recap

a year in review

Mar 18, 2022

About a year ago—March 15th, 2021—I published my first piece here, a reflection on the very different ways that Bitcoin and Ethereum were being outpaced technologically called “Futures Past.” I had a background as an arts writer long before I became a founder—at some point after college I lived off $500 monthly checks from a publication while I worked on farms for room and board—but I hadn’t published anything in years and had never had a great deal of success. So when I checked Substack’s analytics a week later and saw that 0 people had subscribed, I wasn’t too surprised. I took a walk, smiled, and figured it was a chance to write for myself.

A year later, a lot has changed. I left a four-year relationship and the life and circles I’d known. I moved back to the states from Europe. I entered therapy and started to feel that I was learning to emotionally walk—badly—for the first time in my life. I paused speaking with my remaining family after I found out they’d been lying to me throughout my life. I stepped back from my company that I’ve run for the past seven years. And you’ll see the pattern here: I’ve started learning what it means to set actual boundaries rather than those imposed by my own emotional negligence.

Lest any of that sound grim to those unmired in the horrors of global conflict, let’s add what else happened this past year. I joined a bunch of DAOs, cofounded two more, and ultimately went full-time on one of them to build a gamified governance platform—fingers crossed. I started a collective of web3 angels and became an advisor for two web3 funds. I joined Twitter for the first time. I made many of the best friends I’ve ever had in my life, which above all else is why I’ll always be grateful to web3. And I published a couple dozen articles here, have gotten syndicated by Product Hunt, and have seen the readership climb to over 2,000 people. There’s a good chance you’re one of them, so let me say as sentimentally as possible: thank you. Seriously, thank you.

I am still processing the magnitude of just how much has changed in a year (am I in a… cult? are we all? aren’t we all?), and I owe an apology to anyone who knew me before I started going to therapy. Frankly, I probably owe some apologies to those who have met me after too. It’s a process, learning how to center myself and learning how to uncenter myself—though this is very much the process of writing too. To what degree is it our responsibility to center ourselves in our sentences, to acknowledge our biases, blind spots, and grudges? And to what degree is it our responsibility to uncenter ourselves, to reach beyond the reflexive ramblings and muscle-memory syntax of our everyday speech to try to become—to speak to, to speak for—someone, something more profound than our humdrum daily selves?

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Recently I’ve written less for a variety of reasons, but the main one is that it’s really hard. Getting words to the page is challenging enough, but the real struggle is getting the body to the page. At some level, if you want to write to think, you have to brace yourself for a few inevitable hours of the slowly-dawning realization that whatever you thought you would say is actually unverifiable, incomplete, or incorrect. If you do it well, writing is basically just one long, constant discovery that you are wrong—for reasons that are probably wrong as well.

This is particularly true when it comes to tech. Frankly, the more I learn, the more difficult it becomes for me to have an opinion on anything. With enough knowledge, every case begins to seem like the right one; and with too much knowledge, every case begins to seem wrong. After all, there are no perfect solutions.

So over the past year, I’ve started trading my stances for knowledge—a boring trade, unconducive to the contentious prose I favor, as I increasingly realize I don’t know that I know what the future looks like. “Will modular blockchains beat out monolithic blockchains, or will there be a space for both?” I ask myself, but it’s a question I couldn’t have even phrased a year ago. I don’t know that I could write a piece like “Futures Past” today, not because I think it’s wrong, but because I don’t really know if it’s wrong: if we want to get technical, we could talk about the case that modular blockchains will save eth and a case the case that they’ll kill eth, but there’s a bigger point here. Nuance is the enemy of theses.

Finally, it doesn’t help either that I am throwing these words into a bear market, an emotional bear market where figures across the space are burning out from 24 hour cycles, scams dilute our attention, retail interest is drying, impossible valuations are requiring impossible returns, we muster our last embers of excitement for bored ape french fries, and making money is no longer making money: everyone has learned how to print sovereign currencies without quite figuring out how to monetize them. (Let’s leave aside a global war, rocketing inflation, a burning planet, and a plague—as your host here, I don’t want to be impolite.)

The only point I want to make is that I’m hoping to increasingly use writing as a way to teach myself—to break down difficult concepts to someone as ignorant as I am—and that I’d love you to be along for the ride. And if that means disagreeing or correcting me, all the better. These are, after all, forms of dialogue.

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And in the meantime? I’ll keep using Twitter for threads exploring the social implications of increasingly niche topics in tech. But I’m going to try committing to writing more longer-form pieces again, partly because it’s the only way I can think effectively. If all goes well, I should have three pieces to share next week.

Above all, though, I’ll continue writing because it enables the perfect flywheel for having the kind of conversations that bring me real, lasting joy. I was wrong in thinking I could ever really write “for myself.” Everything I write comes out of dialogues with people I meet, and just as importantly, they enable me to meet others in turn. And this is what I’m most grateful for—getting to have an open conversation with everyone here.

Below, I’ve categorized essays and threads from the past year if there’s anything you’d like to check out, and as always, feedback, pushback, and skepticism is very welcome.

With incredible gratitude for the past year,

David

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