As a relative neophyte in the world of intent-based architecture, what immediately stands out are the epistemological implications involved in exploding fiat as a universal denominator. In the world of fiat, legibility before the value graph is restricted to private, individual humans, and the process is self-reinforcing: those who value collective agencies, process entities or the nonhuman are systematically marginalized - and, of course, those agencies themselves are excluded entirely.
An intent layer on blockchains seems to ābreak the spellā, so that those with different ontological assumptions - or in the liminal cases entirely different umwelten - can nonetheless participate in counterparty discover on a value graph.
If my assumptions here are correct, then thereās a whole potential research space around applied biosemiotics and Anoma: If an intent based OS reduces the need for a universal denominator in a value graph by taking on the burden of semantic standardization, how deep and weird can the pluralistic denominators beneath it get?
Speculatively, intent might even come from exotic agents beyond those traditionally defined by biology - for example, sociotechnical assemblages, collective affects, or inorganic assemblages like storms or rivers that may have enough cybernetic complexity to be registered as possessing intention. Itās plausible that social coherence provided by this infrastructure could even make evident cognitive capacities previously invisible to us.
(And yes, I do have A Thousand Plateaus sitting on my desk right now).
Curious if there is any thinking in this direction, or maybe flaws in my assumptions around what Anoma can do
Fascinating point of departure! Big fan of Michael Levinās work as well.
Although Iāve read a little Deleuze & Guattari, Iām not extremely familiar with these perspectives, so Iāll start here with a few clarifying questions and attempts of my own to clarify the boundary of what Anoma does and does not do.
Questions
What do you mean by āepistemological implicationsā ā changes to what can be known, and how it is known, writ large, specifically changes to what kinds of knowledge are legible to economic systems (and how so), or something else altogether?
I think the key question here would be ā registered by whom? Anoma ā as a digital system ā has no intrinsic ability to recognize humans, rivers, or assemblages of any sort ā it deals purely with informational-functional notions of identity (e.g. whoever can produce a signature with a particular private key). Neither the identities of humans nor the identities of rivers as we would commonly understand them are particularly related to knowledge of private keys, so some mediation is required to translate between the historical-temporal and information-functional notions of identity.
In the former case, this is currently practically accomplished by physical devices which store private keys and people are expected to keep safe ā a relatively brittle mechanism in my opinion, but no worse than any which we use to interact with distributed digital systems at the moment. My question here would be: who would register these agents as possessing intentions, and could both (a) the identities of the agents in question and (b) the intentions so registered somehow be translated into the information-functional conceptions of identity and intent which are legible to digital systems?
Boundaries
I think whether or not Anoma takes on the burden of semantic standardization depends on what you scope under āsemanticsā, namely:
Anoma takes on the burden of database semantics standardization, in the sense of providing protocols (e.g. controllers) which different computers (and blockchains) can use to interoperate with each other and to provide the user (who or whatever they may be) with a standard interface, where the protocols themselves are value-neutral.
Anoma does not take on the burden of representational semantics standardization, in the sense of somehow determining what it is that an āAppleTokenā in the database relates to in the physical world (this is, of course, impossible for a digital system to do ā representational semantics are in the eye of the beholder).
I think that one can make the argument that standardizing protocols which do not fix or preference a particular notion of value (such as a particular fiat currency) can indeed open up more space for alternative notions. However, the protocols alone merely help open up a space of possibilities, which will only be actualized if social actors (be they individual, collective, alien, or otherwise) take it upon themselves to use the protocols to instantiate alternative, concrete economic flows.
Yes, I do mean āchanges to what kinds of knowledge are legible to economic systemsā, or more importantly, what kinds of knowledge are available to us through the shared epistemological filter of our economic system.
I think both the questions of registering identity and registering intent from different entities point to the research space Iām trying to get at: specifically, biosemiotics (āeconomic biosemioticsā?
), with an emphasis on cyborg or prosthetic appendages that might help an animal, plant, swarm, or other type of sensemaking cybernetic system in broadcasting intents, not passively, but with the learned expectation that interacting with said prosthetic interface might help them reach a goal. In this case, registering an identity would be the end goal of a likely long, iterative process of real instantiation of the interface into the ābehavioral programā of the entity.
My interest in this comes from a brief collective research project on āinterspecies mutualismā with some regens in the space that tried to think about nonhuman participation in economics or governance that was direct rather than representational, expert based or rights based. The fact that this isnāt really being considered in academic animal rights discourse points to how difficult and sci-fi the problem space is..
My techno-optimist intuition here is that where there is plausible scaffolding for a cognitive system between organisms, they will often adapt to to those channels beyond expectation (see the ectopic eyes experiment linked above). Maybe this can be thought all the way from the collective intelligences known egregores or tulpas - there is a good deal written about the uncanny sense of their sentience and intentionality and the feeling that, given an opportunity, they will exploit it (see Slenderman documentary) - to simple organisms that seem to carry a more-than-just-reflexive cognizance of participation in an ensemble. Could niche-specific token economies act as this cognitive scaffolding, symbiotic signaling interfaces between organisms or entities with a common environment? Perhaps these organisms in themselves canāt directly scale to participation in a global economy, but one can imagine them scaling as a collective (by way of these niche economies) into an effective counterparty at the intent interface level, giving emergent collective bargaining power at the scale of human economy. The first part of this is far from trivial and maybe not even possible, but the ability of Anoma to do open ended counterparty discover and find liquidity paths between distant economic paradigms begs the question (again) of how alien those paradigms could be.
Iāve written a bit of a manifesto on this topic, with some mention of these questions & Anoma here: noopunk . It can be a bit hand wavy (as I have been above) so excited to escalate this to a more technical level if anyone is game !