I saw a comedian on a Youtube Short who said “I used get bullied as a kid and so I decided to learn karate. The thing about Karate is, it only works so long as both people in a fight use the same rules.”
Shortly after, on LinkedIn, I saw a post about “minting pokemon cards” (i.e., creating NFTs) on some blockchain and the enthusiasm this poster had about “having real life assets on chain.” I’ve already expressed why I think NFTs are nonsense and highly recommend Line Goes Up by Folding Ideas. But to me there are some fun similarities between the concepts of having real assets on a blockchain vs. learning karate to fight someone who doesn’t know karate.
The theory and the reality just don’t match up. And it points to a broader point of how being entrenched (or not) in systems helps make them “better” – more efficient, useful, valuable, etc. – vs. the ability to step outside of that system to see it for what it is, potentially changing that efficiency, value, usefulness of that system.
Up until a certain point in my head, I didn’t even think about the words “systemic change”, but the process of seeing the system you’re looking at for what it is, even if you need to be a bit reductive to do so, helps one get to the point of understanding why systemic change would be needed. For example, why mint a pokemon card on a blockchain? Just open an excel sheet and create an inventory of them. If ownership transfers, that’s just the movement of a physical card – you don’t need a whole tech system for tracking that, we have inventory management systems. So it begs the question: why bother? and it’s an important question – it forces people who, seem to not care, to think about why what they’re doing is worth while.
This isn’t meant to be a ramble on NFTs (I’ve already done that here) – it’s more meant to be some thoughts on how when you consider a system or paradigm – the blockchain, karate. If you step outside of that paradigm and see what’s around you, you can quickly see what might work and/or be worth your time and what might not. I would probably quickly lose a fight to someone bigger than me, no matter how skilled I was in karate (I’d argue the real factor is the ability to land and absorb hits, not necessarily form). So by looking at the paradigm I’m in, looking at what’s around me, I can see what might or might not work. In the dojo, I might have a shot!
Anyways, I just wanted to ramble a bit about what happens when you think you’ve learned, built, or done something that seems to make a ton of sense and works really well within the system you’re in, but when you pop your head out from doing that thing, you realize it might not be as useful as you thought. Context matters.
Amaan Lakhani 