I believe:

  1. The introduction of the iPhone represented something like a speciation event for humanity - i.e. that a human with a smartphone is a very different organism from one without. Smartphones with internet access give us different abilities: instant and hyperscale communication, perfect memory, additional senses (GPS, compass, camera) and the ability to draw on almost the sum total of human knowledge and experience instantly. I wrote more on this here: https://www.divydovy.com/2020/05/homo-digitalis/
  2. A number of institutions (by which I mean cultural as well as formal) designed for pre-web humans have proved to be readily disrupted by post-web humanity (see newspapers, taxis and Brexit). This trend of disruption started with institutions which were low down the difficulty/cost spectrum but will continue into institutions which are fundamental to society - education, law, finance, government. As Larry Page put it: "A law can't be right if it's 50 years old, like it's before the Internet..."
  3. This disruption will be far deeper and more fundamental than many realise. The rate of change will accelerate despite the increasing challenges of the disruption as it reaches deeper levels of society. This acceleration will be both a result of the increasing composability of existing digital technologies and the evolution or introduction of individual technologies - particularly AI and crypto. Notable from a hardware perspective will be vastly improved input/output devices such as AR/VR glasses and direct neural input.
  4. The metaverse is a reasonable vision of what this looks like over a longer time frame. Hopefully less dystopian than the Matrix or Ready Player One. It will open up a whole new medium of economic activity - much of it will be greenfield. It should also start replacing some current industries. Seen positively, digital flexing should start at least displacing some real world flexing. I believe this will be net good for humanity and earth.
  5. This disruption's foundations will be human nature itself, along with whatever new technological foundations we can lay.
  6. Such foundations include our hierarchical drive and tribalism. These two forces combined contribute massively to our daily wellbeing and long term sustainability. The hierarchicalism drives us to excessive consumption and waste as the human equivalent of a peacock's feathers (sexual selection being a huge driver of human behaviour and evolution).
  7. Another is our desire to be pioneers and explorers. This instinct drove our expansion out from Africa to colonise the rest of the world but now with very little left in terms of frontier, we have no natural outlet for this drive. I believe this manifests itself negatively as we increasingly turn from 'external enemies' to internal ones leading to increased hierarchicalism and conflict.
  8. The more that projects align with human nature (both the good and bad bits), the better they will do. Our job together is to figure out how to align incentives to mitigate the bad bits and promote the good bits.
  9. People are currently focused on the perceived conflict between humanity and AI and this is a common theme in popular culture. But the reality is that our true struggle is an internal jihad with our own nature. What if we can instead use AI as an ally to help us find an outlet for these negative drives and instead harness them for good? Sports and videogames are great examples of this - both provide frameworks for us to complete/fight/pioneer. With the right design, these games can nudge us towards better outcomes, whether that's learning new skills or knowledge, or becoming more self-aware.
  10. The great convergence is underway. Outlier Ventures' Convergence Ecosystem is one good take on this.
  11. So what this means is that we are at once deconstructing existing institutions and congealing new ones based around core foundations. Why should education be different from work? Why should community participation be different from economic participation? How is a BAYC different from a Bitcoin?
  12. The software we're writing now is literally designing the future of humanity.
  13. That blockchains give us open state as an extension to open source.
  14. That finance as a superficial single value like gdp has failed humanity by creating problematic externalities. These can be addressed by representing more assets as part of a far more connected and open financial system eg carbon credits.
  15. There are some key problems that need solving in crypto still, like:
    1. User experience for new people to onboard
    2. Liquidity for DeFi
    3. Algorithmic stablecoins
    4. Long term DAO participation incentives
    5. Actual rather than theoretical decentralization
    6. Scams and other financial crimes
    7. Cross chain finalisation

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