Pixels and Pavement

The second Protocol Worlds event kicks off tomorrow afternoon at Edge City Lanna in Chiang Mai. With over a dozen SoP researchers here and a roster of excellent guest speakers, this promises to be another great workshop! This time, the theme is Holographic Cities.

Digital cities, like Ethereum or Twitter or Gitlab, can be projected onto the canvas of a physical city, created a holographic layer. Physical cities aren't blank canvases, but they can display multiple projections. Chiang Mai, for example, is simultaneously displaying twelve different pop-up cities. How do these layers interact with each other and the overlapping cityscape, culture, and local life?

The interests of digital and physical cities are not aligned by default. Over the next five days, attendees will explore tensions related to holographic cities. They'll use tensions to explore failure modes and harden their holographic city concepts. By the end of the week, everyone should know if their concept is robust to a variety of futures. Both physical and digital cities have a lot to gain from getting the right protocols in place.

This week-long workshop is also an opportunity to learn about the bleeding edge of technology. It's a natural incubator for situational awareness, which is a key trait for protocol entrepreneurs. Attendees are from a range of fields including VR, biotech, applied cryptography, AI, disaster management, robotics, protocol research, and cybersecurity. If you're in Chiang Mai, you can register for Protocol Worlds II here.

Summer Showcase: Plurality

As it happens, Martin and Rich's SoP24 project will help decide the winners of this Friday's Holographic Cities. The weeks' attendees will put their design fictions and holographic city mysteries head-to-head, and the crowd will conduct a plural vote. By using the Plurality in Practice tool, each voter can allocate their budget of hearts among their favorite projects.

To make things fair, voters are split into affiliation groups. If all the members of one group try to collude, the algorithm will discount the voting power of their hearts. Conversely, if members of different groups vote for the same project, that strongly signals that said project is of high quality, and those votes are counted as stronger by the algo.

Check out Rich and Martin's research salon from the Protocol Symposium for more details on this great protocol orienteering project. Most voting mechanisms stay in the land of theory, so it's valuable to see one actually being tested in the field.

PILL Highlights

Technium Underground by Kay Yu

Technium Underground is the story of “Hara,” a block pruner agent born as a “redundant organ.” Exiled to the vast blockchain records, she wandered like a ghost, scavenging through history’s fragments. Along the way, she witnessed countless deaths without funerals and began to ponder the nature of life, death, and autonomy of existence.

FarFlora by Sevenfloor

Farflora is an exploration of generative art NFTs, experimentally integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into the generative art creation process. The AI agent introduces randomness and autonomy, challenging conventional, human-centred art creation methods.