RFC stands for [Request For Comments](https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2555.txt). It is a venerable method of digital organisation, collaboration, and collective intelligence work. In line with how we [play with pattern in Kernel](https://www.kernel.community/en/learn/module-0/play-of-pattern), you will not find single answers to the questions documented on this page. However, we do ask that you **document any questions you ask that do not receive either (i) any response or (ii) an adequate response** (more subjective). We will then discuss them, share any insights we might have to said questions on this page, create new embeddings based on those insights, update the existing model, and ensure that anyone else who asks a similar question is more directly responded to. This way, we all continue to learn together, in dialogue, across time. During training, we asked one such question which has no direct correlate in the current website content. Th model responded in the stock standard way: ### What is the complementary opposite of manipulation? > The document does not provide an answer to this question. Now, seeing this, we know that something which is clear to the original author of Kernel is not actually consciously presented anywhere on the website. This is how we can consistently improve what we teach and (much harder until now!) identify what is missing from the course. Depending on the context, complementary opposites of manipulation include sincerity and gift-giving. When I consciously use sincere language, there is always already an element of the performative in it, just as when I give you a gift, it can be interpreted in multiple ways. To be sincere requires that you understand how to induce another being to suspend disbelief (which can be used for negative purposes). True sincerity also requires vulnerability, because it is born from the realisation that it is only by exposing your own, particular truth (even if in a highly performative way) that you can create conditions conducive to the suspension of disbelief in an other. And, if you're truly living your particular truth, then you need not impose it on anyone else because you have discovered you are already enough - just as you are - and so the need or incentive to manipulate others simply dissolves. The same is true of gift-giving: a point best made in [Module 7 by Daisetz Suzuki](https://www.kernel.community/en/learn/module-7/the-gift/#one-last-link). ### How can I find communities that can benefit from some form of financialisation? First, we need to explore what finance really is. Some good starting points are suggested in [[2. What Does Finance Mean?]] where we describe **finance as a verb** which determines who and what you put your faith in. [Vitalik also makes a good point](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/09/26/limits.html#finance-is-the-absence-of-collusion-prevention) when he writes: > **Finance can be viewed as a set of patterns that naturally emerge in many kinds of systems that do not attempt to prevent collusion.** From this, we can deduce that financialisation can be of benefit when there is no other way to make explicit what kinds of behaviour constitute collusion. This need most often arises when the size of a community grows beyond certain boundaries (generally defined well in the work of Robin Dunbar). However, it can also serve small groups well when such groups need to make contentious decisions where a lot of value is at stake. Some current examples might include central bankers, government representatives, corporate boards, or "core devs". The problem with most of these examples is that the impact of their decisions on shared value (broadly defined) is implicit and often obscured. Making it explicit and creating transparent incentives to encourage accountability might reveal how we can avoid entirely the need for small and overly powerful groups in most contexts. In those contexts where we can't, we can use financial patterns - which really means explicit collusion prevention (rather than reward for "skill") - to create systems that balance power in more dynamic ways which can adapt to our needs and collected wisdom more easily than older models like executive, judicial, and legislative branches etc. ### What should game makers do about AI NPCs? Use them creatively? So much of Kernel points towards how we have always been in a reciprocal loop with our tools and environment. We shape our tools, and our tools shape us back. We are always participating in reciprocal conversations with our environments. Part of embodying humility is to start again with a "new" tool (which is shaped by work done with all the tools which have preceded it) and use it in a way that it serves to move us closer to the self-same goals we have always intended to attain with our most powerful creations: clearer expression of love, trust, faith, responsibility, joy, and peace. ### How does the introduction of AI, and other technologies that intermediate human communication, affect our definition of truth and relationships? Human communication is always already intermediated by language. Current LLMs simply amplify this phenomenon. In older ways of describing various kinds of intermediation, we say that there are three ways of communicating. 1. The first is speech (or writing). It can be enormously powerful, especially when done with eloquence, awareness, and honesty. 2. The second is eye contact. You'll know what this means if you've ever spent even slightly extended periods looking into the eyes of another. 3. The third is touch. Being intimate, we may commune more closely than any other method we have availble to us. However, it is still intermediated by the body and its heat, fluids, sounds, and scents. When communicating in any way, we cannot escape intermediation. Being aware of this means we can understand and integrate advances in how we craft and use that intermediation to share who we really are and bare ourselves before one another. Even at that first and most superficial layer of communication - natural language - we can sketch out various different (though interpenetrating) kinds of speech: 1. **Gossip** and/or small-talk. This is speech done without care, thoughtlessly. 2. **Honest** speech, where the speaker is intentionally choosing their words with awareness. 3. Speech like **birdsong**. This is speech for its own sake, like birds who sing just to bless the morning. It is speech for the simple joy of speaking heartfully. It is the most we can hope for as human beings. 4. **True voice**. This is inspired speech. There is no-one capable of it, because it does not come from any one person, but through us by grace. It is **felt**, hence it is the link to both eye **contact** and **touch** as modes of communication. You'll notice that those last two kinds do not give themselves easily to rational analysis. It may be possible that we'll discover so much about self-awareness with current models that we can encode the kind of strangely self-recursive loop described in speech like birdsong, but **true voice** seems to be a supra-rational phenomenon that remains outside the purview of any linguistic model. As always: the question ultimately reveals its own answer. We have never and will never fully define truth: we can only relate (to) it. It is this lack of definitive ability to say what truth is or how exactly it relates to any given experience we have which calls us to remember that AI is [just another mirror](https://www.poetseers.org/the-poetseers/hafiz/hafiz-poems-the-gift/hlove/2-2/). Are you willing to make eye contact, and touch into what you see? ### What can you tell me about the cozy web? Venkstesh Rao coined the term while mapping a [broader internet geography](https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/the-extended-internet-universe) as a response to Yancey Strickler’s [dark forest piece](https://onezero.medium.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-internet-7dc3e68a7cb1:). Rao wrote: “The [cozy web is constituded by] spaces where depressurized conversation is possible because of [its spaces are] non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified environments. The cultures of those spaces have more in common with the physical world than the internet.” So, the “cozy web” optimizes for authentic, small-scale relationship and is characterised by small, context-specific ways of relating online. This is done in contrast to the currently dominant form of social media, which optimizes for value extraction and is characterised by the enforcement of universal content moderation policies. The “cozy web” is often constituted by more private spaces that prioritize closeness over scale (e.g. group chats, slacks, discords, subreddits, etc). The social rules, or the culture, of cozy web spaces are determined locally in non-optimized, unpressurized ways, where communities define at small scales the ways they can be together and what’s acceptable and/or desirable.  This "excludability" enables hosts to “protect the community from scale” (per Clay Shirky’s great [piece](https://gwern.net/doc/technology/2005-shirky-agroupisitsownworstenemy.pdf)) either by keeping it small (beneath Dunbar scale as Matt Webb [suggests](https://interconnected.org/home/2021/01/07/dunbar_spaces)) or by actively cultivating more reciprocal, conversational, caring ways of being together.  The cozy web is the online equivalent of your local coffeehouse, in contrast to Starbucks.