Source: Moving Castles: Modular and Portable Multiplayer Miniverses by ARB and GVN908

“With a last squeak the castle lifted, the crew cheered as we could see across the dark forest for the first time, our eyes locked on the arid wastelands on the horizon. Now back to chat, this machine won’t move itself.”

Cozyweb is non-indexable because of a lacking interconnection between material, creating unintentionally disconnected islands populated by isolated communities.

In our vision of this new media format, Moving Castles are modular and portable multiplayer miniverses; inhabited by communities that use them to manage their lore, ecosystems and economies. They are collective machines controlled by governance mechanisms and allow low-barrier participation.

Moving Castles should reflect the following principles (adapted from the design goals described in Modular Politics)

  1. Collective: many contributors share control through transparent and real-time governance mechanisms. (see: Metalabel)
  2. Portable: the ability to move freely between platforms, standards and protocols, from private to public, without losing any value, knowledge, or lore in the process.
  3. Modular: ability to construct Moving Castles by creating, importing, and arranging composable parts together as a coherent whole while making these parts available for others to reuse and adapt.
  4. Interoperable: ability to interact with other communities; communicating, playing games, and sharing knowledge & skills in order to help these communities become Moving Castles themselves.

The Story of All Powerful Wizards

Source: A story of all powerful wizards - 20th of Nov 2021 @ 0xPARC Boston by Justin Glibert

Early internet: individual gardens linked by hyperlinks, tended to by all-powerful wizards who could build any worlds they wanted. Very libertarian

Proposing: a bazaar, no access control and everybody plays by the same rules. Where each visitor has the power to change the world around them, as long as they respect the physics of the world.

You could visit these other gardens that wizards built but in doing so, you lose all of your wizardly powers in their domain.

Are there any ways we can remove the distinction between all-powerful hosts and powerless guests?

  • With the power of a host, it only takes one bad actor to destroy an entire garden

Systems of magic

  • Specificity is good
  • Rules should be able to be composed
  • Should not be too powerful

Programming is magic, and it’s too powerful. There is no OS for the Internet telling you what you can and cannot do (only limitation is not running out of memory and time).

What is interesting with systems is not what you can do, but what you cannot do.

What if programming was closer to mechanical engineering and physics?

  • Energy conversation
  • Symmetries
  • Spatial computation
  • Causality, speed of light, etc.

The dream is to be wizards in the same world together. We want to be able to protect things like person A wiping all of person B’s work out of existence with the snap of their finger