Summer of Protocols: Retrofitting the Web with Dorian Taylor

Transcript

[Music] welcome to the green pillow. network podcast if you're just joining us we are building a coordination a network Society of thousands of hackers dreamers and doers focused on using crypto to bring positive some digital systems to the world the podcast features people who are doing it and it's published every Tuesday and Thursday if you want to learn more visit our website at Green pillow. Network where you can download the green pill book for free join the Discord and become a member of your green pill. network chat chapor my guest today is Dorian Taylor who is a self-taught practitioner who grew up in Canada in the 1.0 era at just the right age at the right time he went from pushing pixels running servers to programming infrastructure to ux design and experiencing what it's like to build

the web from every angle while it's still possible to get one's arm around the entire thing in web 10 he now helps clients with strategic planning developing situational awareness and the occasional heavy lift from there the uh episode that we did today is an extension of the summer of protocols series that we've done which again is an 18we program which is funded by the ethereum foundation so we're taking a look at what would be true if we took a more protocol Centric view of history and human coordination as opposed to agent Centric view of human coordination the paper that Dorian wrote that will be released through the summer of protocols is called the inter twing Engler which

is a software product that will be released in the not to distant future so um basically I'd say that the thing that the inter twiler does is it does hypertext right so um basically a way for ordinary websites to turn their content into a more semantic web uh version of their content and those of you who have been following the evolution of the web for as long as I have might remember that the original web 3.0 was a semantic web this idea of ideas and Concepts all being in XML or Json structured data formats and being related to each other which separates the presentation layer of the web to the actual content layer of the web why does

that matter well uh in a world in which the uh web is getting incfi that's venites Val's word uh that he talks about uh describing platform Decay a way to describe the pattern of decreasing quality of online platforms uh Dorian is kind of fighting the intific of the web by using the inter twiler which is a tool which allows us to turn regular websites and ified websites into a semantic web and then from there we can browse knowledge without advertisements and surveillance architecture and shitty user interfaces that have sort of evolved as the web has turned into a surveillance machine so um dorian's kind of an eccentric autodidact um I I think

he on kind of like a quick setic Onan mission to fix the web and I admire that uh I think think that uh you might find Dorian unless you're deeply Technical and you think in systems uh you might find Dorian um like a little bit uh hard to understand at first but uh I think that that's what happens when you're trying to understand people doing difficult things at the frontier of internet technology so a lot of this episode I think is is um talking about the System Dynamics models and data behind the web and then trying to build stories around them why is it important to have a more semantic web how can we fight the intific of the web by using the inter Twi glare and so this is a

unique episode it's not like one that I think that we've done before but that's what happens when we stretch ourselves when we step outside of just ethereum and D apps people working in the ethereum ecosystem and into the summer protocols and see people like Dorian who are looking to push things forward so this is a fun episode and without further Ado I give you Dorian Taylor enjoy Valley Dow is an open Global Collective working to finance and democratize the governance of synthetic biology Technologies to protect the future of our planet research and progress into synthetic biology is critically constrained by the world of nation state regulations and bureaucracy from middlemen but the potential that synthetic biology has for the world is massive it can produce a world in total harmony with nature we can grow stuff

using cells like software it's awesome and the best part is we no longer have to pull carbon out of the ground to grow and maintain civilization don't you think we should be funding this valy Dow does and that's what they're here to do to try and make the solar Punk World of Tomorrow a reality today so join Valley Dow right now and save the planet at valy dow. bio hey how's it going great Kevin thanks for having me on yeah really excited to have you on and to continue our series on the summer of protocols I'm wondering if to start you can bring us into the heads space of Summer of protocols and uh and what you were thinking about during the summer of protocols program yeah absolutely um so uh I've known vancat Ralph for a while

um and he sort of came to me earlier this year and said uh you know this this thing that that that I'm working on and uh you know you can apply to it uh I'm not I don't have any say but you know go ahead and I managed to to get a slot on this thing which was uh an 18-week program uh starting in May uh going through the end of August uh where a bunch of really genius people got together and um sort of probed the essence of the even sort of like a almost quasi philosophical questions of like what protocols are and that was my understanding what what the ethereum foundation was really after was language

like basically a rhetorical basis for uh expressing and and and I mean it really was like a think tank Venture um as it were and it was really kind of an interesting model right like it's a sort of popup Think Tank and I mean I guess the sort of the communities really kind of got that pattern or not I mean if it's not on loock yet it's it's getting there um where uh you know you take a very modest amount of resources and you get a bunch of smart sort of self- actualized self-directed people and just like go for it you know here's your prompt go nuts so um yeah I was really uh definitely excited to be to be a part

of that and I'm still working on the thing um but I'm the output which is a very cool thing the U the sort of a binder that's that's happening this a that's something you subscribe to so you get the binder the first installment and then like every couple months or something like that there's going to be one of our essays uh that goes out of it plus a bunch of ancillary material which is super cool so it's like a physical artifact that's kind of coming out of this in in addition to all the rhetoric and all of the language that was really kind of I mean I think we really Advanced some stuff too yeah the the other guests we've talked about basically establishing should this be a field uh protocol studies and what if we took a more protocol Centric view of human history instead of agent and

institution Centric and I think kind a weird head space to get into but it's the kind of thing where once I see it I can't really unsee it so it's been kind of fun to to dive down that rabbit hole and the brain power in the room when I was when I was out there I think was just immense so it's been really cool experience totally I mean the um it totally reminds me of this conversation that was happening like I'm going to say like 13 14 years ago where the words user experience design like were kind of new um before that there was this like very concrete idea of information architecture and very concrete idea of interaction design and like one was the declarative one the other one was the procedural one and then they kind of like got Amalgamated sort of subsumed

into this umbrella of ux and that's what we talk about now but at the time it was a similar thing like is information or like are there such thing as information Architects or is there just information architecture so there was definitely a rhyme there as you can tell I'm old yeah as a Elder Millennial in the crypto space I also feel like I'm uh getting up there there was a time when I was the youngest person in every startup out there but uh uh by by the laws of entropy and the forwardness of time people get older and uh yeah and maybe as ethereum matures protocols will be a field of study just like how ux is a is something that people can specialize in today yeah I I mean I think it definitely is a headspace you know like because there's it's one thing to design

a protocol in a context of a a technical protocol like like um the IP uh you know stack or whatever um I actually was just reading a really interesting book on that it was the uh um biography of um of jcr licklider um and uh is kind of a history of the internet at the same time uh and the sort of interaction with AI so there's that aspect and then there's the aspect of the sort of international relations and you know how we're going to come up with a climate protocol and like you know sort of a policy law kind of angle of it too but are they sort of you know there's invariance that happen among protocols between those those kinds of um uh environments you know

this disciplines or what you whatever you want to call it like there's there's a lot of stuff that rhymes there's a lot of uh of stuffing there so we might not just have one field of protocol studies but maybe several subfields in the future if protocols rule the world yeah I mean what if you were to sort of like you know you think about like cybernetics in the 40s and 50s right the and 60s I guess um and 70s kind of think of it they kind of like died off with the first AI winter I think in the early 80s but um yeah cybernetics was a thing and there was like General systems theory and there was operations research and there were all these sort of very you know very closely related um you know where they're looking at like systems qua systems as opposed to U you

know particular kinds of systems and I find I mean talking about systems to people they're like well what kind of system and you're like any system because it's a system and then we're looking at the systemness of the system you know you have that conversation goes back and forth so you know we're GNA have a similar kind of thing with protocols I think you know it's GNA be protocols for what and it's like goddamn it protocols in general yeah um okay so we're kind of circling uh your research here but I'm wondering if you can take us deep so tell us about your summer of protocols project and I'm really interested to get into the inter twiler uh so let's let's go there sure so um now this is something that goes

back like a really long time for me like there's bits and pieces of of this thing that um you know that I I can date like 15 years old or something like there are real and I would consider myself like I have a funny career like I started off as a visual designer like in the 1.0 era and then I like went deep into systems and uh infrastructure Dev and because it paid more and um and like infos SEC and all that kind of stuff for like a chunk in my career and then I kind of came back out again for the IIA and ux and whatever land but I've always had this kind of like infrastructur uh uh vibe I guess um you know even when I was doing visual design

I was like you know the polar bear book from Lou Peter Lou um Lou Rosenfeld and Peter morville was sort of you know on my radar in you know 2000 2001 so I mean so I've always sort of had this infrastructure and I've always been working with the web you know since 15 years old 15 16 but uh what what uh the what inter twiler is and this took me uh and it tells me how deep in I I was because I got to the retreat in Seattle and one of the other core researchers says I have no idea what you're working on and I'm like I have spent so much effort trying to tell people what I've been working on and and it's like I okay

you're a technical person you understand stuff in general and you don't understand this then I have to basically R so I would say the inter twiler is this it fills the space of basically WordPress but it has nothing like WordPress I was like thinking it's like oh is it more like rails or Django like is it more like a Dev framework H not actually it's more like it's what I've gone and done um is I've tried to make it so that if you've ever read Roy fielding's uh rest paper dissertation um you know uh one of the the core sort of ideas is this kind of layered system

you've got the Tim burer Le stuff in there with the uh uh um you know durable URLs durable URLs turns out to be like the most important thing and I wrote this down in one of these places was like it's very very cheap to change the lexical content of a URL like the string that is the URL very very cheap to change that very very expensive to change all of the places where that's written down and that is basically the mechanism of why links break and if you could fix that that would just you know what you would be able to do at that point is you would be able to shrink the size of the the the page into this entity that's just a whole snarl hairball of links and then compose those

together reuse content um you know you could reverse proxy out to other things you know the sort of like this Horizon of capability just this opens right up and this kind of like almost Paradigm changing thing so what I'm trying to do is shrink all the crap work to a point so that um you can try more forms of like actual creative expression using hyper media um and you know like what if you had like an instance of this thing on your phone and then you know it you know proxies over to like your hosting site and then then maybe that goes out on the ipfs or whatever goes out on a CDN you know there's like all of this

kind of like hey what if we made the web Lego and then um you know in a more legoy way than like than than attempts to to make it Lego have have so far been and you know not thinking of it in terms of like a yet another platform or Dev platform because part of the eventual ambition of this thing is that you know people are going to write different versions of the same thing in different languages and then it's going to basically have a protocol of sorts that you know bolts everything all together and then we're we're not talking about again crypto or anything like that at this stage but we're talking about just like plain boring htdp HTML you know and uh and and various other data structures

and so it's like what can we do with that if if the crap work of initially URLs um was just taken off the table as something you have to worry about you just didn't have to think about if you wanted it you could add it but you don't have to um and so that's really kind of the dumb you know Nexus of this entire thing so yeah that's an incredibly long-winded way to say that this is basically a thing for making websites except the characteristics of the websites that it makes are completely unlike anything else out there so um this is a a thing that sort of the inner twin gouler uh I guess the sub title is retro retrofitting the web and so you're

kind of ingesting URLs and and transmitting them into into a new form and what does the what does the new form have that's different or better than than the traditional web so I mean it's it's for like making your own websites right so it's like yeah you know if you were gonna make like if you were gonna you think about you know Jackal or you know 11d you know some of those things that are just like super straightforward you know they take a f and full of files and and make a website so the essence of it really is if you know you think about even like when you're making a website you got ke or something like that even you know and you're linking stuff typing things out and uh you know you link things together and so on and so forth

and then like the the overhead of that starts to add up and you know you kind of have to remember like what things are called and so on so you know at the at the center of this thing is uh just effectively a scheme or a policy if you want to call it or even a protocol if you want it for all right so everything gets get a canonical identifier it gets a durable identifier that is the boss identifier that lasts forever um and then you get overlays on top of that for if you want this thing to be human readable SEO friendly whatever the hell you uh you can add that and then you want to go and change that well then you change the overlay but it remembers the old one and the net effect of that is it

turns out that when you make that part of the job just dirt fraking cheap then what you can do is you can crank up the the sort of the the the density what I would call i' call it dense hyper media as opposed to sparse hyper media so take the median website clip off the nav clip off the footer whatever and then uh you know scan what what's left scan the main content and it's like you might as well have paper because like uh uh because there's no links in there um and so Visa like retrofitting the web so you know there's a bunch of there's a kind of laundry list of things like you know there's not a lot of links to start with the links are untyped so like you

don't know what kind of thing it is your linking um so let's say like the difference between you know this like you see like the little arrow that goes off to another website for example when it's an external link or um maybe like somebody's enterprising has gone and said oh this is a definition of a term or something like that um you can even think of like regular kind of arcs to go other places versus images that are embeded as kinds of links as well because they are um you know you can just say like here's a different processing expectation put this here as opposed to go there um you know uh so there's this kind of a there's a vocabulary and the vocabulary like out of the box is

incredibly small as far as the web there is plunk thing on page versus go somewhere else and that's pretty much it and then you know you can finagle it a little bit like you can use some CSS to make the a little arrow if you go to an external site or whatever so we're trying to in this case we're trying to regiment all that uh trying to add to that vocabulary and I mean that's you know that's all stuff going back 20 years semantic web stuff that's very just just grab that off the shelf and use so there's that kind of an aspect of it and uh I don't know what else you want want me to say about that it's kind of like the species of links the number of links sort of het ority of links you

know uh say you you manag you got oh we got a lot of links on this page well what are they it's like oh it's just like Twitter or something like that or you know X know and it's just a long list of things they're all the same you know so your vocabulary like they're kind of the structure of a page is is constrained by the kinds of things if you've ever written like MVC web apps like you know you you've got a little thing in the corner it's an inset and like that might be a module in the template or something like that it's like all of that information exists like in this kind of ocean of like not really anywhere it's like kind of contingent on like hooking this file and hooking that

file and this database record and so on and the idea is really just boil all that down to just like raw data um and then you can transform it on top because you have all the information that you need in order to say this kind of thing is this kind of link and if it's this kind of Link then actually it's not just a link it's an image or it's an audio or whatever um or it's a dictionary reference or something like that put the logic comes through this this it's embedded in the actual content and then we're just kind of so the the actual sort of style of how you would make content you know actually like go and make websites with this thing is actually very different and there're

sort of like separate con uh constituencies um that actually one of the things that came out of that the um retreat was that there were like like actually there's like five completely separate constituencies here there's like the people who would be using the apps and the website there's the people who would be like instantiating them like in a Docker container or something like that there's the people who would actually be making those apps and websites on top of this thing there's the people who would be extending it so they would be writing handlers and transforms and we can talk about those if you want and then there's people porting it to other so like five completely separate constituencies they're almost kind of like gr gradated on levels of uh of kind of how much of

of a pain it is to to have this gain the skills to do that um but uh but yeah anyway so um yeah that's an incredibly incredibly long wounded uh way to uh to discuss this well I'm wondering um I'm actually realizing as we're speaking I'm an elder Millennial I was around when web 3.0 I think it was in college the dream was that web 3 would be the semantic web just like these relational structures of uh basically nouns and verbs and kind of like a graph database uh where you strip away the HTML and the and the presentation markup T just reveal the semantic graph of all human knowledge and it feels like this vision is sort of

in the vein of web 3.0 in the semantic web type of sense in not web 3 in in this sort of uh Financial internet sense it would you agree with that and and if so uh could we talk a little bit about about that Vision yeah sure so um I mean the whole the uh version numbering the web is a funny thing anyway if I'm not mistaken it's all marketing let's be honest well except for the original Web 2.0 if I understand correctly was like an off-hand comment somebody made like a food camp in 2004 and it just kind of sto and then the rest of it is absolutely marketing but um I started working with semantic web Tech in like 2006 and it sucked until about 2009 2010 when it really started to warm up and

then like around 2013 or so is when um sort of like pivot to AI I would say around then started like um you know the people who were making the HTML spec like the guy in charge of it was working for Google and he's like oh we don't need to uh actually do any embedded metadata because we're just going to AI it was the attitude at the time and um so there's this kind of antipathy toward it uh um that I I find sort of and I worked on a project a couple years ago sort of internationalization strategy project for a client and uh one of the head developers was like semantic web isn't that dead technology and it's like

actually it's kind of finally finally out like reaching the slope of productiv ity in your sort of hype cycle like it just it's it spent a lot of time in the uh in the in the trough of of disillusionment and and it's just finally getting to a place where we can actually use it and the reason why is the tooling really sucked like it really sucked for a really long time and it's still part of the reason for making this thing is to make the tooling suck less um you know uh like for instance think about a piece of Json right and the keys that go and into the into the Json structure you know name rank serial number that kind of thing those symbols are they have to mean something but like

if you if you don't specify what the symbols refer to on the other side of the equation I that's you know whatever the data description you want to call it the thing that reads it has no idea what that is and so the all the semantic web does is it says we're going to take those symbols in the keys of the Json thing and we're going to make those URLs and then we can put that on a website um and the website is the spec for the thing and um you know and then we're going to add rules to that so that the actual spec itself is machine readable so you can just ingest that spec and then your database just knows what stuff means it

just knows that like oh this is a name and this is a thing and it um you know there's um Corey um I think I can't remember his last name who was one of the guest uh speakers was doing climate stuff he's using rdf so rdf is resource description framework that's the kind of meta you know structure language framework of our of of the semantic web so he's using that for climate stuff and one of the really cool things and like you know we're thinking down the road here so you know dids right like uh distributed identifi irus well a did is a URL effectively it's a URI and it's totally legal to swap out HTTP youris and stick in dids and you still have the

same text stack except like you are using a completely different resolver now you're using a dead resolver instead of an HTTP get so that is a really really exciting proposition to me like you know I'm imagining you know like part of the reason for for twiler is to like let's get the mechanics of just making content down so that it's costs almost nothing to do the data entry of a structured data object that has the correct structure and it has it has Uris in the term so that you can go to the spec get the spec automatically stick it in your database and it knows what it's looking

at um and of course this is all deterministic there's no AI involed here this is just you know you can use e-w to compute this stuff it's there's no you don't need grids of h100s or whatever the hell um and um you know uh so we could imagine just one day going just like you know the ethereum fork just one day being like okay we're just using this regime now all the content stays the same we just mapped it A to B one to one you know and now we're we're on this different policy and I mean there's people doing right like this is the uh there's a video that I did for the the uh sunare protocols where I sort of go over the nitty-gritty of

this and um the uh one of the things was uh the elephant in the room is is uh you know personal knowledge manager right like PKM stuff so you know you've got Gordon brander for example doing a a subconscious and he's gone and made this whole thing on top of ipfs which is really interesting my stuff is kind of complimentary to that like it's kind of like orthogonal to it almost where I'm just trying to solve like the problem of of how do you do these sort of semantic representations of that very very small very very large numbers of very very small objects that are very very densely linked together how do you manage that and then we can think about how you

Federated or whatever later on I think there's a there's problems sort of inherent to Stu like ipfs like somebody's got to host it right like and uh and so I'm sort of taking it from the from the uh uh from the perspective of I'm gonna host my stuff and if you want to Federate it proxy it if you wanna you know we can come up with ways of of of um uh connecting it to to other things later on but I'm interested in how do I get the data in the in the case of say yeah let's make a PKM on top of this thing on top of inter twiler similar you know you could it would be like a paint

by numbers exercise almost so it's it feels like you know sort of part of The Upside here is building out and fulfilling that vision of the original semantic web and then when you have the semantic NE Web of Knowledge in a certain domain area that makes it easier to uh to accomplish whatever your goal whether your goal is is climate or or some other some other domain and so uh is that sort of a is that to reductionist or is that a concise synopsis of of why this kind of Technology matters definitely going back to like like why the semantic web you know again got such a bad rap and I mean

I think part of it was a PR campaign on the part of Google and the other part of it was uh a um the tooling really sucked and it still sucks and and and so in a great part inter twiler is exists to uh to make the data entry part of semantic web content less bad for sure and yeah like have something like a a demonstrator basically for like Okay so this if you had a again a semantic web engine that also was a regular web engine you know it more or less behaved uh uh the same way for you know if I

wanted to make a regular I elen it to Wordpress in the sense that you know you should be able to and we're we're like a long ways away from all of the you know millions and millions of dollars that have gone into the UI and the you know the packaging and the installation and whatever has so we're not even close to that but the idea of you know I I want to be able to ship this to like a an indiv idual who who's only cares about making content they don't care about you know fiddling around with like heavy kind of code and so there's a way that uh there's there's some stuff in the internals that are that are kind of interesting um that we could maybe get

to if you're interested in that but um but mainly um the idea is like how can we present uh you know a A system that is going to do the management of again persistent addressing and then the representations of the actual um you know structured data and do data entry for structured data um that uh that just still doesn't exist you know again you've got yeah you've got like the PCMS they don't they don't um they don't have link types right the links aren't typed in P um inter twiler takes care of backlink so like the reason why inter

twiler is called inter twiler has to do with Ted Nelson who coined the term hypertex in like 1960 uh he's the guy responsible for the biggest vaporware project in existence called xanadoo and his like mean beef with the web is like the links only go in One Direction like well what do you need to do to make the links go in both directions um you can do it on your own site if you promote links to First Class citizens then the links and the back links are just the forward links turned backwards um going across administrative boundaries on the other hand you've got all sorts of problems like telling the truth you know how do you trust uh you know and especially these days when the referral

header is garbage um and you pretty much have to rely on Google to tell you who links to you um and that's by design of course like and so you know it would be a very interesting thing like at some point in the future to be able to have some kind of trust protocol in the back linking so it's like okay you know I know that I link to these people that's worth some that information is worth something to somebody is there a way to freely exchange that information without too much transaction cost like that is an interesting question you know one of the things I'm sort of realizing from talking to is that you kind of like speak like an engineer you're talking from the data structures um data structures up and it's kind of

interesting to imagine a counterfactual vision of what the world could be oh I've never thought about how backlinks are just unidirectional what if we built a web of trust that was uh that was back and forth and what would that web even look like who would aggregate that and what would it mean for the world but I'm wondering if you could spell uh like spell out why that matters to the audience and um and you know how this maybe maybe from there how does this relate to to protocols into into crypto Discovery in general is a problem and the way that we do like the way that we just find out that stuff exists is the reason why advertising qua advertising the whole Enterprise of advertising exists like

the basic form of advertising is I here right there's nothing we're not trying to say buy my product we're just saying I exist and you know we're not trying to say I'm good we're not trying to you know you think about the like you know the the really kind of auster brand advertising that you see for like some you know Mercedes or something like that and it's just the or whatever and it's like yes we're here that's all they're saying you know when you sort of like think about that in a in a in a in a different context of um well how what is the mechanism that sort of underpins that you you go back to like the days before the internet and there was just TV and billboards and whatever and this like involved like massive media buys

and this was you know mediated by you know a handful of entities who owned all the Billboards or owned all the TV stations or what have you you the problem of just yeah the problem of just Discovery I think is ameliorated considerably by stuff like back Ling if I find out that all of these things point to this page and I and I do this you know and I have done this it's not as good as as it used to be but like you know you could just comb through the refer headers of your you know web server logs and go oh that's kind of an interesting what's on this and you go and you click trying to new L note that there's people discussing your work you

know and they might be too shy to reach out and so you show up and you're like hey guys like I'm the guy who made the thing and they're like oh my God you're the guy who made the thing and that's like a you know that was like what Twitter did you know for me Circa you know 2009 through uh yeah you know last year or whatever um it's uh you know it was the sort of like discovery engine and so you know reliable back links for instance that are true um is a is a handy thing um when you type the links when you actually say like in the links are typed so like what kind of link is this what kind of relation is this um you can partition them based on what

they are when you type the objects you say well what kind of thing is this well then you kind of create a reusable object and then you know when you make the URLs uh uh durable you can actually be like well if if I link to this thing and a year later it's going to still be there you you can you can kind of make a guarantee and this part of the reason for inter twiler was like what code do I need to write to be able to make these guarantees is kind of the the one of the the ways of articulating the approach it's like how do I guarantee this for everybody into the you know until I die and I and I and I lose my domain name which is a you

know that's a that's a problem that has to be dealt with um you know and there are people working on that for sure but I'm kind of imagining this kind of you know if you've ever read like good aler Bach about the uh you know he's talking about isomorphisms and like things that are kind of like you've got these structures semantic structures that move from medium to medium you know it's like the when you see the thing comes into your eye and then it gets processed by your brain and using Antiquated Neuroscience I'm sure but uh cuz he wrote it in 1979 but uh the uh the sort of idea of uh of being able to take the structure that has the meaning and then just move it to another thing whole

cloth just be able to move it to a to a a different medium except it has the same structure it has the same semantics you know we got to get good at that um and I we're like getting better at it but I mean like you know when you think about all of the stuff on like archive.org the like you know you've got Vin and surf uh complaining about uh how the hell are we going to use all this Digital Data these data structures and file formats like 40 years 50 years 100 years into the future and I think the answer to that is you got to keep it alive somehow and the way that you keep it alive is you transpose it from one substrate to another and so making that substrate the best substrate it can be

so that you can do that transposition operation at some point in the future I think is pretty important so this brings me kind of back to one of the things that was in your your post about inner twiler which is um uh you were talking about Alan Kay who's a prominent computer scientist positing that there's three modalities of thinking in order of increasing levels of difficulty there's stories and then there's arguments like logical reasoning and then there's System Dynamics and I feel like one of the things that I'm trying to to pull out of you from this conversation is is going from The System Dynamics of okay these are backlinks this is semantic web and these are the kind of stories that we're building on top of it all the kind of systems that we can build on top of it and the

implications for building a mopan uh crypto web so yeah I think there's there's just something profound there in in Allen's statement but also sort of applying to this conversation as well the thing for me like the sort of the real undering you know reason why what motivates me to do this stuff and why I care about it um has to do with this basic problem and I think it's just like if there's if there's no story nobody cares you know or at least 95% of the population doesn't care and um and that's just I mean I think that just

really boils down to training like it's sort of like if you're not if you don't have to worry about System Dynamics you'll never learn about it because it's like you don't have to learn about partial differential equations you're never going to have to need it but I still think that people still you know have this you know mental model of of of you know you you still have a sort of perceptive environment of like well you know what's happening in the world and like what happens if I poke this and you know and so on there's still a rudimentary thing there and I think like providing the means for people and groups to um develop like basically work out the muscle of understanding System

Dynamics and understanding uh uh you know being able to just get a feel for it I think as a really is kind of a kinesthetic experience I think you really have to feel it um in your bones and um you know it has to be like you know something that you did so it's like okay this happened because of me and you you hear that um there's like that adage that's like uh you know tell me and I'll probably forget show me and I may remember involve me and I'll actually care um I probably butchered that but it's a similar sort of thing it's like well how like what tools do we need I mean how about what tools do I personally feel like I need in order to communicate the kinds of things that uh

um you know the sort of like how do we increase the really you know when I look at you know when I look at you know your your there it was in the video um it's like if you have a story it's like well a story can exist within a paradigm like it can exist within a worldview but uh um you can't challenge the worldview with a story really like you might be able to get one concept out you know if you were really doing some interesting weird speculative step but like the farther you get like the less interesting that's going to be to the the big middle um and you know stuff like argumentation like St you know is

really boring I mean it's the reason why like Cicero and Aristotle or whatever you know said that uh you know reasoning is actually the worst you know it's actually the the least effective form of uh of argumentation and the reason why is because people can just ignore you like I I don't like you I don't care what you're saying I don't care what your thing is about like I'm la la la I don't care unless you force me to so you know reasoning the reasoning works over the set of people who are already kind of sympathetic and they like looking for a robust justification to take your side and then System Dynamics forget about and um but you know when you think of like these massive media franchises like

um whatever Marvel Lord of the Rings Star Wars you know these giant media franchises where they just go and they pluck like oh what if we took these guys and these you know planets and we you know whatever we stuck these together you got a story and so you have this kind of like a the system has this generative potential and and it's a very very dense you know kind of nucleus of Dynamics really um that you can mine for stories and um we are just you know as a as a civilization like just just just gaining the capability for that and the way that I kind of feel about it is like

if I was like a painter 3,000 years ago and I wanted to paint a picture what would I have to do it's like okay I've got to go and I've gotta plant a field of flex and then I'm G to harvest that and then I got to turn that into linen and then I got to chop down a tree for the frame and then I gotta go kill a wild boar for the bristles and then I got to you know go and mine the pigments out of the ground and you know do chemistry you Alchemy to them so that I can get like white and blue and whatever and it's like this whole you know process and then you get to the end of that you're like what the hell was I even G to make what was I what was I G to paint I don't remember because I was

too busy setting up the uh all of the infrastructure for that and so like you know part of the the the goal of inter twiler is to set up the infrastructure make like make all of that stuff really really cheap uh to make it uh um be you know something that that people can pick up and use and create crazy stuff with it and like you know I see again like B crypto um you know one again one concrete thing is some kind of backlink stated thing for sure um and some kind of you know maybe some kind of authentication stuff uh I could see in the future being being a thing as well

um but you know this could be like the training wheels you know for some kind of like dense hyper media post HTTP web um I wrote a thing God it's like probably 20145 I call it the 100-year infrastructure um and it was like where I posited you know 100 years we're going to still have the web or something at least as good you know barring you know EMP event or something like that so um you know like let's get good at it there's some really opportunities here that I see colliding with um basically making this the vision of the semantic re web actually real uh disintermediating

advertising business models making knowledge available for free without advertising riding along and um along with crypto reimagining the structure of the web and it's not totally obvious to me what the implication survey as an end user of the web will be but I think you know if it's just inter meeting the big tech companies and uh bringing the the advertising surveillance business model down a notch I think that that feels like it fits within our theme of protop and crypto that we have on the green pill podcast yeah absolutely again you know it's kind of one of those things where it's like it's going to take a while have it out there in the environment and people using it uh you know and it's like I'm gonna have to go

and I'm gonna have to make a bunch of test apps demo effectively um for it uh you know and there's other people too that that have an interest in Express expressly in this and they have they have very clear ideas of what they're going to do with it uh once they once they have their have their U their hands on it um and again yeah like it's it's let's change the Dynamics change the Contours change the the uh assumptions about working with the web and and really like I kind of said like let's like kick it off its orbit you know and see where it lands uh with different Contours different Dynamics and it's kind of again yeah

it's one of those things that you know it's not entirely obvious like I you know when you're I think vancat had this like too big to nail uh Trope that he had a while back meme that was the sort of idea where you've got an idea that's just like you know if you were going to be able to producti monetize it like that you would be able to explain it to everybody this is kind of one of those things where uh you know I took a sort of a no hand waving policy a while ago where it's just like you know no I'm just gonna make the damn thing I'm gonna make it and then you can see it when when Once once you've got it in your hands well let me ask you this because I

know that we've only got five minutes left but I'm wondering um as a closing question if we are maximally successful in realizing this Vision uh if the inter swingler is is is massively used what does the world look like in in five or 10 years uh can you paint us a picture of of that not only in systems but maybe in narratives of uh of what the world looks like for one I think what we would be able to do is we could get away from the idea that um that stuff needs to be pinned to a particular programming language and we're all using protocols and so like the sort of idea of like you know whereas you've got these kind of adherence to rails and Jango and whatever um the idea one of the ideas behind in tlers it's it's trying to be

as agnostic it's using Ruby right now there's dumb practical reasons for that it was either Ruby or Java for some of those years so there's that aspect of it then as after that I think that like you know if you were G to talk in 10 years down the road like the reality of having a server on your phone that has some stuff and it might bolt up to your VPS or whatever or even your house and that's got some stuff and then that goes and you know so your your phone your house your VPS kind of shares a space and then you might Federate on top of that you know CDN on top of that um and and so you kind of I mean I imagining this kind of almost a a

soup of information resources as that you can still claim you claim that cryptographically um and you access control it basically by air gapping you know selectively saying you know this is physically just not you know accessible and you kind of onion skin and you can kind of have this much higher addressability and visibility into and and effectively reusability too of your um of of content of information um and uh and yeah and you know people are are using this uh to their own personal advantage and I mean obviously there's of that there's

security stuff that needs to be figured out but the idea is is like you know where you've got the single source of Truth is a sort of again another Trope you can have several sources of different slices of the same TR and those can be in different places and they've all got to be somewhere they just have to be uh they have to be somewhere and so the idea is is to put those in the safest places they can be the high availability low uh uh sensitivity information can be out in the cloud you don't care the high uh you know the stuff that U um you know is is itinerant will be on your phone

the stuff is in your you know that that has very high security will be air gapped in your house like that kind of thing as is is something that I'm definitely imagining um it's it's it's in the DNA and then you know delegate certain functions to other things like delegate certain verbs to to entire other you know what if there's a a service provider that provides some particular computation like just utility compute let's think of an interface for that what does that protocol look like how do you pay for it you know so there's all sorts of stuff but it's like you got to kind of get over the hump of like the actual owner is part of building websites which you know into you know something that costs you

virtually nothing and and I think like the biggest part of that is the stupid URLs it's the in the document I wrote it's like it's the URL stupid Tim beo suggested that I call call the uh the whole essay that and I was like can't do that we'll make it a section well um yeah it it's really quite interesting I um am curious to see where you're taking it from here if people want to learn more how do they find more about you or or your work so um Dorian Taylor do um there's Dorian taylor.com sumof protocols I have it on the front page still that's hyphenated summer H have Hy protocols um I am on farcaster I am on

masteron I am on Blue Sky I am of course on Twitter still um those are all linked off of my site uh in the footer um so I'd say start start of the website um and just yeah if you want to search for Dorian Taylor I'm just Dorian on farcaster so that and uh yeah and the and the standard places well thanks so much for being on the podcast and explaining your work to us Dorian enjoyed it absolutely thanks [Music] K all right you just heard from Dorian

Taylor I excited about them for the amount that he has bent my thinking into thinking about the semantic web fighting the inchis ification of the web and what a different web could look like thanks for listening to the green pill. network podcast again we are featuring people who are building a coordination a network Society of thousands of hackers dreamers and doers using crypto in the web to bring to bring more positive some digital systems to the world like Dorian Taylor like the inter twiler if you value our work please make an offering to our algorithmic overlords by subscribing reading and reviewing and please remember to share this episode with a friend who might enjoy it I will see you next time thanks again for

listening peace