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.

Everything is Fine

Last week cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase launched a new marketing effort in the UK. The centre-piece of the campaign being a satirical piece of musical theatre about the state of the UK economy, called Everything Is Fine.

Alongside it is a print/visual campaign simply stating facts about the UK economy. Here is a photo a friend sent me of the back of a London cab over the weekend: the poster that simply says, “Real wages: stuck in 2008.”

I sent the person who took this photo the accompanying campaign video and they just replied, “Pure cinema.”

It’s had me thinking, what does it mean for a cryptocurrency exchange to be producing one of the best pieces of satirical media about the current state of the UK?

Keep Calm and Carry On

The advert strikes a chord I think because we live in a society where the-people-who-are-in-charge seem to think a better future is not possible—or even desired.“Everything is fine” is basically the ruling ideology/mantra of the media class in the UK.

I belive the “Everything-is-fine-ness” of the media class is the logical endpoint of the most pernicious meme to enter the British psyche in my life time: “Keep Calm and Carry On.”

The original Keep Calm and Carry On poster (if you belive the lore) was discovered in a bookshop in 2000. A powerful piece of World War II-era government propaganda intended to be displayed alongside “Freedom Is in Peril / Defend It With All Your Might” for deployment in a worse case scenario if the Nazis ever directly attacked the UK beyond the Blitz. Of course, it was never deployed, because things never got bad enough for it to be used, and all copies were supposed to be destroyed, leaving only a handful remaining.

It’s hard to express to someone who isn’t from the UK just how much gravity the Second World War (80 years on from is resolution) still exerts on the British cultural psyche. Boomers sing wartime era songs at dinners and dances, and pretend they won the war personally on social media all the time. We dress our children up as evacuees at school and get them to pretend they were caught up in it too. And we have newspapers that considers not wearing a Remembrance poppy on television or at formal events in the month of November basically tantamount to treason.

Whilst the original poster may have been re-discovered in 2000, it took nearly a decade for it’s sentiment to diffuse out fully into public consciousness. All it took was the 2008 financial crash and subsequent recession and the Coalition/Tory government’s imposition of austerity on the county.

The public sort of ‘self deployed’ the most powerful piece of World War II propaganda ever created on itself. And the British cultural psyche ate it up. A way of avoiding the effects of austerity etc.

Coinbase’s ‘Real Wages Stuck in 2008’ is a fact. The slow bleed out of the UK economy over the last 17 years. We’ve dealt with austerity, Brexit, pandemic etc. The looting the elite engaged in during the final years of the Tory rule was basically ‘stiff upper lipped’ and tollerated by the general public by keeping calm and carrying on, and buying cupcakes.

The death of possibility that this mantra had on UK culture was given a name by Tom Whyman at the time back in 2013: “Cupcake fascism.”

this constellation includes “tea-drinking, knitting, cycling, sorting out one’s recycling properly, organic food, free-range eggs and local produce, gin, real ale, Cath Kidston bags, throws on the couches, making your own chutney, and Rugby Union.”

It is rather in what these things come to symbolise. They are all ‘nice’ things and they are used as expressions of how it is nice to be nice and how life would be better, perfect indeed, if people were just a little bit nicer. The possibility of ethical life comes to be contained, for people, in these objects, which means that for people who enjoy them the possibility of the world functioning well comes to end up looking like: if everyone behaved a little bit more like, and enjoyed the same things as, me, a nice middle-class boy or girl.

Keep Calm and Carry On was a cultural mantra and delusion that, in the post 2008 world, suggested that if everyone (and in particular the middle class) just collectively ‘wished hard enough’, things might change for the better.

Of course, that didn’t happened.

2008 was of course, also the year that Bitcoin launched. Another idea based on the same stucture: the idea that if one wished upon it hard enough, it would make it true.

The difference being that our collective wishful thinking was a passive hope, while the Bitcoin bros’ was an active form.

Britain throughout the 2010’s didn’t wish hard enough, but the Bitcoin bros did.

Which is why this is relevant to the Coinable advert.

Exit Through the Casino.

I’m currently about 1/3 of the way through the final edit of a text I’ve been working on since January called SLOP MACHINES. It’s about 40,000 words focused on the post 2008 fusion of code and capitalism and the world that it has created. So I’ve been thinking about crypto and culture all year tbh.

Coinbase’s advert is, I think, effective satire because it’s true. Since 2008 everything really has gotten worse. “keep calm and carry on”, the most powerful memetic weapon the UK government ever devised has run out of juice. “Everything is fine” really feels like the only line the elites in this country seem to muster.

Yet, we all have eyes and can see that it’s really not.

The advert itself, with its melody reminiscent of Oliver Twist musical; also contains a threatening subtext—one aimed squarely at the middle and credentialed classes. Everything is fucked, and if you you don’t do something you’re going to be driving for Deliveroo.

The implied message and solution of Coinbase’s advert is basically “a brighter future through finance”.

This image from my post on playability and systems the other week sums this sentiment up:

‘Gambling it all on hyper finance’ is, in my opinion, one of the only avenues of perceived agency that people have to escape the rot economy they find themselves in.

“If you want out, you need to exit via the casino.”

The other seemingly being “Blame migrants.”

You may think that I’m being cynical, but this sort of ‘casino culture’ is everywhere in the UK.

This recent Novara interview with Dr Eliza Filby author of Inheritocracy: It’s Time to Talk About the Bank of Mum and Dad is interesting as she talks about the cultural explosion of financial advisers, financial podcasts, and people telling you how to manage your money we have seen since the pandemic.

In fact 46% of Zoomers in the UK own financial instruments, and 28% of the 18-34 year olds own crypto.

Rachel Reeves despite being part of Starmer’s “Everything is Fine” government, definitely knows that everything isn’t fine. She also sees “exit through the casino” is a viable avenue for exploration for the popualtion. Just last month she announced plans to nudge savers into buying stocks and shares instead.

The Coinbase campaign is effective because it’s speaking to the public’s justified anger, and explicitly names the rot that we have all been told to ignore: a nation that’s been economically frozen since 2008. But it channels us away from collective political questions and towards individual financial risk.

As good as “Everything is Fine” is, the ad’s satirical despair is basically a marketing funnel for its preferred solution: “exit through the casino.” It reframes systemic failure as an opportunity for a personal gamble.

As casino culture becomes more and more mainstream, and the government validating it as a legitimate escape route, the crucial question becomes: what happens when this bet fails for the majority?

What are we going to do when the ‘exit through the casino’ proves to be a revolving door?

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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

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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.

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My talk below on the design of ‘Myth-Making Mechanisms in Autonomous Worlds‘ is one of the best talks I’ve ever given about Worlds. And represents where my thinking on ‘Worlds Theory‘ is at present.

I’m really pleased to be sharing it, I hope you check it out!

The talk covers a lot of ground – 80 slides in 22mins lol – but the main topics include:

I hope to write a great deal this coming year about *why* my primary thesis: All techno-social systems should be seen through the lens of worlds is important. But for now, now this talk is online – a talk I’m immensely proud of – I’ll be pointing people to it whenever I’m asked the question ‘What do you do?’.

Mostly – as a result of my own failings – my research interests, consulting work and essay collection has been opaque and hard to parse. But being invited to speak to a room full of people building Techno-Social systems - that one day (they hope) will become alive and living Worlds seemed like a good place to lay out the terrain of thought I’ve been exploring.

If you find this talk of interest, or a value, please share it or get in touch!

Permanently Moved

Permanently Moved (dot) Online is a quarterly audio personal podcast, written, recorded and edited by by @thejaymo

The post Myth-Making Mechanisms in Autonomous Worlds appeared first on thejaymo.net.

November 25, 2023

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Blockchain ⛓️ | Permanently Moved 🔊 | World Running 🌐

Exploring blockchain’s shift from finance to creating games in digital universes. A look at this tech’s new role in gaming and virtual worlds.

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2023/11/25/301-2339-autonomous-worlds/

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Autonomous Worlds: Misusing The Money Machine

Last week was the Autonomous Worlds Assembly at DevConnect in Istanbul. I was there to give a talk on myth-making mechanisms, and moderate a panel about decentralised narratives. It was well attended, and as I understand was about 3 times oversubscribed.

Being there felt like Autonomous Worlds are an idea that have arrived.

I wrote my Wind-Up Worlds essay in May of last year. Attended the first AW symposium in November and the follow up hackathon in December. The Autonomous Worlds Summit was in May this year, and 6 months later over 500 people came together to discuss these new unstoppable, infinitely moddable worlds on the Blockchain. We have moved from a tiny scene to a nascent industry, fast.

I can’t help but think that on chain games and Autonomous Worlds are going to play a large part in the next crypto bull run.

For better or worse. But like Playmint CEO David Amor said, the whole time I was there I didn’t hear anyone say words like token, Nft, arbitrage, stake yield etc.

Autonomous worlds are software that’s seemingly exploring some of the other affordances provided by Blockchain technology. Beyond the creation and organisation of value, they also allow for; composability, persistence, and encryption.

If you think nothing has happened in crypto since the dramatic fall of Sam Bankman-Fried then you have not been paying attention.

The market might have crashed but development hasn’t stopped. Certain technical challenges have necessitated the development of new forms of applied cryptography. The main one being Zero Knowledge Proofs. If you haven’t heard the combination of those three words yet, you will again soon. In short ZKP’s allow one party to prove the validity of a claim to another without disclosing any details about the claim itself. They have applications everywhere. ZKs are going streamline the sharing of private data: identity, address and financial etc across the internet. 

Anyways blockchains aren’t just for coins, NFTs and monkey JPG’s anymore. You can now boot whole games directly from the world computer. You can go to a URL, enter your details or not at all depending on the uses of new tools like account abstraction. And then an entire game will unpack off the blockchain into your browser. It’s all rather remarkable. 

A use case for a global shared permissionless database thats well beyond the limited imaginations of the finance bros. 

Which is where the the title of this episode comes from. I spoke to lots of other attendees out on the terrace at DevConnect. Whilst appreciative of the technical innovations made by the Autonomous World’s scene. Things like novel ZK implementations, Merkle tree indexers etc . I got the impression that the wider crypto industry is totally baffled and confused as to why anyone would want to play games on their money machine. 

Which is surprising given that it’s a hard rule of computing that if a computer exists, someone will want to play games on it. The first documented computer game was Christopher Strachey’s Chequers. Programmed for the Pilot ACE at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, in July of 1951. Sure it ran out of memory and crashed the machine, but he didn’t need to wait long to play it. The game was up and running by October on the Manchester Mark 1. Just 3 years after they’d first turned the thing on.

Hilmar Pétursson CEO of Eve online – the first multiplayer database game by the way – said something similar at the conference. Autonomous Worlds have the same sort of energy as the late 80’s and early 90’s Swedish Demoscene. Technically impressive programmes running under all sorts of constraints. Imposed either ideologically, or by the limited nature of the hardware available. But still, the Demoscene gave us hardware acceleration and drivers.

CCP (the creators of Eve Online) are interested in blockchains not because of their constraints – but because of their affordances. Now in its 3rd decade CCP are turning their minds towards the persistence of the world’s database. How can the world of Eve Online – To quote Ian Cheng – “live beyond the life of its original creators?” A challenge that as Hilmar said in a recent interview might “take a few decades to get right… I mean, the sooner you start, the sooner you’re done.”

Justin Glibert from 0xPARC gave the conference’s opening keynote. Laying out the long term vision for Autonomous Worlds. His talk had some real Y2K vibes. Cellular automata, and artificial life in virtual worlds. It’s clear that we have a torment nexus of our very own. Permutation City, the 1994 novel by Greg Egan.

I imagine that by the end of next year, there will be at least one Autonomous World that’s a hit outside of the cryptosphere. Being played by people who don’t care about the database it’s running on, only that it’s fun. Its only a matter of time.

But its clear that there’s two competing visions for the types of world that might be a hit. On the one hand there’s infinite and persistent virtual worlds. And the other, death match cockfighting rings for AI with hard digital physics. So pick your position. 

The 72 hours that I spent in Turkey really opened my eyes to the size of the industry. Grown from a handful of weirdos last year to 100’s of people worlding autonomous worlds. Big thanks to 0xParc, Lattice, the Playmint and the Moving Castles teams.

It makes me excited to see what’s coming, and to be involved in whats coming next.

Watch

The post Autonomous Worlds: Misusing The Money Machine | 2339 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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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.

Worlds A Walk Though: Their History Done Quick

The talk was the first outing for some of the material from my book The Web Was a Side Quest.

If you want to read more from me on Autonomous Worlds: Check out my Wind-up worlds essay from May 2022 or my essay collection at worldrunning.guide.

Permanently Moved

Permanently Moved (dot) Online is a quarterly audio personal podcast, written, recorded and edited by by @thejaymo

The post Worlds A Walk Though 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.

A day late on my Weeknotes due to exceptional circumstances. Those circumstances being a sore throat.

I know, I know, thats a little woe is me.

But it totally wiped me out. It started when I woke up Tuesday morning, Thursday though Saturday it was like swallowing sewing needles. Saturday night I was thinking that I’d have to go see the clinical pharmacist today with full blown tonsillitis – but Sunday lunchtime things turned a corner. It’s now day 7 and it just feels like I have a lump in my throat, so I’m on the mend.

Recording the podcast last night was the least fun I’ve had making it in a while to be honest. Ah well.

On Monday I went to 0xPARCs Autonomous Worlds demo day in London. A follow up to the AW symposium I attended in November.

If you aren’t familiar with AW’s check out my long essay on ‘Wind-up Worlds‘

It’s a project exploring advanced technologies for ‘on chain’. I was absolutely blown away. Things are moving insanely fast in this space. Improved Gas / transaction fees and ZK rollups are changing whats possible with the ‘world computer’ that is Ethereum (and other compatible EVMs).

Some of the games on show at the demo day had over 10k lines of solidity and execute very very cheaply on chain.

Livestream of the event below:

If I hadn’t been so sick this week I was going to write up my thoughts on the event – but alas.

Instead you can check out Luke Gibson’s very impressive live tweeting skills below:

Almost all the projects were built on the MUD toolset which you can see introduced earlier this year here:

64 player tower defence game on the blockchain? no problem.

Games shown at the demo day take advantage of the three other affordances that blockchains provide in addition to creating and organising value, ie Composability, persistence, and encryption.

For the first time ever, using novel encryption methods like witness encryption game designers can now genuinely hide things from players, and the game state.

There is also no client server architecture per-say present in any of these games. They are all loaded from the blockchain – they are server-less. MUD uses a ECS (Entity, Component, Service) architecture – like OG mainframe games like…MUDs. And includes some really nifty P2P networking code for multiplayer.

All the ‘WhATs ThE usE CAsE’ people are going to have to find a new line when these games launch next year.

Unstoppable, Infinitely Moddable, Autonomous Worlds are coming.

Might be a good time to refresh/re-read my wind up worlds post.

Permanently Moved

Step Away From Noise

Perhaps things that are meaning-less can be made meaning-full by stepping away from them?

Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• We had our last week at the New Centre course I’ve been teaching. The students did their final presentations – DAOs of 2035
• Went to the Autonomous Worlds demo day on Monday and had my mind totally blown
• Finished up a short writing project.
• I need to edit and submit two essays for various upcoming books ASAP

Terminal Access

Friends Huw and Ben’s book Bad Gays: A Homosexual History won Goodreads.com’s Readers Choice award in History & Biography category. CONGRATULATIONS!

Dipping the Stacks

Soap Has Always Been With Us, and Longer Still

The oldest record of soap is from Babylon, some 4800 years ago as we moderns tell time. A clay tablet bears the magic formula for the creation of a specific kind of soap, one used to clean wool so that the dye will take better.

Rebuilding After the Replication Crisis—Asterisk

Over a decade has passed since scientists realized many of their studies were failing to replicate. How well have their attempts to fix the problem actually worked?

IFComp Winners 2022

70% of the top 20 Interactive Fiction entries are choice-based instead of parser-based, continuing the trend of the last few years

Dr. Smartphones: an ethnography of mobile phone repair shops

The rapid spread of these repair spaces poses questions about the sustainability of contemporary technical objects. The smartphones repaired, refurbished, and jailbroken in these spaces are, elsewhere, held up as icons of a continuous innovation regime

gilest.org: How will your words exist in the world?

Here’s a tip for anyone about to embark on some writing: before you start, have a think about where your words will live. How will they exist in the world?

Reading

This week I read JDO‘s book Dying World. Absolutely brilliant. highly recommend it.

I’m currently reading a PHD from 1999 called EMuds: Adaptation in Text-Based VirtualWorlds which is basically a book. A bit of a slog but very interesting. Its pairing very well with a MA thesis from 1996 I read recently called Nonverbal communication in text based virtual realities.

I listened to a Warhammer book called Rogal Dorn: The Emperor’s Crusader it was quite short. More of a long novella, it was OK. Well paced for this kind of book/series entry.

Music

thejaymo.net Spotify Playlist

Daniel Bachman – Almanac Behind

What an album. A fully formed Sonic journey that paints with field recordings, fingerstyle guitar, and drones to die for.

The thing that sets this album apart form me is the tunings. To my ear, almost all the instruments across the 15 tracks of album are modally tuned. The melodies he plays are internally coherent, captured and located around the electronic drones.

This is an album about climate change and natural disaster. As the album unfolds, so does ‘the event’. Track names like “Grid Reactivation” and “3:24 AM KHB36 (When The World’s On Fire)” give you an idea of where you are in the unfolding drama.

I listened to this album twice so far. Once on a train journey and the second time on the stereo . Sat on my couch paying attention from start to finish – whilst I was under the weather this week.

The album also has a complete accompanying film. If I do a third sitting I’ll watch this.

I find work like this super inspirational. I’m going to try and pick up the record on the secondary market.

Remember Kids:

The post Unstoppable, Infinitely Moddable, Autonomous Worlds appeared first on thejaymo.net.

March 26, 2022

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Blockchain ⛓️, Dimensino 👾, Governance 🗄️, Organisations 🏢, Permanently Moved 🔊, Software 👨‍💻

21st century meme culture and real-time chat have combined in DAOs to create the rolling AGM as a novel participatory form

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2022/03/26/301-2212-daos-governance-vs-coordination/

Watch 301 on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/jayspringett

Support the Show! https://thejaymo.net/support/
Website: https://thejaymo.net/

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

Show Supporter 📻

£5 MONTHLY 👏

Quarterly zine; my gift to you ✉️

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DAOs: Governance vs Coordination

In January I watched the livestream Radical Friends: DAO Summit for Decentralisation of Power and Resources in the Artworld.

OG blockchain artist Rhea Myers’ spoke, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

She said that one of the best ways to think about DAOs is that they “model and incentivize human behaviour. They are a public, transparent and rigid – that is unyielding and inflexible – way of modelling how we believe people should behave and how we believe they should interact”.

DAOs are worlds, rigid code spaces made up of people and software. They are … total institutions. (See Episode 19-32).

Rhea talked about the various problems that arise from modelling a world with code and said:

“[They] are well understood and well known by people who understand DAOs. There is no simple critique of naive crypto bros to be had. Plenty of people have come into the DAO space, tried something naive, discovered it doesn’t work and then had to read up on mechanism design. On organisational structures and on how you handle bad actors and economically irrational actors” etc.

Before I talk about the importance of DAO’s and governance as design space, a little history.

The first deep conversation I had about DAO’s was in Berlin, 2015. I was over there to run a workshop on Infrastructure Space at Transmediale festival.

Ethereum mainnet was still 6 months from launch.

Vitalik had written about DAOs in the white paper. Virtual entities he said, “That [have] a certain set of members or shareholders which, perhaps with a 67% majority, have the right to spend the entity’s funds and modify its code.”

Vitalik also offered the term “decentralised autonomous communities”. Let’s bracket the difference between Organisations and Communities for another day. For now though it is my opinion DAO’s have clear, shared collective goals. DAC’s are open ended, concerned with the collective flourishing of their participants.

That cold January we all sat around a huge kitchen table in an AirBnB. Dreaming about the possibilities of more advanced blockchains. What does incorporation look like on the Blockchain? How does voting work? Are DAOs lifeforms? Could they be? These were, and are still important questions.

Everyone there was involved in some way with the UnMonestary project. A place-based social laboratory. It explored methods and techniques of living and working together for the benefit of a community. That project opened my eyes to coordination as a design space.

Some people in that room went on to become custodians of the emerging planetary scale infrastructure that makes DAO’s possible today.

In 2015 if you said your interests were in governance, code spaces, organisation design and collective decision and meaning making mechanisms. People would think you mad.

DAOs are an opportunity to develop and explore new governance mechanisms. Someone invented the ballot box after all. But we should be careful with our definitions. Picking up on the theme of episode 21-12, we should make a distinction between governance, and the mechanisms of governance. Aka coordination.

• Governance is decisions about the whole, by the whole, that affect the running of the whole.
• Coordination is the successful running of the whole without affecting the whole’s running.

The most important essay of the last few years in my opinion is: Modular Politics: Toward a Governance Layer for Online Communities. It amazes me that loud DAO boosters with NFT PFPs on Twitter haven’t ever read it.

From the abstract.

classical governance typologies tend to present a choice among wholesale ideologies, such as democracy or oligarchy, Modular Politics would enable platform operators and their users to build bottom-up governance processes from computational components that are modular and composable, highly versatile in their expressiveness, portable from one context to another, and interoperable across platforms.

Let’s return to Vitalik’s example of voting to spend funds or modifying code. In this case is voting a governance mechanism? or is it a coordination mechanism? I’d say: If spending money, it’s coordination. If modifying code, governance.

Imagine for a moment that you, I and others are working on a shared endeavour.

We are standing in the street trying to decide what to have for lunch. If we vote for sushi, is this an act of governance? Going further. Is voting sushi for lunch an important enough collective decision to enter into an unstoppable immutable public ledger? I don’t think so. It was simply a coordinative act that didn’t affect the whole project.

Governance is different from coordination. But coordinative mechanisms are required for governance.

Enthusiastic DAO participants often confuse the two. 21st century meme culture and real-time chat have combined in DAOs currently to create the rolling AGM as a model participatory form. Endless 24/7 discussion that gets transmuted into solemn sacrosanct votes on chain.

A hellish kind of technocratic LARP.

Think about the current mechanisms for governance and coordination in the workplace on a platform like Slack.

Perhaps a poll? Maybe a multi-vote emoji process. Beyond that there’s not much.

We need to be imagining swarm consensus architectures. Telegram channels with 10’s of thousands of people using real time tools to come to a decision.

What modular tools and techniques can be imagined and used elsewhere?

It’s Web3 that is going to develop these tools. As soon as new mechanisms exist – we, the public, are going to demand and expect them in all the virtual spaces we inhabit.

Until we have mature digital coordination mechanisms.
We won’t have mature digital collective governance.

Watch

The script above is the original script written for the episode. It may differ from what ended up in the edit.

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The post DAOs: Governance vs Coordination | 2212 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

This post is part of an ongoing scrapbook series exploring the emerging Dweb (Web3) ecosystem, the #supportnet, and the coming ‘Metaverse’.

What follows isn’t so much an essay. More like pages from my notebook building upon Navok’s thread. Thoughts unspooling in to adjacent topics and areas. Thinking in public.

1 Sources of value vs organising value

1.1

Instead of just thinking about games, let’s widen the scope of this discussion to all areas and sectors of content creation.

1.2

Park the sources of value framing and consider instead the way we organise value.

How we organising value is of fundamental concern to the Dweb and coming Metaverse.

The crypto currency boom of 2017 showed that the digital creation of real world value is possible and Satoshi Nakamoto’s thesis was in fact sound.

Jaya Brekke‘s commentary on Satoshi Nakamoto’s The White Paper published by Ignota Books is vital reading if you want to understand what all the fuss is about:

If you aren’t following the crypto world closely you can be forgiven to thinking that it’s all about coin prices, rampant speculation and unchecked materialist accumulation.

This is not an unfair perspective. A large proportion of discussion in the public sphere is about blockchain is exactly this. For the proposes of the Dimensino series park all that to one side. Move it all in to the mental category of ‘Crypto Fandom’.

It is a mistake to belive that all that heat light is the only thing that is going on in the Dweb world.

Jaya again:

Since the great crash of 2018 crypto projects have been in BUIDL mode. Solving problems and exploring the possibilities of this new database technology. This is (of course) also why early adopters got involved in the first place. I remember discussing DAOs in a kitchen during Transmediale 2015 they seemed so sci-fi. Yet, plausible. Many of the people in that room are now at projects bringing Distributed Autonomous Organizations in to reality.

I encourage everyone following this series to keep an eye on the ecosystem of TOOLS that are currently being created around the DAO space. That bare absolutely no relation to the endless noise and heat generated by the Crypto Fandom Bros.

Especially things like Gnosis Safe Multisig (a SERVICE to manage digital assets) and the Gnosis Protocol itself. Other protocols like POLKADOT are building out cross PLATFORMxTOOLS and integrations supported by their WEB3 Foundation. As is COSMOS with their Interchain Foundation. Not to mention of course, the recent explosion in DeFi most commonly built upon Ethereum, which itself is about to go though a massive upgrade as the protocol that underpins many of other aforementioned TOOLS. There are far more to mention. Don’t @ me for not mentioning your favourite project with a coin.

Web3 / Dweb is currently a wild and crazy place full of innovation and surprising moments.

The fully decentralised protocol for automated liquidity provision Uniswap (Uniswap is a cryptoasset exchange who at the time of writing has a trading volume over the last 24 hours of $86.74M). Last month (Sep 2020) dropped a share of its new governance token to everyone that had ever used the platform. Even those whose transactions had failed. It gave something like $1,400 (400 UNI) to all its past traders. Even more went to anyone who had supplied liquidity or who held its SOCKS token.

Are there any examples in the regular tech Industry of projects returning value directly to users? This new kind of organisation of value is a core tenet and very common in the Dweb space. All users with UNI tokens can now participate in the exchanges future governance and vote on its technical roadmap.

1.3

Recalling last weeks post let’s return to SERVICES. Let’s call Games Publishers and Record Labels in the traditional media world SERVICES.

SERVICES are entities that performed an act on another’s behalf.

Substack and certain elements of Patreon are services made up of TOOLS. Modular elements combined and recombined. In the future many of the discrete TOOLS currently provided by games publishers and platforms like Steam will be abstracted away into SERVICES. I expect that even games themselves will be DAOs controlled by developers and the community that play them. There may even be SupraDAO’s that house several DAO games.

In the Dweb future and by extension the Metaverse everyone will be operating as a Vertical of One.

15

Skipping to tweet 15 here as it has a useful note on the TOOLS layer.

15.1

Just as game development companies use off the shelf TOOLS to make their own projects, the same is true in the new Dweb space. It is already full of building blocks for the future, but in this case open source.

For example Circles UBI is built with Gnosis Safe, xDai (an Etherum sidechain) and is ultimately, underpinned by Ethereum.

Circles has proved to my satisfaction in the last week or so that social mechanics (can be) baked into Web3 primatives. Projects like Circles have the potential to reach a drastic amount of users with an interesting set of dynamics at play.

As I say. all the most exciting stuff going on in the Dweb is around organising and managing networks of value rather than just creating it in the form of a coin.

TOOLS like these are the building blocks for DAOs that will come to utterly define how we associate and operate in the coming Metaverse.

1.4

To return to CONTENT category as a source of value for a moment. Holly Herndon and Matt Dryhurst recently had the founders of the Zora Marketplace on their Interdependence.fm podcast.

This week we welcome Dee and Jacob from Zora, a new organisation that is building tools for artists to issue tokens around their creative practices.

We discuss their idea of dynamic pricing of art releases and at the advent of the musician RAC releasing his $RAC token through ZORA, the new space of artists and their audiences owning a stake in the value they interdependently create in the world.

About Zora:

Zora is a new online marketplace for internet-born brands that lets early adopters convert their eye for fashion and other goods into profit.

Zora aims to present a new paradigm of transaction between brands and buyers by ensuring creators of limited-edition goods such as sneakers and streetwear receive the full value of items they create. It uses a system of tokenisation for goods, which means they can be dynamically priced.

With a focus on buying, selling and trading limited-edition items, people can use the platform to buy popular products early and sell them back at a profit before even receiving them. They can also fund creators’ work, participating and buying into the ideas and products of creators they love early in the process.

In addition to dynamic pricing, the system also allows items to be fractionally traded, which means people can sell part ownership of an item to another. As the market for fashion re-sale and limited-edition goods grows, Zora shows how new metrics of value are being put in place to fuel the Hype Market.

Here’s some quotes from Zora’s manifesto.

The platforms that hold our audiences 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?

The CONTENT and SERVICE layers are implicit in the following text I feel.

We need new infrastructure, something transparent, ownable, accessible, financially sustainable, where we can share the value we create, something for the community, something that’s ours. It’s not mine, it’s not yours, it’s definitely not theirs, it’s ours. This is Collective Creation. We have the tools, we have the moment, and we have the power. We can take on humanity’s greatest endeavours. We could build cities. We can create so much more.

The full Dweb is about 5 mins in the future. It’s going to disrupt content production, distribution, and the organisation of value created by whatever CONTENT in a big way. Parts of it are already here being prototyped at this very moment.

The DJ RAC’s recent community token launch with Zora is one of the first prototypes in a new phenomenon that is going to rapidly expand and evolve. This intersects with the idea of ‘The Alms Race’ that I’ll get to in another post. RAC’s token’s immediate purpose is to allow fans to “unlock access to various perks and exclusive content.” I.E. you need to buy in to a community token from a creator before being able to select a Patreon level/reward.

Imagine tokens like this for fandoms. If you have a ‘My Fav Fandom’ Token for example, you could write as much fan fiction as you wanted. Then potentially get paid for it based on however the community agrees to share value. These sorts of arrangements will require what I call: PERMISSIVE IP’S.

Zoras other efforts are not just limited to web content. They recently spearheaded the tokenisation of physical assets like limited run of shoes by Nike designer Jeff Staple.

The premise of Zora is to let artists and designers capture part of that resale value by creating a digital token that can be redeemed for merchandise, or else sold to someone else for a higher price. In the case of a bidding frenzy, the creator not only pockets a higher ultimate price, but part of the fees collected when the token is resold.

Zora’s head of business development, Dee Goens, says Zora is primarily aimed at “hype beasts”—those consumers who are super fans of a given brand or creator. Other creators using Zora include Jeff Staple, a Nike designer famous in sneakerhead circles, who has been selling limited edition shoes on the platform. (The pair below fetched $2000 after being listed initially at $160).

If you are unfamiliar with the concept of unique / non mutually interchangeable tokens check out the early experiment Cyptokitties or NTF’s on Wikipedia.

All of this CONTENT discussion be expanded out to include virtual property in the Metaverse. Buy a pair of shoes on the Dweb AND get the same pair of shoes as a digital twin for your virtual avatar in the Metaverse.

Wallem AR

To illustrate how quickly this is all arriving from the futre: 3D augmented reality game/Pokemon Go clone Wallem launched his week .

Wallem uses a 3D map and augmented reality (AR) technology, to place virtual objects in the real world. It features a cryptocurrency wallet and allows its users to find and collect Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) and other cryptocurrencies, which can be transferred to external wallets and then sold on an exchange. 

In addition to to the AR and 3D world, the game has its own native game currency called Pteria (PTE), which as far as I can tell is issued by a DAO of the same name managed via the SERVICE provided by Aragon protocol, built on top of Ethereum.

Interestingly Youtuber PewDiePie is involved in the games marketing :

On November 1, the Wallem team announced that the team has issued a limited number of NFTs via the Pteria DAO, the NFT skins represent unique skins. The Pteria DAO (following a positive majority vote) issued a limited number of NFTs representing skins that can be used within the Wallem app,”

6 Unique, never to be issued again, NFT game skins of PewDiePie will be available for players to buy:

The first one sold on Monday for 23k USD.

Pteria DAO put on sale its first PewDiePie’s NFT on its Opensea store.

The result? Dozens of bids and in 5 hours the price grew so fast that Pteria decided to close the auction, selling the PewDiePies’ first NFT for a value of 57.75 ETH, or about 23k USD at the current ETH price.

What happens next?

First of all, there are still 5 other NFTs available on the market, so Pteria will put them on sale very soon.

This sort of thing whilst in its infancy and has come a long way in the last few years, and has clear implications for the Metaverse as the Dweb becomes more sophisticated. PewDiePie NFTs were issued by a DAO, with community involvement:

Users can control the development of the DAO and take an active part in the team decision-making process by voting or making proposals.

The DAO was born as an independent entity from Wallem™ or other games, but, through a vote, the DAO decided to allocate part of its tokens (2.5 million to be precise) to Krakatoa™ (Wallem’s parent company).

The Pteria DAO, in fact, was created precisely for this: to reward interesting and deserving projects, giving them tokens to implement on their platforms, encouraging the use of the blockchain in the games sector.

The possibilities for organising value via the Dweb are currently coming as fast as they can be imagined and built. The most successful games/worlds/projects will be the ones that return the most value to their users.

This is a topic that we’ll be returning to and scrapbooking as more of the future arrives.

NOTE: This post may contain a lot of buzzwordy jargon. I intend to build a glossary page linked off the Dimensino category home page soon.

Previous Post

Verticals of One

Next Post

PERMISSIVE IPs

Never Miss A Post

Dimensino is an ongoing series: Over the next few posts I will be continue to post notes building on Navok‘s THREAD.
Next week: PERMISSIVE IPs.

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You’ll also get posts about my weekly 5min podcast, my webshow, and my weeknotes.

Alternatively you can grab the dedicated RSS.

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Hire Me

If you would like to hire me to puzzle this sort of thing though for you in a professional capacity – Get In Touch!

Thanks to: Cade Diehm, Ben Vickers, Jaya Brekke, Guild.is Crew, Trust Squad, Blogger Peer Review, Other Internet, Interdependence.fm, Common Knowledge Coop, and RIVAL STRATEGY for all the conversations and friendship over the years.

Let’s get this done.

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September 20, 2019

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Attention 🎯 | Blockchain ⛓️ | Permanently Moved 🔊

Back From Holiday so settling back in.

Prepare for my talk and a panel at Unsound Festival 
Finish Land As Platform
Make an audio comic?
Finish some music

Thank you to everyone who has downloaded and shared my zine!

Links:

Guild: http://guild.is
Unsound Poland: https://www.unsound.pl/solidarity/events
Primer: http://primer.dk
Unseen Audio Comic: https://www.unseencomic.com

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To Do List

As usual big hello to any new and all subscribers. And a big thank you to all those who have downloaded and shared the first issue of start select reset. I’m really pleased with it. The phrase ‘Your attention is Sovereign” seems to have been useful to some, and for that I’m glad. It’s also sparked some interesting discussions i’ve seen around and about. Particularly on attention as currency. 

Despite participation in the crypto space – and the decentralised artists network guild.is. I’m not so sure that ‘attention as currency‘ is the best way of thinking about it. I point you in the direction of some of the better critiques of the Brave Browser and it’s token ecosystem to pursue at your leisure.

For those that are unaware. People who use the Brave Browser can earn Basic Attention Tokens or BAT by viewing privacy-respecting ads. In return BAT can be used to Tip creators. You can also buy BAT to tip creators from your token bag. It’s an interesting system but doesn’t really feel like anything that new. It feels like a slicker implementation of Flattr’s first iteration back in 2010. Founded by two of the creators of the Pirate Bay. 

Anyways. I’ve come back from holiday and trying am trying to get back into the swing of things. Massive solidarity with everyone out on the Climate Strike today, it’s inspirational. Despite all the massive protests that have happened in my lifetime. Today’s Climate strike has the most Secessio Plebis about it.

Today will be another bitty episode. A few people have asked me for more essays on the culture industry. Continuing my thoughts on cultural fracking like the spiderman show etc. But they will come when they come. 

I thought today I would take a look at my todolist and tell you about some of the things I thinking about working on.

At the top of the list obviously is:

Find some more freelance work. 

My work over the summer doing some strategy with a pre seed drone AI company has come to an end as they got their funding. All those hours in spreadsheets doing burn rate senarios was worth it. 

And some recent work with a few quote un quote content creators on their monetization strategies has finished too. 

I was hoping a big medium term project i was going to be involved with would drop this autumn. But unfortunately it’s been pushed to 2020 due to budget stuff.

The work I did with the youtubers was really helpful in my own life. Its inspired me to sort out my own web presence. I’ll be moving my blog etc over to thejaymo.net at some point and make that website my central web hub.

So I have some ideas and plans of things I want to do creatively.

Firstly, I need to finish my talk titled “Solarpunk: Life in the future beyond the rusted chrome of yestermorrow” ready for unsound festival in krakow in October. I’m planning on talking about how solarpunk works as a memetic engine for featuring our ideas space. It will also include the most in depth history of the movement/genre I’ve done so far. I’m planning on recording the audio on my phone so watch my youtube for that.  I also have to prepare for a panel on interspecies solidarity. I’m planning on using the work of Kenneth Olwig on landship as a framing device.

I have a commitment to finish the first draft of Land as Platform by the end of the year. My talk in copenhagen at http://primer.dk in January will be its first complete outing.

I have a vague idea of finishing up an 20k word ebook I wrote during a manic phase in 2015. I wrote it post transmediale festival in Berlin. Where I’d ran a workshop on Mobilising Infrastructure Space and Stacktivism. The title is “Corporate Phenomenology In the age of Planetary Scale Computation – New Narrative Strategies“. 

I was working at a subsidiary of Gartner at the time and felt i needed to get all the ideas out of my head. But. It can be summed up with the subtitle. “If a corporation think it’s a person, then the singularity has already happened”. and it might be worth it seeing the light of day.

I have a few loose plans to do more audio projects to come out here on this feed. One is a self contained solarpunk fiction project on a solarpunk short story i wrote. Whilst well received by the anthology it was rejected. The repurposing of the project is inspired by the recent release of https://www.unseencomic.com/ by chad allen which is an audio comic for blind (and sighted) audiences. Its fantastic. Link in the show notes. 

Lastly, I’ve been really into synthwave as I’ve playing the game hotline miami on the switch. I’ve made a couple of tracks. And as I think of myself as a musician before anything else it might be cool to put something out.

Permanently Moved

Permanently Moved (dot) Online is a quarterly audio personal podcast, written, recorded and edited by by @thejaymo

The post To Do List | 1925 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

“The names of blockchain firms make Californian companies look humble – Gnosis, Ether, Kraken, Stellar …. Ontology” – Ben Cerveny

I missed a week last weeks blog entry. I thought it might feel like the weekly chain had been broken and everything comes tumbling down. But it doesn’t so there’s that. The week before last was really busy sorting out travel for events and writing talks, being social and also family stuff.

Today is Monday Oct 1. Yesterday I got back from Amsterdam which already feels like a blur. Meeting people I admire, 3 talks in 4 days, 2 day workshop, new faces and lots of good conversation, oh and tiny but cold Dutch beers, lots of them.

The main reason I was in Amsterdam was to speak at TerraFiction at Brakke Grond as part of Fiber Festivals Coded Matter(s) #15

The talk went really well. I enjoyed it a lot. I spoke along side a fantastic lineup: Astronomer and writer Pippa Goldschmidt, the speculative fiction writer E. J. Swift, Maja & Nik from FOAM, Ivan Henriques presented his [Symbiotic Machines for Space Exploration] project, and Miha Turšič from Waag spoke on his new project with the ESA. What I was doing there talking about Land as Platform and Solarpunk remains a mystery.

I also gave a long presentation to interdisciplinary students doing an MA in worldbuilding. On (unsurprisingly) world building but more importantly reality hacking. And I spoke on solarpunk and they way it can be used to speculatively re-imagine civic space at Tolhuistuin.

In-between all that, I caught up with a friend I haven’t seen in ages, and attended a two day workshop at Waag on world building which was the third part of the same workshop I’d been in at Het Nieuwe Instituut earlier in the year.

My output was a short story about a baker in late 21st century Amsterdam who’s business partner is the yeast called (Hono) he uses to make all the bread. They work as a bio-coop. Also if there is such thing as Middle Ages High Catholic sci-fi that’d be his world view.

One team produced an *extremely* Adam Curtis video about their Accelerationist patchwork city:

Also Ben Cerveny from The Foundation For Public Code and The New Normal took me and Sjef for a ride on his boat.

Permanently Moved

Your attention is sovereign

1. You, personally, get to decide where you put your attention.
2. By acknowledging this fact you have to take full responsibility for where you have put your attention in the past, and where you will put it in the future.

Multitasking is mostly bollocks.

This is last weeks episode. Its had the most positive feedback of any show i’ve done so far. I’m really grateful for all the positive remarks.

Dipping the stacks

Don’t bother

The Ministry

got a lot more on my pate. I need to write a talk on conspiracy theories for unsound.pl more on that next week.

Also super energised after all the conversations In the last week. Much to think on in terms of my own life and what I want from it.

Reading

I finished Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants on the plane on the way home. Incredible book.

Music

Remember kids:

The post Catching Up appeared first on thejaymo.net.

September 7, 2018

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Blockchain ⛓️ | Permanently Moved 🔊 | Solarpunk 🌅

Episode 22 – Handprints and Maps

This week I remind you all I’m speaking on Land As Platform at TERRA FICTION as part of codedmatters.nl on the 27 September 2018. Criticise blockchain thinking, then talk briefly about John Barrell’s notion of Circular Geography.

You can subscribe to Permanently Moved in itunes: permanentlymoved.online/itunes or search in all your favourite podcatchers.

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

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Handprints and Maps

 Welcome, new subscribers. I do hope you feel like you were well met, three times over. And to all my regular listeners, a big thank you for continuing to subject yourselves to my dulcet tones and support me. Before we begin, I’d like to remind you that I’m speaking at Coded Matters Terra Fiction in Amsterdam on the 27th of September, where the program of speakers involved will reassess man’s future relationship with the Earth and the cosmos.

I’ll be speaking on Land as Platform and solarpunk. I will begin by haranguing the audience and describing the term invasive species as a racist one. One of the major intellectual and cultural projects of this century for us in the West is to decolonize our worldview. It is our responsibility to do so, slowly at first, and then all at once.

I will propose that at the same time as we reassess our relationship to the non human world, we should fold in thinking machines and sensors into our new environmental engagement. To fully consider the implications of the cybernetic meadow, Where mammals and computers live together in mutually programming harmony like pure water touching clear sky.

Nature 2.0 is a popular discourse in the blockchain space and needs to be crushed before it launches. It is a term that is beginning to be used in that space and it is illustrative of the faulty assumptions made about the nature of the world. That is, in this context, so endemic to the blockchain milieu.

Also, see Jaya Klara Brekke for more on this and her call to stay in the here and now. and not fear indeterminacy, using the term land as platform instead of Nature 2.0 and the cultural work that it entails. I’ll close with that it is not a footprint that we want to leave on this world but a handprint, intentionally so, a sign that we were here and we tried to leave the small patch of earth around us a little bit better than when we found it.

I want to return again for the remaining time to the notion of landscape, this time, maps. In episode 1819, I discussed the subject of home and a sense of place. In episode 1818, I discussed genus loci, kitchens, workshops, desk, mise en place, and way back in episode 3, landship. So with all of that in mind.

John Barrell, in The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730-1840, says, here is a sense in which an open field parish in the late 18th and 19th centuries could be said to have a different geography according to who was looking at it. Thus, for those of its inhabitants who rarely went beyond the parish boundary, the parish itself was, so to speak, at the centre of the landscape.

For those inhabitants accustomed to moving outside it, however, and for the travellers who passed through it, the parish was defined not by some circular system of geography, but a linear one.

Circular geography, as a model, features heavily in Franco Moretti’s 2005 book, Graph, Maps and Trees, particularly maps.

Using this circular geographic model, he maps out the characters, concerns, and places. In Mary Mitford’s Our Village, published in five volumes between 1824 and 1833. It is, of course, set in a real place, Three Male Cross in Berkshire. So he also has geographic maps of the area to compare and contrast the types of geographies.

If you can imagine a map with three concentric circles, the dot in the center consists of the stories that are set in the heart of the village. The second focuses largely on personal relationships. And the third emphasizes more natural spectacles within the landscape. I think anyone can draw one of these circular geographies You’re home in the center, your friends, relationships, and job in the next ring out, and then lastly destinations and special trips that you make.

Of course, you always return to the center. Of course, even linear geography can be problematized. Think about the road that you walk down when you leave your house, and then imagine walking home again. And the question that you have to ask yourself is, are you walking in two different directions, up and down the same road, Or are you walking in the same direction down two different roads?

Anyway, thanks for listening and hope to speak to you again next week.

Permanently Moved

Permanently Moved (dot) Online is a quarterly audio personal podcast, written, recorded and edited by by @thejaymo

The post Handprints and Maps | 1822 appeared first on thejaymo.net.