#60: Internet shutdowns and the crypto promise

💎 Word gems

In the Dark: Seven years, 60 countries, 935 internet shutdowns: How authoritarian regimes found an off switch for dissent (Rest of World / Peter Guest)

Internet shutdowns might not directly impact you, just like they don’t me. But, they do happen. Rest of World have some terrific reporting looking at how governments use the physical aspect of the internet to to turn it off.

When the Myanmar military wanted the internet turned off in February 2021, soldiers were dispatched to data centers, where they enforced the demand at gunpoint. Sources with knowledge of events at one of the ISPs later confirmed to Rest of World that staff had been physically threatened and equipment had been damaged. Several telecomms companies told Rest of World that while they might raise protests, they don’t really have the power to defy an order given at the barrel of a gun and that they have an obligation to protect their local staff from reprisals.

Tokengated Commerce (Not Boring / Packy McCormick)

I remain skeptical of cryptocurrency, especially NFTs. That said, this piece gives a somewhat compelling argument for how they could end up being used (once we move past this overhyped period). The use case described here isn’t entirely new, but it is a new way of thinking about connecting different web applications together.

One of the yet-to-be-realized opportunities I’m most excited about in web3 is what happens when developers start building products and experiences that adapt to peoples’ wallet inventories. As an example, if I own ReFi NFTs, a site might offer me the option to offset the carbon footprint of my transaction at checkout. That’s a simple one. The real magic will come when developers, armed with new primitives, build millions of new experiences that treat users as both community members and individuals. That’s what Shopify’s helping to build.

Crypto’s Failed Promise (Napkin Math / Evan Armstrong)

An excellent critique of where the utopian crypto promise has gone wrong.

Crypto has failed to achieve its promise because of the flattening of its output. What that means is all the success of crypto gets flattened into one simple metric: IRR. It is that most devilish of metrics, that insidious indicator, the internal rate of return (IRR) that has been the poison at the very heart of Cryptoland. Every single project, from digital art to social organization, is ultimately asked to do one job: enrich its participants.

Do You Have Poster’s Disease? (Gawker / Fran Hoepfner)

I read this and internally kept saying to myself, “yes, this is exactly what’s wrong with online discourse!” only then to realize that this newsletter is exactly a perfect example of poster’s disease.

Make of that what you will.

To have poster’s disease, you have to believe that posting has an action: posting is a job; posting is giving; posting is achieving; posting is a game, intramural or otherwise, that must be won. Poster’s disease is linking a public tragedy to your own non-tragic experience (posting will achieve proximity and perform empathy), or providing commentary on a conversation that you eavesdropped on (posting will show that you lead a public life in which you are a folk hero observing the whims of the common man). Poster’s disease is tweeting at airlines to get better service. Poster’s disease is “today I learned” for the off-Reddit crowd, perusing Wikipedia or IMDB for a fact that can be shared for #knowledgeclout (posting will equate to intelligence, or if not intelligence, then humility in ignorance). Poster’s disease is threading more than two tweets in a row. Poster’s disease is cross-promoting tweets on Instagram. Poster’s disease is sharing a podcast from the New York Times and writing, “This is so important,” so that people know that you listen to the newspaper of record and also have the intellectual authority to decide what is and is not important.

💩 Cool shit

The New Normal - I hate the phrase new normal, but this is a cool site showing how shopping search trends have changed because of COVID.

Eurosong Generator - Tap into the fun and weirdness of Eurovision and create your own entry.

Waterworks.digital - This is a fascinating art project mapping where people have cried.

Oldest Search - Find the oldest search results using this search engine. It’s a simple but cool tool.

HUDS + GUIS - A collection of fictional interfaces. This is right where my sci-fi and tech interface intersect.

The Climate Game - A brilliantly strategic and educational game where you need to reach net zero by 2050.

Super Fungible Token - An NFT “whose contents anyone can edit”.

Race and ethnicity across the nation - CNN have plotted census race and ethnicity data on a map to give a wonderful geographical view.

CIA FOIA Reading Room - A repository of documents publicly released through the Freedom of Information Act.

Share this email with a friend to find out Does Elon Musk Earn more money with a Secret Bitcoin System !