“History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies” – Alexis de Tocqueville
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- 4-1a4b2b2a Rules and leaders emerge from informal governance but they are a product of inscrutable social dynamics rather than thoughtful design
- 4-1a4b2b3 Time will tell because time can de-contextualize seeming necessities
Related:
From Balaji Srinivasan and Chris Dixon
- 8-1c3a Internet turned everyone into publisher. Crypto can turn everyone into investor.
- 8-1c3a1 Internet vs Telecom will recur in Crypto vs Financial Services
- 8-1c3b Farming became the most common job during the 19th century
- 8-1c3c Manufacturing became the most common job during the 20th century
- 8-1c4d1a Writing pre-internet era was mostly about English literature
- 1950 as mirror point for centralization/Westernization to decentralization/de-Westernization
- The Wild West ended in 1890s but the Internet opened new frontiers in 1990s
- Indian-ancestral man running Britain
- NYT + Russia vs Ukraine to NYT + Ukraine vs Russia
- US was massive exporter and China was just market
- China was stuffed with opium
- America was unified. India and China weren’t.
- 20c was US vs Russia
- 21c will be about China vs Indian
- BRICs (Russia, China, India) as parallel UN (winners of WW2 - 80 years ago)
- Communism is now functioning and capitalism has crumbling societies with military propaganda
- Christianism justified hierarchy in ancient Rome
- Replace Christianism with Communism and Rome with China
- 12-1a2b3 Left eventually becomes the right, not ideologically but economically and systematically
- Christianism justified hierarchy in ancient Rome
- Internet is to America what America was to Britain
- Internet values are to the West what the West was to the Christendom
- Even early Americans took some time to be independent from Britain
- India can be big part of the internet
6-3b2.5 India (or any other country-company-community) can act as the tech-media superpower of de-Americanization-dollarization movement
- 2-1a0 ‘Creative destruction’ - Think outside the box. Evolution of ideas must be revolutionary. Knowledge creation involves rebellion against current explanatory framework.
- Internet values are to the West what the West was to the Christendom
- A similar tripolar configuration has happened before
- NYT, CCP, BTC = the Soviet, the Nazis, the Americans
- Networks > States
- NYT, CCP, BTC = the Soviet, the Nazis, the Americans
- AI will do what coal/oil did to us
- Algorithmic TikTok is not about follows
- 5-3c1 One of the lessons from the last era of the internet is that if a service needs to be built, it will probably get built — if not as a public good, then as a private good
- Power must be organized collectively just like unions bargain collectively
- We must remember the lesson learned with search in the 1990s
- Because it can happen again
- Can we avoid the worst case scenario by using blockchains?
- Because it can happen again
- We must remember the lesson learned with search in the 1990s
- Power must be organized collectively just like unions bargain collectively
- Creators must be organized and bargain as a group
- The same reason labor unions bargain collectively
- Invert: in the case where this fails, what’s the potential end-goal? What should I do?
- Remember Naspers (news publisher turned to internet investor)
- Recentralization is a cycle back to centralization from one vantage point but a step forward from another
- Current information explosion = the Reformation (the Protestants, the Lutherans, and then the Baptists had to attract people to their interpretations)
- Mapmaking + Print capitalism = State formation