Hey, Baratunde here.
Thanks for continuing to follow my work here at Puck, our new media company covering the inside conversation at the intersection of Washington, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood.
Today, as promised, I'm sharing my thoughts on Bitcoin, blockchain, and whether crypto can provide a pathway to financial freedom for communities that have struggled to build intergenerational wealth. Is blockchain a technology that will disrupt Wall Street, or just another tool for Wall Street to win?
I'll be discussing it all with my colleague William D. Cohan, a former M&A banker, during an off-the-record call for Inner Circle members later today. As a reminder, you're receiving the free version of this email at {{customer.email}}. If you're enjoying these notes, consider subscribing for full access.
See you in the metaverse,
My father’s parents abandoned South Carolina for Washington, D.C. in the 1940s because the racism there was so unbearable and the cost to remain just too high. Later, my mother was basically forced to sell our home in D.C. because the crime was so out of hand, and she legitimately feared for my safety. I did not inherit any property or financial investments. My inheritance came in the form of stories, advice, a great set of LPs, and an early tech literacy which set me apart from many of the other Black kids I grew up with.
I’m pretty sure we were the first family on the block to have a computer, and even when I transitioned to private school and my peer group became much more white and wealthy, I possessed more technological know-how than most of them. That exposure shaped my life. Tech gave me a leg up on research and job opportunities, gave me a creative outlet for my comedy and writing, gave me a sense of usefulness when I was able to help friends and family with something tech-related. I played the role of their own personal Genius Bar.
I have loved tech for a long time. I’ve embraced the changes it enables and enjoyed working through its puzzles and challenges. I’ve also grown increasingly disappointed with the ways Silicon Valley has accelerated tensions in society, from the concentration of wealth to the coding of algorithmic bias to the amplification of polarizing voices in our public discourse.
In most of the technology-rich rooms I’ve inhabited, I’ve been the only or one of the few Black people present. This was true when I beta-tested Windows 95 for USA Today back in 1995; true when I was active at the Harvard Computer Society as an undergraduate; true when I attended the Consumer Electronics Show in the early 2000s on behalf of my consulting firm’s clients; true when I spoke about Web 2.0 onstage at SXSW in the early 2010s. It was rare and special to find other Black folks in these spaces—I still am connected with folks I met through the Blogging While Brown conference, back when blogging was a new digital media frontier.
And so it was only natural for me to become interested in the next wave of connected technologies emerging under the banner of web3 and crypto...
FOUR STORIES WE'RE TALKING ABOUT An outbreak of 9-figure deals is fueling a new arms race—and serious FOMO from producers like me. DAVID T. FRIENDLY A potentially definitive, highly unscientific analysis of who has the most political juice right now in Silicon Valley. TEDDY SCHLEIFER Jeff Zucker’s resignation has upended the calculus within CNN. Here’s what I’m hearing about how it went down, and what's next. DYLAN BYERS An exploration into the latest B.S. post-crypto fiscal fantasy of the economy’s late-stage-Covid consensual hallucination. WILLIAM D. COHAN |