Open discussion session following the 'Inventing Psychohistory' symposium talks, with participants including Andre, Florian, Shawn, Venkatesh Rao, Sachin, and Mike Travers debating pace-layer time theory, fashion as an interface layer, and Shawn's concept of 'new nature' as technological systems with no one to appeal to. Venkatesh Rao connects this to Paul Ford's 'why wasn't I consulted' essay and Dan Davies' unaccountability machine thesis, arguing complex systems becoming unaccountable makes them paradoxically more predictable as autonomous machines; Mike Travers questions how this relates to historical disenchantment and Descola's animism framework.
YouTube’s automatic captions, unedited, so names and technical terms are often misheard. Each timestamp opens the video at that moment.
0:01 And uh I think we have um we’re basically at time to start on the discussion piece. Um uh so over to over to whoever is going to kick off the discussion.
0:16 Yep, we are in the discussion session now, so uh no particular plan for how to structure this unless an issue had some sort of um discussion structure plan.
0:31 Not really. I mean like uh I think we we we can just like chat about um what what what what what what like what what everyone said. If there’s questions, we can take those.
0:51 Or also just comments. Uh we’ve been doing this for like 4 or 5 months, so interesting to see what people coming in cold think of what we’re trying to do here. Was it even clear what we’re trying to do?
1:14 Well, I kind of associated, so maybe not fresh eyes, but combining Florian’s and Shawn’s talk, uh I saw an interesting link between the different type of time in the pace layers and the idea that the pace layers don’t actually follow like a progression towards more and more micro time, like they kind of jump around. Um where commerce commerce would be capitalist time, infrastructure would be micro time, and then governance would clock time. And um where I was looking for an answer is what kind of clock will fashion follow in the future?
2:00 Um Florian, do you want to take a first stab at that or
2:07 Mhm. Yeah, I have to think about it. Um I mean like like did I understand you correctly like like fashion like uh haute couture fashion for example.
2:25 Oop. You’re the expert uh Shawn on the pace layers. Just not fashion as just the clothing but just like what’s popular now. I mean it’s it’s not like it it can’t become micro because you need to have some momentum and time for for fashion to catch up if you’re just doing weird stuff. But it it doesn’t seem to fit into any of the other times. I mean there’s some calendar elements where the seasons change and we change our clothes but I I I don’t think it exactly fits the the pace layer idea.
3:02 Well, I was just going to say the first thing when it comes to the idea of fashion is the first thought that came into my head is that um would be something super low tech uh that people would because time is sort of a solved problem further down and timekeeping sort of further down the layers. Uh all of a sudden, you know, like um we could have fashionable like uh like a fashionable sundial that you bring along with you or a little water clock or you know, or something along those lines is that I I think that because um you know, on the fashion layer, I think that uh it being very accurate is no longer something that would be fashionable. I would think that the fashion part would then kind of go would kind of be different. Florian, over over to you.
3:49 Um And there’s a I think there’s certainly a section also wrote there’s certainly some kind of uh preconfiguration element to it, I could imagine. Um I think that’s also something we see already actually when uh you consider how Yeah, I mean going back to clothes like how how kids dress these days, it’s it’s much more synchronized across the globe than it was uh because there’s like a system underneath running brings everyone on the same beat to some degree. Um But I also think there is probably some kind of decoupling going on. So um I I killed one slide where wanted to show some some different watches uh because I noticed there’s also a very interesting um development going on as basically watches become less meaningful as actual timekeeping devices because in what they call a capitalist time, it’s more and more other digital interfaces that give us time and then increasingly it will be uh probably automations that do time for us so we don’t even have to check the time.
5:03 Uh so watches become more and more uh fashion items and basically run on their own logic, but that’s very decoupled from like other time processes. So if you see stuff today like I don’t know, the Trump watch or um the uh yeah, there’s this this famous Casio clock uh Casio watch that um Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden both uh used, which is uh has also been used for improvised explosive devices and so on. So there’s a lot of pop cultural stuff happening, but it’s I think Yeah, I think it’s there’s some divergence to it. That’s all I can say.
5:48 have a comment here. I think the fashion layer in the pace layers diagram conflicts two things. One is fashion in kind of the familiar sense of like, you know, clothing and styles and essentially ephemeral aesthetics. Uh Ephemeral not in the sense of like, you know, um it should be devalued or unimportant, but ephemeral in the sense of it’s not a fundamental driver. It’s driven by other things. So, that’s one view of fashion. But, the other aspect of fashion you could think of as uh um the user interface specifically. So, what’s the surface layer through which the rest of the stack is controlled. And if you want to think about fashion that way, um I was thinking back to my old idea of whatever used to call manufactured normalcy. So, human society cannot absorb change at too fast a rate. So, we tend to normalize things. So, you know, when a new technology is invented, we make its UI look like the old technology. So, when air travel was first invented, airports used to look like train stations. And then eventually, they slowly became more adapted to actual planes, right? So, that was my idea of manufactured normalcy in an essay about 15 years ago.
7:06 And manufactured normalcy is in one sense fashion, but it brings an interesting twist because the argument there was that it in some sense moves slower than the technology under it. In fact, its function is to move slower to allow human psychics to adapt, right? So, I think I’d make a broader point here that uh you want to talk about the layers as having like causal couplings between them and also to understand the speeds of the pace layers in a slightly different ways. Like, yes, in one sense fashion may move much faster than infrastructure in the sense that you know every year or every 3 months in the case of fast fashion clothing styles change, but in another sense fashion is also more cyclical than other things like infrastructure really changes in a secular way, but fashion yes there are some secular trends like clothes overall got less elaborate and showing more skin over the last few centuries, but there’s also you know cyclical things like clothing from the 1920s is not particularly different from clothing today. It’s like a several cycles of the same thing. So you could argue that certain aspects of clothing fashion have changed less slowly than lots of the infrastructure like transportation and stuff under it. So there’s Uh the pace layers model is a useful starting point, but I think it um confuses a lot of causation and like cyclical dynamics and stuff.
8:40 Yeah. Yeah, I mean like my thought about this is that the pace layers idea itself works because I I think so far we were limited by how fast humans could do things, but but I have a feeling that like going ahead um some things might move extremely fast. Like for example um being being able to query across syssl government and and then inside like private private companies, we we can probably arrive at decisions much quicker than we used to. And so in that sense like time might actually tend to collapse simply because AI makes the time which it took to access information nearly zero. And so now maybe that there’s there’s no time needed to diffuse um what’s actually happening, but there but there may be times still involved in in like what actions different groups will take. So, so I mean like I have a feeling that that time might collapse uh in different parts of uh of our processes.
9:55 Uh I think Florian’s model of four layers of time is kind of interesting because it gives you a pace layering of time where each layer is actually almost ontologically different and also maps to structure. Like I put put it in the chat, but when that slide was up uh uh a phrase occurred to me like he had what is it? Infrastructure, structure, uh I think capitalist and something there there are like four very distinct terms that looked like they came from completely different ontologies, uh but it struck me that you could think of them as infrastructure, structure, superstructure, and last layer it’s a word that just occurred to me, vivistructure as in the structure of the living process inside it. So, that’s that was my alternate labeling of Florian’s diagram, but yeah, Florian I’m curious to see if you can connect the time layering ontology to the pace layer, which is more like a structural thing.
11:00 Mhm. Yeah, it’s a Yeah, I I I think I’m not really there yet with the pace layers to be frank.
11:10 Um I was I was still thinking about the the fashion aspect of it because just as you said there is an like an ontological element to these uh time regimes they put up in this book of Warm and Stein. Um so, it’s basically each of them is a different way of dealing with time and I think um if you think about stuff like fashion, it also always relates to what kind of idea you have of the future. So, you you had like the I think like the 1980s or something where um you had a lot of innovation in stuff like product design or fashion. Um and you also had a strong idea of a future and then at some point uh this got stalled a bit because stuff around in society changed and this also impacted how uh yeah, what what people could like it it also influenced culture to some degree. So, I think yeah, it will change with every layer, but uh I cannot synthesize it yet with the pace layers, I think.
12:29 I can change the topic a little bit. I saw some interesting comments in the chat from Sachin about uh pre-commodification and diachronic and synchronic. Sachin, if you’re able to speak uh right now, maybe you can like unmute and share some thoughts.
12:50 Uh yeah. Um yeah, this [clears throat] was really interesting and uh helpful for me as well. Um yeah, I guess I was thinking of in terms of the uh sort of fashion layer of time in that layer that you were talking about. Um there there is sort of a uh yeah, especially when you think of uh how you interface with the fashion layer, uh I was wondering if there is um uh phases uh of time when sort of a synchronic interface dominates versus a diachronic interface. And by what by that I mean in the uh in the case of uh synchronic so a good example is like uh trend cycles and cyclical cycles uh where you’re basically studying sort of uh like a like a timeline of something um and while diachronic is sort of uh you’re taking um you’re studying something at a particular moment in time like a So a good example would be sort of LLMs versus social media and you could make a distinction between I don’t know 2010 to 20 22 it was dominated by a sort of synchronic interface where you had people were paying a lot of attention to trend cycles how new slangs formed and things like that and uh post LLMs use more more have like a domination of a diachronic interface where uh an idea like pre-commodification which I like which I don’t think would have made sense in a sort of trend cycle dominate social media dominated landscape uh so um and I want yeah and I’m I’m not sure if you can apply that across larger um uh periods of time but I guess that’s what I was thinking of.
15:05 Well, I think when I um when I’ve been thinking about the future as being somewhat de-dramatized, I think that to some extent it is. Um you know where we begin to see a little bit a little bit less of that sort of the synchronic now now you know, it’s sort of a fashion sort of um TikToker or or real sort of like um this is just the thing of the of the moment and that more energy and attention is being as is going down into the more diachronic um you know, um LLMs, uh you know, further, you know, further down the layers where I think people are it it it’s deeper to the extent that um I think people are are having more um you know, potentially more deeper uh conversations uh with it um and that but it’s also a tad bit um maybe pre-ma- maybe pre-commodification is actually some way of actu- of actually kind of bringing it back up a a a little you know, somewhat where even though people are are spending a lot of time just talking to Claude and having, you know, deep the deep philosophical conversations, to some extent there is people are are are are still um you know, we’re still surfacing a lot of the same uh a lot of the same things even though people think that they’re sort of engaged in something, you know, slower, more thoughtful. So.
16:47 I was thinking the evenfulness bit that Venkat posted about is interesting. Um I guess uh um I I in in some ways uh the evenfulness idea uh has like a um it happens in sort of a type of temporality where like past history does not seem to matter as much in that particular sort of period of time. Um like it’s it’s a it’s sort of like a bounded period of time where uh sort of older rules don’t um matter or something and things suddenly uh shift. Uh uh like um you like you could think of like COVID as like one such sort of like eventfulness thing that sort of shifted um work habits or even like little fashion um in a way where uh you like it it seemed like for a particular period of time um it’s sort of um history did not play um like a sort of uh big role. I’m not sure if I’m phrasing that correctly, but it’s sort of like history becomes like the the the path dependency becomes a little less strong or something like that.
18:24 Yeah, the eventfulness idea it’s kind of like really hard to wrap your mind around and I think the easiest way to get at it is through specific examples. So, take uh revolutions. Uh the paper itself I think focuses on the French Revolution and I think one way to understand revolutions is you cross some kind of event horizon into a period of time where all the causality kind of gets wrapped up in uh that particular window of time. Does that make sense? Because yes, there may be like, you know, 300-year-old historical causes leading up to the events of the French Revolution, but once the French Revolution has started, all the causation kind of happens in a little whirlpool whirlpool of events, kind of like a vortex um that becomes um sort of alive by itself and becomes its
19:18 own unit of explanation. So, I think something like that is probably true like COVID exactly, right? You cross the boundary into COVID, you’re now in a special COVID rules regime of history where yes, there were like events from 2008 and stuff affected it in sort of a broad sense, but in general you explain events in COVID with reference to the COVID time period itself, right? So, that’s kind of how I think of eventful time and I think the larger use for us is that when you’re doing trying to do long-range prophecy, uh, eventfulness is kind of your friend because you want to like look at conditions and ask when are they heading towards eventful vortices in the, um, flow in the pace layers or something. Or if you want to like think of the pace layers as, um, a a spatial representation of the flow of time, you can think of vortices or knots in wood or something like that. So, that might be a good visualization like imagine, uh, the grain of wood generally flowing in one direction, but wood also has knots in it where there’s like local circular worldly structures. So, something like that becomes, uh, a way of understanding eventful time.
20:34 Uh, Mike Travers has his hand raised. Mike, you want to go?
20:38 Uh, yeah, um, well, first thanks to everybody. This has all been extremely thought thought-provoking. Um, I guess I had a question mostly for Shawn. Um, you mentioned, uh, you know, animism on on one of your slides as part of the, you know, what alternate ontology. That That That’s just something I’ve thought about for a long time. I wrote a whole dissertation on how animism works in different programming language paradigms. Um, but the you the usual you know, his historical take on this is that, you know, modern modernism involved a a disenchantment. You think We used to think of, you know, and trees and animals and buildings as as as having a soul or anima, and but modernism kind of drained all that away and reserved all the animism or agency or mind for for humans. Um, which is, you know, not quite true, but that’s that’s kind of the standard story. Um, so I I haven’t read Descola.
21:37 I just wondered how, you know, that fits in with, you know, the that standard theory of disen- of disenchantment fit fits in, or if you have any remarks about about that.
21:46 Uh, absolutely. So, um, one of the things uh Descola talks about a lot is um um basically is that you know, the way he sort of re-derives um animism is uh sort of where things have a common inside, uh but then potentially uh different outsides. And so, a common inside would be like one soul, or or maybe the idea that I had in um you know, on the Blumenberg slide was the sort of the move from dumb stuff, like what you’re talking about, where sort of the the liveness of the world sort of um you know, where or or sort of the the personness of the world somehow cut somehow goes out of everything that isn’t sort of persons. Um, or what, you know, what might count as persons. And then um So, and then one way that protocols and AI and new nature is that all of a sudden you know, in the world there might be smart things or things that we can analogize or or have some sort of correspondence with that were that weren’t smart before, but are smart in their own way. So, in a sense that we might want to feel like we need to respect it.
23:07 You know, like you would like in the old days like this we have to respect this tree cuz this tree is the tree of our ancestor. You know what I mean? Or that sort of you know, that sort of older way of of thinking about it. And so, I think that because of new nature and long time periods, we may see us moving from the current you know, um sort of magic has been drained out of the world uh sense that has been extremely like good for for progress during um for during modernity and has gotten us so many amazing things. But I think as we you know, diverge and as how and as how you know, we might have different ways of seeing progress, I think we might see some kind of re-enchantment happening over long It’s something that I play a lot with one of the most important one of the things that’s most interesting to me about the uh Descola ontologies is that there’s opportunity for change over time. And that and that we may see different kinds of enchantment or at some point we may consider from like a Kantian sense that we need to give some of these new entities, you know, that they might be able to reason to the extent that we need to you know, protect them or we need to consider them as being something different from us cuz they’re made differently, but also potentially you know, that they need to be respected.
24:59 I think we have like another 5 minutes, 5-6 minutes. More More comments?
25:06 I wanted to flag one thought for [clears throat] like further processing. I really liked um uh Shawn’s definition of new nature as basically there’s no one to appeal to. I think that’s a very fertile thought to drill down. I’m not quite sure how to go down there, but it it reminds me of um uh Paul Ford’s essay where called I think the internet is a customer service um medium and it’s uh the catchphrase there is why wasn’t I consulted where he argues that if you go look at all the, you know, conversation on forums, bulletin boards, and stuff through the peak era of pre-AI internet, a lot of the content is basically people complaining why weren’t they consulted before something big was changed that affected their life, right? And it tells you something that the world’s infrastructure systems over the last century slowly got more and more unaccountable. Uh Dan Davies has a book called the Unaccountability Machine. So, as technology gets more complex, it gets more unaccountable. And at some point, yeah, I think uh Shawn’s uh prophecy might actually come true, which is like at some point a court will say there is nobody you can hold accountable. You will have a force majeure. Um and we’re almost there now, right? Like if you have a multi-sig wallet now with like, you know, say four of seven type multi-sig wallet, but everybody’s in a different country, no country’s um court has like proper jurisdiction to go after the whole safe.
26:41 Like they can throw you in jail even. Like uh uh but if all seven countries don’t have mutual extradition treaties, there’s no way they can go after that um a wall multi-sig wallet except through violence, right? So, in a sense, we are already there, but more consequential things like that might happen. So, I think there’s something really powerful about um that definition, and I think we should like drill down into that. And I think one of the reasons it is also powerful is once something becomes unaccountable, it actually becomes a true machine, which means you can write a predictive physics model for it and say, “Hey, this machine exists in the world, and nobody can like, you know, arbitrarily govern it. It’ll operate by its own laws. Therefore, the world itself becomes more predictable.”
27:34 Yeah, and it’s also um I I think interesting and also just a a just a tad bit of be careful what you wish for kind of uh kind of thing is that is that to to the extent to which new nature becomes more, you know, more successful and more instantiated, uh there may be uh you know, there will be obviously um you know, unintended consequences, as well.
28:00 Yeah, I’m I’m reminded of like, you know, the famous image of Charlie Chaplin in a modern times where he’s caught in the gear train, right? And that’s I think the normal human reaction to feeling completely helpless in the face of a big machine that’s completely unaccountable. I think what’s new about this AI descending into new nature vision that you’re painting is this machine that’s eating up uh Charlie Chaplin is itself alive, right? So, there’s something interesting that has changed that it’s unaccountable. There’s nobody to complain to, but that doesn’t mean it’s dead and mechanistic. It It’s a liveliness machine that you still can’t complain about or to.
28:48 That That makes me wonder where whether like we’ll go right back to like the laws laws of the jungle as a way of being in the world where where where you counter liveliness machines with your own own own kind of like very aggressive liveliness, but I don’t know yeah, that’s that’s like a thought which I had.
29:14 Right, we have a couple of minutes left, so we should probably quickly announce what our psychohistory channel is about. I actually have that open, I think. Uh Uh Let’s Do I have that? It might be worth flashing that for a second. Let me share that screen.
29:39 Okay, so for those of you who are new to this and you jump on the Discord, you go to the psychohistory channel, you can see all the things we talk about. You click on the threads here, you can see all the discussions we’ve had. Uh so we have uh threads for each book club book that we read. Uh we have uh our regular meetings every other week. I believe we’ll have a meeting uh Uh actually we’re due to have a meeting this week, but I think we’ll be not holding that because of the symposium. So the our next meeting will be 2 weeks from Thursday. So uh do join us if you’re interested. Somebody was asking about cliodynamics. That was July 30th. That was our topic. So join us every 2 weeks, we discuss this stuff, and we have lots of other kind of like theme-based uh uh discussions going on all the time. So Uh with that, I will I guess we can call this special session closed. Thanks everybody for attending. So back to Timber
Kaliya Young presents her Protocol Institute-funded research on the IETF as a 'group brain' — a durable collective cognition combining a memory substrate (the data tracker, RFC series, mailing lists) with a human 'knowing' culture (rough consensus, birds-of-a-feather sessions, sortition-based leader selection) that together produce capacities no individual member holds. She extends the framework to Wikipedia and DAOs as comparative cases, introduces the concept of a 'group membrane' (who's in/out and how boundaries harden toward power), and argues AI should augment rather than replace human group cognition, positioning group-level alignment as a missing middle between individual and humanity-wide AI alignment debates.
Trent van Epps (Protocol Guild) presents a four-corner political economy framework for protocols adapted from Lawrence Lessig's 'pathetic dot' theory—norms, market, state, and new nature—arguing that protocols generate far more value than they capture and whoever governs the funding/labor/legitimacy flows shapes the protocol itself. He proposes measurable indicators for each corner (e.g., open-source status, corporate sponsorship share, legal mandates, cryptographic discretion-reduction) and traces trajectories through case studies including the English commons, CHI conference capture, Chromium's market dominance, DNS/ICANN's state transition, Linux's 30-year drift toward center, and Ethereum's tensions around Bitmine's treasury strategy and EF succession. Van Epps introduces concepts like 'capture,' 'tenseity' (borrowed from tensional integrity sculptures), and ossification to describe how competing vectors pull a protocol's governance toward different corners over time, closing with open questions about whether AI and post-quantum transitions will shift Ethereum's position in this political economy.
Simone Cicero of Boundaryless presents O2A (Open Organisation Alliance), a proposed open standard for making organizations 'composable' by replacing implicit coordination mechanisms like hierarchy and meetings with an explicit, machine-readable contract graph of units, offerings, and relationships. He argues the protocol's compact grammar—three economic primitives (purchase, revenue split, investment) plus composition mechanisms—can represent bespoke institutional arrangements like Haier's Rendanheyi model or joint ventures as 'sentences' in a common organizational language, becoming essential as AI agents enter firms and transaction costs collapse.