@@ -8,345 +8,85 @@ ship = "~lagrev-nocfep"
88image = "https://live.staticflickr.com/4322/35891780782_4179f476f9_k.jpg"
99+++
1010
11−_A version of the following was presented by ~lagrev-nocfep at the [MTAConf 2022
12−conference on “The Decentralization of Power”](https://www.mtaconf.org/)._
11+_A version of the following was presented by ~lagrev-nocfep at the [MTAConf 2022 conference on “The Decentralization of Power”](https://www.mtaconf.org/)._
1312
1413**✿**
1514
16−IN THE BEGINNING, _God created the prokaryotes. And the
17−prokaryotes were without nucleus and organelle; and structural
18−simplicity was upon the face of the deep. And chemotaxis moved it upon
19−the face of the waters._
20−
21−A single-celled organism possesses many advantages, notably simplicity
22−of form. Being largely indistinguishable, they have no differentiation
23−or specialization. Prokaryotes often form large colonies, such as the
24−cyanobacteria. Some prokaryotes discovered early on that it paid better
25−to consume resources that had already been processed into usable form by
26−another cell, rather than to process those resources oneself. Thus
27−predator and prey were born, and they have always exemplified divergent
28−competitive evolutionary strategies. The resulting arms race meant that
29−predators were continually adapting to better extract resources from
30−prey, while prey were evolving to evade, resist, fight, or poison
31−predators. Selection pressures applied at individual, species, and clade
32−levels, lead to speciation across deep time.
33−
34−More complex forms seemed better able to evade predators, and thus
35−simple symbiotic alliances between differentiated prokaryotes evolved
36−into the eukaryotes (yielding specialized features such as the nucleus
37−and mitochondria) and multicellular life forms. Simpler forms also
38−abounded, including the liminal virus. Viruses are forms of near-life so
39−simple that they simply exploit cells to reproduce. They are entirely
40−predatory or at best symbiotic with other life. Evasion of pathogenic
41−disease, or disequilibrated colonization by simpler forms of life, has
42−been a---if not the---primary driver towards increasing complexity in
43−multicellular life.[^1]
15+IN THE BEGINNING, _God created the prokaryotes. And the prokaryotes were without nucleus and organelle; and structural simplicity was upon the face of the deep. And chemotaxis moved it upon the face of the waters._
16+
17+A single-celled organism possesses many advantages, notably simplicity of form. Being largely indistinguishable, they have no differentiation or specialization. Prokaryotes often form large colonies, such as the cyanobacteria. Some prokaryotes discovered early on that it paid better to consume resources that had already been processed into usable form by another cell, rather than to process those resources oneself. Thus predator and prey were born, and they have always exemplified divergent competitive evolutionary strategies. The resulting arms race meant that predators were continually adapting to better extract resources from prey, while prey were evolving to evade, resist, fight, or poison predators. Selection pressures applied at individual, species, and clade levels, lead to speciation across deep time.
18+
19+More complex forms seemed better able to evade predators, and thus simple symbiotic alliances between differentiated prokaryotes evolved into the eukaryotes (yielding specialized features such as the nucleus and mitochondria) and multicellular life forms. Simpler forms also abounded, including the liminal virus. Viruses are forms of near-life so simple that they simply exploit cells to reproduce. They are entirely predatory or at best symbiotic with other life. Evasion of pathogenic disease, or disequilibrated colonization by simpler forms of life, has been a---if not the---primary driver towards increasing complexity in multicellular life.[^1]
4420
4521**✿**
4622
47−The Internet began in the late 1960s, born of scientific alliance
48−between the Cold War Department of Defense and the academic research
49−community.[^2] This community had a signal advantage over many
50−subsequent communities: it was dominated by strong norms of discourse
51−which shaped the professionalism of the community. This is not to
52−discount the significance of courtly intrigue, of course, which deftly
53−exploited tensions between competing systems.[^3] [^4] [^5]
54−Throughout this era, though, the Internet generally functioned as a
55−real-name high-trust environment---if not exactly of peers, at least of
56−colleagues.
57−
58−The Internet evolved as a coordination mechanism---literally a nervous
59−system incarnate in copper and silicon---particularly through the Usenet
60−days of the 1980s. In our days of heightened online tension and mediated
61−preference cascades, it is rather quaint to go back and look at what
62−qualified as email flame wars at the time (e.g. Torvalds/Tanenbaum). One
63−hallmark of the Usenet era, however, is a gradually eroding social
64−trust: spam was invented[^6] and Internet-based scams started to spin
65−up. Pseudonymity gained in popularity as a countermeasure to both of
66−these as well as restrictions on discourse. The revelation that
67−persistent digital records could cost someone's job[^7] further fueled a
68−cyberpunk-like obsession with identity control and hacking.
69−
70−Computer viruses could propagate for the first time: it never made much
71−sense to build a computer virus until systems were connected. Although
72−John von Neumann and others early explored the possibility of
73−mathematical or code structures which could self-replicate, it was not
74−until the Creeper virus in the 1970s that self-replicating code was
75−observed in the wild. And like a bacillus in an immune system-free host,
76−code-based computer viruses began to spread from the 1980s onwards.
77−
78−The crisis arrived in the form of the World Wide Web. Founded initially
79−on a belief in the democratization of information, the Web rapidly
80−became dominated by a handful of large corporations (henceforth
81−"megacorps"). User experience became the predominant driver of adoption,
82−leading to rapid preference cascades as new platforms became available.
83−Any child of the 90s or earlier can recite the lived litany: Ebay,
84−MySpace, Friendster. Initially these served as proofs-of-concept, then
85−became the only significant player (until the next killer app came
86−along). Search engines drove discovery, then focused attention
87−asymmetrically. The "walled garden" approach of AOL, then Apple and
88−Facebook, led to concentrations of users which tipped the balance from
89−single webpage hosts presenting their own idiosyncratic views to
90−corporate-approved genericity and ultimately censorship.[^8]
23+The Internet began in the late 1960s, born of scientific alliance between the Cold War Department of Defense and the academic research community.[^2] This community had a signal advantage over many subsequent communities: it was dominated by strong norms of discourse which shaped the professionalism of the community. This is not to discount the significance of courtly intrigue, of course, which deftly exploited tensions between competing systems.[^3].
24+
25+Throughout this era, though, the Internet generally functioned as a real-name high-trust environment---if not exactly of peers, at least of colleagues.
26+
27+The Internet evolved as a coordination mechanism---literally a nervous system incarnate in copper and silicon---particularly through the Usenet days of the 1980s. In our days of heightened online tension and mediated preference cascades, it is rather quaint to go back and look at what qualified as email flame wars at the time (e.g. Torvalds/Tanenbaum). One hallmark of the Usenet era, however, is a gradually eroding social trust: spam was invented[^6] and Internet-based scams started to spin up.
28+
29+Pseudonymity gained in popularity as a countermeasure to both of these as well as restrictions on discourse. The revelation that persistent digital records could cost someone's job further fueled a cyberpunk-like obsession with identity control and hacking.[^7]
30+
31+Computer viruses could propagate for the first time: it never made much sense to build a computer virus until systems were connected. Although John von Neumann and others early explored the possibility of mathematical or code structures which could self-replicate, it was not until the Creeper virus in the 1970s that self-replicating code was observed in the wild. And like a bacillus in an immune system-free host, code-based computer viruses began to spread from the 1980s onwards.
32+
33+The crisis arrived in the form of the World Wide Web. Founded initially on a belief in the democratization of information, the Web rapidly became dominated by a handful of large corporations (henceforth "megacorps"). User experience became the predominant driver of adoption, leading to rapid preference cascades as new platforms became available. Any child of the 90s or earlier can recite the lived litany: Ebay, MySpace, Friendster. Initially these served as proofs-of-concept, then became the only significant player (until the next killer app came along). Search engines drove discovery, then focused attention asymmetrically. The "walled garden" approach of AOL, then Apple and Facebook, led to concentrations of users which tipped the balance from single webpage hosts presenting their own idiosyncratic views to corporate-approved genericity and ultimately censorship.[^8]
9134
9235**✿**
9336
94−When was the first time you did something in the physical world because
95−of something you read or encountered online? For generations born after
96−the advent of the Web, they may not recall such a time when meatspace
97−existence wasn't driven by life online. As Internet data sources have
98−overwhelmed traditional media, publishing, and distribution services,
99−the resulting tsunami of information and informatization has swept into
100−every corner of lived human experience in technological societies. The
101−psychological (memetic) virus problem is much greater than actual code
102−viruses. The ongoing universal exposure to alien and internally
103−incoherent value systems has undergirded the well-documented crisis of
104−credibility (collapse of meaning) that all Western institutions are
105−experiencing today. The World Wide Web and its technological
106−predecessors acted as a cultural petri dish of clean agar, which grew
107−every spore and germ which fell upon it. We live in the midst of a
108−memetic epidemic because of the World Wide Web, and the dominant strain
109−is corporate, approved by a marketing department and run through a
110−search-engine optimization algorithm.
111−
112−The turn towards a low-trust then zero-trust environment was inevitable
113−if anything like an analogy with prokaryotic evolution holds true. The
114−megacorp platforms are in a way worse than a purely zero-trust
115−environment, because they don't advertise that the world is zero-trust.
116−Thereby they lure the unwary into transgressing arbitrary global norms
117−and courting the wrath of social media mobs and the concomitant loss of
118−access to their data held in "trust." To mix a metaphor, megacorps are
119−apex predators---at best, sheepdogs with a strong strain of wolfishness;
120−at worst, tar pits manned by various bad-faith actors. The pre-Web
121−cypherpunks were right: "Privacy is the power to selectively reveal
122−oneself to the world."[^9] If anything, they were too narrow; not only
123−their valued "open society" (polyvalent crypto-anarchy) but _any_
124−non-megacorp society at all requires true privacy.
125−
126−What cyberspace (and human culture writ broadly) needed was an immune
127−system---and in good Darwinian form, such an immune system has been
128−evolving before our eyes. An immune system formally consists of layers
129−with increasing specificity: first surface barriers, then the innate
130−immune system, and finally the adaptive immune system. The objective of
131−the immune system is to protect the organism: in this case, human
132−sociality and agency.
133−
134−First, what is human sociality? Human culture has been the means of
135−participating in the Great Discussion which ranges from the earliest
136−days of oral culture to the birth of literacy and libraries down to our
137−day. High culture and low culture have both articulated and preserved
138−valuable insights and forms of human flourishing. However, throughout
139−the 20^th^ century and particularly by the means of the consumer
140−revolution, our lives have been thoroughly colonized by capital and
141−commercial instruments. So-called "economies of scale" have disrupted
142−smallholders, artisans, and shopkeepers to the extent that these have
143−been virtually eradicated from the modern landscape in favor of the
144−plastic and polluting "dark Satanic mills." Although small-scale
145−"provident living" has supported gardening, canning, and home
146−production, none of this has survived across a large enough cultural
147−segment to matter macroscopically, and it has unfortunately been tarred
148−with the "prepper" brush that delegitimizes economic downsizing as
149−antisocial because anticapitalist. The siren call of cheap consumer
150−goods has ushered in a generational collapse in self-sufficiency and
151−resulted in the complete colonization of entertainment, food
152−consumption, and self-care by massive corporate brands. Not only have
153−physical goods entered a post-consumer phase, but only certain classes
154−of ideas, attitudes, political stances, regional accents, and
155−sensibilities enjoy the sanction of megacorp sociality. There is
156−essentially no native culture left, only that forged in the enterprise
157−brand management office.[^10]
158−
159−In an immune system, _surface barriers_ are designed to make it hard for
160−exogenous agents to enter a cell or organism; in our analogy, the
161−primary surface barrier was the match of physical separation to
162−psychological separation. Surface barriers were rendered finally
163−obsolete by the launch of the World Wide Web and its subsequent
164−infiltration of every aspect of human culture. To the extent they exist
165−today, it is a matter of ignorance, self-discipline, or happy accident.
166−
167−The _innate immune system_ responds non-specifically to pathogens. Any
168−immune system must have a way of deciding what is _me_ and what is
169−_not-me_. Framed as an identity problem in a zero-trust environment,
170−users have evolved several ways to uniquely identify agents without
171−reference to legacy systems. Chief among these means is the blockchain,
172−introduced by Bitcoin for control and transaction of digital assets and
173−since much exploited beyond its design intent. Ethereum-based ERC tokens
174−represent tweaks of this identity concept, as do many other blockchain
175−platforms.
176−
177−Identity is still fluid and polysemous, but in certain key instances it
178−is indelibly demonstrable.[^11] The individual actor has the capability
179−to express itself with many public faces or none; one of these typically
180−enjoys government sanction and liability, but it is no more _real_ than
181−the others, only more legible to regulation and taxation.[^12]
182−
183−Another aspect of the innate immune system is the public visibility of
184−code. Open source has developed an ethic of transparency on
185−epistemological grounds (i.e. you have a right to know what code you are
186−running) and practical grounds. (Linus's law: "given enough eyeballs,
187−all bugs are shallow."[^13])
188−
189−The _adaptive immune system_ responds to specific pathogenic incursions.
190−Particular conditions arise, whether through social, regulatory,
191−military, or other requirements, which must be met with specialized
192−forms that are thereafter in evolutionary competition with the external
193−factor. For instance, one megacorp solution to what it perceives as a
194−threat, i.e. unsanctioned memes, is to attempt to mandate the ultimate
195−traceability of any image's provenance.[^14] The Internet immune system
196−thus evolves to further obfuscate legibility and enhance individual
197−control and self-determination by shifting to less-traceable
198−technologies such as the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). The point is
199−not whether or not a salient technology such as deepfakes, 3D-printed
200−firearms, deviant scientific or political thought[^15], or even the
201−DRM-free sharing of copyrighted material can be contained[^16]; the
202−experience with export-grade cryptography[^17] has already shown that
203−regulatory attempts ultimately fail. The philosophical question is what
204−kind of world will evolve (a _fait accompli_ driven by factors beyond
205−any individual or office) and the practical question is how any
206−particular group of actors can preserve their own agency, autonomy, and
207−ambit of action.
208−
209−The first decentralized autonomous organization, "The DAO" (Đ)
210−itself[^18], was created in 2016 as a way of distributing ownership and
211−stake in a joint venture capital fund. Đ was a new form of organization
212−in that it was essentially a mathematical entity, a set of smart
213−contracts on the blockchain to which anyone had access. Đ lived up at
214−least to "decentralized" and "autonomous." No money was held centrally,
215−with token-based authentication yielding the right to vote on projects.
216−Having set the criteria for membership and investment, Đ then operated
217−in truly democratic fashion until an exploit of imperfectly written
218−smart contract code led to theft, crisis, and the reorganization of the
219−Ethereum blockchain itself.
220−
221−While the heirs of Đ serve a role in the current Internet immune system,
222−the original was formed in response to exogenous regulatory concerns,
223−notably ongoing governmental insistence on restricting investment to the
224−already-wealthy. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and other
225−agencies have in place arbitrary investor requirements which would make
226−little sense even if pegged to something like inflation or index rather
227−than the rapidly-devaluing petrodollar. Nominally put in place to
228−protect the naïve from getting scammed, these restrictions have had the
229−pernicious effect of pulling up the ladder behind the _actuel riche_.
230−
231−DAOs have rapidly evolved as a way of distributing ownership and stake
232−in a purely democratic way. (As an aside, the word "democracy" has been
233−much abused, but here I use it in a sense much like the Greek original:
234−the holders of an immutable and indelible token cast their secured votes
235−to govern their society.) DAOs represent a resurgence of the sovereign
236−city-state in new guise. Will this be enough to evade "imperial"
237−aggregates which dominate today's Web?
238−
239−Decentralized autonomous organizations, zero-knowledge cryptographic
240−proofs, cryptocurrencies, proof-of-identity systems, and their
241−as-yet-unborn kin represent the evolution of an immune system on top of
242−the Darwinian churn of the legacy Internet. The stakes are necessarily
243−high: possession is _de facto_ ownership, the other end of the stick
244−from "not your keys, not your coins" (the old cryptocurrency chestnut).
245−The focus is currently on ownership of money, non-fungible tokens, and
246−similar assets, but broadly speaking such systems allow the
247−authenticated ownership of all data and assets one holds, from chat
248−messages to market shares to physical real estate. There may be good
249−reasons to retain the legacy system for some classes of physical or
250−legal artifacts, but at minimum these will be in competition with purely
251−autonomous constructs. (As an aside, I am of the philosophical opinion
252−that legal recognition should not be sought generally for new forms of
253−organization, as any legibility to legacy systems opens new attack
254−surfaces in an immunological sense.) "Code is law."[^19]
255−
256−A decentralized autonomous organization seems to be at least the first
257−two: having set the criteria for membership, the organization can act as
258−the (distributed[^20], possibly unknown in the zero-knowledge proof
259−sense) stakeholders direct. This form is still somewhat "yeasty" in that
260−like cyanobacteria it acts as an undifferentiated mass, and we should
261−expect further innovations in DAO-like entities.[^21] The most salient
262−epithet of a DAO is "decentralized"; one can imagine hierarchical,
263−concentric, or role-specialized DAOs as well as other taxonomically
264−related forms, just as one can imagine progressively less organized
265−instances in a chaos-happy Internet.
266−
267−Like the first mutant with a new gene, Đ itself failed. Many lessons can
268−be drawn from that failure, including the criticality of getting smart
269−contract code absolutely correct ("code is law"), and how to administer
270−a blockchain in the presence of massive fraud. And indeed, what has
271−happened to the blockchain world of decentralized finance? Millisecond
272−differentials in responsiveness lead to huge swings in profitability of
273−transactions. Frontrunner bots watch algorithmically for transactions
274−they can complete faster than the original source, thereby making money
275−on asymmetric knowledge.[^22] Zero-day exploits of code abound,
276−heralding a need for more thorough vetting and more expressive and
277−secure smart contract languages.
278−
279−Blockchains (and thus DAOs via Ethereum) operate as proof-of-work,
280−proof-of-stake, etc. This provides node operators with a way of
281−verifying consensus reality and thereby cementing a record of digital
282−transactions. Future innovations hold forth the possibility of secure
283−proof-of-identity blockchains (such as the Uqbar Layer 1 smart contract
284−blockchain on Urbit[^23]), wherein each node which can provide concrete
285−cryptographic evidence of its identity gets a vote on the consensus.
286−
287−We must consider modern systems to necessarily interact at the pinnacle
288−intensity of competence and competition: any differential advantage that
289−can be exploited to outcompete an adversary not only can be exploited
290−but _should_ be. Illegibility, redundancy, and apposite complexity are
291−allies in the immune fight to maintain identity and ownership in the
292−modern Internet.[^24] Any system which does not have an operational
293−DAO-like layer is immunocompromised. All tools for the individual and
294−collective need to be architected around a zero-trust adversarial world.
295−They also need to guard the embers of community and enable new growth.
296−
297−In a nutshell, the early Internet was a cocktail party. By the age of
298−Usenet and into the World Wide Web era, the Internet evolved into a
299−player-versus-player defect--defect equilibrium in which brigading,
300−spamming, and anonymity are rational adaptive behaviors. Indeed,
301−anonymity is barely a protection given the lengths to which governments
302−and megacorps go to prevent truly untraceable usage. This approach is
303−adaptive for agencies which have given up on any other model of reality,
304−fundamentally lacking a vision of humans as other than atomized
305−individual krill for the megacorp apex predators: consumers for the
306−consumers. The legacy megacorp Internet has become a crab bucket, always
307−drawing everything back into itself in a dysfunctional and frankly
308−satanic way.
309−
310−Communities built on decentralized Web3 platforms such as Mastodon,
311−Fediverse, and Urbit[^25] have stepped back from the purely PvP world of
312−the globally-namespaced social media Internet. These today have more of
313−a block party feel, wherein one can wander from house to house or room
314−to room and encounter some of the same faces in the same or new guise.
315−Conversations can drop and resume anew in very different locales with
316−largely the same composition. Marrying the underlying cryptographic
317−identity requirements of DAOs to communication tools and databases
318−yields a strong stable solution to the problem of retaining a foothold
319−of personal identity from which to coordinate one's multifaceted digital
320−life. IPFS, Sovrin Foundation, Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, and Urbit all
321−offer their take on this requirement. Even a Signal chat group running
322−its own server is a kind of token-free DAO.
323−
324−Since the Renaissance, essentially all theology has been humanist in
325−nature, concerning itself with how man should live to flourish in this
326−world and inherit in the next. Even secularized descendants enjoin an
327−ethos of ritual behaviors and practices. The social and cultural "stack"
328−(in software parlance) upon which we build provides for a variety, broad
329−or narrow, of human cultural forms. Lately, the variety of forms has
330−been diminishing both by cutting off older forms from the modern world
331−and by cultivating only certain state-legible apex predators[^26] and
332−their preferred ovine repast.
333−
334−Contra this monoculture, the _telos_ of social computing is to recreate
335−the village green, not the penitentiary. Revisiting a thesis from above:
336−"All tools for the individual and collective need to be architected
337−around _using cryptographic proofs to create stable high-trust havens in
338−an otherwise_ zero-trust adversarial world." The village is a stable,
339−long-term tribe well below Dunbar's limit which shares values and assets
340−in common, from which a member occasionally ventures out into the
341−broader social web but always has a home. Every village will grow its
342−own culture, perhaps even its own _cultus_, enabled by decentralized
343−technologies to protect their assets and precious peculiarities. The
344−World Wide Web has been an extinction-level event for many forms of
345−life, livelihood, and culture. For others, it has offered strange forms
346−of life support and even thriving. With a new immune system evolved and
347−now operational, human endeavor stands on the cusp of a Cambrian
348−explosion, unconstrainable by a rent-seeking boardroom-and-bureaucracy
349−world that never comprehended the light shining in its darkness.
37+When was the first time you did something in the physical world because of something you read or encountered online? For generations born after the advent of the Web, they may not recall such a time when meatspace existence wasn't driven by life online. As Internet data sources have overwhelmed traditional media, publishing, and distribution services, the resulting tsunami of information and informatization has swept into every corner of lived human experience in technological societies. The psychological (memetic) virus problem is much greater than actual code viruses. The ongoing universal exposure to alien and internally incoherent value systems has undergirded the well-documented crisis of credibility (collapse of meaning) that all Western institutions are experiencing today. The World Wide Web and its technological predecessors acted as a cultural petri dish of clean agar, which grew every spore and germ which fell upon it. We live in the midst of a memetic epidemic because of the World Wide Web, and the dominant strain is corporate, approved by a marketing department and run through a search-engine optimization algorithm.
38+
39+The turn towards a low-trust then zero-trust environment was inevitable if anything like an analogy with prokaryotic evolution holds true. The megacorp platforms are in a way worse than a purely zero-trust environment, because they don't advertise that the world is zero-trust. Thereby they lure the unwary into transgressing arbitrary global norms and courting the wrath of social media mobs and the concomitant loss of access to their data held in "trust." To mix a metaphor, megacorps are apex predators---at best, sheepdogs with a strong strain of wolfishness; at worst, tar pits manned by various bad-faith actors. The pre-Web cypherpunks were right: "Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world."[^9]
40+
41+If anything, they were too narrow; not only their valued "open society" (polyvalent crypto-anarchy) but _any_ non-megacorp society at all requires true privacy.
42+
43+What cyberspace (and human culture writ broadly) needed was an immune system---and in good Darwinian form, such an immune system has been evolving before our eyes. An immune system formally consists of layers with increasing specificity: first surface barriers, then the innate immune system, and finally the adaptive immune system. The objective of the immune system is to protect the organism: in this case, human sociality and agency.
44+
45+First, what is human sociality? Human culture has been the means of participating in the Great Discussion which ranges from the earliest days of oral culture to the birth of literacy and libraries down to our day. High culture and low culture have both articulated and preserved valuable insights and forms of human flourishing. However, throughout the 20^th^ century and particularly by the means of the consumer revolution, our lives have been thoroughly colonized by capital and commercial instruments. So-called "economies of scale" have disrupted smallholders, artisans, and shopkeepers to the extent that these have been virtually eradicated from the modern landscape in favor of the plastic and polluting "dark Satanic mills." Although small-scale "provident living" has supported gardening, canning, and home production, none of this has survived across a large enough cultural segment to matter macroscopically, and it has unfortunately been tarred with the "prepper" brush that delegitimizes economic downsizing as antisocial because anticapitalist. The siren call of cheap consumer goods has ushered in a generational collapse in self-sufficiency and resulted in the complete colonization of entertainment, food consumption, and self-care by massive corporate brands. Not only have physical goods entered a post-consumer phase, but only certain classes of ideas, attitudes, political stances, regional accents, and sensibilities enjoy the sanction of megacorp sociality. There is essentially no native culture left, only that forged in the enterprise brand management office.[^10]
46+
47+In an immune system, _surface barriers_ are designed to make it hard for exogenous agents to enter a cell or organism; in our analogy, the primary surface barrier was the match of physical separation to psychological separation. Surface barriers were rendered finally obsolete by the launch of the World Wide Web and its subsequent infiltration of every aspect of human culture. To the extent they exist today, it is a matter of ignorance, self-discipline, or happy accident.
48+
49+The _innate immune system_ responds non-specifically to pathogens. Any immune system must have a way of deciding what is _me_ and what is _not-me_. Framed as an identity problem in a zero-trust environment, users have evolved several ways to uniquely identify agents without reference to legacy systems. Chief among these means is the blockchain, introduced by Bitcoin for control and transaction of digital assets and since much exploited beyond its design intent. Ethereum-based ERC tokens represent tweaks of this identity concept, as do many other blockchain platforms.
50+
51+Identity is still fluid and polysemous, but in certain key instances it is indelibly demonstrable.[^11]
52+
53+The individual actor has the capability to express itself with many public faces or none; one of these typically enjoys government sanction and liability, but it is no more _real_ than the others, only more legible to regulation and taxation.[^12]
54+
55+Another aspect of the innate immune system is the public visibility of code. Open source has developed an ethic of transparency on epistemological grounds (i.e. you have a right to know what code you are running) and practical grounds. (Linus's law: "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."[^13])
56+
57+The _adaptive immune system_ responds to specific pathogenic incursions. Particular conditions arise, whether through social, regulatory, military, or other requirements, which must be met with specialized forms that are thereafter in evolutionary competition with the external factor. For instance, one megacorp solution to what it perceives as a threat, i.e. unsanctioned memes, is to attempt to mandate the ultimate traceability of any image's provenance.[^14]
58+
59+The Internet immune system thus evolves to further obfuscate legibility and enhance individual control and self-determination by shifting to less-traceable technologies such as the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). The point is not whether or not a salient technology such as deepfakes, 3D-printed firearms, deviant scientific or political thought, or even the DRM-free sharing of copyrighted material can be contained.
60+
61+The experience with export-grade cryptography has already shown that regulatory attempts ultimately fail.[^17]
62+
63+The philosophical question is what kind of world will evolve (a _fait accompli_ driven by factors beyond any individual or office) and the practical question is how any particular group of actors can preserve their own agency, autonomy, and ambit of action.
64+
65+The first decentralized autonomous organization, "The DAO" (Đ) itself[^18], was created in 2016 as a way of distributing ownership and stake in a joint venture capital fund. Đ was a new form of organization in that it was essentially a mathematical entity, a set of smart contracts on the blockchain to which anyone had access. Đ lived up at least to "decentralized" and "autonomous." No money was held centrally, with token-based authentication yielding the right to vote on projects. Having set the criteria for membership and investment, Đ then operated in truly democratic fashion until an exploit of imperfectly written smart contract code led to theft, crisis, and the reorganization of the Ethereum blockchain itself.
66+
67+While the heirs of Đ serve a role in the current Internet immune system, the original was formed in response to exogenous regulatory concerns, notably ongoing governmental insistence on restricting investment to the already-wealthy. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and other agencies have in place arbitrary investor requirements which would make little sense even if pegged to something like inflation or index rather than the rapidly-devaluing petrodollar. Nominally put in place to protect the naïve from getting scammed, these restrictions have had the pernicious effect of pulling up the ladder behind the _actuel riche_.
68+
69+DAOs have rapidly evolved as a way of distributing ownership and stake in a purely democratic way. (As an aside, the word "democracy" has been much abused, but here I use it in a sense much like the Greek original: the holders of an immutable and indelible token cast their secured votes to govern their society.) DAOs represent a resurgence of the sovereign city-state in new guise. Will this be enough to evade "imperial" aggregates which dominate today's Web?
70+
71+Decentralized autonomous organizations, zero-knowledge cryptographic proofs, cryptocurrencies, proof-of-identity systems, and their as-yet-unborn kin represent the evolution of an immune system on top of the Darwinian churn of the legacy Internet. The stakes are necessarily high: possession is _de facto_ ownership, the other end of the stick from "not your keys, not your coins" (the old cryptocurrency chestnut). The focus is currently on ownership of money, non-fungible tokens, and similar assets, but broadly speaking such systems allow the authenticated ownership of all data and assets one holds, from chat messages to market shares to physical real estate. There may be good reasons to retain the legacy system for some classes of physical or legal artifacts, but at minimum these will be in competition with purely autonomous constructs. (As an aside, I am of the philosophical opinion that legal recognition should not be sought generally for new forms of organization, as any legibility to legacy systems opens new attack surfaces in an immunological sense.) "Code is law."[^19]
72+
73+A decentralized autonomous organization seems to be at least the first two. Having set the criteria for membership, the organization can act as the (distributed, possibly unknown in the zero-knowledge proof sense) stakeholders direct.
74+
75+This form is still somewhat "yeasty" in that like cyanobacteria it acts as an undifferentiated mass. We should expect further innovations in DAO-like entities.[^21] The most salient epithet of a DAO is "decentralized"; one can imagine hierarchical, concentric, or role-specialized DAOs as well as other taxonomically related forms, just as one can imagine progressively less organized instances in a chaos-happy Internet.
76+
77+Like the first mutant with a new gene, Đ itself failed. Many lessons can be drawn from that failure, including the criticality of getting smart contract code absolutely correct ("code is law"), and how to administer a blockchain in the presence of massive fraud. And indeed, what has happened to the blockchain world of decentralized finance? Millisecond differentials in responsiveness lead to huge swings in profitability of transactions. Frontrunner bots watch algorithmically for transactions they can complete faster than the original source, thereby making money on asymmetric knowledge.[^22] Zero-day exploits of code abound, heralding a need for more thorough vetting and more expressive and secure smart contract languages.
78+
79+Blockchains (and thus DAOs via Ethereum) operate as proof-of-work, proof-of-stake, etc. This provides node operators with a way of verifying consensus reality and thereby cementing a record of digital transactions. Future innovations hold forth the possibility of secure proof-of-identity blockchains (such as the Uqbar Layer 1 smart contract blockchain on Urbit[^23]), wherein each node which can provide concrete cryptographic evidence of its identity gets a vote on the consensus.
80+
81+We must consider modern systems to necessarily interact at the pinnacle intensity of competence and competition: any differential advantage that can be exploited to outcompete an adversary not only can be exploited but _should_ be. Illegibility, redundancy, and apposite complexity are allies in the immune fight to maintain identity and ownership in the modern Internet.[^24] Any system which does not have an operational DAO-like layer is immunocompromised. All tools for the individual and collective need to be architected around a zero-trust adversarial world. They also need to guard the embers of community and enable new growth.
82+
83+In a nutshell, the early Internet was a cocktail party. By the age of Usenet and into the World Wide Web era, the Internet evolved into a player-versus-player defect--defect equilibrium in which brigading, spamming, and anonymity are rational adaptive behaviors. Indeed, anonymity is barely a protection given the lengths to which governments and megacorps go to prevent truly untraceable usage. This approach is adaptive for agencies which have given up on any other model of reality, fundamentally lacking a vision of humans as other than atomized individual krill for the megacorp apex predators: consumers for the consumers. The legacy megacorp Internet has become a crab bucket, always drawing everything back into itself in a dysfunctional and frankly satanic way.
84+
85+Communities built on decentralized Web3 platforms such as Mastodon, Fediverse, and Urbit[^25] have stepped back from the purely PvP world of the globally-namespaced social media Internet. These today have more of a block party feel, wherein one can wander from house to house or room to room and encounter some of the same faces in the same or new guise. Conversations can drop and resume anew in very different locales with largely the same composition. Marrying the underlying cryptographic identity requirements of DAOs to communication tools and databases yields a strong stable solution to the problem of retaining a foothold of personal identity from which to coordinate one's multifaceted digital life. IPFS, Sovrin Foundation, Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, and Urbit all offer their take on this requirement. Even a Signal chat group running its own server is a kind of token-free DAO.
86+
87+Since the Renaissance, essentially all theology has been humanist in nature, concerning itself with how man should live to flourish in this world and inherit in the next. Even secularized descendants enjoin an ethos of ritual behaviors and practices. The social and cultural "stack" (in software parlance) upon which we build provides for a variety, broad or narrow, of human cultural forms. Lately, the variety of forms has been diminishing both by cutting off older forms from the modern world and by cultivating only certain state-legible apex predators[^26] and their preferred ovine repast.
88+
89+Contra this monoculture, the _telos_ of social computing is to recreate the village green, not the penitentiary. Revisiting a thesis from above: "All tools for the individual and collective need to be architected around _using cryptographic proofs to create stable high-trust havens in an otherwise_ zero-trust adversarial world." The village is a stable, long-term tribe well below Dunbar's limit which shares values and assets in common, from which a member occasionally ventures out into the broader social web but always has a home. Every village will grow its own culture, perhaps even its own _cultus_, enabled by decentralized technologies to protect their assets and precious peculiarities. The World Wide Web has been an extinction-level event for many forms of life, livelihood, and culture. For others, it has offered strange forms of life support and even thriving. With a new immune system evolved and now operational, human endeavor stands on the cusp of a Cambrian explosion, unconstrainable by a rent-seeking boardroom-and-bureaucracy world that never comprehended the light shining in its darkness.
35090
35191_The header image is [Volvox sp. microscopic algae](https://www.flickr.com/photos/picksfromoutthere/35891780782/in/photolist-WFCKYA-XPdGLq-2k9Cew6-ViCgrB-23QUBQR-21rF362-CCSE2n-23AwZ7m-CbKedu-gznqa-2dHUv3k-EE8eoq-gznq9-i5zqqk-WYSwcf-XWVgQk-WabAAG-gLjRj-gDcLp-4VvECm-259cDCS-i5zqRk-25cV246-i5yNvM-gupiMJ-PXLbhr-LUACZ7-ihvxSH-ihvvVg-ihwjbF-ihvxDX-i5yQDd-ihzQwK-fWwpxb-rarKrm-8LWTQf-qVar5j-ihzAPA-JNrgyK-ihzBrC-ca6Ex9-2kCTSrj-ihz67k-qfJsYd-248ePDL-ihztbm-ihzuyS-LQYZQq-2kCTRxL-ihvWPA) by Picturepest on Flickr._
35292
@@ -359,7 +99,7 @@ _The header image is [Volvox sp. microscopic algae](https://www.flickr.com/photo
35999[^7]: The first instance which seems to have brough this to general public awareness was the submission of Judge Robert Bork's video rental history as evidence in his Supreme Court hearings before the U.S. Senate. The resulting Video Privacy Protection Act was delightfully naïve. Besides relying on "video rental" narrowly construed, users have effectively no leverage against unilaterally-imposed terms of service and end-user license agreements. (See, e.g., [Electronic Privacy Information Center, "Video Privacy Protection Act"](https://archive.epic.org/privacy/vppa/).)
360100[^8]: E.g. Tumblr and OnlyFans and adult content; Twitter and right-wing content; Youtube and Facebook and unsanctioned medical content, etc. Note that this is regardless of the viability of a given view or the necessity of vigorous debate within a field, but focuses on the palatibility of politics to the megacorp entity providing the platform, even if the content drives platform usage.
361101[^9]: Hughes, Eric. (1993) [_A Cypherpunk's Manifesto_](https://nakamotoinstitute.org/cypherpunk-manifesto/).
362−[^10]: The mass shift to remote work from March 2020 onwards due to the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the trend of corporate colonization of private spaces. At first, this was occasionally humorous, as when a child ran into the background of a Zoom call, or underwear or private materials were inadvertently left in view of the remote audience. In the end, it demanded that individuals reconfigure their homes to accommodate mass corporate preferences, thus another invasion of private space by the megacorp panopticon.\ I note as well an invasive doctrine demanding "truth in communication" under names like ["radical transparency"](https://www.bridgewater.com/principles-and-culture) and ["radical candor"](https://third-bit.com/2018/11/24/afraid-of-change/) put forward by partisans of power over against vulnerable employees, clients, and customers, who may be disproportionately affected by a megacorp demand for one-sided transparency.
102+[^10]: The mass shift to remote work from March 2020 onwards due to the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the trend of corporate colonization of private spaces. At first, this was occasionally humorous, as when a child ran into the background of a Zoom call, or underwear or private materials were inadvertently left in view of the remote audience. In the end, it demanded that individuals reconfigure their homes to accommodate mass corporate preferences, thus another invasion of private space by the megacorp panopticon. I note as well an invasive doctrine demanding "truth in communication" under names like ["radical transparency"](https://www.bridgewater.com/principles-and-culture) and ["radical candor"](https://third-bit.com/2018/11/24/afraid-of-change/) put forward by partisans of power over against vulnerable employees, clients, and customers, who may be disproportionately affected by a megacorp demand for one-sided transparency.
363103[^11]: Several have pointed to the failure of Craig S. Wright to demonstrate cryptographically that he is Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin. (C.f. Khaosan, Venzen. (2016) ["Craig Wright is Not Satoshi Nakamoto---The Technical Proof"](https://www.ccn.com/technical-proof-craig-wright-not-satoshi-nakamoto/).)
364104[^12]: Davidson, Dale, and Rees-Mogg, William. (1999) _The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age_.
365105[^13]: Raymond, Eric. (1999) [_The Cathedral and the Bazaar_](http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s04.html).
@@ -369,7 +109,7 @@ _The header image is [Volvox sp. microscopic algae](https://www.flickr.com/photo
369109[^17]: Heninger, Nadia. (2016) ["The Legacy of Export-Grade Cryptography in the 21^st^ Century"](https://publish.illinois.edu/science-of-security-lablet/files/2016/08/10062016-Heninger-Slides.pdf).
370110[^18]: Chohan, Usman. (2017) ["The Decentralized Autonomous Organization and Governance Issues"](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3082055). Discussion Paper Series: _Notes on the 21^st^ Century_.
371111[^19]: Lessig, Lawrence. (1999) _Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace_.
372−[^20]: Hobart, Byrne \~lableg-tadrex. (Nov 17, 2021) ["The Promise and Paradox of Decentralization"](https://urbit.org/blog/2021-11-18-the-promise-and-paradox-of-decentralization). _The Diff_.
112+[^20]: Hobart, Byrne `~lableg-tadrex`. (Nov 17, 2021) ["The Promise and Paradox of Decentralization"](https://urbit.org/blog/2021-11-18-the-promise-and-paradox-of-decentralization). _The Diff_.
373113[^21]: See, e.g., the Governor Alpha smart contract protocols. Solari, R. (2021) ["The case for Governor Alpha".](https://medium.com/tally-blog/the-case-for-governor-alpha-15c1362d49eb)
374114[^22]: Robinson, D. (2020) ["Ethereum is a dark forest"](https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest). Paradigm blog.
375115[^23]: [Uqbar Network](https://uqbar.network/); ["Introducing Uqbar Network"](https://uqbarnetwork.substack.com/p/introducing-uqbar-network); \~hocwyn-tipwex/uqbar-event-horizon (Urbit group)