Noosphere at Summer of Protocols
I gave a talk about Noosphere at the Summer of Protocols program.
Here’s a teaser. I go wide!
We cover Noosphere, tools for thought, how the web centralized, the dream of collective intelligence, and how we might recover it with decentralized protocols.
Here’s the livestream.
I quote Tim Berners-Lee’s book Weaving the Web a few times during this talk. I recommend checking it out.
TBL wrote this just as the web was beginning to take off. From his vantage point in 1999, the web was already an astounding success, and it was time to write a retrospective. Of course from our vantage point in 2023, we know that this was just the beginning. It’s a wonderful time capsule, with some perspective-shifting insights.
For instance, the web began as a tool for thought! In fact, Enquire—a precursor to the web—was essentially a wiki!
In Enquire… each page was a node in the program, a little like an index card. The only way to create a new node was to make a link from an old node. The links from and to a node would show up as numbered list at the bottom of each page, much like the list of references at the end of an academic paper. The only way of finding information was browsing from the start page.
(Tim Berners-Lee 1999. Weaving The Web)
Enquire supported both bi-directional links, and a kind of semantic triple!
For every link, I had to describe what the relationship was. For example, if a page about Joe was linked to a page about a program, I had to state whether Joe made the program, used it, or whatever. Once told that Joe used a program, Enquire would also know, when displaying information about the program, that it was used by Joe. The links worked both ways.
(Tim Berners-Lee 1999. Weaving The Web)
Reading this book, you get the sense that Tim Berners-Lee envisioned the web as a kind of worldwide decentralized wiki.
Suppose all the information stored on computers everywhere were linked, I thought… All the bits of information in every computer at CERN, and on the planet, would be available to me and to anyone else…
Computers might not find the solutions to our problems, but they would be able to do the bulk of the legwork required assisting our human minds in intuitively finding ways through the maze.
(Tim Berners-Lee 1999. Weaving The Web)
Collective intelligence!