 Okay, so stewardship This was a really big topic and if you guys, I'll put the notes in the chat, too I don't know we'll get to everything, but I guess for me like how I started the readings is I tried to I was looking at Traditional notions of stewardship. So let me come like religious background curse Exposure I got to the idea of stewardship Which is why I kind of started with this like Christian pasture thing Which I don't I really like just like if you guys took a time to listen to it. He's really great like speaker But I moved through on to like stuff that Kind of like prayers for done by this tribe that Kelsey's tribe from this book that she shared last time I thought that was nice to share and then went into Land stewardship ship from this book called turning the wild about native California tribes So I guess I wanted to start by just asking people Like before we talk about data stewardship like what like how would people define stewardship? So Starting there are and also like where did they you know, where did you get those ideas from? So So for me stewardship involves Taking care of something so that others may benefit from it and that's just a really quick definition to raise the issue of notes and Taking notes So I can I can take notes So that we will Ensure this conversation Okay, so I'm not gonna take notes. Yeah, okay Okay, that's interesting like the word stewardship was not a part of my life before data rescue like period And so for me, it's like if I'm being totally honest stewards a steward It's pretty close is the librarian is an archivist of some kind somebody with knowledge of library science and What I find that interesting like I find the notion that the lake I was introduced to the notion of stewardship through library science through people who had very serious views on taxonomies on metadata on And on filing systems and like into and so to me what a steward is is somebody who like It's a profession. It's I I am a professional steward I I'm I'm hoping you can hear my voice that I really want this to fall apart very fast, but But but I think that that's sort of very much what I've Wanted to be honest about the way that I can see above the word steward these days and for me It's somebody who has it has an understanding or an intimate knowledge of library science and says I can steward this I can Has a it has a deep relationship to the notion of availability right somebody who can keep something accessible and available for a long time and Usually their relationship is very tightly coupled. So when someone who is stewarding something is taking on a very serious commitment. It's very It's very it's a very real responsibility to be a steward of an artifact So I'm curious like so the first couple readings that I had nothing to do I Totally have to cop to this. I've been so busy running a company that I haven't had time to do the readings I'm so sorry Kevin. I love you to bits. I just I Can't pretend I didn't read I've literally been doing that I'm like speaking through all of their I think for you Brendan in terms of like two of the readings I think are super directly important to your work. So you should definitely read those regardless which is the long-term ecological research one the first one not the optional one and post custodial archives paper Thank you so much and I have done the readings in the like posts in the past So this is really appreciate it particularly the the scoping. I'm sorry everybody. I'm a bad attendee I've only glanced over the notes myself. So I Think I only had like a week to read though and my life kind of fell apart in that week. So I didn't have time But next time I'll have more operation But then I mean the question Yeah, so the stewardship is a pretty new concept to me like I definitely don't have any cultural knowledge of stewardship and definitely no like personal experiences of it, but one interesting use I found of the world where it was a person in the denpire scene He's putting together like a A network of like Not really kind of like communes, but not really communes where nomads will like come and do some sort of thing With a given focus and then go somewhere else And so there's a there's going to be like a stream of nomads coming and going. It's kind of like a Landing spot, but there's also people living there that are the stewards of the lands that kind of like help You know keep it maintained and the people coming in like help them Last so it's like stewardship there is they're kind of they're taking care of it So that other people can use it and also kind of like helping coordinate so That was very interesting to me. Just the concept that that could be like a real person in life is Really cool Move is that a novel or is that a thing that's real? I missed that part. That's a thing that's real That's a thing a person is putting together in the diet like their family or Is uh, like they bought some land like they pulled it together and they're creating like a circus commune And the hope is to make it one of like a network of these hubs For wow, that's extremely cool Yeah Is there a link that we can look out for that? Um, I don't know I will ask there is a link, but it's I don't know if it's like Super public or if it's like a work in progress or what but I'll make sure to ask and get in touch with y'all You'd be up close to the slack Thanks. That's really cool Yeah, I usually have heard the stewardship term in two contexts and one of them is Montessori and usually about Stewarding a space there's this really cool thing that Montessori elementary classrooms do where everybody has a chore that they do every day and There's a time reserved for it at the end of the day And maybe it's just dusting the computer monitors and maybe it's making sure that something's rolled up and put away or whatever So that's a space stewardship, which is a really cool like Interaction and ownership over a space which means that no cleaners are coming right like you this is your space and you need to take care of it The other context I mostly heard it in is land stewardship and this is this is kind of interesting like my dad spent his whole career as in Timber and timber sales but it's kind of a dual part thing where like They are in some cases clear-cutting Alaskan forests But he's always worked for the tribal Entities there's a bunch of tribal corporations, and I won't go into it now because it's like a long story, but the job he ended up in like a decade ago was in Stewardship of a particular island which had a monoculture of spruce and Spruce take a hundred years to mature so a lot of trees you can harvest in ten years But not spruce spruce is like a really valuable long-term tree He had to make these plans that involved Accounting for the entire livelihood, but also economic and spiritual and recreational Pursuits of the of the tribal owners who are our shareholders of this organization, which is like how Alaska native claims settled out In perpetuity and so he had to start making these hundred year plans for land stewardship. I just think that's a really cool like weird mission statement I think about stewardship Kind of as in opposition by the way interrupt me if you can't hear me Kind of it's interesting to think about like the importance when I look at climate change stuff It's really interesting to think about the importance of place the importance of understand the land and do reading it over time versus Nomad see which is very much how I have been living my life But with strong attachment to place by Moves Land stewards coupled with circus like my nomadic people thing is really interesting to me It's because I think they can go together as long as there's someone The importance of of intergenerational persistence or at least the passing of knowledge as you lose a place Yeah, I Really appreciated those Observations and reflections Kelsey For me to land stewardship is often what I think of when I think of stewardship not necessarily because I have a direct engagement with land stewardship, although my Partners family, you know, they run a farm that's been in their family for A long time and yeah, there's lots to get in there, but You raise the the issue Kelsey of ownership, which I just think is so interesting when it comes to stewardship because Yeah, I mean you the idea here is that as a steward you don't actually a Steward is not an owner as the pastor says, you know, a steward is taking care of somebody else's stuff if you're using somebody else's stuff and I Just think that Just reflect on the reading, you know the pastor's comments. I Felt were shockingly Insightful, I wasn't necessarily expecting something so straightforward in a sermon But they really helped for me to find different dimensions of stewardship in terms of ownership accountability Responsibility authority You know all these things that go into Taking care Somebody else's Stuff for them in relation to others who are You know potentially using it So there's a lot going on here I thought it was a great selection Perspective on it But there's some sort of important Like well, I have this table and it's important that I Or or this this chest or whatever So I can think about that. I guess those are like I like that I like that people touch on the ship. I was chatting with some of my neighbor The pastor You must know a lot about stewardship or and then the thing that things it's like The idea that like as opposed to we are alerting over things control things Or stewards care the proper care and use use of things Which is a theme I want to kind of touch on next because I was I liked it within the attending the wild reading. I Was just read a quote. She says One gains respect for nature by using it That are an animal Similarly from the The LTO you are the long-term Research paper they talked about how like For the scientists in the field like actually like Taking notes and being able to like correct the notes and like putting like this early putting in the data And data Like how do how do we how do we interact with data on a more cultural level but like to like how do we get like Like people that we're trying to reach with like our How do we get them to use data in a way that they will actually like want to do it? Because right now like people like you know hear about Cambridge Analytica and like they did something to my data But like I don't know what that is and I don't use that data on a daily basis So like I don't even care and like how do I make money off of my data? So here's like the people thoughts How do we how do we actually like use this data that we're trying to school So I think one example or is my air-conditioner allowed okay great Um, I think one really cool thing is when they're stewarding it without even really thinking about it So secure scuttlebutt is amazing in that everyone acts as a steward for their friends and the friends of their friends And it's just completely organic You don't have to explicitly opt in to like storing the data or even thinking about data It's more like I use this data because it is like the digital aspect of my social life and by using it I am a stewarding person and I really like this kind of like the kind of scenes just like Making it part of the actual process where You know more transactional places where it's like I am the owner of the data I am the like company that can Facebook or whatever else and then you Gain access to it through my stewardship where it's SSB. It's really like people Create their data and then they share it with each other directly as they use it and I think that's really powerful So I think that's a way you could go for it How to actually get there? That's like a whole other thing, but I think if I can just keep granting I think large Groups of data are bad for this sort of thing because like When you have just this one ginormous data set it becomes so much harder to take care of it Like the logistics are really hard and at that point. It's not really a person-to-person level It's not a family level and basically have to have these higher level organizations like the scientific data from the large Hadron Collider You're not going to have like people stewarding it, but it isn't also people data. So that's probably okay Yeah, but large data hard to Steward ants people could store data as a function of using it. I guess we're really really elegant and Yeah, I like the I Think to try and build upon that from the reading that I'm doing as we're sitting here This post to custodial archiving for the collective good There's this line that just jumped off the page It's like it's continual the continuous custodian to custodian ship of material objects can no longer be the focus of Archival practice, but it this it becomes necessary to shift what was traditionally considered archival labor onto record creators I thought that was like such an interesting like post okay for thinking post Post custodial sort of like archiving SSB seems to have that That and it's used to sort of push that labor down into the protocol level right by automating Dissemination of data and just saying cool. We're by virtue of viewing this. You're actually seeding this. It's just like lovely sort of mechanism I think that that comes with some complications Particularly and I'm not surprised to hear that the follow-on conversation that'd be a direct reference to scale Right because I think a lot of these patterns really work when we're not taking up all of users hard drives and or we're not dealing in like Or we're not and but at that I specifically want to point to when we're not violating a user's expectations right somebody's Participation in a network and sort of they're becoming of the cedar is great up into that moment They're like wait this thing that I downloaded put all this data that I don't care about all the sudden on to my computer And it's like oh shoot and and I think that that's part of where we have this sociological relationship to our data And it's the thing that is the hardest Aspect of this to sort of remedy because it's the thing that requires us to sort of stop everybody and say hey You know that you you you are upset by Cambridge Analytica. You're upset by Somebody aggregating your information in ways that you disagree with What many of the remedies will involve a conversation that you probably didn't want to have before And so like how do we sort of like negotiate that aspect? And I think that it's really like and I think that sort of like shifting labor is like a very real work Right. We're we're moving work on to people who weren't doing work before and and I think it's really important when we're thinking about Stewardship of this information. That's really what we're fundamentally talking about right when we decentralize something we're pushing the burden of keeping that thing available and online and We're turning everybody who used to be a thin client into a steward right if we look at Paul Frazier's sort of Pick thick thinning Conversation from prior readings for now like saying cool You have you have new responsibilities, right? And it's hard to change the rules of the game now When when the internet still works the way that it does and everyone's just been kind of freeloading And we've sort of grafted on this revenue model that is often based on like Extract like treating that same data that people are creating as a kind of labor that can be monetized. I think that's like a really I Think that feels like the central pain of decentralization pains and and and it really does feel like one of stewardship of like We all of a sudden somebody became a steward overnight and they didn't Realize it like how do we sort of have that conversation in a meaningful way that allows somebody to see the value of Taking the SSB road You should That Right and this I like can't Criticize good or bad or anything about Scuttlebutt because I keep meaning to read up on the protocol and Haven't well, right? And so to the degree that that's something that is accomplished by like, oh You sort of declare this person as a peer friend or whatever and so you were also stewarding their data Then that's like a good thing because it does make it a But to the degree that it's sort of like magic we happen for people that you're physically around maybe it's less So I think that's a really interesting And then the the other sort of maybe counterpoint I wanted to make is that I think the concerning issue isn't really so much scale as it is scope And the part that is about scale is more about like commensurate scale Because I think you're right Moe that You know like we can't shouldn't it's not feasible to expect You know you or me or individual users to sort of also be stewards of you know, like that large hedgeron colliders data Like institutions like large hedgeron collider have the same sort of needs co-work and co-stewardship It's just that the Institutions that will be able to support that have to also be able to work in a better scale But the flip side is like I think the thing that is the concerning part or Could be avoiding and I think what you were really getting at is intentional communities that we can think consciously about So the problem is like the Google that stores five billion users data as opposed to You know the community of a thousand people that are storing each other's data, but we're even smaller than people But maybe it's a lot of data for each of the scope that we can make we says what I'm thinking in my head But not yeah, I was I'm like staring at this quote and it's like that's also the kind of Where it says like pushing forward with automated approaches So this idea of like And I just joined SSB like But the first question I asked was like how much like data is this taking up on my hard drive because I didn't know and And I asked sell he's like a developer on I was like on average when I add a person Add it like And so what I've seen though because I kept on checking it he's shown me how to do Like I started at like And then like I'm calling like maybe like 30 people now and now it's like one and a half gigs. I'm just like how did I get here? And the thing that like got to me was like he was showing me Like hatch through like the other clients with SSB is like And No, they're you showing like this is really lightweight If you're taking up that much data and you're not showing people that whatever way Yeah, like You know that's not you're not thinking about like all these cases if somebody has like You know, I think there's many verses that the mobile app and I'm not sure if it does the same thing Data like the down is that team amount like I've had to like struggle with like gates here and there on my phone Scares me I haven't I haven't done a whole lot of questions we legal foreign thing in a long time But like for a while when that was the way to get stuff Had a big focus on tracking Yeah, this is a really fascinating conversation and I'm not sure how much I have to add from the data in the things but you know, I think the basic idea of Trying to develop systems in which the actual use Equals to stewardship. I think is is a really important point. It's good to hear of actual examples out there where that's That's the idea because that is You know this reading we did on tending the wild that's That's one of the things that really struck me, right? Is that we often think of? Stewardship as taking care which often implies don't touch it. Don't use it anything like that This is making the exact opposite point, which is that in order for something to actually be stewarded for The future it has to be used right particular environments ecosystems In California in this example actually require Use to persist over time in the way that they To look like they do now or like they did So yeah, this question of use is so important and it Yeah, maybe differs from other sorts of things like You know your grandmother's table or something like that where maybe it's the stewardship does not involve Use But it sounds like maybe Most maybe a lot of data actually is is we can tie those two things together although maybe there's data where Those two things are are still separate But the kind of this question I think we're really wrestling with it around It seems like a question of incentives and how to get people invested and involved in Inst stewardship in a decentralized fashion. I think From the reading Kevin, I think you read that quote around Tying one's own well-being into The resource that you were stewarding that really resonated with me and I think that comes back to this question of incentives and how might and incentives aren't necessarily monetary but Yeah, how do you incentivize people to participate in Stewardship so how do you get them to see that their own well-being in one form or another isn't Involved in the care of Of this data or whatever we're talking about and one of the points that's made in this reading Tending the wild Now our problems with directly transporting like indigenous care of the land into stewardship of data like that's You know, we want to be careful there, but the author and the coda makes the point that a lot of this is not just like How do you like the technical like how do you manage a resource like how do you when do you You know start a fire and to help plants regrow and that sort of thing but like effecting changes in values beliefs and behavior and so so much of it comes back to like Cultural rules and you know in this case different kinds of Events that You know illustrated the importance of Stewardship and of the resource in question social structures So yeah, you know, that's pretty abstract, but you know, I think the There's so much more to say again around incentives and The role of values developing a certain value belief behavior system around data stewardship Now that as Brennan says people are finding themselves as stewards and how do you do that? so anyway, really I thought really provocative reading Kelsey, did you want to jump on stack you you can't chat. I Would love to at some point You can go ahead Cool I've had a lot of thoughts floating around and I'm like writing them down in my offline space right now But I wanted to directly address what Eric was talking about In terms of incentivization and I was hoping that would come up There's something that I've just been reading over the last couple days called ink and switch You own your data in spite of the cloud and one of the things that it talks about is The value of offline first apps to the user and I feel like that could be a hint for how we make this transition Something that makes people feel like doing it Plum's a leaf raised, but it talks about for example how programmers Have been very resistant to the idea of IDEs existing in a cloud app and Environment they'd much prefer to have them offline and if you ask why it's because well You want it local or because you want to have Ability to work on it while you're offline or because you want to understand the whole file structure and have it right there to work with Or because it's faster and the point that's made in this post is that That's not stuff that is unique to programmers. So why is everybody okay with Cloud native infrastructures in general. Why aren't we building offline first things on the whole? And the the ink and switch I think is a research group and they're looking at CRDT's as a solution and they've done some some experimental like Apps exploring this. I really recommend this post And that's all I was thinking about with that Mind if I comment on that Yeah, so you can switch is really awesome just the the term local first software and air quotes has been Like revolution because I've been talking like peer-to-peer decentralization distributed systems and it's like It's very techie Local first is still pretty techie, but I think it's got more like emotion in it. It's like I Work locally first, but then I also spread out. It's not just fully offline. It's not just fully local It's not fully cloud. It's local first and then you spread out to other people and I really like that and also, you know Like humble break. They're using that stuff under the hood. So It's good stuff But yeah local versus amazing and I think another thing to consider that is it's not enough for a lot of people specifically people that are more well off like if you have great internet and great devices Local first software doesn't offer you that much, especially like business people that are like, you know what whatever I just want everything in the cloud. I don't want to bother with computers All that extra Cruft, they're not the ones that that are going to benefit as much like speaking from my past, you know Having access to internet was not something I had because it's like if I want to program somewhere That's not at home like I had to I like printed out documentation so that I could reference it because I didn't have internet or I Sticked it downloading entire websites for offline use so that I could actually do something Yeah, so and I think Partially is because you know, I was like a poor teenager with no Data plan with no like access to a lot of things and I think there's a lot of people especially as Wealth disparity gets bigger It's the people on the bottom that have the most use for this because they're the ones that are going to have the shaker connectivity and They're the ones that are going to have less say in things. We can tell them Oh, hey, we have stuff that works offline or hey if you're like in the same visit vicinity as your friends You can collaborate without anything extra or you don't have to pay a cloud service provider Because you know, there is no cloud service Um, I think that's like a bigger value adds than say like a tech bro who has everything and Like yeah, but I think just if I can rant about tech rules again We have kind of like a two-class system in which we have the producers of Technology and we have the consumers of technology and the producers are the ones that are most informed and that's why all of like The rich tech people working on social media don't give their children phones You know, or they're the ones that know the peril because they're building it So educating people About why they should care it's like it'll be very hard or even giving empowering them to do something about it is very hard like a big point of This decentralization stuff to me is getting rid of servers so that we can lower the barrier to entry because right now If your base minimum is I need to pay digital ocean five dollars a month For like a tiny little VM. That's already too much because it assumes, you know, I have a credit card I have any money every month and Also that I want to I have the tech skills to like muck around in the server Whereas if we can have higher level building blocks that just use your local device and sharing directly to people It reduces the number of places where you need like Technical expertise and your technical expertise is more about like just working with your data and actually sharing Yeah, I think that's like one of I think the Reading group that has kept to set sort of resonated with me a bunch as we've been talking about this is actually the civics one where like I think The reading on civic republicanism sort of challenged a lot of for me was very challenging and very difficult to sort of and I think As earned a place in this conversation because sort of if we sort of rewind to some of Eric's comments around like The incentive structure right and as soon as of my brain here's incentive models I hear okay transaction systems blockchains right and like like economics is one interpretation of an incentive model and then the other one that we're sort of like seeing a bunch of buyer Sorry The I'm sure he's just having a connection problem and not rage-quitting but The other side of it is like we often sort of hear like Let's do stewardship through Dependency right through I rely on this data. Therefore. I will steward this data right some sort of like graphing onto that and then and then there's sort of this like third space that seems to emerge over time of this like Which seems to sort of be best the best articulation I've heard of it so far is the sort of civic angle of like We're sort of articulating a moral duty, right a moral duty to Participate in preservation of this information and and I think that that's Something that we should call out and talk about sort of specifically like we have sort of economic interpretations We have dependency based sort of let's map. I use this therefore I will steward this automatically and sort of like that seems like another bucket that we can really talk about I think that's very much in the realm of barter systems and like open source sort of thinking But then I think we have this other bucket that if we look at the classic steward like this like okay, hmm wrong We're wrong phrase classic is somebody who Agrees to take care of something. I guess we could loop in like classics or like the notion of like somebody in like a religious figure somebody in a church sort of Keeping a text and disseminating a text or an archivist to sort of like agreeing to keep and steward and maintain a collection all of those things these folks Don't have that like they are explicitly dependent on things and they feel a duty that is very small but they often sort of like carry a ton of weight and I think that That third space is like one of the the sort of tougher to talk about because in in our efforts to sort of create a post Archival or post steward sort of like universe where we're sort of like wholly in either a blockchain or you know Blockchain folks win and just everything is on chain and my life is significantly more boring or The or we or the like completely open source like Zelletry wins and we just do everything by trading sort of I'll give you my straw hat for my lines of source code But we sort of still have this like middle space of like I Agreed to preserve this purely because it's my job purely because it's I have a duty to sort of like Participate in this somehow. I think that's something that we need to sort of talk about more I think a lot about the Internet Archive I think a lot about you know when Trump's tweets get pulled out from nowhere like No one thought that it would be important to archive that stuff right up until the moment it's deleted, right? Like I think about like all of these things that aren't valued by society today and But are very much valuable to somebody later and like that's where this role is like It really doesn't fit in these other two buckets and and to me I think we should really sort of challenge ourselves to ask this question of like Okay, cool. We're trying to articulate to people why they should change their behavior Along the way, are we are we actually talking about like digital citizenship and and like should we really be like? thinking more broadly about this whole conversation or is that too much or like I don't know It's sort of meant to be food for thought more than anything else because I got nothing Okay Yes Yes Also, like I think that's a great point to slide in the very steering end to the post-historial piece That whole last part about from like common good to collective good is is very much like it's in I think that's what you were just saying now We desperately want the not existing follow-on paper that is more about like what they mean and how they're thinking of collective good But there's a whole bit in there That's just sort of like all focused on this sense of like What our our our like responsibilities there The idea that our conceptualization of like common good is now like in the current Economic and cultural environment kind of broken and unable to fill that and so they're turning to this idea of collective good Which is a little bit more More focus on like how do you choose what those things are that you are responsible for? Like what is the cultural system within your working within which you're working and thinking when you make that choice of the things that People are or aren't who who is or isn't actively saying this is important to me Who are you sort of saving it for and how do you make those decisions in a like equitable or just way? Because if you just view it as like your conception of the common good like In what way is that really good enough versus? It's just powered by your particular context if you're the one with the capability to do that You're probably also coming from a affluent colonial white context Which is like a really interesting set of points to make if she's why I really want like a follow-on discussion about like Well, how do you determine like what falls into the collective area? Because this is like huge deal But like the other thing that Eric had me thinking of that like also maybe fits in here Yes, so we were talking about this idea of like oh how much space is taken up now that like I have Scuttlebuck client solved and taken up by like other you know or in any of these approaches where where that custodial Is pushed to to the edges of the network as it were the producers of the records Like in the sense that you want to do that in a community and not just for yourself So like local first or offline first is just for yourself And then you grow to the concept of like okay in what way does that Which made me think of Like I said before about like all those torn trackers and your ratio You're all shooting for sort of like one-for-one like I'm doing a good job like download But like thinking about that now and then you know the numbers that that heaven was coding and I started thinking about and realizing Oh, if you do want to do this in a community context your responsibility is to store a lot more other Which is kind of a thing right like how how do you provide the structures to make that easy and Cultural signifiers to make that desirable in where do Like what was to can fit in in off loading some of that burden Because that's probably not people for everybody in the way to solve that theoretically that's is like some sort of community How do you have the like if we're in an IPFS style land so like the local community like pinning service That's not a 4k thing But it's the thing that we've all agreed on it like and all of our data Is we're going to be stored without it taking up You know on my disk a hundred times So I can still use my computer Yeah, or so that some of us can go around with the really lightweight clients that don't download a whole lot of other people But we're still in some way supporting a community service that does do that And so I think there's something super interesting Both about like if this is important We have to find ways to support the idea that you're probably in most cases and the more Theoretically after when are capable you are the more of other people stuff you're storing that But then like what kinds of new things and or could exist to offload some of that burden And yeah, so I'll see Yeah, I figured out the raise hand feature Um No, I think Rob they're articulating something that I've been calling in my head the weight of heritage And I want to like disambiguate I think there's two forms of stewardship that we're talking about here and one of them is in the present It's it's care in the present of a thing and that is what secure scuttled up mostly does and it's the way It's initially disseminated The way that a thing reaches its community and then the second thing and I think the much harder problem Is the the long-term care of a thing Which involves either aggregating infinitely greater amounts of knowledge as time progresses or pruning it Because you have to and you will in some sense without like things will get lost And at that point it becomes a question of well Partially of justice where we ask the questions of who draws the line like assuming there is a line who draws the line and why and for whom and It becomes really really interesting because that's one of the things about say Facebook Like we don't like how Facebook handles our privacy and handles our data and how they Excuse me and how they monetize it on the other hand They you weren't probably planning to keep all the things that Facebook has kept for you and shown you and like They do a really good job of showing you things that you had forgotten about and making you feel the thing again that you felt at that time and It's fascinating because they've created an incentive structure for themselves to become In some ways very good stewards in the long sense, but also very bad stewards in the sense of doing it in the way that That people want So then how do we how do we manage this this weight this weight of like carrying all of the information of our acquaintances of our past family members of the place that we're at like How do we make those choices and how do we make it so that people can make those choices for themselves? Within within the platforms and protocols that we design I think that an important part of that is to like kind of get rid of even the choice of should I store this or not Because right now a big thing is like we have scarcity of storage Whereas if you don't have scarcity of storage suddenly It's really not that big of a decision whether I want to keep something or not It's more of a decision of which things do I want to explicitly encourage I think and I don't think it's Like storage is Expensive, but it's not that expensive and I think a lot of it is very Artificial like we're getting phones that are that have 32 gigabytes of storage in like 2019 and By 2019 usage standards that sucks But also partially who does it benefit that our phones do not store a lot? Cloud providers yay, but also there is you know SD cards that can store like Terabytes of storage and how much storage does a user really at a time and how hard is it really to have? external devices to back it up like I think in Terms of technology There's a lot we can do to kind of get rid of that choice of what should I store or what should I not store? And I think like it's very possible to make it That's kind of some of the thoughts I've been having because like a lot of the push for thin clients is I think because It's to push cloud forward And get like more like physically fit things, but if you make it a little bit thicker Suddenly, you know a whole bunch of things aren't as big a deal Including storage and distribution of data with Sorry, would you mind turning up your volume? I'll just talk closer the mic to Just a clarifying question, but it sounds like Not the argument, but just like Me is like storage is kind of so cheap that like we don't need to make the choice like Part of what you were saying Back to the SSB thing which I'm really interested because it's like this is here's cuddle, but like you don't Like it's that unedible right it's immutable like once you post something it stays in the record and I'm sure there's a lot of Thought that went into that but like for me personally going on to it when I think about any of these social media stuff like I don't want Everything to exist forever. I want a choice even if we could store everything Like this is like the whole right to be forgotten stuff. It's really interesting and it's like We have to ask ourselves like what is it that we want to like stew or maintain for ourselves And I don't want like my Like my so 20 year olds Other people's entertainment are just like reasons Oh, I put in those just like cat like castle culture. I don't want like my mistakes to So I like Kelsey also that like, you know, like like what is it that we like choose to keep? So regarding like deletion on that is a very big question and not enough people talk about it I've been trying to talk about it for like a couple years now in the doubt ecosystem and I don't think it's Crazy hard to do if you have people you hate people because when you publish something and it's replicated across the world You know, that's kind of scary but what if you had an unpublished button and You're only replicating with people that you can trust to respect that unpublished button like There's like this term called a tombstone In distributed systems where you don't just delete something you won't get saying like, yeah This is deleted forever and you can't undelete it ever again So it's like another thing that like to mention is You know, you don't have to fully replicate everything in the distributed system Or wait, no, that's slightly off topic But yeah, like tombstones are I think very possible. Another thing is let fewer things should be just explicitly public to everybody like Facebook posts that are just public to everybody. That's kind of weird Also, if you like add a new contact them seeing your entire life I think that's kind of weird and I think encryption is kind of like something we could apply to make that not a thing like I think it's very underutilized, but also when you move to decentralization and distributed systems Your only privacy now is encryption. So on one hand, it's like scary But on the other hand, it means that's a question you have to think about so it's like when I create this data who can see it and I think it's kind of on us as the people building applications to kind of give users informed Understanding on being like, hey, this is available forever Or maybe have a button being like, hey, this is available just to your friends until you say Hey friends, please forget I ever did this and Somehow avoid the stri-sand effect where now someone will be like, oh Move didn't want me to see that ever again. I'm gonna make sure to keep a copy because I'm not a jerk Yeah, that's so you could design something like that you can do something like snapchat, but actually real Rather than like, hey, we're gonna we're gonna trust snapchat to totally delete stuff and not share it with anyone But in the end like cryptographically you can't make self-destructive Messages because of how information security works at least not like by using The standard off-the-shelf stuff like maybe there's some new sci-fi technology that this is quantum entanglement that makes it like really one-time use but It's like a trust thing if you trust that everyone getting the data is going to respect that then you're golden But as soon as there's a malicious actor It's not very nice. For instance, even in the snapchat case, you know, it's like people can just screenshot your private photo And even if you have the screenshot notification thing they can just take another camera Take a picture and you wouldn't know so information theory kind of makes all this a bit of a pain in the butt because In information theory once something is out there, it's out there Yeah, I'm not an information theorist though and this is not informational advice Yeah, and trust changes over time to Yes, like you don't necessarily there's so many circumstances of like, you know I mean marriage is one and then divorce like where you planned to spend the rest of your life together And then something messy happens and it becomes this whole thing where the person you trusted with your life and all of the things you own Is now no longer worthy of that or or just the simpler like um sharing of pictures between loving partners who stopped being loving partners and then one of them becomes a very bad actor And our systems need to account for that It's really hard because because of this whole like side channel thing the closest we can get is make it hard Or like make software that behaves well and then hope that they don't Like this is where centralization Wins actually if every time you wanted to access dating you have to go through a third party Access controls there are way better. That's not to say that someone accessing this third party can't save that data for later It's just the default mode of interaction is um through this arbiter so Yeah, it makes things a little more harder But at the same time, I guess software that automatically locks you up. I hope to I don't know. It's very hard. I think this also falls in in many situations that kind of arbiter Where facebook can be your arbiter or like whatever random posted And as long as you trust facebook to like be a fair arbiter Um, then facebook can lock the other person out or something You're right That also requires But I mean we can substitute in some other more trustworthy entity Yeah, I think it's really interesting or I think it's very important to not ask our technology to do things that aren't possible I don't know if you guys can hear me. Okay. Um, but uh I'm currently saying things into a microphone that all of you are hearing If I say something stupid I can't unsay it. There's no There's no back button on and there's a different take backs these on the experiential world right and I think that's like sort of the The end of the conversation when we talk about trust, right? Like, um I've always been taught like when you send an email it's public like it's not you may not think it's public But it's public like there's nothing that times stops from someone from turning around and sort of like disseminating that on forward and that's You know and and this is I think what's so interesting is like we try to build protocols that sort of Automate away the worst aspects of our society But I think when we talk about to try and sort of drag this back to the conversation of stewardship I think there's a question here of um How stewardship is a dynamic thing and how part of the awesome responsibility of being a steward is this sort of The discretion of the author authorial intent the the desire to sort of Have a commonly agreed upon system where the rules of the road are understood like before the sort of like Stewardship aspect begins right and because we talk about like it's sort of embedded in the in this conversation where Oh, we would totally we should have a delete button on that We should have a way to transmit the desire to sort of delete something That's presently not in the protocol, right? And so like it's right now the way the thing we do because it's not a slight on that it's just like It's really hard to make and there's lots of other things to make and we have to and like it's just like it's prioritized on a given day and we I think as we sort of like are trying to get our heads around how stewardship functions Um, and how we move and disseminate the role of stewardship across these different sort of categories. Um It comes with new challenges and it comes with I think problems that don't that may not arise until much longer in the future like a man and this sort of point to Kelsey's sort of Temporal spacing and bucketing of of the notion of stewardship. I think is a really Interesting and very important aspect, right? You don't want a delete button right up until the second you really really need a delete button And you don't want all of your information shared through an encrypted sort of bi-directional happy protocol Until the minute that you really realize that you need that thing and I think that's um Just like That in itself again getting back to this idea of like don't ask things that aren't possible Like it's actually not possible for us this protocol designers to get our heads around this stuff And and think about all of these edge cases in corner cases now Right and this is but like there's the whole history of like law and setting up governments and like trying to plan for stuff that you can't plan for and I think that's sort of humbling and hopefully speaks to The pressing need that mauve sort of articulated to sort of break down some of these barriers between those who author protocols and those who consume protocols Be for these reasons. I think it's sort of really incumbent on us to sort of Try do put the effort for Reliable accurate and useful metaphors. Hopefully i'm okay. I'm done. So I hope that didn't lag out to you It's a little bit To translate we got to put the other word to translate the stuff into useful metaphors for people Um, and that I think that effort belongs squarely on the people offering the protocol Well, I like that you brought up law because I think a lot of type people don't Talk about law, especially in the distributed space Because I think I get a lot is people come up to me and they're like, okay What if I publish copyrighted material on that? and I say, you know Get sued If I create copyrighted if i'm doing something illegal I should be sued And I think a lot of type people think about exclusively in terms of like what is cryptographically possible or not possible And I think they completely miss the whole social aspect of things like 100 the tech should Have good defaults that make that reduce on them But in the end, I think it's like societal pressures that should should be kind of like pushed forward And like enabled like how do we as a society? Um, figure out what is good and bad and do something about it Um, and how does technology kind of like not get in the way of that too much while maintaining some nice guarantees like a balance like I think The focusing on just the tech is not enough and in fact, I think the tech is the least interesting part Well, I mean, it's the most interesting for me because that's my specialty I'm I'm still very new to not tech But I think like on a bigger scale Not tech is like the thing we should learn like what are the cultural values as was mentioned before like the morals like stewardship, you know Uh, like ipfs has file coin, which is like we Stewardship is in the protocol You just publish your files and then the free market provides and there's no human involvement really Which I think is one approach but the alternative is like you have people agreeing socially on what to do And I think that's like really important Yeah, sort of a lot I think if someone Like a partner has data that was supposed to be confidential and they're thinking easy They should get social repercussions But also the tech should try to avoid that if possible It's just like bad actors will always exist And you can't like some things are mathematically possible and that's when you ditch math and you go for the club Okay, and um respect for time. Kelsey, I saw your hand raised. Maybe you can kind of close things off for us Kelsey Yeah, man, this has been a really cool conversation. I love I love where we started with the the personal artifact moving forward and the The space and I love that I love that we moved through also The areas of um What we're keeping why we're keeping it who we're keeping it for and I If I may I'd like to close with a quote from a favorite Borgesian short story which talks about The disappearance of data over time. This is called the witness um It says But something or an infinite number of things dies in every death unless the universe is possessed of a memory as the Theosophists have supposed In the course of time there was a day that closed the last eyes to see christ The battle of june and the love of hell and each died with the death of some one man What will die with me when I die? What pitiful or perishable form Will the world lose The voice of Macedonia Fernandez The image of a roan horse upon the vacant lot serrano and charcus A bar of sulfur in the drawer of a mahogany desk and I really liked bringing this back around to the idea of Stewardship and remembering as you are saying the technology cannot solve every problem. Um, there will be Losses regardless and some of it is is the experiential and some of it is the Deeply personal and some of it is the way that the data affected you or or made you feel and so it's really cool to to hear everybody talking about different ways in which Data is impacting them And the ways in which we're we're thinking about what should go forward and what should be deleted and Maybe nothing should be deleted. Um, but finding value and then remembering all so that But not everything gets saved. So the work that we're doing of trying to save what we can is Although we can do in some sense Thanks Kelsey, that's a great way to Not end the conversation, but leave us thinking more about the conversation continue this I hope that that was my last thing but But I hope people like think about like how do we continue Conversation how we continue to be like good stewards how we continue Preserving what should be reserved or what we want to Are allowing people to choose and it is four o'clock And I just wanted to thank everybody for being here. It was really awesome conversation Yeah, so the next reading group I think if I'm not mistaken Kevin is de-centralization and I am putting together the readings for that. Is that true? I'm like I'm thinking Like because the schedule has ships so much you want Because normally it would be like you should have reading right now. Yeah I think if we if we think about just delaying it two weeks I can put together the readings in two weeks and we can sort of and by I I mean I'm gonna create the get-up issue tag everyone here and pull it in. I've got some ideas. Um, I think it would be really interesting Thing a couple of things that are jumping out at me But this local first software notion and its relationship to decentralization is really interesting So yeah, I think it'd be really fun. Um, so why don't I'll create the issue I'll tag everybody on this thing in it and we'll see if we can get something cool out of it I think we can still pull off a great decentralization reading. It's home stretch It's the easiest topic for all of us decentralization nerds And so like I think there's some fun ways we can take it And I think it'd be really interesting to sort of use local first as a foil for challenging Some of our preconception preconceived notions of decode decentralization as the like rallying drum that we keep beating So see if we can't look at that. But yeah Come on Cool. All right. We'll have a look and we'll debate on issue. Yeah So such a pleasure everybody Thanks everybody. Thank you I can't see