From decentralised by Joel John

TL:DR: Blockchains move capital at the speed of data. They are also able to fractionalise and scale economic interaction between participants online in a way traditional fintech companies cannot. We do not entirely understand the aftereffects of this phenomenon on human interactions.Human behaviour shifts when capital formation and speculation meet attention markets. Polymarket and PumpFun are predecessors to the future of social networks. The next bigexchange will be a social network. The next big social network could be an exchange.

Hey there!

This chart by Ben Evans is one of my favourite of all time. It captures what happened to newspaper revenue right around 1995 when the “information highway” came to be. Source: Link

I want you to consider the chart above from Ben Evans. Published in 2019, it highlights the revenue made by newspapers up until 2019. Newspapers were historically a human institution that was part of our morning routines. We replaced them with doomscrolling and a dose of memes. In the age of clicks, the relevance of a story does not matter. What matters is how much emotion it could incite. This is why Elon Musk acquired X instead of going for the Washington Post like his fellow Billionaire Jeff Bezos did.

Media in the 21st century has become about clicks. We have made a parallel world where attention is commoditised, quantified and sold like pastries at a bakery. Except, in this case, what is moulded is not flour. It is the human mind. And there is a cost attached to it as with most markets. The chart by Ben Evans simply shows a number going down. Filterworld by Kyle Chayka shows the after-effects of this on culture and society.

As the web evolved, our perception of what counts as “good stories” changed. We are no longer optimising for how relevant a piece of information is, but rather how far it can go in terms of virality. Or even worse, how much emotion it can incite. So the local newspaper that once highlighted a charity event around the block, or the foreign correspondent that put herself in danger to highlight struggles that may not be seen, no longer has relevance.

We would much rather have our feeds plastered with cats, dogs, and a sprinkle of political highlights cut to exactly 30 seconds.

Present day social networks work the way they do because they are fundamentally exchanges. At some point in the early 2010s, folks who would have been a quant at Wall Street decided to skip the markets–thanks to the crisis of 2008– and joined emerging social networks like Facebook instead. This talent pool then sliced, diced and sold human attention to the highest bidder. In the process, social networks became exchanges, except these exchanges hold much of the value.