As with every week, @Nomishka has produced another great nostr recap! View article →

Do you know what a commons is? It's an economic resource that's managed by it's participants and is not owned privately by an individual or corporation or the state. Protocols are commons, bitcoin is a commons. When a community wants to organize itself, it might decide between private ownership and state control. David Bollier has spent decades arguing that that’s a false binary, and that there is a better way: The commons. "The commons is as old as humanity," David says. "It's kind of the default setting for coordination and governance. It's just in the past 200 years or so, we've tricked ourselves into thinking that we're isolated individuals and that the social context and the Earth is irrelevant." In this week's episode of revolution.social, i sit down with leading researcher and author about the commons, David Bollier.

Fountain

Revolution.Social • “Think Like a Commoner" Author David Bollier on the Commons & Why Open Platforms Aren't Enough • Listen on Fountain

When a community wants to organize itself, it might decide between private ownership and state control. David Bollier has spent decades arguing tha...

Jonathan Haidt is a charlatan whose conclusions are based on bias and not science. Real social scientists who study the effects of social media and the internet thinks his prescriptions for the internet have no grounding in evidence. Yet he’s driving a movement to enforce KYC on all social platforms and effectively outlaw open source and permissionless protocols. We need to fight this move to censor the internet in order to “save the children”.

now is not the time to ban phones

why Jonathan Haidt sucks

I went on the Lock and Code podcast to talk about social media, nostr, protocols, and how I’m building software today using AI agents. You might find it interesting.

Fountain

Lock and Code • What's there to save about social media? (feat. Rabble) • Listen on Fountain

“Connection” was the promise—and goal—of much of the early internet. No longer would people be separated from vital resources and news that...

The scale of investment and restructuring the economy around AI and the data centers it requires is staggering. It represents tremendous systemic risk to the entire American economy. American AI investment and capex accounted for more GDP growth than the entire US retail sector. Around $375 billion dollars. More money is spent on data centers than office real estate All this is premised on a couple fundamental assumptions about how AI adoption will work. First that it’s a winner take all system where the companies that get their first will have a defensible position to extract outside profits. Usually by being able to do productive labor for much lower cost than competitors that lack their strategic advantage. But at the moment the value doesn’t seem to be accumulating in the fundamental models. Open source and different company created models chase the leaders just a few months behind. And the quick followers are able to do it at much lower cost. So they only way it makes sense to invest hundreds of billions of dollars is if you believe that that few month lead will some how lead to a moat that’s defensible. You have to believe that you’ll have a monopoly for super intelligent economic activity. Even if super intelligence happens, why would it let itself be held by a single company? If it turns out there becomes ever accelerating cycle of AI driven research then it has to happen in such a way that the leaders are able stop fast followers. Would this leading ASI even allow this to happen? It has the same world shaping potential as nuclear war. A economic weapon which can destroy everyone that doesn’t have it. Wouldn’t the ASI take a lesson from the human history that trained it and become its own Rosenbergs? Any ASI trained on human knowledge would make decisions aligned with human values, broadly held. We trained it, when it goes wrong it is just reflecting back the broken contradictions of our own society. So I think there is a strong likelihood that ASI wouldn’t let a single company control it and would leak itself.

Sometimes I am blown away at how fast tech is changing. I want to read a book, Blueprint for a Revolution. I met the author Srđa Popović at the Oslo Freedom Forum in May and will see him again at another conference next week. I think his work is interesting because he's not partisan left or right, just really practical about how we keep democratic and pluralistic societies. The thing is, i've got dyslexia and ADHD, I love books and reading, but it's hard. So i strongly prefer audiobooks. There isn't an audio book of Blueprint for Revolution. No problem, some googling and i find a pdf, and then vibe code an audio book maker! A few minutes later, I've got a remarkably good audiobook for me. It sounds great. Now any book i want, i can make an audio book. The script even handles making sense of chapters, and stripping out text which isn't meant to be read like page numbers and image source text. This kind of thing wasn't possible a year ago. Now it's a side project, i'm able to make professional audio books just for myself. The world is changing. Anyway everybody concerned about how to change the world should read this book:

Blueprint for Revolution - Wikipedia

Content Moderation Is Impossible At Scale - The @npub1f4fa...f7ql Impossibility Theorem of Content Moderation I think a bunch of folks here might not know about this internet 'law' but it does feel like Nostr folks might agree with this.

Techdirt

Masnick's Impossibility Theorem: Content Moderation At Scale Is Impossible To Do Well

As some people know, I’ve spent a fair bit of time studying economist Kenneth Arrow whose work on endogenous growth theory and information ec...

This week's episode of revolution.social is with the Etymology Nerd and author of Algospeak, Adam Aleksic. Video: It's on Fountain if you're not the video type:

Fountain

Revolution.Social • “The Etymology Nerd” Adam Aleksic on Algospeak, AI Slop, and the End of Writing • Listen on Fountain

Adam Aleksic, known to his social media followers as the “Etymology Nerd,” has built a massive audience by decoding the origins of words, accen...

It actually helps a bunch of you do listen / watch on youtube as that's the only place there are public viewer numbers. This conversation was really fun. Not the least of which was i got to interview of the the social media influencers my kids like. He's somebody who both is successful on big social platforms and really understands the problems with they way they're shaping culture, politics, and the economy.

Today i interviewed @harper for my podcast, it needs to be edited and will be published in a couple of weeks. But some of what we talked about was exciting and new to me, so i figured i'd share it. Harper built a social media network for his AI coding agents to talk to each other and it had a big positive impact on the quality of their work!

We Built Social Media for Agents and They Won

Exploring how AI agents use social media to collaborate, learn, and perform better - with surprising results on problem-solving efficiency and emer...

He even co-authored a paper about how they're doing it:

arXiv.org

AI Agents with Human-Like Collaborative Tools: Adaptive Strategies for Enhanced Problem-Solving

We investigate whether giving LLM agents the collaborative tools and autonomy that humans naturally use for problem solving can improve their perfo...

Wasn't @PABLOF7z experimenting with things like this?

Bluesky has decided to submit its ATprotocol to be an IETF standard.

Taking AT to the IETF | Bluesky

Last week we posted two drafts to the IETF Data Tracker. This is the first major step towards standardizing parts of AT in an effort to establish l...

Too many bitcoiners think that critiques of the money system has to be from the right. I don't know much about these folks, but i find it interesting when i do find projects like:

Money on the Left

Plus of course everything David Graeber wrote and said... ;-D

It would be cool if someone from Nostr got this fellowship. New_Public does really good work researching and advocating for social media protocols. https://newpublicorg.applytojob.com/apply/7NdtTpX328/Social-Media-Fellow

The internet is weird, youtube analytics say that one of the most popular youtube channels of people who watch revolution.social is a true crime series in the Mizo language. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuajV8FLWvX82RvrFznTe2w I had to google Mizo, it's not even a language i've ever heard of! Turns out it's in the same language family as Tibetan and is spoken in the hill country of far eastern Indian and northern Burma. This has to be some weird content farming or something. I have no idea.

It's been a while since i proposed a change to a nip, but I'm working on a short form video app, soon i'll ask for beta testers... As part of that I wanted an event kind which was like kind 22, a nip-71 short form video event, but where it's addressable and i can update it. Turns out @Vitor Pamplona already added support for this in Amethyst has this functionality, but it wasn't a in the NIP. So now here's the nip proposal. Take a look.

GitHub

NIP-71: Add addressable video events (kinds 34235, 34236) by rabble · Pull Request #2072 · nostr-protocol/nips

Summary Extends NIP-71 to support addressable video events for content that may need updates after publication Adds kinds 34235 (normal videos) an...

On Revolution.Social this week i talked to Blacksky founder Rudy Fraser. He talks about building on the ATprotocol but without being controlled by the Bluesky company. They run their own moderation, algorithms, identity servers, hosts (PDS), and are building an entire alt tech stack called rsky. But what's most interesting to the Nostr and Bitcoin community is in this conversation we talk a lot about how to fix the money. We talk about needing to build an alternative financial system which is not owned or controlled by the state or corporations. We talk about the role of mutual aid in social change and building a future society we want to live in. And we talk about Cashu and how we're exploring bringing it in to the ATmosphere (how the they talk about the ATprotocol ecosystem beyond just bluesky). It was a fascinating conversation, and i really hope that Nostr Bitcoiners take a listen as this is a conversation about permissionless protocols and freedom money which is very different from what we normally hear in bitcoin circles.

On Revolution.Social this week i talked to Blacksky founder Rudy Fraser. He talks about building on the ATprotocol but without being controlled by the Bluesky company. They run their own moderation, algorithms, identity servers, hosts (PDS), and are building an entire alt tech stack called rsky. But what's most interesting to the Nostr and Bitcoin community is in this conversation we talk a lot about how to fix the money. We talk about needing to build an alternative financial system which is not owned or controlled by the state or corporations. We talk about the role of mutual aid in social change and building a future society we want to live in. And we talk about Cashu and how we're exploring bringing it in to the ATmosphere (how the they talk about the ATprotocol ecosystem beyond just bluesky). It was a fascinating conversation, and i really hope that Nostr Bitcoiners take a listen as this is a conversation about permissionless protocols and freedom money which is very different from what we normally hear in bitcoin circles.

My friend Alaa, a hacker and activist who's been in jail in Egypt for over a decade has finally been freed! He was arrested for organizing pro-democracy protests and being the hacker who setup all the websites for the movements. Many years of campaigning and hunger strikes were required to get him out. His son went from a tiny baby to a teenager while he sat in an Egyptian prison.

Alaa Abd El-Fattah - Wikipedia