Ethereum

I figured out the rift in the Ethereum community. There are two groups who can't relate to each other:

1. Collectivists who see themselves as peers with people like Vitalik and the EF. As labour, they collaborate on equal terms with each other and embrace a plurality of interests.

2. Corporatists who see a hierarchy with themselves as shareholders, the EF as a board of directors, and Vitalik as the CEO. As capital, they expect the interests of the shareholders to be prioritized and feel entitled to make demands.

While most of us are both, labour (contributing to the ecosystem) and capital (holding ETH), we primarily identify from the perspective of one.

It's not a disagreement about management or roadmap, but a disconnect in how we perceive social structures, our entitlements, and others' responsibilities.

july

Two people can read the same books, hear the same debates, witness the same atrocities... and have opposite takeaways from it.

That's pretty wild, but what's more: A lot of people will refuse to believe that this can happen. These people are the real divide.

Combined with the premise that two reasonable people can consume the same content but reach different conclusions, I think it explains a lot of the aggressive "talking past each other" we've been seeing.

A doodler and computerer. I like permissive/permissionless open source, smart contracts, p2p systems, room-scale VR, and NixOS.

shazow.net

Currently: WhatsABI

Combined with the premise that two reasonable people can consume the same content but reach different conclusions, I think it explains a lot of the aggressive "talking past each other" we've been seeing.
https://warpcast.com/shazow.eth/0x329f1516

Soft power is something we can give to a person and we can take it away just as easily. We can give soft power to anyone or anything (even tea leaves!), and we can't be stopped from doing so.

Hard power is something that is held over us. It is granted without our consent. We can design social constructs, like our legal system or decentralized technologies, to democratize and restrict hard power of any one group over another.

This is the difference between me asking you for advice and choosing to listen to you, versus you holding a gun to my head and telling me what to do. They are not the same thing, and we should not conflate them.

A lot of people choosing to listen to a person they consider worthy of their trust is not the same thing as that person having hard power.

Another related concept: Soft power vs hard power. It's easy and dangerous to conflate them.

Another related concept: Soft power vs hard power. It's easy and dangerous to conflate them.
https://warpcast.com/shazow.eth/0x915be27b