Technology

We take a humanity-centred design approach , defined by these five principles:

• Focus on the entire ecosystem of people, all living things, and the physical environment.
• Solve the root issues, not just the problem as presented.
• Take a long-term systems point of view.
• Continually test and refine the proposed designs.
• Design with the community, not for them.

And we're most definitely in the business of sociotechnology, i.e. needing as much social science as computer science in the mix.

We can only describe our technology in harmony with the human side of things, as an integral part of the system rather than as a system pretending it stands by itself. Without wanting to sound grandiose, we're playing our part in redefining being human, a cyborgian expansion. See Cyborg Social .

The description of the digital aspects in the next section should give you the feeling that we're doing the right things right. The final section on the human aspects should leave you in no doubt.

The digital and information architecture

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.

Let's explore the first and last of these in a bit more detail.

Local-first means you’re in sole control of all the data you add and manage in Addresso (or have shared control once collaborative Addresso Books are available). Local storage and local networks are prioritised over servers in remote datacenters. Whether to ever sync with a remote server for whatever reason is entirely your choice, and your local storage remains the authoritative source if you do.

The future is local-first, but then so were the 1980s! Whereas it was the only option back then, we can now blend more powerful technologies with artisanal attention to detail. Web3 needs local-first to realise many of the goals the web3 community has in mind.

Homoiconicity refers to systems where the representation of information (such as code or knowledge) is structurally identical to the processes that manipulate that information. The system can self-represent and self-manipulate its own structure and behavior with the potential for recursion. Homoiconic systems are reflexive, i.e. entail self-examination and self-modification. Consequently, a system includes that which generated it.

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.

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. The semantic web is computing-centered. The meaningful web is humanity-centered.

The perfect segue ...

Being human in the contexts of web3

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 .

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 last year . But it's also the gift that will keep on giving. Meaningful identity is the first step towards the meaningful web.

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 digital and information architecture 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.

A meaningful conclusion

The meaningful web begins with meaningful identity.

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.