A few days ago, while walking with a friend in a small grove at Sentosa, the sound of cicadas was continuous, chirping without end in the tree tops in the evening. It reminded me of the sound of cicadas in the courtyard of my childhood, a sound that filled the summer night sky. If we were those cicadas, what message would we be sending to the world? If there were fiber-optic cables that could connect to those cicadas from that evening or to the stars we looked up at when we were kids, what would we hear? 'Great sound lacks voice, great form is shapeless.'
Today, let's discuss what communication in our new era actually is. Let's temporarily use the term 'Communication3', or 'Com3' for short, to represent this new concept, distinguishing it from communication as defined in the past information age.
First, let's look at the past definition of communication on Wiki, which is 'sharing' or 'building relationships', and is 'an obvious answer to the divergence between self and others, private and public, as well as inner thoughts and the external world'. According to Shannon's definition, communication involves the motivation and logic of exchange, the combination and encoding of information, its transmission through channels, followed by decoding, interpretation, and understanding, a multi-step overlapping and recursive activity. Of course, this includes verbal communication, accounting for about 35%, and non-verbal communication. In the last knowledge and information age, verbal communication was heavily used in societal communication mechanisms.
Let's quickly establish an understanding of Com3 from several different perspectives:
- In a decentralized system, how is the new communication paradigm reformed? If we assume that the internet inherently connects us, then in the new decentralized system, the main challenges are potentially malicious nodes or poor consensus. Communication between nodes is no longer just about accuracy and efficiency from one node to another. More crucially, Com3 in a decentralized system inherently carries a design of consistency or consensus. It's like our past communication systems thought about efficiency from point A to point B, but we need to shift our perspective to redefine Com3. The question might be: In a new Byzantine environment, what is Com3 like?
- Com3 will have a revolutionary impact on monetized organizational internal and external communication. Economically speaking, if our communication can be verified and measured, it will significantly boost capturing the economic value produced by this communication. Com3 is like a 'wisdom exchange' or 'knowledge exchange', which will become essential in the economy. This 'wisdom exchange' might not be a traditional transaction, but it has strong transactional attributes. It emphasizes differentiated high-value knowledge exchanges in organizations with clear separation of privileges.
- Due to its physical characteristics, Com3 inherently possesses anti-censorship capabilities, challenging the paradigms of traditional and systematic governance. From day one, due to the requirements for systemic safety, Com3 must possess a substantial degree of individual and collective anti-censorship capabilities. A significant challenge lies in distinguishing between the individual and the collective. Naturally, the tension between the two brings about significant governance challenges.
- What implications does Com3 have for our community behavior? We can refer to Jürgen Habermas's theory of communicative action to understand the transformative effects of Com3 on individual and collective communication within and between communities.
There are interesting features here, such as liquidity. In traditional communication protocols, there's a connect-then-transfer model, where nodes handshake multiple times for information transfer. In the new decentralized system, the default is that everything is connected, making liquidity interesting. The idea is that new transfers will inherently have better flow. Of course, resilience against censorship is essential, especially in a decentralized system. Com3 also provides more verifiability and economic value. Our future communication will be segmented: rational goes with rational, emotional with emotional, and non-verbal with non-verbal. The system can be designed through certain strategic games.
From a machine's perspective, Com3 establishes communication standards. Machines communicate through well-defined public protocols and standards. This balances individual privacy and ownership rights with public interests. This can be balanced through strategic games within system nodes. Com3 isn't just about efficiency, but about consistency, consensus, and economic changes. We'll have a 'Not Our Key, Not Our Message' tech system, and our understanding or knowledge production activities through communication will exponentially increase.
Simply put, individuals and self-organized groups can use Com3 to rapidly shape new economies. Not only will we have integrated incentives for collaboration, but after separating permissions, economic models can be reformed. Consumption logic, asset logic, and advertising logic can be redesigned within the economy. Interesting scenarios, like education, medical consultation, legal advice, which were once vital communication links in the economy, might be the first to be redesigned.
Com3 mainly reforms collaborative relationships in joint production. For instance, in formats like Zoom, we see how collaboration occurs. With clear knowledge ownership boundaries, a lot of public domain knowledge or wisdom production will be greatly stimulated. New forums for learning and debate might emerge everywhere. With the economic model reformed, Com3 can be directly monetized, which also monetizes people. As discussed earlier, Com3 makes the phrase 'our money' a reality, as many human-to-human and machine-to-human communications can be directly monetized. This will greatly stimulate a 'co-creative economy.' In the past, whether in arts, science, or business, truly collaborative creations among peers in knowledge-intensive economies often had issues, especially due to unclear ownership rights in the production process.
Naturally, Com3 encourages a fluid, high-dimensional co-creation economy, and its disruptive power might exceed our expectations. Especially in cross-disciplinary collaborations, imagine Socrates, Van Gogh, and Einstein in one team, rapidly co-creating through Com3 in a clear ownership economy. Such 'superhuman co-creation economies' could become the shining stars of future economies.
However, we can make some basic judgments. Com3 is based on equality, whether it's nodes, people, machines, or even the future relationship between humans and machines. They all should be treated with a certain level of equality, a principle that's embedded in its foundational design. It may not be a straightforward "one person, one vote" system. Moreover, the principle of "community first" might be adopted in governance. Actions against the collective interests of the community will likely face significant challenges during implementation. Initially, the legitimacy of such governance would be ambiguous. Due to the intrinsic characteristics of Com3's communication behavior, an overly precise definition of legitimacy would restrict the flow of genuine information, affecting production relationships and efficiency.
Com3's governance might evolve towards a city-state model. Whether returning to the ancient governance of small states with few citizens or adopting modern decentralized pluralistic philosophies, there will be layers with limited trust and authority. At the top, there would be a kind of city-state governance. This would pave the way for new organizations to design their governance systems. Especially if the decentralized economy grows large enough and its models are widely recognized, governance legitimacy with a competitive advantage will be sought after. Communities will have stricter requirements, and illegitimate governance will be severely restricted. Traditional centralized organizations will also face challenges and need to prepare for reforms or response strategies in advance. Regulatory lag is inevitable, but its form is unpredictable, especially for traditional hierarchical organizations.
Firstly, the interaction between entities, based on symbolic coherence, aims to reach understanding and form a non-coercive consensus. This isn't a purely instrumental action or simple self-presentation, nor is it just strategic gameplay for favorable outcomes. It's multifaceted, aiming at understanding, and building non-coercive consensus. Over-objectifying humans or the act of communication has limitations, especially aesthetically.
Interestingly, principles like authenticity, comprehensibility, sincerity, and fairness are not only applicable to humans but also machines and human-machine interactions.
First, Com3's authenticity ensures efficient exchange and verification processes. In many cultures, hidden or falsely magnified information damages community consensus. The internet's inability to verify information leads to widespread false narratives, causing many articles and videos to emphasize theatrics. False information will be recognized and verified by machines in the future. The decentralized society will, to an extent, change the narrative that history is written by victors. Not only information, but also the exchange of wisdom will evolve, making low-value information exchanges increasingly irrelevant.
Secondly, Com3 requires groups to sincerely understand. This relates to the linguistic system itself. The vocabulary systems of English and Chinese communities, for instance, are entirely different. Fragmented communications like WeChat group chats might optimize excessive purpose-driven and strategic communications, but they aren't necessarily positive for genuine understanding.
Lastly, Com3 emphasizes sincerity and fairness, not only in actions but also in intentions. This is vital for human-machine interaction, machine-to-machine interaction, or within our communities. For example, as members of the "Satoshi Nakamoto" community, we contribute collectively. We hope to achieve understanding, align our directions, and collaborate.
Interestingly, Com3 might stimulate a substantial adoption of non-verbal communication. Language has its limitations, whether it's computer code, Chinese, or English. Non-verbal communication, resonating without words, will become more relevant in the future.
Standing at the crossroads of production relationships and productive forces, it's poignant that while not everyone might be a revolutionary at the moment, they've been empowered to become entrepreneurs. Among the three activities, verbal action is especially significant. False speech and double-tongued language harm authenticity, connectivity, consensus, and fairness. The concept of Com3 offers valuable insights whether we're designing systems, interacting with systems, or interacting with each other.