One of my favorite quotes, courtesy of William Gibson, is:
The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed
That's how it is with self-driving vehicles. They have arrived. But not everyone knows it.
I was thinking about that at dinner last night while talking to a longtime friend who had just bought an EV and was telling me how much he loves it. And I said, "But it can't drive itself." And he looked at me like I was joking.
I wasn't.
This year, 2025, has been a self-driving journey for the Gotham Gal and me. During our winter stay in Los Angeles, we started taking Waymos over Ubers. We became so comfortable in a car without a driver that we massively preferred it.
When we got back to NYC, we missed Waymos. Eventually, we got a new Tesla Model Y with the latest self-driving hardware and software in it, and now it drives us around NYC. One of us has to sit in the driver's seat, unfortunately, but otherwise it is a very similar experience.
My colleague Nikhil posted this on his return from SF to NYC last week:
every time I come off a week of taking waymos in SF:
1. it feels increasingly strange to return to a non-autonomous city (just as it felt weird to be in cities that didn't have uber yet in 2014-2016)
2. I come away feeling like we continue to under-discuss the second order effects of self-driving inevitability + ubiquity
I think the indifference in the air is largely a function of how gradual (relatively) the rollout of AVs has been and will continue to be
NYC is a tough place to drive in. There are pedestrians and bikes and scooters coming at you from every direction. When you make turns, you have to look everywhere to make sure you aren't going to hit someone. I can't look behind me. But my car can. And so I have found that our self-driving car is able to navigate the crowded and chaotic streets of NYC so much better than we can and almost certainly better than any human can.
That probably sounds crazy to many people reading this. A car is a better driver than a human?
Yes.
That's the reality of where are in 2025. Not everyone realizes it. But that is where we are.
And, as Nikhil points out, the downstream effects of this technology and behavior change are going to be profound.
As many of you know, I dropped a writer coin, $AVC, yesterday and wrote about it after the fact. Now that it is out there, I feel like I need to invest in it. So I think you can expect me to post more in the coming weeks and months.
The "market cap" of $AVC is about $2mm as of this morning. What that means is the current token price of $0.002 times the 1bn fully diluted number of $AVC tokens equals $2mm. I don't have all of those tokens and neither does anyone else.
Right now, I have vested into about $10k of $AVC tokens. I received an allocation of 50% of all of the $AVC coins and I will vest into them monthly over three years so if the price hangs in there, I could own $1mm of $AVC in three years. That's pretty cool.
What's also cool is many of my readers, subscribers, and Farcaster followers, also got $AVC in the airdop yesterday and they could earn real value if $AVC increases over time. This is how the airdrop was set up on Paragraph (the numbers in this image are fake, mine were very different).
One of my strongly held beliefs is that new technologies often spur (and sometimes demand) new business models. And these new business models can often open up entirely new markets.
In web2, we saw freemium (a word that was invented here at AVC) and marketplace models (like crowdfunding) that unleashed entirely new ways of monetizing businesses and hobbies as well.
Writing (blogging, newsletters, etc) has struggled to establish a new business model that properly rewards and aligns writer and readers. The longstanding advertising and subscription models have certainly worked to generate revenues and profits, but they have also led to a host of issues (like clickbait, paywalls, etc) that are deeply problematic.
So I've been wondering if we can learn something from tokenizing a writer's work and letting the writer and the readers benefit from that tokenization. I don't know if this new business model will scale and work, but it might.
And so when Paragraph, where this blog is hosted, launched writer coins yesterday, I decided to launch an $AVC coin to see what might happen.
As part of that launch, Paragraph let me allocate $AVC rewards to long time readers, subscribers, etc and so if you are one of those, you should have gotten an email that looks like this:
I realize that in this day of Internet scams, many of you will be suspicious of that email. I should have written this post before sending out the rewards. I am sorry about that. But please do trust that email and claim your rewards.
If I can drive the value of $AVC with my writing, then all of you who read my work can benefit too.
And that's pretty exciting to me.
So that's all good.
But there were also some snags in the launch.
This cast by Colin, the founder of Paragraph, explains one of the issues.
We discovered a bug with the the Uniswap pool's liquidity which prevented buys after a certain price threshold. We've been working with Doppler to rectify this, and the only solution was to relaunch the coin with proper params and update avc.xyz/coin. The coin's CA is
0x06fc3d5d2369561e28f261148576520f5e49d6ea
For those that previously purchased the coin, we're really sorry about this. Please sell your original position into the original pool. If you received rewards from the original coin, you can also re-claim the full amount on avc.xyz/coin.
I've also heard from many longtime readers and subscribers and followers on Farcaster that they did not receive the email to claim their $AVC. I am not going to take on the project of fixing that for everyone. I am sorry if the airdrop didn't go correctly for many of you, but I don't have the time or the energy to attempt to fix that for each of you.
Finally, some of you raised the question about people who subscribed to AVC after the airdrop and whether they will receive $AVC. I would like to make that happen but need to figure out how to avoid people gaming that. So that's work to be done and I am willing to take that one on.
So that's where my head is at right now on $AVC. I continue to be very intrigued by the possibility of writer coins as a business model for content creators who make long form content. Like me.
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