Hey @DanHassan thanks for watching my patchy lightning talk. This topic is a central thread or lens I hold so stoked to be talking about it!

First off, I'm a lazy ass academic, I read a little and discuss and extrapolate a lot. I originally encountered the idea listening to this talk by Jonathon Blow about how the gaming industry is evolving : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxFzf6yIfcc
He does a great job of introducing the idea with examples from movies + tv, and then talks about how that relates to free to play games.
Hey @DanHassan thanks for watching my patchy lightning talk. This topic is a central thread or lens I hold so stoked to be talking about it!

First off, I'm a lazy ass academic, I read a little and discuss and extrapolate a lot. I originally encountered the idea listening to this talk by Jonathon Blow about how the gaming industry is evolving : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxFzf6yIfcc
He does a great job of introducing the idea with examples from movies + tv, and then talks about how that relates to free to play games.

I may have read other things around this lightly but not to much. I feel totally licensed to fork and mutate the idea... no-one has told me I'm too off-piste yet!

Here's my current hot take

I think about medium as in "medium via which things act on other things". a.k.a. substrate / format / protocol. With this broad definition we could cover : music as a mode, or CD based music vs Spotify based music, or legal structures, or cryptography.

You know the phrase "cypherspace is the space made possible by cryptography". That is the medium is the message. Unpacking that sentence more :

Cypherspace is the possibility-space of interactions which is made possible by cryptography.

But further to that, the possibility space isn't of uniform topology... it's a terrain which has different contours than did previous media (e.g. plaintext). Many domains of study talk about energy landscapes (or topologies), e.g. biochemistry, physics, machine learning

The idea is that the height represents energy states, so lower in the graph = lower energy = more stable. In this topology you can imagine if you put a marble at the top is would clunk around but end up in that low point there in the graph.
In our case the marble might represent "how are we communicating with friends", and the shape of that landscape is being created by many variables - where/ when we are in the world, what our socio-economic status is, how much awareness of s
I may have read other things around this lightly but not to much. I feel totally licensed to fork and mutate the idea... no-one has told me I'm too off-piste yet!

Here's my current hot take

I think about medium as in "medium via which things act on other things". a.k.a. substrate / format / protocol. With this broad definition we could cover : music as a mode, or CD based music vs Spotify based music, or legal structures, or cryptography.

You know the phrase "cypherspace is the space made possible by cryptography". That is the medium is the message. Unpacking that sentence more :

Cypherspace is the possibility-space of interactions which is made possible by cryptography.

But further to that, the possibility space isn't of uniform topology... it's a terrain which has different contours than did previous media (e.g. plaintext). Many domains of study talk about energy landscapes (or topologies), e.g. biochemistry, physics, machine learning

The idea is that the height represents energy states, so lower in the graph = lower energy = more stable. In this topology you can imagine if you put a marble at the top is would clunk around but end up in that low point there in the graph.
In our case the marble might represent "how are we communicating with friends", and the shape of that landscape is being created by many variables - where/ when we are in the world, what our socio-economic status is, how much awareness of surveillance there is, and in our particular example what encryption does to that space.

So we're watching over the past 10 years as this marble (communication amongst our friends) rolls around, and we've seen the rise of the smart phone and messaging apps and it has opened new possibility spaces - I can leave the house without a plan and make it up as I move. I can broadcast an event and people can say "maybe", I can meet strangers in a 1 mile radius and make out with them. The message isn't the dick picks or the short messages we're sending, the message is the fact that the substrate of our communicate has changed our culture, our ways if interacting.

The rant about energy topologies is that this is always changing - just because snapchat was popular doesn't mean it's the end point, we're still rolling. The same is especially true with crypherspace - there's a rise in awareness (and demand) for e2e encryption, for companies to have no access to what it is we've written, but the really whack stuff that we're only starting to dable with is content addressable storage.... content that is no longer bound to location... it has true names. The ramifications of that are far reaching and I have some idea of what it's could do to society, but who knows exactly yet.