GOSPEL Update
We are at a similar inflection point to the electrical revolution — which freed us from the constraint of dietary calorie driven work. The Internet can unlock orders of magnitude greater production of virtual products, just as electricity did physical ones.
A lot has happened since my last newsletter. I was anticipating migrating all my writing over to Pull Request Stories (more on that in a minute). However, I have decided to continue leveraging this platform due to its tight integration with Twitter.
Pull Request Stories
Since my last newsletter, Grok and I laid out a plan for an app called Pull Request Stories (PRS), in the 777 Discord. We then proceeded to build and launch it from scratch. You can think of this as the first app officially in the GOSPEL ecosystem.
The idea is simple: allow developers to easily create companion blog posts to their code contributions.
The benefits of doing this is 3-fold:
- Developers can build an audience which gives them greater wealth, impact, and career prospects.
- Companies and open source projects can gain positive publicity and feed their recruitment pipeline.
- Readers can learn how to become better programmers.
The goal here is to align incentives. When a developer contributes to a company’s open source code base and writes about it, the developer can build an audience while companies can recruit more talent.
Pull Request Stories will incentivize companies to open source their code.
It also consolidates open source contributors and companies on one platform, which can act as a launchpad for future GOSPEL-supporting apps.
You can read more about Pull Request Stories’ mission here.
[Editor's note: the above link is gone–and so is pullrequeststories.com]
Gitcoin
Grok and I also put together a proposal for a Gitcoin grant (we were not selected this time). The idea was to secure public goods funding for GOSPEL research. Here is an excerpt.
During the industrial revolution, electricity transformed the production of physical goods. It ultimately enabled “mass production”, an increase in manufacturing capacity many orders of magnitude above the historical norm.
Today, the Internet is set to fundamentally transform the production of information-based (virtual) goods. This will drastically raise living standards across the globe and, like industrial revolutions past, usher in a new era of prosperity. However, this transformation has barely begun.
To understand the adoption of the Internet, it is helpful to understand the adoption of electricity. Florent Crivello writes, “…factory owners initially failed to realize the benefits of electrification because they didn’t adapt their plants to its new logic. They just replaced their old steam engine with a big electric motor driving their plant’s steel shaft, and it would be decades before they finally started rethinking the plant around the new technological paradigm.”
He then quotes BBC’s article, Why didn’t electricity immediately change manufacturing: “[Due to electrification] factories could be cleaner and safer – and more efficient, because machines needed to run only when they were being used. But you couldn’t get these results simply by ripping out the steam engine and replacing it with an electric motor. You needed to change everything: the architecture and the production process.” [emphasis added]
Right now, most organizations are ripping out their physical operations and replacing them with digital analogs, without changing operational architecture or processes. Meetings turn into video calls; paper gets replaced by Google Docs; Slack becomes the new office. Fundamentally, we are still working in the same way we always have, just with better tools. We are acting as if we are constrained by geography, when in fact we are not.
We are at a similar inflection point to the electrical revolution — which freed us from the constraint of dietary calorie driven work. The Internet can unlock orders of magnitude greater production of virtual products, just as electricity did physical ones.
Diving into crypto
I used to work in crypto and have been around it for a long time. However, I am far from being up-to-date on the latest trends. I just recently secured lzrs.eth and bought my first NFT (see above).
I honestly can’t tell if it was a good decision or not to spend thousands of dollars on the Space Punk (SPC). I really like the artwork, however, it doesn’t seem like SPC is on an upward trajectory anymore. Anyway, I am too focused on building to spend time analyzing NFT trends.
With that said, this is my new profile picture on Twitter. I am happy that it enables me to bring life to this pseudonymous identity.
Lastly, I have been exploring how crypto can supercharge the GOSPEL process. There is so much potential here, it’s crazy. Stay tuned.