On 21st May 2007, I met two friends, and we talked tech. It's been three years since I met one of them, Tav, at the conference he organised in Leytonstone, London, to try to kick off the system he calls Espra; and three years later, he's talking about the same thing. What's changed?
Author: Sean B. Palmer; Date: 2007-05On 11th September 2001, Tav was on IRC speaking to me and Aaron Swartz about a system that he had in mind somewhat like Freenet. It was an auspicious time to talk about anything; Bob Dylan released his album Love and Theft that day, and Chris Onstad started his webcoming Achewood. It seems that most people remember what they were doing on that fateful day, just like people of an older generation say that they remember where they were when JFK was shot.
2002 was a year in which Tav and Aaron worked together to try to make that system, a kind of new method for storing information on the internet, a reality, but the project ended in a rather bitter fork and me stuck in the middle of it all. In 2003 Tav disappeared, but in 2004 he returned more invigorated than ever, trying to kick things off in the form of a series of conferences, which he called "WTF‽" They were fun, and it was an extremely interesting and conceptually productive time. But not much happened in the form of code or ostensible benefits. And there was only one further conference and I didn't attend it.
In 2005 and 2006, Tav hooked up with a bunch of people in a place called the CBASE in Germany. The thing about Tav is that he's not just after technological change, he wants to change the world: he's after social change too. The types of people that tend to be into that are usually what most people think of as the "student" types... vegans, libertarianism, free-thinking, a harkening back to the hippie era. Somehow I don't think that Tav is taken up too much by that kind of milieu, but he certainly tries to utilise it as much as he can. The CBASE in Germany seems somewhere in between Tav's thinking and the stereotypical view.
There were two good things to come from this. Most of the people who got into the project in 2004 left, but a few clung on. 2005/6 saw lots of new people getting on board, and they made Tav to code. And code he did: he produced an enormous code bundle which he called the "Protoplex", and the rest of us spent several days trying to make it work. We did, and it wasn't supremely impressive, to say the least, but it was something—for the first time since 2001 there was at last something tangible, and it was exciting that the whole thing hadn't just fizzled out.
Which brings us to 2007. Tav and the people he's got associated with him decided to kick off a new kind of focal thing, a new idea, rather like the WTF conferences in 2004, only this time in the form of a 24 week long event of furtherence of the ideas that have slowly been developing. It's called, not too surprisingly, 24 Weeks, and it started on a Friday. On the Sunday, Tav asked if he and one of the other developers could meet up with me. Since I rather enjoyed the WTF conference, I wanted to be involved in the 24 Weeks stuff; so on the Monday, meet we did.
Having not seen Tav for three years, he hugged me so hard that he spilled some of his pint all over the floor. T and I merely somewhat daintily but gentlemanly shook hands, in that formal way that people are expected to do in England when they've never met before. T is from Germany, so perhaps it's the same across Real Europe too.
We sat for a while in a cold and draughty station whilst Tav finished his pint; he explained that he'd given up smoking except for the two hours after drinking, so he's having to drink every two hours. T ribbed him about what they're going to do to him as a forefit when he eventually slips up. Pretty much immediately we just started chatting as if we were on IRC, but T had actually come down so that he could meet me face to face so that he had a point of reference with me. I debated this somewhat with him; but by the end of the meeting I'd rather reversed my position!
When I mentioned that the city had grown into a connurbation, Tav asked what it meant and I explained. T said that one of the reasons he found it hard to connect was that I used words which were too bloody long. We got a bit cold and draughty debating long words, and Tav had finished his pint, so we went off to get sushi instead.
One of the things that Tav hadn't explained all that fully to me before was the Toman System, as he calls it, which is the social counterpart to all of the technical ideas that he's been espousing (creating; following!) across the years. He flipped through my miniscule ring-bound sub-A6 plain notebook trying to find enough space to actually write a diagram, but snorted at its inadequacy and grabbed a napkin to write on instead. He used my pen.
The diagram that he wrote told a story of how producers and creators can link together with arbitrators (or reviewers, I think he called them), to make a more efficent kind of model for people working together and doing what they want to do in life. On the face of it, it's a bit like a super eBay or Craigslist, and it's not much more complex, but it's a much grander design. I didn't take it all in since I'm not great in busy environments, but essentially the model contains the following pieces:
Tav explained this rather better, but as I say, I don't take information in all that well in environments like that. At least I have the napkin. (Always keep the napkin!) There were things about the creators giving to the commons and getting resources back. There were points about the capitalistic side of the thing being very contextual (so reputation is only reputation in certain areas; you're a great chef, but a crap musician!), and the communist side with all the commons, the public domain, being non-contextual. I asked where the libertarian side of it was, and Tav said "all of it!"
I also asked what people do to put reputation into the system to begin with, if they can import reputation capital from elsewhere. Tav said that there was no plans for something like that; that they'd just have to start from scratch but that momentum should get going quite quickly. I asked several other very probing questions about it too, but no other question fouled it up as much as that.
Our £49 sushi bill paid courtesy of Tav, we walked outside and talked about stencilling pigeons whilst relocating to some public gardens to sat on a cold park bench. For the most part, T had been quiet whilst Tav was giving his demonstration in the sushi restaurant, but he had been speaking quite evenly with Tav overall, and was speaking quite a bit again now. We were chatting about cultivating trees into interesting shapes, like avant garde bonsai, and T mentioned some experiments that a guy had done using "weide" trees. Tav and I wondered what this obviously German word meant, so we both looked it up on our internet enabled mobile phones. Tav won: it's a willow.
Tav had started a second diagram in the sushi place [@@ continue]
Sean B. Palmer