 Sorry, do we have any non-designers in the room? Anyone that doesn't have design in their title? Pretty good. All right, all right. Cool. So essentially, seeing in systems, this talk got really weird. I wanted to make it more practical that these topics in this subject matter is really... It's hard to communicate, so let's go and see where we go. I just want to clarify something as well. When I say native Ethereum design language, I'm not talking about a design system, which is a systemization of interface components. I'm talking about a generative language in the same way that we have English or something like that. How can we create composable generative elements that actually create a design, a process of design that can be adapted to a complex system? That sounds totally normal. Cool, so the situations. So basically, we invented the Internet in the mid-90s, middle of the century, and it's basically shaped it to our world. So it's a product of our world, to that point. And then, with the invention of the World Wide Web, 1990 to known as LEAM, we arrived at the consumer-friendly Internet, and it incentivized us to feed it our information, and it transformed from being a space, so a destination that you actually visit, to being fused with the very sort of information systems of our civilization. And then, obviously, everything that happened after 2016 was a catalyst for us thinking and trying to question what's happening with these systems, what is happening with the Internet, how is it reshaping society, how is it reshaping civilization. And so my question is, and my thought, one of these thoughts, is that essentially Ethereum and the related technologies are not so much of an invention of italic and friends, but an inevitable, emergent expression of the Internet itself with italic, et cetera, as a medium for which this was expressed. Another way to think about this is that for the longest time, we've had sort of a simulated reality on the computer and actual reality in which it lived. But quoting Paul Edwards, he's an academic that studies and lectures in society and technology studies. He says, programming can produce strong sensations of power and control because the computer produces an internally consistent, if externally incomplete, micro world, a simulated world entirely within the meat machine itself. So that is where most tools produce effects on a wider world, in which they are only a part. The computer contains its own worlds in miniature, in the micro world, as in children's meat believe, the power of the programmer is absolute. And the problem is that now, as the Internet has started to interface with these systems of society, the simulated reality of the computer is brittle and it cannot handle, but it's not capable of adapting and responding to the pressures and the challenges that it's now facing. And the best way to phrase this, I think, is in this essay, a childhoods end that came out on January 1st this year by George Dyson. He essentially says that the genius, sometimes deliberate, sometimes accidental, of the enterprises now on such a steep ascent is that they have found their way through the looking glass and emerged as something else. The models are no longer models. The search engine is no longer a model of human knowledge. It is human knowledge. What began as a mapping of human meaning now defines human meaning and has begun to control rather than simply catalog or index human thought. No one is at the controls. So this is basically my vibe. We live in an age of planetary computing. We've reached the limits of design and Ethereum might help us extend them. Or, in another way of explaining it, how do we get to galaxy brain design? Alright, so just an intermission. Who is this guy? You're probably thinking I'm kind of weird. Some of these topics are real strange. This is me. This is a friendlier version of me. I'm a product designer at Consensus. I've worked on the Rumble Component Library for about two years. I've been researching this topic trying to understand what has been happening since 2016 and what has been happening since then and also before that it was proceeding this whole event. Cool, so basically what's going on? Nobody knows is what I've discovered. Not even the people in charge. This is Casey Newton on Twitter. He interviewed a YouTube CEO at CodeCon. She said we work really hard to understand what's happening on YouTube. So the people that run these platforms don't even know what's going on anymore. And actually this is everywhere. So you should all be familiar with this. Facebook being used to distribute state propaganda. Facebook again being used to incite violence and genocide in Myanmar. This one's a bit more positive actually but this is fun. So basically teens have big parties in LA. They create an Instagram account for the party and people have to request a follow-up. If you get approved it basically means it's your invite. They did not design that. This is an interesting one. Airbnb says we want to belong anywhere. I'm sure you're all staying in Airbnb. It's this whole idea of this sort of global... kind of global mode of living. Anyways Barcelona locals say that basically they see the service as a pestilence which is very far from the aspirational image they're trying to project effectively saying that Airbnb is one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. So does anyone here know Katie? Is this her LinkedIn profile? No, I don't think so. Anything out of the ordinary here? Anyone know what's up with Katie? Is this her real person? Yes, partial credit. She is a product of machine learning but what she's not going to get is that she was also designed by a spy, a Russian spy in order to recruit informants in Washington through LinkedIn. And this is also done by the Chinese allegedly as well. This is a fun one. So Uber, Granny is in running shoes and delivering ramen for Uber right here in Japan. And then how YouTube radicalized Brazil. So these are two times investigators that went down to Brazil in order to understand what's happening down there and they observed or they believed they've got the evidence and they published this evidence observing that YouTube's recommendation engine led to the rise in popularity of J. E. Bolsonaro and led to his election subsequently. So, oh yeah, this is really something. So in this article there's a person by the name of Pedro de Roche and he says, we have something here that we call the dictatorship of the like. Reality, he said, is shaped by whatever message goes most viral. So we're probably thinking what the hell is going on because no one explicitly designed Facebook to incite violence or YouTube to radicalize Brazilians or Airbnb to reshape affordability and cities all around the world. All linked in to be used by recruit and formants for foreign intelligence. And I think I figured this out. I think it's the root cause. There's the Silicon Valley formula. It's pretty simple, I'm sure you will know it. You basically take one young self-assured male, white male, give them a bunch of cash and then they change the world and they impose themselves on the planet and they just federate. The issue with this is that it's essentially scale. It's Silicon Valley's obsession and it's tied to the VC model and the actual power dynamics, sorry, the power law returns around how these VC business models make their money. And the issue with scale inherently is that it leads to complexity. Now complex systems are those where a system is more than the sum of its parts and effectively the issue here is that we can't actually predict their behavior. So a complex system is one where we simply cannot map or model all the different interactions, all the different elements of that system and therefore they're producing the emergent effects that I showed you, which is exactly the problem. Emergence is a classical element or classical property or output of any complex system. It basically says it's stuff that you cannot possibly have imagined sort of manifesting from these things. Oh yeah, so essentially one other way to reframe this is Dr. Ian Malcolm's famous words. So in a simple system, your old designers, except for like five of you, there's a simple cause and effect, right? You have a like button and then you it's tied to a counter and it goes up and you feel good about yourself. The complex system, what happens is that cause might still be tied to effect but then that effect might be tied to other effects as well. See if these second and third and fourth order effects that lead to some of the examples that I showed you earlier in the talk. And so, yeah, the fundamental problem we have here is that we can't fully know all the unintended effects of our design choices. In a complex system, a single cause might have any kind of effect. For an example, if this is tied to a counter in a simple system, I mean it's not a very, it's simple, it cannot be manipulated to any great degree. If the like button is tied to a recommendation engine that is built by a company that has designed a business model to incentivize time on site in order to sell ad inventory, all of those design elements lead to some of the examples I showed you before, radicalization of people distributing propaganda and so on and so forth. So they're used by actors outside the system in politics and culture, et cetera, in ways that were never intended. So has anyone read this book? No? It's really good. So, yeah, so James Bridal, he's written a bunch of essays around this concept of the new Dark Age and then he published this book and it came out at the start of this year or maybe at the end of last, but he essentially says that what is needed is not new technology, but new metaphors, a meta-language for describing the world that complex systems have wrought. A new shorthand is required, one that simultaneously acknowledges and addresses the reality of the world in which people, politics, culture and technology are utterly enmeshed. So what I'm proposing, if you will, is that we need some kind of third layer. The 90s and the early 2000s for anyone who was around in those days was basically all there was was UI. You did UI design and that was your thing when a woman invented UX and applied it in sort of a computing context in the mid-90s, but it didn't find its way into web design as a practice until sort of 2005, six, seven, eight, and so on. And basically UX subsumed UI as a cohesive collective practice and my thought is that a third layer is going to subsume UX as well and it's going to be for the design of complex systems or adapting complex systems. The question is, where can we find a new design language? And I want to really establish that it's not a process of creation, but revelation. We don't need to invent anything new. Everything that we need has already been explored, has been published, has been talked about and exists in many different disciplines right now, today. One example of how we can find this process of revelation facilitated. This is John Boyd, Air Force Pilot. This is a happier John Boyd. He invented what's called the aerial attack state. So in the mid 20th century, I think it was around the 60s, it was believed that dog fighting, aerial dog fighting was far too complex to ever be objectively math and defined and that no objective tactics manual could ever be created. He just applied physics to that problem, it wasn't that hard and he basically determined that in any aerial dog fight the position and velocity of your enemy compared to yourself is all you need to know in order to understand what what maneuvers they have available and what you can do to counter them. Similarly, so this is the Yoshizawa Wrangler system. Up until before their system was developed, sorry, communicating how to make origami was a very complicated process. We just didn't have a system in place that could cohesively or clearly communicate how to make these folds. All they did was create a superior symbolic language to better communicate how to go through this process. They didn't do anything new, they didn't invent anything new, they just took what was there and they updated it and incorporated different symbolic diagrams from other professions or other disciplines. Sorry. So how do you design for complexity? I've got no idea. And that's kind of the point. But I do think we need to go deeper, deeper down the stack so to speak. And the first thing to consider is that the system should be our primitive. So a system is scale free and we're in an age now where scale has evolved these systems or basically incentivized these systems to grow at a planetary scale. A system is scale free, it means that it can be as small as a single cell or as large as a universe. And systems are everywhere. You're all familiar with them. You each have a system for how you navigate a city or how you go about your day. A morning routine could be considered a system and we are very familiar with these with this as a concept and as a construct. And you're already designing the systems anyway. Yes, the transition here is can we think less about outputting objects and outputting relationships, knowing that they're going to shape whatever it is that we want to emerge. So effectively saying that objects as a natural output are a natural output from any set of relationships and interactions that they facilitate. Moving away from the problem solution as a binary and think because some one person's solution can be another person's problem and understanding that there are no, I get a simple system, maybe there is a meaningful way for a problem solution binary to actually work. But in these complex systems it's not so much. And also actually the solution implies that a problem can be solved but any solution is actually only temporary. This is important as well. We design independently. We design as if we're designing a single system but we need to design for interdependence and we need to understand how the systems outside of us are unconsciously shaping our design practices and add our biases and so on and so forth. I think we're really great. This is Benjamin Bratton, design theorist. I think a really great point of view on this or articulation of this was at a talk he gave last year where he said that he suspected or he proposed that the insurance industry has contributed more to car design than the automotive industry itself. And this is another really interesting diagram I found. So basically how do these, in the case of this worker, imagine you're that worker, how do all of these overlapping systems influence how you design, how you practice how you think. And this is where it gets interesting. So moving away from designing interactions to designing incentives in order to encourage those interactions. How can we design modes of value and opinion, belief, social reputation or status systems? How can we design those towards achieving our aims? How can we move from thinking in non-social terms to social terms? Something that Ethereum does very well is acknowledge the implicit social relationships and design for them in its consensus mechanism. How do we go from designing with direct control trying to get clear cause and effect or design for clear cause and effect to indirect control where it's not understanding that it's not possible for us to have every single answer to every single design so-called problem. But we need to be able to figure out ways to shape and influence these things well after we've actually stepped out and how do we acknowledge that we now need to design from static systems to adaptive systems. And obviously, once again, Ethereum is very good for this with its composability and its capacity to be forked. One of the biggest challenges that digital static systems have is in their inability to adapt. So this gives us a model for how we can get around that. Yeah, so also essentially we need to sort of I propose I mean, you can do this enough my suggestion is that we should consider ourselves effectively in a cycle of creation and adaptation and both the user and ourselves are both going through this cycle as well. So just as the user creates and we adapt we create and they adapt and thinking of it less from a hierarchical perspective instead of into relationships. Yeah, so I don't know how to actually finish this talk because this topic is still one that I'm struggling to wait to be able to communicate cohesively or clearly. But this is from Laura Schwalst. She says, a flower is not a flower. It is made only of non-flower elements. Sunshine, clouds, time, space, earth, minerals, gardeners and so on. A true flower contains the whole universe and if we return any one of those non-flower elements to its source there will be no flower. So just thinking about the systems are in and through everything that we're doing. Cool.