Myth Becomes Reality

I find myself constantly recommending two pieces of writing: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari and The Most Important Scarce Resource is Legitimacy by Vitalik Buterin. Together they explain how I see the crypto space and why I’m on a team building the Geo Web.

The central claim of Harari’s book is that the reason that humans rule the Earth is our ability to create and maintain shared myths. Money, religion, countries, and human rights are all just *made up,* yet they are the foundation of civilization and continued progress.

This idea was transformational for me when I first read it because I had always thought of myself as a staunch “math and logic” person. From a myopic perspective, I thought anything other than cold-hard fact was a distraction. Sapiens helped me realize how naive that was and come to a clearer understanding of the world. 

There is undoubtedly an interaction between human narratives and reality as it plays out. Shared myths can even survive the assault of “facts” for long periods of time depending on their memetic qualities and the chain of actions they inspire—for better and worse, intentional or not.

Not enough people understand that yet, and that’s why I love Vitalik’s blog post. It takes this idea of shared myths into an optimistic call to action. The core of legitimacy starts as a shared myth. And as Vitalik frames it, legitimacy can be bestowed as a value-driven choice to drive desirable outcomes. Our ability and desire for shared myths may be innately human, but that doesn’t mean we can’t jumpstart them with conscious choice and design.

That is the story of the Geo Web. Our partial common ownership digital land system is *made up.* There is no basis in nature for what we’re proposing (traditional property rights don’t have it either). But, that doesn’t mean the Geo Web can’t overtake those previous myths to drive new, better outcomes. Importantly, we think that we have the necessary feedback loop to pull it off.

We can embrace the lessons from Harari’s studies, take up Vitalik’s call to action, and turn a myth into reality.

Technical

• Cody finished the new Edit Parcel panel for the v2 Cadastre (https://github.com/Geo-Web-Project/cadastre/pull/136).
• Cody is close to finishing an update to how the Cadastre utilizes Ceramic data models (https://github.com/Geo-Web-Project/cadastre/pull/137).
• We’re exploring both short-term and long-term AR tech integration opportunities. Strategically the Geo Web digital land registry should stay agnostic to what tech is used to deliver high-fidelity, social AR experiences now and into the future, but we still need to explore and demonstrate the possibilities. 

Community

• Community member Kevvles wrote a great beginner's guide to the Geo Web and shared it in the forum. We’re excited to see the initiative that Kevvles took on this project because one of the founding values for the project is creating wide, permissionless opportunities. At our early stage, there’s natural friction to start contributing and receiving value in return (SourceCred is pretty great though!). But Kevvles has come into the community eager to contribute and his example will help others follow suit in more ways than one.
• Supporting well-intentioned projects, creators, and public goods in the space is even more important than ever in bear markets. Leighton Cusack recently shared info about a lawsuit that he is facing for co-creating PoolTogether. PoolTogether is on the opposite end of the spectrum from degen DeFi, yet some people want to tear it and Leighton down. Consider minting a Pooly NFT if you want to help fund his defense.

On Deck

• Cadastre v2
• zkSync 2.0 testnet work (recently unblocked!)