Nathan Schneider
Great summary by @molly0xfff about why you don't need to read a book by an investor whose company helped ruin the internet about how his investments will save the internet.
Review: Chris Dixon's Read Write Own https://www.citationneeded.news/review-read-write-own-by-chris-dixon/
Nathan Schneider
@mpanhans I agree on open source and open stuff. I listened to the whole Bankless interview, and agreed with a lot of it, especially the open source ethos and the emphasis on protocols. I even think blockchains are an important innovation, as I argue in my book.
But nowhere there, and apparently in the book, is there any acknowledgement that the single most centralizing force in both Web2 and Web3 is venture capital. Regardless of the tech stack, that is the most important norm to disrupt.
Matt Panhans
@ntnsndr I haven't read the Dixon book but this seems too critical. I've heard interviews and he often talks about the importance of open source, decentralization, and community governance. He's well read in history and philosophy of science and technology. My guess is he would be really into your ideas on internet democracy and platform cooperativism.
Nathan Schneider
@mpanhans I agree. No one model is itself evil. The problem is the over-reliance on VC as the sole path.
And also the reminder that this whole thing has happened before. Long before Bluesky, early Twitter was exploring federation at the very start. The VCs shut it down because they wanted capture. Now the (same) VCs want protocols because they offer a bigger surface to capture than platforms.
The harms of VC could be much mitigated if there were another other options in town.
Matt Panhans
@adx @ntnsndr I see your points. I've come to the view that things like private equity and venture capital are often bad, but not always purely bad. Brendan Ballou's book Plunder shows how PE does have some success stories, like keeping Barnes and Noble as a going concern. If VC provides some projects enough resources to take on Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Hollywood IP, big telecomm, and replace them with things more open and decentralized, I'm interested to see how it goes.
Anthony
@mpanhans @ntnsndr The problem is that he get's the problems correct, but falls into the techno-capitalist only the right technologies with the right companies can fix it all. So while bemoaning "big tech," he just wants a different "big tech."
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