Been thinking more about our discussions around how to include guests in the broader sphere of Embassy’s operations, and I’m starting to form more of a coherent understanding of one way to approach it. As things start to stabilize for us financially, with regards to resident recruitment efforts, I feel I can start to dedicate a bit more energy to proposing protocolizations of certain Embassy processes. Below are some articulations around this, and I’m curious if any of it resonates with any of you!
- The long term residents are the primary operational stewards of Embassy, and, along with Will/Jessy/Robbie, have the most at stake in Embassy’s well-being. Its a high-trust core of people, and thus the barrier to entry is suitably high.
- Operational responsibility for Embassy is extremely nuanced and requires a great deal of accrued context and tacit attunement to dynamic (and often ‘chaotic’ - see Cynefin framework) systems, which can make delegation difficult, as its largely a primal matter of calibrating ones instincts rather than following explicit protocols. That said, as a believer in protocolization, I do believe fuzzy processes can be protocolized given the proper conceptualization efforts.
- @zzZarinah is, in my mind, a brilliant example of what could be considered “embodied cybernetic stewardship” for the lack of a better term haha, i.e. someone who is able to effectively steward a ‘chaotic system’ (i.e. characterized by a lack of discernibly deterministic cause/effect dynamics) like Embassy. Hundreds of people have stayed here, of whom there have likely been a few dozen who have taken on some degree of operational responsibility for Embassy. That Zarinah has retained a sense of operational responsibility, and has accrued this much tacit context of how Embassy works, speaks volumes to me. That said, I believe chaotic systems are only chaotic until their patterns are discerned and protocolized, which is what I’m encouraging us to consider (and which I believe is central to the ontology of conscious intelligence, fwiw)
- Guests generally choose to stay at Embassy, instead of other places, for a certain sense of intentionality. Some guests are excited to contribute to the collective stewardship of Embassy, whereas others simply enjoy the domestic camaraderie. To Z’s point about setting guests up to fail, I personally think its worthwhile to uphold a certain distinction in how we expect and encourage guests to show up. Specifically, I think there is an “outer cortex” of easily protocolizable tasks and responsibilities which can be broadly delegated to the arbitrary set of guests we have at any given point, and an “inner core” of high-context responsibilities that are only really tenable for those of us who have
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- spent a great deal of time and effort observing and orienting (before deciding and acting) within Embassy as a chaotic system, and building up a measure of tacit context,
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- earned the trust of the other residents/stakeholders, and
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- allocated some bandwidth and willingness to dedicate to un(der)paid domestic labor in a vocational capacity (worth recognizing, imo, that certain societally critical work is not legible to our broader economic system, which is where intentional living can decidedly defy market logic)
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- Even among long-term residents, I do believe the Pareto principle holds, especially while the system in question is chaotic qua un-protocolized; that is, in gradually protocolizing more of the care-work which goes into Embassy, we can smooth the curve a bit. That said, I do believe some of this is an example of where the Pareto principle reflects a certain state-dependent degree of efficiency, i.e. dependent on the current chaotic state of a system. That is, its more efficient in terms of collective net energy expenditure for some people (i.e. some Pareto minority) to actively accrue contextual tacit knowledge of a system, than for everyone to do that. From there, imo, its more a matter of figuring out how to protocolize that tacit knowledge, thus making delegation practically viable, rather than expecting everyone to individually amass that tacit knowledge - hence why I’m writing this, in efforts to protocolize my particular tacit method of protocolizing tacit methods in general lol, in the spirit using one’s mind as an engine for Cynefin-esque entropy reduction and system stabilization. As an aside, this is also why I’m drawn to the work of Machiavelli, as an “apostle of political stability” (some more thoughts here: Reflections on Deep-Network Diplomacy and Micropolitical Stabilization) - I just prefer protocols over institutions.
- As regards EmbassyOS, one route this may take is a corpus of Embassy documentation - most of which I believe already exists in the google drive! I’m starting to think about what form this can take to be accessible to our privacy-preserving locally hosted LLMs, e.g. an Embassy FAQ which guests can engage with via our local embedding system and RAG query engine and chat interface - a stack which already exists and is functional! In more concrete aspirational terms, eventually this could enable guests to ask a local LLM how they can contribute to stewarding Embassy, and the LLM can read some central corpus of documentation wherein certain protocolizable tasks/processes are expressed. Thus, aspirationally, EmbassyOS can help nudge a chaotic system toward greater levels of order without introducing corruptive power asymmetries.
