Special Episode Apps vs Files With Gordon Brander, Peter Van Hardenberg & Jess Martin.

Jess Martin
And he calls that files and that we, and that the data lives beyond the application itself. So once we’ve like, even if the app goes away, we still got the file and that file gives us some ability to continue interacting with that data that we’ve spent such a hard

Gordon Brander
Like these formats, they tend to layer. And it sort of necessarily, like interoperability is an ecological condition. It’s something that emerges over time. You don’t design it. This is often, this is actually why for me, sort of permissionless substrates, substrates that belong to the user where their data is saved

Gordon Brander
Like these formats, they tend to layer. And it sort of necessarily, like interoperability is an ecological condition. It’s something that emerges over time. You don’t design it. This is often, this is actually why for me, sort of permissionless substrates, substrates that belong to the user where their data is saved seems important because it allows the interoperability To emerge retroactively. But in any case, like these things, they tend to emerge over time where, you know, one person creates a format, another kind of app implements it.

Peter van Hardenberg
I think both in your work and Jess’s work and our work, right. Like we’re all exploring different ways of exposing the substrate in more interoperable ways. Yeah. And it’s not so much like locking the door open as like right now, I think like the political economy of choosing files over these other things, right? Like if it’s so much harder and worse for you as a developer to choose like a file-like thing over an API-like thing, you’re probably going to pick the API-like thing, right? Indeed. Some of this is like technical capability and some of it is cultural norms. Yeah.

Peter van Hardenberg
But I think a lot about this question, right? Like I don’t want my computer to be a mall where I go in and I take products out one at a time, you know, and bring them home and consume them and put them in the trash. I want my computer to feel like a wood shop where I have my stock of lumber and I’ve got my tools. And if I want to make something, sure, it’s going to require a little more thinking and expertise, but I can make anything. I can do anything. I can work with other people, right? Like it’s, it’s a different kind of productivity.

Peter van Hardenberg
But I think a lot about this question, right? Like I don’t want my computer to be a mall where I go in and I take products out one at a time, you know, and bring them home and consume them and put them in the trash. I want my computer to feel like a wood shop where I have my stock of lumber and I’ve got my tools. And if I want to make something, sure, it’s going to require a little more thinking and expertise, but I can make anything. I can do anything. I can work with other people, right? Like it’s, it’s a different kind of productivity. Like a kitchen is very much the same thing as well, right? We buy groceries, we buy staples, you know, and a handful of like basic tools, a cutting board, a heat source, a knife, you can do almost anything in the kitchen with a few extra things. You can do remarkable things, right? And like, you know, we, we reject the idea of unit task devices. Often we make fun of people who buy the one-off gadgets for the kitchen, but then we live in a world of these one-off gadgets on our devices, you know, on our computers. I’m trying to think, like, if we’re going to invent tools, we also need to figure out what the stock material is. And, like, yeah, text files are cool because they’re old. And, like, what’s old is good. Like, I don’t mean that in a dismissive way. Like, it is cool because it’s old. It has stood the test of time. And it will stand the test of time. It will still be here in 50

Gordon Brander
You’re such a glorious vision though. You know, I guess for me, like files are not the thing, but what they are, at least for particular formats is like a kind of Lego dot and producing Lego dots like this that allow you to compose Things together. Like Unix pipe is another kind of Lego dot. This strikes me as important in like a laws of physics kind of way. Like one of my favorite books, W. Brian Arthur’s The Nature of Technology. I always get it confused with Kevin Kelly’s book, but The Nature of Technology, he basically makes this very sort of mathematically grounded argument that innovation at its core is A combinatorial process and not just like technological innovation but you know evolution language art like these are about taking pieces composing them together to produce something New in a sort of recursive process and like early computing was all kind of like i don’t know if this was intuitive or chance or what. All of these early pioneers of computing designed their systems in this way. And we saw this kind of Cambrian explosion of really interesting new things emerge very rapidly. Like, actually, we’ve had mobile phones for longer than it took the browser to be invented after the introduction of DOS. So, like, a lot happened in, like, a very short amount of time in that first wave, right? And part of me kind of wonders that if we sort of reduced the combinatoriality of technology to actually slow the rate of innovation, not necessarily like there’s someone scheming In a room, but sort of the purpose of the system is what it does. And like big money, but also kind of governments and it’s eternal september right yeah it’s like if you have a bunch of silos and those silos do one thing like on instagram you post photos And on tiktok you post short videos and i’m like you there is no such thing as combining those into some new medium because they don’t let you and so you kind of have these known quantities That you can

Gordon Brander
You’re such a glorious vision though. You know, I guess for me, like files are not the thing, but what they are, at least for particular formats is like a kind of Lego dot and producing Lego dots like this that allow you to compose Things together. Like Unix pipe is another kind of Lego dot. This strikes me as important in like a laws of physics kind of way. Like one of my favorite books, W. Brian Arthur’s The Nature of Technology. I always get it confused with Kevin Kelly’s book, but The Nature of Technology, he basically makes this very sort of mathematically grounded argument that innovation at its core is A combinatorial process and not just like technological innovation but you know evolution language art like these are about taking pieces composing them together to produce something New in a sort of recursive process and like early computing was all kind of like i don’t know if this was intuitive or chance or what. All of these early pioneers of computing designed their systems in this way. And we saw this kind of Cambrian explosion of really interesting new things emerge very rapidly. Like, actually, we’ve had mobile phones for longer than it took the browser to be invented after the introduction of DOS. So, like, a lot happened in, like, a very short amount of time in that first wave, right? And part of me kind of wonders that if we sort of reduced the combinatoriality of technology to actually slow the rate of innovation, not necessarily like there’s someone scheming In a room, but sort of the purpose of the system is what it does. And like big money, but also kind of governments and it’s eternal september right yeah it’s like if you have a bunch of silos and those silos do one thing like on instagram you post photos And on tiktok you post short videos and i’m like you there is no such thing as combining those into some new medium because they don’t let you and so you kind of have these known quantities That you can regulate and control and also extract 30 taxes on pretty efficiently so there’s this kind of like striation that’s happened of the space and some of this is probably inevitable But i i do kind of want to click the dial a couple notches in the other direction

Gordon Brander
Of what you’ve seen Kapano layout? Yeah, that’s a good question. I guess what we are building is a sort of notebook app called Subconscious powered by this decentralized note graph protocol. And the protocol is multiplayer. So the notion is like, what if you had your ROM graph or your Obsidian graph, but it could sort of freely network with other graphs in this cloud of graphs but that cloud of graphs doesn’t Live on my server where i can sort of you know extract 30 text or whatever it exists on this decentralized network actually that’s not quite right either the protocol is local first so Basically it syncs your slice of the graph like your content plus the content of people you follow onto your devices. So you have your files. And this was clear, right? They are actually files. They’re actually files. If you run Orb, or what you guys used to call it, Orb. It’s called Orb. Yeah, no, it’s called Orb. So there’s a couple of things, right? There’s the app, but there’s also like a command line interface you can use if you’re a developer that’s like Git.

Gordon Brander
Yeah, that’s a good question. I guess what we are building is a sort of notebook app called Subconscious powered by this decentralized note graph protocol. And the protocol is multiplayer. So the notion is like, what if you had your ROM graph or your Obsidian graph, but it could sort of freely network with other graphs in this cloud of graphs but that cloud of graphs doesn’t Live on my server where i can sort of you know extract 30 text or whatever it exists on this decentralized network actually that’s not quite right either the protocol is local first so Basically it syncs your slice of the graph like your content plus the content of people you follow onto your devices. So you have your files. And this was clear, right? They are actually files. They’re actually files. If you run Orb, or what you guys used to call it, Orb. It’s called Orb. Yeah, no, it’s called Orb. So there’s a couple of things, right? There’s the app, but there’s also like a command line interface you can use if you’re a developer that’s like Git. And actually, it works a lot like Git. The whole thing uses kind of git like versioning semantics the difference is that it syncs not just your quote-unquote repository of notes but also kind of the those are the people you Follow so you have your own little internet archive i guess right you like git uh it’s like git submodules

Gordon Brander
Think i look at this as in like a kind of scrappy maybe like entrepreneurial way i’m looking for the cheap hat because i i don’t want to wait for the abolition of capitalism to improve software Somewhat. And I do think there are these kinds of judo moves, these interventions, like CRDTs that can change the calculus. What a coincidence. Yeah, maybe I’m wrong, right? And maybe you’re wrong. Maybe we’re all wrong, but I don’t think so. I think that it requires great ingenuity and creativity to find the strategic angle of intervention. But, you know, people do this all the time. They do it for, they apply strategy to find an entry into a market in order to gain, because incumbents don’t want new entrants in the market either. And I think we have to put that hat on, actually, if we’re going to change the balance of power that users have.
Peter van Hardenberg
How do you think about that with what you’re doing? Oh, sorry, Jess.

Gordon Brander
Yeah, they actually, their protocol is not too different from Blue Sky or even our own news sphere. But it does make a couple of choices around key rotation that they use a blockchain for this.
Jess Martin
I could get into the why if we want to later on. Well, here’s the more interesting thing. Just today, they showed off frames that allow for token transfers to happen inside of it. So basically, they built into their protocol micropayments. And the reason I think this is really interesting is because I think one way out of the current world that we’re in with browsers and same policy and the sort of the dead end, but it’s a happy Dead end where the web is, is a, is building a payment protocol into the, the primitives of the network itself, such that people can remunerate each other directly.
Gordon Brander
And you know, the web was meant to have this. There’s a, there’s an HTTP code for payment, like pay-per It just never got, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was like Tim Berners-Lee just stuck it in there. There’s, it’s, it’s along there with like, what is that?

Gordon Brander
And then we accrued this enormous edifice of regulation around markets in order to get them to function. So my personal attitude toward this stuff, which probably a lot of people are going to disagree with for one ideological reason or another, is markets are kind of like nuclear reactors. They can generate a lot of interesting outcomes, but they also have a tendency to melt down without cooling rods. And this is just kind of what I see happening with crypto. And I think it’ll continue to happen up until the point that it gets some sort of enlightened regulation, which may never come because it seems like nobody’s actually invested in that Outcome on either side. So there’s Gordney’s unpopular take with regard to Web3s.
Jess Martin
I love it. So Web3s is running 200 years of financial market regulation.
Gordon Brander
Yeah, and actually, especially to me, like proof of stake blockchains are really interesting technology that solve like an interesting problem of like decentralized, totally ordered Sort of source of truth, incredibly neutral.

Gordon Brander
So my personal attitude toward this stuff, which probably a lot of people are going to disagree with for one ideological reason or another, is markets are kind of like nuclear reactors. They can generate a lot of interesting outcomes, but they also have a tendency to melt down without cooling rods. And this is just kind of what I see happening with crypto. And I think it’ll continue to happen up until the point that it gets some sort of enlightened regulation, which may never come because it seems like nobody’s actually invested in that Outcome on either side. So there’s Gordney’s unpopular take with regard to Web3s.
Jess Martin
I love it. So Web3s is running 200 years of financial market regulation.
Gordon Brander
Yeah, and actually, especially to me, like proof of stake blockchains are really interesting technology that solve like an interesting problem of like decentralized, totally ordered Sort of source of truth, incredibly neutral. All have to be qualified because you know they’re all of that is also kept afloat by like basically the financial uh function that uh

Peter van Hardenberg
And I think, again, like, have to ask why why are things the way they are yeah and so things are the way they are because you can make a living building software that way you can get investment From other people to build software and if you can’t get investments and you can’t make a living then you’re not going to have the ability to attack attract top talent right to bring in The investment it takes to build a team in advance of revenue right and like the problem with crypto money is that it always ends up being predicated on like the promise of crypto style Returns in sort of the you know idealized case and so what you see is like ecosystems aligning around trying to generate one of those crypto pops because that’s the expectation that Comes with the investment and i think i don’t want to call anybody out i’ll just say that there have been very interesting and promising projects that have over time had to realign themselves To generating crypto interest file returns and that that has very frequently been to the detriment of their mission right token pumping tends to be an unstoppable force.
Gordon Brander
Yeah. And get in that doom loop. Yeah.