This is what one of my meditation teachers told me once. I feel right now we see the fiction of all institutions – although we feel the material reality of these institutions. The duality is mind blowing. Money is a fiction. Laws are a fiction. But they are real. Stories are powerful.

In writing this my mind moves to code. A computer program is a world with laws – it is a fiction that does something. With Category Theory and Homotopy type theory – a mathematical theory can be turned into a computer program and evaluated as true or not. We cannot do this with human laws – we can only determine if they are interally consistent or coherent. We can run simulations to undersatnd the effects of these laws.

I was at a talk this weekend about accountability. In organizations and in comunities how do we hold one another accountable and what does this accountability mean? The overwhelming response from the panel was that accountability does not work.

Accountability reminds me of counting, and accounting – a ledger. When someone comits a harmful act is there any way to balance the books? It is like circling the square – alchemy or magic. There is always a remainder.

I think of the pathagorean comma – this is the difference between two notes with the same pitch (C B#). There are some things that will never be equal -that will never be accounted for.

How do we account for those things? We need a new story beyond counting. Can we write a computer program for that

I had a meditation on accountability, DAOs and computation. If we have computers manage our organization then will everything be accounted for? No – there is always something that is not decidable – something that cannot be discretized – something unaccountable. Perhaps for that we have to go to the oracle – the o-machine – as turing wrote.