Towards the end of my post back in march about the near future of agents I mentioned possible changes to the architecture of how Application and UI interact.

Once that hard layer is built into applications and websites, something happens to the way software operates. The UI stops being the only control layer, and becomes the human layer only. The app and the interface become completely divorced.

This idea has basically been the working hypothesis across a number of the group chats I’m in for at least the last year. Over time I’ve been exposed to a great deal of manic experimentation and discussion about this trajectory from some of the best designers I know.

The clearest signs however that the UX layer is actually delaminating from the application layer came this week at Google I/O with their announcement of Gemini 3.5 Flash-powered Google Search results. In real time, an agent will wake up inside of Google’s code-harness software Antigravity, and dynamically build an interactive page of search results similar to the hypertext objects I describe here. You can see the process demonstrated in the keynote below, I’ve queued it up:

Google has been gesturing at dynamic interface generation since the original Bard era; but the most recent I/O made it feel like a real product direction. I’ll also note, that prompting the search box to give you 10 blue links is *exactly* the kind use case that Google want you to use it for!

There are a whole bunch of terms being used describe these kind of dynamic front ends right now, I like On-the-Fly UI (OTFUI), but I’ve also heard: Liquid UI, Disposable Interfaces and Runtime Artefacts used in conversation as well.

The Great Delamination

Another place you can see this kind of Liquid UI/UX emerging is on dedicated AI hardware that has a fairly constrained action dictionary. For example, the much maligned Rabbit R1 recently got a massive software update to Rabbit OS 2, and it lets you vibe code apps using text to speech:

Matt Webb is also exploring drag and drop / dynamic UX and software interfaces for AI hardware too at his most recent venture.

Another example can be seen from Manuel Odendahl in this this video where he demos “disposable software“, inspired by Apple’s original HyperCard:

And my friend Ramon Marc has been been exploring dynamic front end interaction patterns for non technical users recently and came up with this last week:

It’s an imagined middleware layer that takes a short intent from the user as a text input, and “Double Diamonds” the idea: exploring what would / could be possible from the limited prompt and then constrains it back down to a set of options and questions to show back to the user to clarify / select and confirm before it generates the actual app.

I kept iterating on unfolding intent to see how it could feel in more practical flows, so this is an evolution of [[sxk4bapy|folding intent]].I kept iterating on unfolding intent to see how it could feel in more practical flows, so this is an evolution of folding intent. The core idea stays the same: a prompt is an intent. It gets translated into a function ([[30bptv1y|inspired by Agentic Algebra]]), which produces a JSON tree, where each leaf is a UI paradigm for more granular user input. I kind of think we’re getting into territory where we can make more contextual, hard interfaces with this. Think: I want pizza from place xyz takes the intent, pulls context from the pizza place, and builds a UI based on the tree and availability.

There is another iteration here, that walks though the intent and surfaces the permissions for the user to grant before execution. Based on the principles of hardness. The goal being that vibe coding liquid UI apps is made simple to users who don’t know anything about coding at all. (more on this further down the post)

So… if UX is going to delaminate from applications, one of the things we need to think about is the speed at which these front ends can be conjured into existence by the bot. In RM’s demo video, you can see the token counter coming in at around 60 tokens per second (tok/s) and the UI taking 22 seconds to generate.

Google’s new Gemini 3.5 Flash model comes in at around 300 tokens a second depending on connection time and latency so if at 60 tok/s, RM’s demo takes 22 seconds, At 300 tok/s, the same token budget takes about 4.4 seconds. But during the Google I/O keynote, they showed off an internal Gemini model running at 1,500 Tok/s. Which is 25× faster! Using the same example this becomes 0.8 seconds. Essentially meaning the UI generation becomes instantaneous.

Iron Speciation Triangle

Given this seems to be an observable trend, I’m pretty sure this is the direction of travel. So we should probably take a step back, and zoom out, to talk about model development in general.

Years ago now, I wrote about “maximal intelligence at all levels”. Local models, cloud models, frontier models, etc, will all speak to one and shunt tasks up and down depending on capability and speed requirement.

General-purpose models like Claude Mythos, the next ChatGPT and Gemini models, are all going to carry on getting better as they have been. I think however, over the coming months, and definitely in the next 18 months or so, we are going to see a speciation of AI models.

We already see the first signs of this with the difference between thinking models and instant models, and also in the open source world where small and extremely performant coding models are being developed. But these are only the embryonic versions of the coming split. There is a lot of headroom to be found by keeping intelligence roughly steady while pushing speed, cost, latency, and availability into completely different regimes. It seems obvious and logical that the major labs will go further than they already are, and will produce different models specialised for different tasks alongside their general purpose build-the-machine-god frontier models.

Imagine for a moment that this time next year there’s a model that isn’t appreciably more ‘intelligent’ than the one you are using today. But it’s extremely cheap, and very fast. As fast, if not faster, than the 1,500 Tok/s model we know Google already have internally.

If we take the classic iron triangle of quality, speed, and cost, but for our purposes we’ll use intelligence for quality. We can pick two and work our way around the triangle to speculate on three distinct future species of machine mind:

• Fast and Intelligent, but not Cheap: These already exist in a way, with both Anthropic and ChatGPT offering ‘fast modes’. These will get used for real-time agents, and developers in high-stakes coding environments. But also high-frequency trading, and tasks that require extremely performant multimodal interaction: robotics, security applications, and even surgery in healthcare. Maybe they are dispatched by general models with a one-off agentic task. They are really fast and intelligent, but you just burn money using them.
• Cheap and Intelligent, but not Fast: This is the kind of use case that we are seeing emerge with Claude’s new “dreaming mode”—batch minds that can be left to run overnight, reading things, doing background memory-consolidation, auditing codebases, simulating and generating reports, planning, and doing deep research. Useful for the kinds of jobs and applications that you don’t necessarily need to run in real time. Tasks that you can wait on.
• Fast and Cheap, but not Maximally Intelligent: This is the baseline model I’ve already explained being used for instantaneous UI generation.

All three of these model species would of course, require vastly different architectures at the data centre level: hardware and memory optimisations, and so on. Also important to note, as a lot of people miss this: The literal, physical substrate that LLMs run on evolves and changes to meet the needs of the software design of the model. These kinds of model species will emerge as more data centres get finished up and more compute becomes available.

Runtime Sovereignty

Beyond the data centre, we also have to consider the emerging ASIC chips for AI, where models are essentially baked onto the chip. Taalas recently entombed Meta’s old Llama 3.1 8B in silicon and achieved speeds of nearly 17,000 tok/s. If a chip like that were running a model intelligent enough to execute the example above, which Llama 3.1 8B is not, the same operation would take about 78 milliseconds or 0.07764706 seconds. 283.3× faster than RM’s demo experiment.

Whilst these kinds of fixed chips can’t be updated or changed, if we end up in the near future with “good enough” intelligence running locally, and insanely fast, then these kinds of Liquid UIs might end up being generated on the edge by the hardware/physical interface. Sort of similar to what I was thinking about when I first wrote about Helpful LLocal Models last year.

If we get this kind of local improvement then the iron triangle becomes a square and sovereignty becomes a new variable. Local actions won’t necessarily be performed by the smartest minds, but they do live on your laptop or phone and are optimised for latency, privacy, persistence, and ownership etc.

In addition to open source coding models, you can already see other kinds of specialised models tuned for speed and subject matter starting to emerge. OpenMed, a terminal-native clinical agent explicitly engineered around strict local compliance, and data sovereignty. Using MLX it clocks 24–33× speedup on standard Apple Silicon for local privacy filtering. OpenMed is a real breakthrough showing that a clinical AI can now live entirely inside hardware that a small local clinic can actually own, inspect, and govern. Note: these things can run on iPhones and iPads too at very usable speeds.

As the capabilities of local models increase, we’ll see all sorts of new agent types emerge, ones that run tasks as batch processes overnight. Very similar to the way that the iPhone has run its machine learning over your photo library for the last decade. Local models will be able to tag, process, read, and summarise all your local files, photos, and documents on the device and produce embeddings for them. Imagine being able to search Spotlight for “recent invoices from X” or “that spreadsheet about Y”.

In a maximal-intelligence-at-all-levels world, the winner wins by proximity

Constitutional Software

With liquid runtime artefacts, the question becomes: who is allowed to generate them, where, with what data, under what rules, and on whose behalf? This is of course a question of governance.

Once interfaces are generated on demand, and actions are distributed between cloud models, local models, specialist models, and device-level agents, the interface is no longer the boundary of the application. It’s a membrane between user intent, available context, permissions, model capability, and machine speed. All of this will require a great deal of what I call hardness.

“What can this software do?” becomes: “what is this software allowed to do?” Which model is allowed to see which data? Which actions must stay local? Which decisions require explicit permission? Which agents can speak to each other? Which layer gets to say no?

It’s all very complicated and will need a lot of governance. In the group chat Rafa has been calling this design space constitutional software.

What rules or protocols govern the generation of the UI. Which screens, tools, agents, and actions may appear and under what circumstances. There is a great deal of future work required if it’s going to become bullet proof.

The post AI-Generated Interfaces and the Delamination of Application UI appeared first on thejaymo.net.

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

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

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

What An Agent Actually Is, And What They Are Becoming

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In practice however, those questions are the product.

Types of Agents Today

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

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

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

This gives us two broad substrates for agents.

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

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

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

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

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

Governance Is The Next AI Product Ecosystem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cursed Objects

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

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

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

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

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

Skill Markets and Context Shoppes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paying For It

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

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

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

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

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

Agents Paying Agents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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/

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

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.

Really thrilled to announce that alongside Ross McElwain from 𝔦𝔪𝔭𝔬𝔰𝔰𝔦𝔟𝔩𝔢 ⟠ 𝔬𝔟𝔧𝔢𝔠𝔱 books I will be co-instructing the 2-part speculative DAO design seminar: Daemon & Discord: Anatomy of the DAO at The New Centre. Course begins August 18th 2022.

Course blurb and details are below. You can also read more here.

This two-credit theoretical and practical Seminar will consider Decentralized Autonomous Organizations from many angles. Beginning with their science fiction-influenced prehistory before focusing on what DAOs are today – both technically and imaginatively – the Seminar will result in speculative group projects to design and present future histories of fictional DAOs.

Adopting Daniel Suarez’s Daemon (2006) and Charles Stross’s Accelerando (2005) as our starting points, we’ll discuss the conceptual framework within which DAOs emerge, emphasizing that contemporary DAOs have been fashioned within only a limited range of all their possible modalities and that DAOs could have taken and could yet take different paths of development. Stretching this notion to a speculative extreme, in the first Sessions, we will consider future histories of hypothetical DAOs from the vantage of the year 2035. The Seminar will then step back through time, examining both the principles and practices underpinning the DAOs of the present and the assumptions made about their past and futures. Presentations by participants in the first half of the Seminar will involve pitching ideas for DAOs to the group. Several of these will be chosen via a quadratic voting process for further amplification in the second half, in which we will proceed to create detailed future archives of the chosen DAOs. These will be presented for critique by experts in the last session.

The Seminar’s second Module will take particular care to interrogate the dreams of decentralization and of autonomy (or perhaps automation) by which theorists of DAOs have sometimes been beguiled. The speculative nature of the group projects will allow the participants to explore these ideas to destruction without consequence.

We have lined up a fantastic list of distinguished guest instructors who will be joining us to present and speak with participants including:

Ruth Catlow (Furtherfield),
Kei Kreutler (Gnosis Guild),
Wassim Alsindi (0x Salon),
Julian Bleecker (Near Future Laboratory)
and more!

Lecture One

We recognise that cost may/can be a barrier, so Impossible Object is offering a number of discounted places: Details can be found in their Discord.

The post Daemon & Discord: Anatomy of the DAO | The New Centre 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/

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

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 is a post in an ongoing scrapbook series.
Exploring the emerging Dweb (Web3) ecosystem, the #supportnet, and the coming ‘Metaverse’.

8. Discords Disruption

9.

10: Discords Community Disruption

I don’t really have an opinion on the rest of Novaks thread beyond the tweet below. Aside from being really excited by OnLive back in the day. Beyond trying to understand the server side features and tools for SpatialOS, cloud gaming isn’t really something I’m really that deep on.

Discord is the most important PLATFORM on this list.

Discord exploded out discrete features that has been traditionally tied to console ecosystems. (voice chat etc).

Discord’s opportunities for platform disruption lie given the new pools of value that is has created.

I hate Slack, it’s the open plan office of the software world.

This recent New Yorker piece on the tool hits the nail on the head:

The problem with this trajectory is that no one stopped to ask if it made sense to optimize this style of work in the first place. Though Slack improved the areas where e-mail was lacking in an age of high message volume, it simultaneously amplified the rate at which this interaction occurs

Unfortunately, a large segment of the tech world compares Discord to Slack due to their shared common ancestor – Internet Relay Chat.

There is significant difference. Discord is explicitly a ‘designed for creating communities‘. Slack by contrast built a tool for ‘ineffectual communication in business environments’.

Discord was VOIP first, then built out their messaging platform. The creators of Discord didn’t set out to create the tool we know and love today. It was designed to service disparate groups of people to communicate effectively in and across virtual environments. It grew organically amongst gaming communities and later subreddits.

Putting Slack and Discord valuations aside. It seems really silly to me that the wider tech press has completely missed Discords rapid rise. Discord is facilitating the formation of huge communities, far beyond the scope of anything Slack can accomplish.

Partly this is due to Discords ‘server’ pricing model, vs the per user per head pricing of Slack that gets expensive fast. But also because of the nature of the tool. Its places based. Discord is a spot you swing by and check in on. See whats going, contribute to a discussion and then head out. Slack demands an always on engagement with the tool.

Discord of course can also be used as an internal communication tool for organisations, teams and squads.

Right now I wonder 🤔 how many games studios are making their game using Discord as their core communications tool? Of those Orgs, how many of them also have channels in the same Discord full of people supporting the developer? With accesses gated via the #supportnet ecosystem (Patreon, Steam Early Access, Kickstarter etc).

Discord Should Lean Into The Dweb.

Discord’s most important disruptive features are: Building/managing communities AND being a vital business communication tool. Why not fuse the two?

Why not start coordinating some of the value produced between Gamers and Developers directly? RAC (As mentioned in 1.3) is doing this already with ZORA. Integrating these features and tools into Discord would be a huge leap forward for the Dweb and support net ecosystem.

Two excellent Other Internet adjacent essays are useful as we go forward:

Come for the Network, Pay for the Tool.

As high quality content and effective brand strategy move down the long tail, “community” has become an important concept for every post-Web 2.0 player. Crypto token holders, influencer fanbases, DTC brand customers, creator audiences, and new social networks are all often referred to as communities, and each has a stake in developing community for itself.

A new business type here is the paid community: a direct subscription to join in. Today, most paid communities live on the outskirts of existing social platforms. But as they become normalized, paid communities are becoming a viable business model for smaller-scale social networks aiming to be both profitable and socially sustainable.

This emerging new media thing, the paid community social network, has new rules and new risks, and just as it will require new skillsets to operate, requires a new way of understanding what both business and community mean.

A lot in this essay, Shorin explains that late Web2.0 platforms have encouraged Content and commerce (to merge) to create new publishing endeavours that make no distinction between advertising and editorial. It has resulted in the fusion of paid communities and social networks. The most interesting example in the piece are the microapplications embedded inside the Bloomberg Terminal. And provides a long list of businesses and community types that could benefit from paid social network like SERVICES.

I would also like to suggest that Discord could be a key ‘terminal/portal/place’ that can begin to merge content and commerce and financial plumbing. Discord has the potential to become an important SERVICE to provide the TOOLS and mechanisms for the creation of PERMISSIVE IPS.

Squad Wealth

SQUAD PRODUCTION

Group identity. Shared space. Vibes. These not only enable the creation of social capital, but strengthen the squad’s capacity to organize, minimizing transaction costs and leading to greater productive capacities and resilience; this is “the nature of the squad.” But while squads can be viewed as a “nexus of contracts”, unlike the Coasean firm, they are without legal structure. Social contracts are instead effected through the unspoken bonds of mutual respect and ingroup norms.

But to sustain this solidarity economy the squad may look for ways to translate vibes into monetizable modes of public engagement: clients, subscribers, sponsors, music deals, yields. SQUAD PRODUCTION begins with the creation of processes and interfaces to convert creative labor into units that can be transmitted by global network participants. Here SQUAD TOOLS come into play. Vibes generated at the DAW, on the Figma board, or in the gaming lobby are turned consumable cultural instruments. Then it’s just a matter of distribution. Young artists create online galleries and independent labels because they allow groups to interact (and transact) with the world through familiar organizational patterns. Bandcamps, Twitch pages, DAOs are public APIs for squads to interact with entities beyond their trust boundary.

Squad Wealth is written in a pitch perfect mode for the current moment, it also covers many of the threads articulated across the Dimensino blog series so far.

Contributions to the squad are positive sum. And in return for their contribution, members have access to an expanded set of opportunities, claims on future economic flows and guarantees backed by the group. By risking together, a scrappy group can gain access to multiplicative yields—the path to SQUAD WEALTH.

A strong social fabric and the right tech stack will unleash a new wave of bottom-up economic experiments: interest-free P2P borrowing, anonymous lending pools, collective insurance, socialized ETFs, DAO-based freelancer unions, rotating savings schemes, revshare guilds, meme venture syndicates, crypto ponzis, exit scams, in-browser miners, upstate yield farms, boy bands, cults, and sovereign vacation funds.

Squad Wealth is the most Important essay I think I’ve read in 2020. Check out the first hour of Other Internet Squad‘s recent appearance on the Interdependence.fm podcast. Or you know, subscribe for the full fat show!

Discord and Dweb Developers should….

Web3 Logins

Consider Web3 logins. Token ownership or ‘Proof of community’ should be come a common login default ASAP.

By the end of 2021. Communities will be forming DAOs, issuing community access tokens, minting Meme NFTs and sharing value. Discord can decide if they want to be a part of this or not.

A Dweb login however would be a first step in rolling out wallet infrastructure (Either something like Metamask or native to Discord) to a large user base. The first sign of Verticals Of One.

Multisig crypto wallets

If everyone on a server has a wallet, it figures that Discord should implement shared wallets and other mechanisms for organising and sharing value.

Shared multi sig wallets could quickly start to also hold in game metaverse currencies for players on a server.

Guilds in WOW or corporations in EVE online already have shared bank accounts ‘In universe’ but tying them to communities outside of a metaverses via financial plumbing is important for the future of virtual environments in general. New monetary fabrics could then begin knitting themselves into Discord and virtual worlds.

These early experiments may be fraught with problems, some disasters etc. But the audience is an important one for the mainstreaming of Web3. Folks who play Fortnite and use Discord will understand NFT virtual objects etc intuitively.

Once users have wallets, and we have communities with shared wallets the next step is:

Decentralised Autonomous Organisations

In order for Discord to fully lean into the Dweb; it will need to provide mechanisms for both core community members (EG games developers) and the wider server to nominally enter into ‘semi formal’ relationships with one another. If large groups of people are to produce Permissive Ips together. Experimenting with digital ownership, effort accounting, value return and attribution will need to be baked into a communities DNA.

Discord (I belive) is a space that could rapidly prototype the habits, manners and mores and UX that will eventually become commonplace for users in alegal metaverse environments. Discord’s background as ‘3rd space’ enabling effective communication between users, across virtual environments means a lot of cultural logic required to operate in this emerging space is already extant.

DAO’s are a virtual organisational form where the source code defines the bylaws.

The mechanics and specifics of DAO’s are complicated technically, to be fully formed they require many of the suites of TOOLS mentioned throughout this post. A Vertical of One is the user experience required to fully interact and participate in DAO’s of the future.

Kei Kreutlers excellent recent essay ‘Eight Qualities of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations’ is very good primer:

DAOs can be viewed as software tools that encourage coordination through voting on proposals and allocating funding. As peer-to-peer institutions, DAOs have the potential to significantly decrease the barriers to and costs of starting an organization.

Today, DAO has strayed from its initial signifiers and become a more chimeric term that might best describe a voluntary association in favor of digital cooperativism. Its practical instantiation in the world varies widely depending on disciplinary context.

In summary, eight imagined qualities of decentralized autonomous organizations are autopoietic, alegal, hyperscalable, executable, permissionless, aligned, co-owned, and mnemonic. Drawn from observation, these qualities trace desires for interdependence11 growing in the cracks of legacy institutions, as well as the dubious inheritance of cybernetic dreams from a century of unprecedented war. The question of global coordination and patchwork governance will not be put aside during the 2020s. Mapping the organizational unconscious of our time, however impartially, may be one means to stymie its shadow. The term DAO itself may prove a temporary smoke signal under which co-conspirators can gather before it too must be discarded.

Its an amazing essay and I recommend reading it in full.

Various other parts of Dweb ecosystem are also coming together elsewhere which should not be slept on. Paypal’s recent Crypto integration announcement is being reported (by media still concerned as it with financial speculation story of the blockchain) as a step toward buying and selling Bitcoins. Birch in Forbes today reporting on the story admits he doesn’t have any idea whats going on. “Well, since the people who run PayPal are much richer and much smarter than I am, I am forced to conclude that they must have a plan.” 

It’s also important to point out that Paypal currently won’t let users transfer their cryptocurrency into or out of their PayPal wallets, nor would the users have control of the private keys that allow holders to move their digital assets. So it’s not really about buying or selling bitcoins at all. It’s about using bitcoins to pay for stuff. Crypto media has said this is #Fail. I Agree. On ramps between cryptocurrency ecosystem and fiat are currently marred in KYC and crazy regulation.

This becomes less and less important as projects begin producing and issuing tokens to communities of value. The more complex the MONETARY FABRIC of the Dweb gets, the less important fiat becomes. I expect most tokens in this new MONETARY FABRIC will never be exchangeable for fiat money, instead cross token/chain trading of goods and services will happen directly without the need to transmute into fiat.

The significant part of Birch’s article is the following:

Secondly, the technologies of cryptocurrency (shared ledgers, cryptographic proofs and so on) are going to be the foundations of a longer term shift to the trading of digital bearer instruments that are exchanged without clearing or settlement networks so building up institutional expertise is valuable. It is reasonable to imagine that these instruments might well be implemented as tokens traded across decentralised networks, so exploring the trade-offs around infrastructures and interfaces is a good investment of time and effort.

Paypal building institutional knowledge around DWeb TOOLS is important and encouraging for the future as we move toward Verticals Of One. PayPal’s mission statement after all is: “we believe that now is the time to reimagine money, to democratize financial services so that managing and moving money is a right for all citizens, not just the affluent.”

I can Imagine all sorts of legacy Web2 companies like PayPal and ‘Challenger Banks’ allowing all sorts of wallet/vault integrations in future. Both for tokens in personal and multisig wallets.

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

When a new indie developer registers a new discord to begin work on a project it is a SQUAD, but has the potential to scale its wider community to whatever the size.

To do this, Discord will also need to also explore and implement better governance SERVICES and TOOLS. We’ll explore governance in later Dimensino posts but for now I’ll mention Loomio.

Whilst it’s not perfect, Loomio is one of the best in class tools for community governance. It also appears that they are considering integration with Dweb wallets and (I hope) later down the line smart contract integration with DAO APIs to better facillitate Squad production.. I can imagine Loomio (or something like it) will drift away from being a stand alone platform eventually and become part of the DWeb TOOLCHAIN as a plug and play SERVICE for uses.

For those unfamiliar with Loomio here’s their about video:

The chat APP Telegram is another place that could spin up DAOs. There are already sketched out proposals for DAO creation by members of a telegram channel.

Discord also has the potential to be an important player in the exploration the future of organising, funding, and creating work. Owned by communities at all levels of production.

Well, thats it for the Navok thread. I wanted to get this out before the end of the year and close the book on this particular endeavour. Thanks or everyone who has subscribed or supported so far. More to come.

Thanks to: Ben Vickers, Guild.is Crew, Trust Squad, Blogger Peer Review, Other Internet, Interdependence.fm.

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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.

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