Patrick Atwater | 🌱🚴3🌐 (patwater)

I love this little article on so many levels. My once and (future? :P) cofounder Varun, made our startup team watch Devdutt's East vs West the myths that mystify Ted talk until we grokked it. Myths provide a way to sorta grasp at the water in which we live, to use that famous "This is Water" talk sorta way. In the "West," we take the worldview of the Abrahamic faiths as a given, even the growing number of secular folks operate within a monolithic paradigm rather than being comfortable with the idea of many truths, circular rather than linear views of history and the like. Rather than yet-another-ponderous take on that, I've been itching on a riff. Monkey King! That figure journeys to the "West" which as Devdutt notes is India from Tang era China (actually still true today). He has a lot of campy adventures that also offer powerful parables of well I suppose everything and nothing, the mysteries of the human yada What if he came West? Today. Planning to FAFO https://pioneeringspirit.xyz/epics-without-end

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Digging into a unique local niche is underappreciated as a tool to vast the universal in our global gobble world. Lots of digital nomads trip in around the same Instagram worthy places. Spending time with ski guides and rafting guides who found super deep in places like the Grand Canyon. You realize there’s a depth and spiritual wisdom there that is often missing in the pop oneness of the global different on the same way crowd

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Ppl talking about The West these days reminds me of folks in 1400 in Constantinople, who still thought of them themselves as Romans

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I’m loving the daylight computer and press reader news combo

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Hey, my silly blog made marginal revolution today! https://pioneeringspirit.xyz/an-open-letter-to-lin-manuel-miranda-on-the-last,-best-hope-to-save-the-republic

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The bittersweet and often broken relationship between Venice and Byzantium feels like a good parallel with tech and CA gov today Venice - virtual warehouses (Amazon analogy) - trader ethic - networked - small, agile, nimble - ships -> naval power Byzantium - center of the world (think landholders) - guardian ethic - center - 10x the resources - walls, army -> hubris Playing around a bit and may elaborate more in the future. There is definitely something there in Venice's innovations in norms aka breaking the rules in trading with the infidels and Byzantium's complacent focus on owning land rather than scrappily trading for advantage

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I finished reading City of Fortune over the weekend. It's a history of Venice, an early example of a "virtual" city without natural resources other than a built in moat and pulling itself up with grit, gumption and a lot of warehouses. It kinda reminds me of Amazon to the Byzantine-esque empire in DC these days. Similar to that analogy, Venice had a very intertwined and at times adversarial relationship with Constantinople. Here's a post I wrote partway through the book, part of the Contraptions book club for January: https://pioneeringspirit.xyz/of-upstart-entrepots-and-dying-empires

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