 Dr. Neil Davis works with the Urban Foundation on Developer Experience in the Urban Web 3 Ecosystem. Trained as a nuclear engineer, Neil now studies the history and philosophy of science and technology, applied high performance computing, and science and engineering pedagogy. Dr. Davis also teaches computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, focusing on applied computer science for researchers and traditional engineers. Water above the laptop may be the most dangerous thing we do today. In the beginning, God created the prokaryotes, and the prokaryotes were without nucleus and organelle, and structural simplicity was upon the face of the deep, and chemotaxis moved it upon the face of the waters. A single-celled organism possesses many advantages, notably simplicity of form. Being largely indistinguishable, they have no differentiation or specialization. Prokaryotes often form large colonies, such as the cyanobacteria. Some prokaryotes discovered early on that it paid better to consume resources that had already been processed into usable form by another cell, rather than to process those resources oneself. Thus, predator and prey were born, and they have always exemplified divergent and separable evolutionary strategies. The resulting arms race means that predators are constantly adapting to better extract resources from prey, while prey are evolving to evade, resist, fight, or poison predators. Selection pressures applied at individual species and clade levels lead to speciation across deep time. At the Mormon Transhumanist Conference, that may be the most controversial take here. More complex forms seem better able to evade predators, and the simple symbiotic alliances between differentiated prokaryotes evolved into the eukaryotes and into multicellular life forms. Simpler forms also abounded, including the liminal virus. Evasion of pathogenic disease, or disequilibrated colonization by simpler forms of life, has been one of the primary drivers towards increasing complexity in multicellular life. The internet began in the late 1960s. It was born in an alliance between the Cold War Department of Defense and the academic research community. This community had a signal advantage. It possessed strong norms of professional discourse, which shaped the way that the community formed. The nascent internet generally functioned as a real-name high-trust environment, if not exactly of peers, at least of colleagues. The internet evolved as a coordination mechanism. And here we'll see it gradually evolve from the early 1970s until I think 1987 is the last picture here. Literally it was a nervous system incarnate in copper and silicon. And this continued particularly through the Usenet days of the 1980s. One hallmark of the Usenet era, as differentiated from the earlier Arpanet days, was a gradually eroding social trust. Spam was invented and internet-based scams started to spin up. Suitability gained in popularity as a countermeasure to both of these as well as to restrictions on discourse. The revelation that persistent digital records could affect real-world reputation further fueled a cyberpunk obsession with identity control and identity subversion, including hacking. Computer viruses could propagate for the first time as we look at this spreading here. Although von Neumann and others explored the possibility of mathematical structures which could emulate life or at least produce self-replication, it was not until the creeper virus of the 1970s that self-replicating code was observed in the wild. Like a bacillus in an immune system free host, code-based computer viruses began to spread from the 1980s onward. The crisis arrived in the form of the World Wide Web, founded initially on the belief of the democratization of information, right? Like we wanted to make information free. The Web rapidly became dominated by a handful of large corporations. The reason for this is that user experience was the predominant driver of consumer preference cascades. Any child of the 1990s or earlier can remember back to eBay and Myspace and Friendster and Napster and these waves of technologies that would come forward and shape the way that we interacted with the Web. Initially, any of these served as a proof of concept that something could be done, and then it either became the only significant player or a killer app came along and started to own the space. In most areas, we don't have significant competition in the same sense that we did in, say, 1996. Search engines drove discovery and then focused attention asymmetrically. The walled garden approach of AOL and then later Apple and Facebook led to concentrations of users which tipped the balance from single web page hosts presenting their own idiosyncratic views, on their own servers perhaps, to corporate approved generosity and ultimately censorship. As internet data sources have overwhelmed traditional media publishing and distribution, the resulting tsunami of information and informatization has swept into every corner of lived human experience in technological societies. The ongoing universal exposure to alien and internally incompatible, incommensurable value systems has undergirded the well-documented crisis of credibility or collapse of meaning that essentially all Western institutions are facing today. The worldwide web and its technological predecessors acted as a cultural petri dish of clean agar which grew every spore engine which fell upon it. The turn towards a low trust than a zero trust environment was inevitable if anything like an analogy with prokaryotic evolution holds true. Mega corporate platforms are in a way worse than a purely zero trust environment because they don't advertise that the world is zero trust. They lure the unwary into transgressing arbitrary social norms that are fixed globally and thereby courting the wrath of social media mobs and the loss of access to data and finances and other things held in quote-unquote trust. The pre-web cypher punks were right. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world. If anything, they were too limited. Not only their valued crypto-anarchic open society, but any non-mega corporate society at all requires true privacy. High culture and low culture have both articulated and preserved valuable insights in forms of human flourishing. However, throughout the 20th century and particularly by means of the consumer revolution, our lives have been thoroughly colonized by capital and commercial instruments. So-called economies of scale have disrupted smallholders, artisans, and shopkeepers to the extent that these have been virtually eradicated from the modern landscape in favor of plastic and polluting dark satanic mills. Although small-scale provident living has supported gardening, canning, and home production, none of this has survived across a large enough cultural segment to matter macroscopically. And unfortunately, because it's anti-capitalist, it's been tarred as prepper and antisocial. And in many respects, all of our physical goods and most of our modes of interaction have entered this post-consumer phase. There's essentially no native culture left, only that forged in the boardroom. What cyberspace and human culture writ broadly needed was an immune system. And in good Darwinian form, such an immune system has been evolving before our eyes. An immune system formally consists of layers with increasing specificity. First, surface barriers, then an innate immune system, and finally an adaptive immune system. The objective of the immune system is to protect the organism, in this case, human sociality and agency. In an immune system, the surface barriers are designed to make it hard for exogenous agents to enter a cell or organism. In our analogy, the primary surface barrier was the match of physical separation to psychological separation. Surface barriers have been finally rendered obsolete by the launch of the World Wide Web. They're out of the picture for us now. And to the extent they exist today, it's largely a matter of incredible self-discipline or ignorance or happy accident. You just happen to happen to cross the things that are out there. The innate immune system responds non-specifically to pathogens, right? Some things trying to come in and colonize a particular human organization, a mind, whatever you have. Any immune system must have a way of deciding what is me and what is not me. Frames is an identity problem in a zero-trust environment. Users have evolved several ways to uniquely identify agents without reference to legacy systems. Chief among these means is the blockchain. Introduced by Bitcoin for control and transaction of digital assets and since much exploited beyond that initial design intent. Identity is still fluid and polysemas, but it is also indelibly demonstrable. The individual actor has the capacity to express itself with many public faces or with none. One of these typically enjoys government sanction and liability, but it is no more real than the others, only more legible to regulation and taxation. Another aspect of the innate immune system is the public visibility of code. Since the 1980s, the open source movement has developed an ethic of transparency on epistemological and practical grounds. Summing these up is that you have a right to know and change what code you are running and errors are more likely to be detected by many eyes. Both of these are aiming at trying to create an ethos of truth, right, that we're building models that carve reality at the joints. The adaptive immune system, unlike the innate immune system, responds to specific pathogenic incursions. Particular conditions arise, whether through social, regulatory, military, or other requirements, which must be met with specialized forms that thereafter are in competition with the external factor. For instance, one mega-corporate solution to what it perceives as a threat, such as unsanctioned beams, is to attempt to mandate the ultimate traceability of any images provenance. This was a Microsoft project a couple of years ago. The internet immune system thus evolves to further obfuscate legibility and enhance individual control and self-determination by shifting to less traceable technologies such as the interplanetary file system. The point is not whether or not a salient technology such as deepfakes, 3D-printed firearms, deviant scientific or political thought, or even DRM-free sharing of copyrighted material can be contained. Our experience with export-grade cryptography since the 1980s and 1990s has already shown that regulatory attempts ultimately will fail. The philosophical question is, what kind of world will evolve? A FATAC completely driven by factors beyond any office or individual. The practical question then for us is how any particular group of actors can preserve their own agency autonomy and ambit of action. The first decentralized autonomous organization, the DAO itself, was created in 2016 as a way of distributing ownership and stake in a joint venture capital fund. The DAO was a new form of organization in that it was essentially a mathematical entity, a set of smart contracts on the blockchain to which anyone had access. The DAO lived up at least to decentralize an autonomous. No money was held centrally with token-based authentication yielding the right to vote on projects. Having set the criteria for membership and investment, the DAO then operated in truly democratic fashion until an exploit of imperfectly written smart contract code led to theft, crisis, and the ultimate reorganization of the Ethereum blockchain itself. DAO's have rapidly evolved as a way of distributing ownership and stake in a purely democratic way. The word democracy has been much abused over the past several thousand years, but here I use it in a sense much like the Greek original. The holders of an immutable and indelible token cast their secured votes to govern their polis. DAO's represent a resurgence of the city-state, the sovereign city-state, and a new guise. Will this be enough to evade imperializing aggregates which dominate today's web? Decentralized autonomous organizations, zero-knowledge cryptographic proofs, cryptocurrencies, proof of identity systems, and their as-yet-unborn kin represent the evolution of an immune system on top of the Darwinian churn of the legacy internet. The stakes are necessarily high. Possession is de facto ownership, the other end of the stick from not your keys, not your coins. The focus is currently on ownership of money, non-fungible tokens, and similar kinds of assets. But broadly speaking, such systems are going to allow the authenticated ownership of all data and assets one holds, from chat messages to market shares to physical real estate. There may be good reasons to retain the legacy system for some classes of physical or legal artifacts, but at minimum, these will all be an evolutionary competition with purely autonomous constructs. Code is law. Having set the criteria for membership, a DAO can act as the stakeholders direct. The form is still somewhat yeasty today, like a cyanobacteria. It doesn't have a lot of differentiation. It tends to act as a mess. So I predict that we should see further innovation in DAO-like entities. One can imagine hierarchical, concentric, role-specialized DAOs, as well as other taxonomically related forms. Just as one can imagine, progressively less organized instances in a chaos-happy internet. Organization may not even be the word we want to use for a DAO by the end of the day. We must consider all of these modern systems, particularly in a highly connected world, to be competing with each other, interacting at the pinnacle intensity of competence and competition. Any differential advantage that can be exploited to out-compete an adversary in the system not only can be exploited, but should be. Any system which does not have an operational cryptocurrency, DAO-like layer, whatever you want to call it, is de facto immuno-compromised in the world today. All tools for the individual and collective need to be architected around a zero-trust adversarial world. They also need to guard the embers of communities that have survived the advent of the World Wide Web and enable new growth. In a nutshell, the early internet was a cocktail party. By the age of Usenet and the World Wide Web era, the internet had evolved into a player versus player defect-defect equilibrium. In that kind of scenario, brigading, spamming, and anonymity are rational adaptive behaviors, but they're not pro-social behaviors. Most of the mega-corporations that are operating in the world today are operating under a model of reality in which the consumers essentially atomized krill to be consumed, to be guided, to be sent through this churn. Like the model, the vision of human agency has been lost. The legacy internet has in a sense become a crab bucket. It's been building things back into itself in a dysfunctional and frankly satanic way. Communities built on decentralized Web 3 platforms, such as Mastodon, the entire Fediverse, and Herbet, have stepped back from the purely player-versus-player world of the globally-named space social media internet. These today are starting to have more of a block party feel, wherein one can wander from house to house and encounter some of the same faces in the same or new guise. Conversations can drop and resume anew in different locales with largely the same composition. Marrying the underlying cryptographic identity requirements of DAOs to communications tools and databases yields a strong, stable solution to the problem of retaining a foothold of personal identity from which to coordinate one's multifaceted digital life. IPFS, Sovereign Foundation, Tim Berners-Lee's, Solid and Herbet all offer their take on this requirement. In a sense, even a signal chat group running its own server is a kind of token-free DAO. The telos of social computing is to recreate the village green, not the penitentiary. Revisiting this thesis here, right, all tools for the individual and collective need to be architected around using cryptographic proofs to create stable, high-trust havens in an otherwise zero-trust adversarial world. The village is a stable, long-term tribe which shares values and assets in common, from which a member occasionally ventures out into the broader social web but always has a home. Every village will grow its own culture, perhaps even its own cultists, enabled by decentralized technologies to protect their assets and precious peculiarities. The worldwide web has been an extinction-level event for many forms of life, livelihood and culture. For others, it has offered strange forms of life support and even thriving. With a new immune system evolved and now operational, human endeavor stands on the cusp of a Cambrian explosion, unconstrainable by a rent-seeking boardroom and bureaucracy world that never comprehended the light shining in its darkness. Thank you. And they tell me I have about a minute and a half. I can hear you. A question here. Thank you. Now it's on. So, to follow the Eukaryotevolution analogy, would you agree that without a common identity protocol that a single-celled organism is the effective ceiling for each disparate identity system, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solano or Cardano? I've lost my... Am I back? Okay. I think that we need interoperable protocols that at a minimum allow them to talk to each other. What I really envisioning happening is something like the nucleus evolves that controls the center of everything and interacts through interfaces with all of the other services that are out there. But that you do have this core part of you. I mean, this is very Cartesian, right? Like this idea that you have this thing that is immutably you and anything inside of it is you and anything outside of it is not quite you. So you can imagine that there's layers where you do have this nucleus of the keys that you hold that are the actual thing that are you, but you still have an identity that's separate from your Bitcoin wallets or your Ethereum wallets. So it's a lot fuzzier and the analogy starts to break down. Right. I actually think it transfers really well. In the second part of the question, would you agree that a common adoption of a common identity protocol provides a sort of immunological framework where we can implement and backport that definition of you onto existing systems of centralized control? I think that if we end up at that point, we'll end up at that point by consensus and by it being a superior platform and experience to do it. I don't think we should arrive there with regulatory means in particular. Can we escape that as my prime question? Can we actually create the new village green without acknowledging what is? Because what is is currently more powerful. Well, I hope that's one of the things we're doing here today. All right. I'm out of time. Thank you.