Motivation
Alex during his weekly walk around the town ran into an colleague of his that brought word of his recent trips into the dominion of Anoma. Alex’s initial reaction to hearing about the dominion was one of skepticism as he knew it bordered the federation of Ethereum. His colleague however knowing that Alex’s interest lie in computing, philosophy, etymology, and politics told him of the foundations upholding the dominion. Namely he told Alex that cybernetics is central to the identity of the dominion and that the dominion is worthy of a proper investigation.
That following Saturday, Alex was found hunching over in his study researching the dominion. His first source was an older vision paper that outlined some of the goals of Anoma, after peering through the long document, Alex began to search for newer literature about the dominion. Alex smirked as he found the public research forum that high ranking members in the dominion like to disseminate information on. It seems that the dominion of Anoma is very open about describing core technical problems they face. Alex found a lot of talk about modal logic, category theory, consensi… the discussion certainly tackled slightly harder technical problems than those in the bordering federation however the regional slang still offput Alex. “I’ll look only for a little bit longer” Alex mumbled to himself losing patience for a wasted Saturday night.
Yet right in the following moment, he found his way onto the section labeled “architectural”. After spending 15 minutes reading, he smiled as he has found the entire endeavor genuinely interesting, there are discussions about “chambers”, “courts”, “jury”. Alex however is confused. He has a sense for how the dominion operates but he is interested in the etymology underlying these structures and the strict technical meaning of the ideas he saw. After a bit of searching he finds a technical glossary made by dominion scholars that present the entire dominion in terms of legal terminology. A bell goes off in Alex’s mind and doubles back to reread the vision paper in which he finds a reference to none other than Robert Brandom.
It dawned on Alex, Anoma is a land aimed at the cybernetical goal of allowing for communal “solving”, like a lot of cyberntics aims for. Alex grabs an empty booklet and begins to write notes about the dominion. Alex begins writing “Anoma aims at helping those navigate ever growing social landscapes by providing a suitable computational infrastructure. It only makes sense that the dominion justifies it’s architecture concepts from the core: society itself. Looking at such a complex topic requires a theoretical lens to properly analyze it and Pragmatism provides such a fine lens”.
Before writing more Alex reflects that he was never an avid fan of Brandom’s work but he did fancy the analogies that were made throughout his books. He recalls the analogies of reasoning with court proceedings. How meanings of words are determined by what you can infer from them, how you can use them to reason, to defend yourself and argue for your points as if in a court of law.
Anoma and her dominion now appears to Alex not only as a technical land that he so often criticized her neighbors of, but one that tries to model and draw inspiration from communal decision making as presented by Pragmatist perspective. It seems that the dominion draws from philosophy to formulate its challenges making high-level societal problems that plague his current home such as privacy, decision making and coordination into parables inside of a properly contextualized court. Alex picks up his pen once again to write down these thoughts, while writing he can’t help but smile as this all seems very… human to him. A more coordinated way of tackling problems that he knows first hand.
With a new outlook on the dominion, Alex decides that he will continue his investigation and even publish a technical report on his findings. Thus studiously he delves back into the glossary while thinking of plans to visit the dominion.
Glossary
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chambers (client)
- A place for private endeavors. Offline and secure, a place where individual decisions are made and processed without any inquiry.
- Every citizen has a chambers in which they are their own judge.
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court (anoma)
- An infrastructure where jurors and judges argue and agree and put their decisions into a public record therefore establishing a notion of truth by asking the jurors to record the proceedings.
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juror (node)
- A part of the court that has opinions. The juror engages in jurisprudence to help come to rulings. It talks to other jurors, shares information with them, stores information from them, and advertises their opinion to influence others’ opinions.
- A good juror is assumed to respect history of law and communal decisions. Hence they keep the record as close to the ruling as possible unless it goes against their conscience.
- Each juror agrees to an oath. If an oath is considered broken, a penalty is introduced.
- A juror is a citizen that takes an oath and a possibility to influence the court.
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judge (a special user)
- A specific kind of juror. A juror becomes a judge if and only if they are the sole juror of their case or other jurors in the case delegate to them.
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citizen (user)
- A citizen is a potential juror if they decide to start influencing the court in any way.
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record (committed public storage)
- Immutable record, publicly known by the community of jurors.
A report on the foundations of the dominion: A technical journal
by James S. Barley
Mil New York 2014