post-web thesis

definitions.
web = a document-centric, ad-supported, platform-consolidated attention market with weak provenance and weak consent.
post-web = a protocol-centric, locally sovereign, researchable and programmable medium where identity, intent, provenance, and cost are first-class, and where documents, data, models, and agents interoperate as typed processes.
identity = cryptographic bearer of rights and duties, recoverable, plural, and unlinkable by default.
provenance = cryptographically chained account of origin, transformation, and use.
cost = explicit energy, time, bandwidth, and externality accounting.
researchable = every claim can be traced, measured, re-run, and contested.

part i. foundations

1. the post-web is not a place, it is a semantics. a network becomes post-web when its primitives encode meaning, not just transport bytes.


2. the unit of computation is the conversation among typed processes. categories supply composition, optics supply bidirectional state update, sheaves supply locality and gluing, and proof objects supply accountability.


3. addressability must exceed location. every artifact has a content address, a capability address, and a legal-consent address. storage, rights, and procedures are separable concerns.


4. identity is contextual and plural. agents present minimal credentials needed for a task, bind consent to scope and time, and leave revocable audit trails. universal identifiers without selective disclosure are anti-features.


5. provenance is the substrate of trust. nothing significant should be untraceable: data lineage, model weights lineage, prompt lineage, decision lineage, payout lineage. cryptographic attestations plus reproducible notebooks form the default dossier.


6. attention cannot be the base currency. energy, latency, and externalities must be priced, or the medium collapses into rage-optimizing engagement funnels. costed interactions produce saner equilibria than subsidized infinite scroll.


7. search becomes experiment planning. ranking gives way to executable queries that return datasets, claims, code, and measured uncertainties. the output is a bundle: result, confidence, method, and re-run hooks.


8. platforms dissolve into protocols. any monopoly that arises must be a public good with exit options. interface stability is a constitutional property, not a marketing promise.


9. legibility is a civic right. systems must emit explanations that are falsifiable. hand-wavy dashboards and dark patterns are treated as pollution.


10. consent is computable. policies compile into verifiable constraints over dataflow. the runtime rejects flows that violate consent types. policy text is not comments, it is code.


11. information ecology beats content firehose. deduplicated knowledge graphs with typed edges replace infinite feeds. subscription means run these standing queries and notify me if the result crosses thresholds rather than spray me with whatever.


12. surprise is engineered, not faked. recommender systems are audited for entropy budgets, novelty gradients, and long-term user agency retention, not just short-term click yield.



part ii. architecture

13. base layer: content addressing, capability security, programmable consent. cid for what, cap for who, pol for how. every resource has these three handles.


14. data layer: versioned tables and streams as ACSets with schemas published as first-class artifacts. transformations are optics that carry forward citations and resource costs. joins and updates preserve lineage.


15. compute layer: notebooks as contracts. every service endpoint is a reproducible bundle with inputs, code, environment, tests, and price. caching is lawful only if provenance and consent are preserved.


16. model layer: weights and prompts are civic infrastructure. models ship with cards that bind tasks to training data subsets, evaluation batteries, known failure modes, energy usage, and retraining triggers. inference logs are redacted by default and rehydratable by consent.


17. governance layer: sortition plus proofs. committees are selected by verifiable randomness, decisions are encoded as proposals with testable consequences, and audits are lotteries with teeth. token voting without costed verification is deprecated.


18. economy layer: obligations over balances. value moves when claims clear under rules that price energy and externalities. stablecoins cover accounting, not governance. treasuries fund protocol maintenance as if it were road repair.


19. local-first by default. sync reconciles typed diffs, not blind blobs. offline capability is a feature, not a downgrade. latency is paid in detail, not in silence.


20. interoperability is typed, not stringly. schemas, units, and ontologies version together. dynamic adapters are generated from formal alignments, not hand-rolled by integrators at 3am.


21. observability is science-grade. metrics have definitions, baselines, and error bars. every dashboard tile links to the experiment that minted it. incidents generate compulsory postmortems whose recommendations are machine-checkable assertions.



part iii. culture

22. publish the method, not the vibe. claims without re-run hooks become culture, not infrastructure. culture is fine, but do not confuse it for guarantees.


23. replace creator culture with steward culture. you do not own an audience, you tend an ecology. dependency trees are gardens. the best gardeners prune their own vines.



appendix a. minimal blueprint

a1. identifiers. adopt content addressing for artifacts, capability tokens for access, and scoped credentials for identity. support threshold recovery and social guardianship.

a2. consent calculus. define a consent algebra with compositions for time, purpose, and audience. compile policies into runtime checks that guard dataflow graphs.

a3. provenance kernel. standardize a lineage record: {inputs, code hash, environment hash, cost, operator, attestations, tests}. make it cheap to emit, expensive to omit.

a4. local-first sync. CRDTs or categorical lenses for merging. conflicts are first-class states with guided resolution. every sync action is explainable.

a5. executable search. design a query format that returns a bundle: results plus method, datasets, code, cost, and re-run command. results that cannot be re-run decay in rank.

a6. notebook contracts. pin environments, cache under provenance, meter by cpu, memory, bandwidth, and storage. charge for uncached misses, discount for shared caches.

a7. model cards that bite. ship eval suites, red team results, and renewal conditions. when real-world performance drifts outside tolerance, the card invalidates the deployment and opens a retrain proposal.

a8. sortition governance. rotate review councils with verifiable randomness. pair audits with bounty pools. constitutional changes require live experiments with predeclared success metrics.

a9. ecology metrics. publish entropy of recommendations, attention half-life, consent violation rate, provenance completeness, compute per experiment, and externality price coverage.

a10. defaults. private by default, inspectable by right, exportable by design, revocable by mechanism, reproducible by habit.

appendix b. failure modes and countermeasures

b1. platform feudalism. counter with protocol cooperatives, public reference implementations, and credible exit. enshrine compatibility clauses that outlive funders.

b2. provenance theater. counter with spot-check lotteries, reproducibility tournaments, and publishing penalties for unverifiable claims.

b3. surveillance creep. counter with capability scoping, unlinkable credentials, and budgeted telemetry that must pay rent in demonstrated value.

b4. ai slurry. counter with signed data, dataset hygiene indices, watermark-aware training, and markets that price clean data above synthetic filler.

b5. ossification. counter with versioned subprotocols, explicit deprecation schedules, and migration grants with test suites.

appendix c. mathematical backbone

c1. processes as optics. read and write sides model observation and update, parameters carry hidden state, lenses compose, and laws enforce coherence.

c2. locality via sheaves. data and models live on spaces with covers, sections glue, and restrictions encode data minimization. privacy is a topological property, not a prayer.

c3. accountability via traces. traced monoidal structure renders dataflow with feedback. every cycle carries delay, cost, and guard conditions. snake equations become audit paths.

c4. invariants as contracts. types, units, and conservation laws move through pipelines. type errors are blocked at compile time, conservation violations at runtime.

appendix d. seven experiments to exit the web

d1. executable search engine that returns runnable bundles with lineage.
d2. consent-typed personal data wallet with local-first sync and selective disclosure.
d3. provenance-first notebook hosting where every endpoint is a contract.
d4. model registry that refuses deployments lacking evals and energy budgets.
d5. sortition-run community review for protocol changes with real stakes.
d6. recommendation system audited for agency retention and entropy budgets.
d7. civic data exchange where clean, signed datasets command visible premiums.

epilogue.
the web taught billions to click. the post-web must teach trillions to compose. composition is not decor, it is civilizations trick for building larger truths from smaller ones. set the primitives so that the cheapest thing to do is also the most honest thing to do. then let the weird engines of culture run.

(c)barton.wasm