(2021-11-29) Brander Is Web3 A Petri Dish

Gordon Brander: Is web3 a Petri dish?

Peter Watts, 2001, “Maelstrom”: The term cyberspace lasted a bit longer— but space implies great empty vistas, a luminous galaxy of icons and avatars, a hallucinogenic dreamworld in 48-bit color. No sense of the meatgrinder in cyberspace. No hint of pestilence or predation, creatures with split-second lifespans tearing endlessly at each others' throats… It was only a matter of time before everyone got tired of endlessly reprogramming their minions against each other. Why not just build in some genes, a random number generator or two for variation, and let natural selection do the work? The problem with natural selection in networks is that things change fast. …If you could watch the fornication and predation and speciation without going grand mal from the rate-of-change, you knew there was only one word that really fit: Maelstrom.

How far are we from Maelstrom today?

I have a disturbing sense that this question is the wrong way around. What problem does a case of pinworms solve?

Evolving systems don’t serve any purpose. They propagate. Maybe cryptocurrency is like this? Maybe markets are like this.

An evolutionary system doesn’t need teleology to be viable. It propagates.

Are blockchains a petri dish for something else? Yikes. Eldritch energy. (2021-09-24) Brander Weird Web3 Energy