(2021-08-27) Brander Composability With Other Tools

Gordon Brander: Composability with other tools. Interoperability, exchange, and composition are some of my primary motivations for building Subconscious.

These one-off API integrations form a bi-directional complete graph.

Adding one more app, for a total of 6, means going from 20 to 30 integrations

There is a neat trick to solving this network scaling problem: hubs. Instead of every app integrating with every other app’s bespoke API, what if they communicated through a shared protocol?

Files make interoperability the default

Commercial software, especially aggregators, are incentivized to resist interoperability.

Yet protocols do successfully emerge:
Communication: TCP/IP HTTP, IMAP, IPFS, BitTorrent…
Music: MP3, WAV, FLAC…

Cryptocurrency has provoked an influx of speculative capital, with an unfamiliar set of incentives that are generating new kinds of open-source infrastructure. If you squint, it looks like we might be seeing the bubble phase of Carlota Perez’ Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital. To follow Perez, the influx of capital during the bubble phase fuels the creation of new general-purpose infrastructure.

The question is, what kind of infrastructure does cryptocurrency leave behind?

The design space of some creative work is so vast that no one tool can embody the entire discipline.

To some degree, creative work means piecing together unique workflows using many different tools. The degree to which a workflow has been embodied in a single tool is the degree to which that creative act has been commoditized.

The notion behind tools for thought is that we can increase our creative range of motion through the use of tools. So, what concept shifts might widen the potential of our creative tools?