Meeting minutes
Daveed: This is a thought experiment. We're in a planetary escape room
… There are signals, conflicting explanations, nothing feels urgent, but that may change
… There's a clock that you notice. Systems are hardening, options narrowing. The escape room isn't static, it's in a slow descent
… Each level you go down it's harder to exit
… Level 1 is fragmentation. Perceptions are siloed. We're not seeing the same world
… People and information are fragmented. Little context, or non-existent
… Level 2 is reality collapse. We can't tell what's true or not. We don't have anchors of truth, things we know to be accurate on the web
… Looking at an article or a video, is it a deepfake, or an AI thing, is it human created? We don't really know. It's an increasing problem
… AI didn't cause this, but it's accelerating it
… Level 3, narratives are more powerful than anything else, drive how people see the world. Visibility replaces legitimacy
… The ability to see things is what makes them legitimate
… The way the web works now, we're in narrative channels, for specific points of views, but we don't have strong ways to break out of them if we don't have contextual information
… Level 4, when you have siloed perception, institutions degrade. Working within false constructs means you're not able to approach your situation in the way you would if there was not this constructed narrative you have to adhere to
… By adhering to a narrative you're giving away your agency. In the context of institutions, it stops being about what's real and true, and about perpetuating itself
… It can continue going down, we're not at the bottom yet. In the US it's looking like we don't have any control as people. We're told things by leaders, then they do the opposite
… When we're in a situation where political parties exercise narrative control, and we don't have ways to verify information, then when things are being surveilled and people deplatformed, you have a difficult environment for people to make informed conscious decisions with agency, and at scale
… Hard for movements to materialise and counter these things
… I personally believe, given how AI is going, things may harden in the next couple years, and may be difficult to make structural changes to the system once AI is further entrench
… What does escape mean? It's not something that one person does, but collectively we must do, to meet the challenges and escape the situation we're in.
… Not about withdrawing, but instead coordinating to get to collective outcomes we want. For most people, I assume: peace, harmony, unity. We want to get along, be safe, be heard, and express and not get in trouble for the things we say
… So how to find a viable door we can go through?
… I'll suggest some new tools we can think about.
… I call them meta-layer primitives. This is the space above the webpage, a decentralised space.
… They tend to be siloes. But we need to think layers not silos
… There are some browser extensions that do this, but they're a horizontal very thin siloed layer
… With the meta-layer idea, there's a layer of many layers, where each one (whether a sidebar or overlay), it has a community and a governance, which determines who can see it and interact, etc
… You can also use interaction tags: these represent a piece of code that provides some kind of interaction, e.g., a poll on an image that asks people to give some judgement on the image
… Imagine a contradictory bridge, a news article to a segment of a video where someone says something that contradicts that sentence. That's an interaction tag
… You can design in the meta-layer construct whatever interaction tags, or sidebards or overlays you want
… The context graph allows for context to be attached to be a specific anchor in a piece of content
… In a page there may be different content anchors, and each may have its own set of context, info on other websites, or interactions helpful for the coordination you're interested in
… Secure computation could provide a trusted execution environment where you or a community could enforce the set of interactions that an individual can perform
… You could apply secure computation to a sidebar or overlay, etc.
… Meta-communities are communities that travel with you wherever you are. We already have this in prototypes. In a webpage, you choose to be visible, and you see who else is visible
… For example, in the anime or skateboarding communities. When you go to an anime site, you see others from that community who are present or had been there recently
… What's the missing piece of the web?
… The ability to annotate. Was taken out in 1995 when Netscape went up against Internet Explorer. Before that, they had the feature
… In 2021, Andreesen, said he wondered what the web would be like if we'd had this from the beginning
… It wouldn't be this flat content layer
… I don't think annotation is the big missing feature. The big missing feature is the space above the webpage
… Hypothesis. A space above every webpage, community governed, essential for coordination.
… Today's content is just one layer of the web. We have annotation, in some browser extensions. We have Web3 wallets, acting as an overlay
… We could do computation above web pages, tags, people having presence. Could completely change the web experience
… What does it look like? The meta-layer with communities of people who're active, interaction, a presence above specific webpages on their common interest
… How to break out of this system? We're in silos, institutions beginning to degrade
… [Discussion of some exisitng approaches presented in the Authentic Web Workshop series]
Daveed: We're building Canopi, https://
… https://
… There's discussion, a visibilty list of who's with you on the page at the same time, you can friend people, there's a wayback machine sidebar to see how a page has changed over time
… We're at the early stage, looking to beta in the next quarter
… We're starting to build a governance layer too, so communities can say how they want to interact, content that's acceptable or now, whether agents can reach out to them, or know whether an agent is a real human. Hoping to support in Canopi
… Create communities that have enforcement in terms of how it wants to interact with AI: just for summarisation, or more AI participation, or exclude altogether
[adjourned]