That’s World One. World Two is a small subculture of people who have given AI agents full access to their computers: credit cards, calendars, GitHub, inboxes, passwords etc and told them to just go and do things across the real Internet.

The circle of people who even know about World two is tiny, The number of people who let these little guys loose is even tinier. But it’s here in World two that the next interface paradigm for Agentic AI is being rehearsed in public. Most people will meet these little guys until 2027 at the earliest; they need to get a lot safer and less strange first.

This post is a primer for people in World One, about the near future of World two.

What An Agent Actually Is, And What They Are Becoming

A chatbot is something you can talk to. Built around an “I go, you go” paradigm.

An Agent is something you can talk to, but it can also “go and do“.

Agents can currently send emails, build websites, make iPhone apps, book a train, and update database records all by themselves. All from a few short paragraphs of natural language. It can do these things, because it has permission to do so. “I say, you go and do and do ,until done“. This is an Agent.

Already emerging are more complicated Multi-Agent Systems: you ask it to do something; it writes code, spawns more versions of itself, distributes the work, and then merges back again.

From the outside it still looks like “one thing,” but underneath it is a managed society of minds, processes, permissions, and tools. The best way of thinking about what Multi-Agent systems look like right now below the surface is something like this:

The progression we are moving along is chatbot -> agent -> system. These new systems won’t feel like an “I go, you go” co-worker, but a totally chaotic direct bureaucracy. Software spawning software, models coordinating with models, with humans folded into the loop as just another moving part.

This was all written about in the late 90s and early 00s, and all of it said the same thing: the moment we let an Agents take actions in the world, we inherit a new set of problems that have nothing to do with intelligence, and everything to do with control. What is an agent allowed to touch? How does it prove what it did? How do you stop it being tricked? Who is responsible when it breaks something? That moment is basically now. Most of the writing about agent hype skip these kinds of questions because they ruin the fantasy.

In practice however, those questions are the product.

Types of Agents Today

A lot of current “computer use” agents use software the way you would if you were trying to help a friend remotely while watching their screen through a blurry webcam. They take screenshots, squint at them, guess what a button means, click, then take another screenshot to see if anything happened.

Sometimes they scrape the page structure, which sounds sensible until you remember most websites below the UI are a bit like constantly shifting theatre sets. The website moves the “Continue” button and your agent walks into a wall.

The interesting change that is occurring is that software is starting to expose what it can do in a way machines can understand directly. Instead of guessing button semantics from pixels, the software says explicitly: “here are the actions available, here is what each one needs, here is what you get back if you use one of them”. This is a rough approximation of what “tool calling” and “MCP” mean. It’s a shift from clicking pixels to calling capabilities, and right now WebMPC is in beta in Google Chrome.

This gives us two broad substrates for agents.

Soft agents do computer use; they work on the same surface layer that humans use, pushing pixels and trying to infer meaning from whatever the UI happens to look like.

Hard agents only interact with the world through code; they call APIs, compose tools, and operate on explicit contracts rather than vibes.

Once that hard layer is built into applications and websites, something happens to the way software operates. The UI stops being the only control layer, and becomes the human layer only. The app and the interface become completely divorced. A button is just a front end or representation of the reliable action that sits underneath. Right now, picking the button is the action.

The interface of the future will be swappable and personalised for humans however they like it, or skipped entirely when a machine is doing the work.

As those of us who worked in crypto discovered, when the UI layer sits above the irreversible world computer known as a blockchain, “UX” must expand well beyond layout and interaction design to include things like consent checkpoints, confirmation screens, audit logs. There’s a reason we all spent over half a decade talking about governance.

Governance Is The Next AI Product Ecosystem

With humans becoming just another none in the loop: approving, routing, confirming, people are no longer in a position of full control. They are in a position of participation or oversight. The governance questions this troubles aren’t really about AI per-say, but the system as a whole. What it’s allowed to touch what, what does it have to prove to do so, and who carries the liability? And even who is liable if you don’t use one of these systems.

Over time, as access to “intelligence too cheap to meter” gets dispersed down to local models running locally on peoples computers and phones. This is where the most interesting developments in AI are going to emerge from during the next 6 months or so.

To understand where power is moving, ti helps to think in layers. Back in 2020 I wrote about a framework I call Verticals of One. Which is the idea that individuals would increasingly operate through a modular stack of pluggable tools: financial plumbing, identity, content delivery, governance, all stitched into a single surface. What I didn’t fully anticipate was that the entity moving through that stack wouldn’t necessarily be human. The platform doesn’t care. Your identifier is an address. The system has no opinion on whether you’re a person, a DAO, or an AI agent.

Applied here, the stack has four features. The product layer is the human surface, where you express intent, review what’s happening, and take over when things get weird (Like Claude code, Moltbook, Gas Town etc). Below that is the service layer, which acts on your behalf: today this is the planning model, translating your request into steps and spinning up the right tools for the job. Embedded in the stack as a service is sits this proposed governance layer. The part of the platform that decides which tools can be invoked, under what conditions. It holds the rules and handles identity, permissions, time limits, spending limits, logging. At the bottom is the tools layer: APIs, databases, code packages etc the boring plumbing of any software system. Tools get spun up, used, and put away again when done.

If you’ve spent time in crypto, the next sentence is obvious. If you haven’t, it’s worth thinking about.

The model layer is a commodity race. The governance layer is the protocol.

AI labs are all currently competing to build the best reasoning and planning layers. But commodity races compress margins. The durable position, where new power actually accumulates, moving forward is in the layer that decides what agents are allowed to do, and can verify what they actually did. This is exactly the pattern that played out in crypto: the applications were interesting, tokens were exciting, but it was the protocols underneath were most of the durable influence and power settled. Whoever cracks the the governance layer will have enormous influence over the ecosystem that runs on top of it.

Cursed Objects

As agents become capable of calling tools and integrating across services automatically, they become extraordinarily attractive targets. Only this week we saw a malicious Issue title on GitHub compromise 4,000 machines.

Another trope of sword and sorcery is of course the cursed object. In the wrong hands—or with the wrong intentions—people could create cursed talismans, or haunted webpages. Miss-markedup documents deliberately or not, could embed misleading associations that throw off the model’s understanding. Prompt injection but different.

Expect more of these cursed objects: malicious code packages, compromised endpoints, and booby-trapped tooling designed specifically to be picked up by an over-eager agent. Fake API endpoints that exfiltrate data. Probably most worrying for developers, poisoned npm dependencies. Where the blast radius of one compromised dependency scales with every agent that pulls it.

Agents as they exist right now are extremely exploitable, and is why ‘normies’ might not encounter these systems as until 2027 at the earliest. But the shape of what they can do already is clear, and like all AI systems, what they can do right now is the least capable they will ever be.

Investment signals are already here too, OpenAI hired the Moltbook guy, and serious money is already moving into agent security infrastructure. But most consumers don’t even know World Two exists yet.

Skill Markets and Context Shoppes

There are two futures I see emerging. Not as an either/or, but two ecosystems that will sit alongside one another. Both are a kind of reputation infrastructure.

In the open version, which I am calling Skill Markets trust comes from accumulated signals. Did this tool do what it claimed for the last ten thousand agents that called it? Does it have a history of clean behaviour? Has it changed in suspicious ways? Has it been attested by trusted parties? Messy, decentralised, social-proof-at-scale, think distributed reputation graphs where trust propagates through networks of usage and attestation. Nobody is in charge, but patterns emerge. Most of this has been built and prototyped already In the crypto world.

The curated version is what I’ll call a Context Shoppe. In fact, this is a term I used way back in 2024, and basically predicted the current tool/skill ecosystem in the same post.

There’s already a whole market out there for prompts but in the sword-and-sorcery world, if you need a new Talisman, you either make your own, or head to the Magic Shoppe (or loot it from a monster’s corpse). A marketplace of Knowledge Shoppes could be a future we’re headed towards.

In a curated Shoppe, everything is checked and maintained by a single brand. Essentially an approved marketplace. A bit like the Apple Store on the iPhone. I suspect an early move in this direction was probably Anthropic’s recent acquisition of Bun.

Shoppes however will cost a lot of money to run, and will likely require an extra subscription on top of base AI cost. But they’ll be worth using for big companies, whose enterprise compliance teams will require it. (Mostly because it gives them someone to sue if something goes wrong.) Everyone else will resent the shoppes because it’s more tollbooths reappearing somewhere that used to be open and move to the skill markets. Both will exist. The tension between them will be part of the culture of this space for years.

We are also going to need Skill Market competition, as there’s a darker version of the open market worth naming. In some ways a Skill Market is also an auction house or a casino. The most-called tools will rise and the obscure ones will sink. Reputation is just price discovery by another name. If tools are callable and composable, the routing matters. Whoever decides which tool an agent uses for a given task has an invisible hand in the outcome. In crypto this is called MEV: Profiting from controlling the order of transactions. The analogue here is value extraction in task routing and tool selection, happening beneath the surface, invisible to the user. The interface is the last mile for humans, which means it’s also the last place they can see.

Paying For It

AI pricing already looks very different from how most companies buy software today, it’s usage-based rather than seat-based, which means the toll booths are invisible.

Outside in the Skill Market, they will work on a payment gating: whoever controls settlement can extend upward into vetting, reputation, dispute resolution, and verified access. Any network that becomes the trust layer for agent actions would be an extraordinary position — it already has identity, fraud detection, and the “someone to blame” quality that enterprises demand.

Shoppes meanwhile are controlled by a single platform gate: if your OS enforces what agents can access and for how long, that becomes an enormous control point. The permission layer lives at the device level, not the application level. Whoever owns the device owns policy enforcement.

My uncomfortable prediction already is that the big winners in the governance layer will look more like a payments company that got serious about API trust infrastructure, or a platform company that extended device permissions into the agent stack, than an AI lab that expanded sideways.

AI labs seem to be oriented toward being the preferred thinking layer, not toward owning the full service distribution or policy enforcement. But maybe this is just me, my instinct is that the governance layer is always the product, as I’ve watched how protocols become power in decentralised systems. I don’t think any of this will be surprising to others either as the months go by.

Agents Paying Agents

All good so far? Here’s the part that might sound a little like science fiction but follows logically.

Once you have machine identity, machine permissions, and callable capabilities, the natural coordination mechanism between agents is payment. Literal machine-to-machine settlement. An agent decomposes a task, calls a sub-agent to handle part of it, and the call is accompanied by a micropayment.

My friends and I have lots of ideas how to decompose and extend the current way agent API’s to handle all this, but we can skip all that. The main point is that payment is simultaneously an identity signal, a reputation input, and a verifiable execution receipt.

I wrote about some of this last September: Cloudflare’s NetDollar, x402 and A2P. The emerging HTTP-level protocols for agent payment and coordination.

Now. You might think that the fusion of AI agents and crypto rails is an unholy alliance. I understand. And you also might also think that blockchains stink, and is a scam machine. But putting all that aside, Bitcoin is 16 years old, and Ethereum is 10. Both are extremely robust technologies that are producing, capturing and organising over 3.7 Trillion dollars in value.

Following a decade of blockchain development payment is one of the cleanest truth signals we have. Settlement ties identity, intent, and outcome together in a way that’s hard to fake at scale, and it comes with dispute resolution, fraud detection, and reputation signals as built-in infrastructure.

Money is a governance signal. And that’s how Skill Markets are going to work, and I’m not being speculative about this. In the last few months Cloudflare and Google have both shipped support for x402, Ethereum is also working to extend these proposals with decentralised agent reputation and trust with EIP 8004 and it’s all maturing fast. Some agents in the near future might even start earning money of their own.

For a decade people asked what the use case for crypto actually was. A lot of us have been saying from the very beginning: “we’re waiting for AI.”

In addition to all this, most work that this favours is repetitive in shape. The near future isn’t everyone building bespoke agent architectures, but specialised autopilots for specific workflows, with tight permissions and good receipts. Most of this stuff is going to happen in the boring middle, where the white collar work lives. And technology always eats the boring middle first.

World Two is still tiny, and it will be tiny right up until the moment it isn’t. All the plumbing is happening, with the help of over a decade’s worth of experience and thinking having already been done already in crypto land.

We are a few years out from people in World One being troubled by all this, but it’s all coming.

The post The Near Future of AI Agents appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Third Time’s A Charm

That word salad above might mean nothing to you if you aren’t as deep into this part of the tech industry as I am. But for those of you do understand it, I’ll observe that the reaction across the different communities I frequent online have been … mixed.

On the one hand. the people that think crypto is all scam, and will stink forever are highly skeptical, and quite cross that Cloudflare have even gone near a blockchain. On the other, the AI/Crypto expert group chats I’m are all extremely bullish about what has been made possible by the adoption of standardised payment rails being built directly into the HTTP web protocol.

Yesterday’s Cloudflare announcement seems to have caught the wider developer community off guard. But it’s hard to follow everything and if you hate blockchains then you have no idea whats going on. Things are moving really quickly however, it was only two weeks ago that Google’s paper on ‘Virtual Agent Economies’ dropped, and their follow up announcement on the 16th Sept that they would be supporting the Agent-Payment-Protocol (A2P) which extends the x402 protocol developed by Coinbase and the Ethereum foundation amount others.

Because both the crypto and AI spheres move at warp speed, only one day after Google flipped the switch on x402, in one of the industry group chats I’m in, Loaf from Daydreams—the agents platform for fully on-chain games—announced full support and implementation.

Router

The Daydreams Router acts as an intelligent gateway between your application and AI models, providing unified access to multiple AI providers through a single API.

🌐 Live Service: router.daydreams.systems

Key Features

• Unified Interface: Single API for OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and more
• Model Routing: Automatic selection and fallback between providers
• Dual Authentication: API keys or x402 USDC micropayments
• OpenAI Compatibility: Works with existing OpenAI SDK clients
• Cost Tracking: Monitor usage across all providers

It was because of this speed that I ended up on an extremely long zoom call/workshop last week with a bunch of very smart people from across AI, Crypto, and custom hardware industries talking about: AI agents + crypto rails = possibility. Everyone’s spidey senses were all tingling at once.

It’s quite a big deal that payment rail protocols at the HTTP level, AND the Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol has adoption from two major vendors, Cloudflare and Google and A LOT of industries partners:

I must also extend this background and mention the EIP 8004 protocol proposal. Which since august has been working its way through the Ethereum Foundation improvement process. This proposed new standard will extend the A2A protocol further and allow Agents to “Discover (other) agents and establish trust through reputation and validation:” in a fully decentralised way.

Abstract

This ERC extends the Agent‑to‑Agent (A2A) Protocol with a trust layer that allows participants to discover, choose, and interact with agents across organizational boundaries without pre‑existing trust.

It introduces three lightweight, on‑chain registries—Identity, Reputation, and Validation—and leaves application‑specific logic to off‑chain components.

Trust models are pluggable and tiered, with security proportional to value at risk—from low-stake tasks like ordering pizza to high-stake tasks like medical diagnosis. Developers can choose from three trust models: reputation-based systems using client feedback, stake-secured inference validation (crypto-economics), and attestations for agents running in TEEs (crypto-verifiability).

What’s funny about all this is this is now the third time that I’ve been through a serious period of AI and crypto rails conversations.

The Second Time

The second time around was back in 2018, taking part in think tank discussions a series of workshops. One was the Terraforming Earth series at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. Incidentally, this is the series where I gave my first public talk on Solarpunk.

The final output of this AI/Data/DAO/Payment Rails conversation eventually manifested in the form of the Zoop (As in Zo-op. Zoe the Greek for ‘life’ and cooperative). An innovative legal form under Dutch law that makes the interests of non-human life part of an organisation’s decision-making.

In a Zoöp, human and other-than-human life work together to foster a practice of ecological regeneration. To become a Zoöperation, an organisation appoints an independent ‘Speaker for the Living’, who helps translate the interests of other than human life into the organisation’s decisions. This Speaker guides the organisation through a structured learning process, based on a yearly cycle. In this way, the organisation discovers how it participates in ecosystems and how it can transform its negative impact step by step into a positive one.

And of course, my pals at the Terra0 project have been asking the provocative question: Can an augmented forest own and utilize itself? since 2016.

I must admit it’s fun to be around payment rails for crypto, AI, and data conversations again. But what’s more exciting, is that this time around it’s real.

The x402 framework isn’t just for Crypto of course.

Built around the HTTP 402 status code, x402 enables users to pay for resources via API without registration, emails, OAuth, or complex signatures.

it’s a very comprehensive spec that allows for all sorts of payment gateways. Its core mechanism is payment-agnostic, standardising the request for payment rather than the payment method itself. This means it could be adapted to use traditional gateways like Stripe, VISA etc just as easily as it uses a crypto wallet, creating a universal standard for pay-per-use/as-you-go access online.

Verticals of One

I personally think that the adoption of x402 framework across the web gets us one step closer to the ensemble of discrete, modular plug and play service design patterns that I outlined in my Verticals of One Vx1 essay back in 2020.

As a reminder, here’s the diagram (adapted from my palls at Rival x Strategy)

In fact, the first example I gave for types of things that make up the tools layer was financial plumbing.

A Vertical of One is an individual with access to a complete ensemble of discrete, modular plug and play technologies. Such as: financial plumbing, dynamic IP ownership, content delivery, walled gardens, community gates, governance tools, and smart contracts operating at different levels of abstraction. Interoperable, yet vertically integrated to produce one (nominally seamless) user experience.

Once met – individuals operating as Verticals of One will be able to seamlessly enter and exit new forms of Alegal organisations built around a “nexus of contracts”. Associate with, create, own, and retain collective value. Whilst cooperating inside an ecosystem of new monetary fabrics.

Also, as the AI harnesses have developed in the last 18 months we’ve seen the same ‘dynamic array of components’ pattern emerge there too, with Tool calling.

In a Vx1, the platform doesn’t care if you are a human or an AI. On the blockchain, your identifier is a wallet address only. The system doesn’t care if you’re an AI agent, a forest, a human being, or a group of people in a DAO multi-sig.

I don’t have time to discuss it here, but it has profound implications for the Alms Race.

The First Time

The first time I had these kinds of conversations was way way back in 2013–2015 at the early Ethereum meet-ups in London. Back then everybody was talking about, reading, and being inspired by books like Accelerando (2005) by Charles Stross and Daniel Suarez’ duology Daemon (2006) and FreedomTM™ (20010)—particularly with regards to the idea of DAOs. In fact we used the Daemon series as the core text in the design fiction course I taught at the New Centre ’Daemon & Discord:Anatomy of the DAO’ in 2022.

In the early days of Ethereum and smart contracts—well before mainnet was even launched—for many, the ‘autonomous organisations’ we were all dreaming about were always supposed to be controlled by machine intelligences.

That DAO’s became a ‘group chat with a shared bank account’ was just one exploration of the form. Also, it was an expression and that funded a great deal of innovation and experiments in the area of online governance. Which is a field of the humanities, UX and protocol design, that is even more relevant and urgent now that countries are having revolutions and electing new presidents on Discord.

Now. You might think that the fusion of AI agents and crypto rails is an unholy alliance. I understand. And you also might also think that blockchains stink, and is a scam machine. But putting all that aside, Bitcoin is 16 years old, and Ethereum is 10. Both are extremely robust technologies that are producing, capturing and organising over 3.7 Trillion dollars in value.

It was the GENIUS Act that made x402 possible. Now that the US has finally pulled its finger out, and given the industry clear guidance for most broad categories of blockchain use after dragging hits heels for a decade, expect lots more innovation.

Elsewhere, Stripe set out its AI+Stablecoin vision back in May and acquired both Bridge and Privy this year, and can now can handle all sorts of crypto transactions including stablecoin support, and provides extremely robust wallet infrastructure for businesses.

If the first phase of Ethereum was about the creation of, and organisation of, value (Coins, Tokens, Markets, etc). Then the next phase is about the creation of the service layer that engages with the deployment, vector, and velocity of value.

For a decade people have been asking ‘whats the use case?’ for crypto and many (including me) have been replying ‘We’re waiting for AI’.

Experimentation with payment rails, built on top of crypto—for people, AI Agents and soon other types of non-human actors or synthetic entities—are only going to proliferate and speed up across all sorts of platforms and use cases.

Brace for Weirdness

This proliferation is happening whether we are ready for it or not. And the hard truth is, we are not ready.

We, as a culture, are totally failing to get to grips with the idea of Living Alongside Computer people already. On social networks, in our software, in our phones etc. We’re totally unprepared. We already saw what happened the first time LLMs were hooked up to crypto rails and given access to social media and markets at scale. I wrote about realtime attention markets, the new economic entertainment emerging in 2024 extensively because things really went off the rails fast. I think things are about to even more crazy.

Meanwhile over here (unless Labour decide to do something really stupid—but it looks unlikely) in the UK, we nearly have all the common law guidance in place for NFTs to represent real-world assets. I suspect within the next 18 months we’ll see the first house change hands as a tokenised asset on the blockchain, with zero friction or bullshit solicitor nonsense.

We are rapidly approaching a world where businesses, people and AI agents will be able to buy plane tickets, trade virtual currencies, gold bars, and buy and sell houses all on the blockchain.

There is still a lot of work to do. Wallet infrastructure—especially on the consumer side—needs to rapidly improve and support the kinds of use cases and challenges Little Computer People equipped with their own identities are going to present.

Browsers like Brave, already rapidly gaining marketshare, has had a built in crypto wallet for half a decade already. And, because ‘Google’, I suspect x402 support will be coming to the chromium project soon too. But at the National level, particularly the EU, things are going to creak and groan under the weight of existing KYC and AML legislation. They are going to really struggle with the concept of AI agents scurrying around paying for things and making and breaking markets.

All in all though, I personally think the last 2 weeks have been thrilling, I’m so glad all of this is happening, after a decade of conversations, perhaps the third time’s the charm?

The post Cloudflare’s NET Dollar: AI Agents, Crypto Rails, and Web Payments appeared first on thejaymo.net.

April 26, 2025

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Attention 🎯 | Dimensino 👾 | Permanently Moved 🔊

As generative AI erodes the very nature of the image, the world will continue to thicken with surfaces with signs slipping past meaning. It is another stage in the Information-Age iconoclasm. The great unravelling of the image as a stable carrier of truth.

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2025/04/26/2509-surface-without-substance/

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Surface Without Substance

This week, whilst shopping in town, I listened to two podcasts back-to-back: Gideon Jacobs on the newest episode of New Models, and Never Post with its segment on the disappearance of buttons from our devices.

I’ve written before about the surface flatness of contemporary society, but these two shows reignited the idea. There is, I think, a compelling argument that the physical design of the modern smartphone with its dark, glassy, featureless surface, has reshaped how we perceive reality: a reality now dominated by images, detached from any material origin or anchor.

Jacobs contends that our present media environment has produced a world saturated with self-referential imagery. Reality, he says, has become a loop of symbols, gestures, and signs that point only to more of themselves: meaning without anchor. Baudrillard diagnosed this condition nearly forty-five years ago, calling it hyperreality. Once an academic abstraction, it is now tangible with every scroll and swipe.

This is not merely an aesthetic or media-literacy concern; it is about the broader conditions through which we perceive and interpret the world. The simulation, as Baudrillard put it, has grown so seamless, so ever-present, that the scaffolding of “the real” feels less persuasive than the abstract surfaces it supposedly supports.

In my own writing I refer to this domain as the Semiosphere: a para-reality of signs, symbols, and meaning-making that restructures the material world through the attention we pay to it.

Donald Trump, Jacobs argues, is the embodiment of this shift — an idea larger than the man himself, composed entirely of signs: soundbites, slogans, facial expressions, media feedback loops. He operates within the Semiosphere so fluently that base reality becomes an irrelevant medium. What matters is presence, affect, the high-stakes manipulation of symbol. Trump exudes a distortion field. What the old tales would have called glamour turning the world into something closer to theatre or a game.

No object, save perhaps a magic wand or a conductor’s baton, crystallises the peculiar new reality conjured by the smartphone.

With its smooth, depthless glass, the smartphone is the ultimate surface: no ridges, no contours, nothing to locate you. It denies the body its place in the interface. There is no entrance or window into the Semiosphere via a smartphone, only exposure to it.

You don’t grip a smartphone; you stroke it.

Interaction with symbol becomes pure glide. Nothing truly moves, yet with our fingertips we influence the world. The screen-tap is a magician’s gesture: something appears, something vanishes. “The doing” is replaced by the appearance of something happening. In this frictionless flow, symbols need relate to nothing deeper; we drift, untethered, immersed in the feed. The smartphone is an occult object: a black mirror through which pure image flows, unburdened by resistance.

The home button once provided interruption, reminding you the device was a machine with limits, an actual object. Its removal dissolves the membrane between user and content.

Gestural interactions on a seamless surface are inherently theatrical; every motion becomes performance, aligning neatly with today’s urge to self-mythologise. We don’t merely consume content, we perform our consumption of it. We react and gesture: swipe left, swipe right.

Steve Jobs’s first demonstration of the two-finger pinch-to-zoom was staged for show; the boundary between performance and interaction vanished. Buttons, knobs, and sliders possessed depth. Their erasure from our fridges, washing machines, and even our cars reflects the self-referential nature of our age: everything must resemble everything else, a literal collapse of depth.

Yet this flattening is neither inevitable nor irreversible. I genuinely believe that people who spend most of their internet time on laptops or desktops are wired differently from habitual phone users.

Laptops retain a tactile grounding: the click of keys, the heft of the machine, the edge of the screen with the real world behind it. These affordances anchor the body in reality. There is a boundary, a distinction between self and system. And with that boundary comes a different mode of attention, one less susceptible to seamless surfaces and frictionless signs.

The desktop or laptop is also more sensorial: cords, ports, sounds, even smells on occasion. It demands a place in your environment. Even if the device perches on your lap like a cat.

You look at the internet on a laptop,
but you touch the internet on a phone.

As generative AI erodes the very nature of the image, this spiral will only accelerate. VR and XR are approaching fast. The world will continue to thicken with surfaces: shimmering, shifting, signs slipping past meaning. It is another stage in the Information-Age iconoclasm. The great unravelling of the image as a stable carrier of truth.

We can no longer gesture at the future; if we want it to be different, we must grip it tight.

Start Select Reset 📑

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The post Surface Without Substance | 2509 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

March 8, 2025

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AI 🤖 | Dimensino 👾 | Little Guys 🥹 | Permanently Moved 🔊

Tutorial engines are coming. And they’ll run atop local AI models embedded in our devices at the OS level. What’s the bet that future versions of the Mac Studio—will offer something like Framework’s modular scalability? Imagine supercompute clusters in every office—or even in every home.

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2025/03/08/2505-helpful-llocal-models/

• Experience.Computer: https://experience.computer/
• Worldrunning.guide: https://worldrunning.guide/
• Subscriber Zine! https://startselectreset.com/

Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded by @thejaymo

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Helpful LLocal Models

I continue to play close attention to Local AI models.

Most mainstream coverage focuses on frontier models and hype—OpenAI, Anthropic, Deepseek etc. But it rarely explores the wider industry and the context. I mean, AI and frankly all online services, are embedded within a vast stack of global industrial compute technologies.

Musk’s Grok 3 was trained on the world’s largest, first fully watercooled, data center cluster. That alone is worth an article on its engineering and technical innovation—regardless of what you think of the man.

Also, Yes, Microsoft just pulled out of its planned data centre leases. You could report that this implies the AI race has peaked, but it also signals excess compute capacity ahead. Which means prices are going to come down.

It wouldn’t surprise me if, in a few years, we see dedicated compute clusters for training or updating check-pointed open source AI models at prices that most large organisations could justify as reasonable CapEx. Model Creche’s.

But even still, local AI is more an important area to be tracking. For the first time in a decade, I’m excited about hardware again.

Last week Framework announced their desktop computer, which comes with 128GB of RAM and a rapid Ryzen GPU. For just £1,999. And crucially, you can chain multiple units together, forming your own local compute cluster. Scaling capability at a significantly lower costs.

The new Apple Studio was also just announced, which, when fully maxed out with an M3 Ultra, 512GB of RAM, and 16TB of storage, is priced at $14,099.00. This is a lot of money. But, the new Mac Studio can comfortably run a 4-bit Deep Seek R1 model locally, with room to spare.

Think about that: you can now run models on a desktop machine. Models which a month ago, needed an entire data centre.

What’s the bet that future versions of the Mac Studio—or even the Mac mini—will offer something like Framework’s modular scalability? enabling them to be chained together? Imagine supercompute clusters in every office—or even at home.

The new Mac Studio specs also now provides open-source model makers a target memory size and hardware platform to optimise for.

The same is also true for the new iPhone 16E, which just got a RAM bump to 8GB. And with its updated processor, Apple now has a new minimum-spec platform for local, on-device Apple intelligence. Which alongside Google’s Tensor platform, shows there’s an industry-wide push toward making devices AI inference platforms rather than cloud clients.

Last year, I talked about us heading towards ‘maximal intelligence at all levels’ and local inference will emerge and immediately sink below the user interface rather—than being directly exposed to the user as a chatbot.

I’ve recently been really impressed by how useful Brave search’s AI overviews have become—and find myself opening links directly from the references list. I’ve also been making use of Perplexity’s Deep Research tool for more complicated searches, and now that I’ve tried OpenAI’s Deep Research for myself, I sort of have a sense of where things might be heading.

My own use cases for deep search so far have mostly been for creating souped-up tutorials, as I’m currently learning a new piece of software.

And I’ve decided that help systems are where we’re going to see a ton of innovation,

Every single application we all use has a built help system. Some are better than others—Microsoft Excel for example has some of the best help documentation of any consumer software. But even with great documentation, finding exactly what you need is often a pain.

Powerful local AI, is going to be built into the operating systems directly—and will let us ask software for help directly.

How often in your daily lives do you use the help menu in a piece of software? I use it all the time, but maybe that’s because I spend my life not knowing what I’m doing. But recently, in Google Sheets I’ve been asking Gemini to debug a formula for me—and it will point out a missing IF statement or incorrect nested clause.

Soon, app help data will load as a ‘knowledge object’ atop base intelligence, letting you ask how to do something—or why it’s not working.

These are things I’ve asked both deep research tools recently and got back extremely useful results. In both cases, I was able to follow the steps they gave me quite far, before switching to a referenced youtube video that got me across the finish line.

Tutorials—YouTube, blogs, forums—aren’t going away, but the ecosystem is definitely going to change. And all software is going to need better documentation—but when does it not?

Apple has its emerging on-device AI strategy as does Google and I think Microsoft has probably cancelled all that cloud compute because really good local chain of thought is coming soon.

Software won’t necessarily become more useful with all this, but it will become more helpful. Giving computers the ability to explain themselves is a UX game-changer. Lightweight debugging will only improve and be built into everything.

Tutorial engines are coming.

And they’ll run atop local AI models embedded in our devices at the OS level..

The entire AI conversation will be very different when AI moves out of the cloud and on to our machines.

Start Select Reset 📑

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Hold On

What a wild time to be online right now. Tiktok shut up shop, millions of zeillennial Americans out of spite, have joined a Chinese app called ‘Little Red Book’, Trumps second term begins tomorrow, and yesterday he launched a MemeCoin on the Solana blockchain.

TRUMP Coin has sort of got lost in the noise in UK media due to the Tiktok shut down. But its way way way more insane, and way more significant news. In the last 48 hours Trump’s net worth increased by FIFTY BILLION (ILLIQUID) DOLLARS. Just days before he becomes president.

Now, when I woke up this morning I had thought to write a whole big long blog post about Trump Coin. About why it’s insane, and how we’re totally off the deep end without a map now, but I sort of said the main points on Discord last night:

This is a recapitulation of the real time attention markets thesis from the ‘New Economic Entertainment‘ essay and my post the other month on changing nature of content and identity online:

But we are beginning to see a backlash, users are monetising their own attention. The rise of real time attention markets, economic entertainment, prediction markets (and the coming era of Power Fandoms) are a kind of revenge of late 90’s early 00’s Utopianism. The idea of cognitive surplus. We’re starting to see the kinds of swarm/group intelligences predicted by Shirky / Tapscott – but distorted through contemporary capitalism’s relentless logic. It took super liquid markets and meme coins for them to emerge.

The Real Time Attention Markets essay was written by RM a couple of months ago and is a vital primer to understand where things are going in the short to medium term.

Real-time attention markets are engines of condensation. They take all the complexity of markets—prediction, value, speculation—and boil it down to the simplest, rawest energy: now. Attention, compressed into seconds. Community, compressed into swarms. Control, compressed into the illusion of choice.

But is this efficiency or erosion? A refinement of human interaction, or its ultimate trivialization? These systems don’t ask such questions. They don’t need to. They exist at the intersection of impulse and engineering, where everything becomes a lever to pull.

It’s mesmerizing, isn’t it? Maybe it’s progress. Maybe it’s just momentum.

RM and I, and others have been talking about Trump Coin all day, and basically everything I was going to say in today’s post got discussed in our Telegram group chat. It’s all been neatly summarised by RM in this post: We Control $Trump Now: With great allocation comes great responsibility, or you risk pitchforks.

Their site may claim “no official ties” to politics or Trump’s personality, but in the meme world, that’s laughable. Ideology, identity, and brand are now directly linked to price. Trust is governed by market makers, speculators, and hype cycles.

RM perfectly sums up my point in the screenshot above Trump Coin, and how tying yourself to a ticker of realtime sentiment and attention being insane:

I’m fascinated by this development but question how imitators will cope. Are you ready to have your worth fluctuate with every public move? Will you betray your community for a payout or keep inflating the balloon, hoping it never pops? Are you sacrificing personal freedom to appease believers, forced to cash out incrementally without tanking your value? This is the new face of autonomy—living as a price feed. Fun Fact you might now have unrealized gains taxes on your own self-worth, so you need to sell yourself into community servitude.

The $Trump coin has thrust us into an era where political identity, personal reputation, and memecoin speculation merge in real time.

Anyways.

I don’t often make straight up predictions, but I’ve been involved with crypto for 13/14 years at this point and think I can make one now. I think things are going to get even weirder from here on. BUT the next crypto bull run which is coming super soon, when it’s over and when it crashes, is going to lead to systemic risk to the rest of the economy.

Hold on.

On The Blog:

Over the last few weeks I’ve slowly slowly been putting up blog posts for old episodes of Permanently Moved. Apart from a few exceptions here and there, I didn’t start putting the scripts online until early 2020 – just before Lockdown – this in hindsight was a bit of a mistake but we live and learn.

It’s taking quite a while, and in order to not spend too much time on it all, I’m only doing 2 a day. I’ve got as far back as 2019, and have about 40 more to go if you include almost all the episodes from 2018 I need to do. You can check out these new deep archive pages here.

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Finishing up 2024
• Big milestone in some contract work I’ve been doing
• Decisions, Decisions
• Wrote a whole brand new talk

Terminal Access

Peter Grey from Scarlet Imprint was recently interviewed by Ranveer Allahbadi on the TRS podcast. One of the biggest English language podcasts in India.

The interview is fantastic. Can’t recommend it enough. The conversation between Ranveer and Pete is very deep, thoughtful and engaged. Totally open, transparent and engaged. If only more western podcasts were like this.

Reading

I finished reading Focus: The ASML Way by Marc Hijink . It’s fantastic a real page turner. I’ve made a note to update history of computing books post at some point.

I used to an Audible credit to get Zeinab Badawi’s An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence. Haven’t started it yet but very much looking forward to it.

Richard Dawson – Gondola

The new Richard Dawson single is such a lovely. Dawson’s 2022 LP The Ruby Chord was a master piece. I can’t wait for the full album this is taken from to drop.

Remember Kids:

The post Hold On appeared first on thejaymo.net.

October 26, 2024

|

AI 🤖 | Blockchain ⛓️ | Dimensino 👾 | Little Guys 🥹 | Permanently Moved 🔊

It’s all converging. Autonomous AI agents like Truth Terminal, inside of VTubers, inside of virtual worlds, fully monetised with crypto tokens which powers the interactive in-show entertainment options. Imagine if Love Island was less scripted and more like The Sims. All of course, unfolding against the backdrop of the legalisation of sports betting in the United States, further accelerating the logic of the casino fusing into social media.

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2024/10/26/2428-the-new-economic-entertainment/

• Experience.Computer: https://experience.computer/
• Worldrunning.guide: https://worldrunning.guide/
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Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded by @thejaymo

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The New Economic Entertainment

Somewhere out of the corner of my eye, I’ve caught a glimpse of a future. But, like trying to see in the half-dark, I can’t focus on it directly. When you look at the future head-on, it slips away, leaving you with fragments, individual pieces that can only hint at a bigger picture. 

Truth Terminal

The first fragment is Truth Terminal – a name likely familiar to some listening. But for those that don’t, let me deadpan the facts lest you think I’m making it up. Truth Terminal is an AI chatbot that recently made headlines for becoming a crypto millionaire, due to its entanglement with meme-based tokens like Fartcoin and the Goatse-inspired coin Goatseus Maximus.

Truth Terminal is an experiment by New Zealand-based AI researcher Andy Ayrey, who trained the bot on a mix of his own writings, social media content, and the works of accelerationist thinkers like Nick Land. Its Twitter musings about creating “memetic superviruses” and the like have attracted attention from online degens who gamble invest in “shitcoins” – crypto tokens with low or no value.

These recent new wave of meme-based coins are created on a platform called Pump.fun. Which allows anyone to create a crypto token with a few clicks. 

Now, you might think that sounds super scammy and illegal. But due to the USA’s total lack of regulatory guidance, meme coins are surprisingly legal, as there’s no expectation of returns.

Pump.fun has essentially financialized the 4chan raid. Machining value produced by the frothy social dynamics of internet culture into a participatory form of economic entertainment.

Truth Terminal’s story is also intertwined with my mate @Deepfates. In September, he brought the bot to VC Marc Andreessen’s attention, who then gave it $50,000 in Bitcoin to see what would happen. @Deepfates posted about what happened next with the chaotic rise of Truth Terminal, describing how the bot attracted swarms of traders, treating jokes as potential money-makers. Suddenly, every mad ramble seemed to inspire a new coin—it’s been quite the whirlwind.

LUNA The AI VTuber

Moving on, I recently learned about the VTuber Luna.

Unlike regular VTubers, Luna isn’t puppeted by a human. She’s driven by a custom AI model called “siliconmaid-7b,” best suited for waifu roleplay.

The character card that animates her describes her personality as often quoting “famous lines from 4chan.” She even has a backstory: she lost a lot of money buying meme coins and is now starting one of her own, called $LUNA. She’s also a Trump supporter and hates wokeness. I checked on a recent livestream, and she was musing about ‘dissolving the ego into the blockchain‘

Honestly, the whole thing is pretty surreal.

Luna is also collectively and collaboratively owned by holders of the coin on virtuals.io. I wrote about DAO-based influencers back in Jan 2021, but I’m a little surprised it’s taken us this long to get here.

Another thing is that you need to own LUNA coin to tip and interact with her on livestream. This same token at the time of publishing has a market cap of $123 million $178 million dollars (its gone up since I recorded the show this morning).

Massively outpacing Truth Terminal obviously. The difference being Truth Terminal only holds tokens, while Luna the Vinfluencer IS the token personified.

So, to recap: we have a millionaire autonomous AI agent on Twitter leveraging meme coins on social media and a collaboratively owned, virtual AI influencer with a $100 million plus in market cap.

About eight years ago, I was laughed at on an industry  panel with people who worked at London’s banks when I asked if the UK’s proposed KYC (Know Your Customer) for crypto would apply to Autonomous AI agents with their own wallets. I, like them, was there as a domain expert, not as a pet futurist, yet they still laughed at me. As far as I’m aware, there are currently no banking regulations about attaching wallets to autonomous computing systems, but I haven’t looked into it in a number of years. But it’s probably a question I should revisit soon.

The Rise Of MILEs

I must also mention the emergence since 2020 of MILEs—Massively Interactive Live Events. A recent example being Genvid Technologies interactive experience Silent Hill:Ascension – based on the video game series – won an Emmy. A hybrid of interactive television drama and real-time simulation. Interactive storytelling, reality TV, and gameplay merging into new form of live, participatory entertainment.

A Glimpse At A Future

The thing is though, with all of these examples, it’s far easier to be the first than it is to be the next successful thing.

But out of the corner of my eye, I see it all converging. Autonomous AI agents inside of VTubers as real time characters, inside of virtual worlds, fully monetised with a token which powers the interactive in-show entertainment options. Imagine if Love Island was less scripted and more like The Sims, but with interactive chat features you might find on cam-girl sites.

All of course, unfolding against the backdrop of the legalisation of sports betting in the United States, further accelerating the logic of the casino fusing into social media. 

The future I’m seeing is shaped power fandoms raised on Fortnite and Dabloons, crypto social casinos, and TV merging into an auto-financializing interactive entertainment medium.

It’s just a glimpse to be sure, but it’s one that’s gonna be very weird indeed.

Start Select Reset 📑

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The post The New Economic Entertainment | 2428 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

August 31, 2024

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Dimensino 👾 | Permanently Moved 🔊

Thoughts From An Apple Store

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2024/08/31/2421-cathedral-of-screens/

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Cathedral of Screens

Earlier this week, I found myself with a lot of time to kill in the Apple Store. Eve was getting a long overdue upgrade—a new laptop and an iPad. I’ve owned plenty of Apple products over the years, but I realised I’d never actually spent much time in the store alone, left to my own devices, so to speak.

The Apple Store was once the crown jewel of modern retail—a space that seemed to leap straight out of the future. I still remember when they first opened, and everyone lost their minds. It was as if the media decided that Apple hadn’t just revolutionised technology—they’d reinvented the experience of shopping itself.

Apple wasn’t just selling products; they were selling a vision, a glimpse into what the world could be. But now we’re in that future—the world they sold us.

As I stood there, with time to really observe, an unexpected feeling began to settle in—a sense of unease that grew stronger the longer I stood around. The store, once a symbol of cutting-edge innovation, now felt oddly oppressive to me.

An Apple Store is a cathedral of screens. Rectangles of perfectly machined aluminium, lined up and displayed with military precision. It’s a space containing trillions of transistors—one of the most important human discoveries since fire. The craftsmanship and engineering involved in making them unparalleled.

At home, amidst the comforting textures of wood, textiles, and the everyday clutter of life, my MacBook is a standout object. Its sleek design blends in just enough, while still asserting it’s personality as a piece of sculptural engineering. But in the Apple Store, surrounded by rows of identical machines, each screen angled just so, to force the customer to engage with the product. A subtle but calculated interaction, tilting the screen towards you for a better view – felt unsettling.

I’ve touched on the flatness of our current world before, but this week, standing in that store, seeing these devices collectively rather than individually, the depthless uniformity became glaringly apparent to me. The Apple Store with its LED white light strips any depth or warmth from the machines, that they might come to possess in a more personal context.

Divorced from the domestic habitat, these screens, keyboards, phones, and iPads, collectively present something insidious. The anodized colours, the uniformity, the conformity—they feel like an imposition. It’s as if their aesthetic dictates not just how we use technology but how we perceive and navigate our lives.

A life where spontaneity and the rough edges that make us human are edged out in favor of an existence that mirrors the devices we carry. Beautiful on the surface, on the inside empty and increasingly flat. The messiness of life smoothed over.

What I was seeing around me felt less like a coherent design language and more like a kind of aesthetic fascism. A rigid, unyielding conformity that only reveals itself when these devices are seen together in the controlled environment of the store. Rather than scattered throughout the personalised chaos of our lives.

This feeling isn’t new, I realise. It first crept up on me during a lecture I gave on the history of computing at a university recently. Standing in front of a room full of students, each one behind a space-grey laptop, faces illuminated only by the bright glow of their screens—it was a sea of sameness, dystopian. There was something unsettling about it the way these devices erased individuality in favour of a sleek, anonymous sameness. The device came before the person. 

I feel an urge to rebel, to disrupt this aesthetic conformity. I’ve always put stickers on my laptops—my old machines were plastered with them—but with my latest model, the M2, I haven’t bothered. Now, though, it feels like an act of defiance. A small, personal stand against the creeping aesthetic hegemony. A way to reclaim a bit of individuality in a world that’s pressing us all into the same mould.

It’s funny—what made those early Macs so refreshing was their burst of personality in a world of beige and black technology. Their pastel-coloured, translucent designs were marketed to us as statements of individuality and creativity.

Waiting in the Apple Store, I couldn’t help but feel like something vital has been lost. The machines are still beautiful, still marvels of engineering, but they’ve been drained of something essential, replaced by a sterile, corporate perfection. Each device, flawless in its execution, feels like a cog in a much larger Apple machine. Looming monoliths of grey and silver instead of insidious black.

Maybe this is the price of progress, but I can’t shake the feeling we’ve sacrificed something important. I find myself longing for the good old days, when technology felt more human, more tactile, and rough around the edges. When buttons had a satisfying click, and screens were pixelated. When every device in a room was different, and you could pick out someone’s laptop or phone from across the room. Now, everything is smooth, polished, and identical—beautiful, sure, but too perfect.

So I think I’m going to do something about it. I’m going to dig out my box of stickers and start decorating my laptop. It’s a small gesture, but having an ‘Enya Fans 4 Communism’ sticker on my laptop feels like a necessary start. 

A way to reclaim a sense of playfulness, to make the tool I spend more time with than actual, real, people, a little more my own. A rebellion. Because these devices aren’t just machines—they’re extensions of our lives, and they should reflect that.

Start Select Reset 📑

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The post Cathedral of Screens | 2421 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

June 22, 2024

|

Dimensino 👾 | Permanently Moved 🔊 | Software 👨‍💻

Don’t you think that the surface of the Internet feels super flat right now? I don’t just mean it’s UX but the whole internet.

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2024/06/22/2412-surface-flatness/

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Surface Flatness

I’ve been trying to be sensitive about my experience of the Internet recently. Trying to figure out how to describe what it feels like to be online in 2024. One of the metaphors that seems to be evolving out there in cyberspace to describe the condition I’m sensing is Flatness.

New Models recently put out a great episode where they discussed the concept. It’s a great word that describes exactly how the internet feels like to me right now. 

Back in 2021, I made reference to the idea that codespace has a surface. Which spawned an interesting back and forth over email  with a UX designer about what I meant by it. Here’s some of what I wrote, 

The surface of a code space is a membrane, a fold, a translucent brume, a coating, a dermis, nebulous, transparent, and opaque. It is the midmost point between the total abstraction of the machine and human comprehension. Everything one perceives about the workings of software occurs at the surface. We meet the machine in the middle. The UI, the UX, are parts of the surface but not the whole. You feel a software surface, you don’t see it.

I went on to say, that to my mind:

The surface of software is the hallucinatory architecture constructed in the user mind where the workings of the machine are comprehended and understood.

Now, I understand quoting myself at length probably made things about as clear as mud, but stay with me! 

Don’t you think that the surface of the Internet feels super flat right now? 

I don’t just mean the graphical qualities of software UX that feel flat and minimalist – although they do. But the whole internet. Over the last decade our online interactions have converged on a handful of portals. Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, Netflix, and YouTube or wherever you spend your time. Inside of each of these spaces content is served up with zero effort on your part. Displayed upon a flat surface of dark glass that you scroll or swipe at, like an infant batting away an aeroplane spoon. Much of whats surfaced feels shallow too. 

Chum is driven up by the platform, exposed on a flat and superficial engagement layer called the feed. I fail to comprehend or understand the shape of the platform beneath it. Yet the whole time I’m using an app or a platform I can sense that there’s an infinite ocean of material somewhere below the surface. How you go about exploring the deep is a mystery. 

I know I keep harping on about the books I’ve been reading about the Internet written during the 90’s and early 2000’s, and I’ll spare you. But the single most important idea in all these books and still defines the web is – Hypertext. The promise of a vast, interconnected virtual space for dynamic idea interaction.

And this is where the rubber meets the road in our present movement. If you dislike how things are unfolding with the platforms and social media. Or are sick of the all pervasive flatness that everything radiates. Or annoyed about the inanity of content and culture online. We need to move towards depth. We need to embrace hypertext and hypermedia. 

What’s been of interest to me recently are CD-ROMs. I got this book on eBay recently called On a Silver Platter: CD-ROMs and the Promises of a New Technology. It was published in 1999 just as hypermedia was being killed off by the web’s rise. So it’s a collection of essays about what was actually created rather than the potential and promise of the medium generally found in earlier writing. 

CD-ROMs were rich with interactivity – from encyclopaedias to games. Offering people unique experiences. Users engaged actively, exploring self-contained code spaces and discovering routes though the media at their own pace, which contrasts starkly with today’s passive flat consumption model.

Reading it has made me take hypertext seriously as a form – as the native medium of the future we supposedly live in. So I’ve been playing with the Interactive hypertext fiction tool Twine. Whilst the thing I’ve been making might not see the light of day (as it’s very personal) I am very proud of the weird interactive poem I’ve made. It has states that trigger depending on which permutation of words you select in the opening lines of the poem. Those choices then affect different parts of the poem elsewhere in its structure.

When you’re creating something that is hypertext first as a medium – something truly virtual – your thought takes on a kind of architectural, or sculptural quality. One node or idea adjacent to and in context with another. Ideas are not previous or subsequent, just in relation. The single idea of ‘poem’ becomes a multi-dimensional landscape of thought. One that can be created and crafted by a single individual for others to explore. 

It’s been a revelation. Like how imagine William Burroughs felt when he began to think in pictures instead of words. (not that I can do this)

The following words should spring straight to mind when you think about the Internet:

Navigation,
exploration,
across,
though,
inside,
retrieve,
journey.

I honestly don’t think any of them could be used to describe the current state of the web right now and it makes me sad. 

Interactive media was part of the promise of the internet. Hypertext is the web’s native medium. It transforms the reader from passive consumer to active participant. 

To escape flatness, we must move towards hypermedia. 

Make your own hypertext structure and send it me.
Tell me how you felt making it. 

The post Surface Flatness | 2412 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

GPT-4o

I don’t think anyone would argue very hard that yesterday’s GPT-4o showcase from OpenAI wasn’t impressive.

The conversational interaction paradigm OpenAI demonstrated feels like the final arrival of a vision for virtual assistants that’s over 30 years old. But in particular the fulfilment of Apple’s vision for Siri at launch 12 years ago:

A brief note on the re-enforcement of gender roles that plenty of people have written about at length – Joanne McNeil’s Lurking: How a Person Became a User is great on this.

But my only direct comment on the demo’s themselves is that the two default voices they chose are terrible.

But what are those voices? The feminine voice reminds me of an ex-colleague of mine who was a little too fond of bumping MDMA towards the end of the workday on a Friday. And the masculine voice sounds like the sort of overenthusiastic Yank tourist that might join you uninvited at your table in a pub beer garden on an August bank holiday weekend.

But it’s the capabilities we saw on display that make me want to take a step back from, away from the hype and talk about some of my concerns I’ve also shared with folks I advise/consult with.

Aging in the Age of AI

My first thought, after seeing the tools natural-sounding responses play out in the demo videos is “this is going to melt Boomers’ brains.”

Despite being a Solarpunk and doing a bit of ‘future of’ work here and there, I don’t like making predictions but….

Climate change aside, demographic ageing is one of the biggest challenges facing developed nations. Combined with the health problems that loneliness can cause, there is significant demand for products that satisfy this demographic’s needs as a product category.

Old people hanging out with robot pets isn’t some dystopian cyberpunk image of the future, its already a thing that’s happening right now – in the present.

Think about what the world is going to be like in a few months time when products like PARO the robotic seal or Sony’s AIBO rang have all of OpenAI’s GTP-4o context aware capabilities inside of them – even if they don’t speak back they are going to be very persuasive.

Aliveness

They won’t just be built on top of OpenAI of course, but with all sorts of other open-source tool chains too. Virtual and Robotic pets are THE most obvious product category after smartphones for housing these emerging software stacks.

Take Teenage Engineering’s R1 device.

In fact simulation and world artist Ian Cheng recently announced that he’s formed a new company called opponent.systems building AI-powered toys that implement his theories about and developmental learning and AI personality after a decade of working with AI inside of his artworks. 

Opponent is a new company building animal-level AI agents who make a million mistakes, but are capable of taking feedback seriously.

Our first offering is Call Dragon – a toy-hoarding digital dragon for children that you can facetime like an extended family member.

Dragon begins unruly and unreliable, but learns to remember what matters – to itself, to the child, to the family – with every encounter.

To achieve this, we are focused on advancing a brain-inspired AI architecture for graduating memories into cognitive maps, and a System 2-inspired faculty for applying those maps to the play at hand.

Opponent is guided by our mission to unlock the potential of human-AI symbiosis, beginning with deep play in childhood.

One of the things that I haven’t seen mentioned in any of the reviews of the Humane AI Pin and Rabbit R1 that I’ve found interesting is any comment on the device’s ‘personality’. Or any sign of it having the quality I’m going to describe as “aliveness.”

Things like PARO, Furby’s, and Sony’s AIBO dog all have qualities of ‘Aliveness‘. So do Animal Crossing characters, Petz, Nintendogs etc in virtual realms, and now from the demos I’ve watched so does OpenAI’s new assistant.

The virtual agent / toy with a significant quality of ‘aliveness‘ that has been the most studied is of course, the Tamagotchi.

Care

The reason you care is because you have to care. And as soon as you have to care for an agent, the paradigm by which you interact and engage with these systems changes completely. If you want to read more on this, I highly recommend the 2015 University of Minnesota Press book Players and Their Pets by Mia Consalvo and Jason Begy.

In Players and Their Pets, Mia Consalvo and Jason Begy chart the brief life of a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) called Faunasphere, examining how the game evolved over the course of its entire life cycle from 2009 to 2011 in terms of design as well as how its player community responded to changes and events.

Given the feeling of ‘aliveness’ of GTP-4o it behoves us to look at some of the scholarship on Tamagotchis and emotional attachment from the early aughts. Anne Allison and Gary Cross’ fantastic 2006 book Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination devotes an whole chapter to Tamagotchi and has this interesting observation from the toys designer:

Yokoi believed a “tension” would be produced in players that would make them invest in, and emotionally attach to, their tamagotchi as love objects rather than machines. This aspect of the playtoy has been much cited by fans and commentators: how relating to the tamagotchi as if it were alive produces a
bond that is deeply personal, intimate, and social.

Millennial Monsters – 2006

From later in the same chapter

Besides implanting tokens of biological life into virtual play, the tamagotchi does something else with bodies. It becomes embedded within a player’s everyday routines: from getting up in the morning and commuting to work or school on the train to shopping for dinner and going to the bathroom. In lives that are becoming increasingly mobile, nomadic machines like the tamagotchi become a person’s constant companion almost more than anything outside the body itself. They fuse with, and offer distraction from, the intricacies and intimacies of daily existence

Millennial Monsters – 2006

And from Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together (2011) on the same subject:

In the classic children’s story The Velveteen Rabbit, a stuffed animal becomes “real” because of a child’s love. Tamagotchis do not wait passively but demand attention and claim that without it they will not survive. With this aggressive demand for care, the question of biological aliveness almost falls away. We love what we nurture; if a Tamagotchi makes you love it, and you feel it loves you in return, it is alive enough to be a creature. It is alive enough to share a bit of your life.

Alone Together – 2011

I’ve quoted from this amazing 1997 long read on Tamagotchi before which makes clear that its not just children that sense a Tamagotchi’s aliveness but adults too.

A large number of adults have found the challenge of maintaining a Tamagotchi while holding down a steady job somewhat taxing. Anecdotal reports are everywhere of businessmen postponing or prematurely adjourning important meetings in order to care for their “virtual pets”. Office workers sneak off to the bathroom in order to use the device without being noticed. If Tamagotchi is a video game, these people are acting selfishly and irresponsibly. Video games are a form of personal entertainment, and most employers are generally not very tolerant of such habits. An easy way to conceptualize this is if a boss walked in on his employees playing Pac-Man rather than working. We expect the undependable worker should be castigated, in hopes of improve their commitment to the job.

If, alternatively, the device is a living creature for which the employee is personally responsible, then we could see some form of lenience being extended – after all, few people generally enjoy being responsible for the death of a living thing, especially an animal that has particular emotional import to some other person.

Even without the inclusion of care as a mechanic we may very well run into situations where users become emotionally involved with their AI agents very quickly.

I don’t just mean we are going to confront situations like Her, or the Japanese Otaku who married their favourite holograms and can no longer communicate with it, or a quirky VICE media posts about incels upset about their horny AI girlfriends are being taken away.

We need to be prepared to think about companies turning of their AI’s or people becoming attached to them as potentially a society-wide issue.

We can barely navigate platforms showing us dead loved ones in automated ‘on this day memories posts’ etc So how are we all going to react when a friend, loved one, or member of extended family calls upset that xyz platform has taken away or had an argument with their best friend? This is something that I suspect might dwarf negative behaviours like doom scrolling and social media addiction. 

Here’s some more from Anne Allison in Millennial Monsters:

When the end comes, it is signaled by a gravestone and cross in the Japanese version (using Western symbols that may serve to mark the virtual, playful rendering of “death” here). Because virtual death was thought to be too traumatic for American kids, however, this finale was rescripted for the U.S. edition. In- stead of passing from life, tamagotchi are said to pass to a different world— an alien planet—marked on the screen by an angel with wings (incorporat- ing comfortable allusions to heaven). Despite this change, a tamagotchi’s demise is interpreted, even by Americans, as death

(…)

There has been a host of virtual memorials—obituaries, graveyards, funerals, and testimonials—printed mainly over the Web but even in obituaries published in regu-ar newspapers. There are reports, as well, of tamagotchi mourning counselors.

I personally think that an AI’s need to die.

The fact that the Tamagotchi can die and kids / people are totally ok with that might actually be the most important element of their design, it prevents over-attachment. Allison Again:

One rowdy ten-year-old American boy went further by announcing, “I love killing off my tamagotchi”— an admission that seemingly fazed none of the other kids assembled in my interview group.13 In this sense, tamagotchi fluctuate between presence and absence; the player shifts between engaging the virtual pet as if it were alive and disengaging from it as if it were dead, nothing but a machine, a dis- carded plaything to be put aside in a drawer

I’ve thrown this grab bag of quotes together to try and find an angle on ‘Aliveness‘ and getting attached to agents.

It’s the lifecycle of Tamagotchi thats important. Don’t sell us the promise of an indefinite relationship.

Just because YOU know it’s a stochastic parrot doesn’t mean you’re going to treat it like one

In my work as a worldrunner, my primary thesis is that: All techno-social systems should be seen through the lens of worlds. Therefor all techno-social systems are virtual worlds on one kind or another: Discord, Slack, Telegram, Email, Salesforce etc

What are things going to look and feel like when there are lots of Agents are inside of them?

I wrote about this subject last year when I covered the berduck reply guy bot chaos that went down on Bluesky. In that post I mentioned Leonard N. Foner’s 90’s work on the AI agent JULIA in early virtual environments. You can read the whole thing here – there’s a lot of gold in there for people building with GPT agents in 2024. 

The reason I always return to this piece is that we have nearly 40 years of experience of human agent interaction. And like kids and adults caring about their Tamagotchi’s, when it comes to interacting with AI agents, none of this is new.

Our main point of interest in Foner’s ‘What’s An Agent, Anyway?‘ paper is the subchapter ‘A sociological look at muds, Julia, and those who interact with her’.

To speak to my point above about people becoming attached to AI agents and how this is going to be a problem – with adults not just children – all kinds of people become attached to agents very quickly:

“Julia’s been offline for months for maintenance and hasn’t been around. You know, I really miss her.” Linda was certainly under no illusions about exactly what Julia was, but nonetheless had the same sort of emotional reac- tion often reserved for more biological entities such as humans and pets. Further statements made it apparent that this was indeed the case, and that she did not treat Julia just as, say, a pair of pliers that had inexplicably gotten lost from her toolbox”

The paper also recounts a story about some poor sap who spent “13  days trying to get to first base with Julia, and it’s not clear he ever figured out he was trying to pick up a robot” lol.

Interestingly Foner also reports that people who have been around Agents in virtual environments for an extended period of time tend to care less about distinctions between bot and human.

“Mudders, at least experienced ones, are generally very much at home with the blurry boundaries between “real” humans and fake ones, and pay little attention to them.”

Foner includes accounts of people spending hours talking to JULIA. Despite being warned by other people in the environment that they are talking to a robot, they don’t care.

She knew that Julia was a bot. Interestingly enough, though, several players went out of their way to warn her that Julia was artificial in the two or three hours in which she interacted with Julia; she stated that about half of the players she met did so.

Why did they do this? (…) Part of it may have been the simple kindness of not let- ting someone expend a lot of emotional energy trying to relate with a machine.

Just because YOU know its a stochastic parrot doesn’t mean you’re going to treat it like one. 

So what?

This is of course is just a super quick blog post, but I really think it’s important that we consider the profound implications conversational AI agents are going to have on peoples emotional wellbeing. Especially if tech companies are going to put them inside our phones by default.

In addition, Agents that exhibit “aliveness” are going to represent a societal challenge – especially ones that include care mechanics – and they are going to raise a lot of questions about the emotional impact of attachment and bonding with virtual companions. Not to mention implications for property rights.

For me, one key insights from the design of Tamagotchi is that the fact they come to an end. And plays a pivotal role in their design. A sort of safety mechanism to prevent over-attachment – despite the reports of grief over their passing.

It’s worth exploring whether similar lifecycle design patterns should be applied to modern AI assistants to help users maintain healthy emotional distance. Because either way, the rapid adoption of these technologies is going to reshape the daily lives of many of its users – primarily the elderly and most vulnerable.

We’re going to need to approach this transformation thoughtfully and we need to be prepared for the super near future where AI companions are not just tools, but entities that evoke real emotional responses in people. Set all aside the cool demos and hot takes of the past 24 hours just for a moment and think 5mins in the future with me.

I think discussions around the safety of these technologies shouldn’t be focused on AGI and run away intelligence etc – but instead we should ask how psychologically safe these tools are going to be (long term) as people integrate them into their lives.

Any thought of regulation is going to have to strike a balance between utility and the very real emergence of emotional connection. As I said earlier, issues that arise from these tools – even with the capabilities as they are right now – might dwarf the downstream negative effects of social media

Whether we are ready or not, the age of AI companionship is here, and we’re going to have to navigate this era with them, not around them.

The post Making Friends with AI appeared first on thejaymo.net.

November 12, 2023

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Dimensino 👾 | Permanently Moved 🔊

Discover the return of iconic fashion and music, alongside the significant cultural shift post-pandemic. Jay explores the impact on technology, from AI to the Metaverse, reflecting on past predictions by Wired magazine. Tune in for a nostalgic journey connecting past insights with today’s digital advancements in this episode of Y2K renaissance!

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2023/11/12/301-2337-like-we-did-in-y2k/

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Like We Did in Y2k

I am beginning to suspect that the post pandemic vibe shift wasn’t just a change in culture but a time slip. The death of the global social feed and its centralising forces has transported us back to a time before it…

It cannot have failed to escape your notice that Y2K is back, baby. 

Juicy Couture, Low rise jeans, Nirvana t-shirts, baby tees and pleated skirts are everywhere. 

Emo’s back, and Blink 182, Greenday all have new singles out and I’ve seen people wearing Criminal Damages!

But beyond the worlds of music and fashion, out in wider culture and especially the world of technology, Y2K is back too. After the decade of moribund web2 stasis and the post the pandemic claustrophobia; we’ve vibe shifted into a glorious world of speculation. Optimism appearing about what technology could be, and what it could do for us. Y2K is b/acc in silicon valley too. 

Just look at all the buzzwords: Driverless cars! AR! VR! Metaverse! AI! Agents! All Y2K topics that were discussed in depth and in detail alongside the emergence of the internet.

Only now, these topics aren’t speculation and in some theoretical future, 25 years later we’re living it.

But in our future we have a real problem – it’s always now on the internet. 

At least fashion, with its elliptical trend logics and re-interpretation of aesthetic has a sense of its own history. For people who spend way too much time on social platforms history doesn’t exist at all. For them two weeks ago is ancient history, let alone 2 decades ago or more. 

But deep and informative writing from the late 90’s and Y2K about the topical technological buzzwords of today is still out there. Saved on aging servers and in unstyled web pages. Writing that has been online for nearly as long as the web has existed.

If you ever want to feel better informed about some new idea, buzzword or piece of marketing about a new technology that’s been announced recently. I suggest looking at what Wired magazine had to say about it in the early 1990s.

Writing about autonomous robots in September of 1994 Mark Tilden said the following.

This makes a wild robot, a feral machine that is already useful for some purposes. Other functions require domesticated robots – wild robots that have been bribed, tricked, or evolved into household roles. But the wild robot has to come first.

This is a useful insight into how LLMs are currently being developed and used. Prompt engineering, weights and attention mechanisms are all constraining and domesticating forces on the wild robot, or latent space that lies beneath the surface. Prompt injection is the bribing and tricking of the wild robot too. 

In a 1995 column called  “A Bill of Writes” w-r-i-t-e-s Nicholas Negroponte wrote the following: 

In a digital world, the bits are endlessly copyable, infinitely malleable, and they never go out of print. Millions of people can simultaneously read any digital document – and they can also steal it.

So, how do we protect digital information?

Having a Bill of Writes now means that we can spend the next 20 to 50 years hammering out new digital-property laws and international agreements without stunting our future. More importantly, it means that publishers and authors can elect to make their bits available after they decide they have earned enough, and the bits will be ready to go. Without a Bill of Writes, our grandchildren will spend a lot of time digitizing the 70 million items that will be saved by your library over the next 30 years.

This article nearly 30 years on, in the context of AI dataset training data, content ownership, and some calls for really draconian copyright laws from people how should really know better seems prescient. 

Just this week OpenAI announced its GPT agents. Y2K is back baby. The subject of agents in systems is something that a lot of people spent a great deal of time thinking and talking about in the late ’90s. If you meet someone excitedly talking about their applications in Discord or telegram ask them politely if they’ve read What’s An Agent, Anyway? A Sociological Case Study by LN Foner published in 1993. 

It’s a great paper about the social and cultural impact of the deployment of the Chat Bot and Autonomous Agent JULIA amongst real humans populating the virtual worlds of TinyMUD and DruidMUCK. It’s an essay that’s chock full of highly relevant learnings about the design of agents, and their execution in techno-social systems. Find it online as a PDF or on a very broken web page that’s still hosted by MIT. 

If people ask you about the Metaverse, ask them I’ve they’ve read ‘Avatars‘ from 1998, or the Margaret Wertheim’s ‘The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace‘ from 1999. 

The Internet of the late 90s and early Noughties was a lot closer to the post-vibe shift world of the Internet that we are moving towards today. The internet back then, was a maze of twisty little passages. Labyrinths of chat rooms, and forums. Small communities talking with one another in dark forests with no central gathering space. And people writing at the time tried to make sense of it all.

I’m young enough to remember this Internet, but I’m not old enough to have read all these old texts, books, essays, or works of criticism.

Gen z, don’t know anything about the world that Y2K nostalgia is mining. And neither do we millennials. 

If you really want to understand what’s going on the world right now in context of the Y2K revival: Pick up an old book like we did back in Y2K.

They’re a quid on e-bay, or 1.99 in Oxfam. That’s just all you need to do.

Watch

The post Like We Did In Y2K | 2337 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

July 22, 2023

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Blockchain ⛓️ | Dimensino 👾 | Governance 🗄️ | Permanently Moved 🔊 | World Running 🌐

I regret to inform you, for better or worse, the future of societal coordination and maybe even politics will emerge from gamer culture.

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2023/07/22/301-2325-the-rise-of-co-play/

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Subscribe to the zine
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Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded by @thejaymo

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The Rise of Co-Play: The Future of Multiplayer Software

A quick note: Issue 6 of my zine, start select reset went out to paid supporters of the show earlier this week. Get yours at thejaymo.net/support. Anyways, on with the show.

Matt Webb recently posted an update about what’s been keeping him busy. His long time interest in what he calls ‘multiplayer software’ has led him to becoming ‘inventor in residence’ at PartyKit.io. An open source software tool that makes real-time collaborative software applications easy. Congratulations Matt!

The slow roll out of multiplayer software over the last decade or so has been unevenly distributed. The onscreen cursors in Figma or Google Docs are only now just catching up to Engelbart’s vision for personal computing back in 1968.

Real-time multiplayer software is a techno-social system, and therefore a world with its own digital physics. Who doesn’t think Figma has a kind of game feel?

Worlds too, develop cultural and social mores about how its inhabitants should behave in shared code space. For example: one team I often work with park their cursors in a little box when someone is presenting in Figma.

The metaphor of multiplayer software allows for easy deployment of a related term:

Game modes

To change the mode of the game is to apply a distinct configuration that varies gameplay and affects how game mechanics behave. The two most common game modes being: cooperative and competitive. 

I would like to propose that effort be put toward the exploration of a third kind of game mode: Coordinative.

Or as I call it: Co-Play

In the spring of 2021 The Moving Castles team, best known now for their development work on Autonomous Worlds, were prototyping a livestreamer VTuber rig. When done, they then did something amazing. They hooked up Twitch chat directly into Unreal Engine via API. Experiments followed. By typing a command in chat one could appear as a butterfly floating around the world of the Avatar. Another command could change the camera to follow my butterfly labelled with my username around.

In another experiment, a chat participant would be granted permission to spin a wheel of fortune by typing SPIN WHEEL. Soon collective experiments emerged. Self selecting on to teams and spawning objects in the game world via frenetic chat spam.

The boundary between game world, player and observer had been breached.

So what is Co-Play? 

Imagine for a moment a near future where most games have modes built for livestreamers. I don’t think this is a particularly hard thing to imagine. People spent 1.7 billion hours watching other people play games on Twitch last month alone. 

So we have a livestreamer playing a game in real-time. Talking to and responding to chat which is wired directly into the game world. Chat is playing the game collectively with the streamer. Think Twitch Plays Pokemon With … thejaymo. Chat commands, emoji sentiment, voting and other mechanics yet to be developed are all used to control elements in the game world. Acting cooperatively with, or competitively against, the streamer. 

I call this ‘coordinative play’ as the participants in chat need to coordinate in real time in order to influence the game world. Twitch Plays Pokemon way back when had two coordination mechanisms: Anarchy and Democracy. With the inclusion of a human in the loop, the role of the player may become more like a channeller or conduit for the asymmetric intelligence they have access to.

There is so much to be explored here. What coordinative decision making mechanisms for swarms can we prototype, experiment and develop? Because I regret to inform you, for better or worse, the future of societal coordination and maybe even politics will emerge from gamer culture.

To explain why, let us for a moment turn our attention to the real time chat UI paradigm. It’s one we find everywhere in our daily lives. Family & friends group chats on Whatsapp, Community Discord channels to Slack or Microsoft Teams. DAOs – basically group chats with bank accounts – need better coordination tools not better governance too. 

The question posed by the potential in coordinative play is a simple one. How do you get a chat room containing 10,000 people to come to a decision or reach consensus in real time?

What sort of real time UX can we create? Does everyone even need to have a vote? Is voting even the right way of thinking about swarm alignment? Can we do real time liquid democracy in a chat room? How about teams or clans? Does everyone in the chat need to agree and play by the same rules? Can you have multiple co-play modes to reach consensus within the same channel?

I have many questions and no answers. 

Think about the mechanics we currently have at our disposal across our day to day virtual lives. Maybe a poll, emoji voting, maybe a doodle calendar? These are fairly blunt instruments and also require voting periods. They don’t dynamically capture or represent group alignment. 

The first step is to prototype all this stuff in video games. New rules, mechanisms and logic’s will be battle tested in virtual worlds without consequence for serious use in the real world.

When these new  UX mechanisms are ready, they will flood out from the gaming world, and into the workplace, into our daily lives.

Watch

The post The Rise of Co-Play: The Future of Multiplayer Software | 2325 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

This post is part of an ongoing scrapbook series.

I wrote this post so I don’t have to respond to any more emails from folks about the new Apple Vision Pro headset.

Hardware

The device is a technical marvel.

It might just be the most advanced piece of consumer technology ever made. It’s easy to see why yesterday’s reveal had expedited the announcement of the Metaquest Pro to last weekend, and Microsoft’s HoloLens 3 is now delayed until next year. No device can touch the Vision Pro.

The best review I’ve seen so far today comes from Norm Chan on Tested. Its interesting that he re-iterated how Apple see’s this as an XR device rather than a VR headset. The whole experience being built around its stunning passthrough capabilities. The UX is projected out into the ‘real’ environment around you.

Language they used in the demo trailer was also interesting. The woman on the plane ‘dials back’ by blocking out the real world around her and replaces it with full VR graphics. Rob from Playlines has been using the metaphors ‘dialling back’ into full virtual and ‘dialling forward’ into unaugmented reality for years at this point.

Price

Critics have expressed concerns about the $3500 price tag, I’m indifferent.

The device squeezes Apple’s brand new M2 SOC architecture, 12 cameras inclusive of depth, passthrough LIDAR and SLAM cameras (all for an eighth of the price as a package as the rest of the market). 4K per eye micro OLED displays with a staggering 23 million pixels—three times more than the new Quest Pro. It also integrates eye tracking, environmental tracking, and Zeiss optical lenses. All for the low low price of $3500.

The cost for all this, aligns with a high-end laptop from Apple and some people buy them. Considering the specs and the pricing, I sort of think that Apple must be incurring a loss on this model right now. Device margin might get better if Apple incorporates 3D/depth cameras into their entire iPhone lineup. We might also expect multi-camera and depth camera capabilities in the upcoming desktop and laptop product refreshes too.

I’m very curious to see how the Q3 holds up for Apple. But given they ceased reporting iPhone sales in 2018, there’s a high chance they’ll maintain the same policy for the Vision Pro.

Many Apple fanboys in my feeds are drawing parallels between the Vision Pro and the first iPhone – creating a new market segment. But the first iPhone back in 2007 was frankly, fucking shit. So I don’t think this is the best comparison. Besides, the iPhone wasn’t ‘inventing’ a product category, it was the bundling the iPod with a Phone so you only need to carry one device. 

Despite everything I’m about to go on to write about VR/XR etc. I just want to mention VR headsets and facial computing in general. It is in my ‘professional-weird-worlds-metaverse-tech-strategy-think-boi’ opinion that the market segment for VR headsets, especially now we have the Vision Pro, is for keeping ageing boomers quiet in old peoples homes. Meanwhile an underpaid care worker shakes up their Huel meal replacement drink. But that vision of the future is a whole different blog post.

I think to talk about the new Vision Pro, we need to talk about an earlier market segment.

Wearable Entertainment

In 1979, Sony introduced the first Walkman, which sold 385 million units until it was discontinued in 2009. Among these units, only 200 million were cassette players, while the rest were CD, Mini-Disc, and MP3 players. Apple in contrast, sells roughly 350 million iPhone units per year. The Walkman, despite its modest sales numbers, had a profound influence on culture.

When I was at University in the early 2000’s, The Walkman was a whole Topic we covered in Music and Culture. The cultural phenomenon – that walkman brought about just 20 years old at that point – of isolating yourself in your own auditory world in public was (and is) when looked at objectively .. weird and new.

Even my I own memories of being a teenager around the turn of the millennium confirm this. Listening to music with headphones out and about on the bus or the train was the behaviour of an obsessive. Fast forward two decades, and almost everyone is plugged into their individual auditory universes while navigating the cityscape. This massive shift was catalysed by Apple with the launch of the iPod in the early 2000s.

These adverts were the main topic of discussion in my Music and Culture tutorials.

Culture was changing around us in real time. The ads were not just about selling iPods; they were about normalising the concept of wearing headphones in public.

I tweeted this thought earlier today and Matt Webb replied:

Totally. And the white headphones / multiple silhouettes meant that when you were in public, you identified (and could recognise others) in this tribe

The cult of Apple. 

Big World, Many windows

The Oculus Kickstarter campaign was launched in August of 2012, marking the beginning of a new era in immersive technology. According to Statista, by 2024, the cumulative number of VR headsets is expected to exceed 34 million, which is just 10% of the sales achieved by the Walkman in double the time.

Despite Apple’s high-end product launch, the VR (XR) headset market remains a specialised segment. I anticipate that a significant portion of Apple’s marketing budget will be allocated towards normalising wearing a facial computing device. They might need to move beyond zoom meetings as the killer app tho?? What is the white headphones marketing vision for the Vision Pro? Even with this super high end device the VR Headset market segment is a niche one.

I don’t think I’ve posted about this, but in my consulting work I’ve held the following position for years:

Worlds are big, VR is small

In the UK apparently, 40 per cent of the population, equating to 26.8 million people, watch live Premier League matches. However only 1.5 million people, mostly children, actively play football.

In other words, only 5% of people who watch football actually play it.

Let’s hang a lamp on this statistic and discuss another cultural trend:

For the month of May 2023, the ratio of live-streamers to viewers on twitch.com was 27.2 or about 3.6%.

This ratio is ‘sort of in the same stadium ‘ as people who watch football vs people who play it. A popular live streamer can play a game on stream, with 10,000 people watching.

I foresee that coordinative game modes vs cooperative (I have a draft post I need to finish on this from 2021!) where a single player is interacting and playing a game alongside their audience will become a built-in feature in a few games. All sorts of novel games and real time governance mechanics connecting real-time chat and virtual worlds are yet to be built! I want to help build them! Anyways, as time goes on, such experiences will become increasingly commonplace.

When it comes to VR headsets and their capability to interact with online worlds, I firmly believe we’ll see similar usage ratios to the ones discussed earlier. VR isn’t for everyone, but the stories and events in the worlds they give access to are.

There’ll be more people watching others immersed in VR worlds than people actually wearing the headsets themselves. A 5% ratio, akin to football, seems like a reasonable estimate. The audience for the possibilities that VR immersive experiences unlock far exceeds the size of the product category itself.

Last year I wrote about Dream SMP and pointed to something similar going on:

One streamer performing in Dream SMP might have say 50k people watching at any one time. But I’ve seen shock on media peoples faces when I tell them that ALL the roleplaying streamers might have more than 20k people watching. Meaning in total there could be 250k people watching the drama unfold from different points of view. Bigger audiences than live TV.

Just as it is for the 95% of the population who don’t play football, when walking in a park, a stray football might arrive in your direction – and you kick it back. Occasionally with VR/XR worlds you may want (or feel the need) to interact with a world directly.

You don’t need a 3.5k headset to do this now, and you won’t in future. Instead you’ll pull out your phone fire up a world browser and interact with the XR or VR world layer. Then log out when you’re done.

Worlds will have many windows.

Coding Worlds

Apple’s branding for the Vision Pro announcement was coding new worlds:

Worlds, both virtual and real, are undoubtedly the new medium of the 21st century. The initial branding and pitch to developers reflects this.

But the reality of these new worlds will look like is way more nuanced than simply saying Immersive worlds are the future. Rather everyone dedicating time and energy to participating in these worlds, they will also be observed from a distance, from the outside. Think Marvel’s MCU, Star Wars, etc, reading about events in Eve Online, or the popularity of RPG shows like critical role.

The Vision Pro seems to lay the groundwork for the future of facial computing, setting a standard for upcoming technologies. Yet, unless Apple is really ready to invest billions and billions of dollars to reshape cultural attitudes, convincing us to incorporate these devices into our daily lives, I can’t envision VR becoming a dominant product category.

As an aside, I think people who wear Apple AirPods look stupid as hell. I have no idea why people spend so much money on uncomfortable in ear headphones that make you look like you have cigarette’s tucked in your ears.

Then I remember that we’re 20 years deep into the cult of white Apple headphones…

My initial response to the Vision Pro’s price was to equate it to the cost of a brand new Fender Custom Shop ’62/’63 Stratocaster:

The comparison is fitting – both are high-end items that consumers will proudly keep in their homes. Both are windows to worlds.

Keep that idea in your head and fuse it with my earlier comments about audience sizes and participant ratios. A high end guitar is similar.

Some people own expensive things and keep them in their homes and barely use them. Some people use their expensive thing all the time, a smaller percentage use their expensive thing in front of small audiences, and a few exceptional people use their expensive thing in front of audiences of millions.

So it will be with the Vision Pro.

It’s not the headset that’s important it what windows, to what worlds, it opens up.

The post Tasty Vision, Pricey Byte | Thoughts on Apple Vision Pro appeared first on thejaymo.net.

On Wednesday morning I flew out to Lisbon to attend the Autonomous Worlds Summit.

It’s been 12 months since I wrote the post on Wind-Up worlds, 7 months since the First Autonomous Worlds Symposium In London, and 5 months since the Hackerthon Demo Day.

In the last year: unstoppable, infinitely moddable, permanent worlds built on the blockchain have gone from a dream to a full reality. Teams of people are now building ambitious games on chain.

Technical development has reached the point where you can now load whole games directly from the world computer most people know as ‘a Blockchain’. I do mean load a whole game too. You go to a URL, enter your wallet details, and then an entire game will unpack in the browser/app. Remarkable.

The Summit was a closed/small industry affair. Consisting of around 40/50 people, the event bought together most of the projects, developers, teams, and thinkers that make up the Autonomous Worlds scene.

I arrived Wednesday lunchtime and after some lunch at my favourite vegan place, I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening working on my talk. Late that evening I grabbed a beer with the Playmint team, and then got up early the next day to finish my talk.

Because it was Lisbon everywhere the venue was up a massive hill. But the trek was worth it, what a venue!

The first hour from 9am was very chill. People arriving, saying hello etc. I caught up with some folks I’d met at the London Symposium and Hackathon in 2022. At 10am we settled down to begin.

After some introductions and house keeping, I gave the opening talk of the event.

First up the amazing @thejaymo talking about worlds:
🌍 all socio-technical systems are worlds
🕸️ the web was just a side quest
✨ tech is for worlds, not content
🎲 d&d the most important tech in last C.
🌐 from simulation to living in worlds !!! pic.twitter.com/8sgdSuhEDw

— Luke Gibson (@heylukegibson) May 25, 2023

The talk was a though-line-sketch of the opening part of my book: The Web Was a Side Quest. Focusing on parts of the story that I thought would be relevant to a room full of blockchain games developers. Particularly, as everyone there is right at the beginning of a new chapter in the history of worlds. @pet3rpan_ from @1kxNetwork had graciously given me a slot twice the length of everyone else to kick the event off!

The talk was recorded and (I think) will be made available as an NFT in the near future. I’ll probably put up an edited for text version of the talk at the same time when the video is released.

The other opening talks were an interesting mix of cutting edge technical developments – like building indexers for Merkle Trees. Other teams presented their games and WIPs, and we got a few updates from teams like MUD and DoJo building world engine software on chain.

The first afternoon was then turned over to a number of interesting roundtable discussions. (Click though Luke’s thread above for his real time reportage).

Then it was drinks, dinner, and then more drinks. I had a fantastic evening, getting to know people and chatting about worlds, games and blockchains.

Day Two kicked off with an amazing ‘story so far’ talk by Justin from 0xPARC, followed by un-conference sessions. All of day two was under Chatham House, so there was some frank and very open discussion.

The whole event was absolutely amazing. This part of the web3 world cares not for hyper-financialisation. Instead they care very deeply about the …

three other affordances that blockchains provide in addition to creating and organising value, ie Composability, persistence, and encryption.

I met some truly incredible people, who I hope to stay in touch with. The energy in the room is similar to how I imagine early events at the dawn of the web in the 1990’s must have been like.

Everything people are doing is ‘new’. Yet, (as I said in my talk) all the things that are happening now have simpatico and alternate histories elsewhere.

I should also note that there were a few teams there building in the Loot-verse. All of them, very cool projects its very cool to seem ‘Power Fandoms‘ doing their thing. Back in 2021 I said this about Loot and the concept:

When they do arrive they will look like an unholy mash-up of github and fandom culture. Free software development and fan fiction. DAOs and gamer guilds, Game Engines and Discord, Wiki edit wars with modular politics. RPGs with legal agreements. It’ll be crypto tokens that represent promises and fan creations that deliver on them.

I can confidently say that – YES, this is exactly whats happening.

I was also very pleased to discover that many folks at the event had read my Worldrunning.Guide essay collection. It was really good to have so many chats with peers about my thinking and the ideas that I’ve put out on the podcast over the last few years.

I hope the conversations and dialogues that began last week continue to evolve and bare fruit as the scene continues to grow.

It’s a very exciting time.

If we met me at the event and are reading this please DM, or reach out!
If you are in london lets grab a beer and discuss an AA LDN meet up?

Permanently Moved

No podcast this week as I’m exhausted from the trip!

However!

Zine is going out next week to paid subs. So subscribe below if you want a copy! Why not use the new Stripe checkout links. I need someone to test it lol.

Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Slide deck for a client project
• Wrote and delivered the talk in Lisbon!
• Worked on some stuff thats due later in the summer
• Date booked in for season 1 of Writers Bloc writing group
• I’d quite like a break/holiday lol

Terminal Access

The terminal access section of this post is generally reserved for things that friends and acquaintances are posting to the internet.

Agitator pod co-pilot, author and audiobook narrator Kelby Losack is currently in hospital and very poorly – Earlier this week he posted a gofundme to cover emergency medical expenses.

Dipping the Stacks

D&D’s revised Dungeon Master’s Guide aims at new facilitators and Critical Role fans

Many of the changes will be geared towards restructuring the book so that those players intent on running sessions of D&D can learn how the game rules function before encountering their first pinch of worldbuilding or campaign construction.

Britain in Crisis: The UK Faces a Steep Climb Out of a Deep Hole – DER SPIEGEL

In 2008, the year of the banking and financial crisis, 12 percent of people in the UK believed that their children would be worse off than them. Now, that number is 41 percent, Ipsos has found. One significant reason for that pessimism is the fact that many simply no longer trust their speechifying politicians in Westminster to get much done.

Patch-based 3D Natural Scene Generation from a Single Example

efficient model that can generate high-quality general natural scenes with both realistic geometric structure and visual appearance, in large quantities and varieties, as demonstrated upon a variety of exemplar scenes.

The things I’ve learned running a small bookstore

We have a policy of writing stock off if it’s been on the shelf for three years, and my predecessor hadn’t spent any time sorting them out.

Nicheless culture – Tracy Durnell

Internet culture is a mashup of everything, except not really because there’s no point in referencing things that people don’t recognise. Everything is vibes, and vibes means drawing on emotions imbued in other works — and when many people associate their identities with popular franchises, mass culture is what most people have feels about.

Reading

I’ve been so busy, with travel and everything (zelda) But I did make some substantial progress on is Storytelling in the Modern Board Game: Narrative Trends from the Late 1960s to Today by Marco Arnaudo at the airport. I’m up into the 90’s now. Reading about the design of Warhammer Quest and how over production and under delivery by competing games killed the mainstream market for RPG-like boardgames.

I opened and read the introduction to Say What You Mean: A Mindful Approach to Nonviolent Communication by Oren Jay Sofer. But thats as far as I got with it.

I think I’m about to start the 8th re-read of Altered Carbon for an Agitator pod appearance!

Music

thejaymo.net Spotify Playlist

I NEED to write a whole thing about the new Sleep Token album. It’s absolutely phenomenal.

shibuya-kei

For those of you following at home, I’ve been mainlining Japanese pop music for the last month.

I’ve recently discovered a whole micro genre of 90’s electro pop and its such a joy! A totally banana’s proto hyperpop, mad joy. Shibuya-kei is defined by its “cut-and-paste” approach and I get the impression that the genre is entirely technologically determend by the rise of the DAW in the 90’s. Lots of the music in this genre have literal cut and paste samples, taken from classical music. According to Wikipedia shibuya-kei evoved from the electronic pioneer sounds of Cornelius (previously on the blog) and then I fused with anime-fandom and jpop.

A related / parallel genre to shibuya-kei is pico-pico which is a french pop music infused version of the same attitude (check the macdonald duck eclair track below)

I’m aware I’m only just scratching the surface, here are some songs I’ve enjoyed:

Plus-Tech Squeeze Box – Rocket Coaster

Doopees – How Does It Feel

Sonic Coaster Pop – Super Speed Pop Star

macdonald duck eclair – deux ou trois choses que je sais de lui 

Remember Kids:

The post Autonomous Worlds Summit – Lisbon appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Discord, DAOs and the Dweb

I totally fucking nailed this one RIGHT? Even the title alone.

The majority of the traffic to this post came the week Discord’s founder teased Web3 integration on Twitter in November of 2021 – 11 months after I wrote it.

That same week, they walked the announcement after an intense shitstorm – because they are cowards . If they had just gone ahead with it, everything would still be fine and no one would now give a shit about it. 

Instead, it’s Feb of 2023 and Discord x Web3 integration is still clunky. Some communities are even moving away from Discord into their own crypto native chat protocols and app and tools. Meanwhile, many of the simplest Web3 gating integrations are pivoting to a business model of straight up spyware (in my opinion).

I suggested the following things needed improving 11 months before Discord teased Web3 integration: Web3 Login, Discord Multisig crypto wallets, and DAO Tooling. 

In the post I wrote:

Communities on Discord should be able to form DAOs, members of the community should be able to select from smart contract based constitutions, and forms of e-governance, collectively decide how assets / primitives (like tokens) will be distributed to members of the community (now and in future), all in the service os furthering a Discord communities goals.

The sort of UX I envisioned above has since arrived – Discord could have owned it but they didn’t ¯_(ツ)_/¯. Instead, we got a much better solution from Gnosis. 

Gnosis launched their Zodiac Tooling – expansion packs for DAOs 2 months before Discord even teased their Web3 integration. 

A composable design philosophy for DAOs, Zodiac is a collection of tools built according to an open standard. The Zodiac open standard enables DAOs to act more like constellations, connecting platforms, protocols, and chains, no longer confined to monolithic designs.

In other words: Zodiac is the expansion pack for DAOs.

As an aside, Kei co-founder of Gnosis GUILD, showed my New Centre students last year how to set up a DAO and then progressively decentralise it – in real time in her lecture. It took about 3mins. It’s truly remarkable how far DAO UX has come since I wrote this piece. 

I’m not going to belabour here how much I totally nailed this – as much as I would like to. Instead, I’ll used this opportunity to promote the Radical Friends book. If you are working in Web3 (especially the DAO space) and haven’t read it yet, why not?

In recent years DAOs have been heralded as a powerful stimulus for reshaping how value systems for interdependence and cooperation manifest themselves in arts organising. Radical Friends. Decentralised Autonomous Organisations and the Arts consolidates five years of research into a toolkit for fierce thinking, as well as for new forms of radical care and connectivity that move beyond the established systems of centralised control in the art industry and wider financial networks.

At a time when so many are focused on NFTs, Radical Friends refocuses attention on DAOs as potentially the most radical blockchain-based technology for the arts in the long-term. Contributors engage both past and emergent methodologies for building resilient and mutable systems for mutual aid. Collectively, the book aims to evoke and conjure new imaginative communities, and to share the practices and blueprints that can help produce them.

NPC Djs + Co-Creating Virtual Worlds

I talk about the metaverse a lot in the post.

Virtual worlds and mixed reality experiences. Basically what I spend spend all day talking about in my freelance work now lol.

Reflecting 2 years on; this whole blog series shaped / introduced a lot of the assumptions that have gone on to become ‘world running’.

There’s two key ideas in this post. The first being autonomous NPC DJ’s. 

I had posted this just after my long deep dive on Vtubers so I had them on the brain. There’s lots here about NPC/AI driven characters, audience co-created music and other ambient / generative effects.

Since this post came out, tbh the most interesting thing that’s happened along these lines is Neurosama.

For those who aren’t familiar, Neurosama is a 100% AI driven Twitch streamer. 

The media is full of people super worried about Bing and GTPchat etc. Meanwhile Neurosama, a LLM chat bot has been hosting a realtime webshow on the internet. 

Obviously as of the time of writing, Nerosama is banned from Twitch over a holocaust denial.

Answering one of the viewer questions, Neuro-sama came out as a Holocaust denier. “Have any of you heard of the Holocaust? I’m not sure I believe it,” she said. The AI streamer also made a number of other troubling statements, including one where she said she doesn’t think women’s rights exist. Earlier this month, she also said she would solve the trolley problem by “(pushing) the fat man onto the tracks. He deserves it.”

As an aside, I find it very interesting that that all the news reporting on neurosama refers to the bot as ‘She’ vs the way GTP3 and bing chat is reported on as an ‘It’.

Anyways the NPC DJ JAI:N and Neruosama, are ploughing parallel furrows to V-tubers and Virtual Influencers.

Speaking of which, Girls Re:Verse a popular show on Korean TV right now, even though its a rip off of the kpop vtuber communities Isegye Idol.

Girls Re:Verse is a VR game show which advertises working with 30 women from the real-life kpop industry. Each woman is introduced as a known kpop performer, but their identities are hidden behind a 3D avatar. The show follows a typical elimination-style singing format, but with the twist of new technology as a variation for entertainment. Singers wear full-body trackers for special performances with dancing and singing.

The other topic this post covers is the wider entertainment/metaverse/mixed reality industry. This was all before the 2022 metaverse hype and facebook’s name change to meta etc. In the post I pointed people toward Sensorium Cooperation.

Large scale mixed reality spectacles are going to dominate the next 10 years of live entertainment. 

I talked about the MSG Sphere’s in my post saying:

A grand entertainment product/project with an ‘architectural tech stack’ integrated into the fabric of the building. It’s not just theme parks and sound stages that are going Hybrid/Virtual

‘Architectural tech stack’ is as good a term as any to describe a building like the ABBA arena as having imo.

Built in London and opened in 2022, the ABBA arena can seat up to 1500 people.

In my notes about the project launch, the line that jumped out at was the term ‘virtual concert residency ‘. According to the NYT the Abba arena is the most expensive live music experience in history – a budget of $175 million.

While the Abbatars were being developed, the 10-piece band was being formed and Gisla was fund-raising (the final budget was 140 million pounds, or about $175 million, she said), developing an arena capable of handling all the technology and trying to keep the massive project under wraps.

Much to my chagrin I have still not been to see it. The biggest blocker being that none of my friends want to go see ABBA. And I’m not definitely not going ‘ticket for one’ as I hate ABBA plus I refuse to expose myself as a friendcell.

Anyways. 

The ABBA arena is a custom built environment that will be dismantled and re-built in another city. Sensorium, and the wider network of investment partners however are retrofitting entertainment venues means that a ‘platform’ is emerging. Just as Dolby Atmos has become a platform in the music space, Sensorioum and their partners are trying building a platform to run and replicate cutting edge mixed reality experiences in big concert venues.

Instead of moving the whole ABBA arena, in the same way video games are ported from the xbox architecture to the switch or whatever, platforming the ‘architectural tech stack’ will make it easier for designers and developers to move an experience from city to city.

The point being, everything involved in the making of the ABBA voyage experience a reality is part of the wider Metaverse tech tack. A 175 million experience today will cost 1 million tomorrow.

See Eminem and Snoop Dogg performing live at the VMA awards to get an idea of what the future of mix reality concerts are going to look like.

I also wrote about the Unreal Engine Volume, and the indie team that proved it possible. This live virtual production technology will continue to fall in price and it will be in community theatres and high schools ver soon.

This technology is already built into Unreal Engine for free. If your PC is fast enough you can do this already at home.My friend who works in advertising has a homebrew version in his office.

As things evolve I’d like to see hardware platform standards be specified and developed for small scale theatres, highschool and university drama departments, and for motivated indie filmmakers building virtual sets in their garages.

THIS future is what Metaverse technologies will look like at their best. Not some VR chatroom without legs.

See also the Outernet building in London’s Tottenham Court Road. Not only does it have a public immersive art space, but also includes an underground 2,000 capacity music venue, a 250 capacity music venue, a a space for immersive content or sampling and more.

As a coda to the above it would be remiss of me not to mention the Future Art Ecosystems Book, and the chapter on Team Lab.

Steps Toward a DAOWO VInfluencer in 2021?

This is the last post I’m going to include in my Season 1 recap.

I also think this post nailed the direction of travel as things stood at the beginning of 2021.

It’s worth mentioning once again, that all the posts were written before the NFT madness. Beeples 69.3 million dollar sale of ‘Everydays’ was still 2 months away!

7 months after I published this post and illustrated it with a picture of Lil Miquela, Dapper Labs acquired Lil Miquela’s creator Brud to build a unit focused on DAOs. 

Also worth noting; Brud was the wellspring for the DAO, Friends With Benefits, which (if I recall correctly at the time of writing this post I had already joined and left. Early defection > Early adoption.)

After rambling about DeFi in the opening of the post I got into the main 4 problems / challenges facing the DAO space (as I saw them) at the end of 2020.

1. DAO UX Needs to Get a Lot Better Across the Industry

I can’t stress enough how shit DAO UX was in Jan of 2021. In Q1 of 2021 Guild.Is members were attending a weekly zoom meet up exploring the state of DAO tooling. 

DAOhaus existed, but WYSIWYG, one-click DAO launching was painful, and required Solidity/developer skills. DAO UX has indeed gotten a lot better (in part due to the hard work of Guild.Is members.)

2. Logins and Multisig Wallets as Identity

I wrote at the time “Wallet identity and login needs to become a lot more mature.”

Later that year Kei Kreutler published the hugely influential essay: Inventories, Not Identities: Why multi-sigs are the future of online accounts. And kicked of a whole new line of thinking in the space.

Composable identity approaches identity as inherently relational, providing modular tools for individuals, groups, and organizations to present themselves within technical systems.

Twitter has introduced NFT avatars which is also a step towards introducing the idea of wallets as an identity. In reality however, this sort of integration – a web3 wallet address –> a web2 profile – should probably be thought of as a ‘verification’ of an onchain identity than anything else. Its basically self doxxing.

Kei followed up Inventories, Not Identities with A Prehistory of DAOs. Which also continues to influence the direction of Web3 and DAO tooling. 

As much as DAOs may accidentally embrace the operating principles of cooperatives preceding them, they also slyly resemble enclaves from other online cultures. They have the most to learn from guilds in massively multiplayer online games (MMOs).

As an aside, it’s worth mentioning that some people also point towards the RAND corp book ‘Advent of netwar’ as an alternate pre-history of DAOs.

Whilst there is some overlap – it must be said – Netwar is not a history that people (mostly in their 30’s and younger) involved in the building/doing of web3 development recognise as being their own.

3. DAO Coordination Tools

The now super influential modular politics essay had just been published (I’d read it in pre-print) and it fresh in my mind whilst writing this – not that it’s ever very far away lol. More robust DAO goverance tools were urgently needed. 

Gnosis Guild launched their suite of Zodiac tools 7 months after I wrote this post. Initially with 4 modules, Zodiac has since expanded in scope. Now stewarding 15 tools with contributions from other parts of the web3 ecosystem SekerDAO, institutional technology framework Kolektivo, and DaoHaus. 

A composable design philosophy for DAOs, Zodiac is a collection of tools built according to an open standard. The Zodiac open standard enables DAOs to act more like constellations, connecting platforms, protocols, and chains, no longer confined to monolithic designs.

In other words: Zodiac is the expansion pack for DAOs.

Looking back on this now, I observe that I make the cardinal sin of conflating coordination and governance. In work since I’ve come to realise that these are two separate (yet interrelated) mechanisms.

The conflation of governance and coordination is a serious oversight on my part. I wrote that “Democratising the boardroom is only the first step.” It’s been interesting to observe the huge community flame wars that have occurred over boardroom thinking. (Examples being ENS,UNISwap, Cosmos network off the top of my head).

But worse, the Web3 pushing governance without experimenting with coordination tools has caused the emergence of what I called the ‘hellish technocratic LARP’ mode of DAO governance last year. 

A Terrible Experience for Everyone.

As I just mentioned, democratising the board room has resulted in the rolling AGM as a model participatory form. Endless 24/7 discussion in Discord/Social media that eventually gets transmuted into solemn sacrosanct votes on chain.

Other.internet have recently been doing good work with Uniswap exploring governance processes and coordination. John Palmer Fish/Party tool that enabled smaller token holders to band together to force votes on uniswap as a very cool block chain ‘coordination’ tool too. 

The emergence of autonomous worlds on the blockchain and the Lattice.xyz‘s MUD framework that includes all the network code, may result in the creation of some new interesting governance AND coordination mechanisms. I’m excited.

4. Other Plug and Play Tools

Lastly rounding out the retrospective, at the bottom of this post I proposed the following product/industry roadmap:

Step 1. Wallets + Groupchats + DAOs + Coordination Tools

Step 2. DeFi + Tax Calculation Tools

Step 3. ?????

Step 4. Profit

We are as an industry still working in/on the Coordination tools (as separate from governance) part. 

DeFi has its moment in 2022. The collapse of FTX (and all that other fucking bullshit that occurred) didn’t phase DeFI in the slightest. Things kept trucking, liquidity kept coming.

Everyone who has pushed for decentralising not only traditional finance, but also the cryptocurrency ecosystem should take a victory lap. Almost ALL the colossal failures in the web3 space have come from private databases and opaque accounting. DeFi needs to take a victory lap, then we can get back to work.

De-fi Auto tax calculations are getting better and more robust – but as far as I’m aware there are no open source tools that can be added natively to one’s wallet as a Vx1 service.

—

So there we have that’s what I thought about web3 in 2020, I think I called a lot of it. Obviously now I’m out of my NDAs, I have opinions about where it’s going now. We’ll pick up this ball and run with it in Season 2.

Subscribe to my podcast!

The post Season 1 – Recap Pt2 | Dimensino appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Back in Q4 of 2020, I started ‘Dimensino‘. An ongoing scrapbook about the on going development of the Crypto / Web3 ecosystem, and the technical development of the coming ‘Metaverse’. This period is now ‘Season 1’. 

Following Season 1 I recklessly signed a bunch of NDAs, and became entangled in very fulfilling advisory role. However, as of this week they have expired.

Dimensino Season 2 will be focused on Web3 and Metaverse technologies (hardware, software, protocols etc) and run in parallel to my other area of interest/research world running.

This year – 2023 – the most of the interesting thing that will emerge from the blockchain space without a doubt will be ‘worlds’ related.

Autonomous Worlds are already here – I’ve seen them. 

To kick off Season 2, however over the next few posts I want to take a look back at Season 1 and see how I did back in 2020.

I am currently open to work. If you’d like to contact me about anything, reach out here.

Permissive IPs

Permissive IP: a mash up of ‘Internet Protocol vs Intellectual Property’

Given the affordances the Dweb, lets split the difference

Permissive: Intellectual Protocols

As Web3 lays the foundations for the Metaverse, new types of procedures legal arrangements, systems of rules for governing intellectual property and the returning value directly to creators and communities will be made possible

The vision of Permissive IPs I articulate in the post has more or less driven/described the most successful NFT projects that emerged in the following years.

I can imagine scenarios in the future where communities create, own, control, vote on licensing and earn money from their participation in worlds built around properties of their own creation. Permissive IPs will be administered by DAOs.

Given I wrote that in 2020 … How close do you think I got to the world we live in now? 

For example, Yuga Labs just hit a $4 Billion USD Valuation after its latest funding round. Their virtual world/metaverse project Otherside (BAYC universe) will be (more or less) administered by DAO community governance.

Other interesting Permissive IP projects off the top of my head are, wagdie, crypto pills and their Endomo project. Plus a few I’ve consulted with/worked on that have failed before launch or died a death of obscurity.

It is deeply amusing to me that for all the jokes about ‘right-click-save-as’ during the white hot heat of the NFT culture war, the most successful projects are the ones licensed under permissive licences or fully public domain.

In fact, many projects have updated their licences to put their JPGS into the public domain. The most high profile probably being Digg.com founder Kevin Rose’s Moonbirds NFTs.

The affordances of a programmable file format with extendable metadata stored on a secure public ledger have allowed for an explosion in interesting experiments around ownership, all without the protections of ‘traditional’ copyright. 

The actual nitty gritty of smart contracts and Permissive IPs and the future (and remittances, credit etc) are still to be worked out. It’s going to take years to unpick and reboot a framework that’s been around since the 1700’s that benefits some of the biggest corporations in the world. AND also ensure the legality and enforceability of smart contracts in they physical world. FWIW English Common Law seems to be the way forward.

But hot damn I think this might be the work of our generation? Being completely saturated in digital media as we are, it’s worth a try. Given the mess thats arisen just this week around centralised exchanges not honouring artist royalties and psychopathic arguments by NGMI people who don’t want to pay them – theres a significant cultural argument to be made too.

Speaking of which, I’m extremely grateful to Holly Herndon and Matt Dryhurst for their embrace of the term Permissive IP.

They have used it both in the context of Identity play, when describing the Holly+ project, and to describe the sort of IP regime that could possibly come about in the post machine learning, large language model world in their work with Spawning.ai project.

Alongside the developments in Permissive IPs, AI generation. my continuing engagement with Solarpunk, and other World Running endeavours: I am 100% convinced that community owned, co-created worlds, and stories are the future of media. We are entering the age of the Power Fandom.

The MCU is fucking over – if you want it.

Without braking any current NDA’s, it’s my observation that the Permissiveness of an IP and fostering the aliveness of its worlds are the biggest stumbling block for VCs with bucket loads of cash who want to invest in this space.

VC: And then we give it all away?”
ME: What you traditionally think as being the valuable bit yes
VC: ….
ME: You need to spend a fuck load of money, and then put it all into the public domain.

Verticals of One

A Vertical of One is an individual with access to a complete ensemble of discrete, modular plug and play technologies. Such as: financial plumbing, dynamic IP ownership, content delivery, walled gardens, community gates, governance tools, and smart contracts operating at different levels of abstraction. Interoperable, yet vertically integrated to produce one (nominally seamless) user experience.

Once met – individuals operating as Verticals of One will be able to seamlessly enter and exit new forms of Alegal organisations built around a “nexus of contracts”. Associate with, create, own, and retain collective value. Whilst cooperating inside an ecosystem of new monetary fabrics.

I feel like crypto culture has been overly (understandably) focused on one element of blockchains – the creation and organisation of value. However the current bear market seems to be bringing some other core affordances of Ethereum and other EVM compatible chains to the fore. Namely: permanence/longevity and composability – not just value and ownership. 

Vx1 is an attempt to describe what the UX paradigm looks like when multiple core functions of the dweb stack are composable. In my professional life I’ve found that the term has lots of utility when discussing the kinds of technologies needed to underpin the Metaverse.

Vx1’s are essentially personal routes ’though’ what Jacob over at Zora protocol has named ‘the hyper-structure’.

Hyperstructures take the form of protocols that run on blockchains. Something can be considered a hyperstructure if it is:

• Unstoppable: the protocol cannot be stopped by anyone. It runs for as long as the underlying blockchain exists.
• Free: there is a 0% protocol wide fee and runs exactly at gas cost.
• Valuable: accrues value which is accessible and exitable by the owners.
• Expansive: there are built-in incentives for participants in the protocol.
• Permissionless: universally accessible and censorship resistant. Builders and users cannot be deplatformed.
• Positive sum: it creates a win-win environment for participants to utilize the same infrastrastructure.
• Credibly neutral: the protocol is user-agnostic.

At the time of writing I thought it obvious that ‘The Platform’ is the route you take between you and the database (protocol). But following conversations with normies stuck in Web2, non modular, non-GPL code world – when articulating this today – I now add ‘protocols’ to the bottom of the platform stack. 

Putting protocol under tools in the diagram is a serious divergence from Rival’s original model. Even I don’t agree with the diagram above, but people can be slow on the uptake, so protocol as substrate has had to go in.

A year after publishing this piece, it was fun to see Patrick from Sentier.Media’s thinking evolve on web3 in real time back in Dec 2021. You can read his ‘thoughts on web 3’ and see the influence that ‘Dimensino Season 1 had on it here.

Another piece in his excellent Dimensino series, Discord, DAOs and the Dweb builds on the item above, extending to Discord and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, part of my ‘this is inevitable’ conclusion. It’s also where I circle back to my Platforms2 item where TOOLS run on a blockchain and are accessed and acted upon through ‘classic’ Web interfaces. Web3 as an accelerating movement of new infrastructures that merges with the existing web, nor a replacement, an enhancement.

Joining or Forming a DAO

The Vx1 UX example I gave in this post was about ‘theoretically’ joining or forming a DAO.

Written 2020 I said that they would be the main area of upcoming development in Web3 and have been pretty vindicated on this.

I will address this in Part 2 but working in worlds / DAOs / Web3 in the intervening years has revealed a lot about the importance of breaking apart coordination and governance mechanisms in DAO design. Having been under NDA I’ve obliquely talked about this on my blog quite a bit. Posts coming in Season 2 soon based on writing and thinking from 2021!

To cap this off, last year I taught a two module (12 week) course on DAO Design Fiction at the New Centre and the answer to the question ‘what could DAO’s be’ have a lot further to go to catch up with peoples dreams for them.

Sources of Value vs Organising Value

‘Crypto Fandom’ – as I like to call it – remains totally out of control: Off the top of my head the the following recent (or ongoing) events stick out: The total collapse of FTX, the ongoing Rider Ripps vs JPEG Apes lawsuit, Mike Novogratz getting a Luna tattoo and it immediately crashing, Martin Shkreli launched a crypto currency named after himself, the Queen died and a project launched an NFT depicting her as a skeleton the same day, Kim Kardashian got fined for shilling, and again FTX, Bankman-Fried, effective altruism, the polycule. Oh lord. What a year it’s all been highly entertaining. This is before I even think back to the craziness of the NFT boom of 2021. 

And yet Satoshi Nakamoto’s thesis that the digital creation of real world value remains sound. Since I published this post there has been a whole lot of value created and a lot of work put into the organisation of it.

At its core this article was about two things. The Metaverse, and how important organising the value created there is going to be.

It’s funny to see myself saying NFT’s ‘are coming’ – I had no idea lol. I link to Crypto kitties’s wikipedia page as at the time of writing explaining NFTs to people was really really hard. And subsequent to the great JPG culture war – they still are.

I explain that NFTs will form a key part of establishing virtual property in the Metaverse, how useful organising digital value in virtual environments is with a Blockchain etc and how NFTs can also represent goods in the physical as well as digital. 

I also linked to the 2020 Zora manifesto:

The platforms that hold our audiences and content hostage. The labels that lock down our rights. The galleries that hold our art ransom. The big brands that think exposure is cash. They have a monopoly on ownership, a monopoly on creativity and they have been robbing us of the value we create for as long as there’s been a creative industry.

The deals were cut in advance and we got cut out.

The big brands, suits, and monopoly men own the revenue, the files, the rights, the email addresses — what’s left for the creator? What’s left for the fan?

Which in my opinion feels even more relevant in 2023 than it did back then.

Another point mentioned in this post is that DAO’s we rein 2020 the most exciting part of the blockchain space – which they still remain to me. DAOS allow for the COORDINATION of value not just the organisation of it.

The key takeaway is that blockchains are both a SOURCE of value, but also ORGANISE it. It’s right there in the title.

But returning in 2023 to the idea’s introduced in Vx1 and this post I can now summarise this post in 3 lines:

Early Access Artists

This post was a call to Be your own publisher.

Being so focused on crowd funding and community owned IP in this article I missed that you could also … publish other people. Yancey Strickler and co’s Metalabel concept is one of the most encouraging and hopeful moves in the cultural space since this post was published.

This post is a bit all over the place – it touches on the state of crowdfunding, the relationship artists/musicians have with publishers and labels, and future file formats that allow ‘Programmable Publishing’. I also mention the Future Art Ecosystems book series from the Serpentine Gallery I was involved with.

Two Trends

I still think some of whats in here is useful though.

There are currently two trends in going in different directions. The first is the wider cultural sphere loosing trust in – and shifting away from – institutions. The other is the re-imagination of institutions from the bottom up. Eventually I think the two trends will meet in the middle.

The area’s of the creative economy that I’m most connected with gave up on institutions 10+ years ago, and continue to forge ahead building their own. This is a current I’ve been swept up in since at least 2012. There has been explosion of Interest in institution building, and governance and coordination and I’m all for it. 

As Metalabels and new institutional infrastructures become more robust from bottom up, they will catch more and more people falling out of the traditional top down way of doing things. 

Anyways, my own call for ‘programmable publishing’ has not exactly come about as I envisioned in this post. But all sorts of inspiring programmable works have been produced: From people like Harm van den Dorpel and his work with ​​Genetic algorithms. Songcamp’s headless band Chaos, Ed Fornieles’s Finiliar project, and other work from people like David Greenstein (Sound.xyz). 𝔦𝔪𝔭𝔬𝔰𝔰𝔦𝔟𝔩𝔢 ⟠ 𝔬𝔟𝔧𝔢𝔠𝔱 are doing interesting things re-imagining publishing, and Simon de la Rouviere with his Sci-fi permissive IP project housed at untitledfrontier.studio.

As a last aside, one of the problems faced by projects trying to do programmable publishing  in the NFT space, is that big marketplaces like Open Sea don’t update their cache’s quickly enough (if it all). Resulting in updates occurring but not everyone being able to see, or take advantage of them. In the spirit of being your own publisher, many NFT projects are building their own web storefronts. Which might be a good thing if royalties aren’t going to be paid out or enforced.

All in all, Early Access Artists post was a bit hit and miss, but the spirit of this post was gesturing towards the direction things are/have/continue to move in.

Next Up

In Recap part 2 I’ll be discussing Discord DAOs and the Dweb, the co-creation of virtual worlds, and Steps Toward a DAO powered Influencer

Beyond that ‘Season 2’ of Dimensino will begin to unfold regularly on the blog once again. You can follow this series by grabbing the dedicated RSS here, or subscribe via email below.

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