the vision projects Link to heading

Steve Jobs famously asked of his potential employees. “What is so important to you that you would work on it for free?” Here are my visions.

My visions include:

  • XRepublic: Why don’t you get to vote online? What if you could? How would you evade trolls while engaging the opposition?

  • WWID: Does what you write accurately describe what you believe?

  • Circle Protocol: Vision of the future of subscriptions and trust management.

  • Personal Interrogator: Personal corpus of weighted values, principals, goals and political, philosophical and religious affinities.

  • BoxTag: How could you transform the comments section into something more valuable to all parties?

  • LastID: What is the future of SSI?

Abstract Link to heading

The Logos Project is conceived as an antidote to ‘attention media’. It’s fundamental improvement is that it adds a set of tools that enable judgment. While it is understood that all judgments can be gamed, what is necessary for better judgment is a larger vocabulary than popularity.

These are my ideas for building a ’logical web’. The purpose of these tools and systems are to use web technology to facilitate a level of collaboration that encourages individuals to deal with and create findings of fact. There are several necessary components of this:

Reputation Management
The first piece of the puzzle is to reduce the incentives for anonymous individuals to disrupt the process of fact finding. Let us call this ‘intelligence’. Certain conventions must be adhered to in order to assist individuals in making judgments about the value of statements by anonymous or opaque individuals. I think there are two primary incentives.

Skin in the Game
Individuals who care about their reputation online must be invested. For the moment let’s just called that a paid subscription. If it is not worth $1 per month to participate, then we will ignore them for the time being.

Multidimensional Karma
If the only way that people can succeed is by being popular, then they will contribute over the long term in ways that make them popular.

Secure, reliable identification
Individuals have to be who they say they are. They have to have control over their opacity and they should not be able to ghost their identities.

Disconfirmation & Disputation Via Tajfel, we know that an infinite number of meaningless tribes can be joined and unjoined by individuals finding similar preferences. Our intent is to allow that with some limits of logical exclusivity and an upper limit on simultaneous membership, as well as a mandatory commitment period.

We expect tribes to emerge that have signed on to what seem to be unproven theories, concepts and conspiracies. The implication is that people would rather be strongly wrong than weakly right. If something is correct that they cannot explain, many would prefer an emotional attachment to something they can explain, whether or not that something is logically correct, provable or truthful.

Therefore we expect that it will be more useful for people to be debunked than persuaded, so long as their debunker is a true champion. Such champions must be welcome and invited into the contest of wills and of truth.

Self Ownership Anything a person says belongs to them. They should able to revoke it at any moment. In certain contexts this revocation should be noted, especially if it is a notable artifact in a conversation. People who submit texts for attribution therefore give permission for their name to be associated.

Scrub Revoked attributions are absolute but the comment remains. A ‘ghost’ owns the comment.

Identity Equity We expect individuals to contribute over a long period of time and maintain their reputations over this period. This longevity of self as well as ‘profligacy’ should be reserved.

Artifacts We want individuals to attach themselves with some ease to findings of fact that they did not originate. As well, we want individuals to gain some measure of credit for those they find and present, as well as those they create.

Profile Maintenance An individual should be prompted periodically to see if they are alive. Non-participants may live on, but only ‘in spirit’, and as such cannot vote or comment.