Let's solve the tragedy of the commons!

If we can develop communication patterns that are sufficiently persuasive for people to earn a living by contributing to the digital commons then those methods should bring about the year of the linux desktop and beyond! until finally all we have is microkernels and a build system.

That's great as a litmus test but really what we want is incentive mechanisms that allow us to do bureaucracy better than we currently do it. If we can have (superior) means of assessing the trustworthiness of data than existing organizations currently provide then there is gravity since an advantage can be earned with access to accurate data (to make good decisions). Depending on the quality of the solution this could have very rapid (and ultimately positive) repercussions ... as we come out of our collective delusion and attempt to realign our value assessments (so that they line up with reality).

Now to actually implement these things we end up wanting different assumptions than the current web is built on. Canonical encodings are important. Reproducible builds are important. Cryptographic proofs are important. Logically relating properties is important. Probabilistic assessments are important. Human accessibility is important. To sum up: CLARITY is important.

Ultimately what we are trying to automate is the act of persuasion. In the (recent) past that has been all about the logos (and the associated pathos, i.e. initial assumptions) but now we are increasingly realizing that we must also care about ethos (that is, the shared assumptions, and therefore must deal with kairos; the shared reality, both the ultimate assumption and an evergreen source of sybil / noise). Ancient greek/egyptian jargon (for bayesian probability theory) aside; what we want is to distill knowledge (intersection of ethos and logos is signal) and continuously improve our model of the world. The improvements or tools that bring us closer to this are legitimate contributions to the (digital) commons. The economic system that we aim to build will need to reward such contributions...

Therefore this software is valuable and the more you contribute to the eventually persuasive version of it the richer you are (I suppose). So join me or compete with me or whatever framing you need but understand that even if you are a psychopath this is not a worthless endeavour! (even though I don't have the patience for explaining everything at once or producing beautiful documents with references to all the people who have understood the problem with believing in bureaucracy).

In summary: we can iterate faster in cyberspace, let's find a way to do economics without the tragedy and then we can fix other things using those tools. Join the matrix: https://matrix.to/#/#datalisp:matrix.org.