Felix Notes

The more I care about something, the less I tolerate the possibility of changing incentives of someone with power over the things supply chain

2 min read

  • Because Our brains try to minimise surprisal we aim to rely on robust systems to meet our core needs and wants. Our more plainly: People don’t want to be disrupted.
  • I don’t care about the how (it works in the background), I care about the what (I experience).
  • Example: Social media
    • I care about my friends and want to stay connected.
    • I care about status and want to appear clever to people I admire.
    • I want to learn useful skills and live a better life.
  • Platforms like instagram or twitter bundle what I care about (an interface for connecting with friends or bragging online to strangers, a frictionless onboarding flow, as little cost as possible) with what I don’t care about (how the above is delivered to me in terms of infrastructure and sofware/protocols).
  • The problem starts if what I care about (the interface) gets worse and worse because incentives are not aligned between me and the company that develops it.
  • Competition keeps incentives between parties on a marketplace aligned.
  • A platform as a bundling of things I care about and things I don’t care about is bad if there is no alternative. A platform as a bundling of things that allows me to switch to better alternatives is not a platform, but a protocol with a client.
  • I want the thing I care about to be as stable as possible and only change with broad consensus of people like me/similar incentives. Bitcoin/Nostr and protocols like them are an ideal ground to rely upon. Only if the majority of users decide a switch is good, it will happen.
  • Thus what we need are Protocols, not platforms.
  • An interesting formulation of this is “Preparing for the organization as a future adversary”. Source: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
  • Another formulation: “self guaranteeing promises”

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