Whether you know it or not, you have been exposed and are familiar to the idea of style tribes and how they permeate culture. Some of the movements above are purely aesthetic, donned almost as "ritual-wear" for a specific purpose, while others serve a specific functional purpose based on the wearer's lifestyle. This creates an interesting duality of perception where certain choices of dress can inform who you are without you necessarily even consciously desiring to portray an image. Additionally, you have been influenced by the various sublimations of brands and individuals using these aesthetic and cultural movements as inspiration. A transference of the "solid" necessity for self-expression into the atmospheric "gas" of the Noosphere (more on this later in the series).

Ted Polhemus, an anthropologist who the coined the use of style tribes as "groups of people who dress in distinctive styles to signify membership" [1] in his book Streetstyle: From Sidewalk to Catwalk, also made an elucidation of how influence proliferates as such:

“The street is both the state upon which the drama of contemporary life unfolds and the bottom line metaphor for all that is presumed to be real and happening in our world today. As high culture has given way to popular culture, it is the litmus test of street credibility that is crucial… Like holy relics, street style garments radiate the power of their associations. Styles that start life on the street corner have a way of ending up on the backs of models on the world’s most prestigious catwalks because the authenticity which street style is deemed to represent is a precious commodity. Everyone wants a piece of it.” 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Style_tribe#:~:text=From%20Wikipedia%2C%20the%20free%20encyclopedia,%2Dhop%20devotees%2C%20and%20ravers.

This amalgamation of influence serves an interesting point in our hyperreal world: that, in the associative power of culture that people crave and struggle for, influence radiates outward. The influencer is actually the "influenc-ee" and reaps the benefits of burgeoning movements. In this recursion, the member of a micro-niche style tribe does not receive fair value back from their influence shed on the world and, with the speed of information today, their screams of appropriation are unheard in the deep void of traditional internet media platforms. In extreme circumstances, large fashion houses ape the works of burgeoning artists without attribution or compensation.

trībs seeks to handle these issues in many ways. To start simply, our name derives meaning from the idea of style tribes, and, as discussed in the previous post in this series, trībs on the platform are agent federated micro-niches that serve to offer an arena to discuss particular interests within fashion. We believe that blockchain technology tackles some of the more difficult issues of provenance and attribution. An immutable ledger shows "who did it first", enables tracking of supply chains and the flow of goods, and creates a public record that cannot be revoked by any party. The currency layer of these technologies enables you to contribute to those who have influenced you positively or bring value through their knowledge or artistic endeavors. Lastly, peer-to-peer exchange of value for goods is of course the most obvious use of web3. Why pay a middleman when you are not encumbered by the traditional restraints of finance?

We are thrilled by the interest in the platform so far, and we seek to bring all of these features and more to our tribe. In the next entry in this series, as we expand upon the idea of our algorithmic influence on ourselves and society as a whole.

[1] wikipedia: style tribe

First, we have independent agents. These "users" are the key element to any social/organizational online gathering. The initial iteration of technical tooling for these agents (in regard to organization) is the idea of DAO, with which you should be familiar. But, as you may know, the term has been bastardized, and many prominent projects don't meet the criteria for what a "DAO" is supposed to be. We see the "DAO" as a technical superstructure that provides runway for automated federation, not the organization itself. As introduced previously, trībs is an Onchain Organization (O.O), and with this distinction comes the need for a framework of knowledge ecology. As described by Yogesh Malhotra, Ph.D:

"The knowledge ecology of organizational systems goes beyond the emphasis on information, to account for action, performance and adaptation of self-regulatory systems”. [1]

https://surface.syr.edu/mgt/3/

Web3, at its core, is about using information systems for designing organizations (or applications) as self-adaptive systems. An important element to this self-adaptive nature is not only distributed technology but also "radical discontinuous change," which is the chaos of a fast-paced knowledge firehose. We can even model these "wicked" environments in terms of niche, as fashion itself is incredibly fast paced and moving faster as we continue to integrate technologies into its social and economic aspects [1].

As discussed in the previous post, trībs seeks to be a web3 enabled Web 3.0 (semantic web) knowledge garden. In practice this is considered a Knowledge Ecology that encompasses knowledge management and its own Information Ecology, which we will discuss later. Knowledge Ecology goes beyond the bounds of just pure epistemology into an action-oriented framework for federation of information. A good mental model to clarify would be that information ecology is gas as knowledge is an engine that "consumes" this fuel to propel the agent forward.

Moreover, in order for this shift from data -> information -> knowledge to exist, web3 needed to be created as it enables trusted gamification for dynamic self-adaption. How we wield this tool is important, and trībs takes a deliberate approach to the matter. This method of self-federation to shape and recognize emergent behavior is "the hallmark of intrinsic motivators and self-control that are essential for realizing true human involvement in endowing information with relevance and purpose, and most importantly in converting knowledge into action and performance." [1]

This is a key distinction, and rather than simply become a repository for information, this information must be acted on to provide greater insight in the conversion to knowledge. In this fast-paced deluge of information, federated regulation from agents can mechanize the distinction between right, wrong, and/or useless information via consensus models based on information contextualization. This act of social collaboration through consensus also has an element of competition, and these incentives fuse to promote the health of the ecosystem as a whole along with agent reputation.

"Just as natural ecologies thrive based on species diversity, knowledge ecology thrives on diversity of knowledge." [1]

So, in order for Knowledge Ecology to exist, we return to Information Ecology as the precursor for this finality. It is simply the information environment of an organization and the "interdependent social, cultural, political subsystems that shape the creation, flow and use of information in the organization." As we already touched, this is extended by the action-oriented framework of Knowledge Ecology.

trībs' Information Ecology is a multi-space framework for cognitive augmentation that works from a top-down and bottom-up propagation. Below is a modified version of the framework from Knowledge Gardens, in which there are three tiers of information space. First, at the base is the collective federation. This is the directive of linking information resources to create topic maps and ontologies that define the navigation of information resources [2]. Next is a refinement, a filter into the group level. These groups are topic specific, which are defined as a trīb. This can be about a brand, aesthetic movement, etc. For now, they will be under admin approval only in alpha, but in the future their creation will be self-federated. This distinction is important because we seek not to have useless or dead nodes like some subreddits. The last tier in this pyramid is information resources tied to each engaged agent. Users have the ability to post what they find interesting and/or specific data with which they are associated for cryptocurrency awards. Moreover, they can group information into private collections for consumption.

https://knowledgegardens.wordpress.com/augmenting-cognition-a-multi-space-model/

The goal of this multi-space model is to serve as a working memory that can be modified as the collective intelligence. Tim O'Reilly describes this as:

“If an essential part of Web 2.0 is harnessing collective intelligence, turning the web into a kind of global brain, the blogosphere is the equivalent of constant mental chatter in the forebrain, the voice we hear in all of our heads. It may not reflect the deep structure of the brain, which is often unconscious, but is instead the equivalent of conscious thought. And as a reflection of conscious thought and attention, the blogosphere has begun to have a powerful effect.”

Below is a revised image from the Knowledge Gardens Blog that we adapted to trībs:

https://twitter.com/js_horne/status/1485321183662907397?s=21

Alternatively, a global fashion knowledge garden or information ecology framework. This blog will serve as the intellectual entrypoint for trībs and will continue to develop with the platform and community.

Our first series of posts will involve an overarching theoretical model that is the animus of organizational inertia. We hope to also create content for community enrichment in the near term, such as interviews of people we admire, as well as visual and audio productions.

In this post lies the first attempt at unraveling the metaphorical recursion outlined above. We are aware that its definitions may seem obtuse; however, we are not interested in intellectual grandstanding or unnecessary complexity. Instead we seek clarity through precision, which can then be further divided into digestible memetics.

For now, we describe our Knowledge Garden as a community based, cultivated information ecosystem in which individual agents federate to augment our collective fashion intelligence. Via a web interface, users cooperate in creating a semantically structured knowledge base which is synchronized via various P2P/Blockchain technologies. An emergent example of what a truly global information ecology could be is Wikipedia [2]

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.107.9087&rep=rep1&type=pdf

"A garden...is a place that offers a sense of separation from the outside world. That separation must be created by making a threshold - whether real or implied. This threshold creates the ability to leave one world and enter another. That is the fundamental function of garden: to allow a person the psychological space to dream, think, rest, or disengage from the world... It is meant to describe another type of psychological space, to help you touch real self". [3]

https://www.abebooks.com/Martha-Schwartz-Transfiguration-Commonplace-Meyer-Elizabeth/16190235969/bd

As netizens who have literally grown up with the evolution of the World Wide Web, we have seen to what a lack of rigidity of information can lead. In the transition of the internet from Web 1.0 to what we have today, we can all clearly see the degradation of a thriving collaborative information landscape that has been soiled by the luxury of growth. While there is a large movement dedicated to improving and solving these issues in Web 3.0, the same pitfalls may still occur if not tended to carefully.

Thus, with the exponential growth of information widely accessible in modern society, "knowledge management increasingly relies upon the ability to select information relevant to our needs efficiently and the ability to manage emerging structures of knowledge" [4]. Managing information is a relatively solved problem and can scale to hundreds of thousands of documents. Web 3.0 is seeking to solve the interaction of users with the information in the form of game theoretical meta-interaction and concepts of shared value in Complex Systems. The limits of our knowledge can be stewarded by these systems whose most important qualities are that they are self organizing, non-linear, and relational. Blockchain persistence adds another quality of informational anti-fragility. You have definitely experienced or heard of the common example of data fragility in a "dead link" [5]

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/John-Davies-19/publication/2564152_The_Knowledge_Garden/links/53ec7ee30cf250c8947cbd21/The-Knowledge-Garden.pdf

https://www.slideshare.net/jackpark/knowledge-garden-overview

We must pay as much attention to these relations or links between agents and information as the parts themselves which maintain the health of the system. Web 2.0 began with some great organizational tools such as blogs and forums, and we look fondly of our first experiences on niche fashion forums in which creativity and community thrived. Unfortunately, we were then drowned in the deluge of unorganized information in social media sites, and later there was aggressive centralization to these platforms in the pursuit of social capital. This race to the bottom ultimately led to the degradation of information quality and even the mental health of its participants.

As a collective and O.O, we must overcome these perils and shoulder the responsibility in weaving the public loom of fashion information [5]. In other words, to be the change we seek.

"Excellently observed," answered Candide; "but let us cultivate our garden" -- Voltaire, Candide