Three Things #8: Mar. 6, 2022
🇺🇦 With love to Ukraine 🇺🇦
Thing #1: Helplessness
When I see something that’s broken or not working well, I jump in and try to fix it. It’s my personality, it’s how I was trained, and it’s also the culture I’m most familiar with. Rather than traditional, authoritarian, command-and-control hierarchies, most crypto projects function more like a flat “do-ocracy”: have a bias for action, do things first, evaluate second, and then course correct.
As much as I like this way of working, I don’t think it necessarily translates well to things that aren’t Burning Man camps and crypto projects. If you see a construction team building a new skyscraper and you disagree with the design, you don’t just jump in and start telling people to move the girders. By the same token, you don’t jump into your friend’s startup and tell him or her how to run things.
The extreme case is the nation state and geopolitics. We’re all frustrated, upset, and horrified by Russia’s attack on Ukraine. And I think most of us feel helpless—those of us who aren’t world leaders, or Ukrainian resistance forces, or elite hackers, anyway. That feeling of helplessness can be uncomfortable. It can lead to a lot of cognitive dissonance: on the one hand, we feel that we are well-intentioned, good people who can do anything, be anything, or achieve anything we put our minds to; on the other hand, we feel totally impotent when big things go really wrong, whether they be climate change or war.
And yet, sometimes, doing nothing is the best thing we can do. Because if we try to do something in these situations, we’re likely to get in the way of the professionals who are best equipped to respond. I’ve been tempted to jump on a plane and go to Poland or Romania and try to help coordinate logistics for people fleeing Ukraine—just as I’m tempted to do something similar after every disaster. But I have literally zero relevant skills to offer: I don’t speak any of the regional languages, I hardly know anyone there, I don’t know the local culture, and I don’t know my way around. I’d be more likely to get lost, to put others in danger, or to get in the way of experts who know what they’re doing. To recognize this, and to recognize that I probably don’t have anything to offer directly in the present moment, requires a good deal of self awareness and selfless contemplation. (And to feel contrariwise, like I can single handedly make a difference and save people, is egotistical and hubristic.)
To feel called to help is admirable. But, if you do feel called to action, and if you want to make a difference, the best thing to do is prepare yourself to be able to respond the next time something goes wrong. That might require learning new skills, or even making a career change. It takes years to develop the subject matter expertise to make a real difference.
In the meantime, the best thing most of us can do is to continue what we’re already doing. Keep living your life. Do what you do best, make some money, and send it to the people who need it the most, and to the experts who know how to deploy it effectively. This is true no matter what you do, but if you happen to work in an area like privacy or cryptocurrency, it’s doubly true since these technologies can help directly.
For more: Donate to humanitarian relief in Ukraine (see links below), or to a cause closer to home.
Thing #2: The Last Ground War, The First Digital War
Watching war play out online and in real time is frightening, surreal, and dystopian. It would be exciting if there weren’t real lives at stake and if real humans weren’t suffering, i.e., if it were a game rather than the real thing.
Being bombarded with real-time images and video of disaster unfolding, from accidents to protests and crackdowns to terrorist attacks to natural disasters, is nothing new. Twitter and other social media platforms famously played a role in igniting the Arab Spring unrest in 2010. We regularly see footage of natural disasters, and there’s been no shortage of disaster porn coming from Syria, Afghanistan, and many other conflict zones. But this feels different. Maybe it’s because, for Europeans, it feels closer to home (an unfair double standard). In any case, it’s the first time a real, major war between two sovereign nations has played out in our new digital reality.
The result? All kinds of twisted novelty. Watching the war on TikTok. Hackers everywhere joining the “Volunteer IT Army” on Telegram. DAOs, which were hastily organized over just a day or two, raising tens of millions of dollars and selling NFTs for humanitarian aid. Nation states trading barbs on Twitter. And, of course, a nation state itself soliciting donations in cryptocurrency, ranging from Bitcoin and Ethereum to stablecoins and DOTs, to help fund the war effort. It’s a defining moment for crypto, for sure, which would feel a lot more exciting and hopeful if it didn’t feel quite so dystopian.
At the same time, I see a glimmer of hope: while it’s still early, it seems pretty clear so far that this war is not going well for Russia. The degree of international opprobrium has been swift, broad, and intense. We’ve never seen a major state so rapidly and severely isolated from the rest of the modern world as Russia has been over the past few days. This goes far beyond sanctions: near-universal condemnation of Putin and Russia’s actions on Western social media, denying airspace access to Russian airlines, Boeing refusing to send parts to Russia, technology companies halting movement of vital tech components, oil majors pulling out of deals. Even if Russia does manage victory on the ground, what will be the cost?
The outcome of the ground war is totally unclear at this stage, and the only thing that’s certain is that it will be drawn out, messy, and involve a lot more tragic suffering. When the dust has settled, we’ll recognize that we’ve irreversibly entered a new era of warfare. The previous century was, of course, the century of warfare on a massive, continental scale. This era, by contrast, is asymmetric. This is true in the sense that bigger isn’t always better: it can be a hindrance (since, in the language of cybersecurity, your attack surface is that much larger). It’s also true in the sense that what a country (or small group) lacks in numbers they might make up for in determination, smarts, or cyber capabilities.
The tables could still turn, but at this moment things are looking pretty good for smaller powers asymmetrically defending against aggression on the part of bigger neighbors. The Ukrainians have the asymmetric advantage that they are far, far more determined to win, and that they are fighting at home, for their homeland while their Russian counterparts are fighting far from home and are being kept in the dark about what and why they’re fighting. This can and will lead to a major global realignment. All of this gives me hope that this will be the last major ground war the world will ever see.
Which brings us to…
For more: Read The Sovereign Individual
Thing #3: The World is Changing Really, Really Quickly
“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen” – Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Have you ever been away from home for a few days, during which a major reorganization or renovation took place, and then returned home to find yourself disoriented? You walk in the door, and you know it’s your home—you still recognize it, the walls are (probably) still in the same place, it still smells the same, etc.—but something has changed that throws you off, maybe something you can’t quite put your finger on.
This is what the world has felt like recently. I feel like every time I check the news for the first time in a day or two there has been some major realignment and something unprecedented has happened. Big, big things, things we all took for granted, are suddenly not so certain. Things stuck for generations have become unstuck. War has this effect. It feels weird saying this in the wake of the Covid, because pandemics have a similar effect, and so much has already changed over the past few years, but the things that are changing now are very different things, and, I think, bigger than the things that Covid changed.
My generation has been so fortunate to grow up in a time of relative peace and stability, at least in the West: a veritable pax Americana. Due to a bunch of trends over the past few years—financial crisis, the rise of China, American political gridlock, pandemic—that seemed increasingly at risk, but the tent poles still more or less held, until a few days ago. Russia’s overt attack on Ukraine is the single biggest “fuck you” to the established Western order during my lifetime, and since the end of the Cold War. Without a doubt, it was precipitated in large part by the diminished role America has played on the world stage, and by support on the part of a rising China—perceived if not practical.
In retrospect it’s both remarkable and terrifying how much can change in just a few days. Here’s a partial short list (already out of date). The first order effects of the invasion seem reasonably clear by now: Russian attacks and widespread destruction, havoc and suffering on the ground, Ukrainian resistance. The second order effects are emerging: changing power structures in Europe and around the world, the increasing social, economic, and technological isolation of Russia, Ukraine likely acceding to the EU, further expansion of NATO (ironically, exactly the opposite of Putin’s stated aim). These will continue to play out for some time, over the coming months and years. And we have no idea what the higher-order effects will be, but they will be large and possibly quite grim.
Things that feel big and significant often turn out to have little appreciable impact over the long term, globally. And things that sometimes seem small or insignificant happen to have an outsize impact globally, due to chance and circumstance (take, for instance, the assasination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 which in large part triggered WWI). I hope and pray that this conflict is an example of the former—not that there will be no impact, but that it will be relatively contained and limited to the sort of things that have already happened, as mentioned above. But I’m not sure. It’s too soon to tell. Change is always unsettling, especially when it comes about suddenly, due to war.
To the extent that there is big change—and to be clear, that has already happened—I hope and pray that over the long term it’s positive for Ukraine, for the Russian population, for Europe, and for the world. I don’t think that’s inconceivable at this stage. People are already beginning to call Kyiv the “new Berlin.” That wouldn’t be such a horrible outcome—if the war ends soon and we can skip the intervening decades of privation that afflicted Berlin after its battle.
For more: Study world history to put the current change in context.