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Salon II: ARC Regenerative Communities - 2024 Protocol Symposium

TalkKaliya Young, day
Salon II: ARC Regenerative Communities - 2024 Protocol Symposium

Kaliya Young and 'day' present research into the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as a case study in regenerative governance, tracing its origins from the 1969 ARPANET through the 1992 governance crisis that shifted power from Vint Cerf's 'kitchen cabinet' IAB to open working groups organized around 'rough consensus and running code.' They map IETF practices—nomcom's randomized leadership selection, open RFC documentation, dispatch meetings, and ritualized in-person gatherings—onto three pattern languages (Group Works, Wise Democracy, and Social Permaculture) to argue that openness, transparency, and voluntariness are structural necessities, not limitations, for sustaining a healthy digital commons.

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Talk

Group Brains: Minds Made of People

Kaliya Young presents her Protocol Institute-funded research on the IETF as a 'group brain' — a durable collective cognition combining a memory substrate (the data tracker, RFC series, mailing lists) with a human 'knowing' culture (rough consensus, birds-of-a-feather sessions, sortition-based leader selection) that together produce capacities no individual member holds. She extends the framework to Wikipedia and DAOs as comparative cases, introduces the concept of a 'group membrane' (who's in/out and how boundaries harden toward power), and argues AI should augment rather than replace human group cognition, positioning group-level alignment as a missing middle between individual and humanity-wide AI alignment debates.

Kaliya Young

Talk

Inventing Psychohistory: Discussion

Open discussion session following the 'Inventing Psychohistory' symposium talks, with participants including Andre, Florian, Shawn, Venkatesh Rao, Sachin, and Mike Travers debating pace-layer time theory, fashion as an interface layer, and Shawn's concept of 'new nature' as technological systems with no one to appeal to. Venkatesh Rao connects this to Paul Ford's 'why wasn't I consulted' essay and Dan Davies' unaccountability machine thesis, arguing complex systems becoming unaccountable makes them paradoxically more predictable as autonomous machines; Mike Travers questions how this relates to historical disenchantment and Descola's animism framework.

Aneesh Sathe, Andre, Florian, Shawn, Venkatesh Rao, Sachin, Mike Travers

Talk

The Political Economy of Protocols

Trent van Epps (Protocol Guild) presents a four-corner political economy framework for protocols adapted from Lawrence Lessig's 'pathetic dot' theory—norms, market, state, and new nature—arguing that protocols generate far more value than they capture and whoever governs the funding/labor/legitimacy flows shapes the protocol itself. He proposes measurable indicators for each corner (e.g., open-source status, corporate sponsorship share, legal mandates, cryptographic discretion-reduction) and traces trajectories through case studies including the English commons, CHI conference capture, Chromium's market dominance, DNS/ICANN's state transition, Linux's 30-year drift toward center, and Ethereum's tensions around Bitmine's treasury strategy and EF succession. Van Epps introduces concepts like 'capture,' 'tenseity' (borrowed from tensional integrity sculptures), and ossification to describe how competing vectors pull a protocol's governance toward different corners over time, closing with open questions about whether AI and post-quantum transitions will shift Ethereum's position in this political economy.

Trent van Epps