But we’ve been telling the same story about ARPANET and the web for 25 years, and it isn’t satisfying anymore. It doesn’t help us understand the social internet we have now: It doesn’t explain the emergence of commercial social media, it can’t solve the problems of platformization, and it won’t help us to imagine what …
Web3 advocates promise decentralization on an unprecedented scale. Excessive centralization can stymie coordination and erode freedom, democracy, and economic dynamism—decentralization is supposed to be the remedy. But the term on its own is too vague to be a coherent end goal. Getting the job done takes the right kind of decentralization, and we worry that …
The Web3 Decentralization Debate Is Focused on the Wrong Question Read More »
Last September, the Pentagon’s chief software officer, Nicolas Chaillan, resigned over what he described as the Department of Defense’s poor track record on technological adoption and innovation. Chaillan later suggested that the United States has “no competing fighting chance against China” in the race to develop dual-use technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing, and …
On China, US National Security Experts Fear the Wrong Thing Read More »