VeeSilverball

My principle of “blockchain’s fundamental value” is simply this: A blockchain that secures valuable information is valuable.

To break that down further:

• “Valuable information” isn’t data - it’s something that you can interpret, that has meaning and power to affect your actions. So, price speculation taking place on a chain isn’t that valuable in a broad, utilitarian sense, but something like encyclopedic knowledge, historical records, and the like might be. The sense of “this is real” vs “this is Monopoly money” is related to the information quality.
• “Secures” means that we have some idea of where the information came from, who can access it, and whether it’s been altered or tampered. Most blockchains follow the Bitcoin model and are fully public ledgers, storing everything - and just within that model(leaving aside Monero etc.) there are positive applications, but “automatically secure” is all dependent on what application you’re aiming for.

You don’t need to include tokens, trading, finance, or the specific method of security, to arrive at this idea of what a blockchain does, but having them involved addresses - though maybe without concretely solving - the question of paying upkeep costs, a problem that has always dogged open, distributed projects in the past. If the whole chain becomes more valuable because one person contributes something to it, then you have a positive feedback loop in which a culture of remixing and tipping is good. It tends to get undercut by “what if I made scam tokens and bribed an exchange to list them”, the maxi- “we will rule the world” cultures of Bitcoin and Ethereum, or the cynical “VC-backed corporate blockchains”, but the public alt chains that are a bit out of the spotlight with longer histories, stuff like Tezos and NEM/Symbol, tend to have a more visible sense of purpose in this direction - they need to make a myth about themselves, and the myth turns into information by chance and persistence.

What tends to break people’s brains - both the maxis, and people who are rabidly anti-crypto - is that securing on-chain value in this way also isn’t a case of “public” vs “private” goods. It’s more akin to “commons” vs “enclosed” spaces, which is an older notion that hasn’t been felt in our political lives in centuries, because the partnership of nation-states and capital has been so strong as a societal coordinating force - the state says where the capital should go, the people that follow that lead and build out an empire get rewarded. The commons is, in essence, the voice in the back of your mind asking, “Why are you in the rat race? Do you really need an empire?” And this technology is stating that, clearly and patiently: making a common space better is another way to live.

And so there is a huge amount of spam around “ownership”, but ownership itself isn’t really a factor. That’s just another kind of information that the technology is geared towards storing. The social contract is more along the lines that if you are doing good for a chain and taking few risks, a modest, livable amount of credit is likely to flow to you in time. Everyone making “plays” and getting burned is trying to gamble with it, or to advance empire-building goals in a basically hostile environment that will patch you out of the flow of information.

To me, a big difference is in the lengthy prelude, which follows the model of TOS, just with an updated production. First the synths layered with strings, which are very 80’s wonder-music(it could be right out of the score for Flight of the Navigator or The Goonies) and then the french horns come in playing a round, which adds a Wagnerian element.

The percussive “march music” elements quoting TMP are subdued in TNG’s arrangement - it’s a less compressed, “punchy” sound, and I believe the mic has been set farther back or they’ve EQ’d out some higher frequencies. Those decisions, plus a few choices of instrumentation like the harp glissandos, tone down the bombastic energy and add a gliding, romantic quality. Again, more like TOS, but updated.

I’ve become comfortable with saying, “it’s not worth it being normal”, and thus am ok with the normie tag, even if I don’t want to turn it into a slur. Normal is a form of social construct that tends to be imposed on us: it’s when the teacher enters the classroom and the class sits down and shuts up, not because they explicitly agreed to, but because it was normalized. There isn’t anything in particular suggesting that normal = good.

And that does have an elitist ring to it, which does upset the goal of equitable outcomes in some ways. There are certain philosophies in which a premise of elitism is assumed, as in, some people just won’t be able to access the necessary understanding to participate, so it’s better to have a gate than to let anyone wander through. This is the view of Leo Strauss and followers - for a really detailed explanation try Arthur Melzer’s book Philosophy Between the Lines.

Even if you don’t read that book(it’s a good book), I would make the case in this way: it’s the difference between online gaming that uses automatic matchmaking, versus a martial arts dojo. Online gaming and toxicity correlate because there is no lower bar on who can play, so all sessions are pushed to the lowest common denominator of cheating, griefing, etc. But someone who participates in martial arts like a gamer gets kicked out of the gym, if the standards are high: an instructor who values students does not let them attempt to eyegouge each other or slam their head on the mat.

Occasionally someone like that will sign up for a tournament, commit an illegal move in the first round, and get themselves disqualified. But they can leave their opponent seriously injured in the process, and maybe end a career. So the standards tend to condition a degree of gatekeeping, respect for others, etc. Not every gym does well at this, and some styles like boxing have a norm of “hard sparring” where full-contact is trained and damage is expected. But predominantly the focus is on getting the techniques and training without destroying yourself or others.

And I do liken the idea of complete access to, essentially, allowing dirty street brawls to be the only kind of sparring, the only way in which you can interact online with strangers.

Martial artists also sometimes use the normie term. They will say it outright: you have to be a weirdo to spend so much time getting beat up and choked out. We can have a gate and still be tough on ourselves to do better.

Eugen is not the person I would trust for good judgment on this because his agenda has always been user growth-centric, so a Fediverse that resembles Facebook would just be a “yay” moment for him - either way he can still end up with a career by leveraging his role with ActivityPub.

That said, I don’t believe EEE works here, because AP evolved in an environment that already had to compete like-for-like with corporate options. You’ll still log in for the rest of the fediverse if it brings you better content than Threads…

…and it has an edge on that, because these spaces are not designed around herding around industrial quantities of users. They have a natural size at which moderators shrug and close the gates if a big instance is too troublesome, because it hurts the quality of the experience for their own users. This peeves instance admins who want the power fantasy of “owning” a lot of low-quality users, but it also basically guarantees defederation with corporate social, because it’s never been able to handle its own moderation problem other than in a “pass-the-buck” way.

Coming soon: rebranding /r/piracy to “pirate cosplay”