Joseph Bergvinson is a Canadian author and the cofounder of SaucerSwap, a decentralized exchange on the Hedera network. He serves as COO of DUNA Activities, which supports the SaucerSwap DAO; since 2021 his work has centered on protocol economics, from token design to DAO governance. He writes essays at josephbergvinson.com, ranging from market structure to the design of software agents. He studied chemistry at the University of British Columbia, then developed pipeline products at Eupraxia Pharmaceuticals before moving into crypto.
Articles
You Died, Subscriptions kept Renewing; You’re an Influencer Now!
The dead keep surfacing on the interface. A social media profile reappears under People You May Know, a birthday reminder fires for someone buried in the spring, a subscription renews against a card nobody thought to cancel, a playlist refreshes itself for no one.
The systems are not being callous, requiring a death already registered and then overruled. Strangely, nothing has yet registered. The addressee was never the one who died. It was the profile, the behavioral outer form, assembled from years of signaling, and the profile is now in perfect health again.
The living are now addressed in the same form; death simply makes the separation of the thing and time easier to observe. A feed never overlaps perfectly with a whole life lived; it meets the signal, then rewards whatever performance it can classify. Users learn the lesson without needing to understand it. Some versions travel, others stall or disappear. Over time, this creates pressure toward a self that can revise itself at the system’s speed.
That training takes place inside an infrastructure (platforms, models, attention routes, finance, law), and the means of reproduction is owned. No one has to command the trajectory. Platforms set out to maximize engagement and predict conduct, which requires many users who can be addressed at scale. Because some forms of subjectivity are easier to measure and route than others, optimization selects for them effortlessly, almost as a side effect.