Innovation requires a couple of things, one of the things that
it seems to requires decentralization. I don't think it's a coincidence that the Athenians city-states, the Italian city states or even the United States when it was more freeform and less federal government control or hotbeds of innovation because you had lots and lots of competition. People could switch from one state to another if their ideas weren't welcomed and there was a robust competition of ideas. The real diversity that matters is diversity of ideas, not diversity of skin color. And you also need a frontier.
You need something new to explore either an intellectual Frontier. Physical Frontier. We've occupied
California. If anything. Now, California
is the institution, The Establishment? No longer, the front of the Wild West, maybe we need one is space. Maybe we need intellectual ones like
we have in cryptocurrencies and it's the nature of wild West's that. They're always filled with scammers. They're always filled with crimes. They're always filled with very strange and odd things because they tend to attract a weird crowd, but at the same time it is where a lot of the Innovation is going on. I see a lot of lamenting from
All School scientists and entrepreneurs. Where are the new
entrepreneurs? Welcome. I think
Paul Graham tweeted this. The other day. He's the Y combinator founder. Brilliant guy.
He said something along the lines of Steve Jobs.
Today wouldn't be able to get a
job or wouldn't be able to survive at a Silicon Valley company. He'd be cancelled by his own
team. But Steve Jobs today, would be in crypto. He'd be encrypted with all the scammers and all the criminals and all the
weirdos. But at least there he'd have a space to be weird. He'd have a place to be different. You have a place to try new things without having
Having to constantly answer to someone. There is a pendulum between centralization and decentralization. For example, if you look at the crypto
World, centralized
Finance ends up very ossified, you have the government and the Regulators telling you exactly what you can and can't do you
get regulatory capture. Next thing. You know, it
Wall Street is sucking 20% of the profits out of the
economy and crypto can replace that. So you get decentralisation pressure where people can do it in a free-form, programmatic way, but then you end up with a lot more scams and fraud and losses as well and
Times you worry about brigands and robbers in the forest. So you appeal to the king. While the king
builds, a nice, keep the king mints the money. But next thing, you know, the king is debasing, the currency in the king is throwing
people in jail, then some people run off into the forest, then become brigands again because they want their freedom. But now, of course, they're subject to attacks and harassment from their peers. So there's a
natural pendulum, swing that goes on history, between centralization and decentralization.
And I think the Arc of Technology
actually swung the steward centralization, the last
Decade. I'm a big fan of Amazon but it's a very centralized entity. There's a decentralization Arc that is taking place. Even in that industry things like
Shopify that are coming up, enabling
small stores to compete or even local delivery services like doordash their
centralized services, but they're allowing a decentralised army of
restaurants and local shops to compete against centralized
services. So we would see this are going back and forth.
