Explorations in Dynamic Range

I (Timber) just wrapped up week one of the Tensions Game at Edge City Lanna. At daily one-hour sessions, I help attendees sharpen their ability to identify and manage tensions. These sessions are important prep opportunities for people who want to attend the Protocol Worlds event at the beginning of November. Identification exercises are particularly critical for developing new modes of thinking, and that was a main focus of week 1 (I mapped the ID exercise results below). We covered a lot of ground this week, ranging from interpersonal dynamics to questions of open vs. closed societies. I got asked "So why tensions?" a lot this week, and I've relied on the following two paragraphs as an explainer.

In a complex system, problems are more often managed than they are solved. From a farmer's or camper's perspective, wolves are a hairy problem. In some cases, entire populations of wolves were eliminated, causing trophic cascades that in turn led to ecosystem collapse. Despite the costs of wolf-problem management, the U.S. state tends to reintroduce wolves in such areas.

A tension is a trade-off plus a conflict. Farmers and campers have an strong opinion about the trade-off between their own safety vs. the safety of apex predators. Wildlife biologists have a different, conflicting opinion. Protocols are put in place to balance this tension, rather than solve it completely in either direction, which would reduce the dynamic range of the system.

Pop-up cities are complex systems too. I've been super impressed at the rate Edge Citizens grok the utility of tensions as a tool for thinking about the world. As the Protocol Worlds approaches, I'll continue to facilitate the Tensions Game on a daily basis. This week, I will introduce the theme of Punk & Commons to the growing cohort of familiar players and will host a special onboarding session for Edge City newcomers on Monday, November 21st.

ARC Regenerative Communities, a recursive chain of terms, was an orienteering project that focused on organizational design. It focused on the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as a case study, examining which protocols allowed it to replicate successfully over time as a coherent entity, despite its relatively flat structure and loose set of objectives. Organizational evolution is, naturally, a big question here at Edge City.

Watch Day and Kaliya's presentation on their research findings, which they first publicly presented at the 2024 Protocol Symposium. In this presentation, they chart the IETF's structural evolution and present a catalogue of organizational patterns that are of likely importance to the IETF's success.

This week's PILL highlights center on protocols for refactoring existing things into interesting new media.

Just because it’s written like that doesn’t mean it has to sound like that…What happens to your favorite song when you start playing it upside down and backwards? This system can add excitement, challenge, and novelty to any piece of music!

A prototype for a kit providing instructions, suggestions, and tools for reassigning the various information in a musical score. The demonstration includes musical examples and conceptual discussion, especially the role aesthetics play in the experience of protocols.

Check it out here.

The on-chain world is shaped by the data we own, and current data visualization tools are not enough for us to actively connect with our data. Do I understand my data? Can I interact with my data? How can I connect with others through my data? We need more diverse representations of data.

An artistic approach to data processing might be a viable solution, and this project represents it through data sculpture.

Check it out here.