People are the infrastructure
The internet is described in cables and protocols. A great deal of it is actually people, coordinated.
We describe the internet through its machinery: servers, cables, APIs, protocols. That description is accurate and incomplete. A large amount of what actually happens online depends on people acting, and acting in a coordinated way.
Drivers. Creators. Reviewers. Taskers. Buyers. Sellers. Moderators. Audiences. Remove the machinery and the behaviour stops. Remove the people and the behaviour also stops — but we only describe the first removal as infrastructure failure.
What a metric actually is
Behind every follower is a person. Behind every like, every comment, every share. The number is a trace left by someone doing something.
That sounds obvious stated plainly, and it is routinely ignored in practice, because a system that optimises for the trace and a system that optimises for the behaviour are not the same system. Optimise for the number and the cheapest way to produce the number wins — which is usually not a person at all.
Proof as a relationship
One thing I wanted to test in SABI: what happens if the person requesting activity can see evidence from the person producing it?
A participant submits proof of what they did, and that proof appears inside the order that asked for it. The abstraction thins. Instead of a number arriving from nowhere, there is a record of someone having done something, attached to the request that caused it.
I am interested in this less as a fraud control than as a change of shape. It makes the human link visible, and a visible link is much harder to design away.