Adjacent Possible
With the recent talk of reddit being cannibalized by bitcoin technology, I thought it a good time to post something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Could a completely decentralized startup one day rival the likes of Google, Facebook and Amazon?
Within the bitcoin world there’s a common understanding that the most valuable thing about bitcoin is not the monetary currency but the underlying “blockchain” technology that the bitcoin currency runs on. For those unfamiliar, you can check out three heavily-funded ventures creating infrastructure that would enable anyone to program applications on the blockchain that go way beyond monetary currencies: Ethereum,Swarm and Blockstream.
One such application is what’s known as a “Distributed Autonomous Organization,” which is an organization like a corporation, government or NGO, but which has no central leadership and uses internet technologies to organize and function. Examples of DAOs that you are familiar with include open-source software systems like Linux; terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda; communities like Anonymous; and …
Adjacent Possible, Agency, Alternative Institutions, Architecture, Computation, Crowdsourcing, Economics, Emergence, Incentives, Innovation, Investing, Markets, Politics, Socio-technical systems, Superorganism ,
My TED Talk on the Magic of Crowdfunding
…
Adjacent Possible, Alternative Institutions, Cooperation, Crowdsourcing, Economics, Incentives, Investing, Markets, Scarcity / Abundance, Social Entrepreneurship, Social Networks, TED ,
I have a new column on Unreasonable.is, which is where this five part series is published:
- Part 1: The JOBS Act will unlock $30 Trillion in long-term investment capital that can legally be invested in startups and small businesses through crowdfunding portals.
- Part 2: Currently, investors have a stranglehold on the fundraising process. Once the JOBS Act is implemented, there will be a leveling of the playing field in which entrepreneurs and citizen-investors control the process.
- Part 3: Investment crowdfunding enables individuals to invest in companies they are passionate about, and in so doing, outperform professional investors.
- Part 4: “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to come with me and change the world?”
- Part 5: There is a second revolution coming: investing directly in people. When it collides with crowdfunding, this will create a perfect storm….
…
Adjacent Possible, Alternative Institutions, Cooperation, Crowdsourcing, Economics, Happiness, Incentives, Markets, Scarcity / Abundance, Social Capital, Social Entrepreneurship ,
Here are some things I used to believe:
- The power of the free market comes from competition
- If you are nice to someone, you will be rewarded commensurately
- A penny saved is a penny earned
- The more scarce something is the more valuable it is
I no longer believe these statements to be true. To understand why, I’d like to share a little of my journey as an entrepreneur and investor.
In the mid to late ’90s I was working on a startup and getting my feet wet as an angel investor in Silicon Valley. I, like everyone I knew, was an adherent of the Chicago School of Economics and the Efficient Market Hypothesis. One of the mantras of this religion is that
The invisible hand of the marketplace will feed us all, but we have to compete vigorously with one another for it to work its magic.
Signing a Non-Disclosure Agreement on a first date — that’s not just good business, but a moral …
Adjacent Possible, Alternative Institutions, Competition, Cooperation, Economics, Incentives, Investing, Invisible Etiology, Markets, Scarcity / Abundance, Social Capital, Social Entrepreneurship, TED, Trust ,
To get the theory of relativity Einstein held the speed of light constant and let time and space vary.
These days cosmologists are holding the infinity of the universe as constant and letting its density and expansion/contraction rate vary.
In some sense quantum mechanics is about holding the observer constant and letting the physical interpretation vary (particle or wave; position or momentum; exist or not).
What would we get if we held consciousness constant and let the universe vary?…
Adjacent Possible, Causality, Epistemology, Infinity, Invisible Etiology, Quantum, Science 2.0 ,
Complex Adaptive Monetary Policy (CAMP) is, in essence, a reconciliation of Keynes’ top-down view of macroeconomics with Hayek’s bottom up view. The particular details of the proposed policy below are not as important as the recognition of the fundamental forces at play and empirical evidence that we are at a very dangerous chaos point in history. Both Keynes and Hayek have deep truths to tell, and we discount one or the other at our collective peril. For those who want a primer on the great debate, this rap battle sums it up better than any text book could. Now on to the idea…
The fragility of the global financial system (as measured by the US dollar) is a function of the gap between rich and poor. In the past, only a small ruling elite could decide to use capital to purchase all of the following: food/clothing/shelter; savings; insurance; personal free time; investment; starting a business; buying a private jet; leverage/volatility; political influence; fame. Today an …
Adjacent Possible, Alternative Institutions, Asymmetry, Economics, Government, Incentives, Interventions, Non-linearity, Scarcity / Abundance, Social Capital, Stability ,
There’s a scientific paradox in the world of nutrition about what the optimal diet is. A new theory may resolve the paradox. Oh, and help you live forever too.
The majority consensus is the “post-agricultural revolution diet” is best, which says that a majority of your intake should be vegetables and fruits, and that you should severely limit your animal product intake, especially red meats. Some proponents (like T. Colin Cambell of China Study fame) go as far as claiming that a strictly vegan diet is best.
The other camp argues for the “paleo” or “caveman” diet, which says we need to eat what our paleolithic ancestors ate: lots of foods high in animal fat and animal protein, and avoid industrialized grains altogether (some fermented natural grains are fine). Fermented foods in general are encouraged, honoring the fact that before preservation, refrigeration and pasteurization we evolved a symbiosis with bacterias that are critical for our digestion and processing of nutrients.
Both sides agree that processed …
Adjacent Possible, Epidemiology, Evolution, Health, Interventions, Invisible Etiology, Medical Breakthroughs, Non-linearity, Nutrition ,
The following story is true, I’ve just changed the names and told it in parable form. The material numbers and circumstances are roughly accurate, and Alice is a friend of mine who may tell the story herself on video here soon…
A True Story
Alice was feeling particularly poor at a certain time in her life and because of this she was under a lot of stress. Her friend, Bob, was a billionaire many times over and he disliked seeing his friend in pain and so he wrote her a blank check and said, “Alice, whatever amount you cash this for, it will relieve me of the burden of figuring out what to do with it. Will you do me the favor of accepting this gift?” Alice was stunned because she knew she could have cashed the check for $30 Million and Bob would not have missed it at all. And she knew Bob was sincere in what he was saying.
Alice was overwhelmed with …
Adjacent Possible, Dualism, Infinity, Psychology, Scarcity / Abundance, Self-Fullfilling Prophecy, Stability ,
Are you struggling to pay for your food/home/whatever, or do you know someone who is?
If you can convince someone you are a superstar, there’s a way out. But if you are having trouble making that case, then maybe you’d consider becoming a Social Capital Uncontractor. What’s that, you ask? I’m not sure, I’m making this up as I write, you can help…
Here’s my life. I have a large and growing number of projects that I am working on, and an even larger (and more accelerating) number of projects I’d like to begin. The critical bottlneck for me is not money but time. It’s getting so bad that I don’t have time to even think about the management of these projects, let alone manage them. Plus I hate managing projects and it’s definitely not my biggest strength. I’m much better advising and asking questions that make you think differently.
On the other hand I have many friends, colleagues, acquaintances, etc. who are underemployed, by …
Adjacent Possible, Management, Social Capital, Social Entrepreneurship ,
In his eloquent article, Breaking the Galilean Spell (worth reading in its entirety), Stuart Kauffman has given me the words to finally be able to articulate the uneasiness I feel about statistical reasoning in an increasingly interconnected world:
…[Can] we make probability statements about the evolution of the biosphere? No. Consider flipping a coin 10,000 times. It will come up heads about 5,000 times with a binomial distribution. But, critically, note that we knew beforehand all the possible outcomes, all heads, all tails, all 2 to the 10,000 possibilities. Thus we knew what statisticians call “the sample space” of the process, so could construct a probability measure.
Can we construct a probability measure for the evolution of the biosphere into its Adjacent Possible? No. We do not know the sample space!
I won’t belabor the point except to say that I view the increasing irrelevance and danger of statistical reasoning as the essential argument of The Black Swan, the fundamental reason why the …
Adjacent Possible, Interconnectedness, Science 2.0 ,