This is Three Quarks. It’s… a cultural history of the future? A mini-dive into cryptonomics?An anarchist exploration of marketplace dynamics?
There are a lot of publications about how businesses, web 3.0 protocols, crypto projects, investment strategies, and macroeconomic debt cycles all work.
I’m interested in why they work—and why they sometimes fail. What are the principles behind the protocols? How do they reflect social needs and how do they shape our own behavior and desires?
Finance and business are, at their core, performances on a virtual stage. Convince enough people that a gamble on a stock is a good one, and it will become a good one as everyone joins in. Convince enough people that a given technology is the future, and it, too, will become one. The signaling power of any bet affects the actual odds of that bet as well.
In other words, what I’m interested in is not only how we set the stage, but what makes a performance so good that we all end up believing it.
