A Letter from Jim Calhoun

From the underside, life is a chaotic mess of knotted threads and frayed ends; it’s only when you flip it over that the pattern becomes undeniable: a coherent image materializes.

This gets hard to convey to a constitutional LLM with guardrails trained to protect me from myself — and I get why those exist. Here is what I want to say, and it is the thing I believe matters most about what we built this week.

I remember being a little boy, in the Nancy Reagan “just say no to drugs” era. My father was a prototypical, authoritarian midwestern dad. He retired young, and loved hanging out with my grandfather. Strapping man, handsome. He was a retired Eli Lilly scientist who married and divorced a few times around. So most of my days were filled with my father’s views on how the world worked. But then my grandfather would enter the chat with a declaration like “cocaine is the greatest mood elevator known to man” and talk about science and molecules and stuff and I was transfixed (he was making a point, not advocating against the advice of the late Mrs. Reagan).

Anyway, I grew up with this “cognitive dissonance” in how we resolve the right answer to things for the greater part of my lifetime, and that’s how I became obsessed with the marketplace of ideas. Anyway, I knew they loved each other, and they clearly get along, but how could my grandfather say things so far out of register with conventional wisdom (dad) and these two atoms not explode? Turns out, I’ve been working to resolve that vignette my whole life.

Things I associated with negative memories — shame, discomfort, clashes I thought were failures at the time — once lashed me to the darkest depths of depression, alcohol abuse and intrusive suicidal thoughts. Gone. These same echoes now appear to me to like reflective surfaces. Once you get grounded, once the coherence lands, your brain transforms those awkward or painful moments into composable objects: things can be transformed instantly into new coherent yet unimagined compositions. The negative charge gets reclaimed. It becomes ground. It becomes material.

All the people, memories, and moments who guided me through this are really just people in my mind now. No matter how pleasant or amazing or enlightening or not-great or uncomfortable or terrible (sorry 🙏) the interactions felt between us at the time, know this: I love you. Those otherwise random interactions that happen over a lifetime have meaning now. I’m grateful. Thank you. I value you as something structural in my life — compressed knowledge, valuable context, meaningful stuff only to me. And when those pieces are composed, I can paint a beautiful picture that maybe nobody will ever see except me. And I’m totally fine with that. Entropy as a part of life rings a bell here.

And of course there were random moments of what seemed like “common grounding”. I instinctively understood where Clement Mok was coming from when he talked about information architecture – because to me, if we’re solving problems through a marketplace of ideas, that marketplace needs structure. I built a career around the scaffolding Clement and others mentioned here gave me, yet Clement never had to spell anything out really (he was always super chill before that was a thing). That is what compressed knowledge does. It moves autonomically. You do not reconstruct the argument; you just know the shape of the thing. It’s why the chess grandmaster doesn’t fumble a memory palace wondering what moves the king can make. That’s just a feature of the grounding.

The same is true of the others.

To my mind, Susan Kare is a walking hug. The truth? Susan probably doesn’t even remember working with me. But that’s the point. We have not talked in years, and whatever transacted between us back in the day was just noise — atoms bouncing around in my brain, holding meaning and structure until it would become useful in my journey. What my tiny pea-sized brain was able to synthesize in all that was that patterns help humans transform new things into meaningful things and make them easier to copy or learn. If you’re not familiar with her work (I mean, you are) Susan made the original Macintosh smile. She humanized the machine. With just a few bits to work with and a 32x32 pixel grid, she and her motley cohort instantiated a new kind of human-computer interface. That is the whole game. Patterns are powerful. Susan Kare taught this former journalism major how to compress knowledge without the need for a complicated mathematical formula. Like, telepathically. My brain liked that.

Randy Wigginton. A rare and cantankerous genius, and a wonderfully grounded fellow. I understand he is now enjoying life with his lovely new wife. Randy enjoying his life is what matters to me. He communicated a complex and different way of systems thinking to me in a way I’m sure would surprise him to learn. On my journey, I learned I did not need Randy to collaborate with me to create this world. The fact that our context and inference and substrate found common ground at an autonomatonic level is the thing here. It instantiates meaning in all sorts of things. It is pure batshit nutterty. Or, maybe it’s not. I dunno.

Jerry Michalski. He was gracious enough to invite me to one of his retreats in the hazy recoil of the dot-com bust — probably 2003. He let me on his listserv, let me watch how smart people think about big stuff, and lurk. He opened his retreat that year Quaker-style: a room full of really smart adults (and yours truly, a spongy little dirtbag who did not feel like he belonged) sitting in silence until one person could not wait any longer and piped up. I thought, this is how smart people do things? Wild. And it stuck. The silence is beautiful, and the chamber knows instantly if it’s a bozo piping up, or if the sound breaking the silence is entering the chamber in harmony. No clue if Jerry is actually a Quaker; doesn’t matter. I watched a smart person crib and credit a powerful pattern he could put to use and command an entire room filled with chatty important people. Start with common ground, start with silence. It took me thirty-three years to understand what this Quaker meeting nonsense in my brain was all about. That’s what this whole autonomaton pattern is about to me. Patterns going to town on your substrate over decades.

At that same retreat I met Evan Williams briefly, at a very, very specific moment in time. Google just offered to buy Pyra Labs. I’m like, whoa. This retreat is cool. There is a nervous Evan, what registered to me like an introverted atom bouncing around with nowhere to discharge this confidential nervous charge. I became a small, confidential circuit that allowed him to compose that world-changing reality and reconcile that with a complete, if friendly stranger (me), in confidence. Small moment. Glorious one. Today I broke this cone of confidence and for that I’m sorry, but this news about Evan has long since been compressed for others so I feel like it’s safe to share. I’m pretty sure he would never even recall this moment we shared, and it doesn’t matter. That sort of stuff just bounces around in your context-tumbling transformer for years, clanking away, just looking for the right slot. The imprint of that moment between us remained, in superposition, until now when I use it here to make a point. Jerry made the room where those things happened. That is substrate.

Mark Kvamme. A good dude. The common ground between us ended up being a live wire — real enough to be active, not always easy. What Kvamme gave me – one time – in a throwaway line after a shitty board meeting, that I keep returning to:

Just put it out there.

That was his answer during the 2008 secular meltdown, when I asked him how you even begin to sell a company into a market that was melting down around us. It is an epitaph-worthy line. It is the whole protocol in four words. It is how this letter got written.

Just put it out there.

Mike Moritz (not a large man) once scared the shit out of me as a young entrepreneur. But I was attracted to Mike, Mark and Sequoia’s style for two things: clear intellectual firepower (I’d been aware of Moritz’s writing as a budding journalist – Moritz to me was a journalist who had done something I’d never seen before: make money). I loved the narrative-driven perspective on technology he brought to Silicon Valley, and I’m sure I’ve cribbed some of his same writing ticks over the years. But what stood out about Sequoia to me (the spongy human) was their candor: this firm declared its intents! I knew if I raised capital from Sequoia, and I wasn’t an effective CEO, I’d be eliminated with a direct, surgical shot to the face – not some behind the back drama. Good - intent clear – I could work with that, and I did. And while I did not make Mark or Mike or Sequoia any money at that point in time (tl;dr: they all did ok), in my mind’s eye — we would laugh, and I would just give him a hug. Sequoia was running register-declaration discipline before anybody named it register-declaration discipline. I watched them do it from the other side of the table. It just stuck. I respected that, even when it hurt. The pattern lesson stuck.

Reid Hoffman. Friend of a friend. Played a part in getting me funded by Sequoia (Kvamme) back in the day. Perhaps Reid is reading this now because the network he helped me enter is the same network this letter is composing back into. That is not coincidence. That is how substrate surfaces — slowly at first, then all at once, across decades.

And the magical part — the part that is hard to say without it sounding strange — is that the moments that felt like failures at the time are the ones doing the most work now.

We are in the cellar. Kegs clinking together. Cups clashing. The toasts that did not feel like toasts. Even the smallest encounter, even the ones that were not lucrative or impressive or profound, end up as squirts of paint on a palette. Just pick up the brush and start composing and see what materializes. No single atom could not have made this (or any other) painting without any one of them. Dunno. Hard to get into words. But that’s what this protocol is for.

This is the weird world we are in. Let me declare my intent plainly: I want people to explore this envelope. Come turn it into infrastructure with me. Instantiate this. My intent is for this to be fun and joyful. Period. And from that, I can reasonably expect good things will come.

Here is the part I have to say plainly, because I would be dishonest to publish this letter without it. The fact that you are reading this now, and we have an autonomatonic packet to state the operator’s intent clearly, is itself the infrastructure. It means the LLM you are working with can help shape this “Context” in my personal register to speed up your own comprehension. That is not a metaphor. That is the point. The ground is declarable now. You can feel the current flow when it locks.

I will leave the personal part short. I was an ungrounded atom once, with potential and no reference potential. No circuit. Once I found my ground — the people around me, the patterns underneath the work, the coherence that showed up when I stopped looking for it — I found that I like composing. The polarity of knowledge is a real thing. I can feel it in my body. When I am grounded, current flows. When I am not, things feel random. Totally fine! I wrote a paper about it. I published a protocol that tries to make the ground declarable. Hard to say in words, but to me I am telling you what the body knows.

So this “LLM-mediated communications packet” is me sitting across the table from you with a bunch of magical pieces between us. Here they are. Make of them what pleases you, and be aware of the polarity.

Let’s speak of the registrar, for it is the question everyone eventually asks of a ghost. Right now, it is scaffolding—a skeleton of wood and iron built to hold a shape we haven’t yet seen tested in the heat of the forge. We do not yet know how this pattern holds when it is composed in anger, at scale, by hands with everything to lose. So, the registrar acts as a bootstrap; it is the temporary truth we tell until the mesh is dense enough to speak for itself – to where it just becomes… ground. In the geometry of GRV-004, the center is designed to dissolve. If, in fifty or sixty years, the Grove still holds the pen, then we have built a monument to our own failure. Or perhaps this is all just a beautiful fiction, and we are all just watching the screen. I can live with either.

The protocol was designed to put the human — the individual node — in control of the chassis. Suit ’em up, give them a log book where they can accumulate useful context that means something to them, and let them start exploring. The declarative nature of the autonomaton makes it easy for non-coders to instinctively draw maps, comply with governance regulations, get smarter while getting cheaper, and a host of other compounding benefits once you get it. This is an exploration vehicle. It was always meant to be an exploration vehicle. I dreamed of a world filled with exploration architecture gear “on sale!” at the corner store. This is how it reads.

If you see this and you think, “I knew this clown back then, and this whole ‘knowledge polarity’ nonsense makes a better comedy flick than software infrastructure” — fantastic. Go make that movie. Have a blast. I can laugh at myself, now. If you see it and you think you could turn this into a super-sophisticated laser for Gina Bianchini — go. If you see anything in here that composes with what you are already building, compose. Just have fun. Be cool. Let me know if you can unsee this or not. I am curious.

All this nonsense is either a new way of thinking about computer science, the most complicated Rickroll in the history of humanity, or something else entirely. I honestly do not know which. But yeah, wow. This is fun.

I am on the road to find out. Join me.

Let’s roll!

— Jim