~ Welcome to #thebalance 44 ~
We talk a lot about the increasingly digital world we live in around here so be sure to scroll by #otherthings on your way down for my commentary on the virtual reality experience I had this past weekend (thanks Jeff!!).
P.S. For the first time in many months, I will be back in NYC all week next week. Get in touch if you’d like to grab a social distance coffee with me!
❤️ Likes, shares, and ‘my contacts’ adds are appreciated! It helps others discover what they have been missing out on while ensuring gmail doesn’t junk this thing either :)
⬇️ #thinkingthings, #followerthings, and #otherthings ⬇️
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🤔🤔 #thinkingthings
🟥 >>>> Citizenship as just rent?
This hits on deeply relevant themes (immigration, inequality, patriotism, digital nomad/remote work) and puts it in a perspective I hadn’t quite viewed these topics from before - especially due to the fact that I am an American and no doubt take the status quo this country has afforded me for granted at times…
Nonetheless, I think the below commentary offers some clues on where citizenship might be headed in an increasingly digital, attention short, globalist world… as an immediate example, look no further than what Estonia is doing with its e-residency program. Pretty fascinating stuff: “Estonia is the first country to offer e-Residency, a government-issued digital identity and status that provides access to Estonia’s transparent digital business environment. E-Residency allows digital entrepreneurs to manage business from anywhere, entirely online.”
The modern idea of citizenship, after the French Revolution, is based on two pillars: 1) voluntary or compulsive participation in the political life of a community, 2) the physical “grounding” in that political community. The participation means, in democratic settings, that a citizen has a voice, the right to air opinions, to vote for those who represent or lead him, and to be himself elected. In non-democratic settings, political participation is often not only desirable but is required: citizens of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Francoist Spain were encouraged, or where necessary compelled, to take part in mass public celebrations of the state whose citizens they were.
“Groundness” means that citizens live in own countries (as their political participation in the affairs of the country implies), earn most of their income in own country, and spend most of it domestically.
The growth of the welfare state in the second half of the 20th century, in the West and in the communist countries of Eastern Europe, has added another facet to citizenship: the right to a number of benefits, from pensions to unemployment benefits that are available only to contributors (i.e. citizens who work in their countries) or to citizens as such without any contributory quid pro quo (as, for example, family allowances or social assistance).
The existence of the welfare state in a world of enormous income differences between the countries has drawn a wedge between citizens of rich countries that enjoy these benefits and citizens of poor countries that do not. It has created a “citizenship rent” for those who are lucky to be citizens of the rich countries; and “citizenship penalty” for others.
In fact, around 60% of our lifetime incomes is determined by country of citizenship.
In a globalized world composed of countries with vastly unequal mean incomes citizenship has thus acquired an enormous, and well appreciated, economic value.
But while the citizenship rent element has been reinforced in the modern globalized capitalism, the other two pillars of citizenship (political participation and groundness) have been radically weakened. Citizenship has thus been effectively reduced to financial rent alone.
Groundness is still common among many citizens. But its importance fades as people move permanently or for long periods of time to other countries.
As they move to other countries they work there, make income there, spend money there, and their financial sustenance gets “delinked” from their country of citizenship. All sources of income can become degrounded: both those of labor and capital.
Fully globalized country may be such that its capital income comes from investments in foreign lands, its labor income from remittances sent by its workers abroad, and most of its citizens be living abroad—and yet receiving social and other benefits of citizenship.
Political participation in modern capitalism also wanes. With a much more competitive society where one’s success is measured in terms of economic power (wealth), people do not have enough free time or interest to be the idealized citizens concerned with the political life of their city or nation. Hard work for money takes most of their time. The rest of the waking time is taken by social media, entertainment, family chores, or meetings with friends. Under normal circumstances, time that they can devote to political issues is minimal. This is not the product of apathy only, but of busyness.
The decline in political participation and increasing de-groundness imply that the two modern-era pillars of citizenship have largely been eroded.
The only remaining meaning of citizenship is the stream of income and advantages that one receives if lucky to have been born or become citizen of a rich nation. Citizenship has become an “ideal” category, a right devoid from the need to be physically present in own country or to be interested in it: it physically incarnated in a script, a passport or in an ID; it is a simple physical proof that one can aspire to its manifold advantages.
Countries that sell citizenship, from EU members to the small Caribbean nations, do not make a mistake. Nor do their purchasers do. No one expects the new citizens to either live much of their time in their new countries (Chinese and Russians who buy Portuguese citizenship are required to spend there one week per year), nor to participate in its social life. Not even to know the language, much less history. Countries are exchanging an ideal category (citizenship) that provides a set of rights over time against an amount of money now, equal to the net present value of the bundle of these future advantages.
The fact that citizenship has become a Polanyian “fictitious commodity” has several implications:
1) we must move from the binary version of citizen-no citizens by introducing more intermediary categories distinguished by the amounts of rights and duties they provide (as indeed is already happening with permanent residents who are not fully-fledged citizens).
2) migration can be seen as one of these intermediate positions that do not automatically lead to full citizenship.
3) we should reconsider the wisdom of giving electoral rights to people who do not live in a country for whose leaders they vote, and who hence neither benefit nor suffer from the choices they make.
🟥 >>>> Entropy Theory
A semi-long essay from one of my new favorite newsletters, Not Boring by Packy McCormick. He hits on an interesting concept this week: entropy (which we have covered before in a differenct context - the ‘tendency toward complexity’ concept that I am a big fan of and am also practicing - in the form of aggregation - with the build out of my company in FinTech), and how it relate to markets.\
Click the above link if you want to read the essay in its entirety, for now I include snippets and pictures that resonated:
Like the universe, the market also gets messier and more chaotic all the time.
Every industry is on a parallel journey of increasing, accelerating entropy. New tools create more optionality. More choice, speed, and flexibility create more chaos, which in turn creates opportunities for companies to capture value by temporarily bringing order to the ever-increasing entropy.
Entropy Theory explains industry evolution as a story of ever-increasing chaos and suggests that the most successful businesses are those that use the latest technology to wrangle that chaos, until entropic forces unleash the next set of opportunities.
Entropy Theory explains global progress, industry trends, and company success and failure.
It adds a directional vector to Jim Barksdale’s oft-repeated quote: “There’s only two ways I know to make money: bundling and unbundling.”
Bundling and unbundling is Sisyphean -- bundle, unbundle, start over again, repeat. Ever-increasing entropy gives work verve. We’re not just bundling and unbundling, but unleashing energy, organizing it, and then unleashing new energy on the next thing.
Entropy Theory explains Aggregation Theory, two long-term industry trends, one successful company, and one failure:
Aggregation. Aggregators like Google, Facebook, and Uber succeed by wrangling the supply entropy created by the internet for consumers.
Office Real Estate. The history of the office - from government-owned to remote work - is the history of increasing entropy.
Employment. The rise of One Person Businesses is the natural progression of increasing employment entropy.
Spotify. Spotify wrangled music industry entropy created by the internet and file-sharing, and is running the Entropy Wrangler playbook again on podcasts.
Quibi. Quibi’s failure can be explained by its inability to realize how entropic short-form, mobile entertainment creation has become.
We should be able to predict that more entropic outcomes are more likely than less entropic ones over time, and that valuable companies will be created that bring order to the chaos.
Instead of going back to one office for one company post-COVID, employees are likely to work remotely and even for more than one company at the same time. Short office / long tools that facilitate remote collaboration and multi-company employment.
Education will become more a la carte. The best students won’t get a degree from one school. Instead, they’ll study with the best professors from across the world and combine the disparate credits into one degree. This presents opportunities for new forms of credentialing and ways of matching the right students with the right teachers.
🟥 >>>> GPT-3 - you may have seen the news…
You may or may not have seen the tech world abuzzzzzz from something called ‘GPT-3’ that was announced over the last few days by the OpenAI Foundation (I’ve talked about this cool organization in past editions).
Given its significance, lets get you up to speed and help you understand why the hell you should care. To put it simply, this is a big step in artificial intelligence and the pursuit to have freethinking AI (yeaaaah, I know its crazy, but its coming faster than you think).
GPT-3 is not going to hurt you (don’t worry), but it is important – having big advancements in nature language processing open to the public is a positive thing, and building transparency in machine learning research is one of the main reasons that OpenAI exists in the first place.
GPT-3 is a Machine Learning model that generates text. You give it a bit of text related to what you’re trying to generate, and it does the rest.
Machine Learning models let you make predictions based on past data, and generation (creating text) is a special case of predicting things
OpenAI, a non-profit research group, has been working on this model for years – this is the third aptly-named version after GPT and (gasp) GPT-2
The GPT-3 model is trained via few shot learning, an experimental method that seems to be showing promising results in language models
GPT-3 has picked up a lot of buzz for how good it is - it can generate entire published articles, poetry and creative writing, and even code
OpenAI has been working on language models for a while now, and every iteration makes the news. But GPT-3 seems to represent a turning point - it’s like, scary good.
GPT-3 is a language generation model. Machine Learning is just about figuring out relationships – what’s the impact of something on another thing? This is pretty straightforward when you’re tackling structured problems – like predicting housing pricing based on the number of bedrooms – but gets kind of confusing when you move into the realm of language and text. What are ML models doing when they generate text? How does that work?
>>> The easiest way to understand text generation is to think about a really good friend of yours (assuming you have one). At some point if you hang out enough, you get a good feel for their mannerisms, phrasing, and preferred topics of conversation - to the point where you might be able to reliably predict what they’re going to say next (“finishing each other’s sentences”).
That’s exactly how GPT-3 and other models like it work - they learn a lot (I mean, like really a lot) about text, and then based on what they’ve seen so far, predict what’s coming next.
The actual internals of language models are obviously Very Scary and Very Complicated - there’s a reason that most big advancements come from big research teams full of PhDs.
If you are interested in the technical specs, I encourage you to read on…
📲🧑🏽🤝🧑🏻 #followerthings
(semi-related: give my brother Charlie’s blog, Better your Bread, a look, if ESG is of interest!)
📚⏯️🎤 #otherthings
I had my first real experience with Virtual Reality this past weekend, using the Oculus Quest and, man, was it a tripppp. The experience convinced me that this medium is the future of content consumption - particularly if we are forced to quarantine indefinitely.
Of course, the tech is still in its early days (pixel issues/glitches, unwieldy equipment, tired eyes, etc.), but it was still a very surreal experience. No motion sickness for me though, which was great!
I toured the International Space Station (my favorite experience - I almost felt like I was there), went great white shark cage diving, played target practice and hunted zombie eyeballs in a VR maze game (where I was scared and sweaty throughout! 😅) …. not to mention my ‘homebase’ was a dome-home on a mountain (Iceland or Norway I believe) where I had the fireplace going, a library of content to choose from, and house to chill… just like Sims, except me!
The experience left me pondering how we will evolve in the next 5-10 years using mediums like these to better replicate human connection/interaction in an increasingly digital world. With the COVID-induced acceleration of our digital future already well underway… people will crave connection without actually being ‘there’ and I can definitely see VR as the primary tool/medium to accomplish that.
As an aside, I came across this fascinating ~4 minute video about the creation of PHAROS, Donald Glover’s (aka Childish Gambino) interactive, multi-sensory concert series (which used VR technology to make it a reality) tour that he did a a couple exclusive locations (in the physical world) last year.. Glover’s innovative concert experience coupled with Travis Scott’s Astroworld concert on Fortnite is an early, yet rapidly evolving, indication on what the future of our experiences might just look like.
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Stay safe out there. Peace and love to all y’all.
Curiously,
-Block
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About me:
My friends call me Block. Minnesota born & raised, I now live and work in New York City.
I am endlessly curious and blissfully dissatisfied. I have a passion for new ideas, obsessed with all things technology, and am always seeking to broaden my perspective while striving for balance, of course.
I am an open finance enthusiast, futurist, investor, entrepreneur, builder, advisor, life long learner, hockey player, traveler, podcast addict, hip-hop head, e-newsletter junkie, event planner, and comedic-short producer. Follow me on Twitter here and Instagram here.
“Find a question that makes the world interesting.” - Paul Graham
About #thebalance:
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