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Web3’s future fail is avoidable

Web3 doesn’t yet work how people work. The point of failure is precisely where web3 technology meets you and me in the design of digital identity.

Our remarkable challenge and opportunity can be described in simple terms …

digital identity is not human identity

… and this really matters for the first time as the systems we build together seep into more and more of everyday life by design. We must change our approach not just to avoid failure but to fully explore and expand the gifts of being human.

Web3 today has a lot in common with web2 and nation states when it comes to systems of identity. All of them set out to make us atomically and bureaucratically legible to the system in some contextless number-space , which is kinda odd when so many of our web3 community are intent on upgrading or replacing nation states with something more, er, human.

A tattoo of a barcode on someone’s neck with the words: I am not a number, I am a free man.

The situation is made harder to discern when decentralization is confused for an ends rather than a means , when information security is confused for privacy, when deterministic processes are conflated with trust, and when user journeys take precedence over systems thinking.

Nevertheless, it’s clear that meaningful human identity is mission critical for web3, as reflected in the ETHBerlin manifesto this year . But it’s also the gift that will keep on giving. Meaningful identity is the first step towards the meaningful web.

Why am I here?

Our mission is human identity for digitalized life. Meaningful identity. Generative identity. And our vision is the meaningful web.

You are here because you read or heard something that resonated. Or you were pointed here by someone who knows you well. This is your kind of mission, this is your kind of audacious vision, and you’re wondering how you can play a part.

Everyone is welcome to join in, of course ... we need each other. As such we invite you to read on. It’s not a long read, just long enough to be meaningful.

Naturally

Addresso re-establishes digital identity as a cognitive function, as a contextual sense-making capacity, as sense-making processes. It emphasises our legibility to each other rather than to the system per se because, well, that’s how community works. Naturally.

We’ll expand on what’s meant by sense-making, but let’s zoom out for a moment.

The web3 community and the dweb movement more broadly is drawn to decentralization as one of the truths revealed by nature’s living processes . There’s no set of trees in the forest through which all information flows and so no set of trees able to hold power over neighbouring flora and fauna.

Nevertheless, healthy decentralized and decentralizing patterns and structures sustain in nature but not yet in our sociotechnical systems. Decentralization requires complementary patterns and dynamics to sustain, patterns and dynamics we identify and work to realise.

Sense-making

You are investing some of your precious time reading this. You are grappling with many dozens of words and concepts by rapidly shifting your attention in order to parse and integrate the information encoded right here on this webpage. This is sense-making .

You are deploying your brain’s unprecedented and frankly awesome complex adaptive network of over one hundred trillion synapses. You are establishing the potential to join and expand our collective mind and for us to join yours through future interactions.

To address something is to think about it and begin to deal with it, and such cognitive capacity forms an essential component of definitions of life .

As our evolutionary success comes through our being the most social and cooperative species , we are talking participatory sense-making here . We’re talking about the capacity to determine meaningful consensus and integrate our sense-making into our prior collective knowledge.

Human cognition isn’t a representation of an independent world outside us but a bringing forth of a world of significance. It’s a social, contextual, participatory process from which emerges your sense of self and your being able to attend to your own mind, which in turn helps you act on and in the world.

If the term self-sovereignty means anything at all , you just read what it means right there. 👆

From studying life we know we don’t just have relationships with everything around us — rather we are relationships, and our worldview, identity, autonomy, and spirit are flattened when sense-making is impaired or foregone.

Organisms are sense-making beings. They establish their own goals, and make meaning out of their interactions with their environments. They alter their own environments and those of other organisms. Living is sense-making in precarious conditions, and sense-making is the beginning of mind.

And it’s those relations that make the individual.

There can only be an individuality that copes, relates, and couples with the surroundings, and inescapably provides its own world of sense.

The social value that web3 or indeed any digital technology might help us all achieve can only be appraised in the contexts of such living processes. And for humanity’s living processes, language is essential.

Naturally then — literally, naturally — we approach our purpose here in just the same way.

Our information architecture and technology strives to work as naturally and as powerfully as human language. It helps to combine the best of web3 wizardry and the best of human nature, nurturing and relying on the latter where we can and as we should, and crafting the former as and when contexts demand.

Meaningfully

The meaningful web begins with meaningful identity. And it all starts with something immediately tangible, intuitive, and valuable ... Addresso Books.

We give digital identity a much needed upgrade. We make sure you, your friends, your family, all of us, are very much in the loop. Identity has been ours to behold and name forever rather than something maintained by ‘the system’ or purportedly ‘owned’ by those we interact with. And so, outside the bureaucracy of nation states and corporate services, that’s exactly how digital identity should work too. Naturally.

The Addresso App v1.0, work in progress September 2024

Join us in Farcaster and/or Telegram.

We can answer any questions you may have, and we’ll be able to ping everyone with news of our progress.

For you curious technologists

So here’s how we’re doing it.

Everything about Addresso is built the way you’d hope it would be. Or better! 😁

  • Local-first
  • Decentralized
  • Device agnostic
  • Automated change recording and replication
  • Built with mature, enterprise-proven, open-source tech
  • Security and recovery by design
  • Built around homoiconic models.

We apply homoiconic data modeling to strongly decouple data (web3 and other) from semantic and technical domains, e.g. persistence, exchange formats, protocols, and event-sourcing. Normalized models are the pivotal interface for data, configuration, functionality, and errors, and all models are extricated from technological aspects such as processing code or programming languages, consciously breaking with OOP (object-oriented programming) encapsulation in favor of expert late binding.

Subjectivity and contexts are then celebrated whether the model is considered generic or expressive, and a strict dedication to reflectivity maintains model inter-relatability.

Models can be forked, shared, and merged. Vitally, in light of our biomimicry, such diversity of contextual modeling affords variation, selection, inheritance, and speciation, which together constitute our neo-Darwinian understanding of evolution.

Darwin’s drawings of finches.
Darwin’s finches

Such an approach begins to move us on from the struggles of the semantic web to the realisation of the meaningful web. Semantic here refers to the precise definition of words and their relationships within a specific language system; the objective technical aspects. Meaningful relates to the overall significance and implications of something, often involving subjective (i.e. human) interpretation. You might say the semantic web is technical and totalizing whereas the meaningful web is contextual, plural, natural, human.

Frequently Asked Questions

  • The Unnamed Labs team.

  • Here’s how we describe Addresso in Year 1.

    Addresso helps you store and organize wallet and smart contract addresses simply, privately, collaboratively and securely. It transforms meaningless strings into meaningful names across your wallets, exchanges, dapps, browsers, and IDEs.

  • Addresso is not a wallet. Addresso is not a place to store seed phrases or private keys or any other information that could give us or any other party control of your wallets. Addresso is not designed to store such information.

  • Addresso is the answer to such questions as: How can I manage addresses for contacts, programs, data sources, and AI agents? How can I keep track of my own addresses? What or who is 0x1e...b119c? What does this webpage with long meaningless strings actually mean to me? How can I stop copy-pasting!?

  • All wallet and dapp development teams can help their customers feel right at home by integrating Addresso quickly and easily.

  • As everyone needs a web3 address book, and as UX is critical to web3's growth, we want to make Addresso as accessible as possible. Our core address book software will always be free.

  • We have a few ideas. There's the classic freemium business model for example where a subscription version is packed with more powerful features to organize, explore, share, and collaborate. And just to say, none of our ideas run counter to the founding ethos of the decentralized web.

  • We’re set on getting Addresso out into the world in Q2 2025.

  • The Addresso App runs locally on your devices. Addresso is local-first with peer replication (CRDT), making it decentralized 💥 but not onchain of course. There may be aspects of the Addresso service that are delivered in a SaaS (software-as-a-service) way, but these will always be subject to what’s known as progressive decentralization. Perfection 🤓 is best pursued through progress.

  • Yes. Addresso data resides on your devices. As and when a copy is held on our servers — for optional cloud-based replication across devices for example — rest assured we will never use Addresso data to profile you. That would go against everything we believe in. We should add that we wouldn't even know who you are, not even your own wallets. Nice.

    All that said, EU citizens have the highest privacy protections by law, and we operate as if such protections apply worldwide.

  • Check out the mini-biography for Philip Sheldrake in the Team section below.

The team

You can see the team on our company website . Here’s a short description of our co-founders.

Dirk Scheffler (Innovator, Software Architect, Engineer) is an expert in homoiconicity and the separation and integration of concerns. A software architect for 18 years, Dirk leads the philosophy, design, and development of the Hiconic technology (open sourced 2023).

Philip Sheldrake (CEO) has been deep diving on identity for many years. While researching decentralized social at the invitation of Ethereum co-founder Mihai Alisie, Philip concluded that designing for identity is the nexus.

He speaks on the topic frequently (e.g. the Humanetics workshop alongside Vitalik Buterin and Prof Margaret Levi), contributed the only dissenting chapter in the most comprehensive book to date on self-sovereign identity (SSI), co-hosted the identity track for the wonderful Kernel community, chatted with Kevin Owocki on his Green Pill podcast, and contributed to the Edge Esmeralda Crypto Academic Camp at the invitation of the Ethereum Foundation and the Uniswap Foundation. He writes on the generative identity website .

Philip is a Chartered Engineer. He previously co-founded, built and sold a tech comms consultancy working with such organizations as Mozilla, ARM, the RIPE NCC, Sony, and Fujitsu.

Tudor Munteanu (CTO) is an engineer and serial entrepreneur for 18 years (his previous start-up is part of the Protocol Labs portfolio). He focuses on managing complexity, system design, and GTM. He’s a hackathon mentor and winner, organiser of a DeSoc (decentralised social) event, and FarCon London 2024 co-organiser.