On the way to work yesterday I was listening to the episode of Acquired (check it out!) about Ethereum and the guys were riffing on something and somewhere back around my amygdala I had a flare-up of fairly acute anxiety, verging on fear. "Omigod" I thought "I have no idea what the fuck they are talking about? How can I make a reasonable decision about this stuff?" I successfully turned onto the onramp to I-40 then merged with traffic while I wrestled my demons to the mat, remembering that of course I don't need to understand everything, I just have to fundamentally trust that people will generally do the right thing.
The guys at Acquired are brilliant and incredibly full of energy and enthusiasm and openness, they are generally trustworthy and totally worth listening to (despite their questionable statement that Taylor Swift's net worth of $500 million is "just not a lot of money" -- though I know what they mean). I'm not worried about them.
More broadly, though, what's important is that we generally trust the direction of the world and the intent of those around us. That is harder these days. Between the hyper-fragmentation of the attention universe from the relatively centralized era of Cronkite to the time of Facebook and YouTube when algorithms are crafted to deliver hyper personalized messaging calculated to move us to do specific things (buy this! vote for that! hate those jackasses!). Things Are Falling Apart.
In some sense, we were lulled to sleep by Obama's dulcet tones. An algorithm could scarcely have generated a more appealing avatar for the sweet comforts of the period of late globalized capital. Then Trumputin shook us from our slumber and we are struggling to reconstitute a center in which most of us can believe and trust.
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