Chris Dixon thread on Web 3.0: “Web 1 (roughly 1990-2005) was about open protocols that were decentralized and community-governed. Most of the value accrued to the edges of the network — users and builders...Web 2 (roughly 2005-2020) was about siloed, centralized services run by corporations. Most of the value accrued to a handful of companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook...We are now at the beginning of the Web 3 era, which combines the decentralized, community-governed ethos of Web 1 with the advanced, modern functionality of Web 2...Web 3 is the internet owned by the builders and users, orchestrated with tokens.”
Atanu Dey: “Discrimination by the state is odious, immoral, repugnant and uncivilized. People must have the freedom to discriminate for or against anyone or any group. But a civilized modern state treats all citizens equally. Private citizens and groups have freedoms that the state and its functionaries don’t — and must not — have. The state is a reflection of the people who constitute society. Only if the people approve of state discrimination would the state discriminate. I think it is shameful that Indians tolerate, even approve of, discrimination. Indian society is not civilized. All societies have discriminated against others in the past but most have progressed in the modern age. The unpleasant fact is that India is still stuck in an uncivilized past.”
WSJ reviews Calvin Coolidge’s autobiography. He was US President for 5 1/2 years in the 1920s. “The book’s finest passage appears in its penultimate chapter, mundanely titled “Some of the Duties of the President.” The president must remember at all times, he writes, that he is “dealing with two different minds.” The first is the “mind of the country,” desiring the nation’s welfare but remaining “unorganized, formless, and inarticulate.” The other is the “political mind”: “a strange mixture of vanity and timidity, of an obsequious attitude at one time and a delusion of grandeur at another time, of the most selfish preferment combined with the most sacrificing patriotism. The political mind is the product of men in public life who have been twice spoiled. They have been spoiled with praise and they have been spoiled with abuse. With them nothing is natural, everything is artificial.””
