogmatic about his approach, his profession, or his title, instead, he focuses simply on the things-to-be-done and the practical journey of such obligation. The question V’s friend asked stuck with me ever since, like a whale swimming quietly in a tank. I’ve been careful not to disturb the water to stay focused, but the whale finally lashed his tail when I encountered Max Weber’s collection that found its way to the shelves of my favorite bookstore. <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5657429b-d7b1-4aab-b4e5-d4d9452d52e8_1024x600.jpeg" width="1024" height="600" style="width: 389.111px; height: 227.995px;"> In the summer of 1917, a group of university students in Munich invited Weber to launch a lecture series on “intellectual work as a vocation”. He was a popular choice by the students in Munich, who formed the Free Student Alliance to battle the German universities that advocate for the idea of an objective Truth. Weber was like the dark knight representing another side of reason, battling against the patriotic traditionalists, who claimed that to oppose the state was to oppose reason itself and to emphasize the state’s greatness was to stress what’s true. Universities had become the new church, where prophets were established and meaning disseminated. Students flocked to Weber’s lecture in the hopes of finding clarity, but also “meaning”, as the title of the lecture entailed. Yet, what Weber brought was disenchantment. Weber argued, to lead the life of scholarship began with the duty to recognize that universities cannot deliver ready-made world views, especially in a time when the imbalance of narratives were already clouding sound judgments. Scholars had the duty to exercise self-restraint and instill an unflinching honesty in their students. Anything superfluous would be a violation of professional ethics. The role of a scholar isn’t to be a thought leader, a charismatic speech giver, a futuristic prophet, but simply to introduce potential ways to recognize realities clearly and to find alternative paths forward. <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3d3c7108-3678-4a30-8891-a0f957fff867_943x608.jpeg" width="943" height="608" style="width: 389.111px; height: 250.88px;">Footbridge between worlds | Un Autre Monde by JJ GrandvilleIt is in this light, Weber introduced his infamous term “the disenchantment of the world.” He was keenly aware that rationalization and disenchantment could weigh heavily on the soul, and a disenchanted world could be dark and wintry. The starry-eyed young scholars came in the lecture to look for answers, and Weber pointed out it was precisely this yearning for meaning and authenticity that propelled the students to expect their professors to pose as prophets in the classroom. Yet like a mean uncle who walked in the room to tell the kids that Santa doesn’t exist, Weber walked in the lecture room, offering corrective and bleak prospects of education: If scholarship and science can do anything, it is precisely to uproot and destroy the belief that the world has anything as a ‘meaning’! For students interested in academic life, Weber felt a moral obligation to dash their Romantic impressions that university studies should focus on the search for capital-T truth and the evangelical dissemination of that truth. Instead, Weber said, they would become specialists in a field they would never fully master, the point of which was to provide those who come after with the means of even greater mastery and thus erase the contributions of those who came before them: you will work diligently, that is, in hopes of being forgotten. It wasn’t a surprise that one student who was present at the lecture later wrote: Weber has transformed scholarship and university study into ‘respectable suicide’, a path to death that leads through stoic heroism. Weber didn’t deny the possibility that the life of a scholar could be its own reward, but only if the hero devotes his soul to the journey itself, not the destination. As fickle and unpredictable as “inspirations” and “ideas” are, they are prerequisite to any meaningful discoveries. And the only way to have these “inspiration” is through an irrational passion for the task at hand with almost no expectation for the outcome: The only way to have “personality” is to be wholly devoted to what you are studying. And that is true not only in scholarship. All great artists known to history entirely devoted themselves to their work. Even a personality in the arts of Goethe’s stature had to pay the price for taking the liberty of trying to turn his “life” into a work of art. He then suggested that the most common distraction from devoting oneself to one’s work is one’s own ego: How can I prove that I’m more than a mere ‘expert’? How can I say something different in form or substance from anything that has ever been said before? To Weber, people who are concerned with these questions come across as small and petty. These longings [to be contrarian for the sake of it] diminish the person who has them, whereas inner devotion to his task is the only thing that can raise him up to the heights and dignity of the matter at hand, the cause he claims to serve. I start to imagine what it would be like if Weber were to livestream this lecture in 2020, where people are outsmarting each other and making new faith out of personalities and serving the god whose true name is the algorithm. Despite all the multitudes yearning for new prophets and saviors, the situation today is the same as the one described in the Book of Isaiah, in the song of the Edomite watchman during the time of exile: One calleth to me out of Seir: Watchman, how much longer this night? Watchman, how much longer is this night? The watchman sayeth, The morning cometh, but it is still night. If ye will enquire again, come back again. Weber’s lecture lingers on my mind. It isn’t meant to provide any inspiration, it simply stated a scholar’s life the way it is. What he provided was guidance on understanding the practical value of scholarship even when there might be no meaning but to connect two nodes with a newfound edge. Young and ambitious German students flocking to the classrooms to look for meanings from the most popular professors doesn’t sound like a foreign phenomenon, because such collective meaning finding is now happening everywhere. The Romantic narratives that serve well in peaceful times become dangerous in a time of chaos. When uncertainties become the norm, controlled variables become the new scarcity. Just like Weber’s poignant portrayal of academic life has clarified what it takes to pursue a path toward scholarship, the organization’s leaders are stepping up and becoming honest about the work they do. Companies start building in public, the government starts revealing their progress, leaders start revealing vulnerabilities. On the surface, it seems like the movement of rationalization is taking place at scale, as the tools to reach a visually rationalist conclusion become readily accessible. But often times, the data-driven analysis can also be a form of enchantment, even if there are only a few missing variables. The most dangerous is enchantment in the disguise of disenchantment when rationality itself becomes a cult-like fever that puts unity and peace at peril. When the supply of disenchantment is abundant, the demand for its complementary —&nbsp;“hope, dreams, wonders” —&nbsp;also increases. The more rationality seems to dominate, the more we also desire its complementary. The two need to coexist for a state of equilibrium. For some reason, I started to think about V’s question again in a time like this. “What would you want your loved one to say about you at your funeral?” If the demon for the world is its deception and sufferings, then the demon for us is our own deception and eventual demise. If we choose not to avert our gaze, but to stare into a demon’s eyes, we want to have some clarity on this question. Yet to answer the question means we have to supplement what Weber hasn’t answered. Weber himself acknowledges that increasing rationalization and intellectualization does not mean a greater general knowledge of the conditions we live under. I start to believe part of that knowledge emerges somewhere while we develop deep empathy for our planet, with one another, and with our own potential. We show courage when we take on the responsibility to navigate the areas where reasons haven’t touched. We can no longer outsource meaning finding to anything other than ourselves. This is a journey with a choice in our own hands: do we escape into blissful oblivion, self-deception, or do we confront reality as it is? Luckily enough, I get to be surrounded by people like V who are taking a strong stance. They choose to go full force with their conviction, understanding the possibility that they might be misunderstood, dismissed, or simply forgotten. When presented with the choice to share their beliefs or to solve problems. These people almost unanimously chose the latter. According to Weber, these people are mature human beings: What does move me, immensely, is when a mature human being - whether old or young in years - takes real responsibility, with his whole soul, for the consequences of his actions and, following ethics of responsibility, stops at some point and says: “Here I stand. I can do no other.”... To that extent, the ethics of personal conviction and the ethics of responsibility are not absolutely opposed: they complement each other. The sky of San Francisco is a bloody orange smogged with old dreams, while the sky of New York is crisp and clear. Two visions of the same sky are shared by you and me. As I type this letter, I can smell like the last rose of summer and see the first leaves that will turn red. There’s a sense of clarity that is pushing me to go just a few feet deeper into a path less taken, capturing the impossibles being made possible, hoping to be a part of it.