Protocol updates: a new look at what Basis is

Andrew Lyon - Oct 8, 2021

Wow, it's been over a year since the last update. It wasn't my intention to give no updates on this project for this long, but life and the complications it brings have slowed down my work on Basis. It hasn't stopped my work though, and short of death itself, few things hold the power to keep me from what I'm passionate about.

The reason for my passion is that I view Basis as a solution to an existential threat: the relationship between humanity and our environment. The larger the population of humankind on this planet, the more important this relationship becomes. It is my belief that we are gaining collective awareness of this relationship in important ways, however our current economic and social systems do not facilitate a medium for this awareness to grow or develop.

Stepping back and looking at Basis, one could call it a method of socialist organization, or a protocol for a resource-based economy, but these things are incidental. They are in support of the ultimate vision: Basis is a system of collective awareness. It's a way to measure and mediate humanity's relationship with the environment.

Although this is a recent revelation, keeping the idea of systemic collective awareness in my head while working on the project has been helpful and has opened up other possibilities for either expanding the protocol to other areas, but also removing parts that are not relevant to this goal. This work has been ongoing, and is being reflected in a new version of the project paper.

Working on a new paper

Outside of my own head, the Basis project itself lives in the paper (and partly in the project tracker as well). However, I realized a while ago that the organization of the paper and many of the concepts in it are convoluted and confusing.

I've been working on a new paper that treats Basis as what it is: a protocol. It breaks down this protocol into the components that make it up, and the interactions between these components. It also uses some new terminology that will hopefully paint a clearer picture of the different parts of the protocol. I also made the mistake in the last paper of tightly weaving together the protocol itself and other systems for interacting with the outside world. Because of this, it can be hard to tell what is Basis at its core and what is a system for interfacing with the capitalist system around us. The new paper will make these distinctions much clearer, and will segment these different parts into their own sections.

I have been working on this new version of the paper for quite a few months now. It's going well, and I'm hoping it will much more effectively communicate the inner workings of the project. Many of the ideas are still not fully formed, and will remain in the project tracker for ongoing discussion, so stop by and tell us your thoughts!

I am posting regular updates to the new paper, so if you are interested you can follow progress here.

Visualizing the protocol

On top of the paper, I believe the paper and the people reading it will benefit from more visualizations, so it's my plan to create and include them, even if simplistic. Here's a high-level view of the protocol as it exists now:

I intended to create a number of helpful visualizations when I made the how Basis works page but I'm beginning to think I approached it too much from a marketing standpoint, and I really need to remake the page as more of a guide to understanding the protocol.