I actually think the growth of app layer is exactly the time that good social philosophy is needed *most*.

Analogy: imagine that C++ had been made by a totalitarian racist fascist. Would it be a worse language? Probably not. C++ is general purpose, there isn't much surface for bad social philosophy to wreck it (or good social philosophy to improve it).

Ethereum L1 is not quite in that position: someone who doesn't believe in decentralization would not add light clients, or FOCIL, or (good forms of) account abstraction; someone who doesn't mind energy waste would not spend half a decade moving to PoS... But the EVM opcodes might have been roughly the same either way. So Ethereum is perhaps 50% general-purpose.

Apps are ~80% special purpose. What apps you build depends heavily on what ideas you have of what ethereum apps (and ethereum as a whole) are there to do for the world. And so having good ideas on this topic out there becomes crucially important.

https://x.com/owocki/status/1911160442728419681

So imagine there is magick in the world - ‘real’ dragon flavoured, dmt wielding, victorian bon vivants & wise women wyrd in the woods magick. Now imagine the early magick was leared through a monk-like devotion to inscrutable practice, powerful but occluded, lets call the source or akashic power “machine code”

Artist, idiot, distaff traveller and veteran of the time wars. Co-founder of Illust (web3 spatial platform & AR culture). Creative for MF Dooms AR NFT 2021

Then came the ‘enlightenment’ where magick practice got formalised -still advanced, still occult, but no longer as occluded as the path of shamans and monkish devotiees. Pacal, C, Lisp et al came to the fore (Pascal also played in the other ‘enlightenment’ fittingly) more magicians could manipulate the source

As time tumbles on the accretion of abstraction multiples, further from the source but closer to language that is ‘natural’ eventually magician and muggle can no longer be distinguished- script kiddies and warlocks compete for memory, only a few oft discounted ‘pagans’ play deep in the code.

The journey from source to a language we can just about speak. The issue is that abstraction is not a perfect translation (nothing is of course) so unintended consequences some far worse than memory leaks happen.however it is democratised, no longer must people embark on kung fu like montages to become a low level mage

Once magick was only wielded by the mages who had mastered the trials close to the source, now it was possible to cast mind bending magicks just by speaking. However abstraction or the translation into natural language loses specificity as it gains more universal accessibility. One day we will all be fluent in magic without truly knowing what we are summoning. The question is:  is it better to all be magicians albeit vague when it comes to specificity or did the original occultists have it better?

Time moves on and a few wizards (and it was wizards because people feared witches-perhaps because they code better). These wizards came up with a way to manipulate machine code via translation that fell closer to speech, known as Fortran it unleashed a renaissance of abstraction away from the machine code ‘source’.