Droughts, Web3 and peer review
Neologism #23, 14.12.2024
‘It’s not drought - it’s looting’: the Spanish villages where people are forced to buy back their own drinking water
"It was brutal: cars, chunks of machinery, big stones, even dead bodies were swept along in the water. It gushed into the ground floor of buildings, into little shops, bakeries, hairdressers, the English school, bars: all were destroyed. This was climate change for real, climate change in capital letters."
"The truth is that these types of rains cause damage and misfortune, but most of the water just ends up in the sea because the parched land can’t absorb it when so much falls all at once."
"It’s a cheek – the companies are extracting the water from under our feet, and selling it back to us."
The Third Web
"I had hoped that I wouldn’t have to write this thing, that blockchains and NFTs and all that would just go away and become a chapter in a book about weird economic scams. But if 2021 taught us anything it’s that we can’t have nice things so here we are."
"Web3 is a blockchain-based backend and infrastructure layer on top of existing network technologies that aims at restructuring the internet in a radically decentralized and individual way."
"The very techy blockchain crowd has been looking for new use cases for their technology for a while and building a new web with structures based on blockchain ideas and technology would prove the value and general usefulness of their technology beyond any doubt."
Not to mention capabilities of tools such as Indieweb or the federated social web. I think web3 is primarily about politics rather than technology.
Read The Third Web
The rise and fall of peer review
"For the last 60 years or so, science has been running an experiment on itself. The experimental design wasn’t great; there was no randomization and no control group."
"Peer review was a huge, expensive intervention. By one estimate, scientists collectively spend 15,000 years reviewing papers every year."
"Reviewing papers before publication, which was 'quite rare' until the 1960s, became much more common. Then it became universal."
In the current era of fact-checking and trust decay, perhaps we are at a stage where the importance of validation is at an all time high, compared to the importance of efficient communication?
Read The rise and fall of peer review
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