Caviar began as food for Russian fishermen, before becoming the choice of royalty because Ivan the Terrible took a fancy to it. Lobster, foie gras, sweetbread, and other delicacies started as pleb food and became exotic as people further afield discovered it. In this way, luxuries are made luxurious. Price dictates status, regardless of whether it is dictated by actual scarcity (difficulty of capturing sturgeon) or artificial scarcity (fishing bans). When the good becomes desirable enough to more consumers, suppliers become crafty and find new technologies to scale production, overcoming the scarcity hurdle. At some point, scarcity is artificial and its reputation relies on its ability to manipulate supply to hold out as a Veblen good. One producer estimates that “In a room that is less than 300 square meters, we can produce more caviar than the entire annual global production.”

As we move from scarcity-as-luxury to luxury-as-status, things like caviar end up in limbo. Consumers still believe Russian caviar is the most luxurious, although over 80% of France’s Michelin restaurants use Chinese caviar. 60% of caviar is farmed in China vs 8% produced in Russia, and many gourmands admit that Chinese caviar is better; wild caviar often has too much variability.

So what is a modern luxury good? In food, it might be eating mold or reindeer brain at Noma. Redzepi asserts: “But see, anybody can get caviar. It’s going to sound weird, but it’s only money. Luxury is about experiences that are unique and caviar isn’t unique.” Put another way, luxury requires specialised knowledge and access. The average consumer might be able to identify designer logos, but designer is an increasing inaccurate proxy for luxury, exemplified by a TikTok trend where girls dress up in identical outfits, one designer and one dupe, and people guess which is designer, and many get it wrong.

In the past, becoming a purveyor of luxury had no shortcuts. The greatest luxury has always been having the time to leisure, and it took such time to learn about what luxury goods feel like. What corrupted this was brands using branding as a shortcut for consumers to verify that their goods were high quality. When this began, luxury brands were not ubiquitous, you still had to be in pursuit of this to learn to recognise logos, so only consumers and aspirants would. As the pool of aspirants increased, brand recognition became commonplace and branding as the illusion of quality began to command unsubstantiated prices, launching into a virtuous cycle. At some point, we even made it into simulacra territory where holding a digital version was more expensive than the physical. The proof of access is arguably better than the object, for you can only wear one outfit a day but you can display your whole wardrobe digitally at all times.

When we look at a luxury fashion house’s P&L, we see how this has manifested. In the last 10 years, Hermes’ COGS has dropped 340bps, Kering’s 1100bps and LVMH 230bps. Accusations about cutting labor costs and manufacturing goods in China but labeling as France may be part of the reason, but it mostly comes from being able to justify charging more and more. Despite this, Hermes’ topline is up 368%, LVMH 276%, and Kering 171% in the same time period.

Bagflation is rampant: Chanel has doubled the price of the medium flap bag in the last decade. The internet was recently enraged by a Dior lawsuit, which revealed the cost of making a $2700 bag to be $57, a 47x markup. Modern luxury brands produce objects that derive value through their marketing. They engineer price ladders: Louis Vuitton uses monogram bags priced around ~$2000 (double from 2014, and 5x from early 2000s) to create attainable yearnings for aspirants, but thoroughly segregate access to core products, priced at 2-3x. Handbags and perfumes tend to be the cash generative products of luxury brands, and not coincidentally, two of the most logo-adorned items, which help to reinforce the marketing that sold it to the wearer.

We are now in a luxury limbo where, for the masses, caviar and Dior are still the ultimate luxuries. From scarcity of production, to knowledge, to access, technology has inched through its democratisation of each and made all our lives opulent, not just with production, but also with services. Chauffeurs became Uber drivers, personal trainers became Peloton videos, butlers became DoorDash drivers. Everything is so accessible that snobs pre-emptively demote current luxuries: logos and members clubs are a sign that you haven’t evolved past entry level tiers of the luxury pyramid:

The top of the pyramid cannot be replicated, it is an all-encompassing lifestyle rather than an isolated aspect. Copies galore of everything, digital versions eclipse physical reality, so exclusivity has retreated into a different realm: knowledge of status games that are too indirect to be legible, like the upper two rungs of the pyramid mocks. Luxuries of the past are becoming more affordable as basics become more expensive. Brunello Cucinelli once said, “Until 30 years ago, luxury had no adjectives attached to it.” Now, we have types of luxury: affordable luxury, quiet luxury, sustainable luxury, etc. We have untangled luxury from an item’s virtue into status games. But status games can always be elevated, luxuries will never go away, they will only evolve faster.

Neoteny, “the retention of juvenile features in adults”, is commonly used to describe physical looks. Human society has become more neotenous, physically and behaviourally, with which they reinforce each other. Childlike faces elicit childlike responses, childlike behaviour paints faces to be perceived as younger. One of the more prominent roots of such neotenous behaviour is in Asian culture, which has always promoted neoteny in many more forms than the west has, partially due to physical neoteny’s prevalence. “Promoting “cuteness” [is] one of Japan’s most lucrative cultural exports”, and the concept of “kawaii” has resonated in the west.

Cuteness, physically and behaviourally, is a neotenous trait. Japanese culture is overwhelmed by concepts that reinforce this: kawaii, amae, lolicon, gaming, anime, etc. Amae describes a behaviour that the Japanese practice as adults, which mirrors the behaviour of children towards parents. Lolicon is still legal in Japan, and their repressed culture seems to create desire for extremes not seen in any other developed country. Japan dominated gaming early on because they had a hardware advantage, making arcade games like Space Invaders and PacMan before consoles like the Game Boy and PlayStation. Gaming graphics have the legacy of manga influence, and anime’s popularity is entirely downstream of gaming, and its mostly male following has spread so far that hentai has been the top PornHub search term for the last five years.

The cuteocracy in America “came from idealistic, hopeful social movements of the 1960s and the exuberant subcultures of early-1990s clubbers and digital dreamers”, much of this influenced by Japanese aesthetics. Kawaii as a cultural export means: “While cute is associated with childlike innocence, a naive spontaneity unaffected by adult restraints, ironically, Kawaii cute is consumer-oriented, contrived, cultivated, artificial, bought and sold.” Perhaps they index on behavioural markers more because East Asian women show the fewest signs of ageing compared to Caucasians or South Asian women. But as this permeates western culture, this leads us to showcasing girls who look young and act like them too. Rave culture today consists of mostly Asian women dressed in hypersexualised outfits adorned with stuffed animals, mixing cuteness with sexual desire that helps reinforce attraction towards the young. As we lean into our evolutionary slant, we are being drawn into more extreme displays of neoteny that lead society to spiral past ephebophilia into hebephilia down the slippery slope.

Or maybe women are portraying themselves as younger because we are all starting to look younger, both because of improved diets and sanitation and better cosmetics. More women than ever are getting plastic surgery and botox, they are spending more on cosmetics, competition to beautify the self has become more rife as the methods to win are more accessible to all. Compared to previous generations, our excessive attention to skin preservation by eliminating cigarettes and replacing them with anti-ageing creams in our teens has confused us into believing we are all ephebophiles. If everyone looks 20, you must look even younger to win.

Despite this, it doesn’t mean that men actually pursue the age of the women they find most attractive. The age range that men set is generally considered socially acceptable, they are not all actually pursuing women of the age they find most attractive, as shown in the chart above. In the age of parasocial relationships, this changes the gap between revealed and actioned preferences. Instead of taking the socially acceptable route of specifying age ranges and only dating within them, men go on OnlyFans and Instagram and are shown the creators they are most likely to like, all of whom skew towards the age they actually find most attractive.

This may just lead to an opening of the Overton window, where 39% of Americans have been in a 10+ year age gap relationship. Dating app age range filters make this easy, it is a mere two taps to see a stream of women in prime attractiveness. On the flipside, the proliferation of content means that younger men can find the most desirable women on their own terms, and can opt out of the dating market. If they were to opt in, they would have to compromise on the women they end up with, which is a core belief of inceldom. The second order effect of this is reduced male intra-sexual competition where a lot of these men who are no longer competing opt out of male games. Women are born, men are made, but as men opt out of this paradigm there is no need to make themselves, they content themselves with being born.

For men, peak fertility is somewhere in their twenties, when sperm quality and testosterone peak, but this doesn’t mean they’re most attractive when they’re most fertile. Women find men older than or equal in age to them attractive until 31, and then begin finding slightly younger men attractive. While this also has to do with women ageing out of fertility being a driver of attractiveness, the traits women find most attractive in men are relative to them. Provision, caretaking, mastery, etc. are all exhibited in people who are in great shape, old enough to have some success, mature, but also vitality of spirit.

No matter the format in which men encounter young women, youth will always be prized above all else.

“When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it.” - The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde

The life of a $100 bill begins at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, then moves to Federal Reserve vaults. From there it flows to what the Fed calls “Extended Custodial Inventory” hubs: banks in Frankfurt, Hong Kong, London, Singapore, Zurich. The ECIs are the wholesale distributors of physical dollars abroad. They load pallets of $10M onto cargo planes run by armoured logistics companies, who charge ~1% for each leg of the trip. A dollar from London could then be shipped to Dubai, where the guardrails on who can buy are a little murkier, which then ships to places like Tripoli. By the time you add up the cost of transporting the bill to the money changer’s drawer, you’re at a couple percent of its value, not including FX costs and the spread each handler takes. Even at the 10%+ premiums that the customer ultimately pays, the physical $100 bill is the most reliable liquid store of value that has ever existed. Nobody can intermediate your cash. These markets even price the quality of each bill, pre-2013 series carry higher counterfeit risk (due to North Korean superdollars1), torn or marked bills are rejected. These buyers are in the market for a guarantee, and anything that reduces the bill’s validity reduces its price.

In some places, these markets have well-known and easily discoverable prices. In Tehran, if you go to Ferdowsi Street, the spreads are small because it’s hard to maintain information asymmetry when you can hear what your competitors are offering. This means that when rates surge suddenly, markets catch this quickly because liquidity is so live. Tripoli’s money market is similar, and the Libyan dinar’s rate surges to 2x the official rate when oil prices fall or conflict flares, and this is the leading indicator for the bank to realise it. Speed, scale, liquidity, and quality are the tradeoffs you make when you buy your dollars.

This gap between the official price and the real price appears everywhere; most of the time it is too small for anyone to care. When it is just big enough, a subculture of obsessives emerges to harvest it (like with airline points or couponing in the west2), without threatening the system. When it is large, as in Libya, it produces a parallel economy. At the extreme, it collapses the system. Everything that follows is the same trade at a different size.

In Argentina, everyone understands the gap. The country has a whole host of dollar exchange rates: the official rate, the informal exchange rate, the foreigner exchange rate, the soy exchange rate, the tech exchange rate, the Qatar exchange rate, the Coldplay exchange rate3, etc. These spreads lead to retail trades: the puré: buy your $200 a month at the official rate, sell it on the street for the unofficial rate or the rulo: buy at the official exchange rate and sell at the bond exchange rate (MEP). These gaps are small, but accessible enough that the average person becomes a specialist, and in aggregate, this ecosystem stays small enough that the system doesn’t eliminate it.

The gap can get big enough that the state must tolerate it because too much of the economy is entrenched in it. Libya has the cheapest fuel in the world, 2 cents per litre, and some 15% of it is smuggled abroad. Smugglers go overland to Chad, Tunisia, and Algeria where the price rises the closer to the border you are, 5x at the last stations before you leave Libya and some multiple of that once you cross. Many ship fuel to Europe too, where Maltese and Italians get fuel at a third of their local cost and Libyans get a 20x what they bought it for. The government condones this because if they ever adjust fuel subsidies, it causes riots. The system feels broken, but every actor in it gets their cut so it is in nobody’s interest to dismantle it.

Sometimes the gaps are so obviously superior that instead of being tolerated, it gets formalised. Phone credit were once used as a remittance platform. Airtime is easy to send abroad, carries no KYC or FX fees, and runs on a network everyone is already registered for. If enough people believe airtime balances are worth the cash they represent, then this is functionally a version of the dollar. Collective belief makes it trustworthy, and people started to build specialised off-ramps in these countries for people who receive their remittances this way. This is what inspired M-Pesa, the now-dominant Kenyan mobile money system, where a phone number maps to a wallet you can send to. The major networks in Africa: Orange in French-speaking Africa, Airtel in Central and East Africa, MTN in the South and West, all expanded into mobile money networks leveraging their existing networks. They collectively do hundreds of billions of dollars in transactions, and are the default in many geographies.

Instead of replacing the system, the gap can also erode the system beyond repair. In Lebanon, the 2019 run on the banks meant that banks no longer had the liquidity to pay out dollar deposits. The country functionally ran on three currencies: the official exchange rate; the “lollar,” a dollar trapped inside the Lebanese banking system withdrawable at 15–25 cents; and real dollars, traded in cash through sarraf (money changer) networks. The government itself bought dollars through the sarrafs, the whole economy ran on informal cash networks because they had the most sophisticated, although dubiously legal, methods and the government had run out of ways to get more dollars.

That is the endgame: when coordination collapses, so does the currency, and once trust is gone, people do price discovery from first principles. Official rates only matter if they reflect real demand and supply. In informally dollarised countries like Cambodia and Venezuela there was no formal switch, no official way of acquiring dollars, people acquired them slowly over time. In Ecuador, half the country was already informally dollarised when the government made it official, buying $20B over the years as it got rid of the sucre, its local currency. The dollarisation was underwritten by debt operations: more dollar credit coming in, and a restructuring of the debt owed to reduce dollar outflows. Fraying systems either stay small enough to remain arbitrage only worth doing only at scale, or grow large enough that the system becomes the fray, with issues so large that even small holders care.

The Buenos Aires puré trader, the Nairobi airtime broker, the Tripoli $100 bill aggregator all make their livelihoods in the gaps. They use imperfect systems to do the same thing at different sizes, with different stakes, and with different consequences. They know the real price, even though the system tries to hide this. The trades that form around any gap is that system’s price discovery function, at a scale proportional to the value of the gap.

Libya is not a great country in modern times. It is the eighth least densely populated country in the world and the tenth richest in oil and gas, with an estimated three times that still undiscovered. It has natural beauty with a long Mediterranean coastline, natural wealth with gas and oil, and some of the best Roman ruins in the world. Sanctions have stopped development, mismanagement has halted production, and the refugee crisis has made its geography its downfall. Even with this mismatch, the people feel an entitlement to their ancient status and as someone told me, “Libyans believe we deserve a good life because we were born into it.”

In the airport, we are brought into a waiting room where we stare out at the damaged military planes sitting in a hangar. An excited officer strolls over and tries speaking to me in Arabic, then whips out a phone, and then another, to pull up a translation app. He speaks into it and the screen displays: Your mother drink in help to Libya. He is holding my passport hostage, so all I can do is smile and nod. He speaks again: Do you remember the victim of Olivia and Angel? in English. He holds out the phone for me to reply, and seems to accept my confusion as a non-verbal answer. When our fixer arrives, he says that the immigration officer had never seen a Hong Kong passport, and he was surprised by tourists taking a flight from Damascus to Tripoli, a route that transports captagon, not people.

On a tourist visa, you are followed at two levels: a tourist police officer who accompanies you everywhere and is always on the phone updating others about your whereabouts, and shadow police who track you to intervene when something goes wrong. Our fixer insists that every hotel approved for tourists has security planted in the rooms. This feels like an exaggeration, and at best performative, our tourist police officer did the minimum, and kept asking to be left behind to wait in the car so he could video-call his children. When we walked around tourist sites, he asked me to take photos of him as he posed. At the same time, they make it very clear that if you deviate from the approved route or leave your hotel without your officer, deportation is imminent.

A Chinese man we meet in Tunisia gave us his Chinese friend’s contact in Libya. We try to visit him, but our request gets denied by the tourist police. Over WeChat, our Chinese-Libyan friend tells us that our visa was very cheap, the $63 e-visa, and the cheaper your visa, the more heavily you are monitored and restricted.

On the highway, we swerve around two lanes of cars parked on the shoulder. It seems that Libyans like to stop on highways to get out and chat, but many are also in hundred car-long queues waiting to fill up on gas. The oil refinery had closed due to fighting a week prior, with no plans to reopen for a year. In a country where petrol costs two cents a gallon, having to refine oil elsewhere means cost will surge, and people are pre-emptively stocking up. Our driver races through red lights as he explains this, and sensing our alarm says, “Red lights are a suggestion, it’s more dangerous to stop than not.” This is encouraging, given that all the highway barriers are toppled and Libyan cars are often imported secondhand cars that fail western requirements.

A car’s plates vary depending on whether the driver is Libyan or not. The distinction between Libyans and non-Libyans is made explicit time and time again. Tourists are too small of a contingent to matter, so non-Libyans are mostly migrants. In other parts of Africa, people have complained to me that Maghrebi Africans feel superior. In Libya, this was definitely the case. I asked one Libyan whether he “identified as African”. He seemed offended by the idea and told me that Libyans “don’t feel African.” He made no effort to hide his distaste for the non-Libyans we passed, the only homeless people we saw. He tells me, “we have no poverty here. If a Libyan is hungry, he can ask any Libyan and they will give him food.” But this duty is only to fellow Libyans, not migrants.

In the ancient Mediterranean world, being the centre of Africa and Europe held some truth as being the centre of the world. Today, it means they are a hub for the refugee crisis from the Sahel. Libya is one of the principal staging points for migrants attempting to reach Europe, so much so that the EU used to pay Libya to detain migrants. Many migrants stay in Libya for years to save up for the trip and make up most of the service staff we see in Tripoli. There are rumours about the job market for them being so dire that Libya has one of the last functioning slave markets, but when I ask about this, my fixer does not like the line of questioning. He will go as far as to admit that migrants in desperate circumstances are sold as indentured servants, but denies slavery vehemently.

In the centre of the city, we observe the money market, which opens at 9AM Eastern/1PM local time when New York determines the LYD:USD exchange rate. Cash is offered for bank balances at discounts as high as 22%. Hundred-dollar bills command a premium; some dealers specialise in exchanging small bills for large ones and charging a fee. These markets function through accounts in lax offshore jurisdictions like Dubai, to move money in and out. There is a large black market for dollars, made easy by fuel arbitrage: fuel is so heavily subsidised that 15% of it is smuggled to and sold in Europe for foreign currency. An estimated $3B changes hands through informal channels, often over WhatsApp, at nearly twice the official rate. The only people who demand dinars not dollars are immigrants sending money home, where they want their local currency even less. They typically use hawala or physically carry cash. The largest of these, the Libya-Niger corridor moves around $1B in remittances annually, none of it through formal channels.

Libya should not be a poor country, it has just been stifled by sanctions. The reason the west retains leverage is that it froze $67B of Libyan assets and has returned none, on the grounds that the country has not yet stabilised. Libya has not received a dividend from the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA) since 2011. Instead, the UK government collects £5M annually in tax from the frozen assets, and fund managers have received $179M in management fees while growing the portfolio only $3.3M in twelve years. The portfolio includes prime property in London which is unmanaged and vacant, haemorrhaging hundreds of millions. The Londoner recently found that the LIA’s prime property of 484–504 Oxford Street now houses “knock-off Harry Potter shop Wizards and Spells, where morose Dobby dolls stare out alongside an array of generic tourist memorabilia.” The situation became so bleak that HSBC asked the LIA to close some accounts. It could not because closing an account would be a transaction, and sanctioned accounts cannot transact. The United States is dangling these funds as a reward to Libya as it tries to negotiate stability.

This is the inheritance of Gaddafi’s vision. Oil runs the country, and the economy is so reliant on it that he shut down entire sectors, like tourism, without affecting GDP more than 1-2%. The goal was to keep Libya insular to prevent western countries from stealing oil revenue. The Gaddafi years were impressive: tripled literacy rates, guaranteed employment, one of the highest GDPs in Africa, etc. But the grand vision of upskilling the country and nationalising oil with local workers stalled.

They tell me they idolise Saddam Hussein because “he never knelt to western powers” and this is the “ultimate masculinity” which leaders need. The desire for an iron fist is similar to the reason some Syrians still miss Assad: they do not know who to blame, but they know who not to blame. Life was better under Gaddafi.

Part of the problem is that “Libyans are fundamentally lazy”, someone tells me, they are not accustomed to working because under Gaddafi everyone made money without doing much. There are still subsidies on essentials like groceries and fuel. This mindset is evident as you walk around, there is a thriving retail and restaurant scene creating traffic at all hours because so many people have nowhere in particular to be. But these people are still financially insecure; whenever oil prices dip or the government says something ominous, there is a run on the banks. We saw ATMs being restocked with cash with crowds rushing towards the gender-segregated machines on many street corners.

In many ways, Libya is still very disconnected. It is the country where the fewest people I have ever encountered speak basic English. The ones who spoke English told me they had learned it from TikTok. Cultural exports seem lacking, except Turkey has a firm hold. Turkish Airlines advertises Amazon and Shein as imports it is bringing in. Another Turkish import is Espresso Lab, the coffee chain, which has become a gathering place for people doing remote digital work and gays. In a place where both of these are strange, they congregate in the western-feel coffee shop. Libya is the first place where I didn’t see any Coca-Cola, only Pepsi. These small things add up to a country that feels distant.

Libya internally does not feel like it has experienced much change since the war ended. Uncertainty is constant, but the day to day is stable enough to ignore it. Libya externally sounds like it is at a turning point: the American military recently conducted its first joint exercise here in decades, an American envoy has been mediating between the two rival governments for nearly a year and helped broker the first joint national budget, oil exports are rising and commanding a premium, and major airlines are returning as the main Tripoli airport reopens after twelve years. But perhaps there is a ways to go before these visions merge, for the external matters cannot solve the internal matters without the people’s will to do so. And the pride and pessimism of the average Libyan feels like it will take much convincing to overcome.

Most comparably poor countries have always been poor, whereas Syria regressed from being an industrialised country. Syrians do not seem to assign blame, there are too many candidates: fifty-four years of the Assads, the Arab Spring, interference from Russia, Iran, Turkey, the Gulf states, and the West in the war, ISIS and a constellation of other jihadi groups, then a 2023 earthquake in the north. In December 2024, the regime fell and Assad fled to Moscow, and the West decided Syria was finally a friend. Since then, the US has began to lift sanctions, removed the terrorist designation from its new government (a former al-Qaeda affiliate) and Syria begins the long path of rebuilding.

We arrive at the Jordanian-Syrian border, staring at the options: Women Arrivals, Arab Arrivals, Foreign Arrivals, Syrian Arrivals, Jordanian Arrivals. We tentatively choose the women’s line and find ourselves behind a row of men, one of whom escorts us to Jordanian Arrivals, behind a Congolese man. We have pre-applied for visas on US passports, but having entered Jordan on Hong Kong passports, they demand to see our exit stamps. Holding both, the guard looks up. “You are Chinese?” I nod. He hands back the US passports as I try to explain our Syrian visas are registered to those. “But you are Chinese?”

He takes the Hong Kong passports away and returns with a slip: $25. The cashier stares at the passports, “You are not Chinese, you are Hong Kong!” We say Hong Kong is Chinese, and they argue with us in broken English, saying Hong Kong visas are $150, still less than the $250 I’ve been told for US passports, so I nod. Animatedly, he points at me, “150 US dollars! US dollars! Are you sure? Are you sure this is ok? 150 each!” They take the passports away and spend a long time arguing in the back room, one of them intermittently sucking on the cover of my passport. When they return, I present three $100 bills. One laughs, “Mistake, mistake, too much. $25 ok!” We give them $50 and they laugh as we walk away.

Our driver assured us this kind of chaos was only temporary, the new government is improving things like this.

Many Syrians are less optimistic about the new government. A Christian woman I met lamented that they had at least held elections in the Assad era, nobody had voted for this president. She says that sectarianism had never existed until this new regime adopted the western talking points. She worried that Christians were becoming repressed, Easter celebrations now had to be held in private and her Muslim friends no longer joined in, as they always had. She resented the new regime’s attention to what she considered frivolous matters: restricting alcohol, cracking down on pornography, introducing speed cameras, getting rid of anti-Israel signs. “Now we understand nothing,” she said. “We are less hopeful for change than before.” Eighteen months into the transition she felt there was no progress to be seen. “People are getting poorer and poorer than before.” Public sector wages suggest otherwise, having risen 10-35x. She felt that Syria was being passed around, “The bus was being driven by Iran and Russia, now it’s being driven by Turkey and America.”

A man across town offered a different account. His current wife is Sunni Muslim, his ex-wife Christian, his neighbours Alawite and Shia. He insisted that Syrians continue to be the most inclusive, and even his Jewish friends have returned under the new regime. He mentioned his cousin, a polygamous Muslim married to both a Christian and a Muslim woman which is acceptable because from each woman’s perspective, she is in a monogamous marriage. He insisted only Alawites, Assad’s minority sect, had ever been sectarian.

In the old city, we passed several shops selling pictures of Saddam Hussein. Our local companion pointed it out, explaining that Syria needed a strong leader like him. She had visited Iraq before 2003 and found people happy and free under him, just as her country had been under Assad. “We wish he’d come back,” she said. “Or someone like him. Everyone knows our lives were better before, how can they wake up one day and pretend to hate someone everyone knew we liked?” (perfect example of Timur Kuran’s Private Truth, Public Lies).

We walk into a cafe, where a soldier rests his chin on the barrel of his gun as he smiles at me. Another soldier has his shoes off, foot up on a chair, with a missing toe. Some Chinese men from Lanzhou (= Muslim) started talking to me, they had moved to Damascus two months ago and liked life here, making ~$100/month at a Chinese hostel. They summarised Syria: the food is bad but the police are fair. He was most appalled by our indulgence of the local cuisine. “A week of Syrian food! Let me show you where the Chinese supermarket is so you don’t have to suffer anymore.” The hostel’s owner was another Chinese Muslim with Egyptian-accented Arabic, who spoke of his plans to expand into a chain.

I ran into a group staying at said hostel in Palmyra, who explained that Chinese hostels are always a goldmine in places like this: they don’t advertise on English websites, so you can only find them on ChatGPT, and they’re always cheaper and cleaner. He tells me that Syria has the most trusting and generous people of anywhere he has been, and I am inclined to agree. For example, I tried to buy some things at an antiques store but didn’t have enough cash on me and the owner wrapped the things up for me and told me to just leave the money at my hotel, he’d grab it later.

At a cafe near the Roman ruins of Bosra, I ask to use the bathroom. The cafe owner smiles and apologises that he doesn’t have one, gesturing to the cafe’s exterior which has been bombed out. There is one small area they’ve cleared, which is the cafe, left and right are piles of rubble. A boy of maybe 10 waves me over and the owner tells me to follow him. He takes my hand and walks rapidly over to another cleared structure among more rubble, which seems to be his home, and gives me a short look around before letting me use the bathroom. This area is between Deraa, where the war started, and Suwayda, where it continues to go on today (Jordan is bombing to destory its captagon production).

On the road to the Crusader-era castle, Krak des Chevaliers, we pass many checkpoints. At each, the guards joke with our friendly driver, one even dances for him, with his gun bouncing on his hip as he does so. I ask the driver how he knows all the guards, he says he doesn’t, the guards are all like this when they don’t have particular orders. At the castle, we discuss who has fought here, and among discussions of the Ottomans and Crusaders, a guard strolling around says hi to my guide. He abruptly switches to discussing the most recent fights here: ISIS had taken over the castle and imprisoned that man here. The overlay of recent events was often given more attention than the remnants of the distant past in such monuments.

At the Aleppo citadel, he shows me secret passages with bullets on the ground and says his tourists like to take them home as souvenirs. Aleppo was the hardest hit city, worsened by the earthquake, and it is difficult not to be shocked by every street corner’s destruction. A minaret that stood for 1000 years fell for the first time 12 years ago. Next to every rebuilt wall stands a falling wall, often in the same house; the skyscrapers have their windows blown out; shops occupy the ground floor level of buildings that have collapsed in on themselves; street signs have bullet holes. He points out various destruction, being careful to differentiate war and earthquake destruction, and telling me the exact date that every wall was rebuilt, most of it in the last year. We walk around to see that restaurants that haven’t been open since before the war are finally reopening, most of which have opened in the last three months, after 14 years.

At Palmyra, the destruction by ISIS is pointed out more to us than the underlying site. “It’s safe! Just don’t step anywhere I don’t because there might still be mines”. At every site, the guide tells us how much dynamite was used to blow up each site and what atrocities ISIS committed there. The Temple of Bel had been blown apart by 30 tonnes of dynamite, the theatre was bulldozed then the head archaeologist was beheaded on livestream with 20 others executed. A Bedouin man selling tourist trinkets follows us, and when we have refused for long enough, he ups his game trying to sell us ISIS money. In one tomb, we go into a hidden alcove that once held dozens of bodies which was only discovered when ISIS used the main chamber as a prison and the prisoners found the hidden tomb in search of an exit. Our guide tells us that growing up, Palmyra was known as a place people went to party, but it has been a long time since people have partied here.

On the road back to Damascus, we stopped at the Bagdad Cafe, named for the American film, run by a Bedouin family who moved to Lebanon during the war to keep their son from being conscripted, and returned the day after Assad fell. In 2010, the owner had told The Guardian: “We’ve had our president, the Chinese prime minister and a bunch of German politicians call in for lunch.” Now they raise goats and serve a couple tourists a day, on a good day (Palmyra itself gets 5-10 tourists a day). Down the road, the highway from Iraq was backed up with oil tankers, the Al-Tanf crossing had been hastily reopened while the actual infrastructure would take months, to give Iraq an alternative to the Strait of Hormuz. The intersection with this Iraq highway is the only checkpoint where guards seem to be alert, not dancing.

At the Four Seasons Damascus, which has not been a real Four Seasons since 2019 when its majority owner was sanctioned and management pulled out, Saudis, Emiratis, and Qataris roam the halls. Maseratis and Range Rovers are parked in the driveway, contrasting the average car in Syria, which is usually secondhand, commonly with only one door opening with mirrors taped in place and cloth for windows. In our five nights there, we see no tourists. The concierge laughs when we ask for tourism recommendations. We saw three female guests. Much of the staff are very made up Syrian women, with lip filler to rival Slavic women. In the complex, there are fake restaurants from well-known brands like Em Sherif (Lebanese chain popular in Monaco and London), Cafe de Flore (Parisian cult cafe), and Angelina (Parisian patisserie).

The delegations shuffling through the “Four Seasons” are promising billions of dollars. UAE’s Emaar promises $19B, more than the total GDP today which is ~$13B. The estimated cost to rebuild Syria is $200B, but the Syrian Investment Authority seems more keen on soliciting investment for its 590 projects, costing from hundreds to millions, for yacht clubs to traffic light factories. They claim that they have “one of the world’s top 10 investment laws” with 100% tax exemptions for foreign investors. The division between this and the average Syrian’s life is hard to reconcile.

Everyone I met had chances to go abroad, many of their families had moved to Europe. But they chose to stay because they didn’t feel like refugees. Whatever Syria had been reduced to, they had declined to be reduced along with it. Women put on a full face of makeup even when they have subsided off only bulgur for weeks, people gift you Syrian delicacies upon meeting you, coffee arrives as you walk into someone’s home or store. It is easy to find corners of Damascus where the prolific indoor smoking and shisha cloud reality but it is hard to forget for too long, once you step outside again.

Women exercise this pettiness at different levels, intra-female competition is rife in every corner of female life from Instagram comment sections where pretty girls reassure ugly girls that they look good to creating movements that pretend to amplify less attractive traits. Women compete more on looks than men do, so this is a rather gendered phenomenon.

On the subconscious level, women feel most competition from those most similar in rank to them. Tracy Vaillancourt (excellent intro to her work here) has studied this via hairdressing where “the more attractive the client, the more hair was recommended to be cut off”, with hairdressers being the most competitive with people most similar in attractiveness to them. Even with no malicious intent, women subconciously compete. This can often be witnessed in how women help their friends choose outfits or photos, erring towards being nice instead of truthful. In the seldom instances where women are truthful, this often leads to a counterattack where the expectation is you can only criticise if you have no flaws yourself.

The next tier up is women broadcasting things that they believe are good for society but are an exception to. One commonly mentioned example is Alex Cooper of Call Her Daddy, who built an empire on broadcasting sexual liberation while quietly entering into a trad relationship that is attainable to her because she is a high-status (attractive, famous) woman who can get away with a couple years of promiscuous behaviour and come out unscathed. Promoting sexual liberation was a win-win: she encouraged other women toward behaviour that made them less competitive in the high-value mate market, while secretly exiting that market on favourable terms. Sexual liberation is something most women claim to support but still judge those who practice it. Feminism for thee, but not for me. Women commonly shame others “by ‘‘punishing’’ other females who seem to make sex too readily available ‘‘through informal sanctions such as ostracism and derogatory gossip’’. The listeners whose lives were permanently altered by their newfound sexual liberation are the unknowing foils to Cooper.

Rentafoil by Emil Zola is about a man who discovers the business of hiring out ugly girls to be foils to non-ugly girls, like the cheerleader effect. The foils do not want to be foils: when he advertises for ugly women, there is no price he can pay such that the ugly will come flocking, only insecure pretty girls come. The ugly do not admit to being ugly, only girls who know they are not ugly, just not pretty enough, call themselves ugly.

Ted Chiang’s Liking What You See: A Documentary is about calliagnosia, a treatment that blinds you to facial beauty. People debate its merits, and the ones for whom lookism is least relevant, because they are privileged in one way or another, are the greatest proponents. Renouncing the perception of advantage costs them nothing whereas the unprivileged cannot afford to be so vocal.

The final tier is conscious competition, where women are actively keeping out other women from their peer set. These examples might seem akin to the hairdresser example, but there is a clear group of women who hold the power, compared to hair which is about relative attractiveness. These examples are the most malicious because there is a guise of generosity in the mechanism.

Workplace harassment is a way for older women to maintain their status and restrict younger women from finding shortcuts to the top. A younger woman who can sleep her way to the top challenges a woman who didn’t, or even worse, couldn’t. By seeming like she is protecting younger women from male predators, the older woman seems like a guardian while also guarding her territory. Body positivity works in the same way. When slim women encourage body positivity, they stop other women from becoming their competition, presuming most desirable men have a strong preference for slim. Anecdotally, I notice the people who are on the verge (slim to most, but not quite slim enough to anyone truly slim) are the ones who care most about entering this group. By fending off competition of all degrees, and encouraging a girl to not lose weight, you gatekeep. We see something similar in GLP-1 usage where people feel cheated when their friends use GLP-1s, they are admitting the existence of the game.

In Facial Justice, when the protagonist begins to make lookism legible, it becomes harder and harder to endure. The more hidden competition stays, the easier it is to make moves that one is barely cognisant of or can disguise as generosity. She exposed the logic of facial justice in a facially just society which showed it was not about uplifting the underprivileged, but suppressing the privileged. “It is easier to lower a standard than to raise one”. The principle is always downward, because “Why should you be at liberty to feel superior, just because, in this one particular, you have more than other people?”1

Zola’s Rentafoil business fails to attract the ugly, they must seek them out. If the ugly recognised themselves as ugly, the game would break. It works best when only the ones at the top are in explicit competition, because they can afford to be seen competing. For everyone else, the most effective players are the ones who do not believe they are playing.

Hawala can only expand as far as the trust network can. In a village, one guy takes your money and tells you that you can collect it from any one of his friends with a password only he, the other hawaladar, and you have. You know that guy’s family, friends, and every social link of his. If he breaks that promise, the whole community will bring shame on him accordingly, meaning he would have no way to participate in society, because nobody would trust him. The cost of this is so large that trust in the entire network becomes transitive. The end state of this is a network with nodes all over the country and in every country with the diaspora. This was how Somalis sent money around for years, until technology tried to formalise the network. Today, providers like Dahabshiil and ZAAD overlay that network, with the same hawaladars as nodes for on and off-ramps, but allowing each user an easier way of identifying themselves at each node.

The hawaladar who defaults loses everything in life, making the network so durable over centuries. In Afghanistan and Yemen, where rival factions control different areas, hawala is one of the only open channels between them Money stays fungible because it is backed by something war does not rupture: birthright.

Every financial system is built around a basic social unit. In the west, it is the individual. Our institutions save us from the tediousness of having to evaluate individuals by giving us intermediaries we can trust because our government regulates them and we trust our government, and so, we trust the things it governs. In government-less Somalia, the only unit people trust is the clan. The obligation to this unit is your birthright, there is no society without the clan.

The Somali have layers of the clan, like the beel, qabil, reer, and mag, which are used for different systems built on top of it. The smallest is the mag, also known as the diya-paying group, which is an agnatic lineage that pools liability from 300-3000 men. Diya is sometimes called blood money, but covers any kind of payment for harming another clan’s member. In the west, this resolution would be managed by a mix of insurance, a judicial system, and a credit bureau. For them, these institutions are baked into their social system, so all kinds of disputes are settled by the clan. When Dahabshiil or ZAAD settle disputes, it goes to the clan and they resolve it internally and tell the company where the disputed funds should go, the legal system only handles vagabonds. People trust people, not institutions.

David Friedman’s Legal Systems Very Different From Ours is a study in exotic legal systems based on social units larger than the West’s individual. The gypsies, formally known as Roma, have stood up a system agnostic to the countries they reside in to solidify their in-group: membership is defined by adherence to Romaniya, the customary law, where given geographic dispersion, compliance to the law is the way to retain membership in the group. We see this reflected in their language: there is no Romani word for people, only for Romani and non-Romani. They enforce this with marimé, “pollution” which once associated with you, excludes you from the group. The courts they use to enforce this are only given power if the community agrees with the verdict, there is no permanent institution upholding the law; it is an informal, undocumented, locally variable, decentralised enforcement mechanism.

The Amish have a membership system with the Ordnung, where each Ordnung has differing strictness of contact with the outside world and an individual can move upwards in strictness freely, but if they move downwards, they get shunned by Meidung, Amish equivalent to marimé, by the stricter sects. Shunning is wholly social, so there is no legal matter that a country could enforce to stop this paralegal system from working (like the Roma). The totality of the social unit in both these systems means that being a bad actor in one domain affects your entire social standing.

Every system that cannot enforce obligation through the social unit has to pay to enforce it some other way. There are many examples of technology companies trying to replicate high trust societies in a way that is retrofitted to our low trust financial system, like crypto. Don’t trust your counterparty, trust your network; don’t trust an arbitrary token, trust the stablecoin; don’t trust your account custodian, trust yourself. Trust in transparent rule-based systems attempt to replace human trust, but the fault we constantly come back to is that human:system interaction is not right for many human:human purposes. For example, chargebacks and refunds are givens to the American consumer, and as commerce is being explored on-chain, the introduction of reversible transactions necessarily takes away trust in the system and reverts it to a human. Few people trust technology enough to delegate decision making to it. We wrap technology in brands to make it more palatable to the average consumer. The institution wraps the system and becomes the unit we trust.

Trust at the individual level is not scalable, all of these examples abstract it up into groups who hold obligations and punishments at the individual level. The foundations of our society are in the social unit we trust. Each time we scaled the distance of trust, we scaled our societal systems. Our western systems have thin membership into each, you can go bankrupt but have your social life unaffected. Our systems are gated by function which means we cannot guard against someone who is a known bad actor in one domain entering a parallel domain, to stop us from having a social credit system. We pay for the system’s uncertainty about everyone in it, including its uncertainty about ourselves. It is sort of a trust tax, because financial cost is the alternative to a social obligation. Only at the extremes, like incarceration, does our system affect us wholly. In the clan system, the incarceration equivalent is handled in the same way as a petty dispute, the system is omniscient.

Western systems are leaps and bounds more functional at scale, but underneath, we are always trying to simplify our networks to reduce friction. Understanding the pockets of the world that have systems with different underlying networks helps us humanise our systems back to their ground purpose: facilitating trust.

In strange countries, I bump into many such travellers. We go through the ritual: “How many countries have you been to? Oh, you were just in Somalia, well I was just in Liberia.” I’ve learned that it is an unspoken taboo to ask why they travel to strange countries. The answer comes with a scoff, “this country exists, so I am here.” My friend from the Congo described his feelings about a canceled Arctic circumnavigation in the world’s roughest waters: “It would have been awful, you expect it could be miserable. But as long as it was available, I thought I had to do it.”

“Because travel is often a sad and partly masochistic pleasure, the arrival in obscure and picturesquely awful places is one of the delights of the traveler.” - Theroux

The modern explorer

These explorers live vicariously through their statistics and stories, besting each other for the most obscure knowledge and destinations traveled. The desire to explore has been flattened into conquering a coloured-in country on a personal map. Then, after hitting 193 countries, you begin to split your map into regions. You seek the thrill of being one of dozens to visit the Wakhan Corridor, the only part of Afghanistan that the war never reached or to be the first person in recent history to land on Bouvet.

The modern explorer is caricatured by Lord Miles or Citrini Analyst #3, but they actually seek more intentional and narrower experiences than country collectors. Modern motivations are often sensationalist; terrorism tourism is a social media niche. Going to the frontiers of civilisation used to be risky, patriotic, and an all-consuming endeavour. In the Great Game, where Britain and Russia competed to map out lands between India and Russia to fend the other off, the directive for explorers was to go into the unknown and come back alive for the sake of filling in the map. There is a universal drive among explorers to believe that they can escape what they know, and back then, there was more truth to this: “He did it for a reason common to travellers setting off: he was, among other things, “thoroughly tired of ‘progress’ and of ‘civilisation’” (Paul Theroux on Richard Burton).

There is a distaste from most about these country collectors, for it is modernity at its most excessive, going to the ends of the earth to tick a box. The ends are too well-defined for the means to retain any purity of intention.

The aspirant class of adventure travel is growing, where many people want to believe they are high in openness but are too neurotic to actually be so. These are the people, (mostly women), who watch TikToks about oases of civilisation in the developing world, like Marrakech or Mexico City. They travel virtually first, through content creators, and travel to recreate the content they watch. All hotel interiors look the same, all tourist sites have known photo spots, all coffee shops have vegan milk options. But these people still believe themselves to be well-traveled. They are only comfortable seeking narrow forms of newness, something that sounds different in name but is the same in feel.

This aspirant class and extreme travellers suffer from the same modern problem, or modern luxury, depending on how you view it: travel is a sophisticated form of consumption. Perhaps modern explorers were just born in the wrong era, and they would rather run amok around the third world than have to deal with the bureaucracy of visas and FX, but their systemisation and pattern-matching implies otherwise, these people are good at navigating the digital world, not physical. Globalisation has killed the thrill of exploration. There is no more scrambling left to do.

On otherness

Modern travelers claim that “authenticity” is one of the top things they search for. When I travel, I too want to believe that I have authentic experiences. In the Qinghai plateau, I hung out with monks WeChatting their friends and playing video games; but a traveler seeking authenticity would feel cheated if this is what they found, they prefer to see traditional rituals performed, even if only for show. All authenticity a foreigner witnesses is tempered in some way.

No matter where you go, people are more similar than different to you. People are more adaptable than we imagine. Working out how to survive in circumstances, no matter how dire, is the human condition. When we, as tourists, peek into this life, it is never processed as our reality. Americans “eurosummer” and view it as a playground, they never question what a real life in these countries might actually be like. The “europoors” are an abstract concept. Eastern and southern Europeans 18-24 make an average of less than €10k annually, the same price as 3 nights during peak season at Eden Roc.

It is the narcissism of small differences that we fixate on. We often believe we are seeing something shocking, like in Nasiriyah, I saw dogs snacking on dog carcasses in a trash heap off the side of a highway, or in Varanasi, I strolled by people bathing in the Ganges as human ashes are being thrown in. The shock at filth is acute but fleeting. What is lasting is the shock that people who find these things normal are, all things considered, similar to us, so much so that we can communicate and build trust given our shared set of assumed norms mostly holds. Extreme travel and authentic travel converge on our shared humanity.

Huxley’s explanation of the Beaten Track in Jesting Pilate describes this well: no matter how foreign the things you see are, “life is still fundamentally the same”.

Eritrea

Eritrea’s past is littered with ugliness, of which you can read a good account from Alex De Waal on their dictator, Isaias Afewerki, here. The country releases no statistics, no official documents, not even a population count. The government is concerned with power, not fame, someone explained to me, and this is why their toughest policies affect the world stage but do not quite harm the lives of locals. In Asmara’s oldest hotel, I met a man who had served on the constitution commission. He told me how Ethiopia’s dictator Mengistu tried to eradicate Eritrea’s intellectuals. “I was on a list of the top ten,” he said. “The other nine were murdered. I survived by luck. Everyone here has a story like this. It is where our Eritrean spirit comes from.”

The story of Eritrea is hard to untangle between narratives one reads and what one sees: it has mostly eradicated malaria; it has one of the highest rates of refugees as a % of population; there is no petty crime; it has the lowest internet penetration globally; it is the only country other than America to tax on citizenship not residency; it has fascist signs on buildings; the contrast goes on. Eritreans were colonised by the Ottomans, Egyptians, Italians, Brits, and Ethiopians but hold a national identity rooted in being one of the oldest bastions of civilisation. On their western colonisers, locals I spoke to held balanced opinions, with distaste only directed towards Ethiopia. Summed up: “Under the Italians we could eat, but not speak. Under the Brits we could speak, but not eat. Under the Ethiopians, we could do neither.”

Asmara feels like a city that fell asleep in the 1930s and has not quite woken up. The Italians used it as an experimentation ground for modernist architecture, fascism forbade experimentation on the mainland, so the architects came here. After fascism, Asmara was used as a model for urban planning in Italian cities like Latina. The Fiat Tagliero is perhaps the most famous relic of Asmara’s colonial history, a gas station shaped like an airplane, with concrete wings cantilevered over the pumps. The Italian engineer who built it threatened to kill himself if the wings didn’t stand when they removed the support, which most people believed they would not. Today, it still stands.

Eritreans dressed in summer suits sip macchiatos on sunny terraces on the main street, an extremely clean, palm-lined boulevard with old Italian cinemas playing old American movies, dive bars dedicated to the pro-colonialist prime minister Crespi, and bowling alleys where old Italian men and young Eritrean men compete. If you don’t focus too hard, locals say you could be in Trieste. But one is shocked back into reality by the children shouting “Chinese!” When children see tourists, Europeans and Asians alike, they assume they are Chinese because they have become the dominant foreign influence.

Asmara is unlike every other developing world city I have visited: the men do not harass women, locals speak good enough English to have substantive conversations off the bat, it is incredibly clean. But beneath the surface, it feels stagnant. When I asked what it would take for things to change, people blame the region’s sanctions and instability, things out of their control. It feels like many problems are bubbling under the surface that don’t quite disturb daily life, but prevent any forward motion.

Djibouti

“Welcome to China!” the driver said as we left the airport. I thought he was joking. He was not joking. We passed the Chinese port, the Chinese military base, the new Chinese hospital, the Chinese apartment buildings, the signs for the new Chinese construction site, past a row of interspersed Djibouti and Chinese flags, to our Chinese hotel designed from used shipping containers, where the Chinese manager greets me in Mandarin. He laments that he has been in Djibouti for seven years and cannot understand why someone would visit this country for fun. I ask him what’s wrong with Djibouti: “Africa has Africa problems.” He said this as if it explained everything.

The dislike is bidirectional, our driver told us the local slur for the Chinese is “Alibaba” which he likened as offensive as the n-word.

Djibouti exists because it controls a chokepoint which 10% of global trade passes through. It is the only overseas base of the Chinese, with the American base five miles away and French, Japanese and Italian bases scattered in-between. We spoke briefly with American soldiers who treated the dysfunction of the country as a fact of nature, a Palantir employee who seemed distraught to be there too.

Poverty estimates are shocking: 79% nationally and 94% outside of the capital. The roads are so bad that all taxis are 4x4s. The trash on the streets is worse than most Indian cities. Stores and restaurants open and close within a year because there is no middle class to sustain them. A Djiboutian told us that Yemeni refugees who had fled to Djibouti were starting to go back to Yemen. Its redeeming quality is that the default here is peace, because it is so strategically important to everyone. The locals told us that they no longer care to cater to the needs of any foreign power, they have learned the hard way that any living standard increase they get is simply a byproduct of having to do business there, their poverty impedes no one.

Somaliland

Flying into Hargeisa, I made the mistake of giving my letter of invitation for Mogadishu to the immigration officer. He sternly asks me if I am in the right country. When you board the plane to Hargeisa, they need to see a visa for Somalia. Then when you arrive, the Somalilanders render that invalid and issue you a new visa for Somaliland, a place that is a de facto country with its own government and currency, not a de jure country. I show him my Hargeisa LOI, and he asks me to airdrop it to his iPhone named “Bulbulooooz”.

On the side of a busy street where goats, donkey-drawn carts, and Japanese cars from the 1990s jostle within inches of us, we sit on broken plastic chairs with Somalia’s highest-ranked chess player. His friends egg him on by telling him Somaliland will get recognition from China if he beats my Chinese friend at chess. Everywhere we go, people, even the police, yell “recognition” at us, joking that our presence means our country will give them recognition as a separate nation to Somalia. Recognition is on everyone’s minds: it has been 34 years since they separated from Somalia but the recent Israeli recognition has ignited hope.

While Somaliland is more stable than Somalia, with its democratic government and lack of violence, it is less developed. Mogadishu has better infrastructure; Hargeisa’s roads in the city centre are unpaved and many buildings haven’t been repaired since the civil war ended in the 90s. In contrast, it is safer: street vendors, including money changers, leave their stalls unmanned when they go to pray whereas Mogadishu’s terrorist groups cause lots of violent crime.

Money changers are very important, their central bank does not set the exchange rate because it doesn’t have enough foreign reserves, so these changers are the best gauge of the rate. The Somaliland shilling trades for around 10,000 shillings to 1 USD, up from ~6000 shillings 15 years ago. Money changing is crucial for locals: menus in Hargeisa list prices in dollars but in rural areas they list in shillings, all white collar businesses pay employees in dollars but blue collar businesses pay in shillings. Their mobile money is quite sophisticated: the mobile wallet ZAAD took off because of its dual currency structure. Beggars chase you around holding signs with their phone number that using ZAAD, you can text USD to them instantly and for free. The offboarding is seamless too, you drive a couple kilometres in any direction and there will be a guy in a store who will hand you cash in USD or shillings from your balance.

Remittances, which make up as much as 50% of GDP, prop up a lot of the Horn of Africa. Some estimates of unemployment are as high as 75%, partially because of low female employment but mostly because remittances fund many families. These idle men often develop a habit for qat, a stimulant that men chew for hours a day socially that tanks their productivity. Once they start, this expensive ($5-10/day) addiction bars them from being useful members of society. An ex-qat addict helped us peel the highest quality qat he could find, telling us it was a quintessential local experience. It is like caffeine in small doses (15 mins of chewing) but more like weed in larger doses (2+ hours of chewing). When we drove out of Hargeisa, the armed soldier accompanying us chewed qat nonstop, telling us he had chewed enough overnight to be seeing the common hallucination of a golden bird, of which one believes they can pluck a feather from and become wealthy enough to never work again.

Qat is haram, technically, but so is polygamy practiced the way they practice it. Islam says that you can take multiple wives (up to four) if you can support them, but in Somaliland, it is mostly poor men who marry multiple wives, wealthier men prefer monogamy. When a poor man has several wives, the women have to support themselves and live completely separate existences, sometimes even in different cities. A local, Omar, tells us about his best friend’s family, who are an exception. They came from a wealthy clan (they have tens of thousands of camels). The men of this family wanted to marry young. So young, in fact, that two of the brothers (one currently 12, one currently 28) married four 18 year old wives at 12. Abdirahman, the current 12 year old, dropped out of school and works in construction to support his wives. The women are paid mahr by the man’s family (traditionally 100 camels, where each camel is worth ~$1000, now usually just cash) and care more about marrying into a good clan than that they are marrying a 12 year old boy. The polygamous wedding ceremony is all lumped into one weekend, but each wife has her own event. He meets with each woman’s male relatives to give them half the mahr on day one, then the other half to the female relatives on day two, doing this four times per day.

Some women are more modern than this: one urbanite woman we met told us about her seven sisters, of which only one is married, and the rest work full time jobs and never plan to marry, but they all will indefinitely live in their parent’s home. This is rare. A telling interaction on marriage’s importance in society was when a young girl came up to me to practice her English, and all she knew how to say was: “what’s your name? are you married?” and then ran out of English vocabulary. Somaliland is very religious and traditional, much more so than Somalia. Ten years ago, a woman not wearing a hijab on the street would be yelled at, if not beaten up. Now, wearing loose, long-sleeved clothing and a hijab, men yelled at me on the streets for “being naked” because anything less than a dera is nudity to them.

Clans are the backbone of Somaliland: their government was formed because they were able to quickly stand up a council of elders, one from each clan, who organised democratic elections. Every person has a duty to his clan, and the clan a duty to him. For example, if you commit manslaughter, your clan pays the clan of the murdered in camels. For a man, the nationally accepted rate is 100 camels, for a woman, a mere 50.

Camels act as a store of wealth but are still commonly eaten, especially as the staple food on Fridays. (They eat camel meat with spaghetti, twirling spaghetti around their fingers like we do with a fork.) Livestock, mostly goats, has created the wealthiest people in the country, as merchants who export livestock to Saudi Arabia. These merchants funded their initial foray into independence because they were wealthy, but not wealthy enough, so they sought stability over all else. This, along with the clan structure, is one of the unique factors that made their state formation possible despite the messy circumstances (civil war) surrounding it.

This region’s relative stability may be underpinned by scarce capital, but this is about to change: Somaliland found oil in 2025 and will start to drill in 2027. This region also has a lot of gold, but right now it is only informally dug up by locals. Along with the hopes for recognition, Somaliland feels hopeful. Stereotypically, Somalis are wild and talkative, and we found them to be kind, full of laughter, and earnest. Some examples of kind behaviours that were seen as commonplace: 1) At restaurants, our Somali friends gave any leftovers to beggar children, even teaching them how to eat complicated foods; 2) In the streets, there are scales where you weigh yourself and if you have gained weight, you donate some amount of money multiplied by the extra kilos you have gained, which goes to feed the poor. I hope this spirit continues to shine through the impending changes.

The need for non-dollar stablecoins

While the dollar might power financial markets, local economies do not run on the dollar. In some countries I’ve recently visited, like Turkmenistan and Argentina, while the dollar commands a premium far higher than the official exchange rate, merchants still do not want to be paid in dollars, only the upper-middle class wants to save in dollars. Right now, this is one of the most compelling reasons for individuals to use stablecoins: avoiding capital controls. Despite paying 30% more to access dollar stablecoins than standard dollars in some countries, there is a willingness to pay. But eventually, everyone changes their money into local currency to spend, because if not, you pay 3x the rate by spending in USD via payment rails which run on official exchange rates instead of black market rates.

Countries with stable currencies are using dollar-denominated stablecoins to trade, but end up paying on average 4.7% more than standard dollar price. Look at Korea: the top country for on-chain trading doesn’t have a prominent KRW stablecoin, although there are some candidates: KRWQ (on Base but not available for Koreans) and KRW1 (to be launched on Circle’s Arc chain). The need does not seem urgent for traders, because USDT-KRW trades near the official rate. Non-US exchanges do not want to encourage buying USD stablecoins because they, through their banking partners, are regulated in how much FX they can do. Despite this, 17% of transactions on Upbit and Bithumb (Korea’s largest exchanges) are stablecoin trades and rising.

On-ramping to USDT grants a retail investor the prices of institutional FX markets, which small scale retail cannot access. Exchanges handle the FX for you because they can aggregate enough volume, but on the backend they are still doing two trades: KRW to USD and USD to USDT. As a Korean citizen, you cannot separate these steps and access USD for yourself at that rate (retail spread is often ~10x higher), so you are forced to pay whatever fees the exchange sets without being able to disaggregate the actions they are undertaking. The on-chain dollars you buy are non-fungible with currency you spend, you must off-ramp and pay more fees for your money to be usable again (stablecoin cards are a UX workaround but still do the same thing).

Even for institutions with access to the underlying trades, FX markets are inefficient despite deep liquidity; they suffer from running on T+2 settlement, meaning counterparties do not receive the money they traded until two days after due to banking networks not being able to communicate efficiently and the added complexities of timezones. T+2 reduces liquidity and increases risk, sometimes as extreme as your counterparty going bankrupt in between, but there is no better way to trade FX, yet.

The FX market is the largest financial market, settling $7.5T everyday: used by central banks controlling their currencies, banks doing cross border settlements, hedge funds making macro bets, etc. Every single country is reliant on FX markets with varying levels of openness, where the less open, the greater the need, cost, and inefficiencies are. Given the size, parts of it have migrated on-chain and there is some indication of demand: we have more and more FX perps, but that is upstream of FX spot. We could reroute some of that liquidity to FX spot, or, as off-chain markets move towards T+1 and even T+0, incentivize legacy institutions to trade on-chain.

Why this doesn’t exist yet

There is an intentional regulatory hurdle, where central banks prefer that there is no separate market where it is easy to trade their currency without being able to intervene. An on-chain FX pool could lead to more capital outflows and act as an unregulated, albeit more expensive, way for people to buy dollars. Any inconsistency between the regulated and unregulated pools could lead to unwanted currency pressure. For now, it is too inconvenient to constantly change your money for most people to save in one currency and spend in another, given that smaller transactions are more expensive and 41% of adults worldwide have less than $10k in wealth, not even liquid wealth.

Apart from regulation, there are two reasons FX is not on-chain yet: liquidity and use cases. Tether has established broad market accessibility with fiat, making markets like USDT/KRW trade at USD/KRW prices; these are synthetic claims on USD. In Argentina, the USDT/ARS is informally known as the “Crypto Dollar” exchange rate and is a leading indicator to the unofficial exchange rate, Blue Dollar, since it trades 24/7 and cuevas (informal exchangers) are only open during the day. To set up a USDT/local stablecoin to compete with this would need to offer the same competitiveness in price and more rewards to offset the nascent pool risk. Crown, a Brazilian stablecoin, shows how simply accessing local bonds could be attractive, by backing their coin with Brazilian T-bills which currently yield 14%. After hedging currency risk, this is a less attractive trade, so the demand for BRLV would have to be strong enough to subsidize attractive rewards for market makers to provide liquidity. Mento Labs has launched 15+ non-dollar stablecoins, but are offering 893% rewards on Kenyan shilling, underscoring this liquidity issue.

The right use cases would bootstrap liquidity, because they generate demand for local stablecoins without putting pressure on FX, so an issuer would be able to subsidize these rewards cheaply. If your primary use case is FX spot trading, then being the issuer of 15+ stablecoins all launched together could make sense, but injecting liquidity into each becomes expensive. When Terra was around, there was an app, Chai, that claimed to use stablecoins to settle $1.2B+ in local transactions because it was cheaper and quicker for merchants to get paid. Apparently, this was a scam, but it was marketed to merchants as settled on-chain, and so at least the value proposition was appealing to non-crypto natives. Even absorbing the FX cost made it cheaper than using traditional rails, so subtracting the FX cost would be even better. So long as the financial markets run on dollars, there need to be more localized reasons like this to justify the existence of local currency stablecoins.

Much of this could point towards CBDCs as the palatable answer to this. As Mert recently tweeted, stablecoins are never truly self-custodied because the issuer can always lock you out. Whatever central banks are worried about, being the issuer solves this. The Korean central bank has said they want to reduce usage of dollar stablecoins, but are not sure about the tradeoffs. Since CBDCs are unlikely to be first movers, this can also be true of stablecoins issued by or with banks. As long as the use cases for stablecoins expand from avoiding capital controls, this is mutually beneficial.

Beyond payments: credit

For credit, on-chain markets for non-trading loans are immature, because we are lacking infrastructure, especially for loans that require money going off-chain. However, the added benefits to credit on-chain mean that this can be much more profitable than private credit or bank loans. Holding the loan on-chain means the money for the borrower and lender is more productive when sitting idle, the money is traceable, and if foreign, FX is cheap enough that you can exchange as you need across many transactions. Essentially, a wallet acts a multi-currency account with access to the best interest rates, which is a prized luxury for most small businesses in developing nations (Wise ostensibly does this, but I’ve spoken to local businesses who say Wise “functions” in their country but does not let them get paid and the debit cards don’t work locally). The programmability of money also improves trust in these vehicles because the lender can dictate where the money goes, avoiding Ponzi schemes.

An interesting case study of what a specialized local credit market could look like is inKind. They loan to restaurants, get paid back in credits to be spent at the restaurant at 2x what they loaned. For a restaurant, their cost of additional revenue is ~30%, so they end up actually paying back 1.4x, not 2x. inKind sells credit to their whole network of restaurants at a discount to customers, and gives them an additional 20% cashback within the system, also saving on payment processing fees. If someone were to launch inKind on-chain, it could be an interesting way to bootstrap liquidity for a local stablecoin in a use case-focused way. As credit for smaller businesses has become harder and more expensive to acquire since the financial crisis and the outsourcing of credit from banks to private credit institutions, being a small lender has become a better business, and more consumer facing apps should take advantage of this, especially with the ease provided by stablecoins.

Some questions:

• Maybe crypto will just run on USD?

  • Local exchanges have always quoted crypto in local prices, which was the root of the Japan/Korea Bitcoin premiums that traders arb. Now, these markets are sufficiently liquid for this to be negligible but it still exists in countries like Iran, where BTC is still priced at 20%+ to market rate.

  • Most people are not particularly financially sophisticated. It is difficult for people to be rational about prices in other currencies, where they tend to overspend for cheaper currencies and underspend for expensive ones. My British friends sometimes joke that BTC has not broken 100k, since the GBP ATH is £93.5.

• Does regulation beat the market to these decisions?

  • A lot of these only remain open questions so long as there is unclear regulation. So far, we have seen in the US, EU, Singapore, and Hong Kong that assets denominated in local currency must be settled with a local currency stablecoin.

  • An interesting counterexample to this is the UAE government’s tokenized real estate where the currency of settlement is RLUSD, despite having regulated local stablecoins like AECoin. The AED is pegged to the USD so the FX here does not really matter, but it is a stark example of local payments being dollarized.

• Will all of a currency’s stablecoins have parity?

  • Right now, there are tiers of stablecoins. USDC is considered a solid dollar to everyone, USDT to most, DAI to fewer, etc. As we introduce currency complexity, while anything regulated by MiCA, GENIUS, etc. would be considered fungible with its fiat equivalent, the variable strength of local regulation might introduce even more subjectivity in deciding whether all of a currency’s stablecoins should be considered equal.

• Is microfinancing an interesting use case of on-chain credit?

  • On paper, this sounds like a massive opportunity, it’s a ~$200B market that is mostly manually executed. Right now, it is extremely predatory in many countries and there is a massive funding gap because many local loan markets are monopolies. Global platforms like Kiva have long been around but are constantly embroiled in fraud scandals. If you could prove SMB on-chain credit, lots of those learnings would be interesting to transfer, but you’d still begin in countries with less FX risk and whose local stablecoins have liquidity from other sources.

  • There have been some experiments: Haraka using Mento Labs’ infrastructure to loan out $57k with social reputation instead of collateral, and Jia, which financed a Filipino logistics SME. But the intricacies of microfinancing are locally embedded and hard to scale without community insiders, making problems around collateral, traceability, and last mile logistics difficult for now.

De-dollarization is a worry in global markets, but in local markets, dollarization is the worry. If stablecoins are to appeal to end users, they cannot stay dollarized. Users shouldn’t have to eat FX costs like they do today. And central banks will catch on and not let dollar-denominated stablecoins roam so freely if crypto is to become regulated globally.

Image: Monument by Jenny Holzer.

A topic that has come up through discourse on climate, inequality, feminism, and more is anti-natalism. Without diving into the reasons for this or the current state of things, I want to explore the post-apocalyptic world that leaves us in, where we face the degradation of familial values. In a world where 25-50% of the fertile population does not want to have children, what are the downstream effects of this financially, socially, and demographically?

• Financial

  • From 30-50, when people tend to be occupied with their children outside of work, childless people will have more time, money, and energy for recreation. For people 50+, there is a term, the “silver economy” which encapsulates all their spending. These habits are usually separated from those 30-50 not because 50+ people do not work, but because they have more recreational spending and do not have dependents. Soon, these groups (the childless + silver economy spenders) may merge. I predict this would lead to a boom in hospitality, fitness, consumer goods, etc. that may even be larger than the decrease in spend on parenting or child care products because there is a more short-termist and self-indulgent mindset.

  • When we look at who is having children, there is a clear divide between developing and developed countries, as well as less and more affluent areas in developed countries. We should prepare for a world where parenting is abstracted away to more scalable software as parents have less time and money to spend on their kids, since they are on average less wealthy. On the flipside, wealthier parents who do have children will spend more money per child, leading to the opposite extreme of opulent, highly-tailored childcare.

  • One reason that developing countries still have children at a faster rate is that children are economically useful, like in an agrarian society or family-centric culture. Agrarian society makes children have a positive economic impact, not negative. Family-centric culture also engrains the costs of not having children, like in China, where multigenerational households are normal and the expectation is a child will care for its parents when they grow old. The decline of both of these causes (agrarian societies being replaced by machines and strong family-based culture losing to globalization) means that children become an economic burden, making the developing and developed worlds more and more similar with anti-natalist beliefs.

• Societal

  • A desire to not have kids makes marriage less important. When we look at societal trends around marriage from the last two decades, we see that the number of unmarried people in the US has tripled. In China and Japan, women past their twenties are shamed for this: China calls unmarried girls “leftover ladies” and Japan has the equally enduring term “parasite single”. This trend coincides, or maybe slightly precedes, the trend of anti-natalism. Date-onomics by Jon Birger, published 8 years ago now, is a fascinating dive into the numbers that have caused this. He shows a clear difference in college campus dating cultures depending on their gender ratios, where anything skewing female-heavy leads to a scarcity of men and therefore a hookup-heavy culture vs male-heavy (which is rare in higher education these days) leads to a dating-heavy culture. This is also true of, but harder to measure in cities, where Manhattan has the worst dating scene for educated women and a great playing field for men because educated and attractive men are scarce. The Bay Area is the opposite. These poor dating scenes both a cause and effect of anti-natalism.

  • In academia, there is a measured difference between women who have children and others in making tenure, where motherhood and tenure-track years coincide and make women choose between one or the other. There is also a general “motherhood pay gap” that never gets closed between working mothers and fathers. As more people remain childless, these people, especially women, will begin to have career trajectories more like men, where they can afford to work 80-hour work weeks well into their careers, leading to more promotions and higher salaries. The gap between childless women and mothers will be financial. The knock-on effect of this becomes social, which we are already seeing now, where young women choose their careers over marriage because they have a higher chance of being successful. Most end up foregoing having a family or having children by unnatural means at unnatural ages.

  • So, more people are single than ever before, throughout their lives. Marriage rates are at an all time low. These people feed into the culture of singledom and do not feel the pressure to change. For unattractive women, this is especially appealing. There is a phenomenon that in the short term, women attain more attractive men and in the long term, settle for less attractive men. For men, they settle in the short term and date “up” in the long term. This is because women want relationships and men want variety, and if forced to do the opposite, the appeal must be greater. With the rise of dating apps, we have seen a wave of women who are not unattractive but not attractive who in the short term land men who are the crème de la crème, and then believe that in the long term they deserve men like that because they’ve benchmarked at their hookups. These delusions mean that attractive men have it better than ever before, leaving incel culture to blossom. This has made being forty and single socially acceptable, even desirable to some, yet the family remains a strong American value. High-achieving, childless, single people (better yet, women) will become truly empowered when we see a president who looks like them, without wife and kids in tow.

• Demographic

  • For those that do have kids, multiculturalism is making it more difficult than ever before. There has been a lot of research into how third culture kids differ from people who grow up in one place. We are moving to a world where there are more of these than ever before, including kids that have parents that are each half-something and half-something else and grow up somewhere different, leading to 5+ cultures in a kid when they’re born. As we globalize, families are becoming more diverse. However, some of this is less voluntary than others. For example, in Date-onomics, Birger looks into orthodox Jews and Mormons and how due to gender imbalances in these religions, where women outnumber men, women are having to leave their cultures to find husbands or foregoing having families at all. These trends are likely to only continue accelerating. This leaves us with confused kids who don’t know what the meaning of a nationality is. In places as insular as Japan, if you are not ethnically Japanese and culturally raised there, you will always be a foreigner. Most places are more welcoming, but what will it mean for a quarter Ethiopian, Pakistani, Japanese, Brazilian who grew up in New York but went to school in London to go “home”? Third culture kids are already more lost than others because of their lack of groundedness. The parents of the next few generations have an uphill battle ahead.

  • Beyond demographics, the strata of society having children is changing the makeup of our population. There is research that each generation is losing 0.5-1 IQ points due to dysgenic effects. Higher IQ individuals tend to be more wealthy, and wealthy people have fewer children. This means with each generation, our population is skewing towards uneducated, lower income families. Fertility rates for women in poverty in the US are almost 30% higher than national fertility rates. Parental education levels are a common predictor of a child’s success, so this downwards trend starts a vicious cycle that will reshape society.

In some ways, we can argue that this anti-natalist world will be more equal, prosperous, and diverse, but there are undeniable drawbacks, such as population decline and demographic turnover. It seems much of this is inevitable from here on out, and so maybe we should just embrace these changes and think about how we can become better equipped for our dystopian future, through investing in the right technologies and more sophisticated education to try and combat the downsides. Or, we can join the elite couples breeding to save mankind.

If you were to ask high-achievers whether they would be happy with their lives if they never worked, you would be hard pressed to find a 20-to-30-something year old who would genuinely say yes. This is because they have been trained in a system of education where the purpose has become distorted into becoming about the ability to command high salaries. If you ask high-achievers what they would be happy with, they throw out arbitrary measures such as a dollar amount or a job title. If you dig deeper, their justifications for this falter. Most achievers’ sense of purpose is baseless.

If you add up the sum of daily happiness over a lifetime, this is a greater sum than can possibly be achieved with the notion of “success”. The perception that true happiness derives from success is based on the fact that everyone would be miserable if they weren’t fulfilled after decades of hard work. Since the feeling of achievement is less painful than all previous states, we believe that this must be happiness. We cope with the situation we have fashioned for ourselves and proclaim it to be gratifying. Because we have never known true happiness, any state that is not unhappy becomes happiness to us. There is a study that lottery winners are less happy than paralysis victims in the long run, as they realize that wealth does not equate to happiness.

Everything that we have traditionally valued has fallen out of favor whereas the accumulation of money has continued to increase as a value. If capitalism is our only source of purpose, perhaps we aren’t thinking hard enough about why we subscribe to what we do. How many of us can really define why we have set our success metrics at particular points? Why do we care so much about constant accomplishment? A frequent answer is that people desire validation which comes from doing something well, and this stems from our evolutionary competitive instincts. But this does not take into consideration that modern day life does not require the kind of competition we were adapted for. Instead, we have morphed our own evolutionary design to be challenged in artificial competitions by keeping ourselves occupied with infinite games.

Mass digitization has democratized information to such an extent that we are made aware of how boundless what we want can be, creating insatiable desires. We are indignant about what we feel we deserve instead of chasing things we actually want. Advertisements and high-status people create desire for the plebeians; they do not need to know how to want because their desires are dictated for them.

We take it as common wisdom that we should forgo short term pleasures to have some grand success. This indirect pursuit of pleasure means that we have lost the ability to derive real, sustained happiness from true pleasures, independent from what society deems appropriate. We often conflate vices and short term pleasure as one and the same, instead of what we personally actually conceive of as pleasurable. Long term pleasures are dictated and imposed upon us, and we blindly believe that there really is a higher form of pleasure we will reach once we are successful. Truthfully, high-achieving people are not happier than non-achievers. The long march toward supposedly such “success” appears gratifying, but its promises are empty.

Ataraxia (αταραξία is the lack of ταραχή, the lack of disturbance or worry) produces actual pleasure. It originates in Ancient Greek philosophies, in particular it is at the heart of Epicureanism. It is often connected to the two forms of pleasure: eudaimonia and hedonism, where the former is divine happiness and the latter is short term, often sensory, pleasure. In Epicureanism, hedonism is ataraxia, meaning that the ultimate pleasure is the lack of bodily or mental pain. To Epicureans, material achievement is not a pleasure if it requires you to endure pain over years and years, that instead makes a Stoic out of you. It would be perverse to an Epicurean that words like ‘busy,’ ‘grinding’ have become modern day virtues.

Hedonism—not driven by vices, but proper Epicurean hedonism—is only acceptable in modern day culture for housewives and nepo babies. Instead, high-achieving people over-index on professional success instead of learning to find happiness in other facets of their lives. This is especially true of professional women and non-Europeans.

Ataraxia is lost in the modern world. We pursue lives full of stressors, we live in dense, dirty cities working jobs that detract from our happiness, in pursuit of proxies for success like prestige or money. American culture has it wrong. We must no longer deceive ourselves into enjoying the objectively unenjoyable, and then shame the rest of society into doing the same.

In Ancient Greece, the state of ataraxia led to success because its tranquility allowed for greater mental clarity, with the byproduct of enabling success in battle, relationships, and education without sacrificing happiness. To achieve true ataraxia takes discipline and mental fortitude that only the strong-minded can endure. Reaching such a state is the ultimate success, the only one that has a measurable and provable value—actual happiness.

There is a saying: “California is America, only sooner.” And for good reason: technology, immigration, homelessness, and affirmative action all began here and slowly spread across America. Really, this saying should be corrected to “Stanford is America, only sooner.” Stanford pioneered technological innovations—and extreme politics—in the last few decades, before anywhere in the state, let alone the nation.

Elite universities have always been microcosms of extremities, especially in politics. It is partially a function of universities being echo chambers with a high density of energetic students, but it is also a function of students being at their most malleable and vulnerable point of ease of changing ideologies. Stanford, a century ago at the whim of California’s extremism, has embodied it and now makes California succumb to its extremism.

Today Stanford is the pinnacle of liberalism and progressivism. Its progressiveness in the tech world goes hand in hand with its progressiveness in social justice. From the new Doerr School of Sustainability to the Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative, Stanford is casting its net wide in trying to be the leading university of everything progressive. We pioneered the campus sexual assault movement, homeless people dying on campus, ROTC bans, the removal of Indian mascots, standards to quantify IQ, big tech boycotts, and campus police abolition. Stanford has even pre-empted the results of the affirmative action case at the Supreme Court through increasing its Asian enrollment.

It was Fredrick Terman, the Provost of Stanford in 1955 to 1965, that turned the University’s emphasis on to technology. He created SLAC and secured DARPA funding for students and faculty to start companies, not do research. When this led to breakthroughs in technology, Stanford rapidly ascended to an elite university, worthy of the Ivy League. All of the other prestigious universities of the US have been around for multiple centuries, but despite its newcomer status, Stanford managed to do something none of them could: be at the forefront of innovation. In order to stay on the frontier of innovation, it has tried hard to stay ahead of every trend.

The problem with pushing forward multiple trends at the same time is that some movements are more all-encompassing than others. Put simply, wokeism corrupts everything else. To push this agenda is to wipe out the integrity of research, to shame free speech on campus, and, perhaps most important to Stanford, to dampen entrepreneurship. Everything that the university once stood for is affected. If you create a culture where people are afraid to speak their thoughts, you hamper progress. We have seen backlash on speech, speakers, and startups. These trends that cemented Stanford’s reputation today may also contribute to its downfall at this rate.

Stanford has publicly suffered from a slew of scandals over the last few months. When you google Stanford or see it trending on Twitter, it's equally likely to be about a new LLM research project or a woke DEI dean at the law school. To some extent, we can still separate these Stanfords, where there is a thick line in the sand between students who represent woke Stanford and those who are pushing the frontiers of technology, but the University is already trying to blur the lines. Computer science students are taught ‘ethics’—really just thinly veiled woke ideology—and mandated to take courses about social justice in CS. As this happens, they are slowly being indoctrinated so that when they go into academia or industry, their research will be colored by their education.

Stanford might be leading the pack today in terms of both innovation and activism, but it is already falling behind. The insatiable appetite of activists means their demands are getting more and more insane. To maintain its status as an elite university, Stanford needs to drop its current priorities and focus on what will lead to lasting prestige. As Stanford regresses into a playground for the woke, America should proceed with caution as this bleeds over.

Please reach out with any thoughts, critiques, or further reading on Twitter.

Making seemingly harrowing decisions comes down to one thing: how you preserve the artefact of your current self. Making big decisions undoubtedly changes who you are, but deciding what you want to preserve and what you want to test comes with every iteration of life. When you're in college, the first decision feels larger than anything. Over time, relative to every decision you've had to make, each one becomes less consequential, so the first decision feels bigger than any other one will.

My thoughts, aggregated from many conversations with people who have smarter thoughts than me:

• Perfect information is an impossibility and so deciding the point where you are as well-informed as you will ever be is important. Finding out the information that would convince you to make the decision can only come after the decision and so finding the point of optimal balance between being informed and spending time always feels underwhelming. T.S. Eliot puts it best — paraphrased, it is that we only know what we want to say after we no longer want to say it.

• Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
  For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
  One is no longer disposed to say it
  — T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

• Making a decision is the correct decision. There is no correct decision and even if there was, you would never find this out because we cannot relive our decisions. The most important thing is to settle on something and let yourself build conviction in it. The hard part about conviction is forgetting that you ever had to convince yourself.
  
  You can frame every decision to be the most exciting when you try hard enough, which is why it is hard to decide. The most important factor in being decisive is comfort in your certainty, not in the sense of knowing that your next move is cushy and comfortable, but that you are comfortable with how you came to this point. The things that seem to bog people down are fret over rejection and stress, the opposite of comfort. Once you accept these as part of the process, you allot attention to what energises you instead.

• Let people into the process. The more you let people in, even those on the fringes of your life, the more opportunities you create to be prompted to think differently. Everyone loves giving advice because they want to feel helpful and believe their perspective on the world is right, and it’s interesting to aggregate these.
  
  Generally, we do not listen to anyone, we listen to the feelings that resonate the most strongly. People will say things that make you think, but the only things worth thinking about are the ones you can’t stop thinking about. I find that this is the beauty in sharing slivers of your life with anyone who is willing to listen — you come closer to dissecting the gaps between how they think and how you think, and this is how you better understand yourself.

• You might not know what you want, but you should learn what you don’t want. Putting things to paper or repeating them enough times to different people helps you better articulate what you value the most. An interesting framing of this is to think about the things you don’t want to admit to yourself but expect to have in the future — things like a family, close friends, time to learn new skills, a well-designed home — it can be anything. It is so easy to put off these things for years, because we default to routine.
  
  Understanding these peripheral desires and aligning them with where every decision takes you will lead to fun daydreams about rogue paths you might take and how you can maintain focus on the subgoals needed to reach larger goals. The beauty of planning is that none of it will ever come true exactly as you imagine, you can only best prepare yourself for all eventualities.

• Don’t fulfil ideals, fulfil curiosity. There are many ideals out there that we buy into — I love the Slim Aarons description “attractive people in attractive place doing attractive things”. Who wouldn’t want to be that? The more you seek out these veneers, whatever they might be, you seek something in lieu of what you are actually seeking, often prestige.
  
  The classic grad jobs of investment banking, management consulting, and software engineering are all safe options on tried and tested paths that guarantee you a low risk of failure — something would really have to go wrong for that to be a bad decision. However, if you follow these paths for too long, you end up never having to break out of the system, you never make a real decision for yourself. You can make partner young, but still be scared to meaningfully uproot your life because you have only ever worked within closed confines. Navigating ambiguity is a skill you’ve avoided developing. That doesn’t sound like a very fulfilling life.

• Adjust for your risk aptitude but know that most decisions aren’t risky enough, especially when you’re young. Most of my peers pursue stability above all else. Stability on the surface is financial stability, but it really boils down to “peace of mind”. The big differentiator I can see between those who seek this and those who don’t is background. In reality, it is all a difference of mindset.
  
  There are so many people who would overcome this if they had met the right person willing to take a bet on them early enough in life. For many who have the profile but cannot dissociate stability from their mental frameworks of life, I seek to push them 1% closer to making riskier decisions every time, even if they never make the decision.

Choose something that expands your definition of yourself. Don’t limit yourself to who you are right now and trying to upkeep this persona. Life isn’t interesting if you’re always trying to balance inputs and outputs to remain where you are, life becomes interesting when you try out every other set of coordinates and understand what you like and what you don’t like. And when you’re young, understanding what you don’t like is more important than understanding what you do like. Make sure you’re not climbing the wrong hill.

Reading List

• Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot

• Climbing the Wrong Hill by Chris Dixon

Like all educated women, female Stanford students won’t just settle for any job. However, after a few years post-college wholly encompassed by their careers, women are hit by the sudden realization that their biological clocks are ticking and are forced to settle for suboptimal personal lives. In our current culture, there is a generation of women deprived of their ability to choose a traditional life due to social stigma and pressure to be like men, who can afford to be completely immersed in their careers in their twenties. Our culture desperately wants to frame women and men as equal such that we take away from a woman’s autonomy to be a woman. By telling women they are like men, they plan their careers like men—until the day they realize that they are not men and their biological clocks tick away much faster.

In college, we don’t differentiate between men and women when advising students about their careers, as if their life arcs will follow the same trajectory. The greatest privilege that high-earning, educated women have is the privilege of choice, but this notion of perfectly equal career trajectories disadvantages women. The downstream effect? A fertility crisis and a concentration of wealth among the highly educated and elite. Fertility rates are decreasing in developed countries, leaving the populations of developing countries far outpacing the developed; among educated women, the median age of having children is 5 years later than those less educated.

We have a serious societal problem of educated women not having children. The archetype of the perfect wife and mother is now attributed to traditional conservative values, whereas the feminist with an illustrious career and geriatric (aged 35+) pregnancies is the modern, liberal woman. Biological and social constraints are creating a gap in the developed world between the 2.5 children the average woman desires and the 1.7 that she actually has. This has led to a rise in fertility startups, helping these women have children at these unnatural ages in unnatural ways.

Conservative women also have more kids, and they have them earlier than liberals do. This is because conservatives operate on a different definition of feminism: feminism means the right to choose, not the need to act. Put simply, conservative feminist women can choose a career and not to have kids, to be a housewife, or anything in-between. However, broadly speaking, liberal feminists believe that feminism is only real if they actually enact every liberty they have fought for.

In college, it seems rather innocuous to say that you plan to have kids around 30. While being filmed for The Marriage Pact documentary, many female students had never thought seriously about when they wanted to have children and threw out numbers, usually around 30. Instead, they spent time laboring over every career decision, pushing off their personal lives until they have established careers. Soon, women who think this realize that this means getting married by 28, which means finding a suitable partner by 26, which is four years out of college. If you do two years of banking and two years of private equity, or any common route for fresh grads, your 80-hour work weeks do not allow you to date enough to know what you want in a partner or search through enough partners by 26. They should really start looking in their junior year of college.

There is a “well-known myth that about 70 percent of Stanford students marry other Stanfordites.” This rate is too high compared to what is colloquially discussed on campus these days. Now we tend to hear 20-30 percent of Stanford students marry their classmates. To date and successfully find a lifelong partner does not happen after weekly frat parties or spending all your time in Huang basement. It’s especially difficult for high-achieving women as they progress in their careers; it’s such a problem that there’s even an app for it. Simply put, high-achieving men generally don’t want to marry high-achieving women, but high-achieving women want to marry high-achieving men. While this does not lead to an inequality, it does lead to a scarce playing field. The “Female Delusion Calculator” is a fun tool to see just how scarce the market really is.

Neglecting their personal lives in favor of their professional lives makes women fall behind in the long run. It also generally decreases equality in society, further concentrating wealth at the top. It is a privilege to acknowledge this gap, and by doing so we can shape better lives. Maybe business school is useful (for women) after all.

Underwater basket weaving is described by the Guardian as “the foppish pursuits of the already privileged” and by Wikipedia as “supposedly useless or absurd college or university courses and often generally to refer to a perceived decline in educational standards.” The original meaning of this could have been characterized by any discipline that ends in “studies,” those niche echo chambers that have filled course catalogs in the last decade. Now, however, it seems that all courses that teach skills which do not directly translate into a job are considered similarly superfluous.

Stanford claims that “it embodies the cornerstones of a strong Liberal Arts education,” but what are those cornerstones? The value of the liberal arts in the ancient world was to have the foundations of a broad education across disciplines, setting a student up to be a lifelong learner and contributor to society. That is not the case in many Stanford courses. Today, universities abuse the term “liberal arts” by using it to describe curricula that no longer teach students the liberal arts rigorously.

Stanford once required year long English, Western Civilization, mathematics, and general requirements across the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Today, a hollow shell of these requirements remains in the form of COLLEGE, PWR and WAYS. In these courses, students generally do the bare minimum—many go through the requirements without reading a single book.

When students write in these courses, quality does not matter. Out of 1708 students listed in PWR, only 16 received "No Credit" or a grade lower than a B. These statistics demonstrate that grade inflation allows students to perform well without ever honing the skill of writing. On a campus social life app, Fizz, one student ran a poll on whether Stanford should get rid of PWR and 67% of 394 respondents voted yes. Clearly these courses do not inspire students to up-skill in the core parts of a liberal education.

Stanford recently realized that its core requirements were lacking, and created a new program to replace the Thinking Matters courses, which was meant to “transition students into college via multidisciplinary learning.” The new program, called COLLEGE, attempts to introduce students to “civic, liberal, and global education.” Dan Edelstein, who directs the COLLEGE program, said in an interview that the problem before was not about "how we educate students", but "why we educate them in this way." He said that "Stanford students get a liberal education in a descriptive sense," but many students do not recognize the value of this liberal education, and therefore do not currently engage in it. COLLEGE's goal is to rectify this and make the case for why a liberal education is worth it. These courses may be well-intentioned and well-received by those predisposed to reading and writing, but for the less keen, there is still a cop-out: it employs "contract grading" which means if an assignment is completed a student will get full credit, without consideration of the assignment’s quality. For many, it is yet another requirement to get out of the way.

This is in part because of Stanford’s high percentage of engineering majors, estimated in the 30-50% range. In the current system, these students have no reason to seek out a liberal arts education because they are lauded for their engineering prowess, which is what Stanford's modern reputation is built on. This challenge is not unique to Stanford (the rest of the cathedral suffers from it too), but Stanford is a leader in shifting its courses to further encourage their students in this direction. Engineering students should not be siloed in their discipline, rather these are the students that could benefit most greatly from the liberal arts.

However, it’s not that Stanford is too pre-professional. In fact, vocational schools are actually pioneering a resurgence of liberal arts. Through purely vocational teaching, West Point and the Culinary Institute of America have recognized that their students benefit more from a holistic liberal arts education. No matter how narrow a career someone picks, having a broad base of knowledge is a necessary starting point for people to excel anywhere. As Stanford edges towards becoming a trade school, it becomes more important than ever to prompt students to pursue the liberal arts.

But, Stanford is focused on the now: the immediate payoff of its entrepreneurial and technical reputation, and this is what is driving the professionalization. It is demonstrative of how modern vocations are changing. With the advent of increasingly complex technology, humans move through life making fewer decisions without the need to think deeply. Think of the typical jobs a graduate from Stanford goes into: big tech software engineer, investment banker, management consultant. All of these are heavily assisted by tools that automate parts of the job and require very little novel thinking. The liberal arts are no longer required for career success.

In ancient society, skill-training was for the plebeians; it was the upper echelons of society that received a liberal education. The liberal arts sought to prepare free men for life in society, where they could debate complex issues thoughtfully so they could vote on them. If Stanford students have aspirations to lead society, a true liberal arts education is vital.

Image: The City by Fernand Léger. Please reach out with any thoughts, critiques, or further reading on Twitter.

Across all species, the human ability to imagine is unique. We can comprehend the past and the future, because we can imagine. It gives us the ability to conceive of abstract and higher purpose, to picture the world beyond our immediate surroundings, and to question the world more broadly. It allows us to dream big about how we might change the world. For founders, their job is to actualise figments of their imagination, pushing the world forward bit by bit. This is the greatest feat of human ability: imagining something into existence.

We have always shared slices of our imagination through media. This began with oral storytelling, moving to photography and film, and now, stretching as far as immersive mixed reality. Documenting one’s imagination opens up new possibilities for others. We have a mental crutch: the adjacent possible, the concept that when you ground people in one concept, they can extend it, but it is hard for them to conceive of the initial concept. This is why when we talk about up and coming technologies, we often use sci-fi comparisons to describe it, to benchmark in something concrete.

When we see innovations in sci-fi, we are often impressed. However, there is no drive or desperation to try it for ourselves, it’s all about the novelty, not the utility. Even when we have the technical capability to make these things, there is no demand for it and many sci-fi inventions live on as sci-fi only. Think of AR, first popularised in William Gibson and Neal Stephenson’s books before being visualised in Iron Man and other movies. To this day, AR has not taken off even though we have had the technology available for decades. Big tech has tried to launch it again and again, with Google Glass, Meta’s big bet on Oculus, Snap glasses, etc. As cool as it these were, those that bought them did for the sake of novelty and they faded out of usage after a couple months. But still, out there are still many hopefuls betting on AR taking off. AR is a sci-fi technology through and through.

Are there some technologies that are fated to live in our imaginations because the world just doesn’t need them? For example, when we read Snow Crash, most of us are more scared than excited by this metaverse-fuelled future because the technology distorts our perception of what society should be like.

Not all sci-fi alters our world so drastically, many do not require paradigm shifts because they are simply incremental improvements on existing tech. For driverless cars, people are excited because the utility is clear and the benefits are great. However, we often underestimate the high barriers to switching that most people unknowingly harbour. The cost of abandoning a functional solution in favour of an unknown alternative, no matter how appealing, is often too daunting for a small increment of improvement. We see this with driverless cars, where they are reaching being on-par with human accident frequencies, yet every time we see any negative press like a death by driverless car, the comfort with this technology goes back to square one. Until they are 10x better than human drivers, it is unlikely that they will take over our roads.

Crypto has suffered from both bad depictions in sci-fi and offering solutions that are basically on-par with existing ones. It is hard to describe the theoretical benefits of solutions in crypto to the average person who has no background or desire to understand. When we get excited about technosolutionism, we often struggle to communicate that excitement to people and crypto has suffered from our repeated failed attempts. There is a narrative that crypto applications are a solution in search of a problem. There is another narrative that blames the lack of apps for the lack of infrastructure, and the lack of infrastructure for the lack of apps. There is yet another narrative which is that consumers don’t want what crypto companies are offering today.

However, maybe the correct narrative is that the technosolutionism of crypto is scary. Why would a government want an open financial system that they cannot control? Why would a private individual want verifiable, on-chain identity accessible by anyone? Why would a consumer want trustless protocols when we could instead have a trusted company to blame and sue? We have intellectualized all of these solutions with our utopian imaginations, picturing some brave new world where everyone is an alpha, smart enough to understand why it’s so great that blockchains are immutable, decentralized, and permissionless.

Most people don’t care about the principles that crypto-natives seek. They are most comfortable in commercial hierarchies, with corporations to blame when things go wrong. This is what modern day corporations have done so well, they create an opaque brand and accumulate trust, and soon this brand becomes a proxy for trust. Few people understand how their money gets moved, yet they trust their online banking app to display their correct balance. Consumers, including ourselves, are dumber and lazier than we would like to admit. We trust these brands because they have proved stable, but we also trust that if anything happens, our legal system will hold them accountable. The recent SVB crisis is a testament to this. Consumers do not need to know, and they do not want to change these habits, unless everyone else does first.

The narrative of crypto has been bulldozed. We need to prove that crypto isn’t as demonic as recent media has painted it to be. There is such a strong community — a cult, around crypto. We have a collective belief in a better world, and use our conviction to dedicate our lives to bringing alive a part of that future. Most industries do not require this level of conviction. Something like AI is a technology that slots right into our current day paradigms. AI leads to advancements across the board, including in crypto, but it is not a philosophy. The draw of an industry like crypto is that it is deeply alluring to few, because the scope of your imagination must be exponentially larger. I hope to see a future where we resurrect the narrative around crypto in our collective imagination. We need to reinvent and retell narratives that make us imagine more.

Image: Indecision by Ed Ruscha. Please reach out with any thoughts, critiques, or further reading on Twitter.

The liquidity of our modernity has birthed the playground of culture: the internet. As conceptualised by Zygmunt Bauman, modernity is liquid because of the ‘permanence of change’ seeking ‘an infinity of improvement’. The enabler of our impermanence is software. Allowing us to transcend all of our physical limitations, software enables us to write and rewrite, send and resend, do and redo at no extra cost.

The internet is a polycentric society. It is a modular world for every user, where we are all working off the same database, but discover different centres and then generate different journeys. From luddites to the Extremely Online, we have connected billions of people who have and will never meet, democratised information for anyone with a connection, and created countless online-only industries that have flourished into multibillion dollar businesses.

Culture is created in corners of the internet, with niche internet microcelebrities becoming the pulse of our digital lives. Our consumption has converged into these hyperpersonalised pockets, brought to life through the fragmentation of communities and the advertisements that manufacture our desires. We have become what we consume.

Without the internet to connect us to our in-groups, we would be left wandering aimlessly with a disconnected sense of self where our sense of culture would be too distant from most people we will ever encounter. This is a symptom of internet people, who no longer scroll and scroll just to consume media, rather they scroll to come alive. Personalised distribution has made us antisocial beyond belief. These subcultures are what have amalgamated into our post-internet world.

“Post-Internet does not imply a time “after” the Internet but rather a time “about” the Internet” — Artsy

The idea of post-internet is maybe most akin to post-modern, which was a commentary on modernism that became a movement in itself. We mock, compliment, and iterate on internet culture all the time, and that is a culture: post-internetism.

The pre-internet era was limited by physical distribution, where we had to deliver newspapers to households or stream radio and television to a whole family at once. Now, a media business only needs a website or social media page to exist, and then a couple thousand superfans to become sustainably profitable. We are beginning to see specialisation trump generalisation, with the rise of microinfluencers and the verticalisation of every market. The post-internet era is further catalysed by the ease of creation (enter generative AI), ease of monetisation (enter crypto), and ease of distribution (enter social media).

Media no longer correlates to anything real or tangible. It’s beyond digital-first, it’s digital-only. The internet began by digitising the real world, shrinking the entire world into our screens. The post-internet enlarges the world to as big as one can attempt to fathom. There are no limits online, we create infinities. The physical limitations of our world are a mere nuisance to be bypassed.

Every craze in technology fuels this future vision. We are becoming more and more online, so that ideas, happenings, and relationships happen online before they happen (if they ever end up happening) in the real world. Human interaction is scrunched up into the mediums of texts, tweets, and taglines. By the time a message reaches another receiver, the message is a product of the internet, not an unadulterated thought from someone made of the same matter. Maybe soon, when we come to accept postinternetism is here to stay, it will become the consensus that our physical world is no longer the real world.

Reading List

• Liquid Modernity by Zygmunt Bauman

• Fabric of Reality: A Figurative Language Moodboard by Olivia Kan-Sperling

• Life After Lifestyle by Toby Shorin

• I Don't Want to Be an Internet Person by Ginevra Davis

• Generation Swipe by Suzy Weiss

• The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt

Please reach out with any thoughts, critiques, or further reading on Twitter.

Trust as a currency

The greatest currency is trust. As our world has expanded, we have lost trust. Instead of living in small societies where everyone you encounter is at most two degrees away from you, our urban and digital lives let us hide behind anonymity, forcing us to use proxies for trust. We don’t trust everyone we interact with because we know their character well, we trust them because they work for a company whose brand we trust, or a friend trusted them and we trust that friend. Crypto offers us a trustless system where we do not need to trust the people around us or a proxy, we only need to trust the technology. If we all operate on a trustworthy system, the problem of trust is abstracted away can be simplified in certain interactions.

These days, financial trust underpins every action in society, since money is our medium of barter. Instead of having to trust one another via potentially faulty proxies, we only have to trust the system we are all operating on. Most people do not trust systems because they have a deep understanding of them, they trust them because they are sheep, blindly following some leader who trusts the system. When we use Visa, most of us don’t know how Visa takes money from our bank account and gives it to the merchant, and we have no way to verify what their private ledgers have done. We only see the top level interface and trust this because Visa is a big brand with auditors and a stellar reputation.

Crypto’s greatest value proposition is that it abstracts trust away from human networks, namely human control. When a society is accustomed to an unstable government, volatile currencies, and predatory conglomerates, trust becomes scarce. The most important criterion in financial providers for these societies is that their money is not controlled by their government.

In emerging markets, there is so much uncertainty around all financial tools that cash and the US dollar are considered safest. Oftentimes, foreign cash is king – physical USD is shipped in swathes to many countries to power black markets where it is traded for 1.1x to 7x the official exchange rate. The black market is so profitable that countries that have long turned a blind eye to it have sometimes even tried to capture parts of the market, like Colombia’s “sinister window”, a central bank-run USD deposit window where drug cartels traded USD for COP at black market rates, or Argentina’s “cuevas”, who run illegal exchanges that help alleviate the regulations on USD in the country at the informal ARS:USD rate, the “Blue Dollar”.

Foreign exchange is not the only bottleneck in emerging markets. Their financial systems tend to be heavily regulated too, making it difficult to move money domestically and abroad. Fintech has tackled every market aggressively, from PayPal pioneering online money in the late 1990s, to blazingly simple solutions like WePay and AliPay in China today. Many multibillion dollar winners have emerged from these efforts. The size of this problem and the strength of the consumer need mean that many things have been tried and tested in many markets. Now, the technology has become a commodity, where instead, markets are won through moats built in trust and compliance.

So if these web2 fintech startups already exist in all these markets, why is there a need for web3 fintech?

The original promise of crypto

The original promise of crypto was permissionless payments, open to all. In the bear market, as we think about what will actually take off in the next few years, many people are turning back to payments. Crypto does not have to reinvent the system from the ground up, it can slot into our existing systems and manage them better.

So far, many web2 products have tried to expand our default western standards to these countries, by creating online banking that is easily accessible and allowing people to transact from their phones in a couple clicks with minimal fees. However, most of this fintech is just a shell for existing payment rails, not fundamentally changing how we move money, only replacing the brand and interface we trust to move our money. Instead of trusting a big name bank, we have derived our trust in this new wave of brands like Stripe, Plaid, and more, which are more convenient but still only deserving of our trust due to established branding.

Many geographies haven’t been won by a specific fintech yet, there is a plethora of options competing for dominant market share by subsidizing fees and high referral rewards. While customers are jumping from provider to provider, the next wave of fintech gets ready to infiltrate and improve the system again. Crypto has the greatest potential to do this.

Does anyone buy into this yet?

People are onboarding into crypto in different geographies for different reasons but it mostly boils down to this: moving money is a basic right. Without it, life is severely limited by capital constraints. The greater the flows of money moving through consumers and businesses, the greater the economy performs. Here are some popular reasons people are on-ramping:

• Web2 fintech often still requires a bank whereas crypto P2P exchanges don’t require a bank - for the unbanked or in places where using banks is slow and unreliable, crypto offers a solution to circumvent this. They have the freedom to move money in any amount, at any time, to anywhere. In China, we have seen digital wallet systems at a large scale take off, proving that bankless systems are possible, but even they are pioneering alternatives built with crypto. Plus, this requires trust and centralisation to execute if not done on-chain.

• Liquidity and speed of transactions can be very important - in situations of instability, quick access to your money can be the difference between life and death. In less immediate situations, faster liquidity means better financial management and fewer predatory loans, resulting in a healthier economy. Crypto rails settle transactions instantly, including on-ramping and off-ramping in seconds, meaning people can send money to those in need at their moment of need and withdraw their money at will. This is already more popular than most people realise.

• Countries with volatile currencies lead their citizens to turn to stablecoins to retain value - if a country’s currency is being devalued day by day, holding savings in a USD-backed stable coin is highly preferable. Venezuela and Argentina have both seen huge rises in crypto adoption as their currencies have plummeted.

• Currency controls restrict movement of money across borders - people who want to hold alternative currencies often cannot because there are legal limits that restrict them from doing so. This is also an issue when people want to go abroad, or send remittances. Crypto provides a source of arbitrage that bypasses limits. With dollar-backed stablecoins, people in these countries bypass the foreign currency limits their governments have imposed through traditional institutions without having to pay massive premiums.

• Crypto is seen as an investment for more sophisticated, educated or wealthy people - in some countries, access to stocks, bonds or other traditional investments is limited, making crypto an alternative. For those who are wealthier, holding BTC or ETH instead of stablecoins is also seen as an investment instead of just storing value in stablecoins. Vietnam is a prime example, where traditional equities are hard to access, and so altcoins have grown in popularity.

Open questions

• Does the value of crypto payments just come from regulatory arbitrage?

  • As Scott Alexander argues, “the crypto financial system is just reinventing the regular financial system except worse in every way, and that’s fine”. Maybe this opportunity will go away when equivalent regulation settles.

  • More optimistically, if regulation for all financial systems were better, there would be less useful regulatory arbitrage, especially in emerging markets. This could be the catalyst for better banking services for many countries, like it was in Ukraine.

  • Binance and Tron are leaders in emerging markets, despite their reputations in the west. This is because they work and are cheap – the aim for many users is to hold money that the government does not control, not decentralization.

• Once we get people to move money in crypto, how do we get people to keep their money in crypto?

  • Lots of crypto usage in the west is as a speculative asset, not a medium of exchange.. Stablecoins are changing this, but the current incentives with stablecoins compared to fiat are still limited. It is often used as a form of settlement, or something behind the scenes for more complex transactions. It has not reached widespread adoption as a replacement for local currencies.

  • Non-finance related crypto use cases are mostly crypto-native, meaning they are limited to NFTs, DAOs, gaming and other niche interests. Since these technologies are far from reaching widespread adoption, there are very few non-crypto use cases to spend crypto. We need to create use cases where we leverage low fees and fast settlement times, not just crypto-native use cases, to create compelling ways for people to use their crypto.

• Can we generalize a solution for payments across different countries?

  • For such a ubiquitous need: the transfer of money, the way in which payments are done is surprisingly localized. This is because of regulation, cultural norms, and current adoption. In many countries, payment systems have risen and dominated by bending themselves into the tight web of government regulation. In others, they have bought and earned trust. These strategies tend to be dependent on the developmental level of the country. Needs differ like this: in southeast Asia, most people use mobile data to access the internet, meaning latency and mobile applications are crucial; in China, they skipped the credit card era, hailing straight from cash to digital payments, so digital wallets don’t need to account for credit cards, like an Apple Pay wallet.

  • One of the recent success stories of crypto is Argentina, where more people than ever are receiving their salaries and remittances in crypto and storing their money in DAI and other stablecoins. The driver of this is inflation, and we have seen similar behaviors in countries whose currencies have lost as much value as quickly. However, the existence of such volatile markets are not consistent and such variability does not make for a viable market to plan a business model around.

• Will CBDCs take over?

  • It doesn’t make sense for governments with a CBDC to make existing stablecoins legal tender. If this happens, will there be as much freedom of programmability and usability as there is today for crypto? China has already pioneered the digital yuan, introducing features like a spend-by date, where your currency can expire. These new ways to control money could spur or hamper crypto adoption massively.

  • There is a strong argument for private blockchains superseding public blockchains. We have yet to see how great the dominance of Onyx, JP Morgan’s blockchain arm, and Visa Crypto, and similar institutional blockchains will be, although it is already shockingly high. These have a leg up in being transparently regulated, instantly deployable to millions of customers, and high consumer trust in legacy brands. CBDCs have all of these perks on an even grander scale.

• Will crypto replace cash?

  • Short answer: no. As crypto becomes regulated, cash may see a resurgence in gray market activities. However, crypto can take over certain use cases that cash is currently used for and hopefully make the financial system more efficient. While a lot of their use cases are similar, the traceability of crypto threatens that people may end up using cash even more prolifically.

  • In many countries, cash is valued for its untraceability, like to avoid taxes in gray market labour. The all-cash payroll has been an issue in countries like Argentina, where avoiding taxes is common. Commonly in LatAm, convenience stores like Oxxo act as cash points, where customers can pay for e-commerce transactions in cash. In Mexico, the Economist estimates up to 86% of transactions are done in cash. Elsewhere, like in Kenya with M-Pesa, people can top up mobile wallet balances in cash and then spend digital money. Cash is still the on-ramp to digital money, so any crypto solution needs to be cash compatible.

Fashion is a vector of identity that we use in the real and digital world to project our values. What you wear is determined by what you care about and more broadly, who you are. Fashion, or the lack of, is a statement. We have to go through the motions of dressing ourselves, choosing to put on the clothes we do, making excessive care or lack of care equally as bold a choice. Fashion is the most visually striking indicator of a person, since there is no bypassing it when you encounter someone, creating the ultimate signal.

The potential signalling in the digital world is even greater, since virtual worlds are unbounded by time and space. Online, fashion manifests itself as digitized reality, proliferating in photos, videos and renderings. Social media seeks to capture and memorialize what we look like in specific moments. Avatars wear clothes that resemble humans’ in order to mirror reality. E-commerce displays digital replicas in the manner that makes it most appealing to own these in real life. All these forms take clothes as they are in real life and simplify them to fit the constraints of a screen, trying to preserve their physical forms as much as possible. Digital fashion as we know it isn’t digital — it’s digitized.

Digital fashion has the potential to make fashion bigger than ever before because it is one of the most antiquated industries that has always seen innovation come from the outside. For the first time, we’ve seen experiments come from legacy brands like Louis Vuitton releasing a game in the metaverse, Paco Rabanne selling NFTs of iconic pieces to fund repairs of the physical pieces so they can be displayed in a museum and Fendi x Ledger collaborating on hardware wallets. As traditional brands experiment, and new brands build on these, we will continue to widen our definition of digital fashion. When it comes to measuring the success of these luxury brands however, we often conflate revenue with adoption, but we must keep in mind that these customers will spend money on any novel offering. Once these offerings lose their novelty, customers may retreat and focus on the brand’s next activation. The novelty of crypto will not be the long-term selling point for these collaborations, rather it will shift into a technology powering the utility of future activations.

A couple categories which digital fashion is beginning to materialize in:

• In-game wearables are the largest category of digital fashion in terms of spend. They have gained traction because it is practical, since avatars need to wear something to replicate human norms. Games have shifted this from a necessity to a status signal, where players can either earn upgrades or buy them. Luxury brands have started to create wearables that sell for thousands of dollars like Fortnite x Balenciaga and Roblox x Gucci. As we combine traditional brands with digital universes, we will see more collaborations like MSCHF or RTFKT, which both play on existing trends and create digitally-native cultural artifacts from them.

• Hyperpersonalized commerce will perhaps become the most ubiquitous form of digital fashion. E-commerce is already the most ubiquitous form, and virtually everyone discovers items to purchase on social media. Hyperpersonalization comes from the rise of algorithmic recommendations, just-in-time manufacturing, upfront financing, and digital fittings. Imagine a world where you see a jacket on Instagram, buy an NFT that includes the rights to the design (like Kosmos), have it digitally fitted to your measurements (like Warby Parker), and get it made just for you (like Unspun). This vision is not far off, we have seen the “OS for fashion”, Cala and AI and user-selected fashion, Finesse. This is essentially making the internet a decentralised store, enabled by manufacturing and logistics. Fashion is made and created online and is translated offline.

• Crypto-native fashion riffs on hype streetwear culture like Supreme, using drops as both a marketing lever and a way to manage supply. The exclusivity of drops works because crypto-natives buy these clothes to signal to an in-group, showing other people in the space that you are either well-connected or early in the collection. Since the primary signal here is ownership of a publicly desirable good, NFTs are an obvious match. Owning the physical piece allows for limited signalling, it is only when something is immortalised in a photo or another digital format that the true value of it is realised. NFTs change more than just the distribution mechanism, they also allow for upfront financing, so suppliers can create as many pieces as are wanted, making it more environmentally sustainable too. This I believe will be the first category to fall since it is novelty-driven and only appeals to a crypto-native people.

• Tracking provenance on-chain is one of the most exciting applications, being experimented on through physical-digital chips like Dopamine and IYK which allow any physical object to have a linked NFT that can be used for verification, rewards and more. There are also companies creating “product clouds”, like EON and Everledger, putting DIDs for every product on-chain to be able to track inventory globally to simplify resale, authentication, and loyalty. If we could aggregate this data at large, it would revolutionize sustainability initiatives, democratize resale pricing, and give brands more autonomy over their products over its whole lifetime.

Crypto unlocks new ways of interacting with fashion online and offline. Digital twins change the manufacturing process — allowing suppliers to not need to predict inventory and create waste, digital-first clothing changes how we signal status — creating broader use cases and audiences for our signals, and digital-only clothing changes the limits of fashion — no longer bound by our bodies and environments. Fashion is diverging into physical and digital forms, which unite into a new medium to display a vector of ourselves.

If you’re building in or thinking about digital fashion, I’m working on a couple exciting initiatives and would love to chat, you can reach me here.