r/ArcanumVentures

I started thinking about this after reading that Myspace may be attempting another comeback.

Obviously the old web was technically worse in almost every way. But it was also terrible at profiling us. You could get lost, click on something bizarre, reinvent your profile six months later, and none of it was being continuously fed back into a model of who the platform thought you were.

That eventually led me to a stranger question: does increasingly perfect personalization make it harder to contradict our previous selves?

I wrote a longer piece about it here if anyone is interested:
https://www.gonzocapital.net/the-internet-was-better-when-it-was-worse/

Hey we've just covered this on our weekly show and wanted to share here if that's ok!

After $225 million in lobbying and a bill that looked like a sure thing back in the spring, the Senate went on recess without a vote, and the window before midterms is really tight. There's a real chance this thing just dies.

It's pretty fascinating because the blockchain/crypto industry used to pray for the government to regulate it correctly and offer it a legal pathway to legitimacy.

With Fairshake SuperPAC and the current administration, we were supposed to get favorable regulation right away. It was a guaranteed layup with all branches of government, the courts, the executive, the congress (both houses) all beholden to Trump and the pro-crypto lobby.

SO what the hell happened?

Even weirder, since the boogeyman Gensler and his crackdown from the SEC left, the SEC has been way more reasonable.

The SEC is even stepping in to write its own rules on token fundraising, which is a strange thing to see.

What do people think will happen with Clarity Act after Congress returns from recess in September?

Will it get passed before the midterm elections or new winners take office, or will it get kicked down the road infinitely?

Is there a chance that some people in crypto secretly don't want this to ever pass because the grey area is more advantageous to them?

One of the stranger second-order effects of generative AI has very little to do with model benchmarks.

It has to do with old books.

Anthropic’s Project Panama showed how valuable physical books became as training material at industrial scale. But there is another characteristic old material has that is becoming increasingly interesting: provenance.

A book printed in 1981 obviously predates ChatGPT. An archived forum post from 2004 probably does too. A random page produced in 2026 is much harder to reason about.

This creates an odd historical situation.

Frontier models inherited decades of overwhelmingly human-produced material. They learned from it, became capable of generating convincing material themselves, and are now contributing enormous amounts of synthetic information back into the environment future systems may learn from.

I went considerably further down this rabbit hole in the latest Gonzo Capital essay, including recursive training, model collapse, “Human Authored” certification, Anthropic’s book-scanning operation and the idea of the pre-generative internet as a kind of informational fossil layer.

It’s deliberately less sanitized than the material we publish through Arcanum, but the data provenance question is one we think is worth paying attention to.

The Internet Ouroboros

https://www.gonzocapital.net/the-internet-ouroboros/

Interested to hear whether people think provenance actually becomes a meaningful moat as synthetic material proliferates, or whether better filtering and verification make the whole distinction increasingly irrelevant.