Three Things #23: June 26, 2022

Things to write about

Time for a bit of self-indulgent reflection! I’ve had a lot of fun writing here the past few months. This newsletter is an experiment, and the experiment is going reasonably well. I’ve written more words, and covered a broader array of topics, than I intended or expected. When I started Three Things, I promised myself I’d write about whatever was on my mind on a given week, with no specific categories or rules. I think that’s reflected in the diversity of topics I’ve written about—typically things I’ve read about or listened to on podcasts during the week—from politics to pandemic to personality, from open source software to trilemmas to crypto events and protocols, and much else besides.

Having said that, I do think I want to be a bit more directed in the future. My favorite metaphor for writing is that it’s like sculpting. You start with a big, ugly, misshapen hunk of raw material. You begin carving away, and eventually, gradually, you reveal the figure hidden inside. I think this is true both on the level of an individual piece, and of the long-term arc of a brand or “franchise” like this newsletter. The shape of Three Things is just starting to reveal itself, though I can’t quite tell what it is yet.

Here are three possible future directions: three things I hope and want to write more about.

I tend to write best in dark rooms. Doesn’t everyone? Photo by Steven Houston on Unsplash

Thing #1: Spacemesh

This should surprise no one. Spacemesh is my day job, but it’s more than that. It’s also a manifestation of my values and beliefs. It’s a form of artistic creation and self expression: Spacemesh—the product, the platform, and the protocol—is a thing that I believe needs to exist in the world, and for that reason I’m pouring more of my life force into it every day than I am into anything else.

I haven’t written much about Spacemesh for a few reasons. For one, I like to use this space to explore topics and concepts I don’t come across in the course of everyday work. While I believe in focus and in pouring myself into my work, I also believe that it’s important not to lose the broader context, to understand how one’s work fits into the bigger picture and the world at large. At the end of a long day, I love switching off the crypto part of my brain and engaging with other concepts for a little while.

For another, I don’t want to force the topic on anyone. I don’t want to be that guy who incessantly talks about crypto and shills his own project. People need to come to Spacemesh, Bitcoin, and crypto more generally, of their own volition, if they want any chance of really understanding it. Bitcoin stands for freedom, and it’s not something you can sell to people unilaterally. It needs to be a dialog. Those who are curious will ask, and when they do, I’m more than happy to talk about it.

But the biggest reason I haven’t written more about Spacemesh is the same reason I haven’t spoken much about it (aside from talks at a few industry conferences and events). I believe that a good product should speak for itself. I have very little to say about Spacemesh, because I direct that energy instead into designing it and building it. In other words, the things I have to say, I say through design and code. That code will speak for me, for the entire team, for our values, and for itself, when it’s done. In a landscape of shill-fests, hubristic jingoism, and fake-it-til-you-make-it memetic phenomena, I love how Spacemesh is a low-hype, high-innovation project. I believe in underpromising and overdelivering.

Having said all of that, the design of Spacemesh is in its final stages and development will also be done soon. We’re soon to transition into an all-out testing phase prior to launching the network. There are a lot of interesting things to say about Spacemesh—its motivation, history, design choices, challenges, tradeoffs, and our hopes, plans, and dreams for the future—and as we approach genesis, it’s probably time to start telling those stories. Expect to hear more about Spacemesh here.

For more: Stay tuned for more on Spacemesh!

Thing #2: Sci-Fi

I love all fiction, especially fantasy, but my true love is science fiction. I’m hopelessly obsessed with sci-fi. It’s a way of imagining alternative realities: alternative versions of the present and the future. Some people may look at sci-fi and fantasy as pointless escapism, but to me it’s a very useful exercise in relaxing constraints and imagining the way things could be.

Whereas fantasy often involves realities that are, shall we say, very relaxed, I love sci-fi in particular because its realities are often adjacent to or just in front of our own. We don’t read fantasy novels and think, “Hmm, if only we had orcs and mages running around.” Good sci-fi feels believable. We do wonder, “Hmm, what might the future of humanity look like with faster-than-light, interstellar travel, and instantaneous communication? How would things change if we could upload our consciousness into the cloud?” It’s not actually that hard to imagine these things coming to pass. The best sci-fi portrays a reality that feels plausible—and then uses that alternative reality as a device to explore the human condition. Good sci-fi always makes you bring useful questions and ideas back to reality. I find it extraordinarily inspirational, personally and professionally.

Artistic expression is the original proof of work. And I feel like writing is the best, most honest, most creative form of expression. I have nothing against other types of art and enjoy many of them, but I especially love words, books, and stories. Stories are universal and absolutely fundamental to the human condition and to how we communicate, embody and transmit knowledge and ideas (even more than other forms of art like dance, music, sculpture, etc.). And the novel is the pinnacle of writing, because it’s a platform to tell real human tales.

I aspire to someday be a real author. I feel like I have stories inside of me that want to get out, but I don’t really know where to start to discover, record, and share them. I don’t know yet if this is the right place to explore fiction writing, but it might be worth trying. I’m okay if the medium evolves. A lot of the ideas I’ve explored here are inspired by sci-fi, and I suspect some of them could be further explored through fiction, but I have to figure out how.

I read somewhere that Haruki Murakami, one of my favorite authors, begins each of his novels as a single scene, around which he later builds characters and a novel. I might try doing that. What would three scenes, or three characters, look like? Could they all fit into the same context and reality? It might be fun to try to fit them together.

For more: Let me know your favorite sci-fi book or series. And let me know if you have any advice on how to start writing fiction!

Thing #3: Essays

If long form fiction is good for exploring the human condition and imagining alternative realities, essays are good for examining and understanding reality today, in bite-sized chunks. Essays are perhaps the ideal writing form because they’re long enough to explore a topic in real depth and no longer; they don’t require the same investment that a book requires (to write or to read). A good essay can introduce you to a new idea or possibility, whet your appetite, and leave you wanting more.

In a sense, all of my writing these past few years has been essays. My Medium and my blogs, Etherean and Applescotch, are certainly a traditional essay format. While I’ve played with the format here a little, the format of this newsletter is still basically the essay. This is by design, more or less. I want to explore topics at depth and in detail but I have no idea how to even start writing a book, so essays seem like the logical place to start. If it goes well, via these essays, I should eventually have the raw material for a book. (I haven’t actually stopped to count the words or pages I’ve written, but at around one essay per week for 2-3 years, it’s definitely beginning to add up.)

Having said that, most of the essays I write are very high level. This is by design too. Writing a serious, well-researched essay is a big project. Some of my longer, deeper ones were half to full time projects for a week or more. My favorite, Autonocrats & Anthropocrats, took over a year end to end (after starting, stopping, and picking it up again several times).

That essay isn’t perfect. It’s too long, unscientific, and probably a bit repetitive. But I’m quite proud of it. It explores a genuinely interesting, timely, relevant topic that hasn’t gotten much attention. It introduces some novel ideas and framing, and asks hard questions (how far can we, and should we, attempt to automate systems of governance, in the context of blockchains and smart contracts?). I haven’t written too many essays up to this standard. I want to write more. But I’m afraid it’s not compatible with this format, nor with my writing style or the amount of time I have to devote to it right now. I have dozens of topics I still want to write about, and not nearly enough time to do it. The experiment continues.

For more: Let me know what sort of topics you’d like to see covered here.