Sunday Edition #16 - Social Systems Scaling

Also: History of Japanese Urbanism, Art Shows, and Adolescence

Welcome to the Sunday Edition where I share interesting articles and links alongside what I’ve been up to!

Beyond Szabo Scaling

I enjoyed this vision from

Venkatesh Rao

on what a priority for social scaling should be. Szabo Scaling to him (taken from Nick Szabo’s work) is a focus on trust-minized social scaling. In other words, when we coordinate with other humans on larger scales, a key factor is reducing the need to trust a specific human (or bunch of humans). Instead, we rely on increasingly impersonal abstractions like markets, contract law, voting, neoliberal capitalism, containerization (literally, in a specific case, the invention of containers), and protocols/software. Society is eventually built on compacted layers of humanity, with some parts of it once fresh new ground, now buried deep as a foundational layer (like http or the airline industry). But, like VGR, I’ve grown a bit pessimistic on this vision as well. I’ve often hoped that the same interest in the blockchain world in building technologically mediated coordination could also be channelled into innovating regular social innovations. There’s been such cases, like conviction voting that’s under utilized (thresholds for action are only reached by holding the same preference over time, not in one instance). The closest crude variant, for example, of conviction voting that people might experience is an electoral run-off, where if your preferred candidate got into the top 2, you have to vote again.

There is a desire for a focus on social scaling theory that doesn’t have to reduce humans as we do more, together.

Libertarians actually prefer this of course. They prefer direct human sociality to remain small-scale, enduring and intimate, leaving social scaling beyond the Dunbar limit to more indirect and impersonal mechanisms ranging from public-key cryptography to markets to voting. Rather paradoxically, as we’ve come to realize in the last decade, they are also actively eager to find end enthrone putative “Great Man” types in unique positions as scalability hacks. Libertarianism in actual practice appears to be a combination of trust-minimization and demigod-construction.

And VGR believes that scaling should focus on expressivity, because expressivity produces surplus.

What do we do with that surplus? We fuck around and find out. Sometimes that causes trouble, but on net, expressivity maximization has in fact been the historical story of social scaling, and the source of a great deal of thriving. Because the volume of things that actually get expressed seems to be a function of the expressivity of the system in principle, and the possibilities only become obvious once the system is actually available to fuck around with.

It’s something that I often struggled to explain to people about blockchains. Earlier they would ask: but what can I do with it? And I could only reply with costly and awkward use cases. But, it was hard to explain just how interesting a cryptographic and programmatically composable ledger outside of an organization was. “This has never existed before! Don’t you see?! The potential is so interesting!”

It didn’t matter if nothing eventually came of it, because the idea in principle was a new form of expressivity. A new form of surplus.

I’m not hundred percent convinced by VGR’s claims (not because I don’t think it’s true, it’s just that I need to think about it some more). But generally, the idea of building systems for expressivity resonates. Building systems that produce social surplus resonates. But, it also comes with directing our lenses of innovation beyond just the promise of new technology, but also visions of the messy necessity of social systems innovation.

Tokyo Urbanism

I’ve talked quite often on this newsletter about Japanese urbanism, especially its novel zoning policies (that generates its characteristic mixed use). But, I didn’t know more of *how* it came to be. It was in part, accidental following WWII, but also, eventually deliberate. Really great video on not just how Japanese zoning works, but also where it came from.

Death of Comedies

This is not meant to point to recent political events in the US, but I’ve been generally fascinated by two trends in film: comedies going away alongside the rise of horror. And in that, I’m mostly thinking not just in supply (horror is a great cheaper-ish way for film directors to showcase themselves days), but also *why* there is this demand from movie-goers. I asked why on notes a while back.

While I was wracking my brain trying to figure out if there’s some cultural reasons, I think my current answer is simpler: horror is better in a dark and all-encompassing cinema than a home-streaming setup where you can be distracted by your dog wanting to go pee. While laughing with an audience is great, you don’t *need* to watch a comedy on the big screen as much as you need it for horror.

I’m curious if you have ideas/conceptualizations here.

What I’m Up To

I’ve been visiting NYC again. It’s a very magical place in the late summer (early fall). Might be able to tolerate its generally unwieldy wildness if it was like this for an entire year. 😂

🖼️ Art - Exhibitions

Being in New York, I took the opportunity to attend a performance of fellow conceptual/blockchain artist Sarah Friend as an extension of her Prompt Baby work (she sold an NFT collection where collectors could prompt a generative AI model trained on herself with the safety filters removed). In the performance she acts as the generative AI model that she trained with images of herself. I love the Prompt Baby work because it not only makes visible the sometimes hidden nature of porn and sex work, but only highlights consent, especially when generative AI models asks us to wrestle with it. Mainstream society might balk at underground NSFW AI models trained with non-consensual imagery, but it is also then (more?) okay to do things like upload private text messages to ChatGPT to ask it what it should reply to the guy/girl they’re dating? How will society continue to negotiate consent with the rise and proliferation of large language models?

I also got the opportunity to see Sasha Stiles in the MoMA! Been a fan of her work since first collecting a few years ago. Really cool to see her work take up such a prominent space!

🏃‍♂️ Running

I’m still diagnosing my less-than-desired form in last week’s half-marathon. In the run up that week when I ran, I felt a bit woozy afterwards. So it might be that I was nursing a hidden illness/bug. I chalked it up to being underfueled, but it wasn’t something I’m familiar with in feeling generally (unless it’s very hot and humid). Regardless, I did also go out too hard in general. All lessons in paying attention to one’s body! Taking a small rest week as I recover and then headfirst into training for an ultra-trail event in November. 35km and 2000m elevation. Excited and nervous. Need to put a lot more trails and volume in soon.

✍️ Writing - Novel #2 Revisions

I’ve not heard back from any of the other batch of initial 8 agents I queried in June/July. But, I have been receiving feedback in general, and I’m busy making some revisions that will mostly impact the first half of the book. Feeling very confident on the changes.

📺 Watching - Adolescence, The Naked Gun

So, I finally got around to watching the new Naked Gun (after watching some of the old ones) a while back. And yeah, the humor definitely lands more, for today, but it’s still particularly American humor. For you if you enjoy: dry american humor and detective noir. btw, apologies if this is a mild spoiler (I don’t think one watches these films due to a focus on plot 😅), I’m kind of tired of villain plot lines that focus on making the world better (for many or a few) by culling the population. It peaked with Avengers. Time to retire that villain. It’s also something that I think people in ten to twenty years won’t even understand as a thing due to the world facing increasing fertility decline.

I’ve had Adolescence on my to-watch and with the recent Emmy wins, thought it was time. Nerve-wracking and emotional thus far. Acting and directing is stellar. Also, persistently topical.

📚 Reading - Ocean Vuong - On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Gosh, some of the prose in this, is incredible. Enjoying it!

🕹️ Gaming - UFO 50

Still playing in dribs and drabs and enjoying it. But, not going to lie. I’m *very* excited for Hades 2 launching on the 25th of September. This is on the level of waiting for a new Zelda game for me.

🎶 Listening - La Femme - Oceanside Seaside Resort

Love this dreamy California vibe track!

Perfect for a sunset. :)

See you all next week!