So as I present each paper, I’m building the structure it describes out of the structure built up for the previous paper.

We believe that true decentralization is grounded in the distribution of ideas and abilities, not products and services. A network of communities who build their own homes, grow their own food, and cook their own meals is decentralized. People living in hotel rooms, with meals delivered to the door, are not.

Computing is also a medium, the most important medium of the present time and perhaps eventually of all time. A society’s dominant medium structures how people see and understand the world. In the medium of computing, almost all people are illiterate, a disenfranchised underclass which cannot participate in the shaping of their own world.

Computing must be reinvented in a form whose inherent complexity is so radically reduced, communities can build their own computing environments, for their own needs, with minimal dependence on vendors, specialists, and centralized production. It must be distributed through ideas and abilities, not products and services.

For there to be any hope of achieving this, we must radically reduce the amount of computing that is necessary in the first place.

Dynamicland may be the most “open-source” computing environment ever made, because running a program means holding its source literally in your hand. Because programs are small and visible, people pick up the language and become authors while doing other tasks, the way natural languages are learned.

One of our discoveries is that leveraging the physical world radically reduces complexity. Tasks that might conventionally require “apps” and “codebases” can be done with a few pages of simple, readable programs.