[MINUTES] CCG Atlantic 2026-07-07

This meeting featured a presentation by JeffO on "Digital Identity as a
Martial Art," which explored navigating the digital landscape with
intentionality and resilience. JeffO discussed the concept of being "on the
X" (following platform defaults) versus "off the X" (dictating one's own
terms), drawing parallels to natural world phenomena and human
consciousness. The discussion highlighted the challenges of the digital
realm for human sensibilities and the importance of developing "digital
martial arts" for self-protection and intentional engagement. Attendees
contributed with observations on resilience, the limitations of binary
digital representations, and strategies for data privacy.

*Topics Covered:*

   - *Digital Identity as a Martial Art:* JeffO presented his framework for
   navigating the digital landscape by understanding and controlling one's
   presence and interactions, comparing it to martial arts for its focus on
   awareness, strategy, and skillful action. The core concept is to move
   intentionally rather than being passively influenced by digital platforms.
   - *"On the X" vs. "Off the X":* This concept was explained using
   analogies like casinos and CES attendees to illustrate how individuals can
   either conform to a platform's designed experience ("on the X") or actively
   shape their own engagement ("off the X"). The outcome is the ability to
   reclaim agency and personalize digital interactions.
   - *Wet vs. Dry Structures:* The analogy of naturally formed "wet"
   structures (like ponds) versus human-structured "dry" ones (like swimming
   pools) was used to discuss how digital systems, often "dry" and rigid, can
   disrupt or fragment natural human social formations. This highlights the
   potential for technology to impose unnatural behaviors.
   - *Human Consciousness and the Digital Realm:* The presentation
   emphasized that the digital landscape is not built for human consciousness,
   leading to disorientation and a need for greater awareness and resilience,
   similar to how humans adapt to extreme physical environments. The
   discussion underscored the immaturity of psychological protection in the
   digital space.
   - *Data Privacy and Digital Footprints:* Various strategies for
   minimizing data exposure and maintaining privacy were discussed, including
   using cash, avoiding smart devices, and actively "going for a walk" without
   digital devices. The consensus was that every small action to reduce
   digital footprints contributes to self-protection.
   - *The Limitations of Binary Systems:* The discussion touched upon the
   inherent simplicity of binary (zeros and ones) in representing complex
   human reality, with a suggestion that higher-fidelity representations, like
   those in quantum computing, are needed for richer understanding. This
   implies a fundamental limitation in current digital architectures for
   accurately modeling human experience.
   - *Developing Digital Literacy and Resilience:* The group explored the
   idea of "digital martial arts" as a form of education for citizens to
   navigate the digital realm without compromising their freedom. This would
   involve providing tools for critical thinking and conscious decision-making
   rather than simply exposing individuals to vulnerable states.

*Action Items:*

   - None explicitly stated, but the conversation generated ideas for
   future discussions and encouraged continued exploration of these concepts
   within the community.

Text: https://meet.w3c-ccg.org/archives/w3c-ccg-atlantic-2026-07-07.md

Video: https://meet.w3c-ccg.org/archives/w3c-ccg-atlantic-2026-07-07.mp4
*CCG Atlantic - 2026/07/07 12:01 EDT - Transcript* *Attendees*

Alex Higuera, Dmitri Zagidulin, Elaine Wooton, Erica Connell, Grace
Rachmany, Gregory Natran, JeffO - HumanOS, Jennie Meier, Kerri Lemoie,
Lancine Toure, Phillip Long, Ted Thibodeau Jr, Will Abramson
*Transcript*

Will Abramson: Can you hear me now?

Will Abramson: Yeah. Hi folks. Hi Jeff.

JeffO - HumanOS: What's up,…

JeffO - HumanOS: Can you hear me? Okay.

Will Abramson: Going through loud and Yeah. So, today we've got a special
last minute guest speaker. Jeff is going to speak to us because, Ram of
Vouch Protocol, who was supposed to talk today, had to unavoidably drop out
last minute. and I felt bad about canceling another call or whatever and
Jeff kindly decided to step in.

Will Abramson: So I don't know what you're going to speak about Jeff but I
guess I'll hand over to you in a few moments and let you can say now if you
want but we'll do the admin about 5 minutes past and then sounds great to
me.

JeffO - HumanOS: Yeah, absolutely.

JeffO - HumanOS: It sound okay at this level. Right basically what I'm
going to be doing is reviewing last session out of IIDW. It was digital
identity as a martial art. is going to talk about the ways that we move
through the digital landscape where we manage the forces in the room based
on platforms behavior,…

JeffO - HumanOS: devices our own behavior. Sort of bringing it all together
sort of full stack operations from the human up.

Will Abramson: Sounds exciting.

Will Abramson: I'm excited. Yeah, it's cool.

JeffO - HumanOS: You have a couple minutes before you start your thing.

Will Abramson: Yeah,…

Will Abramson: I'll start about now. I usually like to give people a few
minutes to trickle in and then kick off, but I think it's fine to go now.
so yeah,…

JeffO - HumanOS: Okay, I'll save my opener for that.

Will Abramson: All right, folks. welcome to today's credential community
group call. He also said today we're joined by Jeff O who's gonna talk to
us about digital identity as a martial arts as he just mentioned. before
that I'll just go over the admin. So as always we are W3C community group.
We follow the W3C code of ethics and professional conduct. So yeah please
bear that in mind and continue to treat everyone with respect and create a
friendly space for us all to collaborate So, anyone is welcome to
participate in these calls. However, substantiative contributors to any CCG
work items must be members of the CCG with full IPR agreements reach out to
me or Mimmude or any of the chairs if you're not sure, Ben as well.

Will Abramson: call notes. So these calls are recorded and transcribed and
they will be shared with the mailing list within 24 hours. next
introductions or reintroductions. There's anybody new to the call today who
wants to say hello or maybe hasn't said hi in a while and feels like
introducing themselves. Feel announcements and reminders. Anyone have any
announcements or reminders that they want to bring to our attention?

Grace Rachmany: I have a quick announcement. I don't know if you can hear
me.

Will Abramson: Yeah.

Grace Rachmany: I'm at a train station.

Will Abramson: No, it's fine coming through. Okay.

Grace Rachmany: We will be having a DIDCOM breakfast at IETF on July 22nd.

Will Abramson: Cool. Thanks,…

Grace Rachmany: We're going to be announcing some results that we had from
the DIDCOM survey. and anybody who's going to be at IEP, please join us to
support DIDCOM and the decentralized work that we all did.

Will Abramson: Anybody else? No. okay. Last call is any updates on the CCG
work items for the community. no, I did intend to review the work items,
but I've just got home and I'm not fully prepared. So I think I'll push
that to next week. I guess on the calendar coming up, I think we don't have
someone scheduled for next week. So we're trying to figure that out.
00:05:00

Will Abramson: on the 20. maybe we do have some for next week and we don't
have the week after, but the next call we'll be having is Nick Jenza who's
going to be presenting on record web and he has an outstanding proposed
work item for this. So, it'll be a good chance for us to hear what he wants
to do under the CCG and then hopefully after that, I'm assuming we can
adopt it unless people have significant concerns that we need to I think
that's everything. Last call. Anyone have anything to say before I hand
over to All right. Wonderful. Jeff, take it away, please. And thanks again
for stepping in last minute.

JeffO - HumanOS: ready. Yeah,…

Will Abramson: I appreciate that a lot.

JeffO - HumanOS: my pleasure. I wanted to let you know that I had to hustle
through some disruption this morning, which is really a big part of this
presentation. the crux of this is going to be the idea of in the natural
world, we try to stay in circumstances that are preferential for us and
serve us And it's really hard to discern that in the digital landscape. So,
I'm going to be talking about the idea of being on the X versus off the X.
and today, I went to land this for you all, I moved to a location I thought
would be optimal for me. And the moment I got there, I was informed there's
no internet. So, based on the digital landscape weather, I had to do a fast
turnaround and things like that. resilience, which is a big part of being a
human, came into play for me today.

JeffO - HumanOS: I'm going to go to my share screen here and hopefully get
the proper one for you. Let me figure out quite which to share here. Bear
with me. I'm going to go with entire screen. That'll be the easiest. Can
you see that at this time?

Will Abramson: All right. Not yet.

JeffO - HumanOS: Okay, we're going to go with that and hit share. And I
imagine about now.

Will Abramson: Yes. Going through.

JeffO - HumanOS: Great.

Will Abramson: Cool. Yep.

JeffO - HumanOS: And how's that looking at move 78 screen?

Will Abramson: We got you.

JeffO - HumanOS: All righty. I wanted to let you on this presentation from
a point of view of the human being in great challengecape.

JeffO - HumanOS: And it's even more so now having just hearing some news
this morning about just how the new tooling is building upon itself in ways
that's very interesting. So move is actually the 78th move in game four
between a gentleman named Lisa Doe the world's finest go player which is I
think oldest game on the planet to my understanding. It has more possible
moves than there are atoms in the universe, which I have a hard time
putting my head around, but it seems to be true. So, Lisa Doe played
Google's Deep Mind Alph Go learned the game through 300 I think thousand
photos, taught itself the game, and then they put the machine up against
the human.

JeffO - HumanOS: In move 78, Lisa Doe did something that undermined the
machine's logic ability, and I'm not going to spoil it, but, did something
pretty fascinating. And that move speaks to the ability of the human to
come up with ways to stay ahead of the game, even in the most challenging
digital landscapes. In that game, by the way, chess has about an average of
12 moves per turn. Go has about 200. So, you can imagine a computer that
can do that type of stuff. All right, let me see how I do on going to my
next screen here. Okay, so this is my session.

JeffO - HumanOS: Every time we go onto the digital landscape, we create a
ssion level presence. every time we step into one of those sessions, we do
it with different intentions, with different platforms, with different
devices. all kinds of things. And I wanted to address the idea of how to
move through the digital landscape in our own way rather than being hurted
and nudged and things like that. So I was sitting there thinking how hard
it is for people to make their way through the digital landscape. I do this
every day. I have this conversation any number of ways with any number of
people through the week. This is my common language like you guys talk code.
00:10:00

JeffO - HumanOS: And I was sitting there thinking, you'd have to be a mixed
martial arts badass to make your way through the web and understand all the
forces up against you in many cases, except it's digital, so even if you're
MMA talented, it's in the digital landscape. So even your human physical
abilities, aside from acuteness and awareness and acuity, can be really
challenging u because it doesn't apply in the digital landscape. So the
idea of being on the X comes from the idea of an udaloop and I don't know
how many folks out there know this but an udaloop was designed it's
basically I believe defensive sort of logic personal defense military
udaloop stands for this it is to observe to orient to decide and to act.

JeffO - HumanOS: So when a person might go onto the internet for a reason,
they say, I observe that I'm in a positive state of mind. I observe I'm in
a negative state of mind and orient myself to that. I need to be more
gentle where I'm going because it'll show, if you're operating as an FBI
agent trying to find child predators in a kid social media space, you don't
want to go out there all pissy about being an adult because it's probably
going to bleed over. So, you need to know these things about yourself,
orient yourself, decide what you're going to do about it, and act.

JeffO - HumanOS: Similarly, when we go on to the digital landscape, we
basically are doing this sort of thing. And, bear with me while I go a
little out of order here. So, The idea of the X is that when we go into a
casino, for instance, you're on their X. As soon as you pick them as the
hotel, they're happy. Their seats, every one of them is a high-profit
location. They want you in a chair. They're going to be bringing drinks
once every five minutes for the high-end seats. maybe once every 10 minutes
for the other stuff where they don't make as much profit. The rooms in the
TVs start up with the house promos. They want you to go to the shows. They
want you to eat dinner there. All of these sorts of things. So, when I go,
and I'm realizing that this actually isn't serving me really well the way I
reordered it for you all.

JeffO - HumanOS: If we go over to the top here, I am off their X when I go
as a CES attendee. That's my model. I go into the same building. I use free
drink coupons, so I don't buy their drinks. I have freedom of movement. I
don't go to their shows. I like to watch people. That's my eye candy. And I
like to go hiking instead of going to a show. So in the same space here
where the house would like to see me doing what they want me to do, I
choose to do it this way. Now in the digital landscape when we look at
getting on a new device setup is basically full X. the personal computer
out of the box experience OB is to you take all the default settings.
You're going to be sharing location data.

JeffO - HumanOS: They might even have you sign in with a heavily freighted
profile that they'll be able to ascertain a whole bunch more data in my
computer world with my folks, I disabled just about every single connection
there is. I quiet and silence the default settings like location, data
shares, and the idea of signing in maybe with a completely new account for
this purpose so it doesn't bring any legacy or tail to the situation. So
that's how to be on X with a new machine rather than the manufacturer's X
on the new machine. After this next one, I'll see if there's any questions.

JeffO - HumanOS: digital landscape model when you sign up to a platform
very similar to a device default settings same if you use their app that's
a whole another thing and I would really like to maybe have a bit of a
discussion about that I'm going to try and leave some time for that and
that's going to be about the idea of using an app versus a browser page I
hope we get to that over on getting off the X in my world I encourage
people to not necessarily use the default settings. Go for that my terms.
And I understand the P is off of there now because it's no longer proposed.
So 7012, That's what off the X is, folks. It's my terms. It's not the
digital landscape manufacturer platform It's my terms. So I really like how
that rolled in. and there again is a question of using a web page in a
secure browser versus an app. So I'm going to roll back a couple bits here.

JeffO - HumanOS: So, as we go forward into the digital landscape, being
able to observe what's going on, orient to it, decide and see if you can
translate real world intention and function through the glass to put
yourself where you want to be on the other side rather than be rolled by
all those forces, which pretty huge. Okie dokie. So, just this is a bit of
an aggregation from a few different things presentations I did. Humans are
built for very basic stuff. Gravity, air, and Folks, we're basically a food
tube. We're a fancy version of a worm. We put stuff in one end, it comes
out the other end. It's what almost all sentient creatures are up to every
day. Job one. And then if you can procreate, great. You made it that far.
So, we deal with gravity, air, and food. None of that's on the digital
landscape. Our sensor package, we can hear, smell, touch, and discern time
locally.
00:15:00

JeffO - HumanOS: we can only see in here as far as Generally, we're built
for a small tribal community, which means, familiarity, and that brings
some sense of security. The familiar realms we have, if we're not in a
onetoone relationship like this, which I would just call real time. And the
reason I'm bringing this up is because the digital landscape brings realms
that are not built for human consciousness. And I was thinking, where does
the human mind find itself? It's going, "Whoa, what just happened?" Dreams
can do that. Sometimes our imagination, you can just be staring off into
space and " whoa, wow. Where am I?" And it's like, "Whoa, I was elsewhere."
Hallucination, mysticism, deja vu. I think Will, you even brought up the
dja vu one a while back. Maybe that was These are all things we find
ourselves contending with as normal humans.

JeffO - HumanOS: Living is local, meaning basically within about 20 to 30
minutes where your feet touch the ground, wherever that is on the planet,
it's mobile. That's where your intention of passion, compassion, intellect,
energy, time is designed to be spent there. Life is global. There is
interesting stuff all over the planet. And if you pass through that slash
there, consider that going to the other side of the glass, you'll find that
there's a whole lot going on planet Earth that's potentially more
interesting and intriguing and more convenient than what's happening right
in front of you, which is frictionful and effortful. And here we have this
gravity of people sort of tilting across the glass and what that might
bring into it.

JeffO - HumanOS: So along the way to this idea of mastering the digital
landscape as a martial artist, I think or I'm pretty sure that knowing
yourself in these disciplines is really important. are Are you not
gullible? Are you not Can you move between these two things? or are you
bipolar or manic? Knowing yourself is going to have a lot to do with how
you go out into the digital landscape because that's going to be amplified
probably unless you're really on top of it. yourself, your reason for these
sessions. And it could just be I'm reading email, but it could also be a
lot more deep. So what are you about at this moment? What's your reason for
doing what you're doing? What's the device you're going to use? What's the
platform? And how are you going to make your way through this?

JeffO - HumanOS: In cyber warfare, I tell people I hold up my phone and I
say, this is the same thing that gets special operations guys deep into
environments. It's their protection. It's their possible weapon. And it's
also a double-edged blade because it's that same thing that gets them in
and out of there that can do them in. so it's important depending on what
you're doing to be on top of it. This community is very very specialized.

JeffO - HumanOS: It's super high functionality that's supposed to address
complexities that may or may not show up. so you guys all do this in a
different way, but not necessarily, I think, at the level I'm doing it. So,
humans extend themselves into risk realms all the time. I'm going to
compare this up against the other side of the glass, the digital realm, the
unfamiliar realm of human consciousness. We go into air, flight, deep sea,
fire, space, biohazard. Every single one of those requires protective
equipment. You generally have to bring your air. None of those things are
on the other side of the glass. it speaks to the difference in the realm
just from the get-go. And we have been giving people protection to be over
there.

JeffO - HumanOS: Certainly anti virus, malware, those types of things are
in play. but the psychological protection is very immature, almost even
non-existent. I do not run into many people who talk about this at the
layer level I talk about it, which is from the ground up as a human and
what it's like to be a human and be doing this to for ourselves. So, we're
still discovering the impact of this. The phrase I'm using is a textion. I
used to say we're extending across the glass. This is a textion. Let me
take a look at my next slide. Any questions at this point? I'm sorry, I
can't see chat or anything. Okay.
00:20:00

Will Abramson: I'm the only one on the chat, but I think everyone's
engrossed.

JeffO - HumanOS: Very I want to talk about the idea of wet versus dry.

JeffO - HumanOS: This was also a session that I gave out at wet are
naturally formed things that formed by convergent forces of Dry things are
human structured. I was explaining this to my sister one day. We're sitting
out by her pool and she's just like, don't get What? I said, Your pool
right there. This is going to be so fun to say, Jennifer. Your pool is dry.
It's a human structured thing. Water would not accumulate there without the
shape, the lining, the piping of the water. That's a dry structure. So,
what would be a wet structure? And she said, "A pond." And I said, "Yes, go
girl." So, that's the difference between things that form naturally and
things that are human structured and how the outcome can be similar. And
what you're about to see here, a friend of mine turned me on to this after
we had this discussion and it was just fabulous.

JeffO - HumanOS: So, taking a look at this picture here, you see a plate
that's full of water. Yes, the plate is structured by humans. the table. So
is the wall back there. you see some dirt and trees, but almost everything,
but the dirt, the trees, and the water are dry. that washer that's about to
hit this water is completely dry. Nature does not create perfectly shaped
not perfect but very well-shaped things of this uniformity in this way. You
don't find metal washers on planet earth without humans. So when humans
take a dry structured thing and think software okay think that pool of
water there as people and stuff.

JeffO - HumanOS: Watch what happens when we introduce something that is not
of this world, an otherworldly realm as opposed to convergent forces, and
we introduce it to a wet natural thing. You get these very unnatural
behaviors, but they're predictable because we're impacting a natural thing
with a predictable shape. So, the next one I want you to think about is
software. The next one coming up. Think if you want to split a community of
people into four distinct groups and you're going to see the four distinct
groups pop through the structure and you're going to see everything else
that doesn't want to go off to the side. So the stuff splashing out to the
side can be the people who don't respond. I want to be out of here. And
then the other folks are like, "Yeah, I do like this. I don't like this. I
might like this. I don't know what you're talking about." So that is a way
to go into a naturally formed space and disrupt it really with frankly
brute force and separate it.

JeffO - HumanOS: So I would contend that if you wanted to separate people,
you may do better by rather than landing something on this pile of water,
maybe asking the pile of water that's weird puddle of water. Asking as it
were the water, which of you H2O appeal this way, that way, whatever. And
say that instead of abruptly impacting them with these four channeling
separational things. And by the way, notice once you're in the group,
you're distinctly separated from the others, which is also interesting.
Seems to be like social media to me. so if you could just say to that
puddle of water, hey, who likes that? And then the water could just twinkle
blues, greens, yellows, oranges, just tell us from where you are what your
preferences are, but we don't have to necessarily come in and hammer the
situation.

JeffO - HumanOS: So that's the idea of a dry structured thing, call it
software, hitting a natural thing, call it human socialization and the
impacts it can have. So you see a kind of wild baseline I'm thinking from.
And that LinkedIn right there is where I got that. David Sim's pretty
amazing. I just let this last one hold here. what's about to happen is that
I'm just going to leave it at that. You can only imagine. All right, moving
along. So I operate every day where I am trying, you guys are sheep dogs.
I'm a lamb. I'm a sheep. the predation's all around us in all kinds of ways.
00:25:00

JeffO - HumanOS: So what I do just like this picture is I try and get into
the middle of that looking like that. That's why I come to you guys. I want
to hear what's the challenge, what's hard, what is going who's doing what's
not to be afraid of, and how can you maybe manage those things. this screen
and a couple more are a benefit of Matthew Maynard who does work at Barnes
Jewish hospital here security operations did a really great presentation.
This is just a fantastic slide. He did a couple more slides and what I
really liked about it is I told him I was like bud you you just nailed it
from the ground up really where I like to work from truly raw nature
forward.

JeffO - HumanOS: and he did a great job of interpolating these things. So
he was, showing us this stuff and talking about, you guys will recognize
these things. Just think software, going underneath something, finding a
gap in going over something, or basically channeling and cornering
something. this is how it happens in nature. You guys are probably well
smart enough to imagine these situations in software and probably have some
cool stories about these different things, which I would love to hear.
sometime. So, he brings that up. Pretty wild. here's something that I know
that you guys don't know probably. I didn't know this about sheep and wolf
predation. So, I look down here in the bottom left corner corner. Modern
data consistently shows wolves often target domestic rams more than you use
or lambs, the strong males.

JeffO - HumanOS: While the exact reason is still being studied, a
significant factor in high value genetic loss for breeders, I wouldn't have
thought that as a person who doesn't understand wolves and sheep, I
wouldn't have necessarily thought it in a fight you want to hit the big guy
first. If stuff's going to happen, you might want to get the big guy first.
I think this could possibly be a version of that, but I didn't know. So, I
know things about people and how they work with machines every day and what
happens to them. you guys are humans. you've been through it. You see
people next to you being hurt and damaged and frustrated and annoyed. You
also see the beauty. Believe me, folks, I'm not going to leave that out.

JeffO - HumanOS: there's a awful lot more upside than downside in the
space, but the downside is certainly worth some attention. So, in any case,
looking for vulnerability triggers, easy wins, things like that. just
interesting and actually might have been this I don't know. Anyways, I'm
going to leave that be. But here is his really cool thing. So, his
presentation was hunting amongst the wolves. And what he did here is he
broke out the picture that you saw into what would be a lot more familiar
to you guys. I really dug that he did this. So this is kind of his version
of overlaying what you all are contending with on top of that. the
vulnerabilities thing. This is kind of the over under around corner.

JeffO - HumanOS: he did a really neat job of bringing it down to real for
me. So, We already did that. We are at That's the idea being on and off the
X. I'm going to pause for a minute. and I think that is almost the end of
me here. Anybody have anything to say at this point?

Will Abramson: I don't have a question,…

Will Abramson: but I do just have a comment.

JeffO - HumanOS: Yeah. Anything. Yeah.

Will Abramson: I mean, I was thinking the wet versus dry. I really liked
that video impacting. I think it's very evocative. but I think wet and dry
is also human structures tend to focus on being efficient whereas natural
formations are about resilience. they're expected to fail or break in ways
and that's okay whereas I think the human structures are designed for one
specific purpose maybe even well designed…

Will Abramson: but that there are more purposes right and more things
happen life is complex and sometimes that's a mistake right so I don't know…

JeffO - HumanOS: Yes. Yeah.

Will Abramson: how we design technologies that are more alive and wet or
more natural But it's nice to think about

JeffO - HumanOS: And yeah, so to that point, I was talking about the fact
that I had to be resilient today. I got up there to do this presentation
for you at my office and found out the whole building's internet was down.
So, you can flip out, you can call and cancel, you can panic out and do
other things. that's what we have to do in the real world when something
isn't going like we thought. You step into a house, you open the door and
the house falls. There's a lot of disappointment there. you got to do
something about it. so, being resilient, and being prepared for brittle
matters.
00:30:00

JeffO - HumanOS: I was recently in the mountains with my family for a
little bit. We were talking about adventures and one of the things I taught
my kid and believe me the web basically almost anytime you go in for a
session it's an maybe adventures aren't necessarily good or bad they are
what they are and the more prepared you are for what you will contend with
whatever the convergent forces are going to be digital or natural more
prepared you are the better the adventure is I went on an adventure today.
I thought I was just going to sit down, plug in my computer, and we were
going to be talking. Nope. I had to pack up everything, roll back, bring
you all to the fort, and here we are. so yes, the frictionlessness of the
digital landscape is very alluring, and it's even trixy, because the real
world is frictionful.

JeffO - HumanOS: And that's another thing, to your point, that people are
just less ready to accept failure out of these things than Natural stuff
naturally es and flows. We know that digital is just like, wait, I mean, I
thought this was going to work. Why isn't this working kind of thing? And
that's part of existing in an otherworldly realm on the other side of the
glass. It's part of what pulls the human sensibilities out. It's what
atrophies that resilience to brittleleness that you were talking about. We
just get too used to it just supposedly work.

JeffO - HumanOS: And if it doesn't, hey, and by the way, there was an
interesting report that just came out about the idea of job environments
where people who are grading the work of h people grade the work of humans
far more rigidly than they do the agend. people are less accountable to it.
that was the AI agent or that was anthropic that wasn't me kind of thing. A
lot of people are rolling with that, because at a level that's true. at
another level, who put it together, who asked it to do what it does, and
why are you running away from the accountability of knowing or not knowing
what happened?

JeffO - HumanOS: But yes, people step away from a system work far more
easily than they do their own in terms of accountability.

Will Abramson: Yeah, I mean I mean yeah,…

Will Abramson: please jump on the queue if you have comments or I'm just
going to keep answer time. one thing I came across recently I mean I think
it's kind of obvious or when you think about it right the digital world is
constructed of these bits right like zeros and ones that's just two states
right that we're trying to build up this reality from this realm from and I
think it's not complex enough to represent our human reality and I think we
have to acknowledge that I mean I recently attended a really interesting
talk about quantum machine learning

Will Abramson: And it's just an analogy they have data that maybe is on
biology or chemical reactions and they found if it's binary data it's just
nowhere near good enough. If they call it relabeling. If you can translate
that into the quantum realm you can get much better results because
obviously it's a much higher fidelity representation of reality. I mean
that's just a side comment but I think it's zeros and…

Will Abramson: ones are simple by design in some work.

JeffO - HumanOS: Yeah, man.

JeffO - HumanOS: Welcome to crazy. Let's go there then. seriously, you just
nailed one and I just dropped this a couple days ago for the first time out
loud. So, I was speaking to somebody about zeros and ones, and we were
actually talking about, the extraterrestrial thing, and, we're living in a
matrix, and the aliens are among us, and I was talking about, how do you
even know the shape of aliens? really, how do we know that? And here's the
crazy. How do we know that the zeros and the ones aren't the alien?

JeffO - HumanOS: Do you ever wonder how it is that an on and an off logic
switch that is only as simple as on and off, a binary setting, can be
complexified to the degree that we are now able to do these otherworldly
things. It's almost once we harnessed electricity, whatever it might be out
there when okay, they got to step one. So now if they keep going and they
learned how to build things on top of electricity, they may eventually find
out about the path to us. So anyways, just thinking about zeros and ones as
an alien thing is kind of fun. Little crazy, but fun. And I throw that one
out there.
00:35:00

Will Abramson: Yeah, I mean I guess I'd say the digital realm is alien in
some sense whether they are real alive aliens but it's definitely an alien
terrain that we are not. Exactly this is a great slide for representing all
of the reasons…

Will Abramson: why we are not built for this alien.

JeffO - HumanOS: Yeah. Yeah.

Will Abramson: No. Yeah.

JeffO - HumanOS: I mean, Is there food there? Can you hear there? No. Can
you touch? No. Is time warped? Yes. I can go from here to there and a
click, as Doc would say, And none of that's over there, Not Nothing's two
words. Nothing. And we I'm sorry.

JeffO - HumanOS: and we expose ourselves to a global community that's ready
to snipe. Go ahead.

Will Abramson: So I mean one of the things I think about is …

Will Abramson: how do we develop a better sensor package for this digital
realm and also the safety kit, I think you've talked about that too, What
is the spaceac suit that lets us be in these environments in a way…

Alex Higuera: What do you mean by sensor package?

Will Abramson: where we're confident? I mean if you go back a slide like
hearing, sight, smell, touch our brain is very good at taking in these
senses and representing it in a way that is meaningful to us so that we
understand our environment in the physical world and we know the risks and
the dangers, right? If I touch something that's hot, I immediately know
maybe I need to not touch that, right? But I think in the digital world,
there's not what are the sensors that let us feel and understand and
integrate the risks that are out there in these digital realms?

Will Abramson: just feels like we Yeah,…

Alex Higuera: Do you mean sensors that help algorithms understand or
sensors that would help us underhand understand?

Will Abramson: I guess it's common because obviously there's got to be some
algorithms in there that synthesize it, but I guess that's like maybe the
digital brain, but there has to be some inputs to that system and I think
we need some richer inputs that there is some algorithm or some
integration, but then it has to get back as well to how does that get
represented to our human selves too. I

Alex Higuera: I'd recommend taking a look I dabble a little bit in
neurochnology. there are lots of commercial grade devices that can take
brain waves for example and use bio feedback to help people. so it kind of
depends on what kind of sensor information you're thinking about, but I
mean there are PLC's, logistic controllers that can measure humidity,
pressure, things like that. And I'd imagine that combining all of these
types of sensors, you'd help an algorithm understand itself or help humans
use bio feedback to improve themselves.

Will Abramson: I guess I would say to that that sounds like it's like using
the neurochnology to sense the human realm right like humidity and stuff
and understand it in the digital world but I think that we need the other
way around and I don't know what are the senses or… things that we need to
be sensing when we're inhabiting a digital space that we can then integrate
and understand. it's not community, but

Will Abramson:

JeffO - HumanOS: Yeah, and…

JeffO - HumanOS: and let me jump in on that. these are all really, really
good points. And, the goal of this comment is to more talk about how, we
sense humidity when it's there. A sensor can do that. But there is no
humidity in the digital landscape. There isn't air. There's zeros and ones
that pipe back information back across the glass to us. And we are told
what it what it looks like. the smell thing's coming. the haptic is on its
way.

JeffO - HumanOS: You can certainly run a clock over there and watch real
world seconds go by. but it's not so much necessarily putting better
sensors out there for the sake of the digital landscape. If anything, I
actually want to strip all that off of this approach to the discussion and
talk about the fact that, for instance, when we put on a fully oluded
virtual headset and you're kind of looking around and you're on a podium
that's like 800 ft in the air and it's 2x two with no rail on it, I'm going
to need plastic pants. It's extremely extremely overwhelmingly convincing
unless you really know this is the part about the sensor I know that this
is just a square that's 2 ft wide before I put this on I know I'm in an
auditorium I could run forward 20 ft and nothing will happen.
00:40:00

JeffO - HumanOS: That's the kind of war space, the battlescape of
sensibility that is hard to bring from the real world across the glass to
that space. So everything over there is messing with our sensor package.
you're just on a 2 x two square that's 800 ft high and the way that it hits
the brain, boy boy. I mean,…

JeffO - HumanOS: some people literally will not be able to move. some
people will just fall over and that's why they put handrails a lot of the
time. If you go to a VR thing, you give you a rail to hold on to. so that
might address that a little more distinctly

Will Abramson: Maybe a question for I have as what's next?

Will Abramson: Obviously this is great because I mean I've seen pieces and
fragments of this over the years at IW and I'm sure some other people have.
I've definitely not captured them all, but right there's a thesis that
you've been working on for a long time and…

Will Abramson: it's great to see this iteration of it, but I mean it feels
like it's part of…

JeffO - HumanOS: Thank you.

Will Abramson: what I hear you talk about is humans need to develop this
martial arts, the MDMA that they can take to navigate is it how do you see
that growing into a thing that maybe even a kid would learn at school, that
would be great if we could like that.

JeffO - HumanOS: My man, thanks thanks for asking. that's the MDMA thing.
That's the mixed digital martial arts. That's the landscape I'm talking
about. This is and you folks and the way that I'm so grateful that you all
bring your heads to this and that's why I love feedback. How does this
strike people who think Yeah, we do need that, don't we? how does this sort
of sensibility strike people who operate in the way that you all do?

JeffO - HumanOS: And yeah, it really cracked me up when I was thinking.
it's mixed digital martial arts. it's MDMA. And I was like, wait a minute.
And I text, searched that and I was like, this is just splendidly fun and
yeah, Wouldn't people, it's nickname Ecstasy X, all that. So, I was just
like, man, it's like people would love some digital X. They would love to
feel ecstatic about their relationship with the digital landscape. I would
love to give them the comfort and…

Will Abramson: I think for me it's a free society should take
responsibility ility for it for educating its citizens so that they can
navigate this new realm that we've created in a way that does not encroach
on their freedom, right?

JeffO - HumanOS: sensibility. needing to know, is big. Wanting to know is
probably more appropriate. But I'll hold that up to you. Do you need to
know how to cross a street after you look both ways? You don't need to. You
probably want to.

Will Abramson: in a way that they are capable of making sense of it and
still not telling them the decisions that they have to make but giving them
the tools to make those decisions for themselves and…

JeffO - HumanOS: Yes. Yeah.

Will Abramson: not at the moment we're just sort of chucking them into this
very vulnerable state and they don't even understand it rather and we all
don't understand it I mean I don't have these skills I don't think maybe
better than some or maybe even most but certainly not I wouldn't say I'm
confident I don't have an ecstatic relationship with the digital realm. I
wonder if anyone thinks that they have got it nailed on. Maybe you Jeff.

JeffO - HumanOS: Yeah. Right on.

JeffO - HumanOS: And I don't want to pull names off the screen, but Ted,
you've been around a long time and you have a very critical thinking
sensibility to my sense. And I'm wondering if you're willing u just how it
generally strikes a person like yourself if you have an opportunity to chip
in a thought.

JeffO - HumanOS: Thank you.

Ted Thibodeau Jr: Yeah.

Ted Thibodeau Jr: Yeah, my experience of the world is rather more mystic
than many people in the text here. and so I've tasted what you're dishing
out in many different flavors from a lot of different sources. I confess
today I'm very, very distracted…

Ted Thibodeau Jr: because I've just received a 2019 vintage laptop to
replace my 2015 vintage laptop.
00:45:00

JeffO - HumanOS: …

Ted Thibodeau Jr: It's been fighting with OS install. So, I'm very
distracted today. I apologize. I've not been paying very much attention.

JeffO - HumanOS: my man, That was a full bull.

JeffO - HumanOS: Thanks a lot and good luck on that. And if you ever get
out to IW and your computer's being a punk, see me because I'm the computer
guy. So, Thanks a ton, Ted. Good luck on that. Mhm.

Ted Thibodeau Jr: Yeah, thanks.

JeffO - HumanOS: Unless anybody else has something to chip in,…

JeffO - HumanOS: I can throw in a little bit more. And Yep.

Will Abramson: Yeah, feel free to jump on the queue or…

Will Abramson: just unmute. I mean, it's pretty small group, quite a
friendly bunch. So,

JeffO - HumanOS: Yep. let me throw over to the slideshow again for a
second. Take you to the last slide. This is kind of a little bit more
exercisy. So one of the things I do when I listen to my liil living is
local lig life is So liil is where we are built for life as global as the
world around us. when I listen to thinking from people I listen to radio
stations I listen to conservative. I listen to liberal I listen to all
kinds of stuff.

JeffO - HumanOS: And what's really cool about the AMFM thing, when you
listen to it through a transistor radio, which I do, is I'm completely off
the X. There's no scoping of how much time I spend listening to what sorts
of information. Don't stream it. I can get those same things off of my
device instead of listening to them through a transistor. And I'm not
paranoic, but this is part of my digital martial art. The less skin flakes
I leave behind in the digital realm, the less the dogs can hunt my pattern
of life. And that matters to me, especially in some of the workspace that
we are all involved in and some of the people we know. Maybe I'm
overestimating things, but I adopted my father's car.

JeffO - HumanOS: He recently passed away and so he had a 2008 Mazda
six-speed turbo. It's fun as hell to drive. Doesn't even have a USB port in
it. Doesn't even have tire pressure sensors, so I don't have the little
Wi-Fi chips on the stems that will allow my car to be track traced and
followed even if I turned off everything else. smart TVs. I spent two Four
hours. Had a friend of mine who bought a big old $600 huge because it's so
inexpensive because where the payback comes from. Has $700 $600 TV up there
and it kept telling him he had to sign up to use it and He's like man I get
this thing off my wall but it's driving me crazy. So I was like hey let me
show you a different way to do it. We went over there. We put it in store
demo mode for starters just to go shut up.

JeffO - HumanOS: And then I was like, "Buddy, so here's what you can do.
this laptop that you're looking in and doing your browsing Plug this thing
into the TV. Use a smart browser on a protected machine. Go to the
website." And we know what give and take happens across the PC. we know
that TV's a whole another thing as our cars. but after about four hours of
noodling and fighting our way through a little workflow, he's got a laptop
sitting next to him down there. He has a huge TV and he can watch anything
he wants on demand, his choice, through a secure source. So that's how we
turned a smart TV into a perfectly damn dumb TV. We got off their X. Why?
Because Matt doesn't want to be on their X. He wants to be on his Y. And
his Y is because I want to be private. See the X and Y thing there? Have
you started work with that connected beds? the data if you're connecting
your bed out?

JeffO - HumanOS: How many places does that go to? There's possibly 50 or
100 other partners getting that data, free services versus subscribing,
yeah.

Will Abramson: I don't know

Will Abramson: if you want to speak to that. I mean, feel welcome if you
can.

Elaine Wooton: Yeah, I put a note in the random ad to Jeff, use cash
sometimes. I think people aren't really thinking when they use their phone
to pay or use their credit card to pay is that, the merchant is having to
pay two, three, 4% for you to do that. If you give them cash, they make
more money. If you give them cash, you're not getting tracked. I like Jeff,
I'm not paranoid about this, but the reality is that out there is too much
data about us. And if you can just every day pick to put one or two less
pieces of data about yourself out there,…

JeffO - HumanOS: Fantastic.

Elaine Wooton: that's a win. I tell people regularly, once a week, walk out
of my house without my phone. I go for a walk.
00:50:00

Will Abramson: Take a quick

Elaine Wooton: I put my health insurance card in my pocket and a $20 bill
and I walk out of the house and that time when I'm not on the RA and I'm
pretty sure there are no flock cameras in my neighborhood, so that works
out all right. Also, whether somebody's watching you. It's about asserting
your right to not be watched. those are my thoughts.

Elaine Wooton: I actually made a post on LinkedIn a little bit about this
whole digital ID thing. I think we're really confused. all this digital
stuff, it's for our convenience. It maybe allows us to do selective
disclosure sometimes so we actually can share less information, but
foundationally our identity is our physical document.

Elaine Wooton: Our money is Everything else is for convenience and for them
to get information about That's my rant.

JeffO - HumanOS: No, it's splendid,…

JeffO - HumanOS: And I absolutely operate with cash in very specific
environments, when I run into people who maybe use dispensaries and stuff
like that. we have a discussion, do you use your bank card or do you use
cash? if you use your bank card, there's going to be a whole lot of other
people finding out about your habit. If you use cash, the only people who
know is going to be the state in that particular storefront. yeah,
absolutely. and I should have cash on that list because that's a very
bright indicator of that. I also want to share something really interesting
about China. I do a lot of studying of what's going on over in China.
through streamers. I live alongside them and I watch what it's like to live
over there.

JeffO - HumanOS: two really wild examples and then I guess we'll be close
to wrapping it up here. one of the things is this gal and her boyfriend
were going to go on a day trip to this mountain lake. So, they pulled over
in this little town area to get some food and there wasn't really any
parking nearby. So, the boyfriend kind of sat there in the car. Jazelle ran
into the place to go get something. She's like, " I'll be back really soon.
we have to hurry though cuz I think this is an old parking." So, she runs
in and she's doing her crazy buying and then she gets back out in the car
and she's like, good. we didn't get a ticket yet or no one has come." And
She says, " it's very hard for us to know if we get a ticket because if you
park, so listen to the immersion in their technical landscape and the
relationships, which aren't necessarily a bad thing, but there's
augmentation and displacement and everything."

JeffO - HumanOS: So she gets back to the car, they didn't get hassled, and
they're about to drive away. And she says, " we would not know if we ought
to ticket because normally if you park illegally, you are informed that you
have about 5 to 10 minutes before your car will be ticketed." So they give
you a grace time. But the problem for us is that is associated with our
mobile device that we get the text. And since this is a rental car, we will
not be informed about that. So, we won't find out until later whether or
not we got a ticket. That's really interesting. Here's another one that
really blew my mind. And this was somewhere between cool and the price of
speaking of rental cars, she was telling a story about how back in the day,
rental cars used to be kind of risky. People beat you up if you didn't just
take the price of it. They'd take your money and not rent you the car. It
was crazy.

JeffO - HumanOS: So, she was talking about being contacted by a rental car
company that said she owed them a little more for their rental. And she
said, her first point is, Why aren't you contacting I'm going to call it U
CRB, the consumer relations broker. the nation state of China has an
operational mid layer. If you have a complaint about a business or if you
have a complaint about a customer, you take it to this operational mid
layer and they mediate it from there. So what happens is they are
constantly informed about people and their tension with happiness. if you
get a repeat performer, somebody who's always pissed, they might get a
social demarit because they're just causing a ton of trouble by complaining
all the time and these people are doing it right.

JeffO - HumanOS: if the company's being a bunch of jackweeds then the state
wants to know that they're ripping off the citizens. So I found it really
fascinating that they had an intermediation layer which is the big
challenge of the internet is putting a layer between people and artfully
doing that.

JeffO - HumanOS: Yeah that's very interesting. So, I'll leave it at that
and I have nothing else unless someone has any questions. And thanks so
much again, Will.

Will Abramson: Yeah. No,…

Will Abramson: thanks This has been great. I mean, it's only a small group,
but it very much reminds me of the IW sessions. I actually did have one
other thing kind of Elaine made me think of it which is there is something
about hiding or trying not to put all of your interactions through digital
mechanisms but what about is there also potentially the opposite where we
flood our digital landscape right with so much junk that they just can't
discern our pattern of life from all the other kind of fake patterns right
maybe that's a Okay.
00:55:00

JeffO - HumanOS: And where do we do we do that in the real world in
conflict environments? We do it with smoke screens.

Will Abramson: Yeah.

JeffO - HumanOS: All kinds of stuff. So it's really fun to look for real
world analogies to questions like this.

JeffO - HumanOS: It can really give great hints and direction. Elaine, what
you got again?

Elaine Wooton: Yeah, real quick.

Elaine Wooton: Piling on what Will said, one of the pieces of
recommendation I put out along with going for a walk is search things
regularly you're not actually interested in. Every time you go to do a
search for something else that you're not actually interested in. That's it.

JeffO - HumanOS: And I even Ted, what's up?

Ted Thibodeau Jr: Just a little recommendation for people to get an idea of
how this can play out. read some Neil Stevenson, particularly Snow Crash
and, Cryptonomicon.

Ted Thibodeau Jr: Neither one is a masterpiece, a literary masterpiece.
They're not, but they are entertaining pros and they delve very deeply into
some of the ideas that just been talking about.

JeffO - HumanOS: precient. That's…

Will Abramson: Yeah, great stuff.

JeffO - HumanOS: what they are for sure.

Ted Thibodeau Jr: Definitely that

JeffO - HumanOS: Right on.

Will Abramson: All right. yeah, I mean, that's great. We'll have to do more
of this shortterm Jeff talks. So I guess before we go I mean there's only
eight of us on the call but really this is just an open invitation if
anyone here has things that they are working on they can be a bit left
field right we have quite an open schedule at the moment and we love to
hear from people working on whatever they're working on I mean it needs to
be related kind of…

Will Abramson: but I think all of us in this space are working on things
that are related to this community.

JeffO - HumanOS: Yeah, and…

Will Abramson: Cool.

JeffO - HumanOS: thank you all for contributing to my disco ball of
brilliant reflections. all great people and from the most expert elite
global folks down to the most simple head injury patients of mine. You guys
just give me great things to reflect back to people over many years now.
It's about nine years coming up. So, thanks a lot.

Will Abramson: Enjoy the rest of your day and see you next week. Cheers.

JeffO - HumanOS: Bye all. Thanks again.
Meeting ended after 00:57:56 👋

*This editable transcript was computer generated and might contain errors.
People can also change the text after it was created.*