alt Hacker NewsI always feel this, but your writing is quite challenging—not because of the readability, but because the content itself is deeply complex for me to grasp.
I spent about two hours reading your writings. Your arguments, such as those regarding the Taiwanese digital democracy movement and how to break the endless cycle of centralization and decentralization, are quite profound. If I were to summarize what you are trying to tell me, it seems to boil down to: "Your previous point was too generalized, and the attempt itself [at building alternatives] should not be dismissed."
Also, your Romance of the Three Kingdoms analogy confirms we are definitely both East Asians: "The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide."
Overall, if I have understood your work correctly, your core message is this: while historical attempts at universalism or a 'new order' may eventually turn into new centralized powers, we shouldn't look at them only through that cynical lens. Instead, we must simply remain constantly vigilant.
I hope I understood you correctly.
Hey. It's hard not to be a bit envious of how many points you, jdw, can rack up with one or two comments while I languish at negative :)
No need to learn nuance, you seem to be doing better than most of the natives here just by being yourself (with the help of modern tools)
I just wanted to get more people to read the vitalik.eth articles along with me. Hope you got something out of 2hours! I had been nibbling at them and steeping in their diagrams for weeks, your centralisation comments provoked me (in a good way)
Vitaliy Buterin and Balaji Srinivasan are both based in SEAsia, Audrey Tang is in Taiwan, Glen Weyl from California is the only Westerner--- but UCBerkeley is like 80% East Asians? Surely they also know about the lore.
I don't know if "staying vigilant" is the mood I was going for. Maybe "being aware of emerging centralising entities and be prepared to engage fruitfully with them"?
These days, "emerging centralising entities" might even be old programming languages like APL that have become popular again..
In the context of the links above, such entities need to provide an "exit option" in order to gain wider traction. For example, APL is clearly an escape from C-like syntax, but there might be new directions that that such "array languages" can take from Python or even natural language:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16247365