Categories
Internet Culture Startups

Day 1421 and Culture Clashes

I sit in between half a dozen different community nodes thanks to my interests in open source software, decentralization, crypto, and autonomous systems technology.

This set of interest covers a lot of ground from ecosystem level collaboration in financial organizations like DAOs and to player versus AI agents coordination to peripheral control of drones and machinery.

Many different demographics are attracted to these frontiers for different reasons. Hackers have a very different mentality than mercenary technologists looking for maximum margin.

Open source has traditionally struggled more from a lack of financialization than from an obsession with it. Which seems less true in the crypto era than in previous more academic and defense oriented eras.

There are classic open source business models and anyone with age and experience in startups has some opinions which I leave as an exercise to the reader. They occasionally fail and an open core loses more than they’d like to professional services. I am writing on WordPress.

One strange aspect of what drives these frontier spaces to interact is that depending on how much leverage you find in building a network you may have different incentives than other builders and users. Expanding out to scaled use may drive a lot more value than the resources required. How the surplus gets divided is always contentious.

For some, the most crucial cultural goals is expanding access to automation and ripping away as many of the services and middle men as is feasible.

Decentralized systems make it harder for middle men to maintain monopolies. Thats its own goal for true believers. For others the goal massive financialization that drives network connectivity is the benefit. Self interest driving common goals is perfectly acceptable.

As I watch the current season of hyper self interested memecoin cryptomania engage with the academic utopian open source artificial intelligence community, I am reminded of so many of the classic issues we have in financing and sharing in the spoils of common infrastructure. Who benefits is a question we should all be asking more regularly