As the TikTok ban approaches, US users have downloaded RedNote en masse - another Chinese video-focused privacy invasion app. There’s a sensational Bluesky thread describing it. It’s not even a straight up replacement for TikTok:
Please be aware, RedNote is in Mandarin. All servers are in China. It's a female dominated social media platform, sort of a cross between Pinterest and TikTok, that's mostly used by Chinese folks to get restaurant recs and beauty tips.
— Erica Wilkinson (@everywhereerica.bsky.social) January 14, 2025 at 3:50 PM
Some fascinating highlights:
And if you had any doubt as to how tangled things are becoming:
And you're going to have a hard time manufacturing consent for aggressive action against China when 170 million American TikTok Refugees are mutuals with half of the RedNote netizens.
This is absoLUTELY going to have diplomatic ramifications.
— Erica Wilkinson (@everywhereerica.bsky.social) January 14, 2025 at 3:50 PM
This is culture wars bundled with social moving fast bundled with the rate of change turning entire groups’ expectations into roadkill.
This is the original text of a talk I wrote for the Tallinn Digital Summit 2024, which was built around the theme of Securing the Digital Tomorrow.
South Korea and Ukraine are “enhancing cooperation” after North Korea deployed 3,000 troops to Russian training grounds, and will exchange intelligence and expertise.
The world is getting so weirdly tangled.
Any time now we’re going to run into a political multi-ball pinball situation, where you have events ricocheting from bumper to bumper in a chaotic way that gains enough momentum to just keep going by itself.
I’m sure there is some sort of country-equivalent to Dunbar’s number, that is much lower than the one for people given the much added complexity.
If so, soon we are going to run into a level where our monkey brains just can’t process the required levels of intentionality.
Things will start looking random even for those who need to make decisions at state level, even if they have an entire intelligence apparatus at their service, because it becomes harder to assign a probability value to a potential outcome (or trace it back to a cause).
It feels like everything is getting more porous.
I wrote at one point that our brains weren’t web scale, and they definitely are not going to be able to cope with whatever dynamics this engenders.
Teemu brought up on Ep. 33 of The Spelunking Podcast a gripe against crypto that I’ve often heard myself: if crypto is so great, then why hasn’t it achieved more penetration in a decade?
The simple answer is that people forget the speed at which the Internet truly developed.
“An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.”
– Iain M. Banks, Excession
My last piece on where prediction markets break down made me realize I hadn’t written about outside context problems here yet.
Outside Context Problems are the most interesting situation one can encounter, when considering pure innovation.
TL;DR: if you expect an embryonic prediction market to tell you the result of a highly-politicized event when there are perverse incentives at play, and a significant disparity between amount-at-risk and expected outcome, you are going to have a bad time.
Recently got into the topic of data ownership on a conversation with Carey Lening which helped catalyze a few ideas I’ve been kicking around for a while.
In short, data ownership requires layer fungibility.
I’ll elaborate below.
While discussing BlueSky’s custom feeds and composable moderation with a friend, he wondered:
I will need to ponder whether it is viable at scale for millions of users to put in the effort to customize their feeds in a thoughtful way […]
They don’t have to - they only need one person they trust (or are willing to take at face value for a test) to create a feed, or to add a feed to a starter pack.
But more importantly, I realized, any customization someone can do, thoughtful or not, is an improvement. It introduces some delta on the perspective, even while they are within a group, instead of putting them into the monoculture dictated by which news items are more clickbaity and likely to bring ad revenue.
It is the same way with genetics: even small mutations can help diversify the perspective gene pool.
I’ve been somewhat erratic in posting these, but we have a new Spelunking Podcast episode out!
Mika Honkasalo, partner at Equilibrium Ventures, joins us on the latest Spelunking Podcast to discuss our hope that Futarchy can help fix token governance by forcing participants to risk something for their decisions. The discussion varied from liquid vs. illiquid vc investments, if we are in a bull market or seeing bull market behavior from crypto insiders (something we wouldn’t agree on), and wonder if the crypto market will end up dominated by TradFi.
There’s a discussion going on the Topology discord about what systems can be described as peer-to-peer.
I think the whole thing is mostly academic, and too focused on implementation details.
Sure, your particular choice of blockchain might have a peer-to-peer gossip protocol and consensus mechanism, but that’s rather irrelevant if people are mostly using tokens with a freeze authority, isn’t it?
And while Binance Smart Chain might have a P2P protocol for sharing information, that’s entirely irrelevant when it’s completely proof-of-authority and a single institution chooses who gets to validate.
If you are looking to describe a system, describe the kind of things it enables that no other approach does.
That’s something the local-first camp does right, and something other projects should strive for.