I'm fast becoming a luddite who increasingly understand little about the techno nonsense going on around me.

It is my experience that my understanding of a subject improves the more I explain it to someone else. It has also been my experience that if I cannot succinctly explain something to someone who actively does not want to understand it, then I don't truly get it myself. As such, this is as much for my benefit as it is for yours, but it's going to be piecemeal because you threw a lot of spaghetti at the wall there.

People like YouTube and Facebook for the stuff the algorithm spoon feeds them.

Sure - same reason they used to like television. However, good television wins out over bad television. This model doesn't work with social media or Youtube because you can't change the channel - you've got the Facebook channel, the Youtube channel, the Twitter channel and they all show you things of maximized engagement. Television and radio don't work this way: you sit there and they interrupt your content with ads. The more ads you sit through, the more money TV and radio makes, so it's in their best interest to give you great content so that you'll sit through lots of ads. Social media measures its effectiveness by how much you change the channel. That's really what "engagement" means: how uncomplacent are you in your viewing habits.

Commercials are a terrible business model. "Here is a free thing, let me bug you enough that you buy something." It was the model we arrived at because broadcasting or publishing cost a lot of money and "give it away for free and make someone else pay for it" worked with the broadsheets. It's particularly terrible for the Internet because the carry cost is one tenth of fuckall and the ads are easily ignored, which means they're impossibly cheap and there's a lot of them. What we've gotten, in effect, is something free that's paid for by stuff we don't want that's so worthless we're buried in it.

It can all.

Go.

Away.

You know what my favorite Twitter account is? This Massimo guy. he serves up always-sourced, usually-interesting little tidbits of science, engineering or kismet, usually with links to more in-depth coverage. And he's constantly fighting Twitter, constantly fighting Instagram because people steal his shit and report him. He mentioned once that just keeping his stuff online costs him about a thousand dollars a month.

The modern Web makes it untenable to just put up a website of this stuff. You have to do Twitter or Instagram or Substack or Medium or whatever. There has to be an intermediary because of the structure we've adopted. But that structure is a function of a top-down hierarchy.

Web3 will allow you to curate a collection of whatever providers you find entertaining, or someone else's collection, or someone's collection of collections. And all of it will get paid for in tiny little instant increments because we've poisoned the term "micropayments" so much that nobody even wants to discuss it anymore, but it's real now. And perpetual. And frictionless.

And murder for Facebook. Because really - they've got an algorithm they constantly fuck with and if I can just go "I'm going to go with Bob, Jerry, Larry, Gerald and Ralph's curation because I like what they're doing, thanks" then Facebook's algorithm loses.

I really might not be getting it at all but what does web 3.0 offer my aunt Cindy that is better than careful constant stimulus massaged with all the tools of modern marketing and neuroscience?

Cindy gets alignment. The people making the content want Cindy to see it, and Cindy wants to see their content. If what she really wants is holocaust denial videos and flat earth conspiracies hoo boy she's gonna get it, no doubt. So long as she doesn't watch anything that violates the law there's nothing stopping her from marinating in antisemitism and cat videos. BUT there's also nothing profiting off of shoving antisemitism uninvited in between her cat videos.

Distributed storage and computation is another one of the big wins for web 3.0 I guess.

Not the way you think. Everything is already distributed, you just don't really notice it. What Web3 changes is centralization. All those servers do what Facebook wants to do. There isn't a rogue Aunt Cindy server creating her own David Duke Cat Video graph. There will be now.

This is an extension and derivation of "The Cloud!." "The Cloud!" is just storing or computing on someone else's computer, that's all it is right?

"The Cloud!" is very much just someone else's computer. Blockchain, however, is no one's Internet. The hierarchy is gone. The control is gone. The tollboothing is gone. It is truly peer-to-peer without some heinous centralized tracker telling everyone where everyone else is.

Right now, everything you browse through your phone is put there by a bunch of indexes that talk to a bunch of corporations that work with a bunch of advertisers and host a bunch of content providers. Soon, your phone and the content providers will negotiate directly. "The Cloud!" is about to be fired.

Will it be cheaper than Amazon?

Frankly it'll probably be on Amazon. For work and play I have double digits of instances on DigitalOcean. Used to have a couple on Google and with a click I moved them. I don't deal with DigitalOcean at all - there are companies that do it for me. I am running software that I can't configure to accomplish tasks that are unique to me. Yeah - there's giant server farms. Yeah - they're owned by corporations. That's not going to change. What's going to change is who controls what they're doing.

The Domain name stuff seems fine, I don't use the domain system Comcast tried to impose on me but it's hardly revolutionary.

I'm going to guess he's talking about single-sign-on and ETH2 domains? Yeah so basically the cool thing here is identity is indelible and can be parsed by humans. All that "sign in with Google, sign in with Apple, sign in with Facebook" shit? That universality is baked in, no corporate overlords necessary.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around why people are paying tens of thousands of dollars for shitty jpegs and all the indecipherable shit that's happening seems to be intertwined with that kind of nonsense.

I wrote a thing.

Long story short, because they're unique, easily traded and are taxed differently.

twenty years ago people were mocking guys who paid ten dollars for a sword in MORPG, that seems silly but not ridiculous.

I mean, what do you get out of it? Does it give you $10 worth of joy? Then fuck the haters. I also have no need for a million dollar jpeg. But hey - if it goes up in value more than the stuff you bought it with, that's a win, right?

There's a very real disconnect that everyone from Millennials up are extremely resistant to bridging. We all grew up with "you wouldn't download a car" and the idea that digital things can be infinitely duplicated therefore they cost nothing to make and have zero actual value. But NFTs and cryptocurrency are something entirely new: you can create a thing that's digital and it's the only one and everyone in the world can verify that, as well as verifying everything that ever happened to it.

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Look. There's a lot of synthesis necessary here to really see the elephant, rather than grabbing a trunk and thinking it's a snake or whatever. If you try and have that discussion, people sniff the air for bong smoke. BUT HERE'S WHERE WE'RE AT:

Trade has, since the dawn of civilization, happened under one of two rubrics:

- Trust

- Violence

If you're in a family group or a village, stuff happens through trust. Jerry's a lazy-ass but his dad's okay so I can give him a sackload of grain, I'll get my milk one way or another. Traders coming through? Yeah, no reason to trust them; we'll exchange goods of known value because we may never see them again.

If you're under a king, city-state or nation, stuff happens through violence. That's what the social contract is: I abide by the rules, you punish anyone who doesn't. Graeber pointed out that governments are fundamentally monopolies on violence - one ducat is worth five ounces of gold and if anybody disagrees we'll smite 'em. From warlords to central banks, trade happens because if it goes wrong someone's gonna get lit up.

But now? now we've got every computer out there with an indelible record of what was agreed. We don't need trust, it's all right there. We don't need violence - if the money doesn't go through, the transaction doesn't happen. We're legitimately looking at a third way for the first time in human history.

It's gonna crack the world.

What does it look like on the other side? I don't know. But I do know that the people who are looking for analogies and previous examples in order to argue that nothing's gonna change aren't thinking about it. They're looking for a reason not to.

This stuff is worth thinking about.