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The full second episode of The Network Society is now available on X.
It’s our best production yet.
We visited Puerto Rico’s biotech hub to explore new cancer and blindness treatments, then returned to @Prosperahn to discuss startup-driven regulatory alternatives.
Enjoy it.
First impressions of Austin have been awesome.
No time to rest or explore much, though.
Tomorrow morning, we'll be visiting our first project: an independent microschool.
The activity of the day? Kids will be cooking chicken adobo for Filipino Heritage Month.🙂 Just another casual day of learning for them.
The school is part of the @KaiPodCo network.
It's a really interesting project that supports education entrepreneurs who want to start their own microschools, with hundreds of schools in their network.
We'll be interviewing the founder, @AmarKumarEdu, in a few days too.
Sounds weird, right? School networks, microschools, kids cooking, entrepreneurs building independent learning spaces, accelerators...
Yea, that's just a small part of a much bigger revolution we're witnessing in the US and other parts of the free world.
A revolution we're documenting at networksociety.film/episode3.
Join us!
Jean Hansen retweeted
In 2002, Brazil had a higher Human Development Index than China, Turkey, Thailand, Peru, Colombia and five other countries shown here. By 2023, all had overtaken Brazil. The world has been moving faster.
🇧🇷
In which I praise the food of Brazil: worksinprogress.co/issue/com…, it is too bad Brazilian food in the United States is not better.
Most Network State critics point to the lack of a military as one of its main potential failure modes.
"Yeah, but when men with guns show up at your little community, you're done."
Well, it turns out the Network is developing powerful new defense technologies, and they're getting better all the time.
In fact, legacy countries will increasingly rely on the Network's infrastructure and innovations for their own defense.
Maybe the better question is: how will a legacy country defend itself without the Network's support?
🇺🇦 Zelenskyy delivers a blunt message to the United States:
“Just give us Starlink back. If you refuse, Ukraine will survive. We will continue defending ourselves with or without it.
But why would you restrict a country fighting for its survival? Why make it harder for us to defend our people?
I simply cannot understand the reasoning behind this decision. It is a mistake.”
Ukraine isn’t asking America to fight its war. It’s asking America not to stand in the way of its defense.
GM.
Tomorrow we take off for Austin to start filming my new documentary, Learning Without Permission.
We'll visit nearly 10 cities across the US, followed by a second trip through Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and talk to dozens of builders pioneering new education models.
I'll be sharing the journey here.
Let's go!
How we name innovative projects and industries matters. Legacy media uses Russell conjugation all the time to frame stories positively or negatively, for example. We should take this more seriously too.
Take "alternative schools." The term makes traditional schools sound like the default and everything else like a secondary option.
For the documentary, I'm thinking of using:
Traditional schools → Legacy schools
Alternative schools → Learning spaces or learning hubs
Even the word "school" feels too loaded. These new models focus on developing student agency and guiding the learning process, rather than having students passively receive instruction.
Jean Hansen retweeted
J’ai entendu dire que la France était finie, qu’il était trop tard pour la sauver.
Mais la France est toujours aussi belle, enviable même. Sa grandeur n’a pas disparu, elle ne demande qu’à renaître.
Nous avons surmonté en un an un problème cent fois plus grave, sans avoir les moyens dont dispose la France.
La France pourrait y arriver en une semaine.
One thing people need to realize is that, unfortunately, decentralized social networks haven't worked yet.
That's the truth.
Farcaster's interactions dropped by 90% after @dwr sold it, down to fewer than 3,000 posts a day.
Lens has never really taken off and has been consistently declining, also hovering around a few thousand interactions a day.
I really love these innovations and have always been an early adopter of both, but so far, they've failed.
There are, unironically, Telegram groups with more engagement than these platforms.
So having someone like @balajis spending time and money trying to make the protocol useful and help it grow is really awesome.
Web3 people really love to engage in these philosophical debates about decentralization, but if no one uses it, it doesn't matter whether it's decentralized or not. It's just LARPing.
Farcaster was dead, and now it's got another shot. If you're enthusiastic about decentralized social networks, take advantage of this moment. Join NS or another client and use the momentum to your advantage.
People who are really serious about (wet) software - culture -, should make their own social network.
@balajis just acquired @farcaster_xyz and set an explicit social contract. Only techno-optimists allowed.
A few didn't consent and exited to other clients, without losing their social graph and content.
That's how it should be. Trying to force two tribes with fundamentally different values to share the same space is crazy.
Welcome to the era of decentralized education.
Learning Without Permission.
networksociety.film/episode3
That's so awesome
In July we open-sourced a dynamic graph of everything a child learns in primary school. 1,590 concepts, 3,221 dependencies.
Now we’re turning every concept into interactive experiments kids can play and learn from.
First one, age 7: heat and water.
Everything that used to be a boring textbook can now be an engaging experience, potentially tailored to every child.
Kids education just got a massive upgrade.
Jean Hansen retweeted
🇧🇷 I told you guys about the South of Brazil!
Do like the Brazilians do and leave organized crime hotspots like Rio and Sao Paulo where rich people have cars with bulletproof glass
Go South Brazil where you can have an actual nice life without fearing for your life
South Brazil is nothing like what you think when you think of Brazil
It's the safest place in Brazil, it's rich and feels a lot like Europe, which makes sense because it literally borders with Argentina and Uruguay
Uruguay is the richest country in South America and South Brazil is the richest part of Brazil
Florianopolis is a great start!
Brazil's map of where people want to live has flipped, and the South is winning.
For decades, São Paulo was the place Brazilians moved to chase a better life.
Between 2017 and 2022, more people left São Paulo state than moved in, the first time since the census began tracking it in 1991.
The whole Southeast region lost about 120,600 people to migration in those five years.
Santa Catarina took the crown.
503,580 Brazilians moved in from other states, and only 149,230 moved out.
That is a net gain of 354,350 people, the biggest in the country by raw number and by share of population.
Santa Catarina grew 21.8% from 2010 to 2022, more than three times Brazil's 6.5%, and only Roraima grew faster.
The South as a whole gained about 362,000 people from migration, more than any other region of Brazil.
The biggest source of new Santa Catarina residents was its own neighbor, Rio Grande do Sul.
People from abroad are coming too, and by 2022 Santa Catarina was home to 72,793 of them.
In Chapecó, a meatpacking city in the far west of the state, residents born abroad went from 184 to about 11,200, and most of the newest arrivals came from Venezuela.
People follow jobs, safety and a paycheck that stretches further, and the South keeps winning on all three.
Money tends to follow people a few years later, and in Brazil the people are heading south.
You can now have a world-class doctor available for 24/7 for 20 bucks a month.
And people are fighting against it.
Surreal.
This morning when I woke up, I thought it was 7:30am, so when I took off my eye mask, I was surprised to find it was only 4:30am. But I felt awake. Not only that, I felt ENERGIZED. I have not felt anything upon waking other than utter exhaustion for at least a decade, but probably more like 16 years.
Last week, I did Function Health Labs, which are super comprehensive. I started getting results back Saturday, fed them to a private AI, and it was freaking out about how I have no energy.
YOU GUYS -- I'm a carnivore and I am ANEMIC. I have eaten red meat 🥩🥩🥩 for 99.99% of my meals for the last two and a half years, and I'm ANEMIC -- wth ferritin stores above 240! (This is so high, it was marked as dangerously high on Function Health.)
It diagnosed me with anemia of chronic inflammation, which I hadn't heard of before, but it explained to me a question I had meant to ask a doctor -- why one iron marker was low when another was high and I was eating so much red meat -- but that doctor missed it because she preferred to spend our appointment time lecturing me about how I needed to eat greens even though I told her that eating this way was making me feel BETTER 🙄. (Pro tip if you're a doctor: if a patient who has been incredibly sick for over a decade tells you something they are doing is making them feel better, BE A HUMAN AND BE EXCITED FOR THEM and don't be a fucking idiot and tell them to go back to eating the way that made them feel worse.)
I spent all weekend talking with the AI about my lab results, and it told me which supplements to take, including a few I already had on hand that it said would help. The main one it said I needed I had to order, and it will arrive next week, so I haven't even been able to take the most important one yet. DESPITE THAT, just taking the one I had lying around for the last seven days allowed me to FEEL ENERGY UPON WAKING!!!!
Is this what it feels like to be a normal human?!?!?!
Feeling energy upon waking made me want to cry. I feel so gypped!!!! I can't believe I'm only 7 days into what I need to do to get over this, and I am not exhausted and fighting to get through the day 😭 If I weren't so fucking excited, I think I'd be crying, but seriously, WTF.
Western medical doctors and the healthcare system are so fucked. Yay for comprehensive labs and AI!!!
People who are really serious about (wet) software - culture -, should make their own social network.
@balajis just acquired @farcaster_xyz and set an explicit social contract. Only techno-optimists allowed.
A few didn't consent and exited to other clients, without losing their social graph and content.
That's how it should be. Trying to force two tribes with fundamentally different values to share the same space is crazy.
Last year I thought Threads was an existential risk to X.
When Meta puts its full weight behind something -- by injecting the app into Instagram, it’s DEFCON 5:
You have to squeeze out every last drop of growth from all available surfaces to save the app.
However, I started to realize that the opposite was happening:
It was strengthening X.
If you look at any announcement by Zuck, you will see the most rude & toxic comments on the internet.
But when he makes those same announcements on X, people are thrilled about how he’s pushing humanity forward. X is a place where people are excited about the future, so it’s no surprise he and his top lieutenants are using it more than their own app.
Threads — and Bluesky — have effectively quarantined some of the worst people on the internet.
And so I had an epiphany: those apps are X’s anti-abuse systems.
The evolution of decentralized and open protocols are not like regular products at all.
The adoption is usually messy, with boom and bust cycles, sometimes filled with scams, terrible PR, bad UX, legal uncertainty, etc.
But the underlying premisses are usually strong -- permissionless, open, censorship resistant, etc -- which makes them very resilient.
Open blockchains, Linux, SMTP, HTTP (Web) and others, have been declared dead many times in history and suffered from multiple attacks, yet somehow they keep growing and getting stronger.
Hope to see Farcaster getting critical mass and sufficient network effect to become a consolidated digital institution and become antifragile.
