Networkologies with Christopher Vitale - Green Pill #50

Transcript

foreign [Music] ation how you doing I got a head spinner of an episode for you today we are talking about Network allergies with Christopher Vitale who is an associate professor of media studies and is in the graduate program in media studies at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn New York he's the author of the book networkologies a philosophy of networks for a hyper-connected age and we talk about the questions of where networks come from how they change and develop what conditions may lead to their and our continued flourishing and we talk about why this is such an important topic for the 21st century endows the network is increasingly one of the

fundamental metaphors that have described the character of our age we have the internet you're listening through this through a podcast listener that is connected through a network of computers and so this is a network that you're using to listen to a podcast about networkologies and I just think that it's it's beautiful the way Christopher can use this network lens to talk about why networks are so important and how to dissect biological systems as networks economic systems as networks and you start to see networks everywhere around you after talking to Christopher for an hour it's that scene in The Matrix where I think Neo sees code all around them I'm seeing networks all around myself after talking to Christopher for uh an hour or so and so uh we turned the conversation in the

second half of the episode to hear Christopher's thoughts about Dows and the ethereum network what would it look like if we could program our values into our money and we could build a decentralized highly relational network of local currencies and of dows that help create human thriving I mean this is to land it in green pill terms is how do we use networks of programmable money and networks of humans to create change of self and change of system in order to create human thriving to regenerate the world and so it's it's kind of an interesting meeting of networkologies in greenpill for this episode for me and I just learned a lot from talking to Christopher I think he's very very lucid and complements the green pill

methodology a lot there are a few episodes where I will go way far outside of the web 3 space in order to bring a guest in and and give them a little green pill and to to bring them to you and Christopher is one of those people actually read Network allergies because Vince horn one of my friends in the web 3 ecosystem recommended it to me and it's just it's just mind-blowing stuff I mean looking at the lens of networks across everything in the world is so important in which we're trying to disrupt the corporate hierarchies of the world and bring more of the Working World in the economic world into networks which are hopefully better for the median citizen than being at the bottom of some corporate hierarchy where your CEO makes a thousand fifty million times more than you so lots of Divergent

thoughts in this networkologies episode I recommend that you check out the book Link in the show notes and read along as you listen along and Christopher is just a really Lucid articulate thinker and really enjoyed the conversation with him I think you're going to enjoy the conversation as well so without further Ado I give you Christopher Vitale the author of networkologies Goldfinch is a decentralized credit protocol with a mission to connect the world's Capital to the world's growth Goldfinch focuses on real yields from real companies so you can stop worrying about the latest crypto Ponzi and start lending your usdc to real businesses driving growth worldwide by lending to Goldfinch you can drive change by expanding access to d5's global potential goldfinches borrowers are proven fintech and credit

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connect.opolis.com bankless to get started Christopher hey how's it going how are you nice to meet you yeah likewise really thrilled to have this conversation when I read networkologies it was just neurons firing everywhere and so finally got you to come on green pill and and talk about the book Network ologies and philosophy for of networks for a hyper-connected age so can you tell me what inspired you to write this book sure uh you know I guess when I I first learned about how artificial neural networks work uh and Notions like back propagation and you know sort of the honen networks and you know the self-assorting feature maps all the stuff that's making the new AI do what it does uh you know especially when we're talking about stuff like facial

recognition it sort of felt like the stuff I was trying to do with philosophy had found a concrete manifestation uh you know where uh we now have sort of an understanding at least in a sort of digital diagrammatic form of what neural processes might be like that could produce something similar to human cognition uh that was organic that was you know sort of inspired by uh living forms um and that was distributed and metastable in ways that really could sync up with complex system science so I wanted to sort of take these sort of relational leanings in philosophy and the science of emergence uh you know in

terms of say complex system signs stuff like that and tied into developments and Neuroscience and artificial intelligence in ways that could um you know do what I think philosophy does best um which is try to talk about big picture stuff um you know like generalize you know you have things from science you have things from technology but trying to find ways to uh develop linkages to culture and history and value and stuff yeah I I know that we started talking a little bit about artificial intelligence and neural networks there for a little bit but one of the things that I think was a really interesting frame at the start of the book was talking about how the network is increasingly one of the fundamental metaphors that have

described the character of our age and I think that that was a reference to the internet but you actually talk further about neural networks in the brain and how a chair could be a network of of atoms that compose it and so you maybe AI is sort of the tip of the spear for you but looking at everything around you as a network of interconnected things that are defined by their relationship to each other is that a fair broadening of the scope oh yeah absolutely uh I mean I think relational World Views are as old as philosophical thinking and they tend to be the norm uh in many Traditions around the world other than that of you know what tends to be called the West you know the say the European Greco Euro kind of thing um but yeah relational thinking is old

and you know you could clearly really argue that um networks aren't as new as we might think um you know cells or networks uh you know atoms and molecules or networks and so I think maybe we just are able to see some of these things now that we have the sort of lenses that have been provided by this new networked age uh so people you know are no longer looking at the world and you know cells and things of that sort as like you know just serial you know linkages of you know binary switches they're they're looking at it more on the model of networks that grow organically like the internet or you know like the way in which we learn things in a brain so yeah yeah looking at the they got the book

right in front of me and and it goes through at the start uh the following network network illogical principles so relation process holography practice practicality intermediation and emergence are the the principles of the networks I don't know if you have anything to say about those but I I thought it was neat to sort of break it down to the first order principles there yeah no I mean everything I'm doing tries to take the structure of networks as sort of a model and you know make that resonate with a wide variety of things and culture language economies uh things of that sort and so the way I break down in the book is that if you look at how networks are understood what are the elements of networks um you know everyone talks about nodes

and links uh if we're talking about you know say how this goes back to the mathematics of graph Theory you talk about edges and vertexes instead but you know nodes and links in common parlance um but then there are these two other aspects that tend to get overlooked and that's the background uh what I call grounds um you know in terms of say like you know the Gestalt psychologists were talking about a figure versus the ground and how you can't really think one without thinking the other or c one without the other being implicit in some way um and then the issue of the emergence of a network it has to always come from somewhere in relation to a process and so what I'm doing takes these four sort of elements of networks the node link

ground and process of emergence of an entire network which usually manifests as a level of a network the way in which networks are nested in each other uh to use that as a sort of structure for an entire way to think about thinking and linking and growing uh that can be then uh you know threaded through a variety of different domains to think about natural phenomena political phenomena cultural that sort of thing right you know I I think that we're talking in a lot of ways about the a priori features of networks here and I'd love to get really empirical uh just to ground this in the listener's mind you know maybe you've got a software

engineer who doesn't doesn't sort of uh have have the vocabulary to talk about networks from a math or a science background or just for the general audience can you ground this in an empirical example of your favorite type of network and how you deconstruct it using this this language there's a lot of possibilities uh I would say anything that you could grab with your hand uh anything any experience could be understood as a node but that node is a part of a network uh but it's also a network itself uh that is composed of other networks and other nodes within those networks and that's where the sort of fractal aspect of this uh you know it's something where I look at anything you could encounter as being able to be broken down into nodes links

grounds and these sort of processes of emergence uh individuation of distinct things um but yeah I mean anything chairs to cells to molecules it's really a lens on the world as much as anything else right so it's maybe just to ground it for the listener who maybe is listening listening to this while they go for a walk maybe they're on the subway maybe they're on a bike ride uh that experience could be understood as a network of the neurons in their brain receiving the audio input from the ear and that gets them lost in some sort of thought process which gets interjected by their experience of I don't know you're on the subway and say you stop and so you have to shift your balance or

something like and this is me saying back to you in layman's terms kind of how I would reinterpret it but you know for a listener who's listening to a podcast how is how is that a network how would you deconstruct that yeah I mean there's the network of your experience uh there's the network of the cells in your body so we've got physical networks versus networks of feeling versus you know and to some extent the I'm trying to undercut the mind-body dualism that you know comes from people like Descartes but also when you hear people talk about the brain versus the mind I just think the mind is another word for how it feels to have a brain when you're inside that brain and so the ways in which all the cells Network together produce this sort of agglomerated

experience but we could look at our experience as you know when you see something in the distance you see a network of colors and shapes and that's because of the way the networks of the cells in your brain are doing what they do and you're what that feels like yeah yeah I I think that's really neat and you know I think that one of the themes on green pill that we talk about is is not just Financial networks of capital which is what I think crypto is known about uh is known for but also social networks um experiential networks spiritual Capital being something that's exchanged in the space cultural capital being exchanged in this space and so you know I I sort of taking your networks within networks analogy sort of think about the

listener being a part of the green pill Network which is all about exploring how crypto could be good for the world but also the broader crypto Network which is part of the complex system that is the world so I'd be interested in sort of transitioning to talking about networks of humans that are interconnected via the Internet and maybe learning and evolving together because that's what we think in the Dallas space that we think that Dallas can disrupt or networks can disrupt hierarchies because networks can learn and expand from the edges whereas hierarchies can only deploy force in One Direction action and maybe hierarchies are a network also but there's a specific type of network that that comes very top down and so I know what do you have to say about about internet networks is probably a lot there but I curious where you'd start I mean when we

look at the waste uh sociologists uh have really gotten into the study of network phenomena uh you know like there's just so many papers that have been written in the last you know 10 15 years about social networks and diagramming out how you know say the organizational structure of a company uh tends to be so you know top down and you see those organization charts and then you look at what's going on on Facebook and Twitter and you can plot out social networks that are infinitely more organic looking more complex and distributed um in ways that are you know that really look more like how nature grows things rather than you know the sort of top-down imposed super centralized stuff

um and you know where I think this gets super interesting is between the extremes because you know certainly you could say well there's decentralized networks and then there's centralized networks and I think most people have sort of you know encountered the sort of extra dreams of thinking through like okay like you know what goes on on the Internet is seems relatively decentralized but then there's the centralized level of protocol uh of the code underneath and especially platforms like Facebook and uh you know Google that are really sort of producing centralized uh infrastructure which is something you talk about green pills um in a way that produces what what I would think of as like a

quasi-decentralized experience it seems decentralized in some ways but there's a bottleneck um and I think that's very similar to capitalism uh you know in capitalism there's the appearance of well you can do anything you could buy anything you could create anything but it's all modulated by the system of finance and you know if it doesn't link into the money form in some ways um it's kind of illegible to Capital we talk about modernization um as soon as you start playing the game of monetization uh there's all of the the sort of uh background networks that modulate things from afar like finance and you know the stock markets right the

sort of algorithmic trading that's going on so I think you know we tend to think that the world is just centralized versus decentralized and I would like to see it more uh in terms of these sort of hybrid structures um and that some of these are peer decentralized but are actually centralized underneath and others are much more distributed and so if you look at sort of the way in which scientists will talk about networks very often it's not so much decentralized versus centralized but distributed versus something else and that's something else I think is what say capitalism does it's what big Tech does uh and in my book I call those sort of paranoid networks or hybrid Networks

um yeah I mean I know that one of the sort of web three criticisms of web 2 is that with let's call it I'll just pick a random example but Google you know you take a you you search and then over time Google can build a profile of you and then they can sell you more efficient ads and it all runs through data Google's data data centers and I think that um you know in a way that's built on TCP which the specification of is centralized but it's running in a diffuse way across all of these networks of nodes across so it's so it's decentralized in the way it's it's implemented and but the fact that we all agree on the standard of TCP is the network and then further up the stack we Google has a network effect literally of more people using Google so it becomes

more useful for everyone but it all flows through their data centers and and I think that what ethereum is trying to do is we're it's trying to make a group of people agree on a consensus protocol proof of stake through which the network of nodes can come to consensus of what the network of of people uh what their balance is is or the state of the evm if you want to get more complex than just Financial capital and the agreement of that standard creates a network effect but it's not flowing through vitalik buterin's data center in the same way that Google gets all of the web traffic in the world and so it's it's like it's more capture resistant because although vitalik has soft power he doesn't have the hard power of being able to change

the consensus nodes of the network and so you know I think that we're maybe complexifying this a little bit but I would posit that web 2 and web3 are different types of of hybrid networks uh what do you what do you think of that yeah no I mean I think that the potential for web 3 to be socially disruptive is enormous and to be socially disruptive and potentially really good ways uh you know I think Dao's um at least as they're currently being formulated uh you know in terms of say the ethereum base and consensus mechanisms you know I think there's no reason to think that this would not be in some ways the future of social organizing uh you know I mean we see the sorts of online distributed communities

that rose up around Wikipedia uh that rose up around Reddit uh clearly ethereum is is poised to take that to a whole Next Level and I think it's not it's not a joke to say or even a stretch to imagine that political parties governments uh really could start to have some competition you know these sort of Legacy institutions that it will take time obviously but I think it's one of those things where you know you see a slow burn of early adopters and then all of a sudden in a time of crisis or opportunity uh you know that a new platform is available in just the right way the right time right place and then all of a sudden you have an avalanche of people adopting it uh and I think the

internet was that way in its early stages you know originally people were just like what exactly would I use this for and then it just hit an inflection point where everyone was using it for everything and the transition was pretty rapid and I think that tends to be how technology works you get those early adopters and you know they sort of pioneer the space and then you just hit a critical mass and so I think yeah web3 is going to uh you know you're gonna start to have new types of distributed organization of humans that can just do with smart contracts you know things like distributed filmmaking and distributed art projects and you know distributed social movements the only thing I worry about is what happens when you know uh not only Legacy Works to

co-op this but also when you start having extreme right wing Dows extreme fascist Dows you know like we have to think about um how these new technologies would be appropriated um and used in ways that might not be um you know you speak a lot about public goods um you know I worry about like when people Define public and good in some very exclusive ways that these could be disruptive technologies that are also not not helpful not good ones and maybe Dangerous Ones so I think any technology has that potential we need to think about that uh when things are in their infancy so we could set up structures that can keep things egalitarian yeah

yeah I mean I think that there's a lot there and I think I would summarize a lot of what you said by the in the in the frame of uh web threes Network allergies Plus Finance networked Finance networked Collective organizing and it can be very socially disruptive but how do we make sure it's actually good for the world instead of just socially disruptive and in many different directions is that a fair summary uh I I don't you know I web 3 is its own thing and you know I don't know if it's necessarily network network allergies a set of lenses to look at the world you know it's like it's it's a wager it's like if we look at everything in the world through the network you know through the lens of

networks what does the world look like what do we what does that allow us to see that we couldn't see before whereas web free is a new set of Technologies and you know I think the consensus mechanisms the the sort of uh you know very specific types of tokenization purpose-driven tokens and you know like there's all sorts of new ways of creating Social Links and I think you know the question is what is what are the stakes of that where could that lead yeah yeah I mean you know I would love to spend the rest of the episode or at least another 20 minutes just talking about these network network logical principles and applying them to Dallas and web3 I mean you know like to me there's some very obvious examples like Dow Forks or Forks of any code is kind

of like a practicality of the web 3 based Network everything here is open source um the emergence of how git coin dial Works basically is that every quarter it has a governance governance process and then it runs a grants round and what emerges iteratively over that is is sort of the direction that get coined out is is evolving and then the relationship of the nodes of the the people in each network uh say in ens if I buy an ens domain then that makes the network more valuable for everyone else because there's more people who have ens there's a network effect because of the relationality of the people in there so I mean those are the obvious examples for me when I take these principles and I apply them to dowels but you know I'm clear I'm curious to just sort of take

your expertise on networks and take that lens and apply it to web3 like what do you what do you think of web3 I guess is the most broad question that I can follow you back to you oh I mean we're at the tip of the iceberg I mean web3 I don't think there's any any reason to think it wouldn't be revolutionary and you know whenever you introduce a new technology it tends to be as destructive as much as creative uh even if in just pushing Legacy mechanisms to the side um so you know I think it's hard to imagine what's going to happen but you know I think you do need to think from the earliest stages like what happens when hyper right wing movements you know start thinking in these terms and can can things be done now to make it more difficult to co-op this stuff for forms

of you know traditional capitalism and things of that nature uh what I tend to do with my work is to look at um emergence as a phenomena uh which is you know where a lot of the science of networks is studying how emergencies happen how um in natural systems in economic systems you have the sort of um sort of spontaneous production of new forms of complexity once certain factors are there and so studying like what are the factors that make things robust that make them resilient that tend to lead to the spontaneous growth of sustainable complexity uh and creativity and I think you know the best thing we can do there is study how it works in nature and

study biological processes and social processes that we already look at and we're just like wow that's great that Fosters creative development it's sustainable how can we reproduce some of those features in our you know sort of uh attempts to structure web 3 uh you know tokens structure incentive mechanisms uh various forms of you know proof of work proof of stake those sorts of uh ways in which we create the smart contracts because if we're thinking game theoretic here um I think you know people really do make decisions based on incentives but I think it's also very difficult a lot of the time to determine which incentives are operative in a given social domain

whether there might not be multiple forms of incentives and how uh we might oversimplify like I was looking uh you know with sort of what happened with some of the earlier Dows and how they uh didn't expect certain types of attacks based on uh the way they structure their incentive structure and you know got wiped out pretty early on um and so you know thinking through the ways in which um Legacy forms of incentive uh might relate to the ways in which they're structured in smart contracts in unexpected ways yeah you know you know as you're speaking sort of about the emergence of this ecosystem I was reminded of the episode that I did with Chase Chapman who's kind of a uh a

really OG and uh smart doll person but she was talking about this thing called gals law which is basically that a more complex system can evolve in from a more simple system so you've got you just start out with a more simple system and then that's wrong but being wrong is the only way to be right and then you evolve that simple system into a more complex system and I see that in if you look at the Dao from 2016 which was grew so fast into like holding eight percent of all ether and then it got hacked and then it collapsed yeah that's the one I'm thinking of yes yeah and then and then but so Amin solimani launched molokdao in 2018 2019 and all that was was a smart contract that except you could join it you could submit proposals and

then you could do this thing called Rage Quit which was exited and it was just a much simpler State machine that I I think it more is more representative guy law and now we've evolved as an ecosystem hundreds of different moloch dials from that simple instruction set so uh yeah I mean the embracing that evolutionarily is I think maybe something that the ecosystem had to learn through the years well I think you know when I say looking at natural sort of models for inspiration uh yeah something like bird flocking and or the schooling of fish and the the simulations that are done of these because you can't use differential equations to model what's going on there's too many too many agents too many forms of relationality at too many

levels of scale you just get your variables though off the chart and you know we just there's too many non-linearities in the equations essentially um and so that's why they found that you know we could just create uh simulations that you know have a couple of very basic agents that follow a couple of very little interaction rules and all of a sudden you get your virtual Birds uh to flock and I think simulation um you know especially when you use uh you know basic agents to do agent-based modeling can I think help um sort of perhaps anticipate some of the things that could go wrong in various ways um but I think they it also indicates the ways in which you know as

um as you mentioned Simplicity often gives rise to massive complexity in the right interactional sort of domains uh and that's why the the work I'm doing now is looking at what are the factors that potentiate emergence uh and you know from all the science that I can you know piece together because complex really they do disagree on some of this stuff it's more like we know it when we see it but if you look at if you boil down all the different perspectives um in the work I'm doing um I I basically break it down to four things right A diversity of the materials uh relationality of the connections um the sort of distributedness of the

structure um especially in relationship to grounds and contexts and then meta stability in terms of the process and it's particularly these last two distributedness of organization and meta stability of its Dynamics uh those are the things that I think tend to be left out of engineered systems and when you have them in nature they just tend to potentiate things enormously and so the more distributed your structure uh and the more meta-stable the organization you know neither stable nor unstable uh but right on the cusp you know sort of a maximum tolerable chaos uh you know on the on the edge of chaos as the

scientists kind of say yeah not chaotic but not unchaotic that's where you get those interesting accidents occur that just be the production of new creative Direction yeah right well next time uh someone says the Dow is chukatic I'm gonna say we're at the point of maximal tolerable okay chaotic which is actually about what a full Rebrand does meta stability and and it'll be a good thing but but you know what now but that feels like a real Alpha leak those four criteria for uh uh for emergence um could we go over them real quick one more time uh I know we ended with meta stability well just sort of just um the differentiation that produces the

diversity of materials and then interrelated forms of networking interconnectedness and then when we're talking about um you know sort of distributedness particularly uh Modes of organization but in relation to context as well and then meta stability of Dynamics so essentially diversity networking distributedness um and metastability right yeah that just triggered another thought for me uh we're gonna have David ehrlichmann on the Pod soon and he wrote a book called impact networks and one of the key points of that was the strength of the relationships and the trust and the Rapport of the people in your network is actually the Network's value and its ability to get stuff done so that reminded me of

the second point there of the relations between the nodes what's interesting you know is people who have studied uh the most effective sorts of cultural capital uh and the ways in which uh networks are resilient and robust and creative it's not the strongest links that tend to really potentiate thing it's it's the weaker links and so you hear a lot of network scientists will talk about the strength of weak ties uh the sort of you know it's it's the ties that are you know perhaps you wouldn't think to use them but in the right situation those become the key to everything and so we started discussions of things like small worldedness um and the ways it's a term that they

use in the science to talk about um neither too many nor too few links but also varying numbers of links between the different nodes that some remain more locally focused some remain more long distance focused and you get this sort of modularity uh and best of all worlds kind of thing where you you know you have some nodes that can hyper Focus some that really special it's an interconnection and that's how organisms work you know you have nerves that are more specialized with long distance stuff versus you know sort of specialized organs that each play their role so again a lot of this is coming from the study of natural processes yeah I think this is so beautiful to use biomimicry and studying economic systems

as a way of understanding networks because you can just see what's organically emerged and by the way these are complex systems I mean crypto economic systems are a subset of economic systems social systems which are complex and the complex systems are complicated like it's it's literally in the name and so just having an allegory to biology and economics I think I think matters a lot what else is there to learn there well I mean I think capitalism you look at capitalism and the first thing that comes to my mind is cancer uh you know like capitalism is a structure that produces a how much that homogeneous product and it's yeah everything gets reduced to quantities of the same thing and those who have more of that same

thing are able to sort of bias the playing field and this is where you know things like protecting against civil attacks and stuff you know when when you look at how Dows are structured you're trying to make sure that uh those who have more capital in the Legacy space can't necessarily have more capital in you know sort of the structure of a dow um you know so I think trying to find ways to defeat homogenization um and it's not just homogenization in terms of say capital I think uh you know you look at the histories of capitalism and slavery and capitalism evolve together uh that you know they they co-produced each other and I don't think it's an accident that uh the large majority of people in the world today

who have the most Capital if you look at the CEOs of the boardrooms across the world they're mostly white to this day and I don't think that's an accident I you know and I think capital is a mirror of the values of those who have it and those who have more but get to project their vision of the world upon it and you know unfortunately then that becomes unsustainable it ends up you know really destroying the resource base and I think we need to think about the ways in which capital is white in our world it's part of the legacy of European colonialism and destruction and uh if you look at sort of a reproduction of the same that sort of brings everything into resonance

with its structure and homogenizes and you know centralizes control uh you know biologically speaking it's it may be decentralized but it's still cancerous and so you look at the way cancer spreads throughout the body it's reproduction of the same yet it has this way of sort of threading into every aspect of a body uh in a way that is decentralized and that's the sort of thing that you know it's decentralized in the sense that it you know it doesn't have a organizational Center but it has the same logic at work uh and so I think there's a lot of analogies between how cancer is structured and racial capitalism in our world today the world has woken up to

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famous Kim Kardashian's audience is growing faster than mine because there's the compounding gains that come from that and over time this has led to economic systems that end in Revolution because the capital gets so concentrated you know in your example it's it's it's Western uh sort of like upper middle class sorry upper upper class white people but um but like in generally their economic systems will tend to will tend to concentrate over time and to me the the mirror that I see there is with with cancer uh there's a coordination protocol around how cells divide in your in your your body and cells can just decide to go Rogue and then a tumor forms and because they're the tumor

because the the cancer cells are growing so much faster and consuming more resources than everything else then it sort of starts to eat the system it metastizes and it needs the system that it's in and so um it feels like to me there's a strong corollary between the coordination failure of cancer and the coordination failure of the Matthew effect there and if you view them both as networks then then maybe there's an analog there but you know I'm curious where that takes you in your mind yeah I mean the Matthew effect is you know when you talk to economists they'll talk about it as the the rich get richer kind of concept uh and and I think this is a false analogy because um you know in some sense it's it's the very

principle of learning uh is you know you test something out in the world and you see if it works and if it works you do more of it you reinforce it yeah and the thing that works most consistently gets reinforced and so you could imagine that the neural populations in your brain that are getting reinforced are you know the rich getting richer the more powerful getting more powerful I don't think that's necessarily bad in and of itself um I think where things become bad is where they're excluding uh other types of things uh and so if you look in the brain it's not just um reinforcement of the same there's also I mean the starting point of the brain is essentially in a massive disconnected mess of

infancy uh your brain is just a hyper-connected hot mess of connections uh and that's part of what makes us able to learn like sponges when we're infants because everything is so near random um that you know all sorts of connections can come about and yes there's a pruning process where that which uh seems to work to the organism is reinforced and so reinforcement learning is kind of the way the brain functions but it also based on an incredibly random set of starting points and it's always multiple Pathways in the brain to accomplish anything uh you know I think people would tend to think that

oh you've got one section of your brain that does one thing or you know uh you know people used to talk about grandmother cells like there's one part of your brain where your grandma lives um and it's likely that there's several of those and they're slightly varied and they compete with each other and that's because everything in the brain is multiple and so you know this is where I think the rich get richer yes in society that's very often the case because we reinforce it yeah when we start thinking about cancer I think what makes cancer so dangerous is that it tends to be the same type of cell that just reproduces itself in a way that has nothing to do with the relationality to what's around it uh so these cells don't

produce anything that's beneficial to the body but they just reproduce and copy the same over and over and over and that's where I think that the the feedback network of capital it's just more of the same for its own sake uh what I like about Dows is you know something you say in green pills is that we can now program our values into our money and that that's a you know a quote from you um I think that is fascinating um and I guess the question for me then becomes if we do program values into money uh and particularly uh values that produce public goods um how can we get people who are caught up in Legacy networks to want to become part of

um yeah especially if those Legacy networks particularly of media and education are so uh destructive in their current setup how do we convince people to want to do public goods those are the sorts to think of yeah really great question um oh man there's there's there's so many Divergent thoughts happening in my brain but but we'll go with the most recent one because I have a small short-term memory uh so basically I I think that there's an opportunity to program our values and turn money in the space and and this is why by the way web3 is so hard to uh to process for people you know it's like um the old parable about the blind man and the Elephant where one of them feels it and they're like this is a Tusk and

another feels the uh or the Tusk and they're like this is a spear and then the other one feels the leg and they're like oh this is a tree trunk and then the other one feels the tail and they're like this is a uh uh a string and and in some versions of the stories they even come to blow because they don't even agree that it's an elephant they're only seeing part of it and to me that's what what three feels like is like some people are like oh it's monkey jpegs and another person is like it's gonna revolutionize Finance because it's the internet of money and now we can send money across the computer network and then you have someone else who who says oh like I'm the public goods guy and and and I think that like that's what makes it really hard to to grasp the the web

through things but like if we can try to see the whole of the elephant it's that we have the internet of money and now we have open source money and we can program our values into our money and it's gonna be whatever our value systems are so for some people it'll be monkey jpegs and for some people it'll be public goods in like tokenized Hacky Sacks is like like something that has happened and this is the Boulder Colorado version of programming your values into your money but um but but anyway so I guess like the the sort of like prompt back to the audience is like when will X happen and the answer is when we build it and I think the key thing is to have that diversity of value systems and local currencies and coordination Technologies such that you don't like you get a monolith like the

four criteria that you just mentioned uh diversity of of value systems in deep relationship with each other that are distributed and metastable like what is what is the Gestalt of all the values in web3 that can can bring It Forward I think is the systemic answer to your question of how we we bring people in and like maybe you'll come in because you you bought a uh an ape JPEG but you'll you'll stay because that uh board ape Yacht Club hopefully in the future uses get coin grants to do quadratic funding and now you're making more money off of uh working for for that than you were off of your leg job like I think there's a Tipping Point and there's going to be multiple tipping points so what does that bring up for you yeah well I mean I I think banking honestly

is banking insecurities is where things are going really going to be impacted by yeah especially if you're not in the United States like there's parts of the world where you can't trust your local bank at all yeah yeah well I mean defy I mean all of a sudden anyone can become a micro lender then that is revolutionary because now the banks don't uh sort of have a lock on being loners right so anyone can loan um and you know cutting out the middlemen is just it's super easy once everything is tokenized I think the fact that Banks may go out of business as an industry that's insane to think through uh the

fact that Securities will be almost impossible hopefully to forge that things like naked shorting and all the other sort of uh shenanigans that goes on that the SEC kind of turns a blind eye to um I mean I think Financial Industries as we know that will be radically transformed and sooner rather than later in terms of this technology uh it's just a matter of getting the protocols in place but I think there's you know uh you know I'm looking at stuff like loopering level two and where that's been going um you know I think Defy is coming and I know that there are ways in which people have tried to produce uh sort of privatized versions of these things uh people have said like well will will

there be fed coin and stuff like that it's like the internet to the internet back in when I was growing up yeah I mean I I think Finance is really where this is going to be absolutely disruptive um and potentially a good way one of the things I sort of think about is you know I I I I believe in this this industry uh as you do but like one of the things I think about having founded Bitcoin was that we just kind of fell ass backwards into an audience that understood transactions in metamask and private key management and so we're living our full best web3 life get coin uh because people understand how that last mile of how to interact with these applications but I wonder with defy if it's going to be more like a blockchain mullet where

it's web 2 in the front and you don't have to learn any like it and it's what it's web3 in the back so like you don't have to learn anything about private Key Management transactions and installing browser extensions or anything like that and I think that that's one thing that's really you either either people are going to get educated to use these protocols or there's going to be things that look more like a Neo bank that that deploy them that's going to unleash the network ology of of Define web 3 for people well I think you know you look at the the iPhone and the Revolutionary cultural impact it had I mean I'm still shocked that it's only 2007. right that that technology has only been around for a short period of time and yeah there were blackberries beforehand but I mean it was to some extent the fact that Steve

Jobs made it um for you know for all the good and bad that he has done um he made it something that people could get in a very simple way and that led to mass adoption almost overnight because he did take all of this far more advanced stuff and package it in the older forms uh you know supposedly he walked around you know the offices uh when they were developing with a piece of wood that he kept in his shirt pocket and he's like I need it like this you know um and so I think technology tends to emerge in the skin of the old uh when when Cinema first came about people were just like oh it's like the theater and they were you know the very idea of a

close-up was something that people had to think through and invent because they were just like wait we can cut this stuff we can paste it back together we could do close-up shots like the idea of different shots and editing that takes a good decade or so and I think web 3 is going to be the same way people are gonna have to develop new ways of thinking but I think when it starts it's going to be packaged in the form of the old yeah and it needs to be if it's going to get Mass adoption yeah totally you know there's this idea of skiomorphism which is the the digital resembles the analog and you know my favorite example of skew morphism is Yahoo and Google having the same Mission which is to organize the world's information but Yahoo took the library card catalog system and put it on the

internet and Google just invented a new form to interact with the information and you know the rest is history but like you know what what is the non-scheomorphic future of the network like can you take us there can you take us to 2035 and what kind of weird networkologies we're gonna see oh good lord well I mean can you can you help frame that question for me like like what where can you say the the what was it non-scheomorphic like non-skomorphic yeah yeah like what's Over the Horizon is the question I guess but it was just that you know you don't have a crystal ball so it's an unfair question but yeah I mean when you're looking at what's being done with evolutionary robotics um you know morphological computation uh you know all the stuff with new forms of

AI that are linked into bodies that are linked into prediction algorithms and the weighting of those predictions as being more trustworthy less trustworthy uh I think self-assembling robots um robots that you know are sort of based on very simple little modules that then sort of evolve a social structure um to produce either bodies or communities of bodies like swarms on the Fly uh don't get me wrong I think it's not coming anytime soon but you know it's the sort of stuff if you look in the research uh the military would die for this stuff and so uh I I think the big question is how are networks and artificial intelligence uh how's that

stuff going to start interacting with bodies in new ways and whether these be uh prosthesis you know things like uh augmentations and extensions of our bodies um what you know I I read somewhere that they just came out with the first um sort of hybrid organism type thing made of frog cells and AI that we're working together in various ways so I I think uh if we look at the future future we're talking about bodies uh you know we're talking about uh possibly things that you know might not even use silicon chips that are cereal in nature underneath the sort of uh Network structures that are you know you look at say artificial neural networks they're distributed on top but the underneath is

a Serial chip um and you know if you can start to use molecules to do your Computing uh you know know but we're talking far in the Horizon for this sort of stuff um then you really cross an inflection point but you know these are the sorts of things that I'm like [ __ ] you know people are actually working on some of this stuff and you don't know when they cross a you know a sort of boundary Point threshold yeah yeah so for you do you do you apply the lens of networks to this where basically the chip and the the cells are just both part of a network and they're speaking the same the same protocol but now there's sort of hybrid things that are enabled by the digital and and the biological um well I think it really comes down to

what's the structure of the network you know you're saying the scientists will talk about the topology of the network right what's the shape is the shape centralized is it decentralized or yeah you know I I think more more Act is it distributed how is it distributed and is there a sort of sneaky level of centralization underneath uh you know and if we're talking computationally speaking we're talking about code or talking Hardware uh and then it's a question of access who has access to that who is the right change the protocols uh how is that negotiated uh these are the issues that I think really um determined on how how not only emergence but how fair a

network is in certain ways so a network could be urgent like capitalism is emergent just in very restricted ways it's emergent the production of new products uh to give rise to more profits but that doesn't mean it leads to the types of qualitative emergences uh that could actually you know serve life beyond those sorts of things yeah you know where my mind goes is we talked about brains being reinforcement learning driven so basically you know if you give a mouse a cookie they get trained on you know that Sugar Rush that comes from that and and you know the argument that one that I that I've heard is that capitalism as it exists right now is just a giant paper clip maximizer and and you know for people who don't

get that analogy there's there's this thing about AIS which is like if you if you had an AI and you told it it needed to maximize the amount of paper clips on earth like At first it's going to be really efficient at producing a paperclip store on Amazon but then eventually it might turn the whole world into paper clips because it's just maximizing on that one heuristic and with capitalism the analogy here is that it turns the world into Financial profit uh price to earnings ratio and so you know I guess my question is how would you design a network that's designed around human thriving and um I don't know let's let's call it instead of a GDP uh gross domestic uh thriving or gross domestic lack of suffering uh more oriented around more human things as opposed to uh just

profit you know but is there any way that you can apply a network or logical lens to to that kind of question well I I like how you put it that now we can program our values into our money uh you know and so like right now we've got one type of sort of meat space token and that's you know a fiat currency produced by dollars yeah yeah um and those tend to you know be kept so abstract in terms of how they circulate that basically Whoever has the most gets to set the terms for the rest and that gets codified into laws and social norms and institutions uh and so I think web3 is really a chance to start experimenting with new forms

um that can lead to different types of Institutions um and that don't have to you know rely on Geographic uh nearness uh in order to really get off the ground so when we're talking about nation states you know everything relies on the fact that they share the same piece of territory but if you have you know like I think of things like you know man there's so many different types of debt in the world and their student loan debt there's housing debt there's Consumer Debt there's International debt between countries if all the debtors in the world which don't necessarily see themselves as having anything in common if they all started to see themselves as having something in common and forming unions and they decided to go on strike

the entire global economy would grind to a halt and people could negotiate um you know better terms for their loans and actually make Capital change make the whole system change and that is something that could be facilitated by web3 but it's also just a change of mindset you know people who were you know we tend to think of debt as like oh if you owe money it's immoral but predatory lending is you know that's what created the whole 2008 crisis and so often is used to control and I think you know particularly with student loan debt we see the ways in which you can't do what you want to do after college if you take

on debt because what you can do has to be centered around paying off those loans and so if we start seeing debt differently and we start seeing the systems and relations and start seeing money differently uh I think uh those sort of mindset changes they can be spurred by web3 they can be facilitated by web3 but I think some of the big battles that need to be fought are actually on the level of values in the very old-fashioned sense uh do we want a world that is centralized do we want a world in which a few people get to control things and I think you know web3 may provide the technology for doing all sorts of different things but if we

can't convince people to use that stuff and use it differently uh or if people don't start using it and then give rise to different results um we're going to end up in the same log jams and you know you look at say how facial recognition software uh was trained on such a limited data set and ended up only being able to then recognize largely the faces of uh white men of a certain age because that's is what was largely on the internet uh and like if you look at the data set that you know Google and Facebook used as they were developing these Technologies Facebook eventually used um labeled faces in the wild as their data set uh and they were you know some of the most commonly labeled faces available on the

internet and they train their neural networks to identify them but it just so happened quote unquote that these were largely of white men of a certain age because those were the people who tended to get famous online um and so the networks were very bad at recognizing children people of color women older people um and that's where the biases of the data set got imported into the structure of the algorithm uh and I think we need to think about how those things happen and how they can happen as we develop these new technologies how can biases get imported in ways that we might even have difficulty recognizing until it's already baked in right yeah I mean I think that you know you just painted such a beautiful

picture of of I think what could be built here and you know where my mind goes is that this is a feedback loop between change of self uh and change of systems and and so changing our values and building monetary systems around those values is not just a technology thing but it's also a cultural and experiential thing and what's the feedback loop that's sigmergently gets people coordinating around whatever their shared needs are and one of the things I'm really excited I think you and I emailed maybe a little bit about local currencies but you know in the world in which everything collapses to US dollars or everything it collapses to bitcoin you're going to get things that optimize for the value systems of of of of those networks and one of the things

I'm really kind of think is interesting about this decentralized modular ecosystem of web3 that's being built and some of the these these monetary systems are much smaller is that you could have a local currency around I don't know supporting downtown Boulder businesses you get a boulder coin you could have uh public goods coin you could have a regen coin and and and basically what this allows you to do is to have monetary systems that are equal to the value of the GDP of that monetary system they have that leverage against the global system but within them they're optimized around a certain value and and I'm wondering if that might be a scalable architecture that has all those

properties that we talked about earlier like you know the Gestalt of that is is uh diversity and distributed uh metastability that that allows for scaling of of more regeneration in the world so I know this is like a leading question but I got it but I guess I'm just wondering uh how you view local currencies as as a pillar of this thing sure I mean I I would say as many currencies as there are locales uh you know why not it makes sense but not you know just I'm sorry to interrupt I just want to interject like we're not talking about physical locales we're talking about uh dramatic locales also yeah absolutely it does not have to be physical locales um you know I think the what a token can be used for is wide

open and will become wide open in ways it hadn't been before it makes me think of you know when people are like well what is the basic sort of um building block of society um and a lot of people would say if you look at a lot of societies around the world throughout history there's forms of ritual and there's forms of Storytelling around that and you produce artifacts when you produce rituals things like sacrifices and implements and altars and I'm talking about you know back in the you know Mists of prehistory and you know where like what is it that brings group together and it's recognition of the importance of certain actions and so I think when you recognize a token as being of value uh

that is a group that is saying yeah we all recognize that thing as being valuable and in accepting a token in giving a token you're reproducing a certain type of group uh and I think when we look at the ways in which uh sacrifices and rituals were done in the earliest parts of humanity um when we look at how myths were produced in relation to that I think there's a Continuum from that to uh you know the production of economies the production of languages uh where languages we tend to think of as the production of tokens that hold meanings uh and by tokens I mean everything from written words to spoken utterances uh you know if linguists will often refer

to those as tokens um and so if you think of language and sort of monetary economies as two different types of token systems and you see those on a Continuum emerging from things like ritual and myth then the potentials for what tokens could become I think really opens up in certain ways and so when people start talking about you can use tokens not only to represent money type things but bundles of Rights identities social roles uh you know those who have a certain number of tokens get the right to vote in certain situations get the right to change the code in certain organizations I think the sky is the limit when a group when a

group recognizes a token as having a certain function there's meaning and value there in regard to how that group understands itself and modulates its processes uh so I think what tokens can become is really open and I think we should start to think of it in these sorts of big terms yeah you know one of the we the things that I got out of the network ologies book is this idea of networks of networks and one of the things that sort of gets interesting for me is not just the internal consistency of how uh one of these local currency Networks works but also what is the Arbitrage between the local currency and the Global Currency you know if I've got like I I don't I I don't know like tomato coin or um let's just call it public goods coin uh because that's

that's a more internet native thing and I think a fit for ethereum is like does the how does that relate to the multi-trillion dollar Bitcoin slash U.S dollar Global hegemony coins it how are they are they valued in relation to each other how does how does one become bigger or smaller uh within the network of networks it is and it feels like to me the answer is the GDP of how many public goods or are coming out of public goods coin Dao or tomatoes are coming out of tomato Dow creates the demand from the global system into that local systems values and there's almost like an exchange rate between the two but there's there's kind of like a geopolitical game or whatever whatever

Network a network political game because we're not using physical here between the local currency and the global currency in relation to how they're valued with each other and and I'm wondering what other attributes of these networks inside of the networks that you that you kind of see here this this might be abstract and far out question I'm not sure if you're totally following but uh you know how do these networks embed in each other I guess is the question I'm asking um I I mean if you look at the history of money uh and angst these sorts of issues were like they were huge you know like should the value of a coin be determined by the content of its gold uh the purity of its silver should it be determined by a completely floating uh you know set of exchanges

internationally speaking so if you look in in regard to the bank of England there were these massive debates in the 1600s between do we make the value of our currency equal to uh actual species actual you know blocks of silver and the weight of those or do we let the value float in relationship to international trade and other currencies and it wasn't really until the 19 well yeah I guess until the 19th century that you start seeing people sort of being like okay it's not really about the silver it's really about the social relationships and the the ways in which different countries value our currency and buy it and use it even though that was kind of the way things were for quite a while

right so you know even though they kept saying like oh it's based in the silver oh it's based in the silver uh and so when you know when you see Nixon take things off the gold standard things had been going that way for you know hundreds of years you could say uh when it comes to uh different you know currencies exchanging off these sort of uh meta currencies we could think of it you know like US dollar is I mean it's a global Reserve currency at this point it's the the sort of meta money of the whole globe you could say um I think the problem is that when things freely exchange against something like that um very often the biggest kid on the Block gets to set the terms for all the

others and I think there's so much that could be done with monetary policy where you pump money into the system using t-bills and Reserve uh Banking and I mean quantitative mechanisms quantitative easing and all that sort of stuff where I mean the fed's just been printing trillions of dollars and you know they used to sort of say when they were putting money into the economy now they have all these Sly methods of doing it um where people don't even know exactly how much money the fed's been slipping in you don't have to print it anymore you don't have to print it anymore it it you know you do it through reverse repo and stuff like that and you know this money just sort of slowly leaks into the economy in various ways uh and all they had to do was move some digits on a

balance sheet uh I think if you're playing on a completely Level Playing Field with that stuff it will make your system uh take on aspects of whatever the most dominant system is and this is it gets the age-old question of like do you want to have protectionist barriers around your Dow in relationship to what's outside of it um and you know a lot of people say no we want you know free exchange but free exchange tends to let capitalism do its thing uh so I I think these are complicated questions yeah yeah for sure uh well hopefully the lens of networks and networkologies will be useful as we tackle these questions I know I certainly got a lot out of

reading the networkologies book so um I think that at this point we should probably start converging towards wrapping up this conversation or although it's been immense and and beautiful and diverse uh in its own way so um first point for the listeners is get the network allergies book there'll be a link in the show notes but it seems like you're working on a on a sequel or at least several sequels so tell me where you're taking this yeah I mean it's kind of hard for me to work on one project at a time so I've I've got several books that are just sort of networking out in separate directions and I'm I'm working to keep them all on the same page even as they grow in different ways and so the the probably the first book that I hope will hit the market is um one

that's about neuroscience and uh the ways in which artificial neural networks function and how this sort of the Mind body split has been deconstructed by a lot of the developments in contemporary neuroscience and artificial intelligence and also developments in cognitive science and Robotics and things of that sort and so really looking at where computation uh and studies of the brain are going in terms of networking and what we can learn about that in regard to The Wider issues of what it means to think in culture uh what it means for cultures to think and process social change so that one I'm calling the networked mind um and I'm going to send out the uh it's

basically written in the book proposal for that should go out uh hopefully within the next month but then I've got this five book series uh that I'm working on that sort of takes Network allergies to kind of the next level and one of this one of these looks at the relationship of the science of networks sort of complex systems and emergence and sort of pulls out these four principles of emergence that I uh you know spoke about earlier another one looks at you know the the studying of experience in everyday life uh and you know in philosophy that's called phenomenology so it how can everyday life be seen as a process of networking you know very concrete stuff like well you know you're feeling States and your senses and things of that sort uh then

there's a book on I'm calling it grammar power at the moment uh and yeah most of these are written at this point it's just a matter of finishing the footnotes and stuff and so this book on grammar power is about uh systems of meaning and systems of value from languages to economies and so the issue of what's a token uh is huge in relation to this um and then I've got stuff that's going you know networks of uh cognition and emotion you know how this works in the body and brain uh so you know these are the projects I'm working on there's several and I'm not sure which one's gonna hit the market first but I'll put everything on my website uh as these things are they're all kind of approaching the final stage uh so I'm

hoping in the next you know probably two years or so you'll start seeing some of these in print great yeah uh we'll we'll uh we'll put a link to your website as well in the show notes and people will check out the series of books so I guess I should say the network of books yes uh I'll post everything on the website as things are coming out yeah and then you know consider myself in the green pill audience to be a bridge into the weird world of web3 if you ever uh if we could ever bait you into building uh doing a book about the network of dowels or the network of networks within dials I think it would be interesting to hit that Frontier together but uh thank you for spending the hour and a half recording this conversation with me I think that

was really great cool great to meet you and totally psyched to you know hear more about this yeah same all right well uh last question where can people find you online uh networkologies.wordpress.com cool yeah all right well thank you so much Christopher really appreciate the the stimulating discussion cool thank you as well take care bye guys [Music]