No-one reading this can be described or understood solely in terms of the biological, psychological, and social. You are bound together with information technology. Your sensing is digitally augmented. Your sense-making and cognition are digitally augmented. Your acting in the world is digitally augmented.

These are definitionally essential living processes . You are then cyborg.

We don't mean cyborg in the Hollywood sense of having a robotic limb or two, or laser eyes, but rather that a good part of the information flows and processing by which you live are digitally mediated by a wide variety of information technologies. Most obviously these include your smartphone, and it includes the applications and services you use through it and that use you through it.

The majority of these digital elements have not been developed first and foremost to serve our best interests or those of our family, friends, and communities, but rather the goals of the organizations selling them. Another mismatch. We might already be cyborg but there’s no doubt we can massively improve and cohere and grow our cyborginess, not least by a dedication to our innate social qualities to make ourselves social cyborgs.

“If conscience and empathy were impediments to the advancement of self-interest, then we would have evolved to be amoral sociopaths. But we have not.”

It's game theoretically advantageous to cooperate with those we live and work with, so much so our evolution has hardwired the fact. The biologist and mathematician Martin Nowak refers to us as SuperCooperators .

We lead with this framing knowing that cypherpunks love a bit of game theory. 😆

Reciprocity — the expectation that people will respond to each other by returning benefits for benefits, both directly and indirectly — is at the heart of social life. When Alice sees Bob do Claire a favour, she’s more inclined to help Bob.

What goes around comes around.

An action is prosocial when it’s perceived as taking others’ behaviours and well-being into account. Such actions are informed by and play out amongst other social actions, never alone. It involves a dynamic, never-ending, collective sense-making of individuals-in-relations-and-dialogue-in-contexts. It involves contexts and subjectivity in determining, employing, and revising meaning with others.

This is in part how the social sciences understand human flourishing, and fluency in social science concepts is essential to pursuing the web3 community’s prosocial goals for example. Obvious really.

Coding for human flourishing is not just a moral imperative, it should also be very good for business. When something is wholly compatible with our nature we welcome it in, naturally. It’s embedded. It’s habituated happily and healthily. It’s the right thing to do socially speaking. The business is different from before because the outcomes we're all working towards are different from before.

Towards the end of 2024 Rolling Stone magazine signposted a new low point with the observation that:

Mark Zuckerberg's tech behemoth Meta seems less and less interested in the social aspects of social media.

Meta’s AI studio encourages users to build “an AI that can message with your audience on your behalf, mimicking your tone and expressions.” The magazine article concludes:

If, in a few years, Instagram and Facebook are just places for AI bots to hang out, it stands to reason that the humans may find other ways to communicate.

The news provoked a backlash that ironically some of the AI 'users' appeared to appreciate . While the company U-turned its actions it's unlikely it U-turned its mindset.

Cyborg Social is the opposite of Meta’s mimicking gimmicking. Cyborg Social sets out to expand and enrich life, not delegate it .

Biomimetics (aka biomimicry) is the emulation of the models, systems, and elements of nature for the purpose of solving complex human problems. The approach holds the promise of unearthing superior designs and perhaps faster than otherwise, not least the potential to participate as nature rather than continuing to pretend we can ride roughshod over it. You could say that we have a lot to learn from Mother Nature given that she’s already tried very many permutations in her time.

Unfortunately, the technology architectures of social networks bear little if any resemblance to human nature and community.

We’ve become so familiar with the archetypal social graph for example that we act as if it’s real, as if it’s true, rather than merely a highly reduced and idealised representation of a tiny sub-set of associated information of uncertain accuracy . Definitionally, monolithic social graphs lack the subjectivity integral to sense-making and meaning-making by those it purportedly captures, so what real meaning is left?

Ditto identity . Computer science adopted the tenets of legal and bureaucratic identity wholesale, which suited the bureaucratic application of computers for many decades of course. It’s ill-suited here. Digital identity has not been designed to rise up to the roles and operations attributed to human identity by the vast majority of other disciplines (e.g. psychology, sociology, cultural studies, history, political science). Most fundamentally, whereas digital identity is merely a thing to render users legible to the system for authentication, authorization, and/or record keeping, human identity is a socially vital process and sense-making capacity in the eyes of the beholders. Cognition-in-the-loop is mission critical to Cyborg Social.

While we’re certain no-one in the web3 community is setting out to build the mother of all bureaucratic machines, there’s more work to be done to ensure we don’t do that by accident.

Right now it’s fair to say that the word social hasn’t been borrowed by technologists so much as hijacked. Social networking platforms and services have so many seriously negative consequences we could just as well refer to much of it as antisocial media.

The cozy web is a turn of phrase describing the growing phenomena whereby web users seek refuge from public algorithm-driven social platforms and services that very often rely upon a surveillance business model. It’s characterised by comparatively small invite-only groups across a variety of applications many of which employ end-to-end encryption for privacy protection.

Surveillance literally means the action of watching from above. It’s not the watching that’s problematic per se but the scale and the privileged position and powers of the watchers. We all need to watch and learn and make sense and make meaning together in order to determine how best to participate and pursue our personal and group goals, and in the superpowered contexts of Cyborg Social we call this socioveillance.

Socioveillance is an innate capability of social cyborgs. It's a social yet personal and private capacity for monitoring our interactions with our friends and colleagues with whom we seek mutual understanding for mutual influence in mutually valuable activities. And perhaps with friends of friends. It entails negotiating meaningful data exchange and interpretation with others according to our respective privacy norms and expectations. It reestablishes the distinction between privacy and information security, a distinction too rarely acknowledged within the information technology community.

The cozy web is refuge. Cyborg Social is life.

Non-biomimetic designing has deep potential value of course, but such design outcomes can only be less harmful and all the more prosocial and valuable when it’s clear how they fit alongside and into natural systems. You know, natural systems such as human community. Such interfaces are ripe with emergent potential.

Distributed ledger technology has no parallel in nature. There isn’t a natural system with characteristics akin to global decentralized incorruptible databases, but then the same thing can be said about the collection of technologies we call money.

Ledger tech is brilliantly suited to the dematerialization and decentralization of money as a form of coordination mechanisms at scale, and its programmability allows us to explore non-typical forms of money. Perhaps rekindling qualitative characteristics in balance to quantities. And money that urges power with rather than power over. Enticing prospects.

Web3 also marks the first time in the history of computer science that anyone can wield an open source mathematical formula in a decentralized system to create abundant public-private key pairs and corresponding universally unique identifiers in no time at all, without anyone’s permission, and at zero cost.

This abundance is ripe with biomimetic potential in the contexts of Cyborg Social, not least in securing unified contextual meaning-making within the whole of the social cyborg, i.e. a common understanding spanning the social cyborg’s biological and digital parts of who’s who and what’s what. See Addresso .

Personalised is not the same as personal.

Purveyors of the most remarkable large language models (LLMs) may well sell personalised services, but when LLM training craves so much electricity that retired nuclear power stations are being recommissioned , you might just guess this cannot qualify as personal. Personal means belonging to or affecting a particular person rather than anyone else. It's often something intimate or specific to a person’s identity or experiences. Either way, it’s not where we're at with Cyborg Social because …

Personal is not the same as person.

The social cyborg is fully a new form of person, not merely a human being with some personal gadgetry, and the social cyborg’s AI parts work into the whole to help exhibit the qualities described above.

We can build this. Let's look at our journey, beginning exactly where you'd expect — where we are today.

LLMs brute force general-purpose language generation. Attention might be all you need for what brute forcing gets you, but it's insufficient otherwise . As we're inevitably talking distributed computation in our contexts here, let’s consider life outside the homogeneous regimentation of the hyperscale data center by way of a segue. Let's start with a data format for storing and transporting structured data irrespective of language or platform.

Google’s Protocol Buffers allows data and function structures to be serialized in a domain-bound way that optimizes them for network transmission across diverse computing environments. But this doesn't get us very far here. We can achieve much more with homoiconic domain-agnostic models assisting transmission and function but also persistence, reflection, metadata, presentation, configuration, and errors.

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.

Symbolic and so connectionist-symbolic hybrid approaches to AI will benefit from the large scale availability of homoiconic models, information, and processes. Being able to self-modify and reflect on their own knowledge, both ACT-R and SOAR architectures for example are highly likely to benefit from the large scale availability of homoiconic modelled information. The self-representing and self-modifying nature of homoiconic forms would allow them to adapt their problem-solving strategies and learn more flexibly. It may also offer a medium for interacting with LLMs more formally to help us help the LLM explain itself and reveal itself for improved governability and astute application.

Fundamentally, homoiconic modelling at scale could prove essential for distributed, decentralized, multilingual, and AI environments, and ultimately a true post-Von Neumann network-based computing architecture. And it also enables other non-Von Neumann ideas struggling with significant architectural heterogeneity, data representation, communication, and instructions execution .

How does this relate to Cyborg Social?

While the potential AI developments described may well manifest at more human scale than LLMs, we still need to get personal and ultimately instil the person with social cyborg superpowers.

Natural language exhibits homoiconic characteristics. The human cognitive system that develops and uses language, and is considered by many to be inseparable from language , is both homoiconic and reflexive. The mind acts as the interpreter and manipulator of symbols, bridging the gap between syntax and semantics and enabling complex thought processes. Cyborg Social pairs this natural system with its AI equivalent, bridging the gap with large scale and plural homoiconic modelling and an associated panlingual exchange format.

Just as language models needed to get astonishingly large to emerge as the exciting phenomena we're witnessing today, Cyborg Social scales up homoiconicity with the expectation of similar emergence. Addresso's technology is developed wholly on homoiconic models for example .

You might describe the potential in terms of a new Batesonian ecology of mind or, channelling Minsky , societies of collective minds.

There's no cold start problem as our journey has value every step of the way. And we scale up out here, naturally, between ourselves. You shouldn't need your own nuclear power station.

Together, we realise the contextual, plural, natural, and meaningful web. A human web. Not a Web They Own, and not even so much a Web We Own, but a Web We Are.