New Year, Newsletter

Focusing our newsletter

2021 has already started off as an eventful year with every Wednesday so far bringing a new global event starting with the Capitol Insurrection leading to the second impeachment of a sitting US President. Then we had Biden Inauguration on Wednesday that followed. Finally, last week we saw Wall Street elites freak out about r/WallStreetBets leading to Melvin Capital requiring a capital infusion that some called a “Capital Insurrection”.

January brought to the forefront the growing influence of networks over typical hierarchies perpetuated by founder stories mirroring the Hero’s Journey. As we look ahead many network enthusiasts are basing their assertions of the future on the “Sovereign Individual” and more empowerment of people over institutions. However, instead what is happening is that institutional trust has been in free fall for at least 2 decades and longer for certain sub-populations in the US. In 2020, we saw the culmination of the lack of trust in institutions, individuals more empowered by their selected intellectual networks, and the ability for rapid organization.

We’re witnessing a once in a generation shift in human governance.

In that vein, we’re evolving this newsletter to pull links and content from the network via our bots as well as follow Yak Collective Mars Rover project. Ultimately, this newsletter will operate as follows: the main beat will be the Mars Rover project and the secondary goals will be to highlight content that YC submits.

Mars Rover Project

Mars Rover is a project set up to land a rover on Mars which will include the ability for the group to raise capital via public funding models e.g. equity crowdfunding, token sales, Kickstarter, and via this newsletter. Additionally, pulling from the insights of this group we expect to be able to clear technical goal posts that will allow anyone to implement the project via open-source hardware and open-source software.

Lastly and most exciting is the ability for the group to lead and manage this fully remote and global project that requires deep technical ability to manufacture complex machinery. As this project evolves we’ll learn quite a bit about how to build a fully decentralized organization building something more complex than crypto software.