Lightning talk given at "Upgrade Democracy" Unconference in Palo Alto

1. THE MAKING OF SENSE /
A HUMANE NETWORK
PETER WANG
@pwang
peter@pwang.io

2. I have come to fully realize that Stories
are more fundamental than Facts. They
are the reality that people experience.
Those who insist on pursuing “the Truth
about the issue”, or solving the problem
of getting “the Right Facts out to
everyone”… are almost always chasing
a mirage.

3. THE META-MODEL
• Facts are notes; Ideas are chords;
Stories are the song.
• The human mind is wired to hear music, not
individual notes. (How many have perfect pitch
vs How many enjoy music?)
• Even if you could ascertain what the objectively
Right Facts are, if you can’t weave them into the
song playing in people’s heads, it won’t matter.

4. YOST VIOLIN METHOD
“Just play all the notes, with every finger.”

7. • We ALL have layers of stories and narratives that frame our
worldview. For something to “makes sense”, it just means that it fits
within the narrative frame — the story — we believe about the world.

8. • We ALL have layers of stories and narratives that frame our
worldview. For something to “makes sense”, it just means that it fits
within the narrative frame — the story — we believe about the world.
• As humans, we need stories to give us a sense of permanence and of
control. This is because we use stories not just to explain the past, but
to lay the groundwork for our expectations of the future.

9. • We ALL have layers of stories and narratives that frame our
worldview. For something to “makes sense”, it just means that it fits
within the narrative frame — the story — we believe about the world.
• As humans, we need stories to give us a sense of permanence and of
control. This is because we use stories not just to explain the past, but
to lay the groundwork for our expectations of the future.
• The fundamental mythos of the intellectual is that they live in a world
where better ideas should win, do win, and move things forward.

10. People want things to make Sense,
more than they want Sense itself to
usefully predict the future.
(Mostly, they want the Sense that is made to re-affirm
that the past justifies the present.)

11. • The stories don’t have to be True (c.f. Trump’s
“Parable of the Snake”
• The facts don’t have to be facts (c.f. Bowling Green)
• I don’t think this is a healthy way for people to live.
It does not maximize human potential and joy.
• But this is how people live. More than ever, human
dynamics are dominated by the memetic landscape.
MYTH-BENDING

12. In the game of human dynamics, you tell
stories and craft myth, or you go home.
• The stories don’t have to be True (c.f. Trump’s
“Parable of the Snake”
• The facts don’t have to be facts (c.f. Bowling Green)
• I don’t think this is a healthy way for people to live.
It does not maximize human potential and joy.
• But this is how people live. More than ever, human
dynamics are dominated by the memetic landscape.
MYTH-BENDING

13. COROLLARY: AN EQUIVALENCE PLANE?
• Trump explicitly tells his supporters stories. He knows what they need and
he gives it to them. They don’t need or want any more Facts than are
necessary to make the Story interesting.
• Clinton would have done the same. (She wouldn’t have told so many
bold-faced lies, because her listeners don’t want to be insulted.)
• Trump is dangerous because he is an opaque vessel for hidden agendas,
and those agendas could be arrogantly stupid, hawkish, or both.
• What about Clinton? A little less opaque, agendas a little less stupid?

14. There is a rare gap right now in the global
sense-making engine. It won’t last long.
We are
here!
Now is the time to start a new song.
But first, we have to get our stories straight.

15. TOWARDS A HUMANE NETWORK

16. ARPANET
• Resilient military network
• Testbed for inter-networking:
scaling a network across
disparate sub-networks

17. INTERNET

18. INTERNET
• Insecure protocols

19. INTERNET
• Insecure protocols
• When centralized, extremely
janky (name lookup, root CAs)

20. INTERNET
• Insecure protocols
• When centralized, extremely
janky (name lookup, root CAs)
• When decentralized,
extremely janky (BGP attacks)

21. INTERNET
• Insecure protocols
• When centralized, extremely
janky (name lookup, root CAs)
• When decentralized,
extremely janky (BGP attacks)
• Pseudo-resilient, de facto
network for human species

22. INTERNET
• Insecure protocols
• When centralized, extremely
janky (name lookup, root CAs)
• When decentralized,
extremely janky (BGP attacks)
• Pseudo-resilient, de facto
network for human species
• Actually a network of insecure
computers

23. STACK PILE OF FAIL
Vulnerability Example
App
DNS, SMTP, HTTP, SSH
• DNS is terrible
• SMTP is terrible
• HTTP is terrible
• SSL relies on flaky CAs
• Javascript sucks
• ISPs hijacking DNS lookup failures to display ads
• Spam is still a problem
• Phishing is a major problem
• No common, user-friendly security protocol
Transport
TCP, UDP
• ISPs attack/throttle bandwidth
• Connection-oriented
• Leaky metadata
• ISPs own your ass
• Net neutrality, “zero-rate streaming”
• Targeted ads based on geolocation
• Verizon uber-cookie
• DDoS
Internet
IP, ICMP
BGP attacks 2013 Belarus traffic diversion (banks, govt, etc.)
Link
ARP, 802.11
Single-source suppliers of HW
parts, firmware, etc.
• IoT backdoors into home networks
• Routers with malicious counterfeit hardware

24. OTHER FAILURES
• Twitter: Libyan rebels calling in airstrikes by DMing @NATO
• Steve Fry, others quitting Twitter
• The Chinese model: Huxley-style control network of WeChat, Weibo,
QQ, Didi, Baidu, Alibaba
• ”Dear Mark, I will not comply”
• Ads vs. Adblockers vs. Google algos vs…
• The "fake news swings 2016 election" is the Tacoma Narrows Bridge
of information networks. Synchrony in communications networks is
significant. In the brain, meta-stability with synchronized firings is
the difference between consciousness and epilepsy.

25. FUNDAMENTALLY
The internet is founded on the principle of end-to-end
connectivity between computers.
The web is based on servers and content, and a universal
addressing scheme in the document format.
These both emerged in an era when bandwidth (and
connectivity) was scarce. Trust, security, etc. were luxuries.
Overabundance of bandwidth has created a different problem:
scarcity of attention.

26. HUMANE NETWORK
A Humane Network is defined by concepts and protocols that give rise to a
communications network for humans which fits the natural inclinations of human
interaction.
It should scale up and out without creating major potential negative outcomes:
• Loss of confidentiality
• Loss of attribution
• Loss of Anonymity
• Centralization of content
• Centralization of traffic flow
• Inappropriate novation of trust into global reputation
In scaling human networks, trust is the scarce resource.
In such a network, a trusted connection is 90%+ of the signal.

27. A NETWORK THAT MAKES SENSE
• In the first era of humanity, Reality was defined by consensus.
• In the second era, it was defined by models, prediction, and experiment.
Models are needed in order to have Explicit Control.
• In the third era, we stop needing reality to be defined in a way that fits
within people's heads, and immerse ourselves in an experiential Present,
confident that the structures we've created will enable our collective
patterns of behavior to converge on optimal actions.
• Technology tools that extend the vocabulary of human interaction
• Allows experimenting with and scaling out different kinds of social structures
• Amplifies and implement aspects of human relationships, which are
grounded in social primitives like trust, justice/fairness, etc.