Emerging Technology for Dummies

This January, I’m teaching myself the fundamentals of Web3, Crypto, and the Metaverse. Come with me.

Have you seen all those headlines about Web3? NFTs? Ethereum? Are you pretending to know what it all means, so you can impress your parents when they ask about it? Yeah, me neither <_<

One of my favorite ways to exercise my brain and my skillset is reading about, and thinking about the future. But it feels like one day I looked up, and everyone was talking about the future in terms I didn’t understand.

So I started to do some digging, and the more articles I read about these topics, the more gaps in my fundamental knowledge I started to discover.

Sometimes the explanation of an esoteric concept is just more esoteric concepts. I think this kind of abstract form of learning works for some people, but it doesn’t work for me.

In the conversations I’ve had about all this with others, I can’t tell if the other person is more knowledgable than me, or if neither of us knows what the hell we’re talking about and we’re both just hurtling buzzwords at each other to forge some kind of play-pretend that we’re both in the know. My guess is the latter.

And since many of these ideas are not quite real yet, it can make it even harder to wrap your head around it.

This month, instead of dry January, I decided that I’d try to gain a baseline understanding of all the different buzzwords that tech folks are throwing around these days: Web3, cryptocurrency, DAOs, NFTs, DApps, DeFi, the metaverse… what else?

I plan to follow my curiosity and share what I learn along the way in the format I like best: concise, high-level breakdowns of the concept, how it fits into a broader context, and why it matters. Instead of narrow and deep knowledge, wide and short.

I’ll also be including the questions that come up for me as I learn, in the hopes that other more knowledgeable folks on this platform can contribute. I’m not an expert here, so I want this to feel less like a one-way broadcast, and more like a starting point for conversation.

If you’re new to these concepts and have been wanting to know more, I’d love for you to follow along.

If you’re an expert on these concepts and have something to add or a correction to make, I’d love for you to follow along.

Why this format? I believe thinking about the future, even at a basic level, is a luxury of cognitive energy. When you’re more concerned about satisfying your immediate needs (food, health, safety), you aren’t going to spend precious mental resources daydreaming about the future.

And I think that the existential turmoil of the last couple years has left us collectively stuck in a sort of disaster-survival mode. Most of us can’t afford the additional anxiety of contemplating a future full of unknowns.

My own struggle with anxiety has made looking up, and looking forward, a challenge. But I know it’s important. So I want to lower the barrier of expectation to make it easier on myself, and maybe make it easier for some of you, too.

Follow me on Medium for more.

Here’s to more transparent learning, and better idea synthesis, for less cognitive energy — in 2022.