Imagine a team of goats mitigating forest fire risk and enabling a forest’s ability to regenerate diversity – bringing back insects, birds and animals necessary for a healthy ecosystem.
And here’s the real goat parkour.
Art Adds Colour to Our Lives
We’d be miserable without it. There’s a reason, that no matter how much funding gets cut or how commercialised it gets, the edgy counterculture movements never go away. Art is in our essence because it’s expression.
I hope the lockdowns exposed our desire for it.
Artvee houses a collection of classical art, accessible to all. Take a look. Life will slow down for a moment.
Do you also go out of your way to step on a particularly crunchy looking leaf?
The Protocol Wars
Everyone agreed on the goal: develop a global computer network. They didn’t agree on how. By the early 1980s, several different protocols competed.
OSI (Open Systems Interconnect), backed by European telephone monopolies and most governments, was favoured. Other strong competitors included two corporate networks, IBM’s SNA and DEC’s DECNET. The dark horse contender was the internet, defined only by a self-governing community dependent on volunteers.
The internet community was nimble – able to develop in months what took the OSI committee-based process years – but it scared off some potential adopters because nobody seemed “in charge”.
A New Kind of Ledger
Having a trusted party has implications. When you send a payment today, you’re actually not the one changing the Paypal ledger. You have no power. You’re requesting (subtle, but a significant difference) Paypal, who has full authority, to change the ledger (add 10 to John Doe and -10 from me). It’s the same with your bank. They can change terms, block payments, freeze your account, or change balances at will (e.g. Greece, Russia).
Where there is no central authority, payments can’t be blocked. You could send a payment to anyone. It could mean freedom for those facing restrictive capital controls or barriers to entry.
It’s irreversible. When you give cash to someone, it’s final, if you want it back, it has to be given back. With irreversibility comes simplicity: there’s no need to identify yourself or fill out forms. Both parties know full control over the money has been transferred – no other questions are asked. For the first time that finality now exists in the digital world because of the decentralized nature of the ledger. It is the first instance of true digital cash.
Due to the open nature of it, anyone with an internet connection can connect to it, anywhere. There are no restrictions, like a bank. There are no arbitrary rules. It could be on a bank holiday. It could be something ultra small like 0.0000318 cents. It could 100 million. It could be accessed by the unbanked (25% of the world population) or it could even be accessed by a piece of software (DAO). In theory, an autonomous car can access it, because identity is abstracted on the blockchain. A fridge can’t open a Citibank account but it can own a BTC or ETH address. For the first time something that is not alive can own money.
More interestingly, since it’s an open network, it’s like the internet. Some nerdy teen in a garage can connect to it, build on it, experiment with it, and improve it. You can’t do that on HSBC’s protocol. It’s not so much money for the internet but rather the internet of money.
Inside
I don’t know about you guys, but, um, you know, I’ve been thinking recently that… that you know, maybe, um, allowing giant digital media corporations to exploit the neurochemical drama of our children for profit…
You know, maybe that was, uh… a bad call by us.
Maybe… maybe the… the flattening of the entire subjective human experience into a… lifeless exchange of value that benefits nobody, except for, um, you know, a handful of bug-eyed salamanders in Silicon Valley…
Maybe that as a… as a way of life forever… maybe that’s, um, not good.
– Inside, Bo Burnham
Immortale
Foodbank
While pensioners lug around crates of food, stoic and mobilised, to feed desperate families – somewhere out there is a young person, preoccupied and hurt by the lack of retweets or likes on their post.
We crave what makes us ill, and neglect what our soul demands. And we always learn this too late.
Knowledge Work
The broad field of knowledge work is in a similar place today as the craft of cooking was in 1859.
Our labor is difficult, but undervalued. We spend way too much time thinking about how to get things done, versus doing them. We approach each new task and project as if it was a completely blank slate, requiring an entirely new approach.
Our careers as knowledge workers are starting to look a lot like chefs – non-linear, itinerant, based on gigs, demanding flexible collaboration with a constantly changing group of collaborators.
Open Source Insulin
Over my lifetime, the price of insulin in the US has risen ~15x, leading patients to ration doses to conserve it.
A group of dedicated biohackers believe that making insulin more accessible requires taking the monopoly away from the big three pharmaceutical companies that produce it. So they’ve started the Open Insulin Foundation, a non-profit with plans to develop the world’s first open-source insulin production model.
Phew!