It’s hard to believe two years are all the time that has passed since Formal Dialectics was released at the end of 2018. Authoritarianism, an out-of-control pandemic, and continuous misadventures by top officials in government have characterized the past period in our shared political history and the time has dragged by as we collectively suffered for these mistakes by our political elite.

Recently, I had the privilege of connecting with an old friend in a new way. Marjan Moghaddam, a famous digital artist I’d actually been friends with for several years, is a deeply fascinating person. I reached out to her about NFT art to see if she had heard of the medium yet. I had seen posts about her digital and AR (augmented reality) art, and was impressed with it. Over time, I became familiar with the trials and tribulations with the technology despite having a state of the art studio.

Life has gotten weird lately, and this piece of writing will also be somewhat weird. It has to be - it is the story of an incredible, weird, fun organization, and the struggle we’ve all faced as we’ve birthed it. Let’s dig in. This is the story of the PageDAO.

PageDAO's V2 NFTBook Minting Technology, enabled by the Page Open Source Project, is a game-changing innovation. Formal Dialectics is the first NFTBook V2.

What is ChatGPT and what does it do? Everyone is raving about the new AI chatbot, and in fact, I have been quite impressed by it. It far surpasses all of my expectations and I want to share an essay I had it write earlier.

The defining characteristic of a successful individual in our time is going to be the ability to learn new things by self-teaching. If you’re not already on that page, you need to flip to it.

Before we begin, perhaps a bit of background on me is important. I’m a philosopher of language and morality, originally. But when I went to grad school, I took a class in cognitive neuroscience that opened a few doors for me. I worked in labs, read science books, etc. And oh, could I bore you with the details. My most recent “real jobs” have included research and teaching college and starting startups up, but there’s a thread of a goal here for me: I’m passionate about solving hard problems and understanding the world around me. Oddly, I’m doing both right now, as I write this short essay.

Many popular reading lists for the COVID-19 pandemic include a text by Albert Camus, a French existentialist philosopher who was a journalist and a writer and a member of the French Resistance to the Nazi occupation. Camus was born in Algeria, and his father died soon after his birth. For a fascinating glimpse into Camus’ life, have a look at Albert Camus: A Biography, by Herbert R. Lottman. Though he sought to avoid being called an existentialist as a means to avoid association with Jean-Paul Sartre, a one-time friend turned enemy, Camus’ work centers upon existentialist themes such as the need of each individual to take responsibility for one’s existence.

DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) are entities that aspire to coordinate human beings using blockchain technology. Blockchain technologies are publicly viewable ledgers that run independently from any particular user or administrator of the system, and as such they represent a new sort of database that accomplishes a good deal of improvement with respect to the general state of the flow of information between human minds as mediated by the internet today, or what is becoming known as Web2.0. Web2.0 is the suite of technologies including Google and Facebook that developed centralized servers users could generally access for free, if they gave up information about how they used the platforms to the service providers.