Hi Casters. USV stopped at the gas station last year and now that we've turned the new engine on, we thought we'd share that news

Hi Casters. USV stopped at the gas station last year and now that we've turned the new engine on, we thought we'd share that news https://blog.usv.com/2024-usv-core-fund

“If we all owned our own data and could make it completely portable, what would we do with it?”

Two category errors here.

First, the propertization of data. Property is a concept developed for rivalrous resources. Data / information are ripe with anti-rivalrous potential.

Second, portability invokes stocks that might be moved. Data can only become useful information however in the context of it flowing, when it’s in motion, and very frequently in transcontextual intermingling.

In short, thinking of data in a computer science paradigm doesn’t get us anywhere near as far as being inspired by information in nature.

For more, I invite you to check out

In short, thinking of data in a computer science paradigm doesn’t get us anywhere near as far as being inspired by information in nature.

For more, I invite you to check out https://cyborg.social

Wholeheartedly agree that data "ownership" is a category error.

My question though is how would you create the incentive structures needed to be able to treat data as part of a flow system (without others simply extracting value from the "data" you create for this system)?

Working on /impact ||


Abundance Economy book: book.abundance.id

Thanks for the question @abundance.

My reply can only be biomimetic, for what other heuristics might we more reliably rely upon when interfacing with natural systems? None.

But we can get there by starting where we are.
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The GDPR doesn’t make any reference to propertizing data, fortunately.

Indeed, the late Giovani Buttarelli (European Data Protection Supervisor) likened the possible emergence of markets for personal data with markets for live human organs, i.e. not a good idea.
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Union Square Ventures is a venture capital firm based in New York City.

Lawmakers and software companies share a reductionist framing. By this I mean an unwarranted and frankly unhealthy binary regard for ‘them and us’, e.g. large corporate and its customers, government and its citizens, the client-server architecture. 

Glen Weyl refers to such reductionism as Atomistic Liberalism and Objectivist Naive Epistemology (ALONE)! 🤣 
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But this is not how natural systems work.

The mutualism inherent to any sustaining system is definitionally reliant upon mutual value within the multilevel paradigm of generalized Darwinism (see David S Wilson).
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Our legal and technical code today lacks the requisite complexity required for a healthy system, and this has allowed a parasitic infection to take hold, i.e. including the value extractors to which you refer.

When the parasite takes hold in one codebase (per Lessig), it is readied to jump to and infect through other codebases, as we’re seeing play out right now.
6/n

The remedy can only be to break the binary. Something that plainly cannot be achieved by celebrating any supposed “self-sovereignty” of the individual as some parts of our tech community obsess over. (Let’s just say Ayn Rand doesn’t come across as a student of natural systems!)

I'm not saying that I under-appreciate agentic tech; far from! But rather that social science has conceived of agency as social and relational for a few decades now and we need to catch up with their insights.
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Biomimetically, we’re contemplating our innate sociality, our deep talents for cooperation, the nature of mind and so language and distributed cognition, plurality, holonicity, and homoiconicity (by which we include reflexivity). And this is the framing by which we have arrived at Cyborg Social.
8/n

To your question, you don’t need incentive structures any greater than or different from the mechanisms integral to living processes.

We're all drawn to systems that feel natural sub-consciously. Sometimes this allows them to be played. In our case, our attention to the anti-discipline of cybernetics and a dedication to abstract away from the underlying technology helps us return to natural ways of relating, interacting, learning, communicating, trading, living.

It helps that we can start this journey with an awesome web3 utility that everyone needs, built the right way 🥳

Biomimetics is wholly compatible with the for-profit motivation just so long as the profiting helps generate value for everyone, individually, socially, systemically. 
9/n

After all this 🤓 , if you feel the need to dive into the various ways (inter)personal data has been conceived, then I wrote this three-parter a few years ago while working alongside the Ethereum co-founder Mihai Alisie at the AKASHA Foundation.

https://philipsheldrake.com/2019/01/the-misleading-name-metaphor-defiance-and-awesome-potential-of-personal-data/
10/n

Just re-read my stream of casts here and spotted something I should clarify.

When I refer to parasitic action I'm talking about a way of thinking, a way of acting, that has been what social scientists refer to as structurated. Embedded. Both constraining and enabling (per Giddens).

I am not referring to individuals or individual companies per se (because I resist binary reductionism). The contexts and the choices these actors make in those contexts are only made possible by the system in which they exist.

To resist the parasitic actions, one starts with Donella Meadows' insights (leverage points to intervene in a system) rather than anything remotely ad hominem.
11/n

Now we have our first mismatch of regulation and natural systems.

The concept of personal data is definition to the GDPR and similar regulations, and yet out here in the real world we only have interpersonal data.

That alone offers up a different lens to the corresponding section of the @usv thesis simply because you could say there’s a whole heap more value for everyone in interpersonal data than can be found in maintaining the fiction of personal data.
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