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More benignly, perhaps, these companies influence the choices we make ourselves. Recommendation engines at Amazon and YouTube affect an automated familiarity, gently suggesting offerings they think we’ll like. But don’t discount the significance of that “perhaps.” The economic, political, and cultu…

The challenge of the “knowledge problem” is just one example of a general truth: What we do and don’t know about the social (as opposed to the natural) world is not inherent in its nature, but is itself a function of social constructs. Much of what we can find out about companies, governments, or e…

The blockchain is what we call a "trustless" architecture. It stands in for trust in the absence of more traditional mechanisms like social networks and co-location. It allows cooperation without trust [...] proof-of-work is not a new form of trust, but the abdication of trust altogether as socia…

[...] While coding may sound like a solution to current market woes, in truth, it will only delay the eventual degradation of such digital labor. When everyone can code, those jobs too will go the way of other forms of work--outsourced, undervalued, underpaid, or automated. However, a digital skill…

[...] technology is not the barrier to making a platform; if anything, the advances in technology have made platform-building easier. The barrier is finance. How else but with mountains of money, could a few unelected men [...] command hundreds of programmers and thousands of marketers and lawyers …