From Economicus to Ludens

Transcript

foreign good morning so my name is Justin I'm the co-president of Xerox Park an organization you might have heard of so this is the last talk before lunch I've heard so I'll go with like the weird experimental one so the question I want to investigate today is what can we still miss these are things we won't miss ux throughput wallets funding models the collective intelligence and the funding models are piling up on these problems the real question is the one that is about missing out on something would be

are there 10 000 to 100x outcome for ethereum and cryptography that we could completely Miss because with the wrong narrative and culture um and so that leads to basically the core question which is what is the core narrative and product affordances of advanced cryptography or crypto economic or blockchains or whatever we don't really have consensus yet on how to call the top level category um the shorter version would be what's this all about and these questions come from an investigation of mind which led to the conclusion that ethereum spans a universe with basically a single verb which is to own so whether it's owning Sovereign

currencies art game items owning uh privately for privacy publicly for status symbols or as a group together it's all about own ish derivatives and this is not a function of the technology it's a function of the narrative and the way we talk about the product affordances of this technology and the idealized Persona of ethereum would be the homo economicus it's a concept from economics it's a perfectly perfectly rational profit maximizing human the vocabulary of the economicals would be depths margin pool Grand staking yield Economic Security and so forth and the thing is as you might know most people are not economicus it's a

spectrum we have a little bit of it inside each of us but I would say that these things only appeal to a very specific part of the population and so you might ask me okay well aren't we already going Beyond ownership you know like there's consumer crypto we're trying to to to to go beyond um the hyper financialization and I would say that the issue is if the centerpiece of your core metaphysics is that is is if the centerpiece of your comic metaphysics is that ownership is the key part of this technology is going to be really hard to appeal to the rest of the population right so when homo economics goes out there and tries to find pmf um they'll say stuff like oh you know the thing video games have been missing all along is that Gamers want true

ownership you know like the thing they really need is to be able to own their items and sell them the issue with social media is that creators have not been able to monetize their content and tokengate their community and you can kind of like apply this logic to anything out there and how do we bring other people here you know like people talk about okay how do we onboard the next billion users and I don't think there is a billion economicus out there right so how do we bring the rest of the people out there why where does the massive backslash against the technology come from because if you think about it it doesn't come from the product affordances once again it's about the narrative and so um this comes from like a small personal Crusade of mine over the last year I've

been working with artist and designer on trying to convince them that ethereum is a fundamentally new medium right the same way radio to film kind of like change everything you can ask any media theorist out there ethereum is a fundamentally new computational medium and when you talk to these people um and when you like inquire within yourself what is it that it brings on the table it's not about monetizing the work it's not about nft it's really not about anything related to owning at all um because it turns out that ethereum true product affordances are extremely relevant to Worlds uh worlds which are the object of study and creation of designer artists and basically anyone that is in the business of putting something creatively together

um and one other thing um Xerox park has been working on we've instigated and been researching this idea of autonomous worlds which you might have heard of I won't go too much in the details but it's the idea that words Want to Be Free of their gods and have like an expensive definition of what the world is it could be a narrative it could be a game could be a story um words wants to be free of their JK Rowling's blizzards or epic because they want to escape the tragedy of the creator for something to be truly alive you need to have a life of its own and so when like I want to insist that these are not words that happen to be on chain but words that wouldn't exist otherwise um and so if you say hey like here's something new that wouldn't exist

otherwise what is the core product affordance that enables this and one way I've been kind of like explaining this to people is that ethereum for the first time enables application to be truly autonomous computers are really powerful today but they've always been in need of their daddy in order to remain alive like there is no way today apart from blockchains to have programs that can't be stopped um and so if you list down these affordances right oh actually you get persistence you get programs that can't help but be composable for the first time you get true secrets on the internet right blockchain is funding most of the research on zero knowledge proof and it's kind of incredible that so far before today we haven't been able to have secrets on the internet that are known by no one right there is always

someone that put it out there so from the perspective of Worlds there's actually a lot of very interesting affordances of ethereum and when you talk about it this way I went to a bunch of conferences and I work with a lot of Studios their eyes light up because nobody has spent some I spent time explaining um as I truly said to them and be like hey the core affordance of ethereum is true autonomy right the narrative out there is the core affordance is through ownership or Sovereign money or so forth um and so John huisinger um wrote this book called homologous a while ago and the idea was that play is a central element of culture it actually predates culture and introduces this concept of homologous which is men the

player um ludens in Latin can't really be translated it means play Society practice and so the idea would be okay how do we narrate and describe ethereum as something for the homologous not just for the economicus right because I stipulate that there are way more ludens than economic is out there if you truly want to bring the next one billion people you have to think a little bit about okay what's the narrative around all of this um and one reason I started investigating um the affordances from this perspective is I I sat down at some point I realized okay the truly incredible thing with this little project you might have heard called dogfrist is that it used ethereum and its affordances from a totally

different perspective than the one you're used to so for those of you that don't know um darkfirst was an unchain game um so it was basically a game that run entirely on ethereum its state and logic was running on chain it was also one of the first um ZK app in production right one even before tornado cash um and so it used ethereum for its own its autonomy and it used ZK for its true secrets and it was kind of incredible because it relied on ethereum and a technology from a totally different perspective than the one you're used to right um it used ethereum as the first computer that doesn't need his daddy and ZK as an enabler of true secrets and and I think people I don't think people have truly internalized this and

that's why it was kind of awesome um and it really reminds me of the history of um parallel scientific Computing so when people started playing like 3D games um Wolfenstein doom and stuff like that there were a bunch of Manufacturers out there that were building graphics cards and graphics cards were accelerators right for graphics so this is a Shader it's basically a little program that color every single Pixel on the screen and the program here is quite simple is you apply a gradient and you have a checkboard pattern but I think that's interesting with shaders is it computes each pixel individually because each pixel doesn't need its neighbors in order to know what color it is and so um it's fundamentally about like making parallel Computing really quickly but at

the beginning people didn't this way the The Narrative around graphics card was that it would accelerate Graphics um so that's what happens for like the first few years and then at some point some um scientists that were doing high performance Computing were like huh I have this uh partial differential equations and it turns out that if I lay down their initial condition as an image and then I program a Shader that applies this equation I can solve it much faster right they kind of like hacked graphics card and turns out he was parallel Computing all along but The Narrative of these accelerators was that they were graphics card and so it took like multiple years to reach that conclusion and now we know what happened Nvidia is

one of the biggest company in the world um they kind of like you can see till 2014-15 that's before Cuda that's before they really embraced the fact that they were building parallel computers all along and so it's not always obvious at the beginning what the true product affordances of technology is um and so if you think about it this way like okay the affordance is we're building a graphics application specific integrated circuit right a graphics card and what we can get all of this is Doom we can get Shadows we can get fast blur but if you do some ship rotation you're like well actually what we're doing is parallel Computing you still get Graphics but now you enable things like machine learning scientific Computing and so forth and the difference between this and that is not really about the technology although you know they

invested a bunch of time in the sdks and stuff like that it's mostly about the narrative around what the technology is in the first place and we don't really know what this is all about um I think that a lot of us out there are building things thinking oh you know like the thing we've been doing is putting true ownership on the internet and we just don't really know yet um what what what these computers are about and when we went from Bitcoin to ethereum I think like like a naive understanding of this transition is that we just added a virtual machine to digital money it's like yeah we we're just gonna make programmable money and it really reminds me of of it's it's kind of like this this funny um in the history of Television there was this thing called Texaco Star

Theater which was the first uh TV show and it was just a radio show that was filmed so like for the first year on TV people would watch radio shows that were filmed um and it's kind of the same now you know like hey man like we're just gonna make really programmable money now that we have a programmable blockchain like the thing we did when we went from Bitcoin to ethereum is we added a virtual machine um and so if we sit down and we think okay like what are the affordances that unlock something like Dark Forest it doesn't seem like it's programmable money even if it's what we've been talking about for literally like 10 years um and it's not an economic affordance or narrative it's something quite different and so there is no consensus yet on like what

are the true affordances of ethereum like the whole point of this talk is to be like a little bit uh controversial and say hey actually this is not what you think it is um it's usually a way for people to be generative to tell them hey you thought it was X or long but it turns out it's why and so um I have an idea of what I think the true affordances are you might have a different idea it doesn't really matter um what I want to get to is kind of like questioning the core narrative that is about ownership um so I would say that one of the two things we've been working on for the last 10 years is true autonomy so whether it's to consensus smart contracts data availability um for the first time we've built a computer that is truly autonomous

the second thing um when like with all the Investments we've made in terms of talent and capital into advanced cryptography is that we've basically invented true Secrets right um there's never been a secret on the internet before that wasn't known to anyone that could possible that you could possibly do something with so with true autonomy and true secrets you can actually build kind of a lot of stuff right you can get true ownership you can get through private ownership but you can also get things like autonomous words sensorship resistance and a bunch of other things we haven't really invented yet but if you swap it if you like kind of like go out there and say you know like the narrative like the core affordance of this technology is that it's about true ownership or as some people have tried to meme it read write own you know

like oh what the what web3 has been about all along is that now you can own stuff on the internet if this is the core technology then it makes sense that the things you get out of this is that well you know I want to own this song I want to trade this item I want to buy this art or I want to sell my content and this mean this shows like really viscerally that is quite important like that the core affordance of something is going to lead to what is going to lead to the products that are built on top of it right so the idea behind this talk is to to to introduce this little thesis of mind which is the luden's thesis and it's that there is a very small possibility um that we can redefine ethereum as a cultural object an object for worlds

playfulness and Beauty um I'm very much not confident on this but it seems like it could be one of these 10 000 X to 100 000x outcome we could completely Miss on because we're not thinking about it um and you would basically see ethereum and advanced cryptography as the road towards the internet being truly alive and generative not just an internet where you can own stuff um and you know people have described ethereum as the world computer I think right now it's basically the words Financial computer um could we redefine it as the the world computer with capital W the computer for worlds um and build things with computers that can't be shut down data that can't be siled identities that can't be forged

and programs that can't help but be composable um and of course it's not as caricatures that make it a bunch of people see theorem as an engine for credible commitment as an economically secure data availability layer as a censorship resistant computer but it is still the case that the dominant narrative is that we've been building true ownership all along and so we really don't want ethereum success to be capped by its narrative because that would be really sad we would have worked so hard and then in the end the thing that capture success was just oh the way we talked about it so um as a closing note like how much do I really believe in this well let's say I have like a 10 okay I said one percent earlier I don't really know it what matters is that I don't think

this is that likely that we'll be able to redefine the thing that far in um currently the narratives are like very well enshrined but it's kind of like an interesting questioning to to sit down and think about okay what's the core narrative correct and can we still change it um because it would be a dope future to be in a world where oh the most important words run in ethereum and just like film ethereum is seen as a major new medium and dollar e the token is just a footnote it might even disappear altogether like there is nothing out there that says consensus has to be about Capital consensus is just about incentives um it just so happens that capital is a very good liquid incentives but we could all have a little box in our head that explodes before validators signs wrong block and it will work out although that

would be a weird future as well um that's it for me you can find me on Twitter and telegram Justin glibert and I can take some questions because it seems like I have some time left thank you [Applause] hi uh if the thesis is correct do you think this could be inevitable so I don't think it would be inevitable because the thing that is kind of

interesting if you look at the history of technology is that a lot of the time like the narrative and the thesis drives what the technology ends up being um I think that a lot of Technologies out there think that oh everything is going to be invented and it doesn't matter the way we deploy it so we should just build it but I think that if you're a thoughtful technologist you actually have to really think hard about the deployment and the narrative around technology itself so I think that the thesis could be correct but I don't think it's inevitable at all there's actually like a very vicious narrative where you amplify the original ideas till you kind of like drive out everybody else essentially and that has happened before oh

there's one there hey do you I mean like how much do you think we should care about the finding and narrative versus just building things that people want how do you know what people want like changing things for the better yeah usually that's what people want I think it's correct like I think I think there both can be something people want um and also like you can think okay

imagine like if you've done some machine learning imagine a parameter space you know you have good Solutions bad Solutions and usually going towards what people want like allows you to move a little bit around where you are but you might end up on like local Maximas or local minimas where you keep optimizing for what people want but you can't drastically redefine what the technology is in the first place um and the nice thing is most of the time for technology there has been some like truly random people coming in and like changing what it's all about and escaping those local Maxima but the thing that is interesting with crypto is that because it's technology culture altogether and the community is very tight in the loop of defining what the

technology is it's actually much easier than in other Industries to be stuck at the local maximal so I think it's generally good to build people like things people want it would be worse to build things people don't want so it seems like it initially is a pretty good strategy but I would say um injecting some Randomness and saying hey actually like once every year let's sit down and think about what the true affordances are and do something else could be interesting um I also think that competing narratives are good because they make it such that we can export different parts of the evolutionary tree if there is one core narrative you tend to stay around your lane all the time yeah great thanks everybody

[Applause]