@The-A-Man ok, this is a fun thread (: But let’s temper statements like “all things pospi” please- I am not important, I’m just one collaborator among a network of folks in this space and the work started at least 5 years before I was even born. I find it best not to attach names and personalities to ideas and movements… cults of personality can be hard to keep at bay and ultimately cause social problems and megalomania; forces I am as susceptible to as any human.
Ok, now that that’s out of the way…
Holo-REA on RSM
RSM conversion work is in progress, and has been an interesting dance with core in pursuit of my desired level of abstraction / modularity. I think the last blockers on that were removed today thanks to conversation with @thedavidmeister (but I’ve been wrong before :P)
Group Agents
There’s been a bit of work on group agents. Perhaps obvious, but they’re pretty intertwined with role-based authentication schemes. I put together a bit of a spec for what the APIs may look like. Note the need for something like @guillemcordoba’s Compository to generate permutations of these modules with different behaviours (eg. unauthenticated vs “vouch-based access” vs administrator-based auth).
As to the pieces, I did up a very simple agent registration module, which felt like the foundational feature to base other elements on. Start with an ability to query “which agents are in this network?” and go from there. Not upgraded to RSM yet. Worth noting that Guillem’s Social Triangulation module has nothing to do with agent registration, but was already implemented, and trivial to compose together to get a module which does “which agents are in this network?” + “who is allowed to join this network?”. There is also a membrane roles module created by Guillem that implements role-based access control, and is quite similar to the ValueFlows agent model with the exception of bidirectional labels for the roles. I think one can see how you could combine these together to get a Holochain DNA which functions as a “group context” within which certain agents have certain roles. That’s about all we want those modules to do for our purposes, I think. It would be auxilliary modules which query that DNA in order to perform access checks before executing other operations.
I think it’s also worth mentioning that the ValueFlows agent model has never been a limiting factor in any project, and probably because the model is the sort of thing that tries not to impose a design. Really it’s just an abstract layer that lets you describe any arbitrary relationship between any agents… the meaning and context of those relationships is up to each application to decide.
God, I hope all that made some sense 
Climate Change and All Our Relationships
(NB: I took this title from a very excellent presentation on the socio-political complexity of these topics which is very worth a watch.)
It’s really nice to see someone calling these perspectives out and asking for more depth <3 I don’t disagree that techno-utopian mindsets have found their way into this space (I say that having come from Blockchain), and there have been occasional accusations of spiritual bypassing and the like in this community which I think are substantiative and should be given due reflection and consideration. Tech is not going to save us.
So let’s see if we can get past the assumptions and mental leaps with this stuff. Does it mean business? heh
There’s actually a fairly detailed presentation that goes through the climate change context specifically- Michel Bawens, @lynnfoster, @TiberiusB and myself presented our work at various levels from the theoretical down to implementation. You can watch it here if you’re interested in the detail, and the deck on Holo-REA specifically can be found here.
there isn’t any conceivable way to get businesses (and individuals) to “account” for all the hidden costs that they impose on their customers
100%. The crux of the promise for me lies on slide 6: fractally composable networks. There’s no reason that REA networks would tell the truth or make their externalities visible to others- as a framework, it’s ideologically inert and you can model oppressive capitalist patterns in REA as surely as you can model regenerative ones. But you can’t stop other organisations spinning up their own networks. I see a future in which watchdogs and environmental organisations manage their own observation data as overlays on top of corporate supply chains, adding external accountability when internal accountability falls short. Only takes 1 click to deploy them.
it will always cost you less to buy a product from the black market, one that was produced with child-labor and harmed the environment in the process than any other equivalent-quality product with a “good” background
I think those are just artifacts of our current economic system. You’re probably right - if you define “cost” as a monetary one - because of all the perverse inequities, levies, investments, scaling effects and so on which go in to arriving at that “cost”. I’d like to see humankind thinking about “cost” differently with some Buycott-like practises driving our economic decisions, rather than them being primarily monetary decisions. In large part this is all just about providing better information to apps such as these. I do have a lot of thoughts about that, but they were pre-Sacred Capital and these days you will see me talking about utilitarian values hiding in those designs, even if they still basically make sense.
There’s also rising consumer pressure for ethical consumption, and I’ve spoken to a number of boutique fashion labels and food producers who say that getting transparency from upstream suppliers is still difficult, but pressure is mounting. So I think we’ll see better practises trickle through supply chains gradually, but steadily.
We might be giving people false expectations by pretending to have found a solution.
I’d like to take this opportunity to cut such promises out of the equation. There are no solutions here, only experiments and possibilities (: But do check out the P2P Foundation report, there’s a lot of really brilliant insights in there as to the material constraints of our time / planet.
The other reasons I can see to be excited about Holochain in the context of climate change could be, but are probably not limited to-
- Targeting low-power, low-cost hardware to run nodes on; when contrasted with the current energy requirements of blockchain which I suspect many here see as a major failure of that space to think about the energy impacts of computing on the environment.
- Deploying a localised “internet at the edges” on low-powered devices which makes the internet more efficient and resilient by not forcing all our packets to go back and forth to datacentres in the US just to talk to somebody next door.
- The possibility for community sovereignty over the means and method of undertaking environmentally regenerative practises, rather than “one size fits all” global-scale metrics and practises that are becoming the norm in Blockchain. Might leave this can of worms there (relates to the Sacred Capital story and deck linked above) but we can open it if you like!
There is a need for more formal definitions around such higher-order operations, especially those that manage interactions with potential legal responsibilities.
