 Hello everybody and welcome. I hope seven but as we just started this we recorded these I hope you're aware of that Is that okay? Okay, cool. I'm saying a thumbs up great awesome welcome to the final Course in our semester two of our data together reading group Very much looking forward to today's topic is decentralization We're just a little signposting we have planned our semester three We have not set dates for but we are now starting to field and collect readings for our next semester Which we'll figure out the dates for it at some point in the future But the subject for semester three sort of like overarching theme is going to be polity Notion that like what does it mean to be participating in a government? So that'll or a governing structure, I guess would be better way But yeah, cool and so tonight my name is B5 I'm going to be helping to facilitate a discussion that hopefully I will be stepping forward giving a little preamble and then stepping back and This topic of tonight's conversation is decentralization And so tonight this is a conversation about a word a word that has pulled a number of us together over over the years months minutes and I think decentralizing Descentralization is very interesting as far as words go decentralization to me is an angsty teenager. It's like this super cool Word that refuses to pick a lane It hangs out with other really cool words like disrupts and design And hoping And it doesn't add in it and clearly it doesn't like fully identify with any of those words. It's just adjacent to those words Decentralization like it's just like this wonderful concept that draws a number of people in But tonight we're going to sort of like look at decentralization in three sort of major contexts if we sort of look at our readings Hello, and welcome Eric If we look at our readings, I Think there's it I sort of thought it would be nice to bucket these in the context of technology groups of people and the state And feel free to sort of like challenge those But we've done a number of readings that sort of help sort of frame and set each of those contexts And because we're here to think critically I think it's the one of the more interesting things we can do is sort of play those contexts off of each other looking for insights And one thing I did want to do sort of as a bit of an exercise if you haven't already done this before we start It's just like now that you've done some reading on the topic if you haven't already like just write down your own like quick Interpretation or definition of what the word decentralization means for you. We're not going to go around and share it I don't I don't think we should I think it'd be more interesting to just write a note to yourself that will hopefully review at the end of this So I'm gonna leave like like a minute not too long And I don't want you to think too hard about it because like you've already done the work And so yeah, let's take one minute and just do a definition for decentralization. How does everybody feel? And we need more time awesome Kevin Let's just should we do like a quick round of interrupt reductions to Wait, that sounds just like a good idea Do you want to start Kevin and then I can call that I'm Kevin and when I'm a part of edgy the environmental data and cover this initiative We're one of the partners of the days together kind of Network I've been a long-term volunteer there for the past three years and for the past Year the part-time community coordinator. I've also so I've been you know on the email list and sending out messages and stuff like that Popcorn style I pick Matt I'm Matt Price I was involved in edgy from very close to the beginning until not that long ago and I Teach at the University of Toronto And I'm here to talk to people. Oh, I get to pick Is that we're doing how about Kelsey? Hi, I'm Kelsey. I am at edgy and have been taking a lead on this data together initiative for the last year ish But I also think about decentralized web and I have a meetup going on here in Seattle on decentralized web and I don't know. I feel like I've introduced myself to all of you before So let's move on to Eric Everybody Eric Noss have been I am involved with edgy and have been for the past two years Especially on the web monitoring side of things and I teach at the University of Guelph I'm gonna point at Dawn I feel like I'm I'm probably the same intro as Matt who's slight variation. I feel like I'm like a emeritus number Edgy and data together around for a long time, but less so lately and the PhD student that's the difference At University of Toronto, but I guess also think about decentralization stuff more broadly than my previous involvement in edgy and data together So it's always been an interesting space where worlds collide And I guess I see Hello I move I Work at the debt projects and I'm just interested. I guess in decentralization in general Lately I've been a lot more into like community organizing and figuring out how to like better facilitate discussions and like have more open ways of people collaborating in tech in my community at that and Also, just figuring out how to like get more Artists to be using this decentralization tech rather than like, you know, business types I don't know who hasn't spoken as Kevin gone I'll pick the fonts Whoever whichever someone wants to go Is it my turn? Okay So I'm I'm Stefan. I I do a lot of different things in the consulting space right now and I used to work in government for a few years I used to be in the academic world for a few years too And now I'm kind of doing a lot of co-operativism with with some other consulting colleagues To try and form a co-operative together so learning a little bit about that which is pretty exciting Fantastic and Stefan part two. Do you feel like I'm saying what? That's how your name shows up in the zoom not what your actual name probably is And so I we can hear you Yeah, well our computers are signed in on the same thing. Sorry Stefan is my husband. I'm Heather Took me a really long time to clue into what was happening and I'm sorry I came in late because I was in the wrong meeting room So I apologize although Stefan did point out that I needed to write down a just a definition of Decentralization so I'm a little bit caught up. But can you repeat what I'm telling you so that I don't say the wrong thing right now Yeah, just what brings you here. Oh, okay well Stefan my partner had told me about this reading group and when he described it to me I got very very excited because a very very very long time ago I did an MA in culture science and technology and also I'm an artist so I have a BFA and then I did that and Got really interested in a lot of different stuff to do a critical theory of interactive media and philosophy of science and sociological feminist critique of things like reproductive technologies and Then proceeded to go a different way and haven't been thinking about those things for a very long time And that was over 10 years ago So now I'm really excited to start thinking about the issues that affect this time in this moment And this seems like a really great place to do it. So I'm very excited to participate Fantastic. Thank you so much. Yeah, this is great. Yeah, you see this a lot. We use this as science support I'll make sure not to do that when I'm like, whoa, stop Or you can I mean if you do it enough you'll get the attention of somebody on here But thank you everybody for joining for those of you who haven't met me. I'm B5 or Brendan O'Brien I'm calling from Brooklyn and I'm I work in a project called query and we do decentralized open data Built partially on the IPFS ideally with more decentralized things in the future Yeah And so with that we've kind of all written John down a quick definition and I think from here It's I really actually love the way that the readings were sort of truncated into sort of three major groups And and I definitely found that having Sarah friends Introduction there like just ten minute like quick sort of jump in was a great framing for a lot of this conversation Given that she sort of like had three questions right at the gates That that I thought sort of like help tee off this kind of discussion And so I thought we just put that to the group as a starting point To just hear what others do central definition decentralization is and if you feel the need to sort of like pull in a different reading Or a public discussion discussion in a different direction feel free So didn't for anyone like what is the centralization mean to them? I know it's the same as like the question just as you write down, but Maybe it's different in the context of Sarah's sort of indication of the of the phrase I can call Yeah, Kelsey then Moff. I can pull up Sarah's Questions just in case you had to go search her on your notes forum But she asked what is decentralization do we want decentralization and are there limits to decentralization? Brendan I totally agree that I think these are these are Questions I feel like we end up asking the first one and not the other two a lot So I'm excited to go into especially critiques of what decentralization is. I don't have a direct answer to what is the central Yeah, so to me decentralization I guess it's almost like a practice or a look at how Power structures end up looking So one thing that's been on my mind a lot is like to me a decentralized group is one where power is kind of bottom up and Individuals ultimately have autonomy and then they collaborate with others so that they can form consensus and like work together rather than Centralization where you have someone up top and it's a top-down hierarchy where they have some sort of needs and then they have the others kind of like Fulfill those needs so for me decentralization is really like Having power spread up and organizing bottom up rather than having power concentrated and organizing top-down that's been kind of like my big thing also like a plurality and They're not being like a one thing with like a bunch of things that are like a loose the interacting I Mean I have a sort of textbook definition I lean on which is maybe not helpful, but I'll say it so delegating decision-making and authority away from the Delegating decision-making and activities away from a central or which is kind of like I think The like abstract way it gets framed in a political context. I don't know if it is totally right I mean, or I don't know if you want to leave it abstract like that when you move it into like a technical Space and I would just yeah, the only thing I would also say is I really Thought these were it was a cool collision of ratings that tried to represent both technical and political sort of sides of the coin and I remember That way back way look way up last year when we did what is the decentralization? I think Matt said Was like flagging the kind of like lineage or the genealogy of the term And that's something that I've been thinking about lately is like where has decentralization been used is also a question that I'm interested in so But I think these readings support asking that which is cool One thing I want to highlight about the word decentralization and this is why Brennan when you asked us to write down definitions I put a note in the chat was like this is harder than I thought it would be and the reason is because it's defined in opposition And I think that's really interesting because I don't think that we have a non-antagonistic word for what we're talking about and It reminds me a lot of basically what it suggests is that there's a tendency to centralize and like we're probably familiar with this in Power structures is that it's just it's like really easy to have there be one source of truth and much harder to have there be several sources of input and also a decision And It reminds me a lot of some of rich Bartlett. I think we've read him before in this Has written about decentralized power structures and patterns as it relates to the Inspiral cooperative. Sorry kids making messes And basically he talks about like how they have to actively work to Continuously decentralize because power like if you're in a decentralized organization And what that means is that you just don't name someone as a leader then they You end up with people secretly in charge rather than transparently in charge And if you want actual decentralization, you need people to say hey I noticed that I've been accidentally becoming a central node. How do we deconstruct that? Okay, did you say Heather? Yeah My definition is not different than what other people said and I Basically some distributed network whereby power is not top-down and I like Kelsey struggled after writing distributed network and then I tried to think of how to say the next part without negating something else and That was really hard and I didn't want to but it's like it's in the word Decentralized is already a negation. So one of the qualities to me that's interesting about decentralized Networks or decentralized knowledge or a decentralized power structures is that what we have is emergent that where direction and tension and all the things you just described Kelsey as well that about Decision-making or who's in charge of something or taking responsibility is an emergent property of a group and So I think it's ripe for coming up with other words I think people have probably already worked on this about coming up with a word. That's not a negation But One place that might be really useful to look is pedagogy. So I'm an early childhood educator And also I've taught in at university level, but right now I've been a preschool teacher for a long time and my interest is in alternative pedagogies such as Montessori Regiomelia and Waldorf as well, but I am I don't teach in that vein and they're very much about Emergent learning or inquiry-based learning. I think I'm 44 So any of you that are much younger might have already gotten to do this when you were in school when you were little But I didn't and I wish that I had I think now it's quite common for So maybe there's a lot of language within alternative pedagogies that would be useful for thinking about Decentralizing our sense of direction and agency and intention sitting Fantastic Stefan, do you want to follow that? Yeah, um, yeah, that's that's great Really great discussion. Um, I I Just want to just before I say something. I just want to say one thing about my screen going black It's only because I will be kind of going away to tend to a kid If the kid needs my assistance at some point, so that's why my screen is going black But I I have you on speaker so I can hear everybody in the discussion So, yeah, my my thought when I was Trying to define decentralization. Oh, I couldn't I was sitting there not being able to and But then hearing everybody else talk about it. I thought maybe I would add Another layer to thinking about how to define decentralization Which I kind of have been thinking about a relationship to the readings, which is this maybe almost like a XY axis where you have decentralization and representation and It seems like with centralization You have the need for more representation and no and more opportunities for mediation and media Kind of slotting in there and then with decentralization There's there's kind of much more of a need for kind of facilitation as opposed to representation and So I just want to kind of throw that that weird little Bend diagram or whatever you want to call it into the mix Because when I was reading those readings I was thinking about how a lot of these examples that are upheld as examples of decentralization Really, it's in a lot of ways. It's people kind of governing themselves somewhat and what that involves and entails is a lot of conversation a lot of facilitation a lot of overcommunication and When you see centralization, it's kind of the opposite. There's there isn't a two-way street between communicators And what's communicated out is like broadcast And so maybe narrow cast is also an interesting Diaconomy to broadcast a narrow cast with narrow casting. We're still in a centralized paradigm, but it's decentralized So the conversation isn't two-way and anyways some thoughts some thoughts So that's that's it. That's it for me No pictures But you're just thinking thoughts. Okay cool Yeah, I think it's really interesting and it's very interesting to hear that almost all the initial reaction sort of comes seem to originate from the sort of political side of things this this question of like And and I'm hearing a lot of like dancing around the phrase power and power distribution Which I think is really really interesting So I think to that end I think to support them where you were saying stuff and Sarah's Asked us to sort of consider this question of like the intersection of intersectional thinking and Decentralization in her very quick talk in this question of like how those two things play against each other And I think that's I think that's some of what you're saying to me gets at some of that of that questioning of like Do we need if we can think of it decentralization is existing on a spectrum and then and can we consider the specter? I'm sort of misphrasing her a little bit here, but like the sort of general vibe is Do we have to get through the whole of the spectrum to be able to sort of be able to Pull this into our heads properly But I think with that I think it's worth I to sort of like try and pull the conversation back towards the technical folks For a little while and then put the the technical pinning on it I Think it's but I think it's really interesting a lot of us sort of came at this from the like okay And I don't think that that's Uncommon, I think a lot of us come to the word decentralization from a political sort of like Trajectory and maybe that's not fair and so feel free to like yell at me for that But I think it when we think about decentralization from a technical sort of side of things It was very interesting to see Vitalik here and sort of just like decentralization is three key concepts Just like it's pretty simple is compute power Distributed relatively evenly does the whole network compute faster able to is a whole network able to process process more transactions than the sum of its parts effectively and can we make sure that control is Control the network isn't basically isn't constructed more than 51% of the people on the network that's a very Cut-and-dry definition of decentralization And I think we should sort of like To me I feel like there's a tension that often exists when we introduce the technology Framing to the sort of politics framing where the technologists really want us to interpret the phrase decentralization quite specifically We have decentralization meaning a specific suite of characteristics of of an of a network and and the way that it behaves and But the thing that draws a lot of us to this I in my mind is is this political framing this question of Well, we're here because we want to have an effect on a method of organizing and to me That's that's really interesting. I just want to throw that on the table So I've got Kelsey then Matt then Eric. Did you have something to Kelsey matter? I think that's really I Like the specificity of that technical definition because it's also clearly about power It's just that the power is really specifically defined in this in this network because it's like because it's code It's made of rules What's really fascinating to me that I I cannot resolve in my head is when we talk about decentralization in terms of social structures It is almost entirely about increasing individual trust and when we talk about it in a technical context It is almost entirely about removing the need for trust through technology And I just I can't that there's so much cognitive dissonance in Using the same language and thinking about both things in the same conversation That none of the metaphors work. It's I would love if we Can resolve some of that confusion in this conversation If I'm not next I that's confusing to me because that gives me a whole other thing to think about but I uh It seems to me that like one way to To begin the conversation is Where does decentralization from what qualities or Associations does decentralization acquire a kind of moral authority for people like us like why do we think? oh decentralization good and um It seems to me there's one set of technical arguments about robustness of a network But then there's a set of political arguments that we've just been describing They're not all necessarily compatible with each other. So they're a kind of libertarian and anarchists decentralizers who may have Pretty different views about where the good resides, but they they share this word right and I think that like Reading some of the doing some of the readings today I felt like Probably a lot of the times where guilty I felt like certainly I am probably a lot of time guilty of a kind of slippage between the technical and uh moral political senses of the term so like like Attributing to the technical features the moral characteristics of shared power when there's no reason to believe or at least this was my sense from From deconstructing Decentralization, which I think like I really like Brendan didn't like that much. I'm totally interested to hear the critique Uh That there's no need for those technical structures to actually move power out of a To de-concentrate power So you can have technically decentralized infrastructure that still Concentrates power in a small number of hands and that seemed like Um a bummer that We should pay attention to With a free ring tone. Uh, I I'm happy to see my time to uh to move if you want to make a direct response to that Oh, thank you. Um, I think like big bitcoin and blockchain and the fintech side of decentralization is an excellent example of Decentralization that's super centralized because or even just like projects end up having centralization just kind of like hidden underneath Um in the fintech case, it's actually like super obvious where the centralization is and it's inside money because at the end of the day Since the whole system is geared around like How do I make how do I keep money? and work With money It goes back to if you money have a system and like if you have you get more money And it's kind of like a barrier to entry to everyone else So it's like even if it's distributed the power dynamics aren't necessarily Decentralized, I'd say like I I think like if I could say another thing regarding this stuff Like decentralized is one thing but then there's also like is it just a distributed system? Is it peer-to-peer and then like is there like a single implementation? So these are like other technical qualifiers that drastically change the way it works But yeah, that's a super good worry Thank you for mentioning That's actually I'm really glad you went before me because that actually sets up The comment I was going to make uh really well, which is that I don't actually really come I'm not a technical person and I only per se and I don't that's not where I Come at this at least at first glance It's more on the the political end of things and so when I was asked What is decentralization? Uh, that was a really tough question and the first kind of word or thing that came to my mind was distributed I think this is also I think heather that was that term was in your definition as well and then And I think about it a little bit more From the technical side of things and just you know like looking at sarah friends presentation I didn't get a chance to hear it, but you know, there is a technical difference, right between the classic kind of centralized decentralized distributed So, you know, it's that's just an interesting observation that that I made that you know, there's You know, actually some some technical differences there that I don't fully understand But that are probably really important and have political implications And and maybe part of it has to do with with scale so as a geographer I come to a lot of questions Through the lens of scale, but especially questions around decentralization and so It's a little bit of a It may not seem particularly practical and At first but like the question for me Would be you know at what scale is a network decentralized, right? um, and it can depend on the sort of How far you're looking into the network or what extent of the network you're looking at um, and so Moe when you mention things like You know part of the network can be kind of centralized underneath or hidden underneath or whatever um, that raises for me a lot of questions of like To really call something decentralized or in the process of being decentralized Then it depends on what scale we're looking at this came up for me and in elinor ostrom's article that we read It was like great cities are doing all this work to combat climate change And it's a sort of decentralized approach to climate change, but You know cities are just one level of analysis and yes, it's more decentralized than nation states or international agreements um Cities also have their own structures that are very uneven and unequal That we may not call distributed or decentralized sorry A lot of did I miss any hands? Does anybody does anybody feel like they have a burning thought right now? They want to jump in on Heather go ahead Getting better at unmuting Okay I have two different things to throw into the mix that are not fully formed thoughts They're more like um, just things I thought about while other people were talking One of them is actually me poaching an idea that I've heard stephen the real stephen bring up many times about So I hope I'm not butchering this stephen feel free to jump in That we have a problem and this is in response to what calcy was saying about the trust issue about this weird inversion of trust and our expectations of trust In the world of tech and data versus the world of decentralized power in terms of political decision-making and power and that is that Historically or at least in our current moment politics is meant to be We think of politics as being a space that's value laden whereas science is meant to be value free hasn't always been that way But that's how it is now And stephen had said that he or he wrote a piece where he advocated for possibly flipping that on its head and Searching for value free politics and value laden science now. That's not original. You know, there's Plenty of work out there done by Bruno Latour and others about value laden science but The idea of making then thinking of politics is something that could somehow be value free Now I can't speak to that but I thought it kind of played with this idea of trust because when we try to remove trust In in the case of decentralizing knowledge networks It's kind of a way of us looking for a value free tech for better or for worse and Then in the other definition of decentralization, which was about politics As calcy pointed out what we're looking for is building trust which is value laden politics so A little bit that has to do with how we already see those things and what happened if we stopped trying to do away with the responsibility of trust in our tech and data decentralization and then Stopped worrying about it quite so much in our decision-making networks I don't know if it would be good or bad But it's something to think about how some of these things flip and turn places and how does that change If we change those definitions away from what we or if we have that guest alt shift or Something does it suddenly make everything else legible? There is a dog constantly licking my arm right now. That's why This stop it So, um, it's because I'm baking and she smells sugar So the other thing was in relation to what move said which was about the um, the money problem And again, I'm just going to throw this into the mix of what you said. I thought that was all really interesting um One way I think about the money problem is in relation to hoarding So our problem with money right now is that there's people hoarding money and our problem was centralized power networks Or power centralized power on the one hand and centralized networks of data and knowledge is again Um, it's like a there's a hoarding of capital. There's a hoarding of knowledge is what I'm trying to get at in my work which um, Steph and I used to organize something called the wayward school that was skill and knowledge sharing workshops We're both really interested in permaculture And do a lot of community building work And we continually butt into this problem of even when people are kind of interested in the idea of doing these things And becoming decentralized becoming really DIY They still like to hoard their knowledge They they like to be the one that knows how to brew something from scratch or they don't want other people to know where you can gather nettle And I know that's a really tangible Concrete example, and I'm not doing a great job of applying it to data and tech But I think that's a little bit. I think that's part of the thing. We're all kind of circling around is Like what people go into it wanting and then what it's capable of doing and then what's gumming it all up, you know and There she is And that's all That's fantastic. I'm going to pick on either Don or Matt who have been lighting up the chat to Come forth and share some views Matt's pointing at Don Don staring at that um I'll just say this is like a slate of sites. I'll say it super briefly I Resonate super hard with what you just said Heather about like that like hoarding of knowledge Or something in some of those like diy spaces having been active in myself and I um We'll say this lately because I feel like I'm on a reading group because it's there's been Oh because of the recent election and politics on my mind is like I think sometimes maybe there's just been a failure in those spaces to like actually have an accurate analysis of power And maybe that's why they don't see what that does as like a form of holding on to power Because I think it's not always a sincere act when people don't know how to like let go of their knowledge But that that's like Totally an aside what I was saying in the chat. I was trying to like think of this thought experiment It's a really cool inversion. I think to say this like okay if we if we talk about if we want to I don't know figure out how to speak about science's value laid in what does it mean to think about Politics's value free and I was just saying I'm not sure if I would want such a thing But also it felt a little bit like Fukuyama's argument about The end of history which is like sort of this like Oh, uh, we tend towards democracy like written in the 90s like liberal western democracies are kind of this ascended form Like we we did it. We cracked that nut. We've solved politics And then it was like oh actually we have it um and and so I wonder actually if trying to think about how something gets rendered value free helps you understand The assumptions and the things that are already like are currently treated as value free that aren't around you Like maybe that's a powerful like like lens or like way to like look at stuff Uh, so that was kind of cool just to like Yeah, just to move on Stefan I feel like I should just clarify a little bit. Um, but yeah the the lens that Heather mentioned there Uh In no way, uh, would I be suggesting that it's possible to have a value free politics? But it was rather just the flipping of the lens almost to be able to see Just like, you know, just a mental Uh, somersault in a way to help you kind of see the the thing a little differently And part of it was actually what I'm trying to remember now. This is like About seven or eight years ago now that I wrote all that stuff up, but um I think I was turning to Manuel Delanda's work quite a bit at the time And he kind of wrote a lot of stuff in his book, uh, a thousand years of non-linear history kind of all about how Social and political forms are just kind of these materialistic kind of creations and You could kind of study them in that in that kind of very kind of neutral way And I thought that was an interesting Book for sure very interesting book Um, but yeah, just jumping on what Heather was saying about the What what would it be called? I guess the knowledge network or kind of the some of the aspects that were in the um Seeing like a state reading Uh, I think that that that problem of hoarding is very Very funny to get around and I think it's gendered For sure. There's there's something going on there Uh and in the in the tech space, especially I I see that as happening I see well, I see that in any space where there's a lot of expertise and kind of insight around Having to really think through kind of I guess what you would call algorithmic thought Um, and so this is another bridge to another Kind of conversation we're all having which is this difference between the tech and the political and and how to kind of think through them differently And I would say that the distinction between the algorithmic and heuristic Thinking is really helpful on this front because if you're looking at it algorithmically you could see The the code beneath the decentralized networks themselves As a form of centralization in the sense that they had to be drafted and composed and written and agreed upon by a group of experts Similar to the way that laws within a legal code are also developed in that way, right? And so in a way law and legal code although they exist within a centralized entity are themselves You know a kind of de-centered process once they exist they kind of produce effects Without kind of too much human input But the power gets baked into it and the power gets baked into the decentralized technical network as well in this algorithmic way Then the heuristic element of decentralization is more around kind of the squishy feelings that humans feel And the ideas and the values that they have and how they kind of come together and reach agreement or work through disagreement around all of that and uh in that way heuristics and rules of thumb and and principles and values and all of these kind of Phrases that we have to try to capture You know where i'm coming from on this issue or whatever it might be Then come into play and then need to kind of be conversed through in this non representational way or at least like As as unmediated as possible kind of way synchronous communication whatever you want to call it Um, so I just it's funny this whole conversation. I'm just I keep going back to all these dualisms and dichotomies And I don't know what's going on It's very strange. Anyways, that's that's it for me This is great. I think it's a wonderful thing Stephen, that's great. I want to try and pull to some of that algorithmic and the sort of heuristic Framing because I think that sort of echoes what Kelsey was saying a little bit about this like cognitive dissonance of the four of the word trust Um, and I want to kind of like again just like kind of provide some anchoring on the technical side Just totally step into the technical side of this I think that there's a bit of a misnomer around the phrase trustless environments And I'm and so I'm going to sort of like start from the the technical framing Or the algorithmic framing I think that if you really sort of like try to bake it down and take as subjective a view of pot as possible That a lot of the there is sort of a cogito in modern decentralization movement But to contradict I mean like the the Cartesian sense of like some I think they for I am And I think the cogito of trustless environments is cryptography And I think that we sort of have this You know and we believe and understand that even in technical circles when you talk about cryptography It is like Oriented in math and it feels like a universal law right like it feels like when you encrypt something it is Its foundations are in mathematical proofs and those mathematical proofs form a kind of rock upon which you can layer other techniques out of a sort of Hell of trustlessness towards something that resembles trust and I think that's the sort of Framing that is uh positioned when we talk about decentralized technologies Personally, I intentionally want to invoke this sort of like Cartesian framing because I think that it has a lot to say about like a sort of gendered Method of believing that you are capable of beginning at zero and moving To a completely cohesion cohesive system in a sort of single line of thought And I have to sort of like draw my hands like this because what I think is scary about this framing is Is that along the way you cannot do that without at some point layering on a technology that Intertwines that heuristic framing this like set of values, right? Like we can we have cryptography cryptography cryptography If you look at any single thing if you layer it up and you turn it into bitcoin, you're now talking you've layered on a sort of capital capital market sort of heuristic onto Onto your technology, right or if you turn it into IPFS or debt you've now layered on a sort of communication protocol type replica sort of free information sharing sort of slant to your To the way that you're thinking and so I think there's like a question about What do we do with these things and at what point do they stop? I think it's really interesting that both dad and ipfs stop much sooner than a blockchain and I think that there's an interesting thing there but What I think is it what I want to sort of point to is I think as someone who is sort of like Struggled with this a little bit on the tech side is like I think there is a Place where the heuristic enters and it's very very very difficult to know what that is because you feel so confident because of the math I've I've it's got lost while I'm speaking. So who wants to go next? I think mad at us end up So That's really nice. We want to think about walch And have the conversation about her piece the deconstructing decentralization one because It seems to me that that What is an issue in that piece is Where the kind of ground is to be found like the foundation of the argument and and There's like a repetition maybe at a different scale of the exact same kind of Cartesian error that you described Like Like I found it I found certainty now I've saw we can start solving problems because certainty is here, right? And of course what happens with day cards, then you get cotton fish and hegel and and it gets more complicated and more difficult And in the same way so so like It becomes the the certainty of the cryptographic solution becomes an ideological conviction which Which wins arguments that maybe it shouldn't win Right like so it's able to win arguments that it doesn't deserve to win. Maybe and and her You know her argument is that You can find concentrations of power and watch them being applied to these systems that The initial description would you believe are immune to the application of power and And what's useful about that Is that it shows that the systems are not purely technical but are also social and when We pretend that they're purely technical we misrepresent them to ourselves And we also maybe participate a little bit in the con job, right? I mean like bitcoin could be also Interpreter has a huge con that's being run on the world economy So So anyway, what I'd like to hear is where you felt like she went wrong in that argument because it to me it was I think because I was like so so friendly to it I saw um I was like, yeah, yeah, okay Yeah sister I guess I'll respond to that and then move do you want to go? uh Yeah, my response is I I just felt like her argument was too weak. Um, I think you attacked the wrong things I think if you're like, hey a bunch of folks stepped into action and changed and patched bitcoin to prevent a um To prevent a sort of like centralization or like they acted and behaved in a centralized way to uh, and that's like And that should be cited as evidence that this is a Uh an impurity in the system like I agree that this we should absolutely be using this was a running I just think it could be applied better Um, and that's a joke and so that's about it. I'm like if that's the thing that we're going to talk about like yeah, it's It is proof that you could have one day like a situation where someone could use that same set of 11 people in the sort of bitcoin security disclosure could behave in a sort of like On you know in a way that sort of uh is a power grab That's totally true, but I think that like the design of the network itself is like it doesn't Invites much more interesting questions about um About centralization decentralization and it's central sort of like tenants or claims. I think that There's a double click that happens when we call it a decentralized thing that We're all that we all experienced first hand we were sucked in for political reasons and then we and and the Cryptography keeps us connected because it sort of seems to make good on some of those promises But there's a that double click has already happened in my mind I can't I I feel like that's that's why I like this sort of like My version of it better Not to like set much do my own art But I like that the idea that like wait you think that you've built something incredibly like Centralized is based in cryptography and it's like yeah, but like as soon as we hit some layer like this This stops being the kind of decentralization that we showed up for The the meaning of the phrase flips when we get to the technology The thing that or the thing that brought us there is not the thing that is keeping us here And I think that that's more interesting to me personally. And so it's just frustrating to sort of see Ah, see people who have right access to the repo like to most point you can write another implementation And I think that it's sad that we don't look at the fact that there are like 25 Gajillion currencies out there and like that that is in itself a kind of decentralization and should be seen as points In the column of like well, you know, bitcoin isn't the only game in town Right and that's that's a form of decentralization and it's it's not a fun one to look at but it's Yeah, I think it's I think there are better ways to sort of Do a takedown person And sorry move. I have totally interrupted you Sorry you're muted Oh Yeah, one thing I wanted to like touch on is I actually wish we had less of the Logic around like trust and like less of the cryptographic proofs that we don't need to trust People um in the tech. I actually think we should probably put trust and all of that on the people So like if I want to trust someone to have my data, I should like trust them in need space And like having fully automated trustless systems for one thing Like capturing every meaning of trust in a smart contract is so like it just doesn't make sense to me Like I think especially looking at like real contracts and like real promises you make to people Um Like they're a lot more loose and there's just so much more ambiguity. Whereas like a machine It's just so much harder to express that ambiguity and just like the the fluid nature of trust and of agreements So like personally like I love crypto for like making sure that data can't be intercepted or changed As it's being transported between people But I'm not a fan of crypto like automating decisions and like stuff that human could Humans could actually be doing in a way that makes more sense for their specific context rather than this imagined Idea of what trust is for all of humanity or for the whole network just yeah, um I'm curious what you guys think I put this in the chat a bit ago, but um What do you think about the idea that so we talked before about the problem of scale in trust in So like social societies, right? Where basically if it's if it's like 20 people you can look around the room and be like, okay We're all going to be nice to each other We're not going to all like there isn't going to be one of us who comes in and just Screws everything up. And if there is they'll leave because that's you know, how social cohesion works In a way that it doesn't work on say a country scale a city scale a an internet scale um, so what about the idea that we use crypt cryptography in networks to create Notlessness which as I've discussed at some depth with rob when trying to understand how decentralized web actually works um like In the decentralized web You have a lot of elements that you don't have to have trust about that you don't have to think about right because That's all this hash data But ultimately if you're trying to come back to a single root hash in order to ask for that root hash or public key in the dat case um You have to trust somebody And there is no version of a decentralized web framework where you don't have to trust anyone at all I feel like maybe what that's trying to do and I don't know if anyone said this explicitly um Is not to get rid of trust but to reduce the number of entities you actually have to trust To a size that is manageable on a social level What I don't know. I'm curious if anybody has a a critique of that thought Eric's got half a thought That's your half a thought which is just to say that there's Sort of scale in the sense of number of people but and maybe also geography, but then also temporal scale Which I think has come up and and at least some of the readings Only some of which I've done anyway, but uh, like the ostrom article right talks about the need for More rapid decision-making around climate change right and so I just wonder if there's something here also about sort of timescale Can I comment on it or who's in the queue? Okay, um, I I like the idea of reducing the number of people you need to trust for stuff to work I actually really like that it makes trust a little bit more manageable The problem I have with the state of things is that The smaller amount of people you trust are either tech bros who I find it very hard to trust Or investors of tech companies or just like regular business people or People with money which are like all people that I don't want to trust as like my building block I'd rather like trust You know like a person i'm interacting with So like I like when we can use tech for that and kind of like ignore Some of the tech folks somehow or like maybe find some tech folks that are more like hippie-dippy But yeah, I think like trusting fewer people is nice when those are people like you can trust rather than those Are people that you have to trust and can't really opt out of Okay. Oh, finally go I think this might i'm gonna try this might not work. Um, so I I guess kind of Actually, I think I can connect to what move just said but also reeling it back a little bit Going into what you said I mean, um about the kind of like The sort of cryptographic proof is this like this kernel or this like Sort of small building block. I mean, I agree with matt's response about Kind of the fact that these are always already socio-technical systems. The thing is that we've not figured out good ways of like Thinking those two things together or like a language that like reflects that so we I think veer into one side or the other and like Um, I guess that's what I'm interested in is like how to be aware of that and like how to like recognize that and doing that careful recognition around Some of these like decentralized projects um, but Then to think about this idea of like trust or what like the the version of trust as as render technical Or trustlessness render technical and it's reliance on cryptography As opposed to like actual models of trust at scale like I think That there's a concern I have with only using the concept of trust because it's sort of like Uh, like this like form of methodological Individualism right like it's sort of like locating in an individual or at the scale of one person and their motivation like a way to think about phenomena that might Be better like in collectives that might be expressed differently. I don't know if that makes sense like So I was like thinking okay, like what is trust? Uh, like that I have one-on-one or like the trust that I would have with a group of 20 people be they tech pros or not And if whether or not whether I don't want that to be like the kind of trust I have And maybe there is a way that some imperfect representation of that exists in like public key cryptography like say key base or something Um, and like how we have to like we have there's like all these chains of proofs in ways that we say we know each other To each other and like publish that places But that isn't the same way that trust and trust doesn't feel like the right word Like I'm comfortable being in the group of friends of friends Uh, you know or like if I'm in like a circle where I know five people really close, but there's like 20 people there But I would feel more comfortable saying something in that group than I would And then in another group, um And so yeah, I was just trying to think about like where trust breaks down or if there's this like implicit like individualism that like Uh Is being surfaced There and maybe there's other ways to think about it and like how are those be implemented technically and I was actually thinking about um Um On scuttle butt like kind of that way of like peer broadcast or like something about the way that you end up actually transmitting or like You know, just just thinking about how that log functions is maybe a way that also doesn't rely on sort of this like Like individual relationship Um, anyway, these are ramblings. It's been a long day. It's kind of it's got lots of really good calls. Um I I'm going to try this on for size. Don't see if this is anyway amenable. Um I think it's interesting that Like the centricity of the trust words and I'm wondering if we just take a framing for a second that maybe it is a very common trick for Tech when we're developing technologies sort of co-opt or adopt language that um and sort of like it almost feels like as the The second movers we've sort of pulled these meanings towards technical centers and I feel like this conversation this conversation has centered around the phrase trust Because of the way that the word trust is used to describe Uh, the environments that were on the technical technical side, but it also feels like we have a similar double-click phenomenon happening where Mo of you're talking about trust as a relationship between people not as a As a provable thing Right, but we have this like But we have this word trust that that has been moved into this provable thing territory Um, and I want I just want to know how others feel about the idea that like in technology We tend to sort of just lift these terms to to describe technical concepts and then it seems to like Maybe be part of this sort of like what if we just called it snarf our and said it's it's the snarf our protocol And then all it does is do sort of some method of making sure that all of your data moves correctly and Chelsea Whenever we make qualitative things quantitative, we're usually wrong trust things too much And i'm trying to think of a a good example because I know I've come across several recently, but um, I guess a canonical one would be the IQ test where To some extent it does measure intelligence and to another extent it measures, um How well you match a training set And to a third extent that training set is based on your existing class and race um But because it's a number and it was A way of turning things that were not originally quantifiable into something that looks a lot like math We think it's right or or a similar I guess I worry a lot about like when we start to move into quantifiable genetic spaces Where there are some data like some data sets to draw on that are much larger than other data sets that we draw on for example, like my native alaskan ancestry means that a lot of the Genetic testing that you can do Is less valid in my case than in other cases, but there are no confidence intervals shown Um at the point of interpretation um So I really worry about anything that that turns something Not mathy into something that Looks mathy enough that people who don't understand how it came to be um We'll just look at it and say well, that's probably right came out of a computer to Bring that towards the reading. I think seeing like a state that was like the whole point of the book to me Because it was all like people coming in and being like all right. We need to quantify stuff And part of the quantification they introduced biases and erased a whole bunch of stuff That was actually super relevant to the context So like at the top you have like a number and that number is useful for like a bureaucrat But it's just completely destroying the actual context. It's being applied on which absolutely sucks. So I agree Heather you've got some great stuff going in chat. Do you want to jump in with any of that or I apologize about picking on you and you feel picked up. No, it's okay I'm trying to I've decided that maybe instead of taking notes. I should put my notes there so they can be discursive I realized just now as you were talking that I Accidentally stated something as a state or I wrote something as a statement which I meant as a question Which was that we can and should ask about the motivations of the algorithm I was asking that more like shouldn't we should we Who are we questioning? So and then that was bringing me to these other places about corporeality is what we're talking about, right? That's the promise of these technologies is That they're immortal In some ways infallible that they Continue on into posterity I don't know if that's grammatically correct so That's where my head is going with this discussion, but it keeps going back to straight up philosophical questions and Maybe pull it away from there back into these More specific questions about the technology itself. I have a hard time with that Not sorry. I don't have a hard time with wanting to do that. I personally always have a hard time doing that because one of the Motivating questions that I have whenever I think about technology media electronic communications and data networks Has to do with agency And whether or not text itself could be said to have agency and thinking of language as actually our first technology Because it's something that's outside of our body That extends our capabilities and can exist without us like it it expands our personal What we can do with our bodies. It's a tool, etc Now I don't think that sounds that crazy to all of you, but when I would posit that To my advisors when I was in dissertation mode That was a real like I don't know if I I don't know if I agree with that kind of thing And so therefore I always come back to it as whether or not we can think of language as the first technology And then also whether or not text can be said to have agency And to me those two questions are really alive in any discussion About blockchain about decentralization And all of the things we're bringing up here about trust and representation, which again avatar representation That means something stands in for something else again that kind of extension of ourself into a non corporeal realm And then back to the Descartes that you brought up that I slaughtered when I tried to make a point about It being I think therefore I doubt which is like no no no that's not what I would say I doubt therefore I think is one way I've heard it put and I doubt therefore or I doubt therefore I am sorry And then I saw okay. No, I doubt therefore. I think therefore I am I'm bringing that up in relation to what you had pointed out about math mathematical proofs And certainty and then if we we think of Cartesian as also being certainty, but it's actually rooted in doubt and It also requires Continual doubt we find a truth But we don't stay there or as Spock would say wisdom is the beginning of logic not the end Or sorry logic is the beginning of wisdom not the end. You see I'm a little dyslexic and ideas So that's why I keep saying them backwards Logic is the beginning of wisdom not the end. So we have to continually doubt and displace And or else we stagnate we become anaerobic basically It's lovely. Anyone we haven't heard from in a while. I want to step forward You've heard from me, but I'll just kind of plus one maybe both with threads that you've brought up Heather like I I think there's a lot I need reference literature at the beginning But I think him as well as other science of technologies dollars have talked a lot or bought a lot about kind of agency beyond non humans Or agency of non-human so beyond humans and and what and like trying to study and understand that in context and I I think that's Super fruitful. I was reading this book Part of this book lately by karmic and thinking through technology Engineering and philosophy something something something. It's a very long title, but um It's kind of about some of these like that that sort of like these early conceptualizations around technology I mean, I think she kind of ignores some of its roots, but yeah, I would also just say I I think It can be helpful to connect The sort of narrow way that sometimes we say mean digital technology when you say technology You put to like reattach it to as much broader understandings of technology because I think that Opens up a way of thinking about Not like relationships to it. Which is kind of what I'm interested in. So yes, I agree Oh my that you want to just read that paragraph out loud of chatter I feel like the conversation I I had to be listening only halfway after Trying to think through things that Don was saying just something that has been Living wanting to say for a while is that well in these conversations about decentralization I thought the unit Of the entity that is that participates in decentralized system is important like like Uh, if you have a collective of collectives um with a rigid like Hub at the center where representatives of those collectives make decisions Is it nonetheless the case that there are? That that we could describe that in some ways as a decentralized organizational structure So anyway, I was thinking about that about the and when Don started talking about the individualism that seems baked into the Ideological structures that we've been discussing I wrote some other stuff down Super good, sorry to pick on you I think I think now's a great time to try and sort of bring back one article that hasn't come up A ton, but I think might be fun to try and sew in as a theme here So if we can't connect some dots, maybe they don't Um, but this the most dangerous notion in reinventing organizations to me this I think one of the central sort of thoughts brought forth there was like I think might be a fun sort of like thought to start to try to close with Which is this idea that like We've we started the conversation like with this notion that decentralization is sort of this defining and definition in opposition um, and I think this I think one if we were sort of riff on the on the, uh Uh dangerous notion reinventing organizations is sort of article Uh, it sort of gets asked us to sort of like say hey, this stuff has been around for a while And maybe maybe this isn't an answer and maybe there are methods that of organizing that have existed for a long time that when we came in and sort of like Data colonized them sort of swept over some very subtle ways of of of moving and and uh conducting ourselves Uh, as was sort of cited in this in that piece on sort of the way that different indigenous californian tribes are Sort of like are operating And so like wanted sort of like ask like We have I know we have the word decentralization being defined in opposition but like in what ways has this conversation sort of Uh, are we are there other things that have existed outside of the technical framing outside of the sort of like political framing? Or maybe inside of the political framing depending on how you want to think about it um that we sort of like trounced over because We uh because of the sort of like major direction of discussion has gone and if we just thought about it as like maybe there is this sort of like Original state or different state or a version of the world in which we don't Decentralization isn't the counter hegemonic force. It's the it's it's a force It's a lot it's pretty models anybody Short point you could argue that it always was because you know in relation to chaos and order Order is constantly trying to deal with all of the stuff that it seizes too noisy and and not producing the right information, right? So they're in relate like they do they rely on each other But depending on your perspective, you could absolutely see that it already always was and is predominant And that everything else is just like a desperate attempt To try to get on top of that So I don't have an example of for your actual question. What are some ways that we see that becoming predominant? I would argue maybe it is it's just our fear of it Because we see it as messier Um, and that we don't just let it be Oh, I love that so Sorry to mr. Hand Oh, it's okay I love I mean it's this has all been fascinating to listen to uh I uh, I think that that reinventing organizations piece was very interesting to me in part because You know a lot of the work that we're doing in our co-op right now is modeled off of some of the agreements and some of the the Organizational DNA that's inside of the Inspiral Handbook um And uh, I know that they're very influenced by reinventing organizations amongst other ideas and whatnot and I thought that uh, I thought that what that uh article was getting at was also basically tying in with some of the other Readians and some of the other authors Books as readings that aren't in the reading list. So Eleanor Ostrom's work um around common pool resource governance Uh, I think it's called governing the commons Um, you know fascinating series of case studies in there that are all non-western and all outside of the canon about how you know people on the land-based uh, kind of contextually responded to um You know all of these different questions that we're dealing with here around power around decision making around around all of that And then uh, you know a lot of the a lot of the Ideas that she was pointing out in that piece were we're looking at You know examples from First Nations communities within the United States and how they've Managed themselves on the land-based um And there's like a thread here He might be catching it now Uh, there's a land base right, um and so When we are looking at things like what james c scott was talking about and seeing like a state Where he's talking about matey knowledge and kind of these ideas around um, you know uh work to rule this idea that you know workers within industrialized factories would Fuck the trend and strike while working by working to the rule book. So working According to the algorithm as set out by management Uh Then everything would be totally inefficient and ineffective and slowed down um And so it was a way for them to resist was to completely follow the rule book um Because what they were experiencing contextually in these spaces was a kind of heuristic algorithmic Blend between the human and the machine to try to understand how to make this thing operate the best way And I think the same could be said about the blockchain space, which then you know Further on brendan's critique of that one article um You know you could you could then say that oh, yeah that article does miss the point because it's it's kind of You know, it's it's it's basically holding that entire ecosystem to this really difficult Uh, uh high standard that it's it's impossible to be held up to because there there will be a need to kind of jump in and tweak the technicalities of the things to help it work better, right because that's just how we relate with technology That's how it's always been So I just coming back to the land base piece. I think that in terms of land base and in terms of The algorithmic and technical side of that. I think things like internet of things all of these different technical um networks that come into play with the land base in different ways and You know measure it or monitor it or whatever. I think these are very interesting sites to begin thinking about You know how we can kind of take some of these older practices that have more to do with stewardship and sustainability and kind of Caring for the earth and caring for people and their relationship to the earth kind of these permaculture principles taking that and like plugging it into some of this new technology to see if there's a way that we can um leverage that to to better deepen Métis knowledge to better democratize Métis knowledge because this is another thing that James C Scott talked about was how Métis knowledge just Uh was kind of undemocratic in a lot of ways and coming back to what we were talking about earlier around people Um, you know kind of hoarding their knowledge so maybe Maybe this is a way forward I don't know I mean, I think thinking about things like this that it's worth reflecting on the fact that The the idea of an algorithmic solution is related to the idea of like a rigid legal structure which guarantees a quality before the law and was the kind of ideology that promotes those systems those kind of modernist systems that James Scott is deeply opposed to and has you know, very important critiques of um Was developed to to address important kinds of injustices and and so like one question the interesting question is like What is it about some systems that seem to promote or or or to dampen injustice without the kind of rigid formality and and weaknesses of like this algorithmic thinking and one thing about systems that are that are based in the land somehow is that there's a shared commitment which is very dependable to preserving the land because Because it you can't get away with with abusing that commitment Partly because of social pressures, but also because the land is on Is not forgiving of your destruction of it so like The question is where is that commitment? In these in these other endeavors these other technologies like how do you guarantee that commitment or how do you how do you promote or create that commitment and At least that was the question that that that Stephon's Thoughts raised from me like Is there some analogy that you can build into the system or promote at least in the system? Also just on that note um to think about what some of those models of stewardship or say that like are in that kind of um say that maybe austrian profiles or the sort of like history of commons forms of stewardship Or like more traditional knowledge and traditional land practices practiced by communities worldwide like, um I also think like what were they what were the Other forms that they were in relation to like we read an article last season semester from um Lineba Peter lineba about commons and it was like I mean he just does this like really intense way of like being like Talking about yeah, actually a large percentage of uk because this is the context he's focusing on Um was held in commons, but a lot of it wasn't and so it's like I I think a lot about like what what were those practices operating alongside And then I wonder it's like yeah, like how do you attach that kind of same level of commitment? And maybe like these digital practices we're talking about and like how do we understand them In their relationship to like the broader digital practices anyway Awesome. Yeah, and Kelsey's got a point. This does I think bring us to a close on our time Thank you so much everybody for joining. This was a delightful discussion um Kelsey has a thing before we close. I do invite you to Take a quick a quick second Think about that definition you wrote down an hour and a half ago And see if it shifted at all um Maybe do that after the call, but Kelsey you have some things that you would like to get across so that other people can leave on time or close time Just just administrative stuff, uh, which is to say um Firstly this call was recorded and I've been writing blog post versions of it. Um, if you would like to Um read the blog post before it goes live and potentially edit it. You are welcome to do so. I will put it on github um, please I'll I'll send it out to the mailing list But also if you want to give me your github username, I'll tag you when I make the pull request and give it We give it two weeks The second part of that is if you don't want to be in it Usually what I do is put people's first names if you would not like your first name associated with it um Let me know and ideally provide a cool alias um Another thing on the same vein is that we do have one that is currently set to go out, um Thursday if nobody puts more comments on it If you want to read up on the data stewardship one and it's in our github repo, which Uh, well, I'll just send that. I don't know You guys can probably find it. It's github.com slash data together slash website um I think that's all. Kevin, can you think of anything else I should say right here? um, no, just um Yeah, uh, brennan, kelsey, and I will be staying on the line to do some administrative stuff too Yeah, I will take this last opportunity to plug our third semester, which we have not picked the timing for yet But join the google group. That's we have centered on that as our way to disseminate information um We and we I there is a conversation happening. We're getting applause for concluding our thing. Um, but The readings are picked and organized. Uh, we have to are by the group We we open up a github issue for each sort of one of these readings So if you have any interest in joining suggesting and in particular if you have any interest in facilitating You do not need to be an expert facilitator, but we are definitely seeking facilitators the topics for the next six sessions of semester Three are selected and so if one of them jumps out at you, uh, most of the folks on there would be happy to either have a Cope facilitator or some of them even don't have a facilitator to begin with Hopefully that helps. Thank you so much everybody for joining and I think this brings us to a close Heather, Stefan and Moe in particular. It's so nice to see you guys. It's new faces. This is great. Thanks everybody Take care y'all And we'll stay on the line. I'll stop recording With the power Yeah, it's nice to see y'all. Yeah, it's so nice to see you guys. Oh, it's super cool And yeah, good gets in the snowboarding then Yeah We don't open the hills right now. It's here. They're not open for like a while They are still we're still recording like holy holy fridges. They have like white out conditions