the idea of duty

mirror.xyz/cryptoprittie.eth is a store of non-edited non-researched conversational content. Contradiction and inaccuracy WILL be present here. The best ideas may make their way to mirror.xyz/cryprittie.eth after continued gestation.

Let’s talk about this:

Think back to the last time you had an idea you were excited about. Maybe you thought of a really good idea for an ARG, or some novel use for NFTs, or the seed of a world that in your dreams you envisioned one day growing into a series of seven novels.

What did you do with that idea? Here are a few common reactions from my own experience and conversations with others:

  • Nothing at all; allow the idea to wash over you and then move on to your next thought, something like: “hrm… did I forget to feed my cat this morning?”
  • Do some amount of research, enough to deem the idea untenable. Maybe it would take too long, maybe you don’t have the right skill sets or the right capital or the right connections to make it work. Move on to your next thought: “what happened to Fergie is she still making music?”
  • Dive right into implementation, this is awesome, you got this, stumble into a roadblock, decide to take a break and the break lasts 67 years until your death in an old folk’s home a few miles outside of Wilmette, Illinois.
  • Put the idea on some “ideas list” that you keep in a piece of paper in your back pocket because you’ve been told so many times, so many damned times, that it’s good to use physical paper for this type of thing, then (a few days later) run the paper through the washing machine and dryer.
  • Put the idea on some “ideas list” that is not subject to water damage and do what you actually intended to do with it, which is, once you have some free time, sit down with your list of ideas and do some form of structured analysis on them, decide what your next “thing” is going to be, based on your personal ability to execute on some breakdown of the microtasks inherent in the blah, blah, blah. You pick one idea. You throw the rest of the ideas into your Google Drive or equivalent folder and bitrot slowly claims them over the course of the next few astral eras.

It’s a common trope in the tech space that ideas are cheap, execution is hard. I am sympathetic to the underlying prescription here, but as a pearl of wisdom it’s the sort of vapid turn-brain-off platitude that can only emerge from a zero-creativity zealously Godless society.

Ideas are not cheap. They are precious. Execution without an animating idea is literally just masturbation. Ideas are what infuse effort with meaning. “Ideas are cheap, execution is hard” is itself an idea, obviously — are you even taking this seriously, anon who still hasn’t left the Bay Area?

The reason why so many believe that ideas are cheap is because their activation energy derives from positive externalities. Ideas are not cheap, but also rarely are they the product of a single genius mind sitting in a room waiting to say the word “Eureka”. Rather, they are beamed into us by the culture we are in, the screens we have around us, the people we have around us reading content off of a screen at us. Tribal/pop cultural memories. Billboards. Combining peanut butter and chocolate was not a solution derived by some master Taste Mathematician working in a dark room until the perfect flavor combination was discovered. It was one result of the Industrial Revolution — enough people having both peanut butter and chocolate regularly available until the right person in the right headspace dunked one into the other and found God waiting for them there.

To put this more succinctly: the ideas you are having, they took a lot of work to generate. But that work was externalized, it is the product of the Network, the substrate of human connection and sharing and memetics and spirituality that grows and roils and experiments and succeeds and fails beyond the ken of any individual person. The fact that the World happened to combine the correct reagents to foment a great idea somewhere within your cerebrum is the Networks grace, entrusted to you.

What the Network’s bestowal of an idea represents is greater than a gift. It is a duty. Your duty, as the recipient of the World’s child — the idea. The idea was created by the Network, not you; ergo, it belongs to the Network. Your responsibility, if you acknowledge the primacy of the Network, if you appropriately discount your own identity and authorship, should be clear: you need to get that idea back out into the Network.

It doesn’t matter how you share your ideas, only that you 1) do, 2) make a good faith effort to put them in front of people who are interested, and 3) minimize the friction for their adoption by others (relinquish all ownership). You could tweet it out. You could write a short piece about it or draw a diagram. You could describe it to a friend who you are confident would execute on it. Or you could execute on it yourself. But Every Single One of the bulletpoint approaches at the start of this article is morally bankrupt. Allowing any good idea — by which I mean to say interesting idea, since the quality of an idea can rarely be fully appreciated without some amount of hydrating execution — to wither in your mind and die, is tantamount to stealing from the Network. Whatever you do, avoid this fate for your ideas, at all costs.

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