Eliminating Gas Fees, Online Pseudonymity, & The Internet’s Resilience

Happy Sunday! 

The holiday season is in full swing, and we're gifting you some great content this week. Let's dive right in!

Goodbye Gas Fees: Hello Layer 2 Living

Nat Eliason / Almanack

Ethereum has soared in popularity this year with the rise of DeFi and NFTs. But with that surge in popularity came a huge spike in gas fees. Transactions that used to be $5 can now run up to $250. For this week’s Almanack, Nat Eliason explains how Layer 2 protocols can drop these gas fees to essentially zero. And that reduced friction means more innovation. Read the full article for more on how to get access to these ridiculously low fees.

Read.

Our Pseudonymous Selves

Fadeke Adegbuyi / Cybernaut

Much of tech discourse over the last 10 years has been around bringing your “whole-self” to work. What if we did the opposite? What if our work identity was anonymized and wholly separate from our personal identity? For Cybernaut this week, Fadeke tackled the question of the faceless participant, taking us through the past, present, and potential future of pseudonymity online.

Read.

How Resilient is the Internet?

Nikhil Mulani / Every

Major outages for Facebook and Amazon demonstrate how much of our online experience relies on these companies. And we're not just reliant on their applications, but on the baseline infrastructure that everything else is built on. This consolidation of power among big tech is frightening. Sure, it has driven down cost—but at what cost? Guest writer Nikhil Mulani tackles this topic with an elegant, accessible essay about the costs that infrastructure centralization has forced on us. He rounds it off with his thoughts on whether crypto can solve the problem of internet resilience.

Read.

The Three Systems Beneath Network Effects

Nathan Baschez & Andrew Chen / Divinations

Andrew Chen is many things—blogger, consumer investor at a16z, and now published author. This week, Nathan featured an excerpt from Andrew’s newest book, The Cold Start Problem. The goal of the book is to give readers a more detailed and actually useful theory of network effects. This chapter argues that network effects aren't one single thing, but rather a trio of forces: the acquisition effect, the engagement effect, and the economic effect. Read the chapter, and then order the book for yourself!

Read.

Should Creators Own Their Means of Creation?

Nathan Baschez & Li Jin / Means of Creation

On the latest episode of Means of Creation, Li and Nathan chat with  Erik Forman, the co-founder of The Drivers Cooperative, a driver-owned alternative to Uber and Lyft. The trio talk about the labor movement, what it means to be a socialist entrepreneur, and how to bring the labor movement to today's platform-dominated economy.

Listen.

You're Invited!

Member’s Only Event: Challenges Facing DAOs, and How to Solve Them

David Phelps / Three quarks

DAOs—decentralized autonomous organizations—have the potential to upend traditional corporations, but everyone is still figuring out how they should work. In this conversation with David Phelps, we’ll cover a bit about what makes DAOs promising in comparison to a traditional corporation, but above all, we’ll delve into some of the major organizational problems that require solving, and discuss what might be done. David founded and helps run ecodao, is an investor in web3 at cowfund, writes on web3 at davidphelps.substack.com, and wrote a thread on problems facing DAOs here.

The event will be hosted live on the Every Discord this Thursday, December 16th at 10am EST/1pm PST.

RSVP

But Wait, There's More!

Here's a couple more things we've loved on the internet.

18 Trends That Will Shape Our Careers in 2022

Nick deWilde / The Jungle Gym

2021 has been quite a year. With 2022 on the horizon, many questions about employment linger. Is remote work here to stay, or will the long-foretold return-to-office actually materialize? Will the economy stay strong, giving employees the confidence to quit, or will economic turmoil send workers back to their former employers? In this article, Nick assembles 18 of the internet’s sharpest thinkers to reflect on the emerging trends from this past year and how they might shape our careers in 2022.

The Jungle Gym is a newsletter from Nick deWilde that explores on career strategy, learning, and the changing nature of work. Regular readers of Superorganizers will enjoy learning about how Nick curates his information diet and thinks about the learning loop of knowledge work.

Read.

Invisible College

Invisible College is a learning DAO for web3-curious builders & creators. Web3 is incredibly difficult to learn, and it can be hard to keep up with all the new terminology, technical concepts, frequent scams, and constantly changing state of the field. This new DAO aims to help other web3-curious builders and creators the knowledge, skills, and relationships to launch their own web3 projects.

For more information on how to join the DAO, check out this twitter thread.