not only do we no longer trust our fellow man to follow those procedures, we also have media

ecosystems that can amplify true and fake reporting on violations of those procedures.

So there's a huge amplification on violations of procedure and therefore a huge loss of trust

in procedure.

And so the allure of crypto is you can agree on the procedures ahead of time.

You can abed them in a cybernetic system, which is not only difficult to modify, but is also

highly auditable and automatically auditable.

And perhaps this can be a path back to certain kinds of trust between these reality

communities.

Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world.

What's going on, guys?

It is Saturday, May 6th, and today we are talking with John Asconus. John is an assistant professor

of politics at Catholic University of America, a writer for the publication, The New

Atlantis, and generally a really, really interesting thinker. He's currently in the midst

of a series of essays called reality, a post-mortem. It's an exploration of, as he put it,

what killed consensus reality, and it includes essays like what happened to consensus reality,

reality is just a game now, how Stuart made Tucker, and what was the fact. When we talk about

big-picture power shifts, one of the things that underlies a

huge amount of political and social and economic discourse is a changing understanding and engagement

with what reality actually is. The internet has fragged communities into archipelagos of belief,

each of whom have different understandings of reality that can ultimately clash with one

...