Worldmaking Part I
2/N of Socratus' theory of change
A bit of a philosophical newsletter this week - we will get into the practical details in the second part of this essay.
Let’s talk about worlds, baby
Wherever you go, there you are. Sounds like the title of a new age book and it probably is the title of one, but there's a core truth to the statement. The world envelops us, making its fruits available when we need them and sending tigers our way when we aren't looking. It's always there. Switched on 24/7. There's no such thing as being without a world. The reason we can't think beyond the big-bang or understand what it's like to be dead is because it's thinking beyond the world.
In part, the world appears the way it does, because of how we are immersed in it. We are bipedal mammals with eyes in the front, eyes with a narrow foveal field. Which means the world presents itself in crisp detail right in front of you and then it fades away to nothing somewhere around your shoulders.
That’s only when you’re standing still. Which we never do. We are bipedal mobile creatures who access the world by moving around. And not just that: we are bipedal, mobile, social creatures that access the world by moving around with others. There’s an ease to how we do so: whether happy or sad, powerful or oppressed, the world never gives up on us, unlike virtual worlds that blink or go dark when the power goes off.
The world is what we can take for granted.
We take for granted that the world makes sense. You open your eyes and a scene presents itself in front of you. There's a little coffee cup a foot to your right; it's easy to take your right hand off the keyboard, grab the cup, smell the aroma of fresh ground beans and taste the hot liquid as it flows on to your tongue and descends down your throat.
Easy peasy. It's like that every single day you're alive. Every once in a while this ease of being fails, like when you run into a transparent window thinking there's air when there's glass. It's a bigger problem for birds than for us but we are susceptible to the illusion too. Glass houses aside, illusions are scarce. We mostly see what we hear, touch what we see, tell people about what we have touched and sleep assured that all's well with the world. While you might enjoy Inception so much that you have seen it seven times, there's no convincing you that the world in which you wake up every morning is an illusion. In fact, it's the very definition of what's not an illusion.
The Social World
It's only when we reflect on boundary cases - like the world before we are born or after we are dead - do we understand that our activities are predicated on something that's invisible. Not because it has special optical properties but because it's not an object of vision; instead, it's that which makes the perception of objects possible. It’s invisible because we are immersed in it. It’s invisible because we trust it with our whole being. That which is taken for granted is often the most trustworthy. You take the ground beneath your feet more for granted than the house built on that ground and the house is more taken for grated than the bed on which you sleep.
Which is also to say that if you had to ask yourself why the bed is creaking, it's more likely the wood is falling apart than the house is shaking, for you trust the house's sturdiness more than the bed's. Of course, it could be an earthquake in which case the normal hierarchy of trust is inverted and the earth is the most treacherous of the three. Which feels like a traumatic betrayal of trust. Here’s the problem:
Finding a foundation of trust is essential to life in the world
Learning that even the most trustworthy entity is ultimately fragile is profoundly destabilizing.
We can’t stop the passage of time, but we can design institutions that help us flourish in the time that we have.
Immersion, trust. How do we build upon those features to make the world a better place?
Consider the problem of inequality, which never seems to go away. Civilization is nothing but a record of how we deal with accumulation and compounding. If everything that's hunted or gathered is consumed right away, there's no question of compounded inequality. Accumulation makes inequality a lot worse because of growth - if our family earns 2% more than yours every year for ten generations, we will be 50 times richer at the end of it. Scratch that - halfway through that process our wealth will help us hire soldiers who will appropriate your wealth and call all of it our own.
The social world is the corner of the whole wide world we can design and change, where we can midwife a better world. Of late, the route to better is through accumulation, massive amounts of it. Unfortunately, while accumulation has no limits, the planet does and we will reach those limits sometime this century. The ever urgent race to expand and organize stuff led to the invention of several social technologies: states, cities, armies, bureaucracies. All our public engineering technologies from dams to highways are housed within those social technologies. Further, those social technologies have spawned products of their own: citizenship, borders, kingship, democracy etc. How will our social technologies manage the transition to the post-growth phase of the human condition? Is there a viable alternative?
These are the kinds of questions we need to grapple through Worldmaking.
Plausible Futures
We live in an era of permanent revolution. Today’s world-changing (and it truly is!) technology is AI. Before that it was VR and Crypto. Nuclear weapons were yesterday’s apocalypse. Climate collapse is the reigning champion today. It's all too easy to be caught in the details of technologies and strategies that keep changing every day. That's where speculative thinking can help us understand the space of possibilities in front of us. 'Near Future" thinking in particular.
Now let’s see how speculating about a near future can help us grasp important aspects of the present. We will use ‘identity design’ as our playground.
Every one of us has a firm grasp of the following fact: there’s a you that’s always been you and no one else; further, you have unique access to that you from the inside. Remember that time when you were bullied on the playground and beaten up for no reason whatsoever (or were you the bully?): you can access the feeling of shame and powerlessness in the first person while everyone else has to do with visual or verbal testimony.
Here’s a thought experiment: let’s say science has advanced so that every single molecule that leaves your body can be gathered and (eventually) assembled into another human being. Now imagine that you were assigned assembly machine # 34872 that went to work from the day you were born, collecting all the molecules leaving your body. Finally on December 18, 2037, the day you turned forty five, 34872 has collected enough of your molecular entrails to re-assemble you as a five year old child, i.e., every single molecule that was in your body when you were five years old or younger is in this new reassembled human being.
Now go back to your first vivid memory from the time you were three - let's say it was the first time a dog licked your face, or the first time you licked an ice-cream cone. Or the dreaded bully beating you into the ground. Do you remember it from the inside? Of course you do.
Yet, every molecule in your body from that time - including every cell on your face and every cell in your tongue - is in 34872's handiwork. But it's you who possesses the memory, not the recreated five year old.
How come?
Somehow your thoughts, your feelings and your experiences are uniquely attached to you even as you age. Some cultures might even believe those unique experiences continue past your death and into your next incarnation.
So who is that you? How is that person demarcated from others?
There are three different aspects of personal identity that matter to our investigation:
Addresses: these are 'places' that are strongly identified with you: physical as well as abstract locations. Passports are abstract addresses, for they can stand for you. Technologically, addresses are well known identity markers: we have issuing addresses in the form of identity cards and other artifacts for a very long time. Addresses are arbitrary - neither your signature nor your passport has any resemblance to you.
Traces: these are modes of behavior and signs of your passage from which I can infer you were there. The scan of your passport in an immigration desk signals that you were in so and so nation at that time. Dogs are very good at recognising their parents from the way they walk or smell. The large tech companies are primarily in the business of inferring people from their traces.
Haecceity. This is probably a new term for you. From the Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy: “The haecceity of an individual a is the property of being that very individual, the property being a.”
Addresses are very common: all of us have several and it’s possible to have cryptographically secure addresses that belong to us and us alone. Traces are getting better and better - the exhaust of our lives pinpoints who we are and big data platforms are getting good at collecting that exhaust. What about haecceity: can technology ever solve the problem of identifying the ‘me in the me’?
What is this haecceity that helps identify us and us alone?
One extreme: our haecceity is so unique to us that it can never be subsumed under any system, which is why the recreated five year old version of you doesn’t have access to your memories from when you were three years old. You have unique access to your life. Two people looking at the same thing and from the same spot have unique experiences - mine is mine, yours is yours.
At the other end of the spectrum: our haecceity is nothing more than a bundle of our addresses and traces, i.e., clustering our identity cards and purchasing patterns is more than enough to point at us and say: this is you and nothing but you. A machine learning system trained on our data exhaust and having access to our addresses is us.
Are you free to talk at 9:00 AM on Monday? A mechanical surrogate should be able to tell you. Does she want to talk to you at 9:00 AM on Monday - your mechanical surrogate might be able to compare patterns with her mechanical surrogate to decide whether we are good matches or not.
But as the old saying goes: you can bring the horse to the water but you can’t make him drink. There are things that only we can do together, not our surrogates. Then again, who knows: perhaps in the near future your digital avatar will go out for a meal with her digital avatar in a digital bar and come back the next morning to report on how it went while both of you catch a good night’s sleep. Win win. So where does surrogacy end and the uniquely real begin?
The Registry
The auto industry revels in concept cars - these aren't meant for mass production, but they showcase what the industry can do at the limits of possibility: say, an electric car that also doubles as a boat, or one so light that it can glide off of hills. Social design needs its analog of concept cars: ideas that are at the edge of what's possible, but can be made to happen if we put our minds together.
Let’s call them concept worlds.
A concept world for identity, that combines addresses and traces could look like a “Registry.” Imagine a digital archive in which all of our lives are chronicled automatically. You don’t have to do anything: eat a sandwich and it adds a row to your data table; take a walk to the bazaar and it adds another row. For the first time in human history, the historical record will be updated alongside the event themselves. Creepy isn’t it? But Google and Facebook are already creating their own registers. Even with all that technology, the registry will struggle with a fundamental question:
What should it record?
When I stumble into the bathroom to brush my teeth and take a bath, should that be counted as one event (‘morning routine’) or as two? If the first, then what about the coffee I make after I finish bathing? Does it get added to the list? Where does the list stop? If the latter, then what about each stroke of the toothbrush? Why aren’t they discrete events? Like with the counting of rivers as persons, the act of counting is increasingly easy, but the real challenge is in knowing
what to count
whether to count it.
Who isn’t struggling to assemble their lives out of individual actions and connecting with others in contextually relevant ways? Identity is a major social challenge precisely because it’s being pressed on all sides. Hypothesis time:
In our Humpty Dumpty era, we are trying and constantly failing at putting ourselves together and most of us can’t do it unaided; we need a technology like the Registry to see ourselves.
The Gallery of Imaginary Objects
Your precious memories and, in fact, your digital twin is now available on a wearable device. It is modular, with fully customizable features and personalized skins.
I love you I love your paintings
How do you see your like s