(2023-08-08) Erlend Age Of Coordination

Erlend Sogge Heggen: Age of Coordination. This is a meandering piece! It's a mashup of ideas revolving around interoperability that will be a lot easier to understand if you've already read Web of the People and Assembling Community OS.

In his article “Memex is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed”, Filip Hráček writes:
Here’s the thing. If I’m being honest, most of my experiments with the different memex descendants mentioned above just kind of faded

This is where the Noosphere approach of being protocol-first is fundamentally different. Protocols are interoperability frameworks

Stefan Lesser chimed in on this proclamation:
I’m glad that protocols are exciting again, which just means agreeing on stuff is exciting again

A lot of technology we still use today came from agreeing on stuff. But then agreeing on stuff fell out of favor and companies pushed hard to be first, best, or cheapest. And that brought us a lot of other technology, often deteriorating and short-lived.

The Silicon Valley VC mindset doesn't understand collectivism.

In the collective model of open source development, value creation/capture dynamics are fundamentally different

Software has indeed eaten the world, but we've been consumed by the wrong type of software leviathan.

In the closed-cloud paradigm, it's only the rent-seeking infrastructure landlords who get to do what they want, while the rest of us have to build according to their strict specifications. That's not an environment conducive to emergent co-evolution.

According to Joseph Campbell's timeless monomyth of a Hero's journey, our current state of entrapment is merely the end of Act 1.
Thus the stage is set for a reclamation of our digital selves. It's time for Act 2!

In his book The Network State, Balaji Srinivasan posits that a startup society – the initiating precursor of a network state – can begin with the formation of any online community.

Balaji can be faulted for many things, but I can only commend him for trying to imagine what greenfield state building might look like in a status quo that considers this to be impossible.

For an in-depth critique I recommend The Blockchain Socialist's 'Overthrowing The Network State' series

Their work has recently culminated in an alternative model of the network state concept: The Rise of Coordi-Nations: Coordi-Nations are voluntary interwoven networks of communities, with aligned values and a shared identity.

This is a remarkably fitting description of the community-owned instances that make up the fediverse.

legacy networks like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Discord are startup societies of the monolithic nation-state variety, Mastodon, Firefish, Lemmy and Commune represent the new world of borderless coordi-nations, i.e. protocol-derived platforms for cooperative network states

Mastodon, Lemmy and their many peers are all uniquely part of the same interoperable network of loosely coordinated builders, intrinsically motivated by the daily experiencing of their self-made spaces. Far better than your regular social-engagement network, the fediverse is a movement.