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A broader question in my mind is: can smart people create anything ingenious that escapes being coopted / subsumed by the establishment? Or, can such a thing su

by psyc 5y ago

A broader question in my mind is: can smart people create anything ingenious that escapes being coopted / subsumed by the establishment? Or, can such a thing survive popularity on its own terms? In the case of the Web, the answer clearly turned out to be a deafening No. Years ago, I had higher hopes for Bitcoin in this regard. Same for so called “censorship resistant decentralized platforms”. I spent years pondering how such a thing might work, before I realized that no technology, no matter how advanced, cannot be struck down by a single act of Congress. Save for cases of crystal clear constitutional protection, if any technology becomes a big enough problem, or a problem for the right people, it will have its day, and then it will be kneecapped.

colechristensen 5y ago
Once you get popular enough, you become the establishment. Once something becomes the lowest-common-denominator populist solution or the solution for the privileged, those use cases become "bad" because of value judgements of the people using them. It's a kind of romanticism for rebellion, and with cryptos usually a broad misunderstanding of what money is, what it does, and how it works. Indeed nothing can be the growing rebellious trend forever. It either wins and becomes the standard or dies failing to live up to whatever ideals it didn't actually have. >can smart people create anything ingenious that escapes being coopted / subsumed by the establishment? Or, can such a thing survive popularity on its own terms? No, everything has vulnerabilities that will be eventually exploited. The American constitution and the many governments around the world inspired by it have done a pretty good job of avoiding a complete consumption (in ways that, for example, communism did not), in part by specifically designing not just to handle or avoid greed and control, but to use those characteristics of societies as a feature.

by psyc 5y ago

colechristensen 5y ago

Once you get popular enough, you become the establishment. Once something becomes the lowest-common-denominator populist solution or the solution for the privileged, those use cases become "bad" because of value judgements of the people using them. It's a kind of romanticism for rebellion, and with cryptos usually a broad misunderstanding of what money is, what it does, and how it works. Indeed nothing can be the growing rebellious trend forever. It either wins and becomes the standard or dies failing to live up to whatever ideals it didn't actually have. >can smart people create anything ingenious that escapes being coopted / subsumed by the establishment? Or, can such a thing survive popularity on its own terms? No, everything has vulnerabilities that will be eventually exploited. The American constitution and the many governments around the world inspired by it have done a pretty good job of avoiding a complete consumption (in ways that, for example, communism did not), in part by specifically designing not just to handle or avoid greed and control, but to use those characteristics of societies as a feature.