Act III: πρᾶξις — Praxis

The Architecture of the Social Network

Acts I and II were a retrospective of my life so far—detailing my beginnings and career while tracing the fundamental tensions we all face as we express ourselves within that singular constraint described by the social sciences: the tension between self-sovereignty and collectivism.

Act III sets out what I came away with as I set out to better model our augmentation of the material world—the social and intellectual ferment of humanity called the Social Network. This is the nexus where we use life as an opportunity to explore and traverse reality, while reconciling our individual desire for self-actualization with our collective need for security or tenable comfort. We do this while confronting existential threats—climate change and global conflict—and the profound inequality that drives both. Think of this as a fabric or texture constantly being knit or crocheted into the future as it arcs or rests upon your lap—a meditative coming together of strands without toil: inaction in action.

Twenty-five years and my life is still Tryin' to get up that great big hill of hope For a destination I realized quickly when I knew I should That the world was made up of this brotherhood of man For whatever that means

~ Four Non Blondes

It is relatively easy to reach middle age with your idealism intact from within the comfortable confines of the prosperous West—where most of us possess the means required for personal self-improvement and elevation in every sense, and where only persistence, intention, courage, and patience are required to live well day by day.

I have generally been good at drawing boundaries around work. Mostly, this involved refusing promotions into the bureaucratic roles beyond engineering—which is exactly where all the real learning happened as software architecture rapidly evolved. The most pertinent shift was the transition from Waterfall to Agile and DevOps methods, driven by a marketplace demanding relentless application innovation. It became imperative that build decisions were grounded in objective metrics traceable to customer experience. In that milieu, you looked beyond your day job—into spaces like the emerging crypto world—for answers that contrasted with the arbitrary, often crudely political, split-the-difference decision-making required to defend corporate turf.

I used the rest of my time to absorb ideas. Some might consider them obscurely intellectual or philosophical, alongside the physical and mental fitness protocols that hold traction in our high-performance kaizen ecology of self-improvement. These paths converge on the same essential discipline: praxis.

Praxis brings fluidity to practice. It has to be a loose fit; it does not have to be legit. It offers one the leeway with which to explore the terrain of the social network—because so much of the extractable value lies in understanding the edge cases. Exploring them ultimately leads to good architecture (firmitas)—a visual and structural harmony that aligns with the broadest consensus: nature. This discipline is critical today because our networks are developing a form of consciousness that requires universal protocols to safely and autonomously govern all of our interactions, and must not neglect the marginalized—including the ecology.

The balance between orthodox and fluid practice, however, is never settled. It is, in fact, the very thing historians call dialectic; negotiated piecemeal in the rough of reality, it produces something deeply personal—one's own lens—an augmentation of reality with which to navigate the topology of man. Theory provides the mental model; reality provides the terrain that enriches it. You march where the path feels true and improvise when it does not.

The bureaucracies and institutions we have inherited struggle to contain the underlying mayhem of human nature pressing against their seams. Yet, these institutions, and the freedoms they afford, remain our only available instruments for building a genuinely better future. Just as praxis informs our personal rituals, so too must they evolve to serve more inclusively.

I earned the orthodox credentials—the PMP, CSM, and ACP—while deployed across virtually every large institution in Toronto: IBM from 1999 to 2010, then as an independent contractor, then briefly with Thomson Reuters from 2019 to 2022. The accreditations were never the point. The office was always one vehicle for understanding something larger: how we interface across the architecture of the social network to solve real problems, balance individual sovereignty with communitarian utility, and deploy our accumulated intellectual and material capital toward that end. We are social animals; we cohere through the people and institutions we respect, becoming meaningful parts of the whole rather than obsolete appendices.

Above all, we need to arrest an unfolding tragedy: our collective criminal negligence toward the global commons—the climate, the environment, and the planetary inheritance we are actively squandering. Endless extraction might be forgivable if it had purchased satisfaction. It has not. I cannot work at the nexus of governance and information technology—efficiently, sustainably, or in good conscience—while pretending otherwise. In truth, there is no separating work and life without upsetting the balance entirely.

Arc and Texture

My job, project management, entails the governing of risks that threaten a project's intended outcomes. For a long time, the project was the primary mechanism through which large institutions evolved and adapted to changing realities. In application development, that meant keeping apps relevant in people's lives: easy, useful, engaging, and even delightful.

Coming to my work from a political economy background afforded me a particular lens. It was evident that software architecture was evolving in ways that distributed and decentralized power—a continuation, and even an acceleration, of an existing trend towards self-sovereignty and away from imperial pre-eminence.

We can go all the way back to the Magna Carta, but let us cut to the chase. What began in the eighteenth century with the likes of the British and Dutch East India Companies continued into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when multinational corporations began to influence global affairs and develop brands capable of challenging, and thereby subtly undermining, the nation-state as a focus for personal affiliation and ambition.

In 1865, Reuters altered European finance by scooping Lincoln's assassination, routing the news through a private, low-latency telegraph network to give its banker clients a market-moving head start to make (another) killing before the London Stock Exchange crashed.

Then corporate leverage reached a harrowing peak during the Second World War, when IBM's European subsidiaries supplied custom-designed punch-card technology directly to the Nazi government. Automating the national census, these machines provided the state with the data processing required to locate and systematically destroy entire populations with industrial efficiency.

Whatever our misgivings, transparency concerning these practices, the moral quandary they present, and our agency to decide for ourselves whether to participate or demur in the commissioning and execution of such contracts are as important as the end of mandatory military service.

Similarly, where once the best and brightest joined government institutions, such as the British Foreign Office or the US State Department, they now turned increasingly to the corporation as a place to learn, to practice, and thereby to be of some utility. The question is, to what end? For personal and corporate profit, or to serve as custodians and guardians for the global commons we share?

A century later, IBM consolidated corporate power by liberating global enterprises from paper records, but in doing so, locked organizational data onto mainframes. Consequently, this data became available to all of us again over time as IBM innovated our first artificial intelligence models—Deep Blue and Watson.

Where the past once had the Nifty Fifty, the present has the Magnificent Seven. We rightly describe them as powerful and extractive—platforms that concentrate attention and data at unprecedented scale. Yet their emergence also marks a waypoint on a longer arc. Affiliation no longer defaults to the nation-state or the lifelong employer; the credentials and infrastructure required to build outside institutional walls are commodifying fast. What decentralizes here is not their present market dominance, but the conditions under which personal agency becomes practicable again.

I saw that shift happen up close through the evolution of the social network, where the object of change evolved. First from the project to the product, and then to the public protocols we know today as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana—each with its own use-case-driven application on that social network.

Project

The institutions I served were large and complex. Even their information technology units comprised myriad departments working interdependently to deliver their applications; this was a cumbersome environment demanding patience and persistence above all else. Projects ground slowly in fits and starts. They consisted of many pieces painstakingly lined up based on dependencies or prerequisites in a chain of causality. They were often concluded late, short of the promised features, and at a considerably higher cost than initially forecasted. We call their architecture monolithic.

These institutions move slowly on release trains. Deployments happen roughly every three months, and the idea is to line your work up with one of those. The odds of an individual project succeeding on its original terms were always small, but competent teams managing with diligence resulted in relative success in the marketplace and thus competitiveness.

As a professional, one had to be content with something well short of perfection—with the steady accumulation of knowledge and its registration into a general-purpose framework for understanding reality. This was something one carried to the next endeavour and which, more importantly, furnished over time a more completely modelled worldview. However, this, in my view, is why we work in any profession: to grapple with how we as individuals fit into the larger picture of communities, institutions, sovereign collectives, and the global commons.

The project transformed states within a finite time period. It had a definite start and a definite end, both anchored by significant ceremonies whose purpose was to define two states—the current and the desired—and establish a plan to navigate between them, all the while keeping stakeholders apprised of progress as well as arising or actual problems (we call these risks and issues, respectively).

Product

The product has since superseded the project. A product amounts to a project with no discernible end following the initial launch of an application (utilitas); it faces the marketplace as a continuous offering, persisting so long as it resonates. Resonance transfers value continuously between the user and the application in exchange for an investment or due consideration of attention and energy at both ends.

Governance has adapted to keep teams focused on the customer—adopting the improvisational frameworks of Agile and DevOps to identify opportunities and manage risks; teams now govern themselves with considerable leeway inside an overarching, firm-level hierarchy. They answer to one thing alone: a relatively attractive return on investment. These teams are light on ceremony and rather more dependent on the trust which organically develops in self-organizing teams possessing their own internal culture grounded in the natural semantics of banter.

Whether the unit of analysis is the project or the product, the primary threat is waste—attention and energy spent badly, generating discontent and dissatisfaction for both parties. Traditionally, teams contained this risk through the triple constraint: money, time, and scope. Today, the distinction between value and waste is a fine line users draw based on how, why, and where they engage with the application. The larger the scope, the more complexity compounds—which is why Agile and DevOps emerged, enabling small, self-governing teams to work with relative autonomy. These microservices are standalone applications created by our best modern firms; they contrast with the monolithic architectures still reliant on legacy platforms seen at older firms.

In my own experience, the autonomy afforded to agile teams correlates directly to something more important: generally, they have more fun, enjoyment, and contentment, and they actually get things done.

These firms and their exceptionally productive teams can deploy application changes to their public multiple times a day. However, the underlying technology is now comprehensively commodified. Today, almost anyone can build and run lean, beautifully presented applications—utilizing AI to replicate the work of a dozen talented developers, designers, copywriters, business analysts, and architects. All from a laptop or even just a mobile device for a dollar or two a day. In this landscape of infinite, automated execution, the engineering itself is no longer the differentiator. All that matters now is for a creator to discover where their unique passion aligns and dovetails with what a public, increasingly exhausted by the internet's decaying quality, is demanding.

Protocol

The products of our most influential firms became the centralized nodes through which we interact—social media, email, and messaging applications. Crucially, those digital messages and notifications represent relative value. This reality was prototyped by Kenya's M-Pesa, launched in 2007 by Safaricom and Vodafone, as a mobile ledger system that showed us precisely what money is at its most basic, abstract level: information.

The architecture, the arc, and the texture of their activity push us toward distributed, decentralized systems. This is our continuation on a path which ultimately reclaims self-sovereignty through identity and data. That shift is happening through the evolution of the social network, where the object of change has evolved: from project, to product, and now, to use-case-specific public protocols with which we convey value among ourselves entirely without trusted third parties, whether they be governments or corporations: Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana.

Ultimately, the capital we spend on raw voice and data connectivity will bypass traditional telco gatekeepers entirely; instead, it will accrue as programmatic data credits directly to the decentralized infrastructure networks and edge-routing protocols that demonstrably improve the quality, privacy, and sovereignty on the internet itself.

Software development's pervasive impact on our lives has forced a reckoning on the social network to precisely define how its constituents (whether individual or collective) transact with one another. Each of us engages with the network in ways that aggregate into a precise signature—and in a world of finite resources, that signature carries weight. Protocols signal our relative preferences at a granular level and register the degree to which those preferences shape society for better and for worse. As such, they express a measure of social credit—reciprocal trust registered by a community, not the surveillance scoring of authoritarian states—reflecting how much others may safely entrust us with things that matter within a particular semantic perimeter.

These semantic perimeters nest within a single overarching claim—the planet as a whole—which needs to be sustained as a collective inheritance and delivered to posterity in better condition than it was received. The evolution from project to product to protocol is the long arc of human history compressed and relayed through the last one hundred or so years as the history of information technology: from rigid hierarchies and their grand projects arbitrarily funded with money tethered to nothing, to the continuous currents flowing to create value with decentralized, value-registering protocols.

The Path Forward

Whether we operate as individual content creators, small collectives gathered around a shared passion, or nodes within a legacy bureau, our digital realities are converging. The semantic perimeters where we generate creative value can no longer exist as unmapped corporate territories; a random collection of suspicious minds. They must instead be securely bounded and aligned in an objective sense to a common purpose.

True self-sovereignty requires our creative capital to flow directly into protocol-level mechanisms—governed by personal cryptographic keys—with explicit processes dictating how value is custodied and equitably distributed among a brand's talents. Consider a small studio—a writer, a designer, a developer, an editor—whose work today must pass through a platform that captures the relationship, sets the payout schedule, and takes its toll. M-Pesa showed that money is information; a protocol-bound agreement, signed by their own keys, can custody incoming value, allocate shares by prior consent, and release funds when agreed conditions are met—without an intermediary owning the ledger on which their collaboration is recorded.

By reclaiming custody of our signatures, these protocols also allow us to renegotiate how we are configured as individual identities within the collective to pursue our desire for self-actualization while serving others. Through this infrastructural shift, we move away from extractive paradigms and finally begin to architect our common wealth sustainably across the broader social network.