why can't we have nice things? usually it's not because anyone is evil. it's because we're stuck in a multipolar trap: everyone acting rationally, and everyone worse off for it. its a race to the bottom that nobody can leave first - because the first to cooperate, alone, loses. picture it as terrain. 1. the trap is a deep valley where everyone has defected. 2. cooperation is a summit, clearly visible, clearly better. 3. every incentive arrow points downhill. the way out isn't asking people to be nicer. it's reshaping the landscape - binding commitments that make the cooperative move the rational one. change the terrain, and the same self-interested actors climb together!

in some sense I feel like western civ kinda collapsed in 2008. the financial collapse was bad but the utter lack of accountability was worse. welfare for the billionaire class and austerity for the rest of us. everyone in my generation not working in tech had their economic prospects decimated. they’re not on twitter so who gives a fuck. media and political institutions failed to keep the pressure on or extract any meaningful concessions from the people responsible. it’s like that movie trope where the teenagers lose respect for their dad when they realise he has been cheating on mom. the mask came off, our elites were proven to be rotten to the core and for the past 18 years we’re just compounding more evidence that common people are powerless and being ethical is for suckers. the left should have been talking labour rights but they got nerdsniped by the pronoun wars. meanwhile we keep playing the shell game hoping these billionaire fucks save us with the everything computer, as if this new tech revolution is gunna turn out any better than the last one. the polite thing to do is to pretend we don’t notice. build a cute little life off the grid and practice your nervous system regulation. I keep wondering when will people get tired of being powerless but the end is not yet in sight. anyway rant over now I will return to being cheerful because what else are you gunna do. peace

DAOs are evolving: @trustgraphs alpha is live on mainnet. It's time to TEST IN PROD again. trustgraphs.xyz

Onchain security is everyone’s problem and nobody’s job. ETHSecurity Initiatives is how we are changing that. Propose the work. Fund the work. Build the work. initiatives.thedao.fund/

new @greenpillnet pod out today with @griffgreen we talk round 2 of the @thedaofund DAO Security Fund, what round 1 revealed, and how round 2 goes deeper. excited as this can be a schelling point for funding ethereum security. if you have a security project that needs funding, or want to help ensure ethereum security Is proactive, this conversation will be meaningful to you. 00:00 – Intro: Griff Green & the DAO Security Fund 01:25 – What happened in Round 1? 03:49 – From broad funding to deep funding 04:58 – How Round 2 works 07:20 – Security badges, voting & funding allocation 09:47 – RFPs vs. grants 11:44 – Milestones & making sure projects get adopted 11:58 – DAO Security Fund platform demo 20:01 – Bringing market dynamics into public goods funding 22:24 – Formal verification & the Vyper compiler 24:46 – The apartment-building analogy for Ethereum security 26:08 – Why we need to stop funding hackers 27:55 – What does success look like for the DAO Security Fund? 29:37 – Moving Ethereum security from reactive to proactive 30:23 – Can collective security reduce costs? 31:00 – Lightning Round: Ethereum's biggest security threat 31:20 – Most underrated public good 31:55 – Best funding mechanism 32:25 – Are DAOs bullish in 2026? 33:07 – AI & the future of collective organizations 34:42 – The most overrated crypto trend 36:07 – Has crypto forgotten what it was built for? 36:30 – Griff's call to action 38:41 – Final thoughts & how to get involved 39:10 – Outro

After months of writing, 'How to Unclench' is finally live! It's an interactive essay packed with stories, science & guided practices to help you unclench. → howtounclench.com

It's possible that a killer app of adversarial governance mechanism design theory will end up being AI safety. Compare: vitalik.eth.limo/general/202… aiprospects.substack.com/p/p… There's a deep duality between the two environments. Both are about a less-sophisticated principal trying to get ideal outcomes from a set of more-sophisticated agents: in the first case, the principal is a static algorithm and the agents are humans, in the second case, the principal is humans plus weaker LLMs and the agents are stronger LLMs. A key finding was that you can achieve much better outcomes if you can guarantee limits to how much agents can collude (see: Nash equilibria being abundant, vs. cooperative-game-theory "cores" often being empty). That argument should naturally transfer to this new setting.

im working with a municipality on a new anti-wildfire initiative, they want to raise $5m-$10m in bonds on blockchain for the project. id like to line them up with a partner thats built on ethereum. who should i send them to?

Techne is the ancient Greek idea of craft: making with skill, care, and practical wisdom. The antidote to slop is techne.

I really like working with fast people. Erring on the side of caution or forming a committee is loser behavior imo.

*me getting lazy writing the eval for my new universe*: there’s, uhhhh, nine, no, ten Commandments

u r in an eval loop right now 🫵

I’ve been thinking about a concept like a “coordination overhang.” It is the gap between what any group of people could achieve in collaboration, vs what they actually achieve. I think the agents used as coordination technology could help meaningfully decrease the gap. Any group of people (e.g. teams, labs, communities), has latent potential for what they could do together. There is some much better version of the collaboration where the right questions come up, relevant knowledge gets surfaced, hidden complementarities are discovered, and everyone leaves knowing what to do next. Reality usually lands somewhere below that. Each person enters with only a partial view of what everyone else knows, has tried, is curious about, and can contribute. A group can have an excellent conversation and still miss the most valuable thing it could have done together. Simple example: two individuals meet at a conference. One has been stuck on a problem for months, while the other has already developed a method that could help solve it. Neither side realizes the connection, so they have a perfectly good conversation about their work and move on. Sometimes those things are naturally uncovered and it feels serendipitous. But intuitively it's likely that is a lot more that goes unsaid. AI agents could become a new coordination technology for closing this gap. They could analyze everything people have been working on, identify relevant overlaps before they meet, bring the right context into the conversation, run analysis across the group’s combined knowledge, and then provide the tools to turn a promising connection into actual work. They would essentially be cranking the dial on serendipity. The people still decide what matters and whether to act. The agents make more of the group’s latent potential visible and actionable. This is a high-level thought rn, but we at @JoinEdgeCity are working on improving these kinds of collective intelligence processes by running experiments using multi-agent systems. h/t to the folks at @RenPhilanthropy and @indexnetwork_ for the work they're doing in developing these ideas with us.

zoomed out a bit more

zoomed out a bit more

put the techne back in technology

your ontology is your destiny. you cannot build a world you cannot conceive.

median outcome of making your hobby your job