Recommended texts for the community

Hi Folks,

I’d like to see if the community can suggest some texts that they consider important reading for the Blockstack community. I’d love to learn which 3 top of my mind books / resources shaped your thinking.

For my part, I’m making a little list here that got my plugged in and excited about joining efforts to de-centralise the Internet, rather, disrupt forms of power as and when they emerge.

  1. www.benkler.org <-- Yochai Benkler is a professor at Harvard, his paper titled Dimensions of Freedom, Dimensions of Power is outstanding. I’ve written a post as well inspired by his work

  2. How the Internet became Commercial by Shane Greenstein <-- Writer is an HBS professor. Not the cleanest writing I’ve come across, but extremely well researched, and I think the history of the Internet’s privatisation + role played by the likes of NSFNET, IAB, IETF can provide much needed context for Blockstack.

  3. Homo Deus: A brief history of tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari <— writer is a historian, his book will scare you but also convince you why targeting the Achilles Heels of the current internet power structure is an urgent matter.

  4. The Seventh Sense by Joshua Ramos <-- writer worked closely with Kissinger, brings a non business non technical aspect to how he views networks and the internet

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I haven’t thought about top-3 but we can post a bunch of links and the community can decide which posts do they like more.

For starters, here is a short post/tweet-storm by Chris Dixon on proprietary services vs. open protocols.

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