(2023-05-21) Taylor Motivation Rationale

Dorian Taylor: Motivation & Rationale. (for Summer of Protocols) The problem that I'm trying to solve—or at least contribute in some small way to a solution—has been notoriously hard to articulate...

but three points of departure:

Repairing a medium: Hypermedia has been an object of both theory and practice for decades preceding the Web

Kicking off a Jevons Paradox: If that proposition isn't valuable enough on its face, consider the problems early (and proto-) hypermedia pioneers were trying to solve: Paul Otlet wanted to organize the world's knowledge,

All of these goals are contingent on making it super cheap to marshal lots and lots of tiny little pieces of information, connected to one another by an even bigger number of links—and this is important—links of all different kinds

Empowering people (platforms can fend for themselves): And if that appeal isn't, well, appealing, consider that there is an entire class of tools that exist—or would exist—just beyond the reach of a spreadsheet. That is, they do very little besides afford data entry into some intricate structure or other, do some trivial manipulations, and then represent that information back to you—or perhaps somebody else. Many of the needs for these tools come from professionals in various niches—often very close the places such tools would be produced.

Personal knowledge management tools are beginning to fill this gap, but in my opinion they fail irretrievably in one important way or another.

One such failure mode is platforms: the integrity of your content depends on paying regular tribute

In systems where you own your data (Obsidian, Logseq), its disposition is ad-hoc. In either case, you lose a piece of what makes the Web what it is: a set of open standards and protocols that provide a single common interface

Repairing a Medium

What could we make if the econophysics of the Web were drastically altered?

Some prior art I can draw on for part of an explanation is the independent researcher Bret Victor's 2015 climate change essay, because climate change is one possible point of departure.

This essay was written a year before what can charitably be described—to use a technical term—as a bullshit renaissance. Its rise highlights a closely related problem: it is manifestly no longer sufficient—assuming it ever was—to simply give people information, though accurate information has scarcely never been more necessary. To animate the facts, there needs to be a narrative, and not every audience either understands or is motivated by the same story

Climate change, moreover, is a prime example of a global, existential, wicked problem:

we can posit a certain category of tool... it isn't really a tool as much as a thin wrapper around data... really just a way to create a constellation of small, structured, highly-connected chunks of information, and navigate around in it.

pkm (tools for thought, second brain) are in this category

add collaboration support and message queue/task scheduling and you net most groupware (which also means, modulo scaling, you net most social networks)....