Tags: crypto

• Download the slides

Hello. I was asked by the Design Business Association to talk to you today about “web3 and AI.”

I’d like to explain what those terms mean.

“Web3”

Let’s start with “web3.” Fortunately I don’t have to come up with an explanation for this term because my friend Heydon Pickering has recorded a video entitled “what is web 3.0?”

What is web trois point nought?

Web uno dot zilch was/is a system of interconnected documents traversible by hyperlink.

However, web deux full stop nowt was/is a system of interconnected documents traversible by hyperlink.

On the other hand, web drei dot zilch is a system of interconnected documents traversible by hyperlink.

Should you wish to upgrade to web three point uno, expect a system of interconnected documents traversible by hyperlink.

If we ever get to web noventa y cinco, you can bet your sweet @rse, it will be a system of interconnected documents traversible by f*!king hyperlink.

There you have it. “Web3” is a completely meaningless term. If someone uses it, they’re probably trying to sell you something.

If you ask for a definition, you’ll get a response like “something something decentralisation something something blockchain.”

As soon as someone mentions blockchain, you can tune out. It’s the classic example of a solution in search of a problem (although it’s still early days; it’s only been …more than a decade).

I can give you a defintion of what a blockchain is. A blockchain is multiple copies of a spreadsheet.

I find it useful to be able to do mental substitions like that when it comes to buzzwords. Like, remember when everyone was talking about “the cloud” but no one was asking what that actually meant? Well, by mentally substituting “the cloud” with “someone else’s server” you get a much better handle on the buzzword.

So, with “web3” out of the way, we can move onto the next buzzword. AI.

“AI”

The letters A and I are supposed to stand for Artificial Intelligence. It’s a term that’s almost as old as digital computing itself. It goes right back to the 1950s.

These days we’d use the term Artificial General Intelligence—AGI—to talk about that original vision of making computers as smart as people.

Vision is the right term here, because AGI remains a thought experiment. This is the realm of super intelligence: world-ending AI overlords; paperclip maximisers; Roko’s basilisk.

These are all fascinating thought experiments but they’re in the same arena as speculative technologies like faster-than-light travel or time travel. I’m happy to talk about any of those theoretically-possible topics, but that’s not what we’re here to talk about today.

When you hear about AI today, you’re probably hearing about specific technologies like large language models and machine learning.

Let’s take a look at large language models and their visual counterparts, diffusion models. They both work in the same way. You take a metric shit ton of data and you assign each one to a token. So you’ve got a numeric token that represents a bigger item: a phrase in a piece of text, or an object in an image.

The author Ted Chiang used a really good analogy to describe this process when he said ChatGPT is like a blurry JPEG of the web.

Just as image formats like JPG use compression to smush image data, these models use compression to smush data into tokens.

By the way, the GPT part of ChatGPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer. The pre-training is that metric shit ton of data I mentioned. The generative part is about combining—or transforming—tokens in a way that should make probabalistic sense.

Terminology

Here’s some more terminology that comes up when people talk about these tools.

Overfitting. This is when the output produced by a generative pre-trained transformer is too close to the original data that fed the model. Another word for overfitting is plagiarism.

Hallucinations. People use this word when the output produced by a generative pre-trained transformer strays too far from reality. Another word for this is lying. Although the truth is that all of the output is a form of hallucination—that’s the generative part. Sometimes the output happens to match objective reality. Sometimes it doesn’t.

What about the term AI itself? Is there a more accurate term we could be using?

I’m going to quote Ted Chiang again. He proposes that a more accurate term is applied statistics. I like that. It points to the probabalistic nature of these tools: take an enormous amount of inputs, then generate something that feels similar based on implied correlations.

I like to think of “AI” as a kind of advanced autocomplete. I don’t say that to denigrate it. Quite the opposite. Autocomplete is something that appears mundane on the surface but has an incredible amount of complexity underneath: real-time parsing of input, a massive database of existing language, and on-the-fly predictions of the next most suitable word. Large language models do the same thing, but on a bigger scale.

What’s it good for?

So what is AI good for? Or rather, what is a language or diffusion model good for? Or what is applied statistics or advanced autocomplete good for?

Transformation. These tools are really good at transforming between formats. Text to speech. Speech to text. Text to images. Long form to short form. Short form to long form.

Think of transcripts. Summaries. These are smart uses of this kind of technology.

Coding, to a certain extent, can be considered a form of transformation. I’ve written books on programming, and I always advise people to first write out what they want in English. Then translate each line of English into the programming language. Large language models do a pretty good job of this right now, but you still need a knowledgable programmer to check the output for errors—there will be errors.

(As for long-form and short-form text transformations, the end game may be an internet filled with large language models endlessly converting our written communications.)

When it comes to the design process, these tools are good at quantity, not quality. If you need to generate some lorem ipsum placeholder text—or images—go for it.

What they won’t help with is problem definition. And it turns out that understanding and defining the problem is the really hard part of the design process.

Use these tools for inputs, not outputs. I would never publish the output of one of these tools publicly. But I might use one of these tools at the beginning of the process to get over the blank page. If I want to get a bunch of mediocre ideas out of the way quickly, these tools can help.

There’s an older definition of the intialism AI that dairy farmers would be familiar with, when “the AI man” would visit the farm. In that context, AI stands for artificial insemination. Perhaps thats also a more helpful definition of AI tools in the design process.

But, like I said, the outputs are not for public release. For one thing, the generated outputs aren’t automatically copyrighted. That’s only fair. Technically, it’s not your work. It is quite literally derivative.

Why all the hype?

Everything I’ve described here is potentially useful in some circumstances, but not Earth-shattering. So what’s with all the hype?

Venture capital. With this model of funding, belief in a technology’s future matters more than the technology’s actual future.

We’ve already seen this in action with self-driving cars, the metaverse, and cryptobollocks. Reality never matched the over-inflated expectations but that made no difference to the people profiting from the investments in those technologies (as long as they make sure to get out in time).

By the way, have you noticed how all your crypto spam has been replaced by AI spam? Your spam folder is a good gauge of what’s hot in venture capital circles right now.

The hype around AI is benefiting from a namespace clash. Remember, AI as in applied statistics or advanced autocomplete has nothing in common with AI as in Artificial General Intelligence. But because the same term is applied to both, the AI hype machine can piggyback on the AGI discourse.

It’s as if we decided to call self-driving cars “time machines”— we’d be debating the ethics of time travel as though it were plausible.

For a refreshing counter-example, take a look at what Apple is saying about AI. Or rather, what it isn’t saying. In the most recent Apple keynote, the term AI wasn’t mentioned once.

Technology blogger Om Malik wrote:

One of the most noticeable aspects of the keynote was the distinct lack of mention of AI or ChatGPT.

I think this was a missed marketing opportunity for the company.

I couldn’t disagree more. Apple is using machine learning a-plenty: facial recognition, categorising your photos, and more. But instead of over-inflating that work with the term AI, they stick to the more descriptive term of machine learning.

I think this will pay off when the inevitable hype crash comes. Other companies, that have tied their value to the mast of AI will see their stock prices tank. But because Apple is not associating themselves with that term, they’re well positioned to ride out that crash.

What should you do?

Alright, it’s time for me to wrap this up with some practical words of advice.

Beware of the Law of the instrument. You know the one: when all you have is a hammer, everything looks a nail. There’s a corollary to that: when the market is investing heavily in hammers, everyone’s going to try to convince you that the world is full of nails. See if you can instead cultivate a genuine sense of nailspotting.

It should ring alarm bells if you find yourself thinking “how can I find a use for this technology?” Rather, spend your time figuring out what problem you’re trying to solve and only then evaluate which technologies might help you.

Never make any decision out of fear. FOMO—Fear Of Missing Out—has been weaponised again and again, by crypto, by “web3”, by “AI”.

The message is always the same: “don’t get left behind!”

“It’s inevitable!” they cry. But you know what’s genuinely inevitable? Climate change. So maybe focus your energy there.

Links

I’ll leave you with some links.

I highly recommend you get a copy of the book, The Intelligence Illusion by Baldur Bjarnason. You can find it at illusion.baldurbjarnason.com

The subtitle is “a practical guide to the business risks of generative AI.” It doesn’t get into philosophical debates on potential future advances. Instead it concentrates squarely on the pros and cons of using these tools in your business today. It’s backed up by tons of research with copious amounts of footnotes and citations if you want to dive deeper into any of the issues.

If you don’t have time to read the whole book, Baldur has also created a kind of cheat sheet. Go to needtoknow.fyi and you can a one-page list of cards to help you become an AI bullshit detector.

I keep track of interesting developments in this space on my own website, tagging with “machine learning” at adactio.com/tags/machinelearning

Thank you very much for your time today.

Bitcoin is Commoditized Waste - by Rusty Foster

It’s a popular myth that a Bitcoin’s value is based on nothing, just pulled out of thin air by math. But that’s not true—Bitcoin is a way to commoditize energy consumption without accidentally producing anything useful. Other energy-intensive industries tend to convert energy into useful materials like aluminum or cement. Bitcoin converts electricity into waste heat and records its destruction in the form of numbers, which can then be traded for other numbers but not used to make anything people need or converted back into energy.

The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble

A handy round-up of recent wrtings on artificial insemination.

Jeepers Frigging Cripes Crypto and NFTs are so stupid and dumb and bad and I can’t even. I’m out. Goodbye. Burn it down please. - Chris Coyier

Literally every experience I have in this world is gross at best and criminally evil at worst. Who it benefits that actually needs the benfefit is vanishingly few.

Here are some rhetorical questions from Chris:

How many years into this are we with no practical use cases for the world? How many resources have to be burned before this is seen?

Those meddling kids! The Reverse Scooby-Doo theory of tech innovation comes with the excuses baked in | Nieman Journalism Lab

Manufactured inevitability a.k.a bullshit:

There’s a standard trope that tech evangelists deploy when they talk about the latest fad. It goes something like this:

1. Technology XYZ is arriving. It will be incredible for everyone. It is basically inevitable.
2. The only thing that can stop it is regulators and/or incumbent industries. If they are so foolish as to stand in its way, then we won’t be rewarded with the glorious future that I am promising.

We can think of this rhetorical move as a Reverse Scooby-Doo. It’s as though Silicon Valley has assumed the role of a Scooby-Doo villain — but decided in this case that he’s actually the hero. (“We would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for those meddling regulators!”)

The critical point is that their faith in the promise of the technology is balanced against a revulsion towards existing institutions. (The future is bright! Unless they make it dim.) If the future doesn’t turn out as predicted, those meddlers are to blame. It builds a safety valve into their model of the future, rendering all predictions unfalsifiable.

I’ve already written about how much I enjoyed hosting Leading Design San Francisco last week.

All the speakers were terrific. Lola’s talk was particularly …um, interesting:

In this talk, Lola will share her adventures in the world of blockchain, the hostility she experienced in her first go-round in 2018, and why she’s chosen to head back to a technology that is going through its largest reputational and social crisis to date.

Wait …I was supposed to stand on stage and introduce a talk that was (at least partly) about blockchain? I have opinions.

As it turned out, Lola warned me that I’d be making an appearance in her talk. She was going to quote that blog post. Before the talk, I asked her how obnoxious I could be about blockchain in her intro. She told me to bring it.

So in the introduction, I deployed all the sarcasm I had in me and said:

Listen, we designers have a tendency to be over-critical of things sometimes. There are all these ideas that we dismiss: phrenology, homeopathy, flat-earthism …blockchain. Haters gonna hate.

I remember somebody asking online a while back, “Why the hate for web3?” And someone I know responded by saying “We hate it because we understand it.” I think there’s a lot of truth to that.

But look, just because blockchains are powering crypto ponzi schemes and N F fucking Ts, it’s worth remembering that it’s also simply a technology. It’s a technological solution in search of a problem.

To be fair, it’s still early days. After all, it’s only been over a decade now.

It’s like the law of instrument says; when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Blockchain is like that. Except the hammer is also made of glass.

Anyway, Lola is going to defend the indefensible and talk about blockchain. One thing to keep in mind is this: remember when everyone was talking about “The Cloud”? And then it turned out that you could substitute the phrase “someone else’s server” for “The Cloud?” Well, every time you hear Lola say the word “blockchain”, I’d like you to mentally substitute the phrase “multiple copies of a spreadsheet.”

Please give an open mind and a warm welcome to Lola Oyelayo Pearson!

I got some laughs. I also got lots of gasps and pearl-clutching, as though I were saying something taboo. Welcome to San Francisco.

Lola gave as good as she got. I got a roasting in her talk.

And just to clarify, Lola and I are friends—this was a consensual smackdown.

There was a very serious point to Lola’s talk. Cryptobollocks and other blockchain-powered schemes have historically been very bro-y, and exploitative of non-bro communities. Lola wants to fight that trend.

I get it. But it reminds me a bit of the justifications you hear from people who go to work at Facebook claiming that they can do more good from the inside. Whatever helps you sleep at night.

The crux of Lola’s belief is this: blockchain technology is inevitable, therefore it is uncumbent on us as ethical designers to ensure that the technology is deployed in a way that empowers people instead of exploiting them.

But I take issue with the premise. Blockchain technology is not inevitable. That’s the worst kind of technological determinism. It’s defeatist. It’s a depressing view of “progress” driven not by people, but by technological forces beyond our control.

I refuse to accept that anti-humanist deterministic view.

In any case, for technological determinism to have any validity, there needs to be something to it. At least virtual reality and machine learning are based on some actual technologies. In the case of cryptobollocks, there is no there there. There is nothing except the hype, which is why you’ll see blockchain enthusiasts trying to ride the coattails of trending technologies in a logical fallacy that goes something like this:

1. There are technologies that will be really big in the future,
2. blockchain is a technology, therefore
3. blockchain will be really big in the future.

Blockchain is bullshit. It isn’t even very clever bullshit. And it certainly isn’t inevitable.

@anildash@mastodon.cloud

When it came time to reckon with social media’s failings, nobody ran to the “web3” platforms. Nobody asked “can I get paid per message”? Nobody asked about the blockchain. The community of people who’ve been quietly doing this work for years (decades!) ended up being the ones who welcomed everyone over, as always.

There’s a repeated catchphrase used throughout Christopher Nolan’s film Tenet: ignorance is our ammunition.

There are certainly situations where knowledge is regrettable. The somewhat-silly thought experiment of Roko’s basilisk is one example. Once you have knowledge of it, you can’t un-know it, and so you become complicit.

Or, to use another example, I think it was Jason who told me that if you want to make someone’s life miserable, just teach them about typography. Then they’ll see all the terrible kerning out there in the world and they won’t be able to un-see it.

I sometimes wish I could un-learn all I’ve learned about cryptobollocks (I realise that the term “cryptocurrency” is the more widely-used phrase, but it’s so inaccurate I’d rather use a clearer term).

I sometimes wish I could go back to having the same understanding of cryptobollocks as most people: some weird new-fangled technology thing that has something to do with “the blockchain.”

But I delved too deep. I wanted to figure out why seemingly-smart people were getting breathlessly excited about something that sounds fairly ludicrous. Yet the more I learned, the more ludicrous it became. Bitcoin and its ilk are even worse than the occassional headlines and horror stories would have you believe.

As Jules says:

The reason I have such a visceral reaction to crypto projects isn’t just that they’re irresponsibly designed and usually don’t achieve what they promise. It’s also that the thing they promise sounds like a fucking nightmare.

Or, as Simon responded to someone wondering why there was so much crypto hate:

We hate it because we understand it.

I have yet to encounter a crypto project that isn’t a Ponzi scheme. I don’t mean like a Ponzi scheme. I mean they’re literally Ponzi schemes: zero-sum racing to the bottom built entirely on the greater fool theory. The only difference between traditional Ponzi schemes and those built on crypto is that crypto isn’t regulated. Yet.

I recently read The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel, a novel with the collapse of a Ponzi scheme at its heart. In the aftermath of the scheme’s collapse, there are inevitable questions like “How could you not know?” The narrator answers that question:

It’s possible to both know and not know something.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot.

Clearleft recently took on a project that involves cryptobollocks. Just to be clear, the client is not a fly-by-night crypto startup. This is an established financial institution. It’s not like Mike’s shocking decision to join Kraken of all places.

But in some ways, the fact that this is a respected company almost makes it worse. It legitimises cryptobollocks. It makes it more likely for “regular” folk to get involved (and scammed).

Every Thursday we have an end-of-week meeting and get a summary of how various projects are going. Every time there’s an update about the cryptobollocks project, my heart sinks. By all accounts, the project is going well. That means smart and talented people are using the power of design to make the world a little bit worse.

What will the metrics of success be for this project? Will success be measured by an increase in the amount of Bitcoin trading? I find it hard to see how that can possibly be called successful.

And I haven’t even mentioned the environmental impact of proof-of-work.

Right now, Clearleft is in the process of trying to become a B corp. It’s a long process that involves a lot of box-ticking to demonstrate a genuine care for the environment. There’s no checkbox about cryptobollocks. And yet the fact that we might enable even a few transactions on a proof-of-work blockchain makes a complete mockery of all of our sustainability initiatives.

This is why I wish I could un-know what I know. I wish I could just hear the project updates and say, “Crypto? Don’t know much about it.” But I can’t.

For seventeen years, I’ve felt nothing but pride in the work that Clearleft has done. I’d happily talk about any one of the case studies we’ve worked on. Even on projects that didn’t pan out as expected, or that had all sorts of tricky complications, the work has always been second-to-none. To quote the Agile prime directive:

Everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.

Now, for the first time, I can’t get past that phrase “what they knew at the time.” On the one hand, I’m sure that when they started this project, none of my colleagues knew quite how damaging cryptobollocks is. On the other hand, the longer the project goes on, the harder it is to maintain that position.

It’s possible to both know and not know something.

This is a no-win situation. If the project goes badly, that’s not good for Clearleft or the client. But if the project goes well, that’s not good for the world.

There’s probably not much I can do about this particular project at this point. But I can at least try to make sure that Clearleft doesn’t take on work like this again.

Letter in Support of Responsible Fintech Policy

A well-written evisceration of cryptobollocks signed by Bruce Scheier, Tim Bray, Molly White, Cory Doctorow, and more.

If you’re a concerned US computer scientist, technologist or developer, you’ve got till June 10th to add your signature before this is submitted to congress.

There’s a lot of emphasis put on decision-making: making sure you’re making the right decision; evaluating all the right factors before making a decision. But we rarely talk about revisiting decisions.

I think perhaps there’s a human tendency to treat past decisions as fixed. That’s certainly true when it comes to evaluating technology.

I’ve been guilty of this. I remember once chatting with Mark about something written in PHP—probably something I had written—and I made some remark to the effect of “I know PHP isn’t a great language…” Mark rightly called me on that. The language wasn’t great in the past but it has come on in leaps and bounds. My perception of the language, however, had not updated accordingly.

I try to keep that lesson in mind whenever I’m thinking about languages, tools and frameworks that I’ve investigated in the past but haven’t revisited in a while.

Andy talks about this as the tech tool carousel:

The carousel is like one of those on a game show that shows the prizes that can be won. The tool will sit on there until I think it’s gone through enough maturing to actually be a viable tool for me, the team I’m working with and the clients I’m working for.

Crucially a carousel is circular: tools and technologies come back around for re-evaluation. It’s all too easy to treat technologies as being on a one-way conveyer belt—once they’ve past in front of your eyes and you’ve weighed them up, that’s it; you never return to re-evaluate your decision.

This doesn’t need to be a never-ending process. At some point it becomes clear that some technologies really aren’t worth returning to:

It’s a really useful strategy because some tools stay on the carousel and then I take them off because they did in fact, turn out to be useless after all.

See, for example, anything related to cryptobollocks. It’s been well over a decade and blockchains remain a solution in search of problems. As Molly White put it, it’s not still the early days:

How long can it possibly be “early days”? How long do we need to wait before someone comes up with an actual application of blockchain technologies that isn’t a transparent attempt to retroactively justify a technology that is inefficient in every sense of the word? How much pollution must we justify pumping into our atmosphere while we wait to get out of the “early days” of proof-of-work blockchains?

Back to the web (the actual un-numbered World Wide Web)…

Nolan Lawson wrote an insightful article recently about how he senses that the balance has shifted away from single page apps. I’ve been sensing the same shift in the zeitgeist. That said, both Nolan and I keep an eye on how browsers are evolving and getting better all the time. If you weren’t aware of changes over the past few years, it would be easy to still think that single page apps offer some unique advantages that in fact no longer hold true. As Nolan wrote in a follow-up post:

My main point was: if the only reason you’re using an SPA is because “it makes navigations faster,” then maybe it’s time to re-evaluate that.

For another example, see this recent XKCD cartoon:

“You look around one day and realize the things you assumed were immutable constants of the universe have changed. The foundations of our reality are shifting beneath our feet. We live in a house built on sand.”

Perhaps the best example of a technology that warrants regular re-evaluation is the World Wide Web itself. Over the course of its existence it has been seemingly bettered by other more proprietary technologies.

Flash was better than the web. It had vector graphics, smooth animations, and streaming video when the web had nothing like it. But over time, the web caught up. Flash was the hare. The World Wide Web was the tortoise.

In more recent memory, the role of the hare has been played by native apps.

I remember talking to someone on the Twitter design team who was designing and building for multiple platforms. They were frustrated by the web. It just didn’t feel as fully-featured as iOS or Android. Their frustration was entirely justified …at the time. I wonder if they’ve revisited their judgement since then though.

In recent years in particular it feels like the web has come on in leaps and bounds: service workers, native JavaScript APIs, and an astonishing boost in what you can do with CSS. Most important of all, the interoperability between browsers is getting better and better. Universal support for new web standards arrives at a faster rate than ever before.

But developers remain suspicious, still prefering to trust third-party libraries over native browser features. They made a decision about those libraries in the past. They evaluated the state of browser support in the past. I wish they would re-evaluate those decisions.

Alas, inertia is a very powerful force. Sticking with a past decision—even if it’s no longer the best choice—is easier than putting in the effort to re-evaluate everything again.

What’s the phrase? “Strong opinions, weakly held.” We’re very good at the first part and pretty bad at the second.

Just the other day I was chatting with one of my colleagues about an online service that’s available on the web and also as a native app. He was showing me the native app on his phone and said it’s not a great app.

“Why don’t you add the website to your phone?” I asked.

“You know,” he said. “The website’s going to be slow.”

He hadn’t tested this. But years of dealing with crappy websites on his phone in the past had trained him to think of the web as being inherently worse than native apps (even though there was nothing this particular service was doing that required any native functionality).

It has become a truism now. Native apps are better than the web.

And you know what? Once upon a time, that would’ve been true. But it hasn’t been true for quite some time …at least from a technical perspective.

But even if the technologies in browsers have reached parity with native apps, that won’t matter unless we can convince people to revisit their previously-formed beliefs.

The technologies are the easy bit. Getting people to re-evaluate their opinions about technologies? That’s the hard part.

Cautionary Tales from Cryptoland

This quote from the brilliant Molly White is about web3/blockchain/cryptobollocks but it applies to evaluating technology in general (like, say, JavaScript frameworks):

I firmly believe that companies first need to identify and research the problem they are trying to solve, and then select the right technology to do it. Those technologies may not be the latest buzzword, and they may not cause venture capitalists to come crawling out of the woodwork, but choosing technologies with that approach tends to be a lot more successful in the long run — at least, assuming the primary goal is to actually solve a problem rather than attract VC money.

I went to TEDxBrighton on Friday. I didn’t actually realise it was happening until just a couple of days beforehand, but I once I knew, I figured I should take advantage of it being right here in my own town.

All in all, it was a terrific day. The MCing by Adam Pearson was great—just the right mix of enthusiasm and tongue-in-cheek humour. The curation of the line-up worked well too. The day was broken up into four loosely-themed sections. As I’m currently in the process of curating an event myself, I can appreciate how challenging it is.

Each section opened with a musical act. Again, having been involved behind the scenes with many events myself, I was impressed by the audaciousness, just from a logistical perspective. It all went relatively smoothly.

The talks at a TED or TEDx event can be a mixed bag. You can have a scientist on stage distilling years of research into a succint message followed by someone talking nonsense about some pseudo-psychological self-help scheme. But at TEDxBrighton, we lucked out.

A highlight for me was Dr James Mannion talking about implementation science—something that felt directly applicable to design work. Victoria Jenkins was also terrific, and again, her points about inclusive design felt very relevant. And of course I really enjoyed the space-based talks by Melissa Thorpe and Bianca Cefalo. Now that I think about it, just about everyone was great: Katie Vincent, Lewis Wedlock, Dina Nayeri—they all wowed me.

With one exception. There was a talk that was supposed to be about the future of democracy. In reality it quickly veered into DAOs before descending into a pitch for crypto and NFTs. The call to action was literally for everyone in the audience to go out and get a crypto wallet and buy an NFT …using ethereum no less! We were exhorted to use an unbelievably wasteful and energy-intensive proof-of-work technology to get our hands on a receipt for a JPG …from the same stage that would later highlight the work of climate activists like Tommie Eaton. It was really quite disgusting. The fear-based message of the talk was literally about getting in on the scheme before it’s too late. At one point we were told to “do the research.” I’m surprised we weren’t all told that we’re “not going to make it.”

A disgraceful shill for a ponzi scheme would’ve ruined any other event. Fortunately the line-up at TEDxBrighton was so strong that one scam artist couldn’t torpedo the day. Just like crypto itself—and associated bollocks like NFTs and web3—it was infuriating to have to sit through it in the short term, but then it just faded away into insignificance. One desperate peddler of snake oil couldn’t make a dent in an otherwise great day.

The Laboratorium (2d ser.) (I Do Not Think That NFT Means What You Think It…)

The bottom line is that almost everything NFT advocates want to do on a blockchain can be done more easily and efficiently without one, and the legal infrastructure needed to make NFTs work defeats the point of using a blockchain in the first place.

🐠 Robin Sloan: describing the emotions of life online

Obviously, no one does this, I recognize this is a very niche endeavor, but the art and craft of maintaining a homepage, with some of your writing and a page that’s about you and whatever else over time, of course always includes addition and deletion, just like a garden — you’re snipping the dead blooms. I do this a lot. I’ll see something really old on my site, and I go, “you know what, I don’t like this anymore,” and I will delete it.

But that’s care. Both adding things and deleting things. Basically the sense of looking at something and saying, “is this good? Is this right? Can I make it better? What does this need right now?” Those are all expressions of care. And I think both the relentless abandonment of stuff that doesn’t have a billion users by tech companies, and the relentless accretion of garbage on the blockchain, I think they’re both kind of the antithesis, honestly, of care.

Web3 - creating problems where we need solutions on Vimeo

This is a great talk from Laura that clearly explains what web3 actually is. It pairs nicely with Molly White’s wb3 is going just great (speaking of which, Casey Newton interviewed Molly White about the site recently).

Make Free Stuff | Max Böck

At its very core, the rules of the web are different than those of “real” markets. The idea that ownership fundamentally means that nobody else can have the same thing you have just doesn’t apply here. This is a world where anything can easily be copied a million times and distributed around the globe in a second. If that were possible in the real world, we’d call it Utopia.

It’s not still the early days

If you’re interested in so-called web3, you should definitely follow Molly White.

How long can it possibly be “early days”? How long do we need to wait before someone comes up with an actual application of blockchain technologies that isn’t a transparent attempt to retroactively justify a technology that is inefficient in every sense of the word? How much pollution must we justify pumping into our atmosphere while we wait to get out of the “early days” of proof-of-work blockchains? How many people must be scammed for all they’re worth while technologists talk about just beginning to think about building safeguards into their platforms? How long must the laymen, who are so eagerly hustled into blockchain-based projects that promise to make them millionaires, be scolded as though it is their fault when they are scammed as if they should be capable of auditing smart contracts themselves?

The more you think about it, the more “it’s early days!” begins to sound like the desperate protestations of people with too much money sunk into a pyramid scheme, hoping they can bag a few more suckers and get out with their cash before the whole thing comes crashing down.

Norton

It me.

Occasionally, I wonder whether I’ve got it all wrong. Is my age, my technical unsophistication, or my fond remembrance of an internet unencumbered by commerce blinding me to the opportunities that crypto offers me? But then I read something terrible and I recant my doubts, meditate for a while and get on with my life.

Blockchain-based systems are not what they say they are

Blockchain technologies have somehow managed to land in the worst of both worlds—decentralized but not really, immutable but not really.

A great analysis of the system of smoke and mirrors that constitutes so-called web3:

Instead of being at the mercy of the “big tech” companies like Amazon and Google that monopolize the traditional way of doing things on the web, you are now at the mercy of a few other tech companies that are rapidly monopolizing the blockchain way of doing things.

Moxie Marlinspike >> Blog >> My first impressions of web3

A balanced, even-handed look at actually using so-called web3 technology. It turns out that even if you leave the ethical and environmental concerns aside, the technological underpinning are, um, troublesome to say the least.