Archive

Planetary Initiation

I think that Western mod­ern civ­i­liza­tion end­ed up kind of caught in a trap locked in its egoic struc­ture, and based our whole trip on kind of hyper­indi­vid­u­al­ism, accu­mu­la­tion of resources, and so on. And we’ve now reached a point where we can’t go fur­ther than that.

Institutions in the Age of Algorithms, and Why We Still Need Them

If you look at human his­to­ry all the way through, we orga­nize our­selves in dif­fer­ent ways. Tribes, reli­gions, guilds, states, more recent­ly com­pa­nies and net­works. And what these insti­tu­tions do is they sort of cod­i­fy val­ues and beliefs, and they they trans­port them across the gen­er­a­tions. So we see this phe­nom­e­non that when you cod­i­fy val­ues in insti­tu­tions, you give those val­ues longevity. 

Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin

I think the obvi­ous thing to do with one com­put­er per plan­et is fix cli­mate change before it destroys agri­cul­ture and leaves bil­lions of peo­ple to starve. That seems like a fair­ly rea­son­able kind of an objec­tive. You know, there are all kinds of lit­tle opti­miza­tions you could do with these things, but fun­da­men­tal­ly the big unsolved chal­lenges that human­i­ty faces are cli­mate change and resource scarcity.