Marketplaces: Unveiling the math behind society and what to do about it — with James Currier

Podcast Notes

In this episode, we have a boundaryless conversation with Arthur Brock, chief architect of Holochain. Holochain is an alternative to blockchain for running fully Peer-to-Peer distributed applications and is shaping the social dynamics of our emerging post-industrial economy.

In the show we widely cover the concept of Unenclosable carriers and how new technologies that are more inherently contextual and agent centred — instead of universal and global consensus-based — may open up new possibilities for coordination and organising, enabling governance through feedback loops.

Here are some important links from the conversation:

• Arthur Brock, The Future of Governance is not Governments https://medium.com/metacurrency-project/the-future-of-governance-is-not-governments-9c894e17b1cd
• Arthur Brock, Unenclosable Carriers and the Future of Communication, https://medium.com/holochain/unenclosable-carriers-and-the-future-of-communication-4ac6045ac894
• Holochain: https://holochain.org/
• Holo Host: https://holo.host/
• Affordance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance

Key Insights

1. Designing and developing new kinds of Organizations depends on new technological tools that may have a different affordance, and therefore lend themselves to a different type of organising

2. Holochain — through its advocacy for local state (vs. global consensus) and agent-centric models (vs. data-centric) provides somewhat a counterbalance to the universalising nature of technology. If Blockchain could be seen as a monoculture, Holochian might be seen as the ecology of technology-enabled, decentralised organising.

3. According to Arthur little energy and time will need to be invested in incumbents and how they adapt to the transition: they will be inherently slow. Instead, energy should be put into figuring out the question of social coherence through the protocols that coordination through “unenclosable carriers” enable.

4. Arthur pictures technological tools and consciousness develop in tandem, using the analogue of a ladder: “one side of the ladder is consciousness, and you know, the story, the vision, the mythos, the ways that you think and the other is the embodied practical physical tools”.

? Boundaryless Conversations Podcast is about exploring the future of large scale organising by leveraging on technology, network effects and shaping narratives. We explore how platforms can help us play with a world in turmoil, change, and transformation: a world that is at the same time more interconnected and interdependent than ever but also more conflictual and rivalrous.