Dan Hughes: “[T]he crux of Web 3 for me is that it offers choice. Up to quite recently, you didn’t have a great deal of choice as an individual. The obvious example is in the financial system. Prior to Bitcoin, if you weren’t desirable to the financial system and you couldn’t get a bank account then you were kind of stuck. You were very limited in the choices that you could make around how to manage your money, how you could invest that money, how you could try and maximize the value of that money by starting a business and stuff like that. Now we have a lot of choice in terms of our money. We have Bitcoin and an endless number of other cryptocurrencies, and I can choose to win yield on it, I can lend out to people, I can start a business within the DeFi ecosystem that’s currently evolving. Web 3 is an extension of that choice. If you are content creator, say you’re making videos, then you don’t have a lot of choice of where to go with your content. It’s mainly YouTube or Twitch and once it’s there, you’re at the mercy of their policies. Web 3 allows you to have a lot of choice over a broader spectrum of your life.”
New York mag on Adam Tooze: “What Tooze gives a reader like Williams is not a piercing, singular insight but a sense of rigorous mastery. In March, drawing on work by scientists, work by economists, and context in German politics, he assessed the feasibility of a Russian-energy boycott by Germany. (Conclusion: certainly difficult but perhaps not impossible.) Tooze’s great intellectual power is a gift for synthesis. “He just digests staggering amounts of information,” said Ted Fertik, one of his former Ph.D. students and now a policy strategist. Tooze roves across vast fields of data — historical data, technical data, data about Russian currency reserves, data about the Nazi steel-tube industry — and returns with a reasonably accessible brief in hand. His omnivorously quantitative approach combines with his economic expertise to reveal familiar subjects in new ways.”
Arnold Kling: “In a true liberal order, your status rises with your ability to persuade. In an illiberal order, your status rises with your ability to conform and coerce.”
