CCG Chronicles #11 - Designing systems without fetishes, the frame, and cups
During the CCG I had a long conversation with Pekko Koskinen and Michael Zargham about systems design, avoiding fetishizing objectivity when designing systems, and cups and spoons. It was an extremely cerebral discussion!
Pekko Koskinen is a game designer, artist and developer specialized in gamification of social conventions and currently, he coordinates the Economic Space Agency. Dr. Michael Zargham (@mZargham) is a data and decision systems engineer with over a decade of experience designing and evaluating decentralized algorithms and is the founder of BlockScience, a research and analytics firm for blockchain networks.
This episode is a continuation of the CCG Chronicles series which is a collection of interviews conducted during the Crypto Commons Gathering (CCG) in Austria back in August 2021. The interviews were also filmed to potentially be a part of a documentary I'm making with a few others.
If you want to financially support our efforts in making the documentary, you can donate so far with bitcoin, ethereum (any layer), or NEAR at the addresses listed on the website. We’re still unsure when exactly anything will be published, but we’re hoping within the next year although that will depend on the amount of support we can get from the community.
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Transcript
Hi, everyone. What you're about to listen to is an interview that I took in person while attending the Crypto Commons Gathering Conference in Austria in August 2021. The conference itself was a wonderful experience where people of a lot of different backgrounds and political ideas were able to discuss openly and safely about how crypto can intersect with fostering the commons. What you'll notice from these interviews is that these differences in thought are sometimes apparent because we all come from different places, and what was honestly refreshing about the experience is is that we could do it in a supportive environment. This is probably one of the most receptive audiences in crypto to socialism, which was really great for me. Also, a heads up is that you may notice sometimes that the audio was clearly recorded in the house that we were all staying in, which wasn't the best place for recording, but we did the best that we could with what we had. A lot of the interviews will also likely feature in the documentary that I'm making about the world of crypto and its potential futures with a friend. A big reason I was able to make it to this conference was thanks to all the support I received from patrons. So if you find the work that I do important, I hope you'll consider helping out starting at $3 per month on patreon.com/theblockchainsocialist.
We're at the CryptoKones. Gattaca again, and I have paired together the two biggest brains maybe potentially at this conference.
Most constraint.
Maybe. Yeah. But to introduce people to who you guys are, if you could just say that who you are and the projects you're working on. And then we'll people will see the they'll experience the big brain.
Speculative value. Would you want to start the introduction? Or Sure. I'm Michael Zargam. I'm the founder and
technically CEO, but more practically, chief engineer at BlockScience. Work on a wide range of, like, system design problems that are embedded in various softwares and infrastructures and affect people's, I guess, behaviors or action spaces. And thus, I think a lot about the consequences of that, and I have wonderful conversations with my friends, such as Pekka, about such things.
And I am that mentioned Pekka. Koskinen's last name, which is both on my parents' fault. No. The last name isn't. Let's not go there. But, I, let let's keep this short. I'm a cofounder of XR, Economic Space Agency. And and but my background comes from more games and particularly game structures. That's probably enough, and I also returned back the gift, because I don't want to keep the pressure. So the gift goes back of I enjoy having conversations with my friends like Z here.
So, you guys I think part of the why your discussions are so interesting is that both of you are coming from a perspective of design, from slightly different you, you have a lot of experience with game design, and you're more in, like, terms of, like, systems engineering. But, yeah. Maybe, could you from you guys' perspective, like, what what is design actually?
Cool. Alright. So I'll just kinda take that on. Design for me is about, effectively structuring the field of action for others, which makes it effectively synonymous with governance, which is a whole can of worms I won't open yet. But just understanding that when you design a system or a space that you are sort of first sort of framing and deciding what you're gonna assume and that those assumptions are subjective acts. So first, I make my subjective framing of the problem, and I work within that framing to try to accomplish some goal, and then I try to evaluate the relative sensitivity of my assumptions and what effects they might have on the outcomes again. The outcomes are a goal, but they might be a formal goal that I can derive or analyze, but then there's a sort of less formal, more experiential goal, associated with the people who are subjected to that design. So it's very abstract description, but it covers a wide class of things from designing games all the way to designing infrastructures.
Yeah. It's it's like I said, there's million perspectives to start with this kind of questions. And, but I I can take a sort of pseudo pragmatic historical. I won't go to etymologies. I don't think it's a that's useful here. But make a comparison, that if you make a comparison between not just art, but the creation in an artistic sense and then design, I think one can first point out that there there's a kind of this act of creation, some kind of conjuring to existence in some in some form, in both. But then what then qualifies design is that there is this, particular relations with intention or outcome of that creation. And that it it's actually in a, like, surprisingly complex space, that intention. Because one can say, okay, design is that we have an object in mind like a cup and then we design towards it. But it's certainly by today's standards and maybe, that never was really enough of thinking of it. And once you start actually changing it, that that it doesn't necessarily have a definite goal, but it does work with this inten relation between creation and intention. And this is true for, I think similarly between something somebody designing an object and somebody designing a system itself. So so that makes it then feel that I don't think there is, and I think it's necessarily useful to pursue, like, this is the definition of design. When there's for me, there is no what is design, and I'm in my internal world, I don't use much like I am a designer. I actually tend to discard that kind of thinking in itself. But if I find anything fertile on that, and it's where I stop with this, the fertility is precisely playing with this semi uncertain relation between creation and its intention,
and the all forms this sort of intention can take. So if I were to, like, kind of reduce it to something memeable, there's this concept from Janella Meadows called dancing with systems, where, like, you kind of acknowledge that you're not so much intervening in a way that you can guarantee the outcome, but that you're in relation with the thing that you are designing for or intervening with. And so if we treat it as a kind of discourse in in behavior and and outcome and experience, then design as, at least I experience it, is a act of, you know, kind of framing what I've observed and then having an intention towards changing it, then, you know, making some subjective decisions and following through to create a change and then observing that change and kind of kicking off or restarting that whole process or enabling that process for others. So, but in the end, it has to be thought of as co creative. Otherwise, it reduces to a kind of, a kind of control or, like, an assertion over or an application of power. So it's a really challenging thing to to grope like, to really grope with as a, you know, I don't know, as someone who cares about maybe their own power and, like, not wanting to over exert it or maybe wanting to be really careful about the consequences of it. Sort of maybe you're almost more burdened by the obligations of it than you are reveling in the application of it. And so although this is kind of a long tangent, this is one of the reasons I agree with the difficulty with the term design because it tends to come with the baggage of I impose upon you rather than or I impose upon some system, or institution, or constituency. Whatever it is that you are designing for, your mental model is to act upon rather than co create with. And I think that's a good reason for being careful about the term. Just using it in passing in its regular use is one thing, but if you're trying to think deeply about it or define it, you actually need to look at what it entails and unpack it a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. And
and really not try to cohere to one pattern of approach, but actually be open to move quite a bit in your approaches in itself. Last note in kind of, in in in a kind of generally agreeing, addition to what you were saying, that there's this interesting quality between this sort of relation in creation and intention. And it's that it it's essentially, like, trapped within social. Design is trapped within social in in a very, in a very quick manner or very very it's very highly exposed to the social. Let's put it that way. And with that, I mean that when you're making something with intention, that evaluation of that intention, however you put it, will become an operation of others, more so than yourself. It can be yourself, but it's a even more so it becomes a social proposal. And and that's why whatever you design, even if it was a solitary process, it's it's kind of more in the space of, the social than even artists. Like, of course, even yes, art is social, but there is a more insistent social quality to design and its results.
Yeah. Mhmm. So I think that's really interesting to pick off that, a big part of this conference is sort of the acknowledgments. I think our theme is the acknowledgments that things have been designed shittily so far.
Mhmm. I would Is there any sense? Design is the wrong word. Right? So I think That things are going that things are going poorly. Yeah. So this is really different though because there's a difference between the acknowledgement of the outcome or even the lived experience of the outcome from the act of design. So, most of the institutions responsible for the shittiness, so to speak, are not actually designed in the way that we can think of as intentional where the The consequences of maybe micro or meso level decisions that could be thought of as design, but the resulting properties are really just like runaway dynamics from the interactions of those systems. And if anything, it was the failure to acknowledge this sort of co creative sort of interplay that led to intentional designs at one scale driving the intended outcomes at that scale, but just ignoring their externalities and creating outcomes and lived experiences of others that were neither planned for or planned against. They merely emerged. Now we're faced with them, and we have to ask not just what we should design differently, but what design means so that we don't just fall into a new version of the same trap.
Yeah. It's it's like, I would agree that there's, like, in the current forms that we have, essentially, we have fragments of intentional design, but mostly emergent resulting design. And by exposition and actual use, whether you're looking at forms of, social structures, etcetera, or or even, like, the instruments, like, like money, etcetera. So, and they are also exposed, like, throughout the design to other factors, like power games, etcetera. And that that becomes a big factor in how the design actually works. I mean, there's there's a time and a place where you could, have called money a key democratizing factor that was a key component in taking down the nobility. It did but, now, currently, its usage is more towards the almost like synthesizing a new nobility by and so so it in this sense, like, well well, one other thing which is almost like the con opposite not opposite, but the point of view from other side of the river. Let's put it that way. And this is the, that situation of actually treating social structures as design is also not new. It's rarer, but it has, of course, taken place. We can call upon the concept of social engineering and the decades of its kind of, high presence. And but that's another thing to kind of evaluate from because much of the problems in there was the separation from the actual use. I designing forms in in in nice drawings and diagrams and and then applying them as is on people, which, revealed their dysfunctionalities, when they were in use and, impermanence. So so in this sense, like, the I yeah. Maybe that's enough for now because there there's a lot of, I'd recommend smaller questions because, like, this is like kind of like, for me at least, there's this kind of struggle because, okay, I have to know, I would need to say 10 things, to have the coverage and then I I can't Are you experiencing the frame? Yes. This I can I talk about your frame? It's
framing? No. No. This is on you guys. I don't know. Your frame. This discussion was intended to be sort of meta and as is often the case We've broken the fourth wall. We've broken it. Right. But I I would say that we have very much experienced your framing of us in this room behind this camera in the context of this conference and both of us are taking our meanderings that we've had all week and enjoyed very much and trying to make them accessible to not just you, but to the people who would be on the other side of this frame later. And Right. That is both constraining and in some ways liberating. Mhmm. And honestly, I think it's an interesting
opportunity for this discussion because it does relate to the performativity of models which is also inherent to design. Mhmm. Yeah. Like in some, like, yes, you can say it's about us, but it's about us framed by you.
And and and, and the the film over here, the video. Oh, get it. You
you in general, but also the tracings that run from you to the gathering itself. It's, like all the social connections come as a framing. And, so in this sense, like, that or that part I think needs to be added to see how this plays out or kind of look at the qualities that it exhibits.
Okay. Do you have do you have any like suggestions
that you would change with this design or No. I think it's less of a comment about like sort of objectifying you should frame it differently and more of a concept of like what are the consequences of your frame because you could have also taken a camera and recorded the organic conversations which would have also probably perturbed them like if we noticed you standing there with the camera while we were having a conversation then we might still behave differently, but that frame is already different from this frame. And so this idea that although the content originally was maybe the discourse that emerged from just us being here in this space also kind of a framing if you think about it, is different as a result of the frame of the camera in the room but not that that was right or wrong or that you should do it differently merely that you're getting a different observation than you would have gotten in a different frame. Yeah. And and this comes from also the qualities of framing itself, like, which I can kind of now make a reference point
to earlier conversations. But maybe it's useful here is that framing is once again one of the facts that is is simultaneously delimiting and expanding. Like and this is true even for the basics of framing. Like, framing an artwork in itself delimits the space and saying, okay, it's this, but not that. That's an act of limit creation in a way. But it's expanding in the sense that now there is an artwork, and it becomes the space. And and actually, if one goes down the rabbit hole, it kinda creates this quality which is typical for semantic or semantic spaces, which account, actually, not just language, but also this, I think social space is a lot of things, but one of the core effectors there are semantic spaces and semantic architecture. But but that that these have a quality of being recursive. Like, if if one thinks, or nested or fractalic, how, whatever word one wants to use, Which is also practically visible in this that if you create this delimitation, and use an use that to make an artwork, you have expanded this space of the painting, which in itself is fractalic because it creates its own meaning space, its own discourse. And if somebody makes a comment upon a particular feature of that point painting that expands to another nested space, etcetera, etcetera. And this kind of quality in itself is, of course, puts us in similarly a frame that is both limiting and delimiting to us, and expanding,
at the same time. So I wanna riff on that to talk about algorithms given that this is a discussion space for sort of blockchains and emerging automation technologies that we sort of mutually subject ourselves to. And there's a design component to, the creation of those protocols, but there's also a design component to the the institutional architectures around those protocols. And so what I would say is that when we design a protocol or an algorithm or or an institution, we always have to start with framing. Like, we we have to say what is and is not in consideration, and when we make that choice, it has a bearing on our conclusions, whether it's the design itself or the way in which we measure the success of the design, and these things end up becoming part of the the living thing that emerges from it. So in this case, we'll take an algorithm that makes some decision predicated on some inputs from an actor. Then you structure the field of action when you say these are the things that you can do in a sense framing. You've said the world is made up of sends of bitcoin or the world is made up of transactions mutating the state of a EVM of a virtual machine or the you've actually framed the world as the set of all actions which mutate the state of this object and then created a layer of infrastructure that maintains the validity of that object and the sort of enforces the rules. Now there's a meta game in the form of, you know, are you actually maintaining that ledger and what resources in the real world do I need to have in order to do that? And you see, discussions of things like externalities of proof of work as you frame wider and wider. As you frame narrower and narrower you get to is this transaction allowed on this smart contract say. Or the sort of really relevant frame right now is a thing called miner extractable value which basically says, well if miners select and order transactions and there are really well defined rules about valid sequences, they can't break those rules but they actually have this affordance of selecting the order and the inclusion from a mempool. And so what ends up happening now is that much of the interesting dynamics in those spaces are a consequence of of a framing of a problem and that framing actually gave rise to the engineering creation of the shared infrastructure and it gives rise to our experience of interacting with it which could range from our experience of lower friction in a financial activity than we might experience in a traditional institution but it also exposes us to risk from the actors who have power in the system for example, you know again, MEV being a injection or reordering of transactions to benefit the person who happens to be responsible for selecting that block and it might be minor, the sensitivity can be measured in a sense like if I have a limitation on what's a valid transaction then you can only sort of extract from me in so far as you can not break the rules. But of course, someone made the rules and that rule making act created the potentiality of that extraction and so we end up with this really interesting fractal framing that results in honestly most of the questions in the space today revolve around the consequences of those decisions and kind of who bears them, right. There's a lot of discourse about regulation that that comes back to who can do what and whose quote fault is it or who bears responsibility for that. And it's not clear because it doesn't match perfectly with the sort of existing, we'll call it, like, political economy. It has its own kind of, its own political economy that we're still just sort of making sense of. Yeah. Yeah. And to no no it's okay like I mean
the more it kind of flows by itself it's it's it's probably better and and I think us of wrestling against the frames is is a good thematic it's the Greek drama here. Anyway, probably not epic hopefully not tragic. Possibly a comedy. But anyway, I wanted to bring one nutshell, not the nutshell, but a nutshell towards framing. And this is a kind of point of view of looking at any framing in the widest sense of framing and and the act of framing which, many examples of that were in what you just said. Is look at the act of framing as expression. And then think, okay, what does it mean? Because it's an inevitability an expression. And, but what does that mean is that in itself, it's a creative act. But like any expression, it it there's nothing like neutrality. Neutrality is an absurd, even a thought for an expression. Rather, it's it's almost like a counter neutrality. It's a particularity. And, and so whatever framing you do, unavoidably, how you frame the question? How do you frame the problem? How do you frame a particular development, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. The framing is already an expression and therefore already influences the direction. And and therefore actually approaching framing as an expression, well, it doesn't save you from this quality, but it actually gives you a certain awareness of how you are being creative, rather than neutral or whatever on with that. I have one more, but if but if you want to tell I want this is short. I can make this short. Okay. Relates to the meta games. That this is another interesting quality about, which touches back to framing, which is this. Like, why there is such a kind of prevalence of these meta games appearing and and this sudden well, there's two things. One is that the game meta game is not a replication of this recursive nested fractal equality. Second thing is they have a there's a high flexibility for them to appear because framing works like a reference point to them. Like you frame something like, oh we are doing this. Oh there's this problem. You created a frame. That becomes a reference point and now you can create another game, another process, another session whatever through that frame that now functions like a reference. So we have this pathway. Framing framing is expressive, and but at the same time, it can behave like a point of reference, which allows for a creation of a meta game, which then all also allows its own framing. And so does the rabbit hole of games and meta games, sub games, however we want to think about it and go.
Cool. So the thing I was gonna jump off was the discussion of neutrality. Because to your point about an expression being non neutral, there's a sort of, fascination with designing for neutrality that I think is actually problematic because it it it strives to design based on what is effectively an objective frame, but since framing is a subjective act or an expressive act, you can't have it. So by trying to be objective, by trying to be neutral, you actually in some ways make the system less neutral. And again, there's an absurdity to this where you're like, the the notion of neutral and its, you know, relationship to this notion objective are creating the problems. If you acknowledge the subjectivities and you exercise them with some care and, you know, transparency where possible and you say, I acknowledge that my frame of the problem imposes upon it and I am going to be try to be aware of the consequences of that. And where I have subjective choice or design decisions, I'm going to attempt to make them in the interest of the outcome from the perspective of those, and they may be multi multiple kinds of stakeholders, but those whom this would impose upon and rather than pretend as though I've achieved something inherently neutral, sort of acknowledge the the the uneven field that I've created. But this kind of ties into the meta game concept because if we think of the act of structuring this field or this game or this design system as, creative, then if we really wanna close the loop on that system, we have to imagine that there's another game which redesigns it or Yeah. Or interacts not just within it, but acts upon it. And so we don't necessarily have to have a super fractal. We could just say there exists a framing, there exists a sort of solution conditioned on that framing, but then we there exists a feedback loop between those who have been subjected to this and this thing itself. And that is a way of understanding the meta game not as something that recurses in a hierarchy, but maybe is a a feedback loop. And we could just describe the game and the meta game as coming into balance and achieving some sort of, you know, power parity. And again, we can't guarantee that either. This is also a model. I'm framing it differently, but I'm offering a way of reasoning about the act of design and potentially what I would call governance of that infrastructure institution, as a kind of co design process between the players of the game or the inhabitants of the structured field and the structured field itself, which is a reasonably good mental model for how society works because ultimately we're imposed upon by how things work, but then we strive through technology, social organization, activism, everything afforded to us to mutate the shape of that field not merely to act within it. Yep. One more note about the sort of,
labyrinth of of fray frames and meta games. And it still relates to or it's one once in this sort of modes of neutrality, which is there's still this sort of escape that some might say and sometimes say, is like, okay, we make the frame neutral quotes by taking the whole thing quotes. But well, the well, the easiest way to say that you have not escaped framing of it is because the framing happens kind of in the ball both ends of the reference. Like, even if you have taken the whole thing, which is an there's an absurdity to that thought as well. Let's not go into that, but that's, that's a whole other topic. But the in the other end, if you're saying we're taking the whole thing and then we are applying process x. Well, here's your framing. The process in itself, because it's it's, like, we're, like, talking about it like this, or we are putting it in this model. You're bringing framing at the other end. So in a way, the framing is pipe, and, and then this kind of puts us, our existence in this process, into this sort of labyrinth of this sort of, frames, and the rabbit holes they create, leading us to new frames of of gaming. And so it goes, but without end, there is really no escape from that that labyrinth.
Basically, what you guys are talking about is this discussion that we had earlier, which we can sort of term this or summarize this as like the fetishism of objectivity.
Yeah. That's your framing of it today.
I think I might have been the way I said that. But I'll try to define it. I I think of it as a fetishization because that fetish is like
Fetish is she? No. You're asking a fin. Like a fetishization. Like,
yeah, fetishization is good enough. I think for like for our purposes. Cool. So I mean, the idea that this is a fetish comes from the fact that we are ascribing sort of an unreasonable amount of importance to it, and we're, like, you know, really zooming in on that at the cost of, you know, other things. And so we're not saying that it's bad, we're saying that it is a one of many considerations, and that if you overemphasize it, that you get something, maybe problematic. Maybe problematic might even be too strong of a word. But, the fetishization of objectivity is essentially putting the all the weight of this discussion on, well, is it objective? Is it neutral? Instead of stepping back and saying, under what circumstances is this an appropriate assumption? And, like, okay. We've made this frame, and we've used it to design, and we're tracking against some outcomes both sort of empirical and sort of lived experience wise. And then as the frame ceases to be the right frame, the capacity to go back and reevaluate the frame, well, you only have that affordance if you acknowledge that it was a subjective act in the first place. So by taking the neutrality or objectivity frame, you actually can see the potential adaptation. You actually cut off a really important feedback path that's required to keep it relevant. Because if you don't evolve it with the changing context or the changing experiences, something that was at once enabling can become, you know, constraining or was at once empowering can become, like subject like subjectifying. And I guess that might also not be the right word, but you kind of get the idea that we're we're taking the same thing, which was in one context framed in a good way and it met the needs of the community and you accomplished it moving towards the desired outcome, then if time passes and circumstances change and the broader context shifts in some unknown way, then what ends up happening is that your model loses fidelity with the phenomenon it was aiding you in dealing with. And if you take the objective frame, there's no affordance for acknowledging that gap and thus adapting the thing. Whereas, if you say that it's subjective, you can say cool it was subjective but it works for us let's use it until it starts to fall out of focus. You're not stuck in this sort of again like system worship where you're like, but this is the thing and we must stick to it or else or our identity is lost because we've conceded this fundamental tenet or ritual or you know sacred thing. And so there's like a I like to use the analogy of the sacred and the profane where we're just basically saying if we hold something too sacred, we don't let the the the real life messy stuff feed back on it. And so it can flow from or it can change from being empowering to being constraining. And so we have to be careful of absolute solutions, Even if they're really freaking useful for a really long time, we just watch out for the boundaries and adapt when we need to. So,
let's see. I think I can tap into that and make a reference to the earlier connotation of framing. Not that you were kind of out of it, but let's say more more high in a more highlighted fashion. And and take the object as a concept, which is, and, as a sort of, religion of of of framing. That is like, the object is almost, you could write the word holy object and because there there's a holiness once you come to this sort of, sense of pure objectuality. And what I mean by this is when obviously, when something is seen as an object, the main actor there, the main creator of that is some kind of a framing in itself. But how do you come to the point that you see the object in itself? Is that you kinda come to believe in the object, to the manner that you you believe that your framing is so pure that you can keep everything outside of it itself. And this it it starts to resemble, a certain religion. That's a I know that's a little bit much, but intentionally a little bit much to say that. I think it's actually a perspective one should entertain the religious or belief part of it without, without taking it a 100%. It's a good framing for this question. Like to look at it as religion or belief. But, but of I know, of course, know that, people, in various context when they use the concept of an object, many people bring, conditions, complications. It's not always that pure. But there is a kind of a tell us or like an archetypical, sense to to object that, has almost like this dream of this pureness. And because it really cannot get there, it has to believe it believe itself there, and then build the practices from, unsupported. The last steps cannot really be supported to go to this pure object in itself separated from any context.
Yes. I mean, I think for me at least this tag begs questions or, like, digs into discussions of, like, ideal like the an ideal or abstract object and our belief in it as it is represented in our own minds, how we think about the thing versus, you know, maybe how we experience it. And so breaking down the, sort of types of mental models that we have and looking at what is, like, a platonic ideal versus, say, a formalism, which is still a reduction, but maybe it's been constructed or framed to represent a more complex phenomena versus something that is real. And when we say real, we would, strive to represent the idea that the thing represented is unrepresentable, that there's more to it than we could get into any such description or representation is Qualia. Qualia. We haven't talked about Qualia once, not yet. But, no, the key here though is that your experience of the world, whether you're designing or just experiencing it directly, is going to include some very compressed abstract objects which are ideals that you need to describe things. In some cases, even constructing a formalism starts from identifying some ideals and then interpolating between them to create representations of, you know, more complex phenomena, but ultimately any such representation falls short of reality, which is part of the reason why framing itself is a subjective act because some of the consequences of putting a, you know, a system or an algorithm or a game into the world based on a formalism, which was created out of a framing, is gonna be a consequence of the stuff you failed to represent, rather than a consequence of the stuff you represented. And so, there's an inherent quality of the act of design, which includes the, we might say, the obligation to consider the ways in which your intent and the outcome may differ, or it could be expected to differ. There is another,
let's say an alternative perspective towards objectuality, which is in bits and pieces in various academic, like, philosophy on oriented discourses. There might be somebody who has kind of, built a whole argument on it, but I I didn't know of such. But this is since they're looking at an object as an affordability frame, that like, if you actually kind of think of whatever the object is from, the operative practices that, that it it is. And is being here that it's actually an affordability frame in the sense that you're cognizant of it through how it's going to be used. And use is also here, like, putting in a place where something is not, just like, like, using a particular instrument or whatnot. So but why it's interesting for me, like, as as another way of looking at object duality as like a first of all, if we are cognizant of an object by our space of possibilities we can do through through it, and that is actually our understanding of an object. The sensible part of the object, like recognizing, oh, this is that object is merely a gateway, but the actual understanding of the object, the depth of the object is is actually the affordability space. And this is, us seeing, ourselves in using it, which is how we, from this view, understand the object. Like, it's the understanding is actually really what we do with it. And of course, thinking, etcetera, processing in that manner is here doing as well. So, and it's it's a useful perspective frame, of looking at it because, it gives you a kind of, it certainly gives different nuances, but it it also rebalances the thing, of how an object objectuality can be.
So would you say then that the the object from my perspective is exists sort of in the relationship between me and it, where I see it as a way to, to do something. So whatever affordances it provides me Yeah. Is part of the relationship between me and it, which ultimately determines
what that object means to me. Yeah. And the kind of networking associations of those cognizant what thoughts I guess is enough for here is your understanding of the object. Like you see this you you yourself in relation to this to it in this way, that way, this way, the association between that. Yes, exactly.
I made him do something. Yeah. By handing him that. I didn't really know what he was gonna do with it. Yeah.
But like my understanding of this, yes there is this pattern matching of like this is the coffee cup and now I'm doing the semi of recalling coffee cup. And this is often the because it's the most obvious level of object relation. It becomes over emphasized, but actually the depth of this is is more the, affordances in the sense of me utilizing a coffee cup and the associations between that, which is the, let's say, the actual practical space and and practical meaning
of the This was me using the object to redivert your flow of what you were saying. I didn't know what was gonna happen, but I just knew that it would change something about what you were doing if I handed it to you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I was testing actually
at what point you would react to it, like, moving slowly. Gotcha. But it it was there, which was actually kind of when it reached your space, so to speak. So maybe, I mean, that's just one instance that's not really,
like intuitively
at some point it got close enough to my space where I felt it was appropriate to retake it. Yeah. But now because you're introducing a pattern or seesaw like going back and forth. Now I actually I only give you this part. Yeah. It this is it's it there is a certain strengths to this act especially because it's also coming so close. So if I do this, it's very different from this. Right. Like, so it's but this is this would be to use this to illustrate this sort of affordability space. We are actually now working with the affordabilities
of of it and that becomes the the actualities of the object in in a sense. Well, because out of this context, I mean the reason I have this in the first place is because I wanted to carry coffee to get caffeine into my body. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But in this circumstance, it's empty and it's actually just a tool Yeah. For like exploring the way that we act through it even when it's not immediately relevant from a drinking coffee perspective. Yeah. Yeah. And and and this is the
kind of analysis that I heavily lean to when there is let's say, objectuality at play because sometimes it can be useful because it's a framing and act. And the framing act can, allow you to move in the process space, because you're framing yourself. Like, now I'm only thinking of this thing, which is an instrument for both good and bad. If you start to make it into a religion of saying my framing is, impervious, then it starts to create problems. But but in that, I tend to favor this sort of affordability space mixed with this, pattern matching at top. Because it actually makes the whole, utilization of object and objectuality into rather active rather open. And of course, it's much more useful for games because it leads you immediately to moves and actions and But I also just wanna point out that part of this has been an interesting experiment in terms
of the way that the affordances of this mug have differed from maybe the intent of the person who created it. Because this particular interaction is highly dependent on the existence of this frame and the context of this discussion Yes. And my expectations about how he will respond to me literally handing him a cup, which would normally mean something like, hey, do you want some coffee? Or do you need this vessel to get yourself some water? Etcetera. All of the ways in which that same act might be interpreted or result in different trends, these particular outcomes are really contextualized to this discussion, this frame. And so the cup means something very different here than it would in a circumstance that might be more normal for the object. But the object isn't necessarily defined by those circumstances. It's defined by, I guess, at least I would say, its affordances are defined by its present circumstances, which comes back to this, like, deep context Yes. Dependence of the meaning of objects. Yes. Yes. No disagreement there. There's also a tie back here to
early days of this conversation because it was in the frame, and the frame allows to does to say there is an early part of here because we created an artificial beginning, which is always artificial. Beginnings and ends are always artificial because they are creative facts. Anyway, but the tie is when you ask about design and the direction what what I was, talking towards this sort of that it has this sort of similar creative beginnings as a artistic creation. But then there is this interesting play with intention that has this mystery quality. And when you are talking about the there there has been an intention, sense of an intention of a designer of this coffee cup. But because we know that that's that, really does not hold it to the actual uses that the affordances, are larger than the intentions. And that creates a space of mystery because in a way, designer has to be aware that even though he has a particular intention in mind, like drinking coffee, he actually has to also deal with the affordance of space. Otherwise, his, his design view is too narrow. And that affordance of space is much wider, essentially. And also, I mean, even the intention is context dependent, but you could say that the,
the affordance space is more aggressively context dependent because it, stems from, like, high variety of context. Yeah. Like But this is a phenomena that's widely present even at least in, like, film and art. You see all the time, like, someone smashes a beer bottle and, like, turns it into a weapon. Right? Like Yeah. Clearly the beer bottle wasn't designed to be a weapon. Mhmm. But the fact that it can change forms in context is something that we see over and over again in action movies. So it's not like a deeply, I don't know, so, like, esoteric idea that the the affordances of an object and the the thing that characterizes it is context dependent. We we experience it that both when we jerry rig or hacked something to accomplish an end that it was clearly not intended for,
in any Yeah. So I think this was a long winded introduction. Very good one. Very good one. I'm gonna be done in that way. Into thinking about, when we're, like, taking this concept when we're thinking about economic design, I think. Because, I think the impression that I have is sometimes that, I mean, economists like to make as if they're, like, trying to fix the economy from, like, an objective point of view. But I think, and we were having a discussion discussion earlier how they, sort of, like, miss on they, sort of, have this fetishism of objectivity a bit. But I'm wondering, like, taking all this into account, how can we think about, like, creating, imagining basically a new world which, you know, sort of in a more positive and more, you know, commons oriented direction, in the case of this, the whole reason for this conference. Like, how do we how do we take that into account and, like, thinking about as well the use of technology, very innovative technology, very, like, you know, still just babies, really, in terms of, like, how long they've existed, and that they're going to have unintended consequences. I imagine this is something you have to consider a lot when you're talking about, you know, system design with the use of new technologies such. So with the particular new
technologies that we're talking about, which are largely, shared databases and algorithms, tools that allow us to maybe decide together to engage in a particular action space. So whether it's, you know, the rules of a smart contract or the rules of a protocol that maintains a ledger, when we engage with that as a as an economic or socioeconomic infrastructure, we are, at first order, sort of consenting to be constrained by the rules of that thing, but we are also participating in defining and evolving the rules of that thing. So I would say the primary improvement here is actually, the democracy ness of the constituency having the authority to evolve or extend that thing, but the big risk is that that affordance is actually not very clear and it's often hidden in a way that it belongs to a, we'll call it like an elite class who can directly interact and iterate the thing and that class in so far as they call it objective or neutral is abdicating the responsibility for its future evolution and the con and basically responsibility for the consequences of their choices where in practice, if we want it to help us, we need to acknowledge that it is maybe in the short term an agreement to constrain ourselves by some rules, but in the long term, and it's an agreement to evolve those rules insofar as they don't achieve our kind of desired outcomes. And, again, those desired outcomes are defined by some context, and we have a narrow context like a particular community coordinating to achieve something they're mutually intrinsically motivated to achieve versus maybe a really broad sense like the current state of the planet leaving its carrying capacity and the hope that we might coordinate in a way that we sort of mutually constrain ourselves in ways that allow us to stay within those limits. But it's very unclear what kinds of policies will be both effective and acceptable to people and so we can't preordain them. In fact, more importantly, we need a sort of operating system for coordination not just over the rules that we hold ourselves to, but the processes through which we amend those rules to attempt to achieve something that's tenable.
Yeah. This is one of these big questions to get. Like, okay. I'll I'll I kind of take a intentionally kind of practical perspective because I generally agree with with, what you said. But I I to bring another, small collection of perspectives into this. So for first of all, towards the kind of transformation evolution directions, it is not an accident that in any of the kind of surviving democratic like like, a crude term, but nevertheless, organizational, structures that we have of always coded in their own transformation rules. That is like, if you look at any, like, even the boring congress, parliament models, This is like, okay. We have this process if it this is actually something that is an addition. We have, usually just a a larger amounts of votes or maybe other process if we're actually addressing our core rules, etcetera. I mean, this is designed towards transformation in in and of itself. And but there but as we can see from the current systems, while that is almost or maybe probably even necessary, that's probably not enough. It's a it's a thing in the toolbox, but you need other tools in the box. The second one is, I'll resort back to game design because I I think it actually fits here quite well. When you're designing a game, unless it's a puzzle, it's like a board game rather than here's the right answer kind of a game. And the actual design space, the kind of, cognition of what does the player do, actually, has to move in, in a kind of prediction which I would call tendency. That is, if you can, in in a board game rather than a puzzle, completely predict what do the players do, the game has already failed. Because it will be boring and the players will actually trace that and that will happen. This is also why it's not interesting to play puzzles twice, like training shortworks. It's the same pattern. But, but on the other hand, if you don't have any idea of what the players do, you are kind of at an impasse design wise, because you are designing towards the players anyway. And once you lose completely or close to the sense of the players, well of course, that's when the play testing starts, or rather it should have started earlier. But anyway, like, but it's it's a point like, here, I'm kind of framing the the quality of this sort of tendency, and I don't actually know anyone who would have analyzed qualities of like like, what kind of images and what kind of tracings game designers do of the players and what is their way of thinking about it, formulating it. I know that they work on this sort of field of tendency, which is not exactness, but also not nothing in the middle ground. But that would be highly interesting.
Well, this is deeply analogous to sort of processing signal in the so in engineering discipline, you look at this concept of signal processing. It's an idea of imposing some structure, but having information that comes from outside. So you don't know what you're going to see, but something as simple as a low pass filter frames or presumes that the high frequency activity is noise and that the low frequency, the slower moving signal is more, fundamental, it is desired. We wanna use it to do something else. So when we look at this, we don't constrain to the point where we know that would be, you know, a deterministic, like, I want this number to be this. Instead, I say there's some process that's happening, whether it's in a person or a physical phenomena, which has some information that I don't have, and I want to bring it into my my system or into my representation without pre constraining it, without pre determining it. And so, the first order version of this is, you know, a sensor picking up some noisy signal and then some, you know, computer or analog circuit that's job is to distill from it the thing that we consider to be the information. What's interesting about this though is that the frame matters a lot, because in some circumstances what I wanna know is that low signal that is hidden behind the noise in my model, but in another circumstance maybe I'm trying to model the error the noise itself. And now the noise is the signal and the signal is just an offset that I need to remove in order to see the noise, because the thing I care about is the distribution of the noise. So even in this most basic phenomena, there is a observation where the interpretation of it is completely determined of by the frame I put on it, my my noise versus signal. And if I take this up a step further, I could have a large number of sensors or signal source and in a social system especially one where we are trying to get, you know, outcomes for the people who are in it then those people have to be thought of as the sensors of the acceptability or the validity of the thing. So although we don't have a direct measurement of what they consider good or desirable, we still have to design for a circumstance where the system trends towards making them feel good about the outcome, which is really abstract and weird because you're like, okay, I don't know what their quote unquote utility functions or value functions are, I just know that I structure a field of play, they act within it, they're constrained some, but they're afforded the ability to change the shape of that field, and over time I want that whole assemblage to move in a direction that increases their own localist assessment of whether this is, you know, again, good or acceptable or, you know, their their own sense of, I I don't like using the word utility here because I feel like it's been baked with this sort of economic utility as opposed to a more fundamental intrinsic utility where, you know, just to kinda bookend that, your financial utilities often emerge from being able to meet your real constraints. So in food, water, shelter, etcetera, and other kinds of affordances that you get access to through markets. You need money because you need to get those things, and we don't live in a a society where we generally produce all of those things for ourselves. So it's natural to specialize, and it's natural to use markets to get access to those things. But, basically, once you've achieved your sort of minimum, like, needs, then ideally, your utility functions don't need to be financial in nature. They they can be focused on what you're intrinsically motivated by. And in doing, that separation, at least I would hope to move away from a model where people's utility functions are modeled as get me more money, even though that's a kind of dominant form of an economic model. Not again, it's a framing. It's what I'm picking. I use it for a reason. But I I like using this framing because by breaking out the the intrinsic utility or the intrinsic what I do because I wanna do it part, I can actually start to acknowledge a revealed preference in that space. Like, if I allow you to achieve or if my system enables you to achieve your basic needs and then says, okay. But, like, what do you do with the rest of your energy, time, etcetera? That starts to give some representation of what is valued beyond the the financial. And I don't really know what that is, but I can at least conceptualize systems that attempt to enable people to even explore that space. Like, they don't even have to know. They are just like, cool. I can do stuff now. And we can imagine that, at least ideally, our system enables them to do that rather than constraining that.
Yeah. It's also like, because value or rather I would use the word valuation and turn it into an act is inherently dynamic. You you know, like, right now, I could, value that beer over there because the last beer, and I don't know how you got it. Whereas that same beer when there was still beer was, was not nearly as valuable. And at some point, I value the bed because I'm tired and then I don't value it at all when I after I slept. And this continues and continues by microsecond, and it's usually multi or is multilevel at the same time that you have different valuations. And this is actually a filtering engine. It's it's part of our action. But when we start to think about valuation in the sense of not con connected to immediate survivability, we enter in the sort of broadening of the valuation space and we can have a dialogue with our own inner valuation, which is much more, fundamental than this sort of artificial, you sometimes useful, but ultimately always creaking and it's artificiality of permanence of value structure. Although I think our conversations, our discourse and culture has been perverted because the the kind of the value has become so important that we are kind of almost forgetting that this is actually not only different but at almost utterly at the opposite end of how valuation works in us. And that the distance in itself is creates constantly contradictions. But couple of couple of things Yeah, relating back back to midpoints of your comment or maybe the first third and end end of the first third of this this. So because, like because I'm also still keeping sort of the frame because you made a huge question. And I'm kind of putting this challenge of, like, okay, let's refund the practicalities here. Like design practices more. Like, not so much like, here's a tool that's of and so for everything, but here's a principle and way of looking at things that is often useful or can be useful. Now first of all, there's sort of, qualities of, moving in this tender space and then including what you kind of added to that thematic. I've just had a couple of other notions. One of them is like, well, in game structures, you actually well, if you think of this as nudging. Like, you find different ways of nudging or pulling or, this kind of terms that are not controlling but creating almost like gravity towards certain kind of direction. Attraction, attractors. The you can, of course, do an attractor that is, isn't a goal like structure. Like, if, if we say here that, my goal is to, get to a meaningful way of saying the word, octopus, then, I have a fairly free route. I have an attractor. Then there could be incentives in that attractor. If I manage to a reasonable way of saying octopus, which I, by the way, just did because as a repetition of my absurdity, it works. And because the repetition is not the reason for it. Anyway, but, but if I have, like, points in that saying of the octopus, there's an incentive to that. But my way of moving towards this is sort of fluid, or let's say more freer, most likely in the structure, because now the coordinating factor is towards the end. And this is different from, like, what is generally rule structures, although would need its own concept because it's a kind of certain major subset of rules, which is like things that constraint you right now. Like, if there was a rule that I have to sit here and and and and constantly talk, like a as a harder rule, it's it functions differently because it's it's like it's a suit on my my my my, behavior right now. Here and now. And and that creates different, operators, and different, the this kind of attractor quality serve different purposes. There are others, but that's two good examples of it's not only about the tendency, it's not only about nudging, but it's even the qualities of nudging and and how they affect the behavior in general. So if I wanted to try to make some practical descriptions of the difference between
sort of like incentives within a space and shaping space. Imagine that we took the whole house and then we hid some objects in it and made a game of who found the objects. Then the shape of the space is still the house. Like, you have to move through the hallways and the stairs. And, I mean, like, if you really wanted to, you could climb up the outside and come through a window. But there's a certain set of rules that sort of dictate how one moves through physical space, which is distinct in nature from the incentives that are placed within that space to nudge you to do certain things. Yes. Be very different if we had dinner was ready and we all move through and get in the line and get our food because we're hungry from such a game as find the hidden Easter egg and whoever finds the Easter egg get some prize n f t or whatever. And so we have to be really careful about our like, separation between the concept create the laws of motion or shape of space and incentivize particular choices within that space. Yeah.
Completely agreed. And that that also brings this sort of, every rule also changes the context. Like here, there's a kind of rule like behavior as you noted to the walls in but then if the rule is changed, like now, it's find the hidden objects. Those, the behavior of those rules change or rule like walls. The walls are still the same, but because the dynamics of the space, by the attractors is different. The behavior of the walls is different. So, so they all of this kind of comes to play, into let's say, like, perception space towards this kind of design and in and of itself. Like, it's it's like almost like your tools and your lenses, which is like, remember to check from there, kind of thing. Or or I'm I'm stumped with the situation. What about this? What about this? What about this? Kind of, actions. But but but still adding practical, like, I'm I'm trying to kind of drop out this sort of, practical directions. There's one I wanted to address because it's both a complication and a possibility. And this relates to, let's call them, there's many names, but isn't it, it's kind of like opt in, opt out structures. And I can use, games as an example again because they are very pure at this. Like, if there's chess, that is actually a chess game wrapped in an offer. That is, like, it offers itself to play. And and this kind of even kind of continues within the game, because while it's kind of sometimes socially awkward to leave a game in itself and somebody might kind of, feel bad about it, it's still a fairly soft act in itself because the whole quality of offer of opting in becoming active to you by opting in is, is affects even being in the game itself. And but this has to be added with the sense that the culture of opting in and opting out is completely different, depending on how many options you have available. Like, if you if you haven't, like, you can go to certain, voting system in certain countries where there's one candidate, and that's kind of opt in or about because you can go vote or not. But, so one of the reasons for game space being, rich in this is because they are all other games. Like, like, they're not fairly normal situation. Let's play a game, then there's 20, and and, choosing from them. And of course, if you would think of economies, one one could say that some of these crypto, developments in crypto economics and the crypto organization and how many ever crypto x terms we can make is is leading to diversity in certain sense. Although, yes, that's being actually tapped from the fiat currency power, and that's a whole another kind of ones. So they opt in about, I'll squeeze the end, is, is a quality of, that is both, I think, a good design filter. But also, it's not just the the thing in itself. It's actually the ecosystem where it appears. Final point, because it's important. And this is how the structure, which is often seen as yay positive, in in general sense. I do think it's a it's a desirable direction to pursue, but it comes with its own structural problems, which are some of these problems are huge and sometimes are forgotten from, let's say earlier learnings. I'll make an example. There is, some some project this, which is favored by some, let's say Bay Area crypto circles, so at least was, which is a law structure where somebody is until it proposes structure that, hey, we make these laws, and then you just opt in, opt out of which laws you get. And and and this is the kind of agent based law structure. And now, the obvious problem with this is like, if we think of public space. And public space is not just like an extra, it's something that we need like a street or something like this. If you are in a, purely opt in of a law structure world, and you're walking on a street, and another person walks towards you, you are actually in a more limited position because it might be that you, actually that person is in laws where you cannot greet the person if you haven't made a contact with them. Or maybe they're in a law structure where they they can punch you or whatever is, like but the point is not the semi amusing examples. The point is that the actual space of operation has narrowed. So your choice of the laws by opting, opt out into the laws seems first, more flexible. So tailored, essentially, is a good word. But then because act actually the these create collated spaces, combined spaces, and the behavior of this combined spaces such as any public space behaves utterly differently. You might actually be narrowing the range of operations unless there is
a coherence between Yeah. The log of your brain. There's like a fundamental problem with that model is that Yes. It ignores the underlying ontology of shared space. Yes. So like Yeah. It's it defines something or that frames it too locally. Yeah. By framing it at the level of you and and me as individuals and ignoring the the inherent edges that arise when we co locate in space. What it's basically saying is that I might have a simple predictable design space around me through my selection, but that the collision or the inconsistencies between our choices create an explosion that's actually more unpredictable and more difficult to deal with Yeah. Than if we had just accepted, like, mutually accepted or come to terms on a set of laws and, I don't know, move to New Hampshire. Sorry. New Hampshire has this thing where there's the free state project and so there's a a tractor of libertarians in particular in The US and you know one of the observations is that that's an opportunity for people to vote with their feet and to just to live in laws that are mutually more consistent which is actually a pretty good idea, first order. Although I think, in particular, it's interesting because it it manifests around a specific set of selections as opposed to, it being an option for you can't move there and expect the laws to be what you want. You can move there and expect the laws to be consistent with what the collection of people causing that to be an attractor wants.
Yeah. And and this this pattern is actually I'm this is a fairly black and white version of the pattern. And but it's also interesting that there's a lot of support for this and which is I think, much of it contains a blindness to this pattern. But I, one other reason why I wanted to bring it about is that there are traces of the same pattern in many of the, designs or principles of approach that are moving in within crypto culture. That it it essentially looks at, the kind of the first order, that they kind of, I'm an agent, here's my choice, and and sees that act. But then this is like reading of consequence system created states, and how they kind of feedback to your position as a much more complicated read. So, this tends to be a prevalent parallel in, many of the design situations where we are. Also, for reasons that they are not even put there, they just appear there because this is a common quality. So this is what I mean that opt in opt out kind of structures while actually, a useful direction to pursue, and sometimes even fairly problematic are not as, a space that does not come with its own problems, and sometimes those problems can be rather drastic. Well, the usefulness of that frame depends on the context. So, like, my
power grid in Arizona doesn't let doesn't want me to sell power back onto the grid from solar. So now I'm sort of subjected to that, and while ostensibly I could choose to move and be in a different local grid, then I could get that choice, but, like, it costs time and money and effort and overhead to switch. So there's switching costs become a really inherent to the opt in opt out consideration. And then Mhmm. To your point about the opt in at the level of laws, I think it's kind of silly to think of laws as individual decisions because they exist Yes. To mutually constrain us Yeah. For us to opt into, you know, we, again assuming an opt in, we're opting into a set of mutual constraints because we at least ostensibly believe that our life will be better, easier, or something that we prefer as a result of having, like, I don't want to punch you in the face and I don't want to worry about being punched in the face. So the idea that that would be assault and that someone might, you know, punish me for doing it is fine because I don't foresee myself, like, wanting to do it and I would prefer to not have the right to do it Mhmm. And to have less of a concern that someone will do it to me. But this exposes a sort of spectrum of framings from the the individual to larger and larger groups Yes. Where the appropriate degree of mutual constraint, might vary widely. Like, your preference of the degree of mutual constraint varies widely. Yeah. And
so, one could make a
I I would love it if next year, you guys can do, like, a joint, like, cybernetic design workshop or something like that. I think that would be very fun where, you use someone saying the octopus is like one of the same ones. I mean And then make making try to adjust those designs based on, but using the word octopus is like one of the main functions.
I think experimental would be a key theme to that. Like I I think actually the, I can feel like the the while the conversation is good, there's amusing quality like we were wearing suits and we're both slightly more stiff than we normally are. And and and I I think like the there is this sort of, there are some interesting possibilities that come through curve balls, like, as the term goes, like, surprising. So if there was cybernetic curve balls, so it well, maybe maybe that's a that's an interesting direction. Yes.
That's often just, like, induced changes. So you start with a framing of some sort of, we'll call it cybernetic game Mhmm. Where we want people to engage in the act of designing the game they're playing, but that we create or enable some sort of external shocks that force them to adapt the game without telling them in advance like that those shocks are gonna happen Yeah. Or giving them specific recommendations about how to adapt the game in response. Yeah. And so, it's really about seeing what kind of affordances they discover for themselves and adapting the game in order to achieve maybe some, you know, external incentivized thing, but like the path to it or even the means of measuring it is left a little hazy. Yeah. So that when uncertainties arise, there's a motivation to come up with creative adaptations.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And and one can create, uncertainties or now make a tie to an earlier con conversation, what I call contours of indeterminacy and, which you, have different names for, but we've both been looking at. From from, for me, the term like is contours of indeterminacy in the sense that the in is in brackets. So it's the, almost like a switch that it's both determinate and indeterminate, which is a space that is uncertain, but it you also know that this definitely won't happen. And then you have might also know that there is a tendency that this and this happens, but there's also an, well, you can go from there to probabilities, etcetera. But the it's a it's a design area. And I've been, looking at actually different techniques of, designing such contours and and how what kind of ways there are to even spawn them to existence. But spawn them to existence in some kind of a controlled manner that you have some some kind of a sense of what is the contour of the determinancy, indeterminacy.
The so a really physical example that manifest this is in medical robotics. Right? You design, say, an arm or something that is is intended to be able to perform certain types of procedures. But as it turns out, there's, like, layers of design from the the material the physical structure of, say, the arm, which has specific ways it can move and can't move. And then there's, like, layers of software and then maybe even, like, you know, control by if it's fully automated, in theory, you would have some algorithms moving things. But if you have a doctor or human sort of moving things, there's a extent to which either the algorithm or the human exercises the degrees of control over the robotic arm. So the non determinacy is the level of what the the algorithm or the doctor does in response to their feedback path, observation, and action, but there's a determinacy in the set of configurations the arm can be in. And so you use the physical restrictions on the arm to protect against certain kinds of movements that might be, you know, associated to harm. So not that the algorithm or the doctor would harm someone intentionally, but in order to reduce the likelihood of a harmful movement, you actually constrain physically a subset of the motions and then you leave the remaining degrees of freedom to the the operator or controller whether it's a human or an algorithm, but it only has control over the remaining indeterminacies and it's restricted by the determinacies of the actual arm itself, the lengths of the rods and the the ways in which it can bend. And so in robotics you would call this a configuration space of the arm. It's the set of positions that can get into as a consequence of the actual, like, material construction of the thing, and it's distinguished from the sequence of instructions that leads to it being in any particular position for any particular reason.
Mhmm. And and to continue from that back to the challenge of trying to provide this sort of design views towards your question long time ago, which will contain everything towards a better economy. Whether, or, but so so why are such things important? Like this kind of a approach of even a presence of indeterminacy or as a rough term, but, like, with all these qualities in and of itself. So there is this interesting quality of, if you're designing systems for humans, if you make an optimal system, this touches by the way on, like, singularity and its paradigms and acceleration is if you design a system where you've, are essentially working to create an optimal solution to every situation. What, what you often leave out is that, if you act design the human out, that there is no actually decision power to the human, human operator in the space. You have, made the space completely dystopic. Because the motivating factor for us is the empowerment. And the fact of being able to make a decision that has a meaning is a naturally empowering act. So creating the best system, which in itself has optimized the humans out, is a dystopia. However good the system is, because it's actually not getting most out of most. It's actually creating, I think all of these designs also address our states of being. And the kind of array or range of our states of being and the
Yeah. I just wanna say that like, you know, the closest thing to so like the framing of optimization at all assumes some some singleton objective to optimize for whereas in in this practice of acknowledging the human and sort of valuing their agency, if you're maximizing for some sort of potentiality on their part, the set of things that they can express, you have of course immediately recurs to the problem of the conflict between the individual preferences to exercise their own agency. So anything like a solution or even a temporary solution, an instance of a solution that's evolving in time has to exist in the trade off space between the affordances to the individual and the, sort of restrictions upon the group. And so you end up with this abstract trade off space between framing at the level of, you know, an individual, framing at the level of, you know, all of humanity and then this question of like, you know, how many different points along the spectrum of frames do we need to flesh out in order to ensure that people are like free in a sense to exercise their own agency and to pursue the things that they're motivated intrinsically by while also, ensuring that, you know, my my agency isn't being used to sort of exploit or harm people either proximate, like, you know, immediately before me or as we often see with our current, like, dominant modes, we push the externalities so far away from us that we can sort of impinge upon people that we we don't see either in space or in time. Right? In another place or in the future, our agency that we're exercising is creating a distant harm. And so how do we constrain ourselves now in a way that appropriately accounts for those spatial or temporal distant harms, while at the same time not reducing to a dystopia where we have a, you know, authoritarian process telling us what to do. And so there's this really deep challenge of, okay, I don't want to over constrain, that's a really big problem. But I don't want to under constrain, that creates really big problems. And so there's this awkward middle ground where we have to be both constrained and unconstrained at once in a way that allows us to feel and exercise our own agency, as well as sufficiently, constrain it that we are not even inadvertently causing harms.
Right. So we're nearing about an hour and a half. So I want to get to my question that I ask everyone. Okay. Since we're at the crypto commons gathering, I need to ask you, what do the crypto commons mean to you?
It's the hardest question.
I know it's another big question that you don't like bigger.
Do you want me to go first?
If if you want like I'm I mean, I I can go
whichever. You can even talk to us. Make it up as I go. So Okay. I mean Yeah. So so I mean I kinda yeah. The terminology crypto commons, like, is introduced to me by the existence of this this event, this organization. Right? I was helping create the common stack, but we introduced the term commons to that in order to evoke Ostrom, and in particular to put some attention on the paid principles and some of these concepts that we felt were being left behind especially by organizations who are endeavoring to accomplish not financial goals, but rather, you know, community or, things related to may building, maintaining, public goods. And so if we're talking about resources and in particular resources that are not not being measured financially, then we end up having to put boundaries around it, understanding what stewardship goes into it, who has access to it, under what circumstances. And for lack of a better term, that led to taking commons as a lens or a frame to examine certain types of cryptosystems. They are not exclusively, interpretable as commons, but they that lens provides some, some focus on some concepts that needed attention. Then more broadly, like this event as sort of enabling discourse around how different people engage with, let's say, non financial value creation, measurement, and what kind of efforts we might undertake to kind of create more things and maintain, in particular, maintain more things that aren't best measured by how much money is this gonna make me or, like, a a purely capitalist lens that says it is valuable precisely because it produces more, you know, financially measured capital or instead looking at, like, natural capital or knowledge as capital or these other forms of value that don't, that actually, like, feed into our individual assessments of value, our intrinsic motivations, but don't line clear align clearly with extrinsic motivations because, you know, maybe I want this knowledge or this tool or this thing to be maintained, but no one's going to pay me to do that or there's no, you know, self referential capitalist process that says doing that will make me more of this sort of financial instrument. And so at least for me, I guess, crypto commons is gonna come back to expanding the lens and looking at, the ways in which the technology of blockchains, crypto networks, content addresses, these new emerging web three technologies can be understood or put to use in ways other than, you know, again, merely saying, I have a financialized kind of capital, and I'm going to get more of it. But there's a lot. That's like more of an opening than a than a narrowing. Right? It's Yeah. This lens is reductive. What other lenses are relevant, and can we explore them together?
Yeah. The these these questions are such mind traps because, not mind traps. Not mind, but mine kaboom thing. Because you're kind of positing this move which where everything one says becomes kind of your commentary on the community. And while making a huge question at the same time, you you said I have problematic phrase. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You said you're greatly, by having kind of like a, a, it was good strategy to play this sort of, solid position that you had like on the basis like you were you had this history and etcetera. So so you're kind of covered, right? I avoided the mind. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah. But I have to cut up and deal with this, essentially, kind of restatement in a way or its own statement of being bridging crypto and commons in this situation, which kind of let let's me straight into the mind. So I have to You could take my move and make me go again. No. No. I I I will jump on the mine. Let's see where this goes. So okay. Okay. It of course relates also why I'm here. I mean, there are many reasons. But maybe what I would highlight, is, so in terms of processing something to the level of, even an economy, never mind the economy, or or or network of economics to, prop reporting to an economy itself, it is almost obvious, I think, that you are your analytic space is call it culture, call it like all the large terms you can put, like you cannot simply take, few approaches and and and put aside, culture view, social view, etcetera. Because economy has a system. It it's kind of an awkward word because it it seems like a noun, but it's really an ecosystem. What what the concept entails, that is more like between verb and a noun and in this sense. And, all of this creates a situation that you you have to be inclusive in your tent. Methods of analytics, methods of, construction, etcetera, like, or you as much as you can, you should include all the points of view, all the analytics that you can. Now if you look at crypto, it has a cultural history, and there's certainly certain, emphasis on its, culture that it it has put a lot of focus in certain areas, and then it's kind of not completely forgotten, but, put aside certain other approaches. And in that palette that it has, it has, crucial holes, critical holes in in in terms of, observation. There are areas that are not maybe completely blind, but kind of like a roughly very, very roughly mapped territory. And and this creates a kind of skewed map in itself like it like, while at the same time creating implications for social behavior as a whole. Potentially, if this whatever crypto form, expands to the whole world, it has implications for the, our economy and ecosystem as a whole, including social system. Yet, if it has not mapped, the points of view that, are somewhat different in the takes than, say, the interest of crypto currently, you are going to have problems. And this is all kinda normal for a young field, young culture. But if one thinks then, okay. What kind of moves one could make to, insert kind of antidotes? It's like, like a create a search in certain kind of area. Then well, there's many moves to make, but I think commons like linking crypto to commons, which kind of pushes it into, different kind of play position, is is a useful move altogether. It's because it's both economical, but it also brings this sort of it opens the can of worms or to questions of the social, and and opens a doorway to bring many of those approaches in. It's not a magical pill. It's not the antidote, but it's it's it's like a useful squirt of, lick no. That doesn't work. Useful shifting of the light, to,
and and a useful move in forcing crypto to consider at least in this context. If we think about it back to our discussion of objects and their context Yeah. I think what we could say is that the the crypto network technology is the family of technologies that that they that they represent are being only viewed within a certain set of narrow use contexts. And so, the first step to expanding horizons is injecting visibility into alternative use contexts, exploring them, which does two things. One, you might discover new and powerful, matches between the technology and use context, but you also unlock the idea that we don't actually know what its use contexts are yet. And so we're probing the the space, the possibility space twice in one move. We're saying, here's another use context for this technology, commons and commons like institutions. And at the second level, we're saying we've gone kind of from one to two in a way in saying, look, use context greatly affect the way we see the object. Mhmm. Therefore, continue to imagine new use context. And it's actually in that that extra space where I think the real possibility for for social change is coming because commons is still, historical use context. It's not an it's not a, hey, people plus situation equals, you know, novel context, introduce a tool into the novel context and try to find new ways of, I don't know, achieving goals. And I guess that got a little abstract again, but I think what I wanna hang on here is that, you know, crypto round one was lots of recreation of, we'll call them capitalist forms, and a lot of concentration around, around those, context solution matches. By introducing another context, commons, and looking at solution, you know, matches to that framing, you get new solutions that could really help us, and you unlock the idea of, oh, what other use context can we frame where this technology will allow us to, achieve something that's novel in its, in its its lived experience. Novel in in what we get from it. And and it's not actually just a recreation of a previously observed institutional form using the new affordances.
Yeah. And one one I just wanna say that was very beautifully said and I love it. Like you're holding this spoon.
Yeah. It's like, it's it's the There is a It's a weapon. It's it's also a symbol of an instrumentality and so it carries through this, which is also like adventure framing. Anyway, that's, that's too much and things. Yes, let's contest. The one, well I had actually one practical small addition to that, which is, which actually just hones in on one point you made, which is the, you you mentioned the kind of historicity of, commons. And it's actually good that in this, case, the context has a weight of history because it, it resists, like, complete real definition. It has its own weight that it can kind of brought into the scales of this. So they are cross spread, like, in a way, putting crypto commons is, is cross breeding of meaning. But in this, like, it also, of course, brings all the historicity in itself. And it and with that history, crypto cannot simply come and redefine itself and, because the history will come back and insert its own elements. So, yeah, I think commons might be an element that resist becoming, a kind of crypt crypto value, crypto ideology in disguise. That's that's, I guess, the summation of that.
Nice. This was a really mind stretching conversation. I think anyone who listened, got a really good mind stretch. But, just to finish off, you guys wanna quickly leave some, your plugs. Where can people keep up with you and your work?
I don't know. Do do I want to plug things?
No. You don't have to. You can you can you don't have to take my free
I reframe reframe reframe plugging because it's this understandable but kind of annoying practice. So I improvise a new framing for blogging. So what should you do if you're interested in this? Now the normal would be contact me and these places and this value, identity, and that one, and so on. But there is another way to look at it. If you were interested, the, like, position of what's the interest within you, the whoever listening in whatever format. And then think from that position of does it prefer to, does it form itself to a question? Then that might be a question, that you can even ask me. And if if if it's a valuable enough the question to ask then you certainly can find my contact information because it's not that part of the park. So so but then you've already started the way in a kind of fashion that has a reflectivity coded in. So I think that's a better recipe. Because the contact issuing point is actually more perhaps more in or that sometimes more important than the target point. So this is to issue the contact issuing point of the methodology of building the contact itself. And also creating a reflection of what other kinds of contact issuing processes they might form for themselves because it's a useful thing to think in this contact contact contact contact world. Okay. That's it. So we have injected some friction between reaching Pekka. Yeah. I probably can do the same thing Yeah. Because I'm definitely more,
attention constrained than I would like, maybe. But I would recommend going to check out the sort of emerging token engineering community as it is sort of the home for a lot of the co creation of sort of method and practice, at least around some of the ideas that I expressed. It's not, you know, exhaustive, but it's a really good place to, start your own journey and that does include interacting with folks like ourselves. But it is intentional about, not making it about, well, go talk to those people. It becomes engage engage with those ideas, apply them, participate, etcetera. Because I think one of the traps that we see right now is that our, you know, attention status economy, begs for lots of discussions and not so much practice. And as esoteric as this has been, both of us are just explaining things that we've come to know through our own practice of design and experiencing the intended and unintended consequences of those designs and if you want to engage with those ideas you have to design stuff.
Mhmm. Yeah. And it's it it is like at least, I think the attempt was and then I do think it was present from both of our sides that while there's a lot of, here's how to consider this, they were actually aimed towards the design. Because in in a way, this or that framework in general, because, of course, in any such act, there is a considerable process as the crucial layer on top of it. And and having this, different points of consideration is a key factor to how designs come to be. It might not be an immediate directed. You cannot see that because I thought of this. This happened. Sometimes it's it is even that, but usually not. But it's it's a way to look at things in in terms of avoiding perhaps pitfalls or at least, lessening the likelihood of them. And at the same time, maybe moving into areas that otherwise would be unconsidered in terms of the design. So it's it is a kind of a buffer, that, of processing, that is, I think, crucial towards the design itself. And I think most of the things we said were towards that. So I'm making the argument to be we were really practical. It it was just one the step when you're facing practicality, that was the state. Like, this was a person looking towards practicality.
So all models are wrong. Yeah. Some are useful. If you're designing something, you're selecting a model, you're making it performative, therefore imposing upon people who are engaging with it, and therefore, we must mind the epistemic gap or the gap between the way we frame or prescribe the system, and how it actually ends up behaving. Yeah. I would agree. Wow.
Thanks a lot. This has been an incredible conversation.
Do we need to put you in the chair and you can also help?
