2024-05-01: Back, back, back!
(If you work at FF/FFDW 🄽 links will send you to a local, editable page in the Filecoin Foundation Notion. If you are in the Filecoin ecosystem, you may be able to join the #monologue-danny Slack channel where I answer questions, take meeting bookings, talk to myself and the other voices in my head. In the glorious decentralized ocap-enabled future, such data-hoardings will be a thing of the past, but we live for now in a fallen ACL world.)
Three Things I Did
1. Got back on my horse
Missed a couple of days! I spent Monday evening (when I generally do these updates) with Kurt Opsahl🄽 and our Chinese lawyers working on the STFIL🄽 case. It’s Labor Day in China this week, so we’re not expecting much change, but he brought us up to date with the information so far, which I’m putting together into an FAQ for those affected.
2. Back into policy-land
And I spent Tuesday at Stanford at the Symposium on Shaping the Future of Social Media with Middleware🄽. Middleware, in this context, is a slightly unfortunate coinage by Francis Fukuyama🄽 (yes, that Francis Fukuyama) et al. It means here tools that let you rewrite or reorganize what you’re receiving from social media: loyal user agents, in other words.
It’s a long time I’ve been in a room talking policy wonkitude, and I decided that while I love a lot of the people involved, I don’t miss these discussions. Great to catch up on Jonathan Stray🄽 ‘s latest research, find out more about Bluesky’s algorithmic experiments, and exchange increasingly wild anecdotes withPaige Collings🄽 off of EFF🄽, and Luke Hogg🄽, Rhonda Bonneville🄽,Zach Graves🄽 off of Foundation for American Innovation🄽. Rhonda always wins though. Also they all drank me under the table, rendering me unable to do my Tuesday link update.
3. …And back into governance-world
Also after a period of absence, and with somewhat of a hangover, I dived back into plotting with Kaitlin Beegle🄽 and Megan Klimen🄽 around reforming FIlecoin’s governance process. Stop me if I’ve bored you about this before, but currently all governance on Filecoin (passing Filecoin Improvement Proposals🄽 etc) require “soft consensus”, ie broad unanimity among an undefinably vague set of people. I’ve spent enough time in anarchist spaces to know how much of a drag that can be, and lots of people want a more voting-driven process, so Kaitlin’s been working on it. Tooling, institutions, politics and politicking. Fascinating and yet full of trepidation.
TIL
- Robin Berjon🄽 of this parish wrote a paper on the “Fidicuiary Duties of User Agents”(!). God, I love “User Agents” as a term of art. They should be loyal to us! I’m still proud of deploying the concept of user agents as a call to arms when we fought in the W3C🄽 about DRM🄽
Links Du Jour
- Malleable Software in the Age of LLMs
- Reasonable Interplanetary Blockstore (RIBS) — am kinda getting into RIBS🄽 as a basic setup for serving files over IPFS while backing them up onto Filecoin. Still in its early stages, but fits my mental model nicely.