If Einstein Had The Internet: An Interview With Balaji Srinivasan

as with everything, the internet is unbundling and then re-bundling. We unbundled songs from CDs and rebundled on playlists. We unbundled articles from newspapers and rebundled them on social feeds. And now like it or not we’re doing that to core societal institutions like dating and marriage. We basically just unbundled all pair mating relationshi... See more

if communism was the redistribution of wealth, wokeness is the redistribution of status. And if communism purported to benefit workers and peasants (but was eventually horrible for them, and everyone), wokeness purports to benefit women and people of color (yet is horrible for us as “people of color”, and for everyone).

I think we’re actually about to enter a Pseudonymous Economy where it won’t even be possible to discriminate against or cancel someone — because they’ll have AI-generated faces, video, audio, accents, and even language.

Yes. But the framework above gives some rationale as to why that is so — why did it start in the public sector, and why did it shift? Because technology no longer favors 20th-century-style centralized states, and new models are now arising. However, there was a period from ~1933-1970 when the centralized US government did the Hoover Dam, the Manhat... See more

Put another way, what’s the most powerful force on earth? In the 1800s, God. In the 1900s, the US military. And by the mid-2000s, encryption.

In the 1800s you wouldn’t steal because God would smite you, in the 1900s you didn’t steal because the State would punish you, but in the 2000s you can’t steal because the Network won’t let you. Either the social network will mob you, or the cryptocurrency network won’t let you steal because you lack the private key, or both.