> The blockchain community, though it contains a few interesting projects, is dominated by obvious scams, and so received an appropriate amount of contempt from traditional finance at Davos, whose scams are much more subtle and institutionalized.
More gold:
> One characteristic of Davos attendees is that they love being called out in a safe and defanged manner, and they love safe and defanged activism.
On journalists:
> The private parties are very good, but journalists are kept out partly because they’re often one-timers, partly because they’re not all that socially skilled, and partly because not many people want spies roaming around their parties looking for lurid details.
the part on traditional banking may sound like a clever soundbite, but the safety of personal banking is actually quite high, at least compared to the crypto space.
And a more general note after perusing the website because the edgy tone seemed somewhat off. While it's quite easy to deride the pretentious Davos crowd, a magazine that describes itself as 'exploring the post liberal future' and puts an oddly positive spin on Chinese internment and policing of minorities, is there some ulterior motive in the reporting here?
Institutionalized, fine, but subtle? I think manipulative is the word for all of this. Short of widespread consciousness to the systems we depend on, the methods at work are manipulation, however deluded the practitioner.
For most of those living under capitalism, freedoms, like that of speech, remain outside of their price range. This is hardly a subtle scam.
If people are trained to not notice something, and they fail to notice it, would you say that the something is subtle? It's an interesting philosophical exercise...
Yes. I think it’s a delicate and important one. For what is the difference in being trained and being institutionalized? Training serves the ability of the individual and institutions serve the ability of the people, so what’s the matter?
I think there is no shortage of paths by which an honest interrogation will conclude that specialization is a benefit in anything but politics, and it’s when the people (Poli translates to “people”) are reduced to services that we have a technocracy. It’s when the people are deprived of the wealth of knowledge and material necessary to be their greater selves, politics and democracy has seen it’s day.
The extent that we have progressed from feudalism is absent in the divisions of power, and ever-present in the displacement of responsibility. For any progress, the societal trajectory is basic as can be: nowadays, the people blame themselves.
> Many are ambivalent about the whole compassion and help the world thing, but will mouth the words if they feel it will increase their chances at belonging in elite social circles
Has the blockchain hype decreased over the last months? It feels we reached peak in 2016/2017. At least within the tech community the number of critics seem growing.
I usually don't follow what happens at WEF since the discussions feel very meta. Some of the people (Michal Dell & Co) are removed from reality and the daily struggle. You won't find any representatives of the precariat at Davos, nevertheless this punchy talk resonated with me:
Blockchain hype has definitely decreased over the past few months and as someone who definitely believes in cryptos future, this is a good thing. Get rid of the ICO scammers so that people can focus on building.
In some respect the people who are showing up to the blockchain party long after it ended are lucky. They could have learned about this stuff in late 2017 and been wiped out.
> The blockchain community, though it contains a few interesting projects, is dominated by obvious scams, and so received an appropriate amount of contempt from traditional finance at Davos, whose scams are much more subtle and institutionalized.
More gold:
> One characteristic of Davos attendees is that they love being called out in a safe and defanged manner, and they love safe and defanged activism.
On journalists:
> The private parties are very good, but journalists are kept out partly because they’re often one-timers, partly because they’re not all that socially skilled, and partly because not many people want spies roaming around their parties looking for lurid details.