Skip to content

Guest Talk with Jay Graber | Q&A Hosted by Venkatesh Rao

LectureJay Graber, Daniel Holmgren
researcherpractitioner
Guest Talk with Jay Graber | Q&A Hosted by Venkatesh Rao
Open resource →

Jay Graber (CEO) and Daniel Holmgren (Protocol Lead) of Bluesky discuss building the AT Protocol as a 'hybrid' alternative to both maximalist peer-to-peer decentralization and traditional centralized platforms, emphasizing that decentralization is 'a function of administrative control, not network topology' (quoting advisor Martin Kleppmann). They explain concepts like self-certifying repositories (DIDs, PDS), stackable/composable moderation as 'building blocks' rather than monolithic trust-and-safety, and contrast their 'schematic web' schema approach (Lexicon) with RDF/semantic web ontologies, arguing protocol entrepreneurship requires balancing fast app iteration with slow, methodical protocol design.

Topics

at-protocol-app-protodecentralization-as-administrative-control-vs-topologygovernancelexicon-schema-language-vs-rdfsemantic-webpopular-lecturesprotocolsself-certifying-data-and-account-portabilitystackablecomposable-moderationtechnology

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