Skeptics Guide To Crypto, Urban Sprawls, & The Real Twitter Story

Human exodus, multipolar supply chains, European decline & more.

One of the articles shared last week was written by AI. Did you notice?

#1 The Skeptics Guide To Crypto

This is really too long to summarize because it's the length of an entire Bloomberg Business Week magazine....

You're probably not gonna finish it in one sitting.

But you should read it, especially if you're a crypto sceptic.

It breaks down what crypto is and shows where it fits in to the modern financial ecosystem. Here are two quote pulls to set the scene.

"Most people in the US, most days, live in a high-trust world, where it’s easy and reasonable to trust that the intermediaries who run the databases that shape our lives will behave properly. But not everyone everywhere lives like that."

"I'm not a tech person, and I’m not a true believer. But it is worth trying to understand what crypto could mean for the future of the internet, because the implications are sometimes utopian and sometimes dystopian and sometimes just a modestly more efficient base layer for stuff you do anyway."

#2 The Mega Urban Sprawl Forming In West Africa & Why It Matters

This is another long but interesting read. The main takeaway from our perspective is that there's massive growth taking place in African creating a huge urban area. And this area could impact the global economy as we collectively adopt remote work.

"Today, Africa has 1.4 billion people."

"By the end of this century, the UN projects that Africa, which had less than one-tenth of the world’s population in 1950, will be home to 3.9 billion people, or 40% of humanity."

"The question of how African nations manage the fastest urbanisation in human history will certainly affect how many millions of its people seek to stay or leave."

"There is one place above all that should been seen as the centre of this urban transformation. It is a stretch of coastal west Africa that begins in the west with Abidjan, the economic capital of Ivory Coast, and extends 600 miles east – passing through the countries of Ghana, Togo and Benin – before finally arriving at Lagos."

"Recently, this has come to be seen by many experts as the world’s most rapidly urbanising region, a “megalopolis” in the making – that is, a large and densely clustered group of metropolitan centres."

Why is this story important?

Because this area could become a competitive hub across the world as remote work scales globally.

As local job opportunities become scarce due to population surge, locals will look internationally for opportunities. In the past, that meant emigrating elsewhere. But in a world with remote work opportunities, many people will gladly take discounted digital age incomes to stay put.

Remote work + human resource costs will eventually lead many companies to offshore traditionally "white-collar" and "location-dependent" jobs. It will shift work opportunities from the developed world to the developing world. And in the process, create a highly competitive and equalizing force across the global economy.

Said differently: many digital workers (like software developers) may soon be competing for job opportunities with Africans willing to accept half their salary. This is the natural arbitrage that forms from remote work.

The point: watch this region and how they develop. Will digital infrastructure expand to meet the opportunity in West Africa? Or will it stall out?

It's too soon to say.

But as satellite internet scales and becomes affordable, and as decentralized financial infrastructure matures, these raw ingredients could combine with a population hungry for opportunity, dramatically changing the global economy.

#3 Why You Should Pay Attention To Elon Musk & Twitter

Like the hostilities against Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, the attacks on Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter are mostly about influence over massive networks of people. It's about who has power over speech and who has control over the ability to determine what is and isn't acceptable speech.

It's an important topic as we move deeper into the digital age where access to larger networks of people becomes more common.

Should speech (whether true or false) be protected? Should the ability to communicate with global networks be a human right? Should any one person or ideological group be allowed to regulate speech? Should social networks be government regulated? Or are social networks best left to some form of decentralized system?

These questions explain the recent conflicts over social media platforms. The anger towards Musk is about the perceived threat of ideological communities losing influence over these massive social networks.

In plain terms, Musk's acquisition of Twitter is generally perceived by the public as a loss of influence for progressive liberals and a gain for conservatives. ie: What does loss of control of this social network mean for the progressive agenda's ability to influence public opinion? How will this impact their ability to achieve their policy objectives?

And it's within this context that we should view the anger or support of Musk. Either he's viewed as a hate monger for allowing more freedom of speech and protecting trolls and bigots. Or he's a beloved champion of the freedom to say what you want, when you want.

Regardless of the many "reasons" for disliking or liking Musk as the owner of Twitter, it all comes down to ideological control of digitally connected communities.

Have you noticed how this situation has a similar vibe to the "peaceful revolution" of a democratic election cycle? One side is happy at the changeover, and the other side is freaking out.

The added wrinkle in this situation though is that for governments, the private ownership of this "public square" can impact government sovereignty. Ie: the government losses some control when one man or group of people can leverage a social network and operate like an unofficial check on government influence.

ex: Twitter has the ability to fact check officials, like has recently happened to the US President. This has massive implications for a world that previously took everything a President would say as gospel. What does it mean if the population starts second guessing the President?

The bottom line: control over social networks and the ability to exert influence on these networks is a digital fault line. An area of society that's rapidly changing and resulting in conflict between the way things were done and the way things are now being done.

We can expect political parties and ideological communities to battle for control over these networks. All hostilities around platforms like Twitter should be viewed through this lens.

Rapid Fire

Extras

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