[01:03.750 --> 01:04.910]  Hi, everyone.
[01:05.210 --> 01:12.570]  Welcome to our next session, From Mind Control to Mind Expansion, Hacking Technology to Rebuild Our World.
[01:14.170 --> 01:37.230]  Geva and Javair are going to give us an interactive session in which they're going to use elements of virtual reality, brain-computer interfaces, and AI to applying the hacker spirit to it, and showing us how to use these things in ways that are not really what people expect us to use as.
[01:37.430 --> 01:39.530]  So we're going to be hacking the shit out of it.
[01:40.370 --> 01:45.090]  So a big round of applause to Geva and Javair, and enjoy the session.
[01:49.670 --> 01:50.190]  Hi.
[01:56.500 --> 02:04.600]  Friends, hackers, it's so exciting to be here and actually gathered together for the first time in ages, and not a moment too soon.
[02:04.940 --> 02:11.000]  Because I think we can all agree that we're sensing a sense of global system crash here.
[02:11.580 --> 02:14.580]  That the engines are turning, that things just aren't working.
[02:14.820 --> 02:20.760]  That the basic props that we're used to, holding us up, jobs, prosperity are vanishing.
[02:21.300 --> 02:23.700]  The planet feels like it's in a precarious place.
[02:24.000 --> 02:27.460]  Our technology that's supposed to be running all of this has fundamental design flaws.
[02:27.740 --> 02:39.960]  And there's a lack that the very technology that we're using has riven and gulfed between us that makes it hard for us to find, identify, and choose responsible leaders and representatives to guide and regulate our growth.
[02:41.600 --> 02:45.800]  We hackers, I would argue, are in a unique position to do something about this.
[02:45.900 --> 02:46.980]  We have a vision.
[02:47.140 --> 02:49.000]  We can understand systems, understand technology.
[02:49.120 --> 02:50.940]  We have the skills to analyze and build things.
[02:51.140 --> 02:53.020]  We have a rich culture of openness and sharing.
[02:53.240 --> 02:57.760]  What we need is an actionable plan to leverage our strengths for disruptive change.
[02:58.320 --> 03:01.240]  And so I'd like to talk to you today about fixing society.
[03:01.700 --> 03:03.860]  About scaling our efforts as hackers exponentially.
[03:05.220 --> 03:07.740]  Growth hack our impact to all of society.
[03:07.880 --> 03:08.500]  Because what society?
[03:08.700 --> 03:09.920]  It's the 7 billion people.
[03:10.060 --> 03:12.460]  It's the total addressable market of the billions of us on this planet.
[03:12.600 --> 03:14.840]  Where we could help solve for the future of work.
[03:15.020 --> 03:15.940]  The future of humanity.
[03:16.160 --> 03:17.000]  The future of the planet.
[03:17.160 --> 03:18.980]  And of course the future of what made it all run.
[03:19.200 --> 03:19.560]  Money.
[03:19.740 --> 03:20.700]  We need to reinvent.
[03:21.040 --> 03:22.260]  We need to fund society.
[03:22.460 --> 03:24.600]  We need to reinvent the economic growth flywheel.
[03:24.820 --> 03:27.420]  We need to come up with a new business models and new revenue models.
[03:28.040 --> 03:28.480]  Decentralized.
[03:28.580 --> 03:29.020]  Distributed.
[03:29.320 --> 03:30.060]  F*ck this.
[03:31.940 --> 03:33.580]  I can't do another second of this.
[03:37.750 --> 03:39.150]  Thank you for sticking around.
[03:39.530 --> 03:41.270]  I was a little worried we get walkouts there.
[03:42.930 --> 03:44.510]  We hear a lot of this sort of thing.
[03:46.250 --> 03:49.690]  That was, I hope it was evident, parody.
[03:50.390 --> 03:51.670]  But it's all too familiar.
[03:52.850 --> 03:53.210]  Right?
[03:53.270 --> 03:54.110]  We see this over and over again.
[03:54.250 --> 03:58.250]  And if you look at... If you look at slide one there, it looks almost reasonable for a minute.
[03:58.350 --> 04:00.410]  There's things not quite right in the world.
[04:00.890 --> 04:06.710]  But over and over and over and over again, we see people standing up and trying to do something about it.
[04:07.130 --> 04:10.490]  It often ends up going what feels a little bit off the rails.
[04:10.910 --> 04:16.970]  And so what we'd like to do today is kind of take a step back and have a look at the system in which all of this happens.
[04:16.970 --> 04:18.990]  We're used to hacking systems.
[04:20.150 --> 04:24.930]  We want to have a look at the meta-system, the system that stands above that, the system on planet Earth.
[04:25.630 --> 04:31.990]  And I want to sort of encourage everyone in this audience to open up and develop a mindset of hacking on planet Earth.
[04:32.250 --> 04:38.070]  Hacking on the systems that run the systems that we usually hack on.
[04:39.610 --> 04:46.390]  And to do that, we'll use a number of metaphors that come up often in things like this.
[04:46.450 --> 04:51.190]  We'll talk about systems and machines and so on because they're useful ways of looking at things.
[04:51.310 --> 04:58.030]  And because machines and so on tend to be the space where culturally we hackers are supposed to be playing.
[04:58.230 --> 05:03.770]  And it's where we're most used to applying a certain kind of mindset and a certain set of skills.
[05:05.590 --> 05:06.650]  It's a useful metaphor.
[05:06.650 --> 05:11.010]  But it's also a metaphor that has its limits because machines, they tend to be...
[05:12.270 --> 05:16.250]  It's a word that comes out of the machine age which has been with us for hundreds of years now.
[05:16.750 --> 05:19.010]  And has stuck with us well into the 21st century.
[05:19.150 --> 05:24.690]  And I would argue is one of the reasons that things aren't working quite the way we might imagine them to.
[05:24.830 --> 05:29.030]  Because there's still way too much machine age thinking built into this thing.
[05:29.030 --> 05:42.530]  The idea of systems that are monolithic, centralized solids, they have centralized knobs and buttons and an instruction manual and a certification regime before you get to, you know, touch any of the knobs and buttons.
[05:42.790 --> 05:48.170]  There's another metaphor, there's another way of looking at systems that we often tend to prefer, which is networks.
[05:48.710 --> 05:53.150]  We often, you know, it's a space in which we've been playing for the longest time.
[05:53.150 --> 05:56.490]  And we often like to conceive of complex systems as networks.
[05:56.490 --> 06:00.410]  It's a more flexible, fluid and open kind of thing.
[06:01.310 --> 06:05.130]  It's more dynamic, it represents flows, it's multi-dimensional.
[06:05.850 --> 06:09.890]  You can imagine modes inserting themselves, removing themselves, reconfiguring changes.
[06:10.210 --> 06:13.850]  And it's a good way of looking at more dynamic systems.
[06:14.470 --> 06:21.090]  Machine land absolutely hates networks.
[06:21.090 --> 06:28.810]  Machine land understands machines best, which is why we've seen this huge effort to turn our networks back into centralized machines.
[06:28.990 --> 06:30.310]  That's why we have cloud computing.
[06:30.470 --> 06:38.070]  It's why we have so many sort of technology affordances given to us through applications that use a back-end in a data center somewhere.
[06:38.230 --> 06:50.290]  It's why we've seen this pull away from networked way of doing things to much more the original sort of mainframe way of doing things.
[06:50.290 --> 06:53.290]  So, we'll use these two metaphors.
[06:53.410 --> 07:03.430]  And there's a third metaphor that I'd like to introduce here, which is the metaphor of a game.
[07:04.350 --> 07:07.630]  Because if there's one thing we like to do, it's we like to play with stuff.
[07:08.910 --> 07:09.890]  Quick technical question.
[07:21.140 --> 07:24.500]  Just checking to see if there's some visuals that go with this.
[07:24.620 --> 07:26.540]  But there aren't, so we'll just imagine those.
[07:34.240 --> 07:54.020]  Right, so if we look at the world as is, what we look at if we can pull ourselves out, if we can step up and have a look at the world as a system, if we step out of the usual layer that we're used to looking at, and look at things that lay up, is we can see a playground there.
[07:54.100 --> 08:05.880]  We can see so much sort of potential, so many possibilities in the resources and the technologies and the energies that we have.
[08:07.340 --> 08:16.200]  But most of the people playing on the playground are playing a game that just doesn't quite seem like the sort of game we want to play, or the sort of game that we want to get into.
[08:17.160 --> 08:24.900]  And it's the sort of game that's heavily, one of its defining characteristics of the classic game, is that it's really, really optimized for high score.
[08:26.100 --> 08:27.800]  Now, scores are useful things.
[08:28.280 --> 08:30.900]  Scores can be valuable in their own right.
[08:31.880 --> 08:45.940]  If you're sort of adrift in the cosmos trying to navigate in some way, having, dialing in a destination, having some measurement of how close you are to that destination in some dimension, can be useful.
[08:46.620 --> 08:48.480]  And a score can be a focusing device.
[08:48.740 --> 08:53.340]  And narrowing things down and focusing and attending to a narrow set of things is what we do.
[08:53.560 --> 08:59.560]  We're constantly experiencing reality flooding in through all of our senses, and we pay attention to a tiny, narrow bit of it.
[08:59.720 --> 09:01.800]  And that's as it should be.
[09:04.360 --> 09:09.280]  But being able to be flexible and shift our attention is also vital.
[09:09.280 --> 09:15.720]  If you've ever flown a plane in dark or in fog, you have to do it by instruments.
[09:15.980 --> 09:25.700]  And one of the first things that you learn is not to pay too much attention to any one instrument, to develop a broader picture, to try and build a picture in your head around these numbers.
[09:25.700 --> 09:28.300]  Otherwise, you end up, you know, flying into the ground.
[09:29.740 --> 09:30.840]  And they're everywhere.
[09:30.840 --> 09:33.940]  This scoreism, this score-based mentality is everywhere.
[09:34.260 --> 09:41.300]  I don't know how many of you have one of these, whether it's a smart watch or a fitness tracker or a smart ring or some other self-quantifying device.
[09:41.300 --> 09:41.880]  And they're amazing.
[09:42.100 --> 09:55.360]  They literally shine a light into our inner workings and show us something that's going on inside and show us something that, although we might well have an ability to have some physical recognition of this, we can't always do that.
[09:55.360 --> 10:01.320]  These things will give us some idea of what's happening with our body's rhythms whilst we're asleep.
[10:02.020 --> 10:03.380]  For example, what does it do?
[10:03.500 --> 10:04.420]  It gives us numbers.
[10:04.580 --> 10:06.760]  It turns everything into raw data.
[10:07.000 --> 10:10.000]  It turns our heartbeat, our respiration into a stream of numbers.
[10:10.080 --> 10:11.940]  And it's not numbers, it's a rhythm.
[10:12.700 --> 10:14.200]  It's the rhythms of our life.
[10:16.160 --> 10:19.060]  And when you compress it down to numbers, it's a lossy compression.
[10:19.800 --> 10:25.560]  But then, what tends to happen is those numbers, rather than deriving meaning from them, get turned into a score.
[10:25.900 --> 10:28.660]  Have you ever used any of the apps that come with these things?
[10:28.740 --> 10:35.540]  It's all about gamification and leaderboards and how well have you hit your metrics and what's your bad body battery doing today?
[10:36.460 --> 10:40.480]  And it's all about someone else's idea of what your rhythms should be.
[10:41.100 --> 10:42.260]  How did I do, boss?
[10:42.440 --> 10:43.240]  Is it bedtime?
[10:43.440 --> 10:44.620]  Mum, do I get a gold star?
[10:49.960 --> 10:57.460]  So, you know, because some authoritative app has decided that this is, you know, this is how to interpret these numbers.
[10:57.560 --> 11:00.020]  This is what you should be steering towards.
[11:00.200 --> 11:15.540]  And whilst there are absolutely people in society who we should respect, we should respect everyone for their whatever knowledge and insight and discoveries they've made, and we should pay attention to people who've gone before in directions we want to go,
[11:18.820 --> 11:28.540]  elevating, you know, elevating people to a position of authority, making them authorities, giving them authority over us, becomes very problematic.
[11:28.540 --> 11:35.880]  And scores are a lovely way of finding those because you get the leaderboard that shows you who's doing well at the things you think you want to do well at.
[11:35.880 --> 11:39.740]  And it's very easy to go from a leaderboard to leaders.
[11:39.740 --> 11:40.540]  What should I do?
[11:41.000 --> 11:42.500]  Tell me, oh guru, oh lord.
[11:43.100 --> 11:45.320]  And once we're following a leader, we're now a team.
[11:45.420 --> 11:47.060]  It's now a team game and a team score.
[11:50.320 --> 12:04.240]  And once we've got that, it's best to have an opposing team or at least something to oppose, a war on cancer, a war on drugs, a war on drug users, which perhaps gives us a little less cancer, but gives us a whole lot of scorched earth in the process.
[12:08.420 --> 12:14.100]  And this is
[12:27.700 --> 12:31.340]  what you get when you end up with a system that's completely obsessed with score.
[12:31.460 --> 12:44.540]  This, some of you may have seen, is a video from some research that OpenAI did in which they trained an AI, a reinforcement learning system, to play a boat racing game and had it optimized for score.
[12:44.640 --> 12:45.540]  That was the reward function.
[12:45.640 --> 12:47.520]  That was the thing that told it how well it was doing.
[12:47.680 --> 12:48.440]  And so it did.
[12:48.780 --> 13:06.040]  And it found, an ideal way found a hack, arguably, to maximize its score by going round and round in circles, getting absolutely nowhere, burning a whole lot of shit up, and getting scores 20 to 30% better than the best human players who were, you know,
[13:06.300 --> 13:07.320]  trying to actually finish the race.
[13:08.860 --> 13:10.320]  And this is what tends to happen.
[13:10.820 --> 13:19.380]  And the problem is that in reality, the things we burn up don't respawn indefinitely.
[13:19.780 --> 13:23.440]  And so we always have to bring these things back to reality.
[13:24.040 --> 13:29.600]  And there's a huge connection between these scores and reality because these scores traditionally, the ones in society, have mattered.
[13:29.720 --> 13:41.800]  If you don't get a good enough score, if you don't accumulate enough, if you don't get enough social capital, if you don't score well on these boards, you end up starving or lonely or dead or wishing you were dead.
[13:43.060 --> 13:45.640]  So historically, the stakes have been huge.
[13:45.900 --> 13:48.760]  An individual level, at a societal level, they certainly felt like it.
[13:48.960 --> 13:52.980]  And that idea is baked into the system.
[13:58.260 --> 13:59.980]  But that's a particular view.
[14:00.120 --> 14:03.220]  It's a particular view of reality that seems more and more detached from it.
[14:03.400 --> 14:07.140]  In an era we seem to have, in some dimensions, too much rather than too little.
[14:10.760 --> 14:19.120]  So it's time to do something that, again, I think hackers are naturally very good at, which is questioning consensus reality and going, well, hang on.
[14:20.960 --> 14:26.600]  This thing that you have doesn't seem to work quite the way you think it does.
[14:26.820 --> 14:31.560]  This system of yours seems to be broken in ways that you aren't even aware of.
[14:31.720 --> 14:40.960]  But also, the system of yours has capabilities and possibilities and can do things that are outside of your instruction manual and potentially way more interesting.
[14:47.100 --> 14:51.860]  So, we can do the same thing with consensus reality as a system.
[14:52.040 --> 14:55.420]  Because consensus reality, at this point, really has its problems.
[14:55.560 --> 15:12.540]  Yes, it gives us vaccines and the Eiffel Tower and whatever music moves your soul, but it also gives us civil wars, it gives us doom scrolling, and it gives us a mechanism wherein supposedly well-off parts of the world, supposedly prosperous people spend over 100,000
[15:12.540 --> 15:24.640]  hours of the most precious parts of their lives doing things for other people's purposes, you know, because of this need to constantly generate score.
[15:28.140 --> 15:33.980]  Now, so if we want to step away from that and reimagine it, well, what do we do?
[15:33.980 --> 15:39.480]  We could, you know, conceive of some alternate reality.
[15:39.620 --> 15:40.880]  But alternate realities have a few problems.
[15:40.980 --> 15:42.520]  One, they sound science fictional.
[15:42.660 --> 15:44.200]  It's something that isn't here right now.
[15:45.860 --> 15:55.100]  The other problem is if you're posing yourself as an alternative to something, then you're letting that something shape you as well, that sort of negative space.
[15:55.100 --> 15:56.740]  If you're saying, well, we don't want to do that.
[15:57.000 --> 15:58.320]  We want to avoid that thing.
[15:58.420 --> 16:00.320]  Under no circumstances do we want to look like that.
[16:00.320 --> 16:03.580]  You're shying away from things and you're constricting your movements.
[16:03.740 --> 16:08.880]  In the same way that your movements are constricted if you buy into the thing, your movements are constricted if you avoid the thing.
[16:11.940 --> 16:14.380]  So, alright, so how about virtual reality?
[16:14.540 --> 16:18.680]  Let's start with a complete blank slate and build up something that we can see.
[16:19.360 --> 16:28.840]  The problem with that, the problem with building something from scratch, apart from the difficulty of finding somewhere to do it, is that you have to have a very... we want a really complete open world.
[16:29.140 --> 16:37.060]  We want something that has affordances in it for a wide range of people and gives us all the sort of things that we really look for in life.
[16:39.080 --> 16:43.120]  And that's very hard to do from scratch and it's impossible to get right.
[16:43.240 --> 16:48.580]  Nobody can build such a system, you know, even if it were physically possible.
[16:48.580 --> 16:58.480]  getting it right, we've seen from smaller experiments out in the world that planning everything out centrally like that never quite works.
[16:58.620 --> 17:00.140]  So, so much for virtual reality.
[17:00.220 --> 17:01.420]  What about augmented reality?
[17:01.580 --> 17:14.460]  What about taking what we've got, taking the society that we have, and adding sort of layers to it, adding shiny new bits sticking out the side, adding sort of overlay network, because we're good at that.
[17:14.560 --> 17:16.540]  We do overlay networks all the time.
[17:16.540 --> 17:21.640]  We take some infrastructure, we take some mechanisms up there and say, oh, we could do encrypted communication on this.
[17:21.740 --> 17:24.120]  We could build a distributed currency out of this.
[17:24.220 --> 17:25.780]  We could build a file sharing network out of this.
[17:25.880 --> 17:29.140]  And we build these overlay networks that add this sort of extra functionality.
[17:29.140 --> 17:29.900]  So there's that.
[17:31.760 --> 17:33.480]  Augmenting existing reality in some way.
[17:35.860 --> 17:43.900]  But as soon as we speak of augmenting it, we're talking about taking what's there and making the edges softer, making it a little bit shinier, opening it up a little bit.
[17:43.900 --> 17:46.680]  But we're still, again, constrained by what's there.
[17:48.180 --> 18:02.920]  And what's there, we've seen again, history has shown us time and time again, that the mechanism, the evolutionary mechanism that's propelled this system forward, is outstanding at taking augmentations, taking things that stick out a little bit, and pulling that inside,
[18:03.040 --> 18:05.560]  using that energy to feed more of the same.
[18:07.400 --> 18:16.120]  look at what powers all of these sort of regressive, quote unquote, tech systems that we see right now.
[18:16.240 --> 18:16.980]  It's open source, right?
[18:17.120 --> 18:18.280]  Open source powers the Borg.
[18:19.080 --> 18:24.400]  The system is excellent at pulling in these augmentations and realigning them to its own end.
[18:24.520 --> 18:25.700]  So that doesn't quite do it either.
[18:26.540 --> 18:36.860]  So then we come to the possibility, switching buzzwords, switching things a little bit, of extended reality.
[18:39.040 --> 18:44.480]  And if we use those words, not in the buzzwordy way, but we think about them literally as the words that they are.
[18:44.540 --> 18:48.540]  That idea of extending reality.
[18:51.920 --> 18:57.840]  So, what that does is it acknowledges what's there already, but it allows us to open up the space.
[18:58.000 --> 19:11.560]  We say, well, what can we build out here that opens up possibility space, that doesn't attempt to oppose that world, that doesn't attempt to ignore that world, that doesn't attempt to overthrow that world.
[19:11.680 --> 19:15.220]  We're not looking to try and grab the steering wheel because we could steer that thing better.
[19:15.600 --> 19:16.940]  Again, we've learned that never works.
[19:18.240 --> 19:20.220]  And we're not looking to burn that world to the ground.
[19:20.700 --> 19:21.500]  For a few reasons.
[19:21.720 --> 19:23.640]  There's valuable things in there.
[19:23.740 --> 19:27.260]  Yes, we can see there's a whole lot of waste, there's a whole lot of misdirection, there's a whole lot of everything.
[19:27.580 --> 19:30.260]  We don't want to be caught by the sunk cost fallacy here.
[19:32.380 --> 19:35.060]  But neither do we want to burn it all down because that's extra wasteful.
[19:35.140 --> 19:38.400]  And also, billions of innocent civilians live in that world.
[19:41.400 --> 19:58.100]  So, instead, we're constructing, we're visualizing and constructing new elements of reality that connect to, that borrow from, that interoperate with the reality that's there.
[19:58.420 --> 20:12.100]  That idea, again, that's very central to a lot of what we do, of adversarial interoperability, of there's something in there that has functionality that we'd like to use a little differently to the way we're quote-unquote supposed to, that we'd like to use on our own terms,
[20:12.260 --> 20:15.500]  rather than the terms of the terms and conditions.
[20:18.280 --> 20:19.880]  We do this and we build out...
[20:20.900 --> 20:21.840]  This is already happening.
[20:21.980 --> 20:23.660]  Some of you may be seeing this space.
[20:23.740 --> 20:25.060]  Some of you may be working in this space.
[20:26.160 --> 20:46.360]  There's little dots starting to form out of many of the resources and technologies and things in that system, but out here in possibility space, drawing from, linking from, connecting to the systems that are there in ways that work in this larger space,
[20:46.380 --> 20:49.480]  not in ways that are necessarily consistent with the system as it's been.
[20:49.740 --> 21:00.020]  And there are people who are starting to be able to move and live and do things in a wider space and starting to bring other people with them.
[21:00.100 --> 21:03.160]  So what does this mean in practical terms?
[21:03.400 --> 21:06.500]  And, you know, this is all very sort of airy-fairy.
[21:06.560 --> 21:07.740]  What does this mean in practical terms?
[21:07.880 --> 21:28.000]  If you're sitting here and you're sensing something, you know, several things that perhaps you'd like to see differently in the world, and you have some connection or attraction to them, but you don't really know what to do with this, and how does this whole sort of image help you?
[21:28.280 --> 21:34.100]  And to make it a little bit more concrete, I think it helps to make it a little bit more personal and start with you.
[21:35.340 --> 21:45.980]  Because to understand where it's possible to move and where it's possible to go for yourself, you're the sort of expert on that.
[21:45.980 --> 22:01.980]  And if you do that, if you figure out where you're standing in all of this and what you're doing in all of this, then in figuring out how to move from being constrained by the system as is to a more natural position, whatever that means for you, if you solve that puzzle,
[22:02.220 --> 22:14.720]  how do I loosen these attachments, retain those connections in ways that are nourishing and helpful to me, and operate in a wider possibility space, if you do that, then you open up the space for everyone.
[22:14.840 --> 22:18.660]  You've pulled the space with you, and you've opened it up for everyone standing next to you.
[22:18.660 --> 22:21.100]  And you've created, if you like, a sort of proof of concept.
[22:21.960 --> 22:22.320]  Right?
[22:22.380 --> 22:23.600]  We love proofs of concept.
[22:23.760 --> 22:28.660]  You're like, somebody discovers a way to do something and demonstrates how to do it in some small way.
[22:29.420 --> 22:34.160]  And that may not work exactly for the rest of us, but it shows us that it's possible.
[22:34.860 --> 22:36.220]  And others can build on that.
[22:39.620 --> 22:46.280]  So, take a moment to, like, think about something that matters to you.
[22:46.280 --> 23:02.320]  Maybe you're concerned about food systems, or something in the way we move around the planet, or maybe there's something to do with the way we connect over networks, or how we sustain each other, or something completely different, large, small, where you're noticing something that's off,
[23:02.400 --> 23:19.980]  or where you're sensing something that could be possible if only we looked at things or did things a different way, and where you have some pull, some connection to that, that makes you feel like you'd like to, like to sort of act, like to somehow be involved in realizing that possibility that you can see,
[23:20.200 --> 23:22.660]  even if it's not sort of absolutely clear how.
[23:24.180 --> 23:26.920]  And let's take a look at the machine again.
[23:29.140 --> 23:36.660]  With that in mind, let's sort of step up and have a look at what goes on in typical consensus reality.
[23:36.880 --> 23:45.960]  And if there's things there that we can borrow, if there's things that we can use on our terms to make those things, to power that possibility.
[23:45.960 --> 23:48.680]  So take a moment to think about that, whatever that thing might be.
[23:48.860 --> 23:53.620]  And situated in space, where does it sit relative to the world as it is right now?
[23:53.700 --> 23:54.940]  Is it something we're quite close to?
[23:55.020 --> 23:56.060]  Something we're far away from?
[23:56.660 --> 24:00.280]  Something that's well connected to what's there, or something that represents something of a break?
[24:01.120 --> 24:02.780]  Where are you situated compared to?
[24:02.820 --> 24:03.940]  Is it something you're working on already?
[24:04.040 --> 24:11.120]  Is it something you can see at a distance, but you really don't know, really don't begin to know how to do anything about it?
[24:11.720 --> 24:17.640]  Take that image, and now let's go and have a look at how things, typically work in the world.
[24:18.060 --> 24:22.800]  And what we see is that there are people creating dramatic new realities on a regular basis.
[24:23.200 --> 24:27.220]  And there's a mechanism for doing that.
[24:27.960 --> 24:41.860]  And if you doubt this, if you doubt this reality creation process and the power of this reality creation machine that's been developed over there, ponder this on your way home tonight in your Uber.
[24:42.940 --> 24:55.060]  And ask how a couple of people with some different idea for moving cars around cities got from zero to covering the world in the space of about five years without actually buying a whole lot of vehicles themselves.
[24:55.460 --> 25:04.540]  Or if you're taking the subway, watch everyone in their daily devotions to one of, you know, five or so websites that give them their view on reality.
[25:05.280 --> 25:09.160]  And ask how we went from nobody doing that to everybody doing that in a very short space of time.
[25:11.260 --> 25:12.280]  Because there's magic here.
[25:12.440 --> 25:15.380]  There's some kind of global growth gun.
[25:16.040 --> 25:19.880]  There's some powerful replicator mechanism that these mechanisms use.
[25:19.880 --> 25:21.920]  And it's readily accessible.
[25:22.160 --> 25:33.220]  There's actually a simple password you can use to access it, which isn't written on a post-it note, but it's written on any number of slide decks that look alarmingly like the one that we saw earlier.
[25:33.240 --> 25:35.120]  And if you haven't seen the password before, I'll tell it to you.
[25:35.360 --> 25:38.840]  You simply say, it's Uber, but for blank.
[25:40.080 --> 25:41.520]  Where blank can be anything.
[25:41.720 --> 25:46.820]  Large, small, absurd, doesn't matter, as long as it's ever so slightly different to something anyone else has said before.
[25:47.440 --> 25:52.240]  You take that, you show that to the gatekeepers of the growth gun machine, and you get given the keys.
[25:54.640 --> 25:56.140]  It's a little bit more complex than that.
[25:57.320 --> 26:07.160]  You know, so there's a few caveats if you're now looking at your thing and saying, well, what if I took... what if we somehow found a way to take that thing and propel it through the global growth gun?
[26:07.580 --> 26:08.300]  Well, there's a few problems.
[26:08.300 --> 26:10.380]  One, there's a little bit more than a password.
[26:10.540 --> 26:13.480]  There's a biometric system as well, and it's a shit biometric system.
[26:14.020 --> 26:16.540]  But you have to be able to say the password convincingly.
[26:16.900 --> 26:18.500]  You have to be able to say it with a straight face.
[26:20.280 --> 26:27.480]  And the biometric system, like I say, it's a shit system, so it's used to hearing that from a certain kind of person, so it helps if you look a certain way.
[26:29.000 --> 26:37.360]  The ideal person is the sort of proverbial mediocre white man, preferably wrapping the mediocrity up in the certificate from some name-brand university.
[26:38.180 --> 26:39.660]  But it's possible to get around that.
[26:39.740 --> 26:43.780]  You might be able to get the method acting right one way or another and utter the password convincingly enough.
[26:44.420 --> 26:45.780]  But that still doesn't work.
[26:46.620 --> 26:57.560]  To take the thing, the sort of nascent thing that you see, and bring it out into the world in this large and flourishing kind of way, because the gun only works for a certain kind of thing.
[26:57.720 --> 27:01.760]  You have to mold it.
[27:01.840 --> 27:07.360]  You have to bend it into something that will fit into that system.
[27:07.440 --> 27:09.620]  And you have to then take the strings that are attached.
[27:09.720 --> 27:15.800]  You have to build it into a thing that will, one way or another, cause investment money to increase.
[27:15.960 --> 27:17.260]  It doesn't have to necessarily make a profit.
[27:17.320 --> 27:17.780]  Uber doesn't.
[27:18.220 --> 27:23.360]  But it has to somehow grow in some way that appeals to more investors and brings in more investment money.
[27:25.140 --> 27:26.640]  And that's a massive constraint.
[27:26.640 --> 27:30.440]  And the thing that you're looking at probably can't survive that transition.
[27:30.640 --> 27:31.660]  It can't survive being squished.
[27:31.740 --> 27:32.580]  Even if it could.
[27:34.020 --> 27:37.320]  The Growth Gun is an incredibly crude kind of replicator.
[27:37.420 --> 27:37.880]  It's powerful.
[27:38.140 --> 27:40.460]  It scales things to global proportions.
[27:40.820 --> 27:43.840]  You know, it blitzscales them in very little time at all.
[27:44.560 --> 27:46.640]  But it's a very, very crude replicator.
[27:46.680 --> 27:48.200]  And it makes almost exact replicas.
[27:50.020 --> 28:02.720]  So, it spreads indistinguishable grey goo, or blue goo, or whatever your corporate brand color goo is, across the world, that requires everyone to mold themselves to it.
[28:02.780 --> 28:13.380]  That requires everyone to discover that they need this thing, rather than adjusting itself and molding itself to the needs of different people in different places, different times, different parts of the world.
[28:14.680 --> 28:15.980]  Different backgrounds and so on.
[28:16.940 --> 28:28.580]  So again, even if you could ram your thing into the input port of the Growth Gun, it's not going to come out, if it spreads across the world, in a very satisfying way.
[28:28.580 --> 28:31.420]  Because what goes into the Growth Gun is a minimum viable product.
[28:31.540 --> 28:32.240]  That's all it fits.
[28:32.600 --> 28:35.260]  That's the term of art in that world.
[28:36.200 --> 28:39.980]  Which is the least possible thing that could approximate looking like a product.
[28:40.060 --> 28:41.520]  And that's not a terrible idea in its own right.
[28:41.520 --> 28:44.200]  If we translate that into our own language, it's a proof of concept.
[28:45.300 --> 28:48.500]  But no sane person puts a proof of concept into a Global Growth Gun.
[28:49.940 --> 28:54.460]  And so it looks at first like the Global Growth Gun is incompatible with sanity.
[28:57.200 --> 29:04.360]  But if we look at the parts of it, we look at what people are doing with some of the parts of it outside of that system, then there's hope.
[29:04.440 --> 29:08.320]  Then there's some very interesting things that we start seeing.
[29:08.500 --> 29:13.400]  Because part of what makes that possible is a whole bunch of technology.
[29:13.400 --> 29:15.280]  And it's technology, it's a certain amount...
[29:17.680 --> 29:18.780]  What we
[29:23.090 --> 29:30.750]  essentially have is technology that in many cases we developed.
[29:32.030 --> 29:32.710]  Right?
[29:32.950 --> 29:39.770]  The global growth industry has discovered that digital things can replicate for free.
[29:40.010 --> 29:41.390]  Can be distributed for free.
[29:41.390 --> 29:49.130]  It's like the Sorcerer's Apprentice discovering magic, using it to serve some banal end and things get completely out of control.
[29:49.350 --> 29:54.370]  And it's magic that we understood long before it went off in that trajectory.
[29:54.370 --> 29:58.090]  How did we get from information wants to be free to that?
[30:02.310 --> 30:04.470]  But the mechanisms are still there.
[30:04.590 --> 30:09.410]  And we know better than anyone, you know, the possibilities there.
[30:09.550 --> 30:19.410]  Think of early file sharing and how that cracked open cultural transmission, because a lot of our cultural artifacts could be easily digitized.
[30:19.410 --> 30:23.450]  Music and then later movies didn't quite get where it could.
[30:23.690 --> 30:31.930]  Because the system imposed artificial scarcity through copyright and so on.
[30:32.070 --> 30:33.890]  And because of those systems themselves, you look at Napster.
[30:34.230 --> 30:35.830]  It registered itself as a corporation.
[30:35.830 --> 30:38.470]  It couldn't resist taking that form.
[30:38.570 --> 30:39.950]  And so there was something to sue.
[30:42.090 --> 30:44.870]  Look at Uber, if you will.
[30:45.070 --> 30:46.710]  There's physical things.
[30:46.710 --> 30:56.970]  There's human beings getting into vehicles and moving around streets and consuming energy, all based on flows of information about who wants to ride where, when.
[30:59.230 --> 31:07.650]  Flows of information, you know, mapped onto the real world, have enormous sort of power.
[31:07.830 --> 31:11.730]  And loosening and unlocking that power has massive potential.
[31:13.030 --> 31:15.490]  If you imagine alternative transportation systems.
[31:15.590 --> 31:20.970]  Transportation systems that open up to more than just one person, one driver, one car, internal combustion engine.
[31:21.850 --> 31:31.090]  If you had that same informational flow in a more malleable way, in a way that wasn't tied to the servers of one particular company that has to build things to suit its business model.
[31:32.130 --> 31:35.510]  It's not too hard to, you know, it's not too hard to imagine doing exactly that.
[31:36.530 --> 31:40.090]  In a way that required no centralized servers, no centralized middleman.
[31:40.250 --> 31:43.690]  Removed all of the deadweight costs of that monopolist, that would be monopolist.
[31:45.210 --> 31:49.770]  Made things better in the immediate short term for the people providing those rides.
[31:49.910 --> 31:53.890]  And allowed us a little bit more freedom, a little more space, a little more openness to move from that.
[31:55.330 --> 31:59.690]  To a set of transportation systems that makes more sense.
[32:01.750 --> 32:17.010]  So, the technology, this ability, this global nervous system that we have to transform and shift information, to translate between the world and bits and bits back into the world, is immensely powerful.
[32:18.670 --> 32:24.450]  And we have a much more creative, generative view of the possibilities there.
[32:24.910 --> 32:26.750]  But it still takes more.
[32:26.890 --> 32:28.150]  It still takes resources of some sort.
[32:28.250 --> 32:32.150]  It still takes, you know, whatever you're trying to do.
[32:32.190 --> 32:34.570]  You can do it in a much more resource-like way.
[32:34.690 --> 32:37.450]  This is one of the big sort of insights of the startup industry.
[32:37.590 --> 32:49.470]  You can have, you know, half a dozen people running a startup and, again, scale that up massively without building factories or taking on inventory or doing the things that you traditionally needed to do.
[32:49.570 --> 32:51.670]  You can get very far with comparatively little.
[32:52.490 --> 32:53.690]  But you still need something.
[32:54.770 --> 33:01.430]  And most of the money, most of the resources, you know, tied to money in the system that we're working with right now.
[33:01.930 --> 33:04.510]  And most of the money has strings attached.
[33:05.410 --> 33:06.890]  Only there's so much of it.
[33:09.170 --> 33:11.010]  And so much of it has become an abstraction.
[33:11.010 --> 33:14.290]  So much of it has become information in its own right.
[33:14.470 --> 33:15.530]  Flows of information.
[33:15.810 --> 33:17.330]  Flows of utterly...
[33:17.330 --> 33:18.550]  You know, money's always been a construct.
[33:18.570 --> 33:35.610]  But in the last 15, 20 years or so with the massive growth of financialization, with the massive printing of funny money to keep the party going, the quantitative easing, central banks printing money, the debt that enables commercial banks printing 10 times as much money.
[33:35.610 --> 33:40.550]  All of this money flooding into the world over the past 15 years or so.
[33:40.670 --> 33:44.490]  That's what's enabled a lot of the wildness that we've seen.
[33:44.610 --> 34:00.510]  All of the sort of crazy growth gun things where you can build a global taxi company that loses money for, you know, 12 years straight and still keep the engine turning because there's so much funny money needing a home for itself.
[34:00.510 --> 34:11.330]  It's why we see some of the distortions, the massive distortions that we've seen in the cryptocurrency market because it popped its head above the ground just in time for all this funny money to be looking for an asset class.
[34:18.560 --> 34:21.100]  Yes, talk about artificial scarcity, right?
[34:25.380 --> 34:31.840]  So there's massive amounts of money floating around in this...
[34:31.840 --> 34:39.740]  that is completely disconnected from conventional reality.
[34:40.300 --> 34:41.880]  That makes it no less real.
[34:42.020 --> 34:48.300]  You still get to turn that into vehicles and hamburgers and rent and so on.
[34:48.300 --> 34:52.880]  And it flows around in ways that can be quite accessible.
[34:54.660 --> 35:00.320]  I'll give you... I really don't have enough time to get into the details here, but I'll give you one very visible public example.
[35:01.160 --> 35:09.460]  Wall Street Bets managed to hack one of the money flow mechanisms reasonably effectively.
[35:10.060 --> 35:13.280]  You know, take whatever view you like on that thing.
[35:13.760 --> 35:19.280]  One way or another, they were able to shift flows through the system using the rules of its system itself.
[35:19.380 --> 35:20.740]  It was an outstanding hack.
[35:21.320 --> 35:39.560]  You know, it was based on some sort of understanding of mechanisms and how they fit together and how if we can pull on this mechanism in a certain way, there's a switch over here when you reach a certain threshold that will force, you know, hedge funds that have taken short positions to close out those short positions and cause flows to happen like this.
[35:39.840 --> 35:46.340]  It's a crude example, but it gives you some sense of how, in some ways, these flows are accessible.
[35:46.580 --> 35:54.440]  They're more directly accessible in the cryptocurrency market where you have huge amounts of funny money moved around by publicly visible algorithm.
[35:54.700 --> 35:57.160]  They're visible in other markets, derivatives markets and so on.
[35:57.260 --> 35:58.500]  I don't have time to go into this here.
[35:58.680 --> 36:07.840]  We'll happily discuss this offline with anyone who'd like to chat about that side of things or any of this afterwards.
[36:08.180 --> 36:32.960]  So, we have technological resources and we have potential access to directly to this, this giant amount of... this incomprehensible amount, these tens, hundreds of trillions of dollars of true funny money detached from anything else floating around the information networks of our world.
[36:33.180 --> 36:39.920]  In addition, we have mechanisms that have developed themselves in the system that we can adapt.
[36:40.100 --> 36:43.040]  There's some... and they're crude and they're not... they're imperfect.
[36:43.040 --> 36:50.460]  But things around... things like crowdfunding, Kickstarter, Patreon, and so on.
[36:50.480 --> 36:56.760]  There are people supporting themselves in the system that is with money that pays their rent and feeds them.
[36:57.180 --> 37:01.220]  Doing cool projects and making YouTube videos around them.
[37:01.380 --> 37:03.060]  It's a horribly inefficient mechanism.
[37:03.440 --> 37:09.300]  They have to skew what they do to whatever the YouTube algorithm wants.
[37:09.300 --> 37:12.840]  or whatever the YouTube algorithm decides its advertisers wants.
[37:12.960 --> 37:17.420]  So advertisers pay YouTube for eyeballs that the algorithm supposedly delivers to them.
[37:17.600 --> 37:24.640]  This video delivers... convinces the algorithm that it's going to deliver enough of the right sort of eyeballs for the algorithms.
[37:24.840 --> 37:38.120]  And the advertisers, and eventually through all of this highly inefficient mechanism, popular enough people doing interesting things with enough of a support base of viewers, get to do their things and are supported somehow by this pool of money.
[37:39.180 --> 37:47.720]  If you look at all of those inefficiencies and imagine smoothing out those inefficiencies and removing some of those inefficiencies and creating more direct mechanisms.
[37:48.200 --> 37:58.920]  Again, it's not hard to imagine, you know, more people being able to support themselves doing things that are valued by some group of others around them.
[37:58.920 --> 38:06.220]  Even within the sort of mechanisms that we're used to right now.
[38:06.400 --> 38:09.460]  So there's a great deal of possibility there.
[38:09.560 --> 38:10.840]  And there's... thank you for that.
[38:11.160 --> 38:14.440]  Greater and greater possibility out here.
[38:14.660 --> 38:19.180]  In... there's lots of things starting to happen in extended reality.
[38:19.480 --> 38:29.560]  There's lots of... there's lots of movement and lots of activity taking that view of and let's tap into the... the... the power that's there.
[38:29.740 --> 38:30.920]  Let's tap into the resources that are there.
[38:31.000 --> 38:32.160]  Let's do it our way.
[38:32.200 --> 38:33.140]  Let's link to that.
[38:34.120 --> 38:37.920]  And let's start creating mechanisms that open up possibility space.
[38:38.340 --> 38:40.340]  That reduce the need for those resources.
[38:40.600 --> 38:42.840]  That use this power, this technological power.
[38:43.880 --> 38:49.140]  This... this... these things that we understand in more efficient ways.
[38:49.200 --> 38:53.040]  In ways that are more... that aren't skewed to a particular business model or something.
[38:53.040 --> 38:58.920]  And where the logic of the old machine system doesn't have to apply.
[38:59.040 --> 38:59.760]  This doesn't have to.
[39:00.040 --> 39:01.740]  Yes, we would like it to be sustainable.
[39:01.980 --> 39:06.520]  Yes, we would like it to... to spread its influence in a positive way as... as far as possible.
[39:06.700 --> 39:09.320]  And... and have some positive influence in as many lives as possible.
[39:09.940 --> 39:11.700]  But it... and we wanted to be sustainable.
[39:11.840 --> 39:13.820]  We wanted to grow in some other sense of the word.
[39:14.440 --> 39:14.620]  Growth.
[39:15.860 --> 39:16.720]  Wanted to flourish.
[39:18.720 --> 39:29.560]  But we don't have to bake in this resource accumulation, this investment increasing, this business model into the thing.
[39:29.740 --> 39:45.600]  We can find... we can very effectively, because these things are so cheap and simple and light on their feet to get going and to get moving if there's enough people energy around them, there's a whole set of new possibilities.
[39:45.600 --> 39:54.200]  So... and unfortunately, the wondrous technology that we have seems to have failed us in this particular moment.
[39:54.200 --> 40:04.460]  So I'm missing a whole lot of visuals and visualizations that perhaps would have made some of this even more visual and apparent to you.
[40:04.520 --> 40:09.500]  I've covered a lot of fairly high-level ground here.
[40:09.700 --> 40:13.360]  We do actually have a few minutes left for questions.
[40:15.740 --> 40:24.980]  So I'm happy to... if there are thoughts in your head that this has sparked off, I'm happy to start some sort of discussion right here, right now.
[40:25.260 --> 40:28.280]  Very happy to talk to people afterwards.
[40:28.680 --> 40:32.520]  A lot of this has necessarily been very hand-weaving because it covers a fair amount of ground.
[40:32.760 --> 40:35.660]  There's a lot of substance and possibility behind this.
[40:35.660 --> 40:37.860]  I'm really trying to sketch out the territory.
[40:38.580 --> 40:54.220]  If any of you sort of come away with this with sort of energy to explore this territory, to do something in this territory, to see about shifting what you're doing into a position that's more comfortable for you and ultimately more valuable for society,
[40:55.680 --> 41:06.740]  we're going to be organizing a sort of ad hoc workshop to discuss these things and get together and look practically at some of these questions and put people together and so on.
[41:06.840 --> 41:09.260]  If that's of interest to you, catch one of us.
[41:09.260 --> 41:18.600]  After this, we don't have a final place and time for this, but if you give us your contact details, we'll get back to you with that.
[41:18.640 --> 41:33.040]  And we'd love to actually sit down and have a more specific, productive session, taking some of these very broad, wide-open possibilities and looking at practical ways forward with them because there are many.
[41:34.220 --> 41:35.680]  So that's a brief overview.
[41:35.820 --> 41:43.440]  I'd say if anyone has any short questions, challenges, anything else you'd like to bring up now, that would be great.
[41:43.500 --> 41:50.500]  Otherwise, catch us afterwards and we'll figure out a time and place for us all to get together and talk about this in some more specific depth.
[42:23.500 --> 42:31.080]  Alright, so I appreciate many of the abstract examples you were giving.
[42:31.380 --> 42:42.840]  I was wondering, are there any particular additional authors or works that you'd recommend looking into for one to better wrap one's mind around your material?
[42:43.600 --> 42:46.040]  Oh, okay, that's...
[42:50.200 --> 42:59.740]  So, yes, there are definitely... I'm not sure I can stand up here and give you a short list this minute, but I would be delighted to...
[42:59.740 --> 43:00.340]  Tab three.
[43:00.980 --> 43:01.720]  ...send some out.
[43:01.960 --> 43:03.880]  I'll tell you what, and I think...
[43:06.440 --> 43:09.400]  I think one of these talks already happened.
[43:09.800 --> 43:13.960]  If you wanted some hope talks that loosely connect to this in some interesting ways.
[43:14.140 --> 43:21.980]  Certainly, a core doctor of talking about interoperability, he tends to talk about that in a specific Internet-y context.
[43:22.140 --> 43:30.760]  But that idea of interoperability, of adversarial interoperability, of taking something that doesn't want to let you in a certain way, and pulling something out of it anyway, is hugely, hugely powerful.
[43:30.880 --> 43:45.000]  If you go to that talk and have him explain, as he inimitably does, what he's seeing in that space, and just take that thought and pull it out beyond the sort of Internet context more broadly, that would be a wonderful thing.
[43:45.060 --> 43:46.620]  I think that's happening tomorrow.
[43:48.580 --> 43:52.540]  The Four Thieves Vinegar Collective spoke, I think, this morning.
[43:52.820 --> 43:53.220]  That's wonderful.
[43:53.280 --> 43:55.320]  So you missed that talk, but I don't know if you were at that or not.
[43:55.440 --> 43:57.040]  But it's a very, very specific thing.
[43:57.220 --> 44:10.540]  There's this tiny collective doing really interesting things about taking one of the most physical things out there, drug delivery, and finding ways to distribute it, finding ways to make as much of it as possible digital.
[44:13.840 --> 44:25.980]  Using AI effectively, fairly old school, but incredibly powerful AI, to take drugs that are exceedingly hard to get hold of because the law gets in the way, patents get in the way, outrageous prices get in the way.
[44:26.320 --> 44:41.380]  Find ways to develop synthesis mechanisms that allow you to make these at home with ingredients that you can get from a school science supply store in a little bioreactor in a jam jar with a few sensors and a basic microcontroller in a safe and repeatable way.
[44:44.020 --> 44:45.560]  It's a very specific example.
[44:45.640 --> 45:04.140]  I think it's an absolutely lovely example of some of the things that we're talking about here, where we have these incredibly powerful technologies that can take so much of this process and make them digital and use these things to collaboratively with these machines that can search millions of science papers and figure out how to answer questions that nobody's asking about.
[45:04.200 --> 45:05.860]  How could we make this safely at home?
[45:06.820 --> 45:14.000]  We can do this as effectively as the big pharma companies do to optimize their processes and open this up to everybody.
[45:14.260 --> 45:17.380]  So just off the top of my head, there's like two hope talks that really kind of resonate with that.
[45:19.300 --> 45:20.120]  That comes to mind.
[45:20.280 --> 45:28.340]  In terms of books, something that's like totally philosophical but resonates with a lot of this talk.
[45:28.680 --> 45:31.920]  Finite and Infinite Games by James Cass.
[45:32.360 --> 45:33.340]  C-A-R-S-E.
[45:33.400 --> 45:34.280]  It's a really short book.
[45:34.480 --> 45:35.520]  It's a really quick read.
[45:38.380 --> 45:43.720]  And it's got nothing directly to do with technology or the specifics or the finance world or anything like that.
[45:44.260 --> 45:51.680]  But in terms of the mindset around that, you can do a lot worse than sit with that book for a few hours and see what it does for you.
[45:51.680 --> 45:52.500]  Excellent.
[45:52.700 --> 45:53.220]  Thank you very much.
[45:53.420 --> 45:54.980]  And I'm happy to talk some more afterwards.
[45:55.440 --> 45:56.280]  I appreciate it.
[46:04.270 --> 46:05.630]  And I think that's it.
[46:06.510 --> 46:07.370]  Thank you very much.
[46:07.370 --> 46:07.490]  Thank you very much.