Launching ORI - Early Access
Last week I was in New York County Supreme Court, fighting for my rights over a project I created over a decade ago. My situation here is very common: two friends create something beautiful together, out of love. Then, suddenly, the world notices, they find themselves with enormous responsibility, and it breaks them. It breaks the love.
This happened to me over a decade ago, and I stopped creating. Everyone told me “you shouldn’t have trusted so much, you shouldn’t have worked so informally, you should have had rigorous paperwork and agreements of who owns what beforehand” blah blah blah, but they were wrong. The magic spark WAS in making something & learning together, informally, with people that you love and trust.
I watched this same thing happen AGAIN in the last 2 years. It happens all the time. Some of us are extremely generative, but are terrible at owning real responsibility. Some of us can hold down the fort & dot all the i’s, but can’t do that while simultaneously tending to the uncontrollable fire of the creative spark. Neither go very far without the other.
It doesn’t have to be this way. There is a new game in town. It’s called ORI. ORI is the explicit attempt at (1) writing down the rules of the game, and (2) testing it with our actions in the real world, in our lives, and reporting back1.
The night and the day
Sweet reunion
First glimmers of a new way
Sweet reunion
.2
My trial is now over, as of 5pm on Wednesday, May 20th. I have my verdict from the jury.
I won.
I would like to make the full transcripts and the whole story public, including the defendant’s side of the story. I learned a lot from this trial, from litigating this & presenting it in front of a real judge & a real jury. I modeled Anatomy of an Internet Argument after the US justice system (the jury is the internet audience), and it was very validating to see how much of the internet game we play, the skills we practiced, are actually helpful, and successful, in a real court.
In either the real courts, or the courts of public opinion, you can play fairly and in good faith, or you can “play dirty”. You can follow the letter of the law but completely destroy the spirit of it, and pretend like you aren’t aware that you’re doing this. If your adversary is fighting dirty, you feel like you must fight dirty, and it is a race to the bottom.
But, again, it DOES NOT HAVE TO BE THIS WAY. Jared asked last week, why should I play fair if the other side isn’t?
How do you determine if the parties are indeed acting in good faith? My assumption/observation is that the vast majority of online arguments do not consist of 2 people that are arguing in good faith
My answer is: YOU CAN WIN BY PLAYING FAIR. It is in fact THE ONLY WAY TO WIN. If you play dirty, if you start engaging in bad faith, now we’ve all lost (the jury, the audience, can’t figure out what the actual truth is). In my trial, I went “off script”. On the stand, I conceded to all the good & important work that the other guy did. This was “hurting my case” / going against the legal strategy. But I made this choice on the stand, to just speak plainly and concede what is not mine, while holding my ground for what is mine.
And it worked. I tweeted this below, very emotionally after stepping out of court. Even my lawyer was inspired. Even he thought it was amazing that we had a fighting chance of winning by just telling the simple truth and not playing rhetorical games2.
There is a new game in town. We can win just by telling the simple truth. We can trust and thrive. But we HAVE to choose it, of our volition3.
.3
Ok, so here’s the plan. I know ORI works. I’ve been beta testing it for over a year now4. ORI can make people rich & famous, it can launch their careers & companies. It can alter people’s life trajectory in less materially visible but profound ways. I currently have more people trying to get into ORI than I can support.
It is time to prepare for launch.
I plan to update the website (https://openresearchinstitute.org/) this week to reflect the current state of the project, and ask for sponsors/investors/funders, as well as those who can donate their time/labor/skill to the project. And also figure out how to split ownership of this thing.
.3
My immediate focus with this launch are the following three core projects:
A/B/U book & flywheel (github)
Anatomy of an Internet Argument handbook & flywheel (entry point + github)
Psyops Hackathon in Austin TX, September 4-7 (github)
These three projects represent 3 pillars. I think they are the minimum needed to bootstrap the “core game loop” of ORI. The first one is about epistemic literacy, establishing a baseline, and creating a formal system for tracking the origin of ideas & influence over our minds.
The second piece is about good faith conflict resolution. When good people stop mistaking each other for bad faith & attacking each other, we will make progress very rapidly & focusing on the source of the actual problems. We will use these techniques internally in the ORI game & externally.
The third piece is something that Kat_The_Vat has been working on for a while and has been suddenly gaining traction & interest. I think it might be “the event” that I have been dreaming of for a long time that would kick off the “white hat culture hacking” industry & community and bring everyone together. I have been wanting to write “the hippocratic oath” or the “code of conduct” for white hat psyops for a long time now, and us playing this live game in September might be the forcing function for us to write down those rules and test them.
In Sept 2024, I wrote one of the first incarnations of this idea on this blog in “Onboarding Guide for Employees of Spaceship Earth (request for feedback)”.
I have tons of thoughts here, about how each lawyer acted, and how they both felt like they couldn’t concede unless the other guy conceded first (& how neither was happy with the equilibrium, which is really the same dynamic we see across internet arguments). Also I have a TON of thoughts on how & why lawyers tell you to “not speak about it publicly” or “please don’t live tweet what’s happening in the court as it’s happening” but I think there is a proper way to do this, and it is actually good if people understand what’s happening behind the scenes, and it can help us reach the truth faster, and a resolution to the conflict faster.
I am not scared of people knowing the truth. I feel safest if people know the truth. The full truth. I have faith in whatever consequences happen to me as the truth surfaces.
See “no such thing as an unstoppable upward spiral”. The point I want to make there is simply that if you are being forced to do good, then you aren’t doing good. The only way to have a good life is to exercise your free will & agency to be & to do good. No one can make this choice for you.
Two of the most publicly successful examples from ORI are (1) the Twitter Community Archive “open memetics” base station (2) Sam Senchal launching his research career through the ORI network. He will be giving a talk this weekend in SF at the machine consciousness conference. I plan to join him there, May 28-30.
You didn't just speak the truth - you also rose above the deception and pointed it out to the jury.
and if you feel inspired to join, read this and just start.
as Guy says: you can just do things.
here's how I did it.
https://shadowrebbe.substack.com/p/the-open-research-institute-onboarding?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=4rbax