This Title Left Intentionally Blank

Blaine Cook · 36 min

Halem, Tanaha, and Semiahmu, and now the Sinaix peoples. I moved around a lot, and I value immensely the broad perspective that this disruption gifted me. It also gave me a deep appreciation for the size and diversity of this province, and how much it resists being flattened into one story. If you have the chance while you're here, I really encourage you to go visit the Museum of Anthropology just across campus. It's one of the best places I know to encounter that diversity on its own terms. And it's special for me to share this with you from my bioregional neighborhood and my alma mater. I studied here, and this is actually where the thread of the talk begins. So at 9 a.m. on September 11th, 2001, I was attending a lecture on relational database theory inside the Hennings Building at UBC, just over there. It's literally the next building over from where we are now. For the duration of that class, not the professor, not the students, no one addressed the elephant in the room. And looking around, I realized that the people in the room, the people who were being trained to build the software systems of the future, were not being trained to think seriously about what those systems would do when they met actual humans. So on 9-11, I switched my major from computer science to sociology. I realized that I could teach myself the software pieces, but that would leave me without a deeper understanding of the social systems that the technology was for. This wasn't a rejection of the technological systems. I like tech. It was a realization about what kind of approach is needed to build technological tools to support people and societies. Engineering trains you to specify desired behavior, build the system, and treat deviation as a bug. I believe this approach is incompatible with social software. Social systems are living, breathing things. Sociology, on the other hand, trains you to observe what is actually happening, to identify the patterns, to try and understand what produces healthy outcomes. Only then can you cultivate those conditions. You don't define and control the system, you tend it, you steward it. That distinction between prescribing outcomes and describing conditions is central to understanding what it means to build the sort of software we want to see in the world. This is part of a long conversation, one that starts before Christopher Alexander's patterns and Ursula Franklin's warnings about prescriptive technologies, and continues through resonant, local-first, home-cooked software. Butler and Ostrom would be proud of today's intercommunal revolutionary networks. Many of you in this room, and our peers elsewhere at the conference, have signed manifestos, written code, and built organizations that embody versions of this argument. So I'm not here to convince you that the first era of social media got it wrong. You already know that. What I want to do is dig in a little and push us to think a little bit further. Because even in this community, in my own mind, I hear a lingering instinct, a quiet hope that the answer is something like a good trust and safety team, but decentralized, a better manager, a kinder machine. And I want to argue that the shift we need is more radical than that. And I want to ground it in something visceral, something that I think proves that centralized cultural governance fails structurally, not just politically. It comes from cheese. A decade ago, when I was living in London, I encountered the work of Bronwyn Percival, who manages the cheese counter at Neal's Dairy, at Neal's Yard Dairy in London, and has written brilliantly about the relationship between safety complexity and living systems. She tells a story about traditional cheese making in the Auvergne region of France. These are, they make raw milk cheeses made with unpasteurized milk, milk by hand in open fields on volcanic slopes into wooden buckets in the fields that serve as the molds for the traditional wheels of salerre. From above, the managerial stance, this looks like a food safety nightmare. There's no sterilization, there's no fully controlled environment, no standardized inputs. And yet these cheeses can be remarkably resilient. Why? Because the microbial culture is already there. It is adapted over time to this place, this practice, this environment. It occupies the ecological niches that a harmful organism would otherwise move into. Safety does not come from absence. It comes from presence, from a healthy, adapted living biome. And one of the remarkable things about traditional cheeses is that they are not all the same. They're shaped by geography, by farming practice, by the cave, by the shelf, the climate, the accumulated microbial life of a place. Terroir is not just branding. It's microbial geography. It is a living community shaped by place over time. Now, pasteurization. Pasteurization saved lives. That needs to be said clearly. Milkborne disease was real. Heating milk made industrial-scale dairy possible and dramatically reduced risk. But it also wiped the site clean. It destroyed the indigenous microbial ecology, the living community that evolved over long periods of practice to do useful things. And then it added back a simplified starter culture, a few selected strains chosen for predictability produced by just two corporations globally. You get safe, you get consistent, you get scalable, and you lose flavor, you lose specificity. You lose 90% of the biological diversity, the accumulated intelligence of a living system adapted to its context, to our context. Sterilization didn't even fully eliminate the risk. It relocated it from places where living systems could manage it to places where only procedural compliance could. Now, people aren't cheese. Human communities are infinitely more complex than 40 kilograms of microbial ecology. The required diversity in a healthy cultural system is structurally impossible to encode from one place at planetary scale. Not just difficult, not just politically fraught, structurally impossible. And that impossibility does not get better as you add complexity, it gets worse. If a single centralized approach can't preserve the diversity of cheese, one of the simplest living systems that we know how to cultivate, then consider what we attempted over the last 20 years with human culture. At most, half a dozen global platforms, each one operating as a single cultural pasteurization plant for hundreds of millions of people. One classification scheme, one starter culture, one idea of what safe means, one interface for the entire world. The possible forms of healthy human community are orders of magnitude more complex than a cheese culture. They require correspondingly richer means of expression, richer and more diverse forms of self-governance, richer mechanisms for maintaining health. I think the first generation of the social web really did try to pasteurize human culture. And the thing that I want us to reckon with is not just that it failed, it is that it could not have succeeded. Not because the people involved were bad, not because the incentives were wrong, but because the architecture made it structurally impossible to preserve the thing that it was trying to protect. And not that it didn't do damage, it did enormous damage, but it could never achieved what it set out to do because human culture is more resilient than any system designed to contain it. There are two ways to make something safe at scale. You can sterilize it, or you can cultivate the conditions under which healthy life persists. The first era chose the first path, I think it's time to try the second. So what does the second path actually require? If you study living systems, cells, ecosystems, communities that persist over time, you notice they all solve the same problem. They maintain a difference between inside and outside. A cell does this with a membrane, not a wall, a membrane, selectively permeable. It lets certain things in and it keeps certain things out. And the specificity of what crosses that boundary is what makes the cell alive rather than just chemicals in equilibrium with their surroundings. A community does this too, with norms, with shared context, with the slow accumulation of trust. When Rudy spoke of groundings with his siblings, this is what he's pointing to. A community that cannot maintain the difference from its environment is not really a community, it's just more environment. Aaron's example this morning of the numbness that results from the jarring contrast of the joy of a wedding and the horror of international atrocities is a poignant illustration of this. And this is what happened on the old platforms. The membrane dissolved, inside became outside, and every context collapsed into one undifferentiated public. So stop thinking about platforms and start thinking about membranes. Living systems maintain boundaries, selectively permeable with consent. They signal across those boundaries, not commands but information that others can interpret and respond to in context. They adapt through feedback, graduated responses calibrated to situation, not uniform rules from above. And they differentiate, becoming this community with this character, with these members, rather than a generic instance of one universal social form, one global social graph. The opposite of a giant engineered monoculture is not disorder, it's ecology. Many bounded systems communicating across difference, adapting to local conditions, and persisting because they are healthy, not because they are controlled. So if that is the vision, many bounded systems communicating across difference, adapting locally, what does the infrastructure for that actually look like? And I wanna talk about two problems. The year before my database class in the same lecture hall, just over there, I learned the old joke that there are only two hard problems in computer science, cache invalidation and naming things. I think that AppProto and this new thing you probably never heard of, PanProto, between them might solve both. Let me start with cache invalidation. If communities are going to persist, they need durable infrastructure that does not depend on one company's continued existence or goodwill. They need to own their data, they need continuity, memory, the ability to move, to fork, to recombine, and to remain legible to one another through all of that. AppProto gives us this. Identity, data, and sync that persist across a distributed network without collapsing back into one service. Cache invalidation at protocol scale. Keeping data consistent, authentic, and verifiable across many independent hosts is what AppProto was built to solve. We're all building on it. You know what it makes possible. Now, a question that I find useful is what sort of forms does Instagram prescribe? That's actually a pretty easy question to answer. A feed of images with descriptions that forbid links, stories, reels, a specific set of interactions optimized for a specific business model. You can describe Instagram's social ontology in an afternoon. What social forms does AppProto describe? That's a categorically harder question. That difficulty tells you something about what kind of system AppProto is. AppProto is not socially neutral. No substrate is. It makes choices about identity, about data ownership, about what is public. But it's architecturally resistant to prescribing the full shape of social life. It decomposes what the old platforms had collapsed together. It creates room. But here's what I think is not yet finished. There's the second problem, and I think the harder one. Naming things. I work on a community platform called Roundabout built on AppProto, designed as a healthy alternative to local Facebook groups and Nextdoor. We're currently supporting communities in Richmond, Virginia, Burlington, North Carolina, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Lincoln County, Wisconsin, and Chattanooga, Tennessee. These are different places with different cultures, different needs, and different ideas about what healthy conversation looks like. When Richmond says community member, they might mean something different than when Burlington says community member. When one community says moderation, they might mean graduated trust building among neighbors. When another says it, they might mean rapid response to harassment. The words are the same, but the social reality underneath it is not. If we require every community to use exactly the same schema, the same names, the same categories, the same assumptions, then we will have rebuilt monoculture at the protocol layer. We've pushed prescription down into lexicons. We've pasteurized the substrate and built a really great distribution system for filtered, normalized culture. And this is the problem with naming things, not in the trivial sense, but naming is an act of social description. How do communities describe their own reality in terms that are locally meaningful and still mutually translatable? I've thought about this for a long time. It's one of the reasons I was skeptical of earlier attempts at interoperable social schemas. I didn't think that we had the tools to do schema evolution well, to let naming diverge without fragmenting. I thought it might be five or 10 years away if we were lucky. After the last couple of weeks, I now think the tools are here or very close. And that's what we're working on with a project called PanProto. PanProto is an attempt to create the conditions under which schemas can evolve, diverge and specialize and still remain in relation. So that a neighborhood forum and a mutual aid network and an art collective can each structure their social life in their own terms and still communicate across the differences. Not by forcing everyone into one vocabulary, but by making translation a first class property of the infrastructure. Not identical, not collapsed into one universal ontology, but capable of relation. AppProto solves cache invalidation, how distributed communities maintain continuity and integrity. PanProto addresses naming things, how those communities describe themselves in terms that can diverge without fragmenting, converging when the time is right. Together, they point towards infrastructure that does not prescribe social form, but creates conditions under which many social forms can emerge and remain in relation. And this is already happening. When people in the atmosphere talk about composable moderation, they usually mean ozone, the labeling model. Label content, label content let users choose how labels affect their experience. And that is real and valuable. Black Sky's recently announced Acorn tool is a beautiful and deeply considered approach to moderation. At Roundabout, our moderation tool, which we call the Empathy Bureau, does not work like Ozone or Acorn. It's not label-based, it is a different shape entirely, and it's based on the pre-moderation pro-social design pattern. Like Ozone and Acorn, though, its architecture is composable, and we're looking forward to sharing it with the wider App-Proto community soon. The fact that App-Proto enables all of this without permission, without a proposal, without anyone at Blue Sky or the IETF deciding it was allowed, that is the point. This is ecology, ecological computing in practice. The protocol didn't prescribe a moderation architecture. It created room for moderation architectures to evolve. Different communities, different conditions, different forms. That is ecology, not engineering. And it extends beyond moderation. Black Sky, Gander, Roomie, Roundabout, we're all working in similar spaces on similar but differently shaped projects. In a monoculture, that would make us competitors fighting for the same users. In an ecology, it makes us something else entirely. Different organisms in a shared ecosystem, each adapted to our niche, each stronger because the other exists. We're a kelp forest, not just one kelp plant. It is critical to our mutual success that we understand this. We're not competing, we're differentiating. And differentiation is how ecosystems become resilient. I want to sit with the hard part of this for a moment. There are many critiques and questions with this line of reasoning. The one I take most seriously is this. Local self-governance has a long history of protecting insiders at the expense of outsiders. Community standards can mean we've decided this person isn't welcome, or this kind of person isn't welcome. Graduated sanctions can mean the popular member gets three warnings while the newcomer who complains gets shown the door. Composable moderation can mean choosing the labeling service that does not flag the content that harms people outside your boundaries. I know this, I work on these problems every day. I'm not going to stand here and tell you that the ecological model is problem-free. But I want to hold that concern next to what came before, because the centralized model did not solve the insider-outsider problem. It was the insider-outsider problem at planetary scale. One company's cultural framework, shaped by one country's norms, applied as the default governance layer for billions of people who had no voice in its design. Rudy's Black Sky demonstrates this better than anything I could build in a slide deck. Under Twitter, black users built something extraordinary, Black Twitter, entirely within and against a system that was not designed for them, was not governed by them, and regularly failed them. What Black Sky has that Black Twitter never could is self-determination at the architectural level, its own moderation, its own governance, its own membrane. On the other side of the coin, does the ecological model also make possible communities that govern themselves badly, though? Yes, absolutely. But those failures are local, they're bounded, they can be identified, responded to, and routed around by the rest of the network. Under monoculture, when governance fails, it fails for everyone at once. Under ecology, the network's diversity is itself a form of resilience. And I want to name one more thing. The ecological model carries its own form of privilege. The ability to run a community, to moderate, to steward, to maintain a membrane, requires capacity. Technical capacity, social capacity, time. These are not equally distributed resources. A world of self-governing communities is not automatically a just world. It just has better conditions for justice to emerge if we build with that awareness. So the real question is not whether to intervene, but from where and with what knowledge. The prescriptive approach intervenes from above with general rules applied uniformly. It scales and it flattens. The descriptive approach intervenes from close with local knowledge adapted to context. It's harder, and it is the only thing that I've seen that can produce health at the scale and complexity of actual human communities. And Kasane's work on governance in this space bears this out. The communities doing the best moderation work are not the ones with the most sophisticated rule sets. They are the ones with the most, the ones most deeply embedded in the communities of the people that they serve. And yes, in a moment when we're all watching what happens with what capital and organizational, when capital and organizational change arrive at the doorstep of an ecosystem we care about, this is why the substrate matters more than any single company built on it. An ecosystem is more resilient than any single organism. We have an opportunity to break with the worldview that shaped the last era, not by building a better Twitter, not by building a nicer control system, but by building infrastructure that supports many forms of community governance, and then doing much harder, much less technical work of ensuring that those communities have the capacity and the accountability to govern well. So I wanna end where I started, with cheese. The best cheeses in the world are not the ones made in sterile labs with standardized cultures. They're the ones where someone tended specific conditions in a specific place over time. They chose the right milk, built the right wooden bucket, tended the right cave, trusted the microbial community to do what it had been doing for generations. They didn't engineer the cheese. They cultivated the conditions under which a particular unrepeatable form of life could thrive. But, and this matters, they did not walk away and let nature take its course. They showed up every day. They turned the wheels, they monitored the humidity, they knew when something was wrong before the tests would have caught it because they had built a relationship with the system over time. That is not hands-off. That is the most hands-on thing there is. It's just a different kind of hands. Not the hands of an engineer building to spec prescribing the shape of a low-poly virtual world. The hands of someone tending a living system. It's not a metaphor for what we're building. It's a description of what we're building. We don't need a better machine for managing culture. We need better conditions for us all to thrive. And then we need to show up every day and tend them. Thank you. Blaine, there are some people who have questions and we have a little bit of time. So I'll run the mic and you'll answer some questions. Love it, thank you for talking. Given all of this, do you think traditional tech standards bodies are still good stewards for the protocol and architecture itself? I'm a person to ask about that. Uh, I think we need to recalibrate a whole bunch of things. So I cut a piece from the talk talking about DNA. DNA is a very simple standard. There are four bases and a very small number of base pairs. And from that, all of life. And so I think that's the level that maybe we need standardization at, like technical standardization. And I think app proto is like, you know, the lexicons plus storage plus communication is like maybe all we need. And then the way that I kind of think about the governance of the next layer up. One of the things that I'm excited about this pan-proto thing is that I think it shifts the conversation to a social governance question. So rather than having a bunch of engineers debate about what the attribute, what the JSON attribute should be called, we can debate about how our communities wanna collaborate and what the meaning that we're communicating across the network is. And those are very different people in the room for that. So I don't think the ITF is a suitable place for that sort of conversation. But I think we'll figure it out. I mean, it makes me think about just even having lexicons that aren't only defined in English, because maybe it don't matter no more. Full emoji lexicons is of course what I mean. And other questions for Blaine. Please state your name. I'm Gav. Nice to meet you guys. I'm wondering, so what becomes of engineering standard bodies in this world? Especially if, like we saw with the Addy demo, everyone can make their own thing, which is great. I love that. But what becomes of formal engineering standards in your opinion? I mean, I think I'll kind of lean back into that prescriptive descriptive lens. I think that the prescriptive, we're gonna define the standard, and then we're gonna build software that conforms to that standard, model should go away. Like, so it sort of runs question. Like, I don't think that that's a useful mechanism in this place. I think that there are some really fundamental coordination questions. So like, how do I get data off of a PDS is a mechanical question. You know, we're talking like tRNA or something. It's like, these mechanical pieces are important to encode, but the rest of it, like everything above that, we need to really aggressively think differently about how we approach that. And I think really, I would love to see us as a community really strongly distance ourselves from this sort of engineering mindset. And one of the things that I'm really so grateful for at this conference is just how many people who aren't engineers are in this space, which is a protocol conference. And I think that's a really good sign for where the community is headed. I'd like to observe that all your observations apply to far more than just technology to do social communications. If you think of how diversity in the animal and the other nature kingdoms is dying, it's the exact same approach of applying the same pesticides in all the same places. And I think there's 100% analogy to what you just said. So very much applaud those comments. Thank you. So first of all, awesome, thank you. So on the one hand, you told the story about the way cheese evolved in the local control and all the, and controls, wrong word, sorry. But just that pattern and how it has all this resilience and the anchoring to the kelp bed floor and all that. But I'm struck thinking back on this that, but it was effectively wiped out by the other approach. And it's all well and good to say, well, don't do that. But if this is indeed a model for resilience, it's also a profound example of resilience failure. So what do you think? I think I'll lean back to the first things that I said, acknowledging the traditional space and the peoples that were here. I think it's actually a profound failure of sort of Western managerial culture and perspectives. The pasteurized cheeses are actually, if you go and look at the science, they're actually less safe than farmhouse cheeses using raw milk because they relocate. And I sort of alluded to this, they relocate the failure cases. And so now it's people in cheese making plants or retail people who are handling cheeses that are less resilient and less safe overall. And so they actually have higher, like the pasteurized cheeses have higher failure rates. And we've also encoded into law the inability to sort of have farmhouse cheeses. And so Bronwyn Percival's book, she's got a book called Reinventing the Wheel, is really about this sort of managerial failure and the governance failure that doesn't let us sort of reflect on, oh, pasteurization was great in the 18th century when people were living in very dirty conditions, making cheese in their backyard. And now that we understand the process more, we could actually move to a different, better mode. And I think, I just want us to avoid doing that again. Let's keep rolling. You should keep talking. We should have more cheese talks afterwards. I think I know what you're getting at, where you're like, are we? Yeah, okay. Any other questions? Amazing. Thank you very much, Blaine. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I know that Ted's room is going a little long. He's going to join me up on stage. I can pitter-patter for a while, I'm sure, around something or other. All right, is it a human joke? It's a human joke. It's an anti-joke. Okay. Which is important. So. And we didn't even record that. This is some of the in-person-only content that happens. Tomorrow. We'll make sure to record it tomorrow. Maybe with some animations. Huh? No. I was not ready for that. We've had it said a couple of times. Yes, we tricked you into coming to a, that you thought you were coming to a keyboard typing conference, but you were, in fact, coming to a let's talk about evolving the state of the world and make cheese together conference. Has it been okay on day one? Awesome. Your task tomorrow, because we only have one last day together, is that we did buy a lot of stickers. But stickers is one way that we spread some of the things that we're talking about out into the world. So make sure by end of day, I know we've got some visitors from Japan, visitors from Brazil. This is actually, Vic, I don't remember what it's called, but it's basically a Brazilian wish bracelet. I'm gonna wear this for three weeks, and then it's gonna fall off and break, and my wish will be fulfilled, which is great. Thank you, Vic. But anyone who's doing regional meetups or other things like that, I know lots of people were like, oh my God, I wish I had those stickers. And through that, it's like, well, actually, there's 12 people from Portland here, and they absolutely will bring stickers back and bring them with you. So make sure to do that tomorrow. Has Ted made it into the room? Keep going. One at a time. There's Beast Guy Chan, drawn by the Japanese community. And the lore of that is that, do people in the room know who Y and Cake are? They've used their real human names now. I liked it when they were Y and Cake, Jeremy and Jimmy, who work on the Blue Sky team and co-host the office in Seattle. And they went to Japan, and actually, the first Blue Sky meetups ever happened in Japan, which is super cool. And they all thought that Jeremy was, in fact, an anime character. And he has various anime character illustrations of himself, as does Chad. Has anyone here met Chad Kowalek, Protocols for Publishers? Amazing. His chibi was also drawn by the Japanese community, the same illustrator who did that. So there's a little lore. How many people in the room know about the fail-alf? Just put your hands up if you know what I'm talking about. Yeah, not very many. That's good. It may depend on your not-safe-for-work settings as well. But in the early days, there were lots of people coming onto the network, and the Blue Sky servers were unstable, and they would break. And this mirrored what happened in the early days of Twitter. And at Twitter, an artist made a fail whale. And it was a whale being carried by strings, much like these strings, by little birds. And so the fail-alf is an illustration of Alf being carried by butterflies. Why Alf? I don't know why Alf. And if you see Fane, Fane has code of conduct abiding sensual Alf stickers. So see if you can find Fane. And if you search backwards in the history of the Blue Sky network, you will also find other images of Alf. Again, depending on your settings. Oh, look, here's Ted. Hi, Ted. Come on down. I almost had to put an image of sensual Alf on screen. Yeah, I made you slides, so it's gonna be super cool when I hand the mic to you and talk about those slides. We'll just, here. No, we can, all right, sure, we can share. Cool, check, check, thank you, perfect. Awesome. Let's get on with it. So Ted and I and Nick are the three project leads for the AT community fund grants. We started to host last year's conference. It is inappropriate and tax impacting if you run a bunch of money through someone's personal bank accounts. Transparency, all that other good stuff. And so we got the Rath Foundation, a 501C.