A True History Turnip Exchange, with Jaku

Everybody's Talking at Once

ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 167.

Jaku is a security expert, a speedrunner, and a longtime builder of tools that expand how we interact with games online—from Crowd Control, which empowers streamers’ audiences to alter the state of the games being streamed, to Turnip Exchange, which vastly expanded the scope and functionality of the stalk market at the height of the Animal Crossing craze.

Here Jaku tells the full story of Turnip Exchange for the first time. It’s the story of a small project becoming enormously popular ridiculously quickly, and all the commercial, social, and technical implications that follow. More broadly, it’s a story about attention, and what it means to be the next big thing here at the end of the end of history, in these waning days of “Web 2” social media, these halcyon days for grifts, rug-pulls, and jank-ass cloak-and-dagger.

Here are links to CrowdControl and Turnip Exchange.
You can also follow Jaku on Twitter, for now at least, and see his streams on Twitch.
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• Here’s Flash Boys, Michael Lewis’ book about the demonry of flash trading.

• The Nookazon folks are making a game called Galactic Getaway.

• Drew became familiar with “the end of the end of history” thanks to Kohei Saito’s Marx in the Anthropocene.

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“All The People Say (Season 5)” by Carpe Demon.
“Turnip Greens,” performed by Steve Gibson and the Red Caps, vocal by Romaine Brown.
“Tulip or Turnip” by Don George and Duke Ellington, performed by Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, vocal by Ray Nance.

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Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.

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