Kodsnack 613 - Opt-in nations, with Corin Ism

Recorded on-stage at Øredev 2024, Fredrik talks to Corin Ism about the power of developers to change the world for the better.

Much of what we do is building virtual worlds - virtual nations if you will - and creating and enforcing their rules and power structures. We should take that power and responsibility seriously and think about what we build.

If you think about the interfaces you build as essentially being the law in the system, will that change how you build them?

We can easily fall into thinking about “the algorithm” as if it was some sort of rain god we pray to but can’t control - but we can and should use our control in everything we build. We think of things like evil puppet masters when we think of control, but everything we build controls in some way, and pretending we can abdicate control doesn’t help anyone. Corin talks about how to think positively in terms of making user of our power, how to see the possibilities, and where to look for inspiration. Oh, and don’t fall into the trap of thinking that what we have right now is set in stone and can’t and never should change. Let’s keep iterating!

Finally, we talk a bit of disconnecting from the internet to do deeper and more focused work.

Many thanks to Øredev for inviting Kodsnack again, they paid for the trip and the editing time of these keynote recordings, but have no say about the content of these or any other episodes.

Thank you Cloudnet for sponsoring our VPS!

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• Øredev
• All the presentation videos from Øredev 2024
• Corin
• The era of the virtual world builder - Corin’s keynote
• The Chinese social credit system
• ESG - environmental, social, and governance ratings
• Liquid democracy
• Plato
• Support us on Ko-fi!
• Hamilton the musical
• The slow internet
• Platform cooperativeism
• Nathan Schneider

• Thinking about what we’re building
• These aren’t inconsequential products
• Interfaces are basically the law
• Completely different worlds
• This is something I can change
• Building a maze for the user
• From a governance perspective
• The rest is footnotes
• We iterate
• We can do a lot
• Opt-in nations
• Part of the wealth nation
• Perform life