Wonderful piece. Beautiful Rome analogy. I see you are starting a magazine. Its mission excites me very much. Cannot find your email. Would love to be involved in any writerly capacity. leilalovelace1@gmail.com
Thank you, Leila. You can shoot me an email as a reply to the next substack post or get in touch on twitter @marsreviewer or, preferably, on Urbit ~librex-dozryc
Thank you for the read and for the comment! And really, please do feel free to use this space for ideological contestation. That's one thing I like about smaller digital spaces: they can feel more like an asynchronous dinner party conversation, and less like a shouting match in the 42nd St subway at rush hour.
Two points in response to your thoughtful post on tumblr:
(1) Even if the two of us agreed that the USG should regulate all emergent technologies as heavily as possible, our opinions on this question would be moot. There's little chance that *all* governments would want to regulate the same way. And this means that if the USG wanted to regulate a certain technology, but the proprietors of that technology didn't want it to be thus regulated, they could just move to another jurisdiction. This might not be a bad thing. It might just mean that whichever states allow technology to be used the most efficiently will become the most successful; or it might mean that the nation state as we know it disintegrates.
(2) The key thing with these new technologies is ownership. If you have Bitcoin, you really own it, and you know the pool of Bitcoin won't be debased, whereas you can't say the same thing if you have USD in the bank. If you own an Urbit, you know that your computing environment is actually yours, whereas you can't say that about your IG, Gmail, etc. And to me, that's the best way to avoid what you refer to aptly as "the ad-based model that brought us our present hell." So, VCs can own a lot of bitcoin, but, unlike the Fed Gov, they can't inflate the money supply; and VCs can own Urbit address space, but, unlike FAANG, they can't arbitrarily and maliciously alter your computing environment.
Wonderful piece. Beautiful Rome analogy. I see you are starting a magazine. Its mission excites me very much. Cannot find your email. Would love to be involved in any writerly capacity. leilalovelace1@gmail.com
(am writing in quite 'establishment' places, harboring major antiestablishmentarianism rage)
Thank you, Leila. You can shoot me an email as a reply to the next substack post or get in touch on twitter @marsreviewer or, preferably, on Urbit ~librex-dozryc
Thank you for the read and for the comment! And really, please do feel free to use this space for ideological contestation. That's one thing I like about smaller digital spaces: they can feel more like an asynchronous dinner party conversation, and less like a shouting match in the 42nd St subway at rush hour.
Two points in response to your thoughtful post on tumblr:
(1) Even if the two of us agreed that the USG should regulate all emergent technologies as heavily as possible, our opinions on this question would be moot. There's little chance that *all* governments would want to regulate the same way. And this means that if the USG wanted to regulate a certain technology, but the proprietors of that technology didn't want it to be thus regulated, they could just move to another jurisdiction. This might not be a bad thing. It might just mean that whichever states allow technology to be used the most efficiently will become the most successful; or it might mean that the nation state as we know it disintegrates.
(2) The key thing with these new technologies is ownership. If you have Bitcoin, you really own it, and you know the pool of Bitcoin won't be debased, whereas you can't say the same thing if you have USD in the bank. If you own an Urbit, you know that your computing environment is actually yours, whereas you can't say that about your IG, Gmail, etc. And to me, that's the best way to avoid what you refer to aptly as "the ad-based model that brought us our present hell." So, VCs can own a lot of bitcoin, but, unlike the Fed Gov, they can't inflate the money supply; and VCs can own Urbit address space, but, unlike FAANG, they can't arbitrarily and maliciously alter your computing environment.