Hi nerds -

I salute you from Chicago, where I’ve spent the last week visiting friends and eating great food.

This week, I was featured in two pieces:

• ​Aragon’s article welcoming me as a Developer Advocate;
• An interview by Thomas Freund on the intersection between political science, software engineering, and education.

And, as promised, here’s my funky Halloween pic 😛.

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3 brain farts

🌊 Modern Renaissance: Largely accelerated by the pandemic, there’s a wave of collective consciousness I'm understanding as the Modern Renaissance.

​An era of cultural, artistic, political, and economic “rebirth”, the Modern Renaissance is born out of collective doubt.

• Is this really the best political system we can have?
• Do our financial incentives create a better world?
• How can NFTs drive the next frontier in art?
• How is does culture change as we migrate to cyberspace?

Au contraire to the European Renaissance of the 14-17th century, today the internet allows us to ponder these globally.

Some people will be lurkers, others who will be builders. Either way, there has never been a better time to bet on your crazy dreams. We’re building the world we want to live in with every tiny decision we make.

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👩🏻‍💼 Companies: For those of us born in the 21st century, it's crazy to think companies haven't existed for most of humanity.

Just like electric generators, telephones, or automobiles, companies are one of those industrial age inventions we can’t imagine living without. That’s about to change.

With DAOs on the rise, global collaboration is reshaping incentive mechanisms, rewarding protocols, onboarding experiences, and ultimately, the future of work.

DAOs are exciting because they are fertile ground for experiments. And if they’re successful, they’re creating a model that makes companies obsolete.

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🌐5 most important Web3 terms:

1. ​Smart Contracts: Programs that automatically get executed on the blockchain when certain conditions are met. They lay the groundwork for most of Web3.
2. ​dApps: Applications built on top of a blockchain, instead of built on a centralized server and database (how most of the web works today). Examples are OpenSea (NFT Marketplace), Decentraland (Metaverse real estate), Uniswap (token swapping), Axie Infinity (blockchain gaming).
3. ​NFTs​: Unique in its kind and registered on a blockchain, you can imagine NFTs like an artistic ID. They're revolutionary because (a) ownership means entrance to online communities + IRL events, (b) artists can add smart contracts to get royalties on every transaction.
4. ​DeFi: Decentralized finance is like traditional finance (TradFi), with services like loans, credits, ETFs, stock tokens, insurances, etc. But because they’re mounted on smart contracts, they don’t require intermediaries like lawyers or banks.
5. ​DAOs: Organizations built upon smart contracts that we interact with through dApps to handle voting, budgeting, and collaboration. Some of my favorite ones are Friends with Benefits (social DAO), Bankless (media DAO), Gitcoin (public goods DAO), SeedClub (investment DAO).

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2 intellectual goodies

“Scenius is like genius, only embedded in a scene rather than in genes.”

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“Less focus on credentials and more focus on doing the work means that the participants in a new scenius will potentially skew younger, infusing new creativity and energy into the scene, and blurring the lines between work and play.”

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~ Today’s quotes come from an article titled Sc3nius by Packy McCormick, where he talks about the emerging collective genius and the conditions that enable it to grow.

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1 funky audio

I went through a phase where I only listened to music created before 1990. This playlist is the result.

Listen to travel back in time and reminisce about the old world.

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Thanks for reading.

As always, feel free to connect by hitting reply and sharing a juicy thought 💡.

We all help the curious community grow.

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Best,

Jules 🤸🏻‍♂️