How not to have a productive conversation :( about society narratives… https://twitter.com/gvanrossum/status/1508959260905918465?s=21&t=qGXfuDEll5wrdhJ4ab_Zaw or how I found this tweet https://twitter.com/lefterisjp/status/1516344014487830528?s=21&t=qGXfuDEll5wrdhJ4ab_Zaw

Explain more. What's not "productive" here? The anti web3 sentiment?

Hi Ivan 👋. Yes I think that, as expressed by Lefteris many people see people like Guido ( Programming language Thought leaders) as a kind of Idol, which may not be wise for one thing. On the other hand one could say it would be totally fine for Guido to declare: I have no interest in a discussion about social narratives which involve web3. Which is quite a different thing then the fireball he mentions. It may be easy to fall for the trap of technical assumptions or presuppositions regarding web3, which is by this point pretty useless since web3 is used in such a broad context. But because it is a broad context it means it has become a kind of social - cultural narrative. As such I think it could be far more interesting in viewing it from a co-creative perspective: what kind of expectations do I have towards web3? What kind of technology I would love to see in web3 ? What kind of role could a programming language and its community(python here) play in the process of finding and living better technological/social narratives. Does that make sense or was it too abstract?

That makes sense. I just didn't want to jump to conclusions about what part of this was not productive.

@curious_reader it looks ok to me that person declares personal view. And it is not ok that other people could not think for themselves

I like that that site @Chris Maughan shows a flaming dollar value in the lower right. Here's a spitball: web3 could be a compelling way to spur degrowth by reducing liquidity and cooling markets. What a delightful can of worms that would be. Update: Whoa! You only have to go back as far as March 8th, 2022 to get to $1bn in losses / fraud.

I feel the tech is amazing, but I don't know how it can be 'fixed' to be safe. There was a recent 'hack' where a new coin was being issued to all holders of Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs; based on how many a user held. An enterprising programmer used a flash-loan contract on a blockchain to 'borrow' a large amount of ETH, bought some NFTs with the loan, claimed the coins he was due given his ownership of the NFTs, returned the NFTs and the money, and pocketed the coins; all within a few seconds. IIRC, the coins were worth about a million dollars. On the one hand, fair play; that's clever (and totally 'legal'). On the other hand, there are probably thousands of similar exploits just waiting to be done. Putting financial systems in the hands of programmers who can't write bug-free code seems like madness; however cool the tech!

I think it is a failure to the degree that the more prevailing opinion streams in web3 simply show us, in some sense, what we are. this is it this is the current level of social, technological and economic narrative. Money in the old sense plays a big role here since money and advertising are closely related. Many narratives violently promoted simply reflect old and not very well reflected assumptions about money and how we grow our relationships around it. In that sense when I'm concerned about how people talk about it in public I refer to the spaces that are very much in spirit of what we call here convivial computing and living. Computing as part of that. Remember our discussions about cooperatives? For me web3 is simply also a space where people explore these ideas.

I really appreciate those thoughts, @curious_reader. That's a much more substantial framing than what I got from your initial post. Thanks for writing that. Why does the narrative matter to you? If there's some worth to further exploring web3 / crypto, why not just do that? Why not just build the thing that's good and prove the narrative wrong? Or at least work to spotlight efforts that point to the unique value of web3? (I'm looking at this issue from the analogous perspective of someone who believes that the hypothetical potential of visual programming is undervalued by the prevailing narrative around it)

You are right Ivan most of the time I’m doing just that and it’s going actually pretty good. Discord and it’s alternatives play a role here. I guess it was that relation from guido with a programming community which related it back for me to Future of coding here. In that sense im grateful for reminding me on just this: not to spend too much time on the critiques but more on building. That said discussion culture is something very dear to me and I always hope that we find ways to have discussions even if we not agree about everything 👌

lol I have similar thoughts about Python and fire