Emile Plato

...

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Over the past year, many people I talk to have expressed worry about two topics:

* Various aspects of the way the world is going: government control and surveillance, wars, corporate power and surveillance, tech enshittification / corposlop, social media becoming a memetic warzone, AI and how it interplays with all of the above...
* The brute reality that Ethereum seems to be absent from meaningfully improving the lives of people subject to these things, even on the dimensions we deeply care about (eg. freedom, privacy, security of digital life, community self-organization)

It is easy to bond over the first, to commiserate over the fact that beauty and good in the world seems to be receding and darkness advancing, and uncaring powerful people in high places are making this happen. But ultimately, it is easy to acknowledge problems, the hard thing is actually shining a light forward, coming up with a concrete plan that makes the situation better.

The second has been weighing heavily on my mind, and on the minds of many of our brightest and most idealistic Ethereans. I personally never felt any upset or fear when political memecoins went on Solana, or various zero-sum gambling applications go on whatever 250 millisecond block chain strikes their fancy. But it *does* weigh on me that, through all of the various low-grade online memetic wars, international overreaches of corporate and government power, and other issues of the last few years, Ethereum has been playing a very limited role in making people's lives better. What *are* the liberating technologies? Starlink is the most obvious one. Locally-running open-weights LLMs are another. Signal is a third. Community Notes is a fourth, tackling the problem from a different angle.

One response is to say "stop dreaming big, we need to hunker down and accept that finance is our lane and laser-focus on that". But this is ultimately hollow. Financial freedom and security is critical. But it seems obvious that, while adding a perfectly free and open and sovereign and debasement-proof financial system would fix some things, but it would leave the bulk of our deep worries about the world unaddressed. It's okay for individuals to laser-focus on finance, but we need to be part of some greater whole that has things to say about the other problems too.

At the same time, Ethereum cannot fix the world. Ethereum is the "wrong-shaped tool" for that: beyond a certain point, "fixing the world" implies a form of power projection that is more like a centralized political entity than like a decentralized technology community.

So what can we do? I think that we in Ethereum should conceptualize ourselves as being part of an ecosystem building "sanctuary technologies": free open-source technologies that let people live, work, talk to each other, manage risk and build wealth, and collaborate on shared goals, in a way that optimizes for robustness to outside pressures.

The goal is not to remake the world in Ethereum's image, where all finance is disintermediated, all governance happens through DAOs, and everyone gets a blockchain-based UBI delivered straight to their social-recovery wallet. The goal is the opposite: it's de-totalization. It's to reduce the stakes of the war in heaven by preventing the winner from having total victory (ie. total control over other human beings), and preventing the loser from suffering total defeat. To create digital islands of stability in a chaotic era. To enable interdependence that cannot be weaponized.

Ethereum's role is to create "digital space" where different entities can cooperate and interact. Communications channels enable interaction, but communication channels are not "space": they do not let you create single unique objects that canonically represent some social arrangement that changes over time. Money is one important example. Multisigs that can change their members, showing persistence exceeding that of any one person or one public key, are another. Various market and governance structures are a third. There are more.

I think now is the time to double down, with greater clarity. Do not try to be Apple or Google, seeing crypto as a tech sector that enables efficiency or shininess. Instead, build our part of the sanctuary tech ecosystem - the "shared digital space with no owner" that enables both open finance and much more. More actively build toward a full-stack ecosystem: both upward to the wallet and application layer (incl AI as interface) and downward to the OS, hardware, even physical/bio security levels.

Ultimately, tech is worthless without users. But look for users, both individual and institutional, for whom sanctuary tech is exactly the thing they need. Optimize payments, defi, decentralized social, and other applications precisely for those users, and those goals, which centralized tech will not serve. We have many allies, including many outside of "crypto". It's time we work together with an open mind and move forward.

[Emile Plato @emileplato_eth]

@Makalapiscine YAMOTO

[Emile Plato @emileplato_eth]

@frecciarossa_fr 20h20 ? Mais on vient de nous prévenir, on est au moins 20 personnes dans le tram en direction de perrache. On va arriver dans 10min, peut il attendre ?

[Emile Plato @emileplato_eth]

@moritzkremb builder

[The Art Newspaper @TheArtNewspaper]

Sixty secondary school students have reimagined an alternative Olympic park in the whimsical two-part Paris show, Gold Rush, at Lafayette Anticipations and Ateliers Médicis, coordinated by ebb global @ebb_global

https://t.co/Igd0jYhmDz

[Louvre pour tou·te·s @louvrepourtous]

La Ruée vers l’Or à @LafAnticipation w/@AteliersMedicis Rarement un projet pédagogique culturel aura été aussi abouti 🔥 Un artiste Neïl Beloufa + 60 élèves d’un lycée du 93 = une super aventure artistique et professionnalisante 👍🏼 https://t.co/DjCRpBQvpr

[Groupe Galeries Lafayette @Galeries_Laf]

À l’occasion des #JO2024, @LafAnticipation & les @AteliersMedicis s’associent à @ebb_global pour un projet inédit avec 60 lycéens de #ClichySousBois. Leur vision d'un monde déréglé ou idéal se déploie sous la forme d’un parc de loisirs interactif nommé "La Ruée vers l’Or".✨

[Libération @libe]

«La Ruée vers l’or» : soixante lycéens de Clichy-sous-Bois ont travaillé avec l’artiste Neil Beloufa pour élaborer un parc d’attractions sous forme d’expo interactive, déployée cet été à @LafAnticipation et aux @AteliersMedicis.

Lire ⤵️ https://t.co/oHdFn0brle

[Emile Plato @emileplato_eth]

@franceCoinSol LESGUIII !!!

[EBB @ebb_global]

Something is cooking 🪦
@nft_paris

[EBB @ebb_global]

Screen-Talk is now available on @ourZORA

[EBB @ebb_global]

Screen-Talk x @ourZORA : Final open iteration starts on Jan 5th!

🔸 Experimental online art experience : Mini-series, Games & NFTs

🔸 Free mint & open edition

🔸 Showcasing now at WORLDBUILDING Exhibition - @juliastoschek Foundation & @PompidouMetz

[Emile Plato @emileplato_eth]

@tetonotsorry Gg bruuu ✨

[Emile Plato @emileplato_eth]

@tetonotsorry @FingerprintsDAO @tokenfox1 🔥🔥🔥

[teto @tetonotsorry]

[ P A N O P T I C O N ]

Tuesday, 14th November
with @FingerprintsDAO & @tokenfox1

[Superpauze @sup3rpauze]

Internet culture is an organism in constant mutation, which is not uniform, as it is made up of several microgroups that interact with each other through codes.
These codes are often transmitted through a form of non-verbal language, aesthetics shared realities.

Myths.
Memes.

[Nicolas Sassoon @Nicolas_Sassoon]

Love this one...
Pattern_27_2023_11_02

[Lossapardo @lossapardo]

Un peu d’acrylique sur toile,
un peu de lumière.