“We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”

“First we build the tools, then they build us.”

“All words, in every language, are metaphors.”

“There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”

              ― Marshall McLuhan

McLuhan, some of you may be familiar with, was the guy who pioneered media studies from the 50's and 60's on. Media studies as a kind of radical anthropology which investigates technological media as extensions of man. And, interestingly, he claims to continue within the tradition set by Giambattista Vico in the 17th century with his Scienza Nuova (McLuhan has also entitled one of his books "Laws of Media: The New Science"). Now, this area of 'science' and research/looking at things I find to be not just of value or useful and providing of a lot of insight, but perhaps even of critically existential significance to us as human species and complex socio-technical systems and societies.

I notice one project which explicitly focuses on these aspects of technology is Holochain. One can't help but notice that even from their choice of words and terms. One such term being "unencloseable carrier". Meaning, all communication is mediated through some carrier medium and some media are encloseable and susceptible to capture and manipulation, while others aren't. Here's how Arthur Brock describes it in a recent blog post about it:

"All communication relies on one or more carriers. At the most basic level, when you’re speaking to a group of people in a room, the air is the carrier for the sound waves moving through it. You pass breath through your vocal chords and shape your mouth in funny ways, and a bunch of compression waves emerge and fill the room with information that others then decode. No one can just grab the words out of the air to stop them from reaching someone else. The carrier is unenclosable.

And yet, most carriers we use to extend the reach of communication also introduce the possibility of enclosure, which in turn leads to power imbalances. Writing gave rise to the literate class, the clerical class, who by virtue of privilege or position suddenly had outsize power, with access to libraries and information and the ability to make deals or even laws that others couldn’t make, or at least couldn’t understand, without the help of the literate. The printing press gave rise to the editors, publishers, and booksellers who determined which books were published or promoted. Broadcast media gave rise to the media empires who today exert preferences over what is broadcast. The ability to control the carrier results in the ability to control the message.

What’s actually true about oral cultures is not that control over messaging is impossible, but rather that the available control mechanisms are more overt. You can stop someone from speaking up around a fire if you physically attack them or try to shout over them. But then everyone knows you’re doing that, which means that your actions are subject to whatever social feedback mechanisms exist to temper abuses of power. So, really, what carrier enclosability gives rise to is covert power. The manager filtering the suggestion box; the allocation of FM bandwidth to someone over someone else; the private understanding between interest groups and politicians."

Truth of the matter is, if we stop and really think about it, a lot of our most common-use and taken-for-granted tools (as in technological media) are really so antiquated and inadequate for what they're meant to do and tackle that they cause a lot of damage in the process of how they mutate and evolve alongside history and changing circumstance. We may have advanced a lot of things in many areas and what have you, but these haven't really had a global wide-spread influence or effect in re-arranging and re-constituting everything else in accordance/around the realities of what had been discovered. In many ways, we're still as primitive as we were in the Middle Ages and maybe even beyond. As George Carlin once put it so eloquently, "we're just semi-civilized beasts with baseball caps and automatic weapons." 

So then, what about money? The post proceeds to explain:

"Monetary systems are special cases when it comes to enclosability and covert systems of control. We all have the capacity to produce value, but we have allowed our exchange of value to be mediated through money, which we’re not allowed to produce. (If we do, it’s called counterfeiting.) The few who are allowed to issue money use that privilege to constrain our participation in the marketplace.

So we’re back to our original question: is it possible to have a system of communicating and transacting that 1) involves truly unenclosable carriers and 2) is capable of massive scale?

So, one key ingredient in making any system fundamentally unenclosable is the ability for anyone to create segmented spaces of coherence into and out of which people can freely associate, with rulesets that are particular to those spaces. 

This leads us to another key ingredient of our unenclosable system: forkability, which means that anyone is free to leave any space, create another based on the same (or similar) source codes and rulesets, and invite people to the new version."

With (one of) the goal(s) of Holochain and then Ceptr being:

A Natural Selection

With free association and forkability in place, an evolutionary phenomenon emerges: the spaces themselves, with their patterns and protocols, enter into a process of natural selection. The ones that solve problems better or serve people better will gain greater adoption, while the ones that don’t do as good a job will die off. 

We believe that by providing an unenclosable carrier for an unlimited range of applications, Holochain will enable the next internet — one that doesn’t involve corporations, governments, or surveillance systems in the middle of our communication and collaboration.

Holochain is actually just one component of the broader concept that is Ceptr - its data integrity engine. And it has been taken in itself as a stand-alone thing just for the purpose of running distributed peer-to-peer social apps which are freely composable and generating of various currents and flows ("current-sees"), as they expand and multiply into a massive DAG (directed acyclic graph) of DHTs (distributed hash tables) and the human agents which form them and their patterns of organizing and translating between one another, in a process which organically maps out coherent sense-making. Which is why I like to see Holochain as a kind of a framework which enables one to become his own anthropologist and/or analyst if you will, to assemble all kinds of data and value flows in all kinds of experimental composites to reveal many otherwise hidden aspects of things and about ourselves.

Ceptr itself is a bio-inspired computational framework for collective distributed intelligence (sense-making and problem-solving) at scale, one that is agent-centric (rather than data-centric) and operating on semantic trees as basic computational units (making use of lightweight virtual machines called receptors). It really is a fascinating experiment/enterprise, one informed by a very wide range of areas of knowledge and experience and with a clear goal and vision. Which puts it in the category of outliers in the space such as Urbit, for example, or even IOTA. Also, Holochain/Ceptr appears to be somewhat aligned in their values and vision/mission (or somewhat overlapping with anyway) with Mozilla, as Mozilla themselves see the future of the internet one driven by applications such as holochain's in place of the client-server model currently in place.

"Knowledge is not a series of self-consistent theories that converges toward an ideal view; it is rather an ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible (and perhaps even incommensurable) alternatives, each single theory, each fairy tale, each myth that is part of the collection forcing the others into greater articulation and all of them contributing, via this process of competition, to the development of our consciousness."

       - Paul Feyerabend, "Against Method"

And above all, we shouldn't forget that cultural evolution determines the vectors and direction of biological evolution. And that there are wrong moves and wrong decisions, evolutionary cul-de-sacs and extinct species and civilizations. So, we should be paying extra care and attention to these things and not take too much for granted or already a priori given - least of all should we adopt somebody or something else's position, ideology, politics or worldview uncritically. I believe Holochain to be one of those tools out there meant to affect precisely these kinds of positive changes and possibilities for new basins of attraction to form, such that we could re-arrange and re-structure coherence and institutions around, such that are designed to reveal rather than conceal. 

Also: a more comprehensive post of mine relating to Holochain/Ceptr.