The Logos Project Restated
Establishing Circles of Trust
When I was about 26, I got bit by the bug of cultural geography. I moved to Hermosa Beach from West Adams, two astonishingly different neighborhoods separated by 14 miles and two multiverses. I called these yuppie playgrounds the GDZs after geographically desirable zipcodes having read a book by a cat named Michael J. Weiss entitled The Clustering of America. Fast forward a decade and I learned that there was a geography professor from Cal State Northridge also named Bowen. He had published one of the first maps of LA County that looked at income and race, or some such. The maps were interesting. What he didn’t have was the raw data.
Ever since then, I have gotten accustomed to taking academics at their word (and a grain of salt) as I generally do not expect them to ever publish or open-source their data. This sucks for me because I kind of get obsessive over stuff like this. Stuff like this being missing data whose numbers I could crunch on my own and put appropriately scaled graphics in front of. These days, meaning these days of the popularity of public intellectuals who perform for the masses ex-cathedra, I have found myself asking more and more of LLMs. I know it’s unhealthy, but they’re so polite and forthcoming. I still take what they say with a grain of salt, unless they are giving me code that works. What they still don’t do is point me to certified datasets.
The purpose of this piece is to restate and underscore my interests in the digital realm both professionally and avocationally but primarily in search of collaboration and funding which might get me into a situation that pays me more doing things that I love more that what I get today, which ain’t hay. I do this directly in response to people who have asked and in order to update some stuff I originally put together before the pandemic.
Speaking of public intellectuals, Jordan Peterson wrote a book I had been wanting to read for a long time called Maps of Meaning. It was hard as hell. In reading that book I was wrestling with two (now three) concepts that do not contradict.
Religion was our first formal education.
Human minds are the evolutionarily in the same place they were 10,000 years ago.
We all deal with belief systems.
So do you see the contradiction? I’m the data engineer who says there will never be enough data to satisfy all of human curiosity. I am the champion of the scientific method who insists that the ubiquity of applied science (technology) leaves us with a god-sized hole. I am the professional who profits from the ever expanding digital world who writes way more lines of essays than lines of code.
So what I expect in the Logos is that we humans get ourselves sorted into healthy affinities somewhere on the scale of Dunbar’s Number, rather than trying to understand the complexities of global information systems and the entire history of human knowledge. So here is the statement that I hope puts it all into perspective:
Bring Decentralized Trust Back
Once upon a time in the wild west, hacker kids and transgressives put together the torrent protocol for sharing files. The killer app was sharing MP3s and MP4s (WAV,AVI) aka music and movies. It has always offered an 'open source' philosophy of share and share alike. But it has also been part of the Dark Web. It was always reasonable to be cautious when both taking what's out there and sharing out what you have.
It is remarkable how long it has been that the simple tools, like PGP and SHA-1 which guarantee some integrity of what and who can be trusted have failed to propagate their capacities to the mainstream. Now today in order to do something like 'Family Sharing' notably with Netflix and Apple, the entire idea has been captured by these large corporations under their centralized control. Meanwhile most of the new decentralized solutions offered by blockchain tech has been an even more tempting realm for fraud.
What are we going to do about this?
Well my idea has everything to do with downscaling and making actual physical communities and neighborhoods work. Whereas the great inducements for VC money and graspers after that business model has been to scale to practical infinity, the entire ethos of craftsmanship and personal attention has atrophied. When you think about it, the real corruption of excellent ideas almost always happens after the early adopters who 'get it' are outnumbered by the millions who 'buy it'. Trolls are inevitable.
Art requires discrimination. Let's bring art back.
No Boilerplate understands this:
Dunbar’s Number
Dunbar’s Number is an estimate, but I imagine it is determined by the depth of your curiosity and conscientiousness. They work in opposite directions. You see this is the number of intimate friends, lovers and family that you truly care about. It’s about the number of people you keep in your head and keep track of their faces. The originator of the concept, I guess named Dunbar, figured about 100-150 to be the count. When we say ‘It takes a village’, that’s the size of the village. For me, it’s the number of people whose voice I recognize instantly when I hear them on the telephone. It doesn’t include the person who looks vaguely familiar, or yeah I’ve heard that name before. It’s the face and the body and the voice and the walk in unmistakable combination. It’s not what Facebook calls ‘friends’.
When I want to really commit myself to something, I socialize it vocally in person to people I respect. There are a million things I want to do, but I’m really driven by my word when I give it to people. As I reiterate that trust is the fundamental currency of society, I keep this practice in mind. I give my word. American contemporaries find it remarkable to see it in our pop fictions: “This is the way” and “I have spoken”. Well, George Lucas is our greatest mythologist. As for me, I’m very curious so I am likely to be interested in a whole lot of people and things. That raises my Number. On the other hand, I’m more conscientious, so I want to handle my business, that lowers my tolerance for risking messing up a relationship. That lowers my Number. I’m also Stoic. I think that lowers my number even further. There are people I have known for decade with whom I speak maybe once a year if that. I pains me when they don’t pick up the phone.
One of those people came by for a visit recently. We face to face crosslegged on my futon drinking apple brandy tea and listening to dramatic ambient music from Miktek. We caught up about 5 years of work, family and adventure. Of course he could spend the night. I had to clean my bathroom and get some fresh towels. He is a C2.
The Circle Protocol
The CP is what I am designing to center people away from the noise and chaos of the interwebz and help them organize their business. It allows you to manage your own circles of trust. The concept is simple, I think the implications are large. It is, hopefully, the thing that keeps the abyss of all of the knowledge in the world from staring back into you. It is a system that organizes your people and associates and services into circles of trust.
C0 is your root. It is the root of your Dunbar group. C1 is you. C2s are the people you would give the key to your front door - those who you wouldn’t mind grabbing a beer out of your fridge without asking. C3s are your cousins and the people you absolutely must invite to your wedding or would hope to show up at your funeral. These are your Inner Circles.
It is amazing to me that nobody has written a contacts application that considers the matter of trust. My Circle Protocol is fast becoming the central organizing principle of the Logos Project. It is how you manage trust. It’s an idea I have used since my kids did playdates. There are plenty of complications in building this out into a formal system, many of them having to do with how to manage complicated relationships and knowing where to draw boundaries, deal with incomplete information and all kinds of security challenges. But I have accumulated a number of very competent friends and associates over the years, and I hope they will be around to offer advice.
XRepublic
Why Can’t We Be Citizens was a well-received essay I wrote this year, part of which was a cri de coeur, part of which was me promising publicly and thus committing myself to action. I have since met with people and knocked the idea around more. What is becoming clear is that this is a system that looks like it fits best in the space of a town hall concept. A community of 20,000 residents might have 1,000 who would be dedicated to participating in a virtual parliament. But this is below the radar of social media oligopoly and beyond the capabilities of most local newspapers. So I think clear business cases can be made for this.
Open Source
It is most likely, that absent running into a millionaire I can trust, I am not likely to find serious funding for this project any time soon. I am undaunted. If I cannot fund or find funding, then I will be dumb and build it myself. Even if it takes 7 years. Or 11.
I like what I have done in my life so far. Professionally it has been all related to this very process - delivering to business owners and decision-makers the tools to better run their operations. A small dedicated team with the right aligned motivations and capable systems can make all the difference in how what is known can be managed. I want to deliver that to those people who currently ‘own’ their digital relationships as curated by tools that are invisible to them and uncontrollable by them. This is the aim of the Logos Project.
Invitation
I will double post updates on Logos here for the next few months, and then switch them over to my data technology publication Tessellations. Make sure you subscribe over there by Christmas. I am also assembling a dev team as well a surveying existing technology. This is essentially the dabbling and puttering of my retirement. I am 62 and three of my grandparents lived past 85. So chances are that before I’m falling down stairs like the President, we’ll all have something wonderful to be proud of. Fingers crossed.