Abstractions. The Origin of Everything

In the universe, humans have evolved thanks to train our minds to work with abstractions. In this way, we have learned to move through several layers or levels of abstraction.

One of the first layers, and the most transcendental, is language as an abstraction. The fact that you can refer to a person by their name, and not a full description, is a good example of this. Moving on to more interesting layers of abstraction, which are the subject of this blog, we can say that programming languages themselves are largely based on this concept.

Arriving where we are, we can already say that abstraction is the bridge that connects the physical world with the digital world. In this way, ideas appear in the digital world that seek to be a virtual representation of concepts so far closely linked to the physical plane, such as the concept of identity or the concept of property. This, at the same time, allows these concepts to be elevated thanks to the almost unlimited possibilities of the code.

The code is what will define the rules that govern this new paradigm, starting from the lowest level, which are the protocols, and they are the basis on which everything is supported.

Protocols. The Rules of the Game

A protocol is nothing more than a set of rules that define how a system operates, how you can adhere to it, and how you relate to the parties. This sounds very simple, but hides a great technical complexity behind it. Some of the most ubiquitous protocols today are the SSL/TLS protocol, which ensure data transport, or the Bittorrent protocol, which defines how to share files between users in a distributed manner, without the need for a central authority.

When you combine protocols with cryptographic tools, distributed architectures, and a vision, great things happen. One of them is Bitcoin. The Bitcoin protocol is perhaps the best known in this new paradigm of digital ownership and decentralized consensus. Bitcoin has opened the door to a whole new set of challenges related to the ownership and transfer of value, forcing us all to step forward and evolve.

Ethereum was born with the same disruptive vision as Bitcoin, but it poses additional challenges, and allows to redefine and re-adapt more concepts from the traditional world, such as identity, finance, or the self-management of organizations and communities.

Systems. Life on the Protocol

A fertile ground, with the right conditions, is always favorable for life to grow on it. This serves as an analogy with what is happening now with protocols such as Bitcoin or Ethereum. On the protocol layer, the systems that will make up the new internet and redefine the way we relate in the digital world are being born.

Bitcoin allows to redefine the way we preserve and exchange value, in this case, offering a distributed, sovereign and disintermediated way. An entire ecosystem of actors conforms to it, such as protocol developers, miners, application developers in higher layers, and, ultimately, users.

New species have grown on Ethereum. One of them is the decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), which function by themselves thanks to being equipped with mechanisms for incentives, voting and decision, etc., and which open the door to what will be the communities of the future.

Ethereum also makes us see that a new type of finance is possible thanks to the use of assets (tokens) endowed with programmability. This makes it possible to manage your finances by talking to a protocol. The Automated Markets (which can regulate “pools”) already represent the new banking. Flashloans (the equivalent of walking into a bank, leaving you all the money you want whenever and wherever you return it before leaving the bank) seem crazy now, but within Defi not only is this possible, but in we have daily examples.

Continuing with abstractions, the tribute to abstraction par excellence are non-fungible tokens or NFTs, which act as rigid designators, which due to their scarcity and uniqueness, can represent an asset that is also scarce like art.

All these systems grow organically, organize, coordinate and defend themselves. Some of them also die or will die. It is the law of life. They represent the intersection of locality and specificity with globality. They are specific communities within a global framework, where bots, organizations and people live together, all of them interacting with each other. One day you’ll be transacting with a bot, another day you’ll be contributing your vote to a community, and when needed, they’ll have the ability to transfer value by talking directly to a protocol, without the need for any front-end or user interface. Or why not, with another person, like you.

Challenges. What are we facing

This creative force that leads us to this new paradigm is not the only current one. The path will not be easy and is full of obstacles. You need to do a review of the societies to see everything that is at risk.

For some time we have been hearing, and realizing, that everything is in crisis. Society will collapse, and the current and old forms of governance no longer work and are completely undone.

Apart from the countless crises with which we are bombarded on a daily basis, there are others that are practically not talked about. The most important struggle is being played out in the shadows. Cryptography is at risk, distributed protocols are at risk (p2p), and your privacy is at risk. This implies the global connectivity of all humanity is threatened.

On a daily basis we see how centralized social networks carry out censorship, traffic in your data, skew your opinion, and create profiles that you are not even aware of. And that, not to mention the selective surveillance aimed at whoever it suits.

The initial idea of the Internet envisioned it as a great network that would, in some way, liberate the oppressed people of the world and lead to a future towards an egalitarian and liberating space. All the information in the world would be available at the push of a button, greater participation in government by the people would be easy, and so on.

The old promise of the internet has not been fulfilled. Faced with this, what are we left with?

Hope. Attain Sovereignty

Sovereignty is an empowering and hopeful word. It must be sought at two levels, individual and collective.

Individual sovereignty is built on knowledge, responsibility and creativity. As Krishnamurti said, societies decay when individuals stop being creative, they become automatons dedicated to imitation.

“Our education, our social structure is based on imitation; that is to say, I conform to a certain social or religious formula. I have ceased to be a true individual; psychologically, I have become a simple repeating machine, with certain conditioned responses. So one of the fundamental causes of social disintegration is imitation, and one of the disintegrating factors is the leader, whose very essence is imitation.
Where there is authority, there must be imitation. And since all our mental and psychological training is based on authority, you need to be free of authority to be creative. Have you not noticed that in the moments of creation, in those relatively happy moments of vital interest, there is no sense of repetition, of imitation? These moments are always new, fresh, creative, happy. Therefore, one of the fundamental causes of social disintegration is imitation, which is the cult of authority.”

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

It is necessary to act on the individual level proactively, using and defending the protocols, documenting, creating content, translating, and doing outreach. Each to their own level.

Just as we learn to read and write as children to communicate with the world, digital literacy is a requirement for participation in a connected world. When we acquired a language, we not only learned to listen, but also to speak. When we acquired writing, we not only learned to read, but also to write. Now that we have computers, we are learning how to use them, but not how to program them. This resigns us to accepting the devices and software we use with the limitations and agendas their creators have built into them.

Digital literacy also means knowing how to act privately. Privacy is “the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world”, and in an open society, it requires systems of anonymous transactions.

Collective sovereignty is achieved when it is built together. Open source is one of the most representative forms of what happens when we build together. Projects as big as Linux have been built in the “Bazaar” style. The “Bazaar” opens the development. Many people manipulate the source code without central control. The contributions are plentiful. chaotic open source development, miraculously coherent in both signal and crowd noise.

Unlike the traditional style of building a cathedral, where the effort is centralized. In this case, a defined group of developers (or even just one) is developing the software. No one else is involved and outside ideas or patches will be ignored.