Old Man

 as long as i can remember

theres been an old man

in my head

telling me

dont do that

its stupid

weird

youll get into trouble

and i didnt

and time passed

life happened

i wish id done that

been stupid

weird

hung out with weird friends

gotten into trouble

old man is quiet now

nothing much to say anymore

doesnt need to

i say it all

i am the old man now

Time passes

I was cleaning out the kids' room, and I found a box marked 'pretend play'.

It was empty. 

I low-key searched the rest of the house over the next few weeks, subconsciously aware of a sense of emptiness, something missing.

I found stuff. A spring-loaded syringe. A plastic potato. Half a tiara. Primary colors grimed over. 

But I remembered elaborate tea sets, a feast of plastic foodstuffs, makeup kits, varied utensils, toolboxes, zoos, benches and easels...

Somewhere between two moves and a lockdown, pretend play had just... gone. 

Soon, the drawings will be gone, then the dresses, then the books...

What do we hold on to, really? 

Memories? A time of half-imagined simplicity and innocence, joy?

Or, as all marketers know, to possibility. 

Everything was possible. 

Soon, it will be a fantastical dreamscape with no relationship to reality... but it will still serve its purpose. 

Happiness, in any way you can get it... still works. 

Can DeFi solve the Fermi Paradox?

 For a long time, I was convinced the Fermi Paradox is a proof of an inescapable trap. 

• Individuals evolutionarily select for one of two survival criteria - individual strength, or individual adaptability. 
• Strength - the T-Rex strategy - meant you would get so big and powerful nothing could kill you. You were the apex predator, top of the food chain, effectively indestructible for all other organisms on the planet - as long as nothing changed. 
• There are some examples to think about, at this stage. Sharks and crocodiles have barely changed for epochs, because their environments barely did. They were perfectly adapted to dominate their space, and as long as their world remained the same, so did they. That's basic evolution. 
• Adaptability meant you were pretty much a tasty snack for almost everyone, but you could hide in physical and/or evolutionary niches so well you would always be around. 
• Then came a third strategy - pack strength. Individually you may be a tasty snack, but in a group, you had better resources and surpluses than any individual, even the most powerful. A lone-wolf warrior in the prime of life could die of a cold, but an aging, toothless, blind matriarch of a clan would survive that same winter. 
• And then there came societal adaptability, rules and norms, the oral tradition and the written word that would permanently embed individual insight into social structure. You no longer had to invent a survival strategy, your ancestors had already done the hard work. 

Result - we rewrote the food chain. We became gods on the earth, armed with fire and bow, genetics and antibiotics. No animal could touch us, no calamity could destroy us. We spread everywhere. A tiger may eat a few of us, and would be hunted down and exterminated. A plague could wipe out a chunk of the population, but would get eradicated soon after. Droughts, floods. wildfires, volcanoes, even an ice age? We migrate. 

The trouble is, that level of competency comes with ownership of power that's not very controllable. We're riding a tiger, engaged in a perpetual arms race with the only remaining threat - ourselves - and as long as even one has more power and money than another, the second can lose everything. 

And that's where ownership comes in, and with ownership, the need to control resources to the advantage of yourself and the disadvantage of someone else. 

Money is like the ultimate expression of power. As long as everyone believes in it - and everyone does - it can get you anything you want, apart from a very nebulous individual self-actualization part that the rest of the world couldn't care less about. 

And so you have the drive towards centralization. And centralization brings with it, short-term goals. 

Consider - if you are rich, do you care that your industry is polluting a lake to the point that in 25 years, it is undrinkable poison? No. You know you can always go to another lake. And if you are too poor to move, can you stop the pollution either? No. You don't have the resources for this fight. 

Democracy tries to fix this, but it's a flawed system. It depends on access to information to work. If everyone knows the truth - and understands it - and accepts it - and reacts rationally - then, great. 

But truth is a little harder to handle than you think. Even if it can't be bought and sold, it can be twisted, out-shouted, ignored, or just buried under a mountain of eminently purchasable lies.

And so the middlemen, the elite, the resource holders and the information brokers flourish and grow, the rich get richer and wealth and power continues to concentrate.

The world continues to get poisoned, climate change accelerates, we squabble over ashes in a burning house, and the Right Thing - even if accepted - never reaches the Right Now stage.  

And I always used to think, this is it. It's a perfect trap. The only way to get out is to give up something today for a stranger to benefit tomorrow. Altruism will always lose majority to selfishness. 

This is what happens to every civilization. You reach the peak of global dominance, but without a common enemy to unite against, you fight one another. Interstellar distances are too huge to find an antagonist in the void. Each other is all that's left left, so each other we claw and tear until one all-powerful weapon falls in the hands of a short-sighted fool, and it's the reset button, ad infinitum. 

And as each civilization reaches the edge of Karashdev I, they inevitably trigger some global catastrophe that would wipe them out. 

And that is the Great Silence. 

Now, DeFi.

I'm not saying cryptocurrency can save the world - but the idea of it is something new. Something that can't be shut down, confiscated, restricted, controlled. Something that can't be limited. An economic tool that anyone can own - truly own - and the only way to destroy it is to destroy the world. 

Sure, there will be ways all of the above can happen - crypto can be stolen, compromised, snowed under, etc, etc - but the idea of it is something interesting. 

Decentralization of economy. Decentralization of computing resources and storage. Web 3.0, back to the original concept of a democratized world without power centers and owners. 

It'll be interesting to see where this goes.

More ways than one. 

  

Everything matters.

Sometimes you look back and imagine you had a time machine. You'd get in, armed with all you know today (and possibly a judiciously selected almanac or a stack of financial times or two) leap back and make the life you always wanted, correct your mistakes, seize all the opportunities.

It's tempting, isn't it?

See, you know those were mistakes with the benefit of hindsight. If you never made them to begin with... would you have learned from them? Or would every mistake fixed fade out a piece of your memory, like Marty fading from his photo, so you're all set to repeat it a few days / weeks later?

You'd be frantically racing back in time again and again and again, fixing mistakes that keep happening, over and over, wondering why your brilliant plan isn't working, while paradoxes fill your history and your memory turns into swiss cheese.

On the other hand... you can justify. What if you don't fix anything? After all, those were your decisions, even if wrong, and they defined who you are today. You proudly own your errors, stand by your stumbles, proud to be the product of choice...

But what if you've already been back, once, twice, more times?

The One That Got Away is the one you are married to now - will you remember her as TOTGA? The children you decided to have, or didn't. The jobs you stayed in, or quit. The investments made or passed over. Decisions made one way, or another.

What you remember is always going to be the product of those choices, minus the memories made by not taking those other choices.

Doing X produces A.

Doing Y produces B.

You can only do one action, and get that one outcome.

The other will be the road not taken. 

Do X, yearn for B. Vice versa, ad infinitum.

Regret not finding B. Lie awake nights, cursing yourself. Swearing to never repeat that. Leaping at the chance to do the next Y1 that looks like it will get you B1. On and on and on...

Until here you stand today.

Proud.

Looking back at A and B1 as the grand achievements of your life.

Idly lost in reverie - what if B, or A1 had happened instead? Sad? Angry? Drowning in pain, or overwhelmed with relief?

But... A or B don't matter in themselves. They're just how you feel about them. It doesn't matter what they were, you'd feel about them the same way.

So... does anything matter, then? Because whatever you do, it matters. Whatever you don't do, it matters just the same.

Everything matters.

My own private Narnia

So, do you believe in magic?

There are places that exist. Maybe they were real once, maybe they only live in the memories I have of them, selected, curated, gaps filled in with imagination and dreams, but who's to say what makes them any less real or false than objective, empirical reality?

There is a place like that I'm especially feeling tonight. A place of dreams, of wild imagination that  became reality before the eyes of their dreamers, came out into the real world and took shape and form, grew and flourished far beyond what they had hoped, beyond what they could have dared to believe.

Silicon Valley is a fascinating story, a myth made flesh, a world of games, stories, vivid, crazy, reckless, explosive magic. A place and time that changed the world. I showed us that you can dare to dream, and make new realities the way you wanted.

And yes, it comes with it's share of corruption, of cancer in it's bones and blood slowly blackening the golden sunshine with darkness and sleaze, with greed and lust and envy, a place where a thousand dreams died for every that lived...

But I'm not talking about the semiconductor factories, the garage inventors, the gamers and hackers and cyberspace architects and explorers, even the coders of the dotcom era or the VCs of the last decade past.

For me, it's always going to be a proof of concept, a place even in it's hard, expensive, gentrified avatar, with it's rents and commutes and affectations and cut-throat capitalism, it's still going to be a place where despite itself it can be a place where magic can happen. Maybe not the big, grand magics of overnight millions and free information and universal connectivity and equality, but small ones. Little things that are so huge compared to the realities of other places. Air, water, food. Interests. A chance to explore, to try. Stories and struggles. Not the destinations reached and prizes won, but a place full of the magic of trying, of running, of the journey.

And when you come out of the wardrobe back into your world, even as the past fades like a dream you cannot talk about, and you get back to the grind, you come back changed. You come back touched by the magic, fey, a little different, marked by a sunshine few understand. And even if you can never return - physically, temporally - you will always remember it as your own experience of it, not so much for what it was, but in what you felt there, what it did to you, how it made you feel. How it changed you.

And that's what makes it a magic place. Something that's yours alone, something unexplainable, intangible, yet so, so real.

My own private Narnia.