I love rabbit holes. It began with a June 20th post by Greg Isenberg, listing what he thinks are currently the most valuable skill sets. The first is all about agents, second is marketing, fourth is curating, fifth is the builder-distributor and sixth is community building. Peter Corbett replied by adding a seventh skill - soft skills: "those possessed of self mastery through nervous system regulation, allowing them to act quickly, decisively and with little to no negative impacts on themselves and others. Soft skills are increasing in value providing sustainable leadership ability."

RecruitmentPQ posted a reply that said "By 2030, about 92 million roles disappear and 170 million appear, a net gain of 78 million, the skills decide which side you land on." A list was then provided of the 15 fastest growing jobs as we head into 2030. Number 15 was 'AI governance and ethics roles'.

Regarding skill number four on Greg Isenberg's list, Charlie Feng posted his reply on June 23rd: "As wordslop will exponentially increase with AI, curators (#4) will be so much more valuable". According to his X bio, Charlie Feng is building @runneragent and is the cofounder of @agoragovernance and @getclearco Since I am curious about DAOs and the governance of DAOs, I decided to go down that rabbit hole.

Agora is "the home of onchain governance." Agora reposted a May 28th post by Jeff Mclarty : "A link is a vote. We are starting to make the case that the timing is right to reattempt trust graphs as a governance primitive." I followed the provided link which led to the article 'The case for reattempting trust graphs'. It's a fascinating, educational read. Two paragraphs stood out for me: "Delegation that decays. A DAO keeps token delegation as the seed of voting weight, but runs it through a managed trust graph that discounts each delegation by how long it's been since the delegate last earned it: a vote cast, a forum post, a renewed delegation. Standing you were granted in 2023 and never refreshed quietly fades, so governance reflects who's currently trusted rather than who was popular three cycles ago. It's token-weighted governance with an expiry date."

Another paragraph from the article that stood out for me: "Reputation that travels. A contributor's standing, attested across the DAOs they've actually worked in, is captured as a locked snapshot and used to seed an allocation or onboarding decision in a different community. Because the graph is portable and the snapshot is reproducible, the receiving DAO can verify the claim instead of taking a résumé on faith, the thing no marketplace reputation score could ever do."

Trust is part of the RECONCILIATION framework and so is being Candid and having Non-negotiables. McLarty writes: "The One Non-Negotiable: It Has to Be an Open Standard. Here's the part I'm most sure about, and it's the part most likely to get compromised: a trust graph only works if it's a completely open standard, owned by no one." He goes on to clarify that "the non-negotiable is...not unconditional permissionlessness. A trust graph can legitimately scope who participates...The line is honesty: gating has to be transparent and fixed at the onset, declared as part of the rules, never a switch flipped ex-post once people have already built on the assumption that it wouldn't be."

I then checked out what Agora was about: "We all converged on Ethereum to create better incentives, fund public goods, foster coordination, and some day, to slay Moloch, the god of coordination failure." This wasn't the first time I had heard of Moloch and so, intrigued, I clicked the link that led to Scott Alexander's 2014 article and went further down the rabbit hole.

Below are some of the many sections that caught my attention from the article:

The Malthusian trap: "A certain sect of rats abandons art in order to devote more of their time to scrounging for survival. Each generation, a bit less of this sect dies than members of the mainstream, until after a while, no rat composes any art at all, and any sect of rats who try to bring it back will go extinct within a few generations."

The link between capitalism and values: "Imagine a capitalist in a cutthroat industry. He employs workers in a sweatshop to sew garments, which he sells at minimal profit. Maybe he would like to pay his workers more, or give them nicer working conditions. But he can’t, because that would raise the price of his products and he would be outcompeted by his cheaper rivals and go bankrupt...Like the rats, who gradually lose all values except sheer competition, so companies in an economic environment of sufficiently intense competition are forced to abandon all values except optimizing-for-profit or else be outcompeted by companies that optimized for profit better and so can sell the same service at a lower price."

More on values: "The Two-Income Trap...theorized that sufficiently intense competition for suburban houses in good school districts meant that people had to throw away lots of other values – time at home with their children, financial security – to optimize for house-buying-ability or else be consigned to the ghetto."

Peace:  "...the best solution is world peace and no country having an army at all. From within the system, no country can unilaterally enforce that, so their best option is to keep on throwing their money into missiles that lie in silos unused."

African soldiers, including my paternal grandfather, fought in the second world war. Here is an Afrogoth D-Day A.I. fashion show inspired by the D-Day Darlings.

Education: "...students’ incentive is to go to the most prestigious college they can get into so employers will hire them – whether or not they learn anything. Employers’ incentive is to get students from the most prestigious college they can so that they can defend their decision to their boss if it goes wrong – whether or not the college provides value added. And colleges’ incentive is to do whatever it takes to get more prestige, as measured in US News and World Report rankings – whether or not it helps students."

Here is an Afrogoth A.I. fashion show inspired by the first scene - a graduation scene -  from the rock musical "Void". You can learn more about "Void" from my post 'Museum of Money...and Fashion?' and also from my post 'Crypto, Trust, AI and a Rock Musical'.

Scott Alexander has more thoughts on values: "...many of the most important competitions / optimization processes in modern civilization are optimizing for human values. You win at capitalism partly by satisfying customers’ values."

When I applied to the Fashionomics programme with a skeleton idea of what I later fleshed out into Afrogoth, I did not know that I was following the white rabbit. Well, I will just continue enjoying the ride and take the advice of Morpheus when he was offering Neo the red pill: "You stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes." ( Check out my blackout poems made from The Matrix screenplay, here)

You can watch a white rabbit-inspired Afrogoth A.I. fashion show here. Music is by Google's Flow Music. My original prompt was: "Afrogoth Kenyan Taarab. Lyrics: Down the rabbit hole. Ndani ya shimo ya sungura". Technically, it's supposed to be 'shimo LA sungura' but because I speak Nairobi Swahili (as opposed to the grammatically correct Coastal Kenyan Swahili or Tanzanian Swahili), it is more natural to say shimo YA sungura.