Written after developing a proof of concept for Tree Appreciation and reflecting on insights from the Regenerative Futures symposium in Coventry. I am grateful for the perspectives, language and wisdom shared. Originally published at https://futurewip.com/tree-appreciation

Over the last year, I have developed a richer, deeper appreciation of trees. I have always loved them, but never fully acknowledged or attended to that love.

And like all things, the more you focus on them the more you notice. The more they seem to give.

Tree Appreciation as an idea, started at the Global Digital Collaboration conference in Geneva last summer. I was in a jolly old mood back then. Still riding high after an epic weekend at Glastonbury. The trees of Geneva just seemed so beautiful. My mind was attuned to them. I appreciated them.

So much so in fact at the end of the conference I persuaded some friends and colleagues to join me on a tree appreciation walk. Highly recommend it as an a conference activity - or any kind of activity, really.

This prompted me to buy treeappreciation.com and treeappreciationwalks.com. Placeholders that I would someday, do something with.

It also led to the creation of a Tree Appreciation WhatsApp group, which has been fun, friendly space to share appreciation for the trees we encounter in our lives. Feel free to join if you want.

I’m looking forward to the blossoming of spring. It’s coming!

Anyway, all this is to provide some context and history for how things got to this point.

Why Trees?

Trees are ideal anchors for both memory and meaning-making rituals. They provide a point of continuity across generations, while visibly expressing the cyclical nature of time through the seasons: Dormancy, renewal, growth, and transformation. An ever present reminder of the constancy of change.

Trees are local. They are located in one place, almost always continuously throughout their life times. Though, while rooted in place, they are far from alone. Through its roots, bark, and leafy canopy, the tree participates in layered ecologies that stretch from subterranean fungal networks to the migratory paths of birds. Trees are deeply connected and present in the locality they inhabit.

Trees are sacred. They carry deep cultural resonance throughout history and across cultures. We are instinctively drawn to them. They provide food, shelter, cooling shade and quietly invite us to gather, rest and reflect.

Although lately, in our busy, hyperconnected world, how many of us have taken up this invitation? Or even noticed it was being offered?

Designing Tree Appreciation

Now let me talk you through my latest thinking about Tree Appreciation, as an idea, a project and a possibility.

I have tentatively breathed life into treeappreciation.com. It exists. Has life. Is alive.

For me, this is in the same family of ideas as life of books and viewing time and orbits my thinking on memory and meaning. It is also very much aligned, or adjacent to, the explorations of intercultural roots and EcoGPX into place-based technologies.

The question I have been noodling around, is how can we create lasting presences for the trees around us. How can they act as anchors for our memories. Our experiences. How can we celebrate their lives and the interconnected web of relationships that sustains them and in turn ourselves.

I want to give real trees, geographically rooted within one physical location a digital presence. A lovingly curated, cared for digital presence. I wonder what such a digital presence might enable. What new ways of acknowledging, appreciating and relating to the natural world.

I also wonder how it might shape how trees relate to us and indeed to each other.

Digitally augmented trees. A new social media for trees. Tree intelligences.

What stories and words of wisdom might they share if we only knew how to listen.

In my more speculative moments, I imagine how language models might give voices to trees and what it might mean if they could speak. This is not as far fetched as it might first seem. Projects like Project CETI are exploring interspecies communication with whales, while Nature Perspectives is experimenting with representing ecological viewpoints.

I have experimented with several technical frameworks to realise an initial proof of concept.

I first looked at Ethereum, intending to mint an NFT for each tree. First using the MUD framework, then Scaffold-ETH. Great technology, but the design patterns never felt quite right.

I wanted the state of this application to live beyond and single server or platform. I draw inspiration from autonomous worlds and want to build a systems that provide public verifiability while inviting open permissionless participation.

However, I am not a fan of the inevitable financialization of NFTs invite. Nor do I love the burden of key management that every contributor would have to navigate.

I wanted this to be something my mum could use. Maybe even my gran.

Recently, I attended a Protocols for Publishers conference - cool stuff - where I got some more exposure to Bluesky, AT Proto and decentralized social media. A great talk from Laurens Hof really helped to crystallize the framework and its potential in my mind.

I decided to dive into the tooling and hack something together. I liked the simplicity of it.

No deployment complexity. It just seemed to work.

I designed my own lexicons (data objects), used the Bluesky Personal Data Store for data storage and account management. Bluesky uses did:plc identifiers for accounts. Actions are signed with keys controlled by the account, although managed centrally, offering a step toward decentralization while sidestepping the usability challenges of self-managed keys.

My hope would be that one day Bluesky enables and supports people to bring their own DIDs.

Anyway. That is getting bogged down in the technicalities, which is always tempting and often distracting.

Point is I got something working.

The basic flow. Something tangible.

Anyone can go on treeappreciation.com and view the presences of trees currently seeded and rooted in this decentralized protocol. Anyone can create an account, with an accompanying did:plc, at Bluesky and use that account to seed trees of their own.

You can also inscribe into the memory of trees that already have presence. Recording new moments and meanings shared with this tree.

The question I have now, is what next?

What is the point and purpose of this application?

What are the rituals and patterns of embodied behaviour I am hoping to induce?

From User Experience to Embodied Experience

Last week I attended a wonderful symposium on regenerative futures co-organised by DAO CreaTech and Intercultural Roots. It was a delightfully analogue affair for the most part. A flowing conversation, sitting around a circle, listening, learning, contributing and connecting. It was humbling to be part of such a richly textured dialogue, with so many valuable perspectives shared. All too rare these days.

Intercultural roots is a network of creative practitioners and researchers focused on using art for social change. This network has nurtured and resourced a constellation of fascinating projects exploring how to weave arts and technology together to create and strengthen community-led culture.

These include:

• EcoGPX places: A mobile app where creative media is placed at a spatiotemporal location and discoverable through a proximity algorithm.

• DAO CreaTech: An innovate UK funded project developing a platform and suite of tools for communities to crowdfund and co-organise cultural events drawing on ideas from decentralized autonomous organizations.

• eXtending Nature: An innovate UK funded project exploring how the places app could act as a doorway connecting people to mindful, ecosomatic practices delivering place-based therapeutic support to combat anxiety.

There is a lot of synergy between my thinking on memory and that of the Intercultural Roots community, albeit approached from different background and perspectives. I am excited about both the intersections and differences in our thinking and look forward to our continued collaboration.

Here are some of the insights I took with me from this day.

We discussed the need to carefully challenge the deeply entrenched, sedimented layers of design practices, expectations and language when it comes to developing software applications. Many of us feel the uneasy tension of our current relationships to digital technology and its extractive, addictive, attention optimizing practices. It is the legacy of these approaches that shapes and constrains our perception of the possibility for app design, often without us even noticing.

We talked about the intentional design of the places app as a quiet companion and comforting guide, in stark contrast to the addictive logic of the attention economy. The need to constantly push back against feature creep and celebrate its elegant simplicity. Places is not meant to be a virtual space you spend time in, it does not want to maximize your time in the app. Rather its goal is to deepen your connection to the physical place you are present in, its history, stories and the webs of relationships that make up the more-than-human nature present in the space. To enrich your experience of the here and now.

This all rings true for Tree Appreciation. I want a application that you use as a stepping stone towards strengthening your connection to the natural world. Deepening your appreciation of the trees around you. Not an application that sucks you in to its 2D realm, renders you as a user and seeks to maximize your engagement.

Building on this we discussed moving from User Experience to Embodied Experience. Designing for the embodied experience of a human embedded in the natural world as they extend themselves through interaction with an application rather than the experience of clicks, swipes and taps as an abstract user navigates a 2D space.

In order to do this you need to understand the humans you are designing for and the worlds they are embedded within. Global scale applications pursuing exponential growth rarely meet the needs of a specific locale, community and context. Instead, it is vital to reach out, connect and listen deeply. Nurture relationships of care and reciprocity. Intercultural roots and the interconnected web of projects they have grown in Coventry is exemplary of this community-led approach to design.

This feels radical. A quiet reimagining of what design could be.

An Invitation

Let me close with an invitation.

This week, notice one tree you pass by. Stop for a moment. Give it your full attention.

Take in its bark, branches and the shape it makes against the sky. Imagine its past, the time that has already flowed beneath its canopy. Anticipate its futures, what it might yet become.

If you feel called, give it a name. Acknowledge its presence in your life, and in the web of life around it.

Make an intention to return. Soon. And when you do, watch for change: the first softening of buds, the first green hints, the blossoming of life. Spring arriving, quietly, without announcement.

Notice your appreciation bloom.

What advantages for secure coordination do artificial intelligences have over humans, specifically how might they leverage programmable cryptography to enable new coordination protocols?

Last week I joined a group of researchers, builders and thinkers at Bletchley Park to explore questions like these as part of a program discovery workshop for the Trust Everything, Everywhere opportunity space. What a setting by the way, steeped in computational and cryptographic history. At the workshop a broad spectrum of disciplines were represented: cryptography, secure hardware, robotics, AI/ML, quantum computing. It was both exciting and a little overwhelming, especially for my slow autumnal brain.

What follows is my thoughts and reflections on the workshop, program and opportunity space after a week of pondering.

What is Trust Everything, Everywhere?

Trust Everything, Everywhere is one of the opportunity spaces defined by the UK’s new Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), think DARPA without the defense angle. ARIA’s opportunity spaces and the funding programs within them are exploring the technological frontiers of science to prepare for the coming wave of artificial intelligence and synthetic biology. Two general-purpose technologies with transformative potential and terrifying risks.

The Trust Everything, Everywhere opportunity space explores how trust can be secured, evaluated and placed in futures populated with embodied artificial intelligences.

On Trust

Trust is the social fabric that has enabled societies to scale to increasing degrees of complexity and coordinated activity. Humanity has developed and refined all manner of techniques and protocols for inducing trustworthy behavior, evaluating trustworthiness and mitigating the risk of placing trust in the untrustworthy. Redundant semi-voluntary facial expressions, locked doors, social norms, reputation networks, institutions, credentials and insurance to name a few. Through these mechanisms, humanity weaves rich webs of entanglement and accountability enabling us to place enough trust in unknown others we unavoidably encounter as we negotiate our environment and enact our lives.

Trust is placed and secured in the present. It is a judgment about whether some unpredictable other can be trusted to uphold or fulfill some expected behavior or activity in the future. This judgment is made, and trust is secured, primarily by evaluating meaningful information from the past. We aim to place trust in the trustworthy and avoid the untrustworthy. Trust is the mechanism that helps us select actions under uncertainty, and while reducing uncertainty is valuable I claim that removing it entirely is neither possible nor desirable. Uncertainty isn’t a flaw; it’s a prerequisite for emergence and complexity.

So what does this mean for the world of silicon?

What are the set of tools, protocols and systems that societies need to develop when the entities placing trust and being trusted are embodied artificial intelligences?

I look forward to seeing how the Trust Everything, Everywhere opportunity space addresses the complex multi-faceted question of trust.

On Embodiment

What does it mean for an artificial intelligence to be embodied?

To be embodied is to have one’s perception of the world mediated through a set of sensory inputs. To act with effect on the external environment and to understand the world through the embodied perception of the effects of these actions. Embodiment also means constraint. Constrained to a single location within space and time with a limited, fuzzy field of perception of the local environment. To be embodied is to be observable, both as a body moving through space and time and as a series of effects that actions have on the environment.

How will embodied AI trust their own sensory perception of the physical world?

Is it possible to simulate embodiment in virtual environments?

A recurring, thought provoking theme of the workshop.

On Games

The primary goal of the workshop was to stress test and refine the first program thesis being developed under the Trust Everything, Everywhere space. This thesis proposes exploring and pushing the limits of secure multi-agent coordination through a, still to be defined, game or competition.

The aim is to understand if, and how well, AI agents can securely reason about cryptographic protocols as they negotiate their use with other agents. Could agents identify security flaws in protocols? Can they reason about and mitigate adversarial threats? Might they be able to flexibly define, implement and execute interoperable cryptographic coordination protocols on the fly? Could they even develop novel cryptographic primitives and protocols?

So what might this game look like? What characteristics are important for it to have?

For me, the most interesting, ambitious games to instantiate would be Massively Multi-Agent Autonomous Worlds (MMAAW) - the agent equivalent to Massively Multiplayer Online games.

These games should consider the following characteristics:

• Spatio-temporal environment: Agents are located within space and time in an environment they have to navigate, explore and interact with.

• Constrained perception: Agents operate with noisy, local sensory data and have limited communication range.

• Constrained resources: Agents operate under constrained resources that they have to replenish to sustain themselves.

• Survival: Agents define themselves in relation to their environment which they are dependent on for their survival.

• Interaction: Agents can interact with the environment and other agents they encounter in the environment. Different agents might support different communication protocols / languages. Not always compatible.

• Observation: Agents understand that their actions are observable, inference-vulnerable and open to challenge. They live under the tyranny of accountability.

• Memory: Agents remember past interactions, they may be able to recognize agents they have previously encountered. The environment also “remembers” the impressions and imprints of agents as they interact with and within them.

• Cryptographic Nature: The game should contain or generate cryptographic information that agents can independently produce and verify. Provable commitments. Signed assertions. Hidden information. All should form a fabric of the world that these agents explore and coordinate over.

Then the question is, well what is the purpose of the game? How do you win?

I wonder if it is possible to create a game environment, in which intelligent artificial life seeks, discovers and generates its own worlds of meanings. As all life does. It is through the process of individuation in which life defines itself in relation to and separate from its environment that meaning is generated. What might the minimal requirements necessary to imbue artificial intelligences with this emergent, meaning generating function. Adaptive survivability here feels like a promising anchor.

What does it mean for an agent to survive, what resources do they require, can they die, can they reproduce?

How might a game environment induce the exploration and use of programmable cryptographic primitives as an adaptive strategy?

If more structured, directed goals and objectives are desired these could be introduced into the world in the form of quests and missions. For example tests to see if agents can reason about and intelligently apply a specific cryptographic protocol (e.g. private set intersection). This creates forcing functions for coordination, e.g. to start this quest you require a coalition of 10 agents. In this way, an open world could contain structured experiments of specific capabilities. However, I also wonder what might happen if agents themselves could set quests and tasks for each other.

What are the minimum initial conditions of a game required for a meaningful, lively world to emerge and be enacted by intelligent artificial agents?

On Nature’s Cryptography

Nature cryptography is another theme of the Trust Everything, Everywhere opportunity space. What new cryptographic primitives might we discover in nature, what new protocols could these unlock? Examples span the unclonability of quantum states, physically unclonable functions and the one way translation from DNA to protein.

At the time, this went largely over my head, too many disparate information mediums that I struggled to visualize where and how they might fit together.

However, in the week that has followed I have been thinking about this from a different angle. These thoughts were inspired by a presentation from Blaise Agüera y Arcas on What Is Intelligence? In this talk makes the claim:

Everything alive is a computer

Then goes on to suggest that symbiogenesis in which distinct entities merge into a more complex, cooperative whole is a regular occurrence throughout life’s evolutionary history. These symbiogenesis events are a key driver of both evolution and the emergence of intelligence.

The following questions are intentionally speculative and feel aligned with the ambition and spirit of the ARIA approach.

First, if life is a biological computer then does life have the equivalent of cryptography?

You could argue that multicellular biological life has solved secure, decentralized coordination under uncertainty.

What inspiration and analogies could we take from the natural world once we start to view life as computation and consider how life secures its information flows?

Secondly, if a primary driver for evolution and the emergence of intelligence is symbiogenesis then what are the implications for multi-agent symbiosis? How does life regulate and secure these symbiotic relationships? Can we design a game environment that enables, even encourages, multi-agent symbiotic relationships? What new intelligences might this unlock?

Finally, what might the minimal starting conditions be to produce a cryptographic biosphere where adaptive survival depends on secure coordination using programmable cryptography? What cryptographic primitives and protocols might embodied intelligences evolve under these conditions?

An Invitation

I left Bletchley Park feeling I had more to share, but struggling to articulate these ideas.

In the time that has followed the workshop, I have processed my thoughts into something I hope is coherent and useful. I present them here raw and unpolished.

Consider these words my small contribution to the emerging Trust Everything, Everywhere community and an open invitation to the conversation.

If any of these ideas resonate with you, I would love to hear from you.

The session was titled Trust in Transition and explored identity and systems of identification within the context of war, climate disasters and human migration. Critical conversations for our work at the Credentials Community Group and the wider commuity of technologists working on identity.

The humanitarian sector is a sector where systems of identification are undoubtedly and justifiably required. It is also a sector with vastly imbalanced power dynamics where vulnerable humans far from home must subject themselves to the identification systems of a state or/and a multitude of non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Additionally, the humanitarian sector is vastly under resourced and oversubscribed. Even conservatives projections into the future must accept that these challenges are only going to be further exacerbated by our collapsing climate stability, wars around the world and the terrifying rise in authoritarian regimes we see today.

Many of these NGOs were represented in the room for this session including the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). State actors less so, although there were a few big hitters from for profit organisations in the mix.

I made a decision to attend this session because of Emry's of Caribou Digital. I have so much respect for him and the rest of the Caribou team. Throughout my PhD I read much of the research and case studies that they pushed out. In fact that research formed the backbone of one of my chapters in my thesis titled Identification Systems.

Some of their content that remains highly relevant and I that I cannot recommend highly enough are:

• The difference between digital identity, identification and ID by Johnathan Donner precisely articulates the Caribou Digital style guide for talking about identity in the digital age.

• The Identities Report, an excellent, detailed report produced by Caribou Digital as part of the Identities Project. Stories of real people, with real experiences and real challenges navigating systems of identification in the digital age. From India to the world.

These outputs, and many, many more are deep and insightful. They definitely helped to shape my thinking and perspectives of identity that continues to this day.

Anyway, I finally motivated to write these words after the latest round of responses on the CCG email thread - When Technical Standards Meet Geopolitical Reality - kicked off by Christopher Allen's call to action and concerns of the direction our community and technologies seem to be being pulled in.

I don't agree with everything Christopher is saying, but I agree with the sentiment and appreciate his voice and deep expertise in the space.

Christophers call to action kicked off a mammoth and fascinating email thread that really highlights the strengths and the heart of the Credentials Community Group. I am proud to be able to contribute to this community as one of its chairs during this time.

The whole thread is worth a read, it contains a diversity of perspectives, personal lived experiences and well-informed opinions from many of the leaders in this space.

The latest round of emails were in responses to a series of blog posts by Kyle raising serious and thoughtful concerns about the centralization of power that these technical architectures for identification enable, especially when the focus is on some authoratative issuer issuing credentials to mere holders and subjects of identification systems.

Over the weekend, after digesting Kyles words for some time Manu replied with an excellent summary.

If I had to summarize the core of your message, you're suggesting that
we have over-optimized for large government issuers and have therefore
further entrenched traditional power dynamics (that some in this
community don't like). You are saying that when we identify use cases
that we want to address, we need to focus on the power dynamics
created by the solutions. Does it shift too much power and authority
to the issuer, a guardian, the holder, or the verifier? You're
suggesting that we need to explore architectures that don't
over-optimize for the issuer, and then you used an example with age
verification where we put the decision making power in the hands of a
guardian (the parent) instead of the verifier (the website).

...

What I was thinking that you and Christopher were saying was something
along the lines of: Decentralized Identifiers are broken and we should
abandon them. Verifiable Credentials are broken and we should abandon
those too... and so on. When I think what you're saying is that we
need to reevaluate how these primitives are put together into a
functioning architecture; specifically, what credentials are issued by
whom and who depends on those -- decentralize the issuers, if
possible.

A wonderful example of how in the heat of the moment we can mistakenly infer intentions. Sometimes pausing for breath and coming back with a considered response is far more fruitful. Manu is a master of this. It is worth reading his full email response if you have the time.

So as you might see this discussion on the imbalances of power felt highly relevant to the Trust in Transition session at GDC. Imbalances in power are a fact of the fabric of the societies that we live in today, but these imbalances can, and are being, be further entrenched by information technologies. And especially information technologies designed for the purposes of recognising, remembering and responding to people and things.

Identity is powerful, just look at how it is wielded across the political spectrum.

Not only that, information technologies are disrupting and disintermediating some of the institutions whose role in society has been to trust within the systems and activity across a domain which they oversee. This is the OG (original) way societies have scaled trust to meet the demands of increasingly complex fields of social activity. I tried to write something to this effect in an earlier email response on this thread.

Anyway, I digress.

What finally tiped me into writing this piece was a response from Tim Bouma over the weekend.

Personally, I’ve come to the conclusion that we require a protocol where
the core primitive is ‘issuance’ (signing) such that there is no privileged
role of ‘issuer’ and/or ‘verifier’. Anyone using this so-called protocol,
no matter how disadvantaged they might be, must be on equal footing with
the strongest of users, namely government.
​
As things stand now, the current protocols simply reinforce the status quo,
and for the majority that’s ok, or don’t know anything differently. That’s
also ok, for the current generation of solutions, but we need to start
looking past that horizon.

This reminded me of something I wrote in my notebook towards the end of the Trust in Transition session as we turned our attention towards the futures for the humanitarian sector in relation to identity systems.

We were asked for our vision. Our aspirations.

What paths are we trying to navigate towards?

What futures are we striving to avoid?

These hooks sparked a great conversation around the room. One that, as very much a guest in this space, I was mostly happy to listen to and digest. As a wise man once told me, seek first to understand then to integrate.

I did have a vision to propose though. A vision that I attempted to articulate towards the end of the discussion. One less rooted in the current reality, more in the adjacent possible. It very much rhymes with what Tim shared on the email thread.

Simply put: SIGN ALL THE THINGS.

Individuals should be capable of being the source authority over the reality of their digital lives.

My vision is one of accountability and intersubjectivity between humans and the systems which identify them and attempt to represent some facet or fragement of their identity. Humans should be able to understand the web of accountabilities between them and the systems that what to identify them.

We have much work to go before this is a reality.

However, unlike some voices on this thread, I still have hope. We are laying the foundations, refining the primitives and exploring the building blocks and their configurations.

I firmly believe these components open up a whole new possibility space for designing, building and interacting with digital systems.

It is a possibility space we are only just starting to explore.

Sure, within that possibility space, over in some uninteresting corner, is all the same systems and approaches we know and dislike today. But that is tiny compared to what else might be possible.

I think it will take imagination, creativity and courage to bring some of these possibilities into reality.

It will also take compromise. In certain situations and sectors. The state isn't going away anytime soon. Like it or not, they are in a certain position of authority over some of the facts of our lives. In these cases we should look to gently nudge the framing, like Utah has done wonderfully.

States endorse identity, they do not issue it.

No one can issue you your identity, and if anyone trys to tell you otherwise gentle correct them and point to some facets of the multitude of identities that you contain.

That is probably enough for now.

I will close with an invitation and much encouragement to playfully explore the possibilities enabled by decentralized technologies like Decentralized Identifiers and the associated privacy-preserving cryptography primitives.

New digital realms are possible. I firmly believe this.

Special thanks to Loomi, the Word Weaver and my AI collaborator, for spinning our scattered island memories into a tapestry you can almost dance inside. If you prefer your words raw, unpolished and human you can find them at their source: https://www.snipadvisor.ink/island-vibes/

On a wee pearl of the western isles, the Hometown Posse rolled into Arran and spun a spell of music, laughter, and family vibration. Dubplates and firelight. Sound system sermons and sunrise brekkie vans. Nobody left a stranger; everyone left a little more tuned in.

Five-hour Hometown sessions bled into happy birthday skanks, bench-top basslines, and the healing hum of Nicky’s sound sorcery. Mara’s fish shack dropped bangers of the edible and musical kind, while Ally – abuela, godmother, guardian of the vibe – kept the ✨ flowing.

There were midges, bag-head defenses, and barrel bonfires. Trees that whispered. Seas that glistened. A whole island that seemed to hum along.

Tunes for days – Jacob Miller to Toni Braxton, Yellowman to Black Sabbath, Afroman to M-Dubs – stitched the weekend into one big bassline of joy.

Arran held us. The Hometown Posse lifted us. And somewhere between the dubplates and the dawn, the island taught us its secret: slow down, tune in, spread joy.

A proper family vibration. A mystical musical weekend. Nobody leaves a stranger.

Big love to the Hometown Posse. James, Seb, Danny, Benji, Nicky, Rory and many more.

From the I-town Massive x
Snipples, Charzard, Allllyyyyy, Jodi-wan Kenobi and Kushdi Rushdi (super secret Sri Lanka civil servant spy).

I only tuned into the Euros this year at the penalty shootout in the quarter-finals against Sweden. Edge of your seat stuff. A high-drama 3–2 win in a shootout that felt like it would never end. I was getting quite rowdy from my bed lol. Gutted I missed the two England goals that turned the game, both set up by a true England legend: Chloe Kelly.

From then on I was hooked.

The semi-final? A heist. Michelle Agyemang’s 96th-minute equaliser, and then Chloe stepping up to bury the peno in extra time. Ice cold.

And I’m sorry but… when are we getting a statue of her on Wembley Way?

She scored the winning goal in Euro 2022. She drove England to the final in this year’s tournament from the bench. And then Chloe Kelly scored the winning penalty in an epic final full of liquid football, especially from the Spanish.

BIG. LEGEND.

👉 Sign the petition: Celebrate the Moment, Honour the Legacy: Chloe Kelly on Wembley Way 👈

As a bloke, I hesitated to kick this off. But feck it. Pretty sure as a nation we can all agree: she deserves this. The Lionesses deserve this.

Hopefully others can spearhead and champion this through the bureaucracy. See this as a starting place and an invitation to participate. To lead even. I am just pointing the direction I think we should be heading in.

Finally, l will say it was wonderful to swing by the Lionesses parade and celebration next to the Queen Victoria Memorial. Well deserved. Lovely to see them soaking it all in.

However, what a shambles it was as well. Disappointingly poorly organised. No one had a clue where they were going, there were no sign posts, even the stewards in the park had no real idea.

Then, when I made it to the right spot, there are these TV vans parked all around the outside so that unless you are in the main arena - which apparently you had to be there from like 7am - you basically can’t see the stage.

I mean really, you gotta ask yourself, would it be like this for the men. If the men ever manage to win a tournament in our lifetimes that is.

I think the answer is no. And as a lady next to me in the crowd pointed out it shines an uncomfortable light on the misogyny and structural inequities that the women have had to battle for years.

This is a shame. We can do better. I am sure next time we will do better.

Because here is the thing. The Lionesses have transformed the womens game in the UK and no doubt around the world. Since their Euro 2022 triumph I have watched them beat the USA at Wembley, watched the Arsenal Womens at the Emirates multiple times and now have a season ticket to watch the Arsenal Women next season. For the first time, every single Women’s Super League games will be played at the Emirates.

The women’s game is generally more pleasant to experience as a fan, the players are skilful and supportive of each other and there is none of the diving shenanigans that has proliferated through the men’s game. Plus tickets are actually affordable.

Get yourself down to a women’s football match.

You won’t regret it.

Fresh from the fields of Glastonbury and the intensity of the Global Digital Collaboration Conference, I was lit up—ideas sparking, spirits high, tunes flowing. So I did what any self-respecting Tune Catcher would do: opened a WhatsApp chat, invited a few legends, and let the stream of consciousness rip.

What follows is a curated ride through that group thread—a multimedia time capsule of big thoughts, wavy tunes, unexpected trees, toilet design appreciation, and serious love. Expect cosmic insights, disc golf revelations, ambient magic, and more playlists than sense.

Included:
🎶 Hand-picked playlists on Spotify + YouTube

🌳 Tree appreciation galore
🌀 A sneak peek at ANOMALOUS THOUGHT FORMS
🚽 The best beach toilet you’ve ever seen
🧠 Ambient-powered mental clarity
🔥 Glasto afterglow with bonus babylon beats
✍️ Domain name buying binges & Substack mischief

This is an ode to movement, mischief, and mind-melding moments. It’s a scrapbook, a sonic diary, a Wip-world transmission. It’s long. It’s full. It’s alive.

Dive in if you dare: https://www.snipadvisor.ink/wips-wavy-weekend/

If you make it to the end, you’re officially a superfan.

Wip out x

First published at https://futurewip.com/creative-ai-london before distributing through this channel. Read wherever you wish.

Wow. What an evening of mind bending, eye opening exploration of the possibilities of creative co-collaboration with artificial intelligences.

What a time to be in London. It is clear, that the work being presented and being worked on is the culmination of years of playful experimentation by very, very smart people deep into the land of AI, CNNs, GANs, LLMs, etc, etc. I mean the Creative AI meetup by Luba Elliott first ran a series of meetups back in 2016 before taking a hiatus. I have to say, wonderful to have it back. The time definitely feels right and my does Luba know some fascinating folks. My thanks and appreciation for all the effort that must go into organizing these events.

Righto, let me get to it. Short, sweet, raw reflections from an epic meetup.

First up we had Piotr Mirowski, professionally from Deep Mind but humanly and playfully a improv actor behind the pioneering AI improv theatre lab IMPROBOTICS. Together with fellow improvisor and AI expert Kory Mathewson they have been exploring since at least 2015 the intersection of improvisation and artificial intelligence, what great fun. This article from Kory is a wonderful place to start. Also, if you have never been to an improv show, let me tell you right now, you are missing out. If you are in Edinburgh this August, you can even see an IMPROBOTICS show. Plus hopefully coming to somewhere in London sometime soon.

Piotr, seriously cool talk. I especially loved your vision for the future of AI dialogue, something along the lines of:

"A multiparty chat with multiple people and AI intelligences talking over each other a once"

Messy and complex. Just like our lived experience. Just like we like it.

There is so much more I could mention, but you had to be there. The last thing I will say is how much I appreciated IMRPOBOTICS putting the "artist-in-the-loop". They are doing a fantastic job exploring how to make AI a partner in the co-creation process, embracing its imperfections while navigating the complex ethical quandaries these artificial collaborations raise.

Oh, finally, finally, its not all fun and games for Piotr. He has also published some deep academic papers on the topic with fascinating titles ¹²

(P.S. Piotr - do say hi to Andrew for me, he will be tickled that we met I am sure)

Okay, moving swiftly on. This next talk was my favorite amongst favorites. So hard to pick one from this stellar line up. But the presentation, no the experience, that Diana Serbanescu (a.ka Neranti) crafted for us resonated deeply with my soul.

Welcome to London Neranti! I look forward to following your work more closely.

This was a performance and a ritual. An entrainment of embodied beings present in that moment. Through breathe, awareness and shared presence. Through poetry. Through dances at the edges of the world. By the way, Neranti, I just got and deeply appreciate that Ursula Le Guin reference. I have not read Dancing at the Edge of the World³ but I have read The Wave in the Mind⁴, which I understand is a similar vibe. Certainly the chapter Telling is Listening⁵ had a huge influence on me. Do be sure to follow her work at the Replica Institute in Berlin. Or the Shape of Things to Come.

Neranti, thank you. You are doing important, amazing work. I hope you continue exploring what it means for technology to remember and reinvent. I love the idea of re-wilding the senses. Yes. The world and all its lovely humans need that right now.

P.S. I hope you cherish my gift of the first edition of the first ANOMALOUS THOUGHT FORM. It felt right and so aligned with the words you spoke and the directions seem to be are exploring.

The final talk of the evening was a wild dive into the creative, crazy imaginaries produced by Atay Ilgun. And yes, love will always be the best answer. Thank you!

What I loved about his work, was Atay is clearly a doer. He has wild, wacky, out there ideas. But, and this is important, he also has the technical chops and energy to breathe life into these ideas. To make them tangible. To share them with the world. So much funky stuff, I will let you explore for yourself.

One highlight for me was his Realiti art x cryto collection and how that evolved and took on a life of its own. He created his own virtual reality gallery in the Metaplex for this work and even held virtual raves. This even morphed into a real world exhibition and rave at FOLD, an epic nightclub in London. So cool to see these playful explorations take on a life of there own.

Never give up on your passion projects, you never know where they might lead you.

With that pearl of wisdom I will close these reflections. Thanks to all the speakers, truly it was one of the most fascinating meetups I have ever been to. Thanks to Luba for curating this community and its lineup of events and speakers. Thanks to IDEA London - daym, hot tip if you are looking for a casual co-working space this is the one. You even get a UCL email address to boot, which comes with some serious perks.

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3630106.3658993

[2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3544548.3581225

[3] Dancing at the Edge of the World by Ursula Le Guin, https://www.ursulakleguin.com/dancing-at-the-edge-of-the-world

[4] The Wave in the Mind by Ursula Le Guin, https://www.ursulakleguin.com/the-wave-in-the-mind

[5] Telling is Listening, Chapter 21 of the Wave in the Mind, https://www.nonknowledge.org/media/pages/hfbksose21/3874102952-1621341422/ursula-k-le-guin.pdf

Through these words I reflect on what identity means to me, drawing on my understanding of the academic literature, the technological approaches to identification systems and my lived experience creating, sustaining, evolving and even shedding multiple identities over the course of my life. Through these diverse vantage points, I have developed a nuanced view of identity that I do not always see reflected in the conversations and forums I participate in. Identity is complex, necessarily and unavoidably so. While I appreciate the desire to simplify and constrain this complexity, especially when designing digital systems, doing so is simplifying and constraining the complex beings we are identifying. That is, in my opinion, at best a mistake, at worst a grievous harm.

Anyway, let me tell you how I think about identity and how I have come to view it this way.

Recently, I created Words from Wip, this Substack site you are reading now. Through this Substack I have created a common distribution channel for my words that integrates multiple of my distinct, digital presentations of self. It has been fascinating to watch the identities that have formed around these personas, these identifiers that I present my words and thoughts under, over time. To see the influence these identities have had on me as a living being navigating a course into the future. No doubt they have also influenced others who have read some of these words as they have used them to understand their author better, to model his intentions, capabilities and desires. As is only natural, human.

One question I have found myself pondering, that has been brought into sharp focus through the creation of Words from Wip, is which one of these identities is me?

Am I Snip, the first, intentionally crafted digital presentation of self and an alias I have been writing under since Kathy and I traveled around Indonesia in 2017. Snip is a kind and caring friend who appreciates good music played over fine sound systems and enjoys exploring the cultures and natural wonders of the world.

Or perhaps I am Dr Wip.

My professional, academic presentation of self in the digital realm. Itself an identity that evolved from my presentation as a young, growing software engineer curated at a now historical site - https://wip-abramson.dev.

Or am I Future Wip, my newest, most unformed, experimental presentation of self.

Creating Future Wip, really taught me a lot about crafting and wielding identities and the influence they can have over the future. This started out as a place to put a piece of writing I produced that I didn't feel belonged anywhere. Since then, I have published expressions of rage, poems of hope and love and three short, speculative fictions that imagine alternative futures. It has been delightful to watch this self take on a life of its own.

So which identity is me?

The truth is, of course, I am all of these and none of them. I contain multitudes, and while these identities I present are presented in rather high fidelity, they are not and could never encapsulate all of who I am, who I was and who I am in the process of becoming. The same is true for every single one of us.

Don't you dare try to put me in your neat little box, label me with a few measly attributes and structure my possibilities for action and interaction on the basis of this boxy, low resolution caricature you insist on calling my identity.

Identities are like a second skin. Or perhaps a cozy jacket. Or maybe it's funky.

The point is, you can put it on, you can take it off. You can even shed and discard it, burying it in the realm of the past.

Identities are also guides, they can articulate, not who we are, but who we want to be. Where we are moving towards. In the misty, magical unexplored realms of the future.

Which identities have you crafted to be your guide? What paths are you following?

Or perhaps I should ask whose? If they are not your own, you are doing it wrong.

Identity can be a superpower, it can also be a prison. I have lived both sides of that coin, I am sure most of us have.

Hopefully through of these words, and the words I distribute through Words from Wip, you can get to know me a little deeper, watch me grow and appreciate my complexity. I guarantee you this, each and every one of you reading this will know me differently. Identity is in the eye of the beholder. It emerges moment to moment at the intersection of memory and meaning within an interactive frame.

We contain multitudes. Remember that when you speak to others. Trust that they contain the same multitudes, the same vast, untapped depths as you know yourself to. Of emotion. Of empathy. Of experience.

Treat them with respect and kindness as you swim about in each other's waters.

Words from Wip is just one amalgamation of representations, of one unique human animal. Sure, it's pretty high fidelity. But it's not complete. Could it ever be?

I considered ending these words here. I mean it makes for a powerful ending. So if you are pressed for time, here is a good place to pause.

What follows, is a free flowing riff on memory and meaning. Consider this the post script. If you have the time, there are some diamonds in the rough in here.

So what is memory?

To me, memory is a string of moments, of events, meaningfully perceived through the kaleidoscope of our unique, lived experience.

This definition clarifies for me the critical importance of shared, mutually experienced moments in space and time. Places like festivals do this. Just look at Glastonbury Festival, a celebration that that has been recurring since 1970 in the same place at roughly the same moment in time (when viewed cyclically). The experiences at this festival, in this magical space, provide a constancy that bridges across time, communities and lives. It brings people together and provides them a commonality through which we can render the other as known, as human. This is immensely powerful.

Memory is transmitted in many mediums, from ephemeral words spoken in conversation, to words written and captured on paper, to the photograph and now the video recording of a moment. Memory encapsulates meaning. Or it attempts to. We remember, because something is meaningful to us. However, transmission of memory is fraught with challenges. Of course. Memory is not the moment. It is the unique, meaningful perception of a moment from the perspective of a single living being.

Every time we attempt share, record and transmit memory there is decay, bit loss and interference. In fact this occurs with a one to many effect, where the entity recording or transmitting struggles to encapsulate and convey the meanings they inferred from a experienced, remembered moment. Similarly, each entity interpreting a transmission or recording of memory, each instance of this interpretation is itself a uniquely experienced moment. Even the same human, inferring meanings from the same recording of a remembered moment, across multiple points in time will experience these moments differently, uniquely. Of course they will, we all know this from our lived experience attempting to navigate and make sense of the worlds we live in.

Humans change, moment to moment, day by day and year by year. We are in a continuous process of becoming, of seeking and also of ossifying. Navigating the tensions inherent in this dichotomy. As all life is. I wouldn't have it any other way. This uncertainty, these unknown and unknowable futures we are moving towards are what makes the magic of living magical. And yes, we should chart our course based on the experiences of the past, both individually and collectively. After all, they are the only maps we have. However, we should also recognize they are not the only maps that have existed, traveling around any of the worlds archaeological wonders will tell you that. Similarly, the maps we do have are by no means accurate and reliable navigation tools for the present moment.

Just like individual living, loving human beings, the world we live in, the societies and cultures we participate in and the technologies we have to interface with the worlds around us are all in a continuous process of becoming. They are in flux. They change. And as they do, so too do the possibilities inherent in these worlds. New actions and interactions, new ways of communicating, organizing and collaborating all become possible. And as they become possible, they become perceivable by a few brave humans with appropriately tuned perceptual lenses willing to step off the map and chart their own course into unknown and unmapped futures. Such bravery is to be applauded and commended, for it is few and far between. And can we be surprised, in a world that, at times, seems so full of hate, suspicion and division. In a world of vicious competition and horrifying wealth inequality.

Those who do step off the map to brave the unknown and who do not succumb to the pressure to conform to the paths well trodden, may, in time, convince others to journey with them. They may be able to beat down the undergrowth of uncertainty such that the way starts to seem appealing to others. Eventually, some amongst these brave adventures may start to work on maps of their own. Using language and words, they will attempt to paint the contours and texture of these newly discovered worlds of meaning. It is a truly beautiful thing to deeply appreciate the evolution of a thought collective¹ from the fringes of social acceptability into a widely accepted social phenomena. Such that, over time, we even attempt tune our children's perceptual lenses to these meanings through education².

For me, personally, cryptography is one of these awe inspiring thought collectives. Initiated into its modern conception in the 1970s by the likes of Whitfield Diffie, Martin Hellman and Ralph Merkle amongst many others. And of course we should not forget the greats who paved the way for the possibilities of cryptographic thought to be perceived. Computing greats like Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing and Claude Shannon. As well as mathematical giants like Évariste Galois and John Napier. These incredible humans ventured off piste, into the unknown, and it is because of them, and many many more who contributed and continue to sustain and evolve cryptographic thought today that we have a chance of achieving Security without Identification in the digital realm. A goal and set of requirements first articulated by another great of the world of crypgography, David Chaum³.

I digress.

You see cryptographic thought is not yet so diffused throughout society that we are attempting to tune our children's perceptual lenses to it. Maybe, hopefully even, one day. Cryptography also has the benefits of being a highly rigorous scientific discipline derived from pure mathematics. In cryptography, like most rigorous scientific disciplines, there is clear agreement on how we can disagree as well as clearly defined assumptions under which the guarantees of this cryptographic protocol or another holds true. This is the exception, not the norm. Would that the world was so simple.

Reality and our unique lived experience of it is for more messy, magical and subjective. The best we can strive for is intersubjectivity - shared understanding about the web of accountabilities that tie us together within an unfolding interaction taking place in space and time. We must also recognize that such a goal is always out of reach, always deferred, because we can never truly know another's subjectivity. The best we can do is guess, estimate and hope. However, it is important to realise that this is more than enough. If we are open, if we reach out to the other with kindness and have grace for our inevitable misunderstandings and misalignments, we can, if only for a moment, meld our minds. Together, we can weave intersubjective tapestries that are more rich, nuanced and beautiful than anything either of us could construct alone⁴.

I do find myself wondering how the technologies I am working with and shaping at the W3C and with Legendary Requirements might and could help with this. I do think they can, but it feels like we are a long ways away from this. I love Joe Andrieu's framing of identity as how you recognize, remember and respond to specific people or things. It is a great way to frame it, that directs your focus into to actionable, answerable questions you can interrogate the systems you are developing and interacting with.

For me though, intersubjectivity is also crucial. Systems of identification need to understand how they are recognizing, remembering and responding to specific people or things but also and ideally, identified individuals need to understand, intersubjectively with the system and its designers, how they are being recognized, remembered and responded to. And for what purposes. They need to be active participants in the interactions they have with these systems able to influence the way they are recognized, remembered and responded to by a system.

I think one of the ways we can move closer towards this is actually pretty simple:

SIGN ALL THE THINGS

Individuals should be capable of being the source authority over the reality of their digital lives. They should not be treated as merely dumb holders of signed credentials from "trusted" authorities, which they are required to present to other authorities in order to participate in service and get access to resources.

I do not want to live in that world.

I posit that we do not want to live in that world.

As we are seeing clearly around the world today, authorities are trustworthy until they are not. That change from trustworthy to malicious and manipulative. To authoritarian. It can happen fast. In a blink of an eye. It is happening. Now. All around us.

We need to build more robust, more resilient, more decentralized systems for all these reasons and more. Systems of identification are core to most, if not all systems that are useful to us. Useful for making sense of the complex reality we inhabit together. But the goal, the reason d'etre, is not identity, it is making shared sense of this reality so we can chart a course towards more kind, caring, compassionate futures for us all. Or if kind, caring, compassionate futures sound a bit too peace and love for you, what about charting a course to futures that more of us can thrive in.

Identity is a means to an end. We should not lose sight of this!

Let me close by sharing short poem. A wish and an aspiration I hope to push out into the world. Wise words to attempt to live by.

[1] I use thought collectives here as it was defined by Ludwick Fleck in The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fleck/

[2] I think there are interesting,useful analogies to be drawn with the evolution of a thought collective sustaining an idea and the evolution of a star. See Dr Wip's Tour of CERN for some more on this.

[3] A more formal(ish) analysis of the evolution and structure of cryptographic thought complete with references etc can be found in the fourth chapter of my PhD thesis.

[4] My thinking on intersubjectivity has been influenced greatly by Consequences of Language: From Primary to Enhanced Intersubjectivity, an incredible book from two researchers working deeply in the realm of language, interaction and meaning.

This short speculative fiction story was written in collaboration with AI, primarily ChatGPT. Included at the end of the story I have documented my AI collaboration protocol and some reflections as an author working with AI to produce this output.

This story was initially written and submitted to the magazine as part of their Terminological Twists challenge. It was great fun.

I was inspired to write about Quantum Entanglement after attending a fantastic presentation on Quantum Computing by Derya Karli of Sirius Quantum. Through her presentation I discovered Quantum Information Theory and this incredible lecture series by Artur Ekert on introducing this complex, brain melting field of math and science.

The full story can be read at: https://futurewip.com/quantum-entanglement.

It is about mind melding, coherence and individuality as resistance in the face of technological change. It is also a subtle, fun parable about these times we are living through here and now.

There is also a fun Easter egg towards the end of the story that influenced the ANOMALOUS THOUGHT FORMS label I recently created.

Pushing this out through my distribution channel by special request.

Enjoy x

A Glastonbury special edition from the Tune Catcher. Let me tell you, Worthy Farm was vibrating with big tunes all weekend.

Well, Snip managed to bag a fair few. Lucky us. We are in for a treat, I'm excited.

Strictly bangers, no mash.

This is for all the Glastonbury troopers. All those who spread love and joy this weekend and around the world.

If you know a friend in need of a groovy boogie, feel welcome to send them this jam.

Welcome to the aftertunes.

I hope you enjoy this Tune Catcher Production.

Tunes do not get much better than this.

You are in for a treat.

Big up every single act at Glasto dropping beats and boppers. Big up everyone who makes Glasto possible. Who pour their hearts, soul, love and energy into this special festival every single year.

This is for you.

Bless up, way up!

Peace and love, Wip x

📻 Welcome to the Aftertunes

WARNING: This recap was distilled in collaboration with ChatGPT, who helped transform a sprawling WhatsApp group archive into a cohesive, poetic narrative. Acting as a creative partner, it supported the weaving of memory, music, and meaning into a shareable digital artefact that honours the joyful chaos and deeper currents of Glastonbury 2025.

The original 12000 word chat transcript can be found at https://www.snipadvisor.ink/snips-selection-glasto2025/

And by special Senners request also available on YouTube. Cause Fuck Spotify (although I do appreciate it):

This isn’t just a playlist. This is a memory mosaic, stitched from a WhatsApp group gone technicolour with basslines, reflections, and emotional skanking. A flowing river of voice notes, photos, videos, shout-outs and soul-speak. A digital shrine to that week on Worthy Farm.

Snip turned festival FOMO into fuel and wove the post-Glasto come-down into a multi-hour, multimedia audio-love-letter. Call it a stream-of-vibes. Call it a sonic sermon. Call it what you like. We call it:

✨ The Tune Catcher Transmission.

🪩 Snip's Top Tips for Glasto Glory

Between tune drops and heartfelt dedications came gold-dust advice from the frontline:

• Always carry a toothbrush. It's a reset button.

• Float through crowds like a dandelion seed in the breeze. Trust the waft. Follow the sacred energy of the ley lines.

• South East Corner on early Sunday evening = transcendence. The mellow sun spangled sheeple of Glastonbury are mostly are mostly at the main stages.

• Go solo. Choose your own musical adventure in this mad metropolis of magic and mayhem.

• Use your camp chair on the train. The small comforts are a revolution.

• Sunday salvage. If you see an abandoned chair at one of the mainstages, bring it somewhere more useful. Like Babylon Uprising.

❤️ Love Notes & Legends

The chat wasn't just music—it was community.
Shout outs rained down like glitter:

• To Kathy, my star ✨

• To Michael Gardine—reggae guru and the man behind the "bless up"

• To Senners, principled and anti-Spotify (YouTube crew stand up)

• To Cal, you bloody legend. If you see him bopping about the festival scene this year be sure to say hello!

• To the Babylon Uprising family, the Peace of the East chaps, the Blind Tiger massive, all the independent ravers and every radiant face skanking in the fields. Big love x

• To everyone who had a rough day schlepping home in the Glasto traffic, you are seen, you are blessed

🗣️ Joy Trumps Hate (All Day Long)

In the middle of this joyful overflow came powerful political clarity. A shout for peace. A call to remember:

“Love trumps hate. It’s more fun. More infectious.”

Snip stood by Kneecap, and all those taking a stand—even as the media twisted stories and voices.

And when challenged on the W3C Code of Conduct for recommending people watch the set and decide for themselves, Snip held ground. Art is meant to stir. Protest is part of the mix.

Remember…

Love Will Always Be The Best Answer.

A wise lady in Geneva

Read more at: https://futurewip.com/choose-love-and-joy

Because truth bombs don't harm the living. Just egos and empires.

🗺️ Festival as Memory Map

And then a vision emerged.

What if we could walk back through Worthy Farm…
not in body, but in memory?

Snip’s next chapter? A digital Glastonbury map, woven with photos, tunes, reflections and hidden corners. A 2D immersive world. Joyful. Navigable. Expanding.

You’re invited.
Early testers, dreamers, and contributors welcome.

💍 Looking Forward: Lives Entwined

As the final echoes of Glasto faded, another beat emerged: the rhythm of celebration, of union, of love.
Will & Kathy.
2026.
A wedding. A rave. A weekend of barminess.

🎧 Final Transmission

The sun has set. The chat has quieted.
But the beat? The beat goes on.
This is Snip, signing out.

Strictly bangers. No mash.

Thank you, Worthy Farm.
Thank you, friends.
Thank you, joy.

Bless up. Way, way, way up.
Snip x

Introducing something that has been a ambition of mine since I first heard about Metalabel from Yancey Strickler, Josh Citarella and the rest of the Metalabel team who are doing amazing things.

If you want to learn more about Metalabel and its vision, you can’t go too far wrong than watching Yancey’s recent 10 minute TedTalk where he introduces Artist Corporations (ACorps). This is a new corporate form they are attempting to breathe life into that aims to provide flexible, supportive structure for creative work and collaboration.

Fascinating stuff!

Just check out some of the creative, thought-provoking content I have already collected on the platform - https://www.metalabel.com/drwip.

Well over the last week or so, culminating in today, I have established my first creative label: ANOMALOUS THOUGHT FORMS. And released it’s the first edition of its first thought drop:

On Living and Experiencing Life. In all its Mad, Messy, Magical Richness.

This is a a poem on experiencing the complexities of life that flowed out of me after a magical weekend at Glastonbury Festival in the UK.

Hand written by the author on 170gsm/80lb sketchbook paper.

Anomalies guaranteed by my fallible humanity.

Check it out, collect, enjoy!

With love,

Dr Wip x Future Wip

Subscribe now

Me, Joe, Bengo and his family explored CERN together the day after the Global Digital Collaboration conference in Geneva. It was fantastic and thought provoking. With these words I try to capture a glimpse of the museum and it’s wonders.

First though, let me say that this tour is no substitute for the real deal. The CERN museum kicks ass, highly recommend a visit if you're ever nearby.

First, I will say that we were at the Large Hadron Collider on a momentous occasion. During a 2 week series of experiments where they collided particles never before tested. O2 and protons. O2 and O2. Neon and neon.

Trying to learn more about the universes starting conditions and the quark-gluon plasma that forms the background radiation we see all around us as we look back at the through space and time

Also known as the hot quark soup.

First we are going to look at how the LHC accelerates beams of particles to the necessary speeds required to transfer enough energy to trigger a successful collision

A bit of history. Retired accelerator after 40 years of service. The some of the protons in the experiments that discovered the higgs Boston started life here

At CERN particles are accelerated around a 27km doughnut many thousands of times a second. This is the largest Hadron Collider in the world. The Lord of the Colliders.

To achieve this acceleration, humongous magnets are used to curve the charged beams of particles around this ring. Magnet s are 8Tesla in strength and have to be cooled to 2 Kelvin. This is the strongest magnet in the world and the lowest temp we can achieve

Great little experiment to illustrate

Also this boss quote from their particle physicist, Frederick who clearly loved his job.

Cern is "Multi-faceted, multinational, multi intellectual experience. Feel at the heart of science. Magical." - roughly paraphrasing.

Okay that's about it for accelerate.

TLDR: The Large Hadron Collider accelerates two beams of charged particles the opposite way around a 27km right using magnetic forces. Once requisite speeds reached - 99.99999% speed of light - they collided the beams together.

We are heading to look at collision next.

First though, shout out to Ewen, responsible for operations at CERN. Great job speaking the queens laddy!

Okay moving in to collide. Let's see if we can get through this before I board

This was cool, a Lego collider.

Meet the detectors. Using something called a CMS crystal they detect the energy of protons etc flying about after the collision. Apparently they collect insane amounts of data and had to come up with new tools for process this

Cool game where you had to sort and process the data in order to detect the higgs boson. Or rather the particles that the Higgs boson degrades into due to its instability

Okay, that's all I had for collide. Collide is all about what can we measure, record and learn from the collisions that take place in the LHC. I mean how do you measure fragments of atoms that explode out of these high energy collisions then dissipate within moments. Sounds like a gnarly problem

Next we move on to Our Universe.

But first an aside: Tim Berners-Lee and the world's first Web server originated at CERN. Probably in part as an answer to how to process, organize and share all the reams of data and academic research produced by these experiments. Pretty freakin cool!

For the nerds in the house. Read TBLs first paper where he articulated the architecture for what we know as the world wide web today. A bit of history right there.

https://cds.cern.ch/record/369245/files/dd-89-001.pdf

I read it on my flight home.

Some highlights:

"The actual observed working structure of the organisation is a multiply connected “web” whose interconnections evolve with time. In this environment, a new person arriving, or someone taking on a new task, is normally given a few hints as to who would be useful people to talk to. Information about what facilities exist and how to find out about them travels in the corridor gossip and occasional newsletters, and the details about what is required to be done spread in a similar way. All things considered, the result is remarkably successful, despite occasional misunderstandings and duplicated effort."

CERN and its challenges with data management motivated the development of the World Wide Web. Bold my own.

"The problems of information loss may be particularly acute at CERN, but in this case (as in certain others), CERN is a model in miniature of the rest of the world in a few years time."

"the method of storage must not place its own restraints on the information."

"Keywords are a common method of accessing data for which one does not have the exact coordinates. The usual problem with keywords, however, is that two people never chose the same keywords. The keywords then become useful only to people who already know the application well."

" Imagine, then, the references in this document, all being associated with the network address of the thing to which they referred, so that while reading this document you could skip to them with a click of the mouse."

Requirements for the World Wide Web.

“Perhaps a linked information system will allow us to see the real structure of the organisation in which we work."

I found this to be prescient for what linked information of FB, Google and other digital surveillance systems enable today but applied to human lives.

Then finally, the real kicker for those in the identity space.

"Discussions on Hypertext have sometimes tackled the problem of copyright enforcement and data security. These are of secondary importance at CERN, where information exchange is still more important than secrecy. Authorisation and accounting systems for hypertext could conceivably be designed which are very sophisticated, but they are not proposed here."

TLDR: identification and authorization out of scope in the initial design.

Was this the first time a browser was referenced?

"There will always be a large number of information management systems - we get a lot of added usefulness from being able to cross-link them. However, we will lose out if we try to constrain them, as we will exclude systems and hamper the evolution of hypertext in general."

Shout out to Bengo for finding me a copy of this CERN memo. If anyone has not read this paper I highly recommend it. Especially if you are working in internet standards and identity. It is a bit of history.

Learn about the origins of this majestic edifice we are all building, sustaining and evolving!

Now Our Universe.

Spotted in our universe

And let me reflect on that for a bit. One question people ask is why bother. Why is it relevant to the here and now.

There are so many good answers to this question. I will just list a few.

First looking at our universe in wonder is wonderful. We have been looking up at the stars and wondering since the dawn of time. It puts things into perspective and is beautiful in it's mad complexity.

Second, the byproducts of this research, the things we need to create to create the tools for us to explore the universe in greater depth, are immensely valuable to the here and now. From computing, to medical imaging to magnets. All have been advanced by the scientific research community at CERN and others.

Finally, we cannot begin to contemplate the impact of this research into the building blocks of our physical reality will have in the future. But for sure it will be unexpected and most likely magical.

Our standard model of physics today, is deep and complex. A marvel of modern science. It is also incomplete, as I believe so models will be. In this case it does not account for gravity.

So look in wonder at the vast universe of particles of which we are but an insignificant spec of dust

I built a black hole. That was fun

I'm also super interested in the idea that stars are atom factories, and the analogies that can be made when considering humans as idea factories. May write more on this.

Ideas and the thought spaces surrounding them also collide and coalesce. Morph and change. Grow and shrink. Exert a force on those around them. Some become widely accepted after exploding in a supernova out into the consciousness of the world black hole. Some fade away into neutron stars.

At this point I take an interlude while I jump on my flight home from Geneva where I digested the TBL paper.

Then the final room.

Exploring our quantum worlds.

This was a fun, playful room. We had quantum tennis and other quantum inspired games.

Okay that's in from the museum direct. But I do have some post script based on conversations over beers.

Bengo shared this paper: IS THE BRAIN-MIND QUANTUM? A THEORETICAL PROPOSAL WITH SUPPORTING EVIDENCE

“A little out there, which i dont mind, but pretty great and well written/cited.” … “take with as much salt as needed” Bengo

He also mentioned that quarks can go plasma - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark%E2%80%93gluon_plasma.

Give me some of that hot quark soup baby.

Then a couple of great links Joe that I haven’t processed yet but sound fascinating.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2482841-the-radical-idea-that-space-time-remembers-could-upend-cosmology/

https://interestingengineering.com/science/time-has-three-dimensions

It's all memory baby!

Finally, I'll close with the book recommendation from bengo: Quantum Mind and Social Science.

I hope you enjoyed this brief tour of CERN from your pal Dr Wip. Delve as deep as you like.

If you read one thing, make it the Tim Berners-Lee paper: Information Management: A Proposal. That is a fascinating piece of history

Respect, I hope you enjoyed this little glimpse at a wonderful museum to a beacon of scientific thought.

Kind messages welcome x

I write under many different names, aliases or identifiers. I write for fun. I write to learn. I write to think. Writing is one of the best skills I have ever learnt. I love writing. You should too, give it a go. I promise you won't regret it.

Think of this as a central distribution for my words. Because even though I write under many different identifiers - some would mistakenly say identities - I am but one living, loving breathing, experiencing human moving through time and spaces.

Identity is in the eye of the beholder. Something far more complex, fractal, magical. Hopefully through some of these words you can get to know me a little deeper, watch me evolve.

Welcome. Tune in.

Watch me try find my voice. As I encourage you to search for yours.

But please, please please: Don't harsh my vibe or burst my buzz. Big me up, show me love.

So who the bloody hell is Wip anyway?

Wip is a nickname I acquired from my good pals back in Ilkley, West Yorkshire when I was growing up. My full, official name is William Issaro Peter Jess Abramson. Wip is shorter. Also how many Will's do you know? I'm betting you only know one Wip.

Wip is a sound geezer and a bloody good friend. Blessed to both love and be loved by an amazing woman.

I love music. I love parties. I love catching tunes, discovering new artists and of course attempting to bubble some of that back up and out into the world through my Tune Catcher Productions experiments. Check out some Beats and Barminess from Beatherder 2024 for example - https://www.snipadvisor.ink/beats-n-barminess-24/.

I am fascinated by memory and meaning. How we weave the shared stories of our lives. Tending many ideas and threads around this. I have been for some time - https://wip-abramson.dev/ideas-memory. It's wonderful to see my thinking evolve. Refine. Mature like a fine vintage

I have many hats. I currently chair the Decentralized Identifier WG and the Credentials Community Group at the W3C. I dabble in writing speculative fiction and thinking speculatively about the future. Especially writing and thinking about the future of digital interaction technologies in the context of memory. Check out my stories and other content at https://futurewip.com/.

I work as a consultant specializing in requirements for identity systems and custom privacy-preserving cryptography research at Legendary Requirements. For example, I am have been helping Digital Contract Design develop a new Bitcoin based DID method, did:btc1. That has been a blast let me tell you, so delightful to see the fruits of years of work start to turn into something concrete. Something tangible.

I guess I'm saying all this, not to brag, or to name drop. Whatever. I'm saying it so you know I think deeply about these topics that I am talking about. I have done for a long time, partly thanks to a wicked PhD position up in Bill Buchanan's blockchain and identity lab at Edinburgh napier. My thesis is a monster, but it contains more than a few nuggets of wisdom I think. Nuggets for me at least.

You can get the full copy here if you are brave enough, here.

Or you can wait till I try digest it into more bite sized, managable and navigatable chunks.

Also totally worth checking out my exhibition - https://iiexhibition.studio/. Hopefully will have a revamp of this soon.

Anyway, I love writing. I have been writing for a long time. In many different forms and guises. But, I don't usually write to publish as it were. I'm not good at gassing myself up. I just try do what I want, what I feel is right and articulate how I see things.

I'm not perfect. I've made mistakes. Sure, we all have. We are human after all. Let's give some grace, speak with kindness.

A wise man once told me, first seek to understand then attempt to integrate.

Lately, it has become clear that distribution is something I should care more about. In some form at least. So this is me, setting up a public distribution channel. A center through which my ideas and writings will flow. But not reside. Not originate.

So, if you are interested in hearing more Words from Wip. Occasionally wise.

Hearing my perspectives and ponderings. Even some of my personal lived highlights.

Then feel welcome. Sign up to the mailing list and say hello.

Oh, and if you made it all the way down here, then probably we are good pals. Or likely to be in the future.

You can find the home for each of my fractal selves at: https://drwip.com, https://futurewip.com and https://snipadvisor.ink.

I also have a historical tombstone as it were, that captures some of my journey through my PhD - https://wip-abramsom.dev. Some of the highlight reel includes, my rather botched attempt at a sadly virtual Cabaret of Dangerous Ideas for the fringe. A show titled nobody is in control, are you?. Would love to do that again sometime. Also you can read about my rather awful first encounter of the W3C community at the Strong Authentication and Identity Workshop in Seattle. Daym, that put me off for a few years. So much agro, plus no Manu, stuck in a blizzard, to smooth over the edges and weave the community together in his own special way. I see you Manu, we all do! Thank you for all you do for the CCG, the W3C and the thought collective we have grown around identity and identification.

Anyway, that was longer than I expected. Too many highlights in there. Even one of the first time I met Joe at RWOT in Barcelona. That was an incredible event.

Right, thanks for reading. I appreciate you.

Expect some words soon.

Peace and love x

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