A Conversation with Stewart Brand (Devcon4)
Ethereum Foundation2 HN recommenders · recommended in 2 months, 2021–2021
interview · general · evergreen · 2021–2021 on HN
A panel conversation with Stewart Brand at Ethereum's Devcon4, where he recounts his life and work 'hacking civilization' and discusses the role of institutions in decentralization.
Shared in web3 threads as a thoughtful conversation tying Brand's long-view thinking to the decentralization movement.
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4 comments from Hacker News
The status blog has some good posts covering daos+communities/wallets/zkproofs/clients => link link has lots of recordings of talks from their hackathons, their playlists split into different topics link is full of interesting discussions, organises meetups, more big picture discussions of the stuff web3/crypto is playing with I enjoyed this conversation with Stuart Brand (of Whole Earth Catalogue) from a few years ago, it lays the ground of what then became NFTs ▶ this video link is a more technical forum to discuss eips link is a good podcast from some musicians interviewing people in the space. link Dom (creator of Vine) is constantly pushing novel toys on chain, i enjoy his playful approach to making stuff less serious. really though its a "get involved to understand" scene/subculture. if you can ignore the noise of markets/speculation/capitalism its a fun crowd poking around. Theres all sorts from content/identity/scaling/money stuff/games. it feels like playing an mmorpg. at some point it'll hit its eternal september moment but its been really great the past few years.
This looks great, certainly an influential mind. soundtrack by brain eno and a fun distribution model too! First time i have used mirror and it is very nicely made. For those interested in why this is connected to ethereum here is the keynote Stewart gave at devcon a few years ago on the connections between his thinking for the past 50 years and what eth does: ▶ this video
we fail and fail and fail again. then we succeed. feels crazy i have to say this on HN. this place has really changed over the years. what happened to the whole earth quotes. "fail fast fail often" at least Stuart Brand is still daring to explore ▶ this video
People need to be paid to do the work, so they can eat and pay rent. We dont actually live in a post scarcity star trek world. So we find a way that people can be paid yet the information and content can remain free to everyone. It seems like lots of people like this. For some reason some people really really hate that other people are willing to pay to make content freely available to them. The people buying NFTs are footing the bill for you to have that free information. Sure thats a social/cultural status game with a side of speculation, but in turn we have art that is permeating culture rapidly. As he is quoting a distortion of Stuart Brand, maybe we should see what he would think? well here he is at the ethereum devcon in 2018 talking about this stuff. ▶ this video Open minded, interested, exploring, doing what he has done for decades and has been admired by people for, being a hacker!