From Mallory Owens’s review of Bruno Maçães’s History Has Begun: It would be disturbing enough if, as Maçães predicts, the great lords of Silicon Valley left us to amuse ourselves in our virtual sandboxes while they went off to conquer the solar system. With an ever-expanding arsenal of digital tools at their disposal, however, they are unlikely to show such restraint. Their war against reality can never truly be won until they have triumphed over the most stubborn and deceitful of all things, the human heart.

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In the Hedgehog Review, Alan Jacobs describes the potential for “A New Guild System”: I envision a world in which the increased fragmentation of our media scene—fragmentation created by institutions that have lost their sense of purpose and individuals who have lost trust in those institutions—leads, over time, to the rise of new institutions that are built on stronger foundations. Micro.blog is certainly part of this new-institution-building. And many developments in web3 seem dedicated to the same purposes: distributing political & economic power in new ways; thinking through what institutions could look like if organized differently—in more distributed, bottom-up forms.

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