Skip to content

Atoms, Institutes, Blockchains

PaperJosh Stark

Stark argues that atoms, institutions, and blockchains share a common property of 'hardness'—fixed, immutable points across time that enable coordination and make the future more predictable at scale. The paper traces how this concept of hardness has evolved from physical matter through social institutions to cryptographic protocols, positioning blockchain technology as a new substrate for creating the durable coordination points necessary for civilization.

Related resources

Talk

Open Social Protocols: A Commons-Based Protocol Layer

Jose Leal (with Scott Clearwater) presents Open Social Protocols, a framework built on Needs (recurring coordination conditions) around which communities publish, fork, and adopt Protocols rather than collapsing into single fixed agreements. He describes 'bridging protocols' that let multiple competing protocols for the same need coexist and interoperate, built atop the AT Protocol and a 'Common Ground' layer, citing examples like Morning Star Farms and Buurtzorg as organizations already operating this way without naming it 'protocol'.

Jose Leal, Scott Clearwater

Talk

De-Dramatizing the Digital: How AI Descends Into New Nature

Sean Stevenson argues that AI is undergoing a 'descent' through Stewart Brand's pace layers—moving from fast fashion/commerce layers down through governance and culture toward nature itself—becoming less dramatic and less contestable as it sinks, following a pattern he traces via Clayton Christensen's theory of attractive profits migrating to the least-optimized layer of a value chain. He proposes a four-stage model (integrate, coordinate, embed, inherit) for this descent and introduces 'appeal foreclosure' versus 'ossification' as a way to distinguish genuine new nature from captured systems, while drawing on Spinoza's natura naturans/naturata and Philippe Descola's ontological framework (naturalism, animism, totemism, analogism) to speculate how AI-plus-protocols might shift human categories of inner life and matter.

Sean Stevenson

Talk

Psychological Safety I & II

Timber Stinson-Schroff argues that AI's workplace effects should be studied through occupational health frameworks rather than existential-risk AI safety, proposing 'cognitive ergonomics' as a better term than 'psychological safety' since it emphasizes chronic, long-term pathologies (like carpal tunnel from typewriters) over acute incidents. Drawing on the safety-one/safety-two distinction from traditional safety literature, Stinson-Schroff advocates crowdsourcing a database of AI usage hazards and pathologies—such as the 'yes man problem' from fast LLM responses and speech pattern changes—toward an eventual diagnostic manual, while cautioning against liability blind spots given the slow, second-order mechanisms by which these harms emerge.

Timber Stinson-Schroff