\n\nReification, Cranes, and Bootstrapping
\nThe original idea of bootstrapping actually came from a Baron Muchausen tall tale of literally lifting yourself up by your bootstraps, which is impossible under Newtonian mechanics. This led to the operating systems usage for bootloaders which are more like awakening processes, and then to startups that use revenue rather than capital to grow. Call these two kinds first-order bootstraps, where determinate start points gather behavioral momentum through a virtuous cycle. But the starting point is hardcoded. In an OS, the firmware knows to look at a specific address to get into the software. In the purest startup case you could use pure time and labor to produce goods for sale to generate money to grow.
\nThere is a second-order sense commonly used in market-making efforts including market startups. Here you must create buyers and sellers at the same time and sufficient liquidity to get things going. This is less determinate in starting conditions, and closer to the Munchausen ideal but still causal, since the buy side has the money and you start the loop by arranging for speculative/consignment sell side and then pitching buy sides (unless it’s a strong seller’s market).
\nWhat interests me though is what you might call third order bootstrapping, where in some sense the process that starts things eventually gets “cut” and the loop becomes internally self-sustaining. A basic example is flight. The bootstrap is the takeoff but once you’re wheels up, lift > gravity and thrust > drag. The physics effect you use to bootstrap (propulsive acceleration) is distinct from the one you use to sustain yourself (lift).
\nThe conceptual counterpart is reification. Treating an abstraction derived from a real instance as itself real, and eventually forgetting the phenomenological origins and sustaining the abstraction through its internal analytics. Like Sun/moon/wheels —> platonic circles —> circle geometry world that has forgotten circularity in atoms world.
\nThe evolutionary version of this kind 3rd order bootstrapping is what Dennett calls cranes. The bootstrapping part is still causal, but the acausal ideal, Dennett’s “skyhooks” is the Munchausen ideal of hopeful monsters.
\nI’m thinking of all this because blygger to some extent feels like a third-order bootstrapping phenomenon. Can a network of decentralized websites really just “hang in mid-air” based on mutual RSS and webmentions alone? Our bootstrapping path clearly relied on centralized platforms (discord, substack), and the question is whether this can physically “take off” like a plane or the idea of a “circle.” Is the “crane” big enough?
\n\n
I had no idea what “Dennets cranes” were, and I wish I could highlight it and ask a question against my Claude API key that my blog has. Of course part of the point of the protocol is that clients can do anything, but seems like the reference client ought to have some form of “augmented reading” built-in to match the augmented writing.
\n","content_hash":"sha256:6b36cb8a715a824fe80cb4ca04e23ce5f7f59cdba86d4a1f64e50fde9416d27f","media":[],"transclusions":[{"id":"7bd91fdjz39gsbh0y3qzbdrv8j","version":1,"origin":"https://venkateshrao.com/blyg/","cited":{"source":"Venkatesh Rao's Blyg","author":"Venkatesh Rao","excerpt":"Reification, Cranes, and Bootstrapping The original idea of bootstrapping actual…","url":"https://venkateshrao.com/blyg/t/7bd91fdjz39gsbh0y3qzbdrv8j/","retrieved":"2026-10-15T23:57:15Z"}}],"stub_of":{"origin":"https://venkateshrao.com/blyg/","id":"7bd91fdjz39gsbh0y3qzbdrv8j","version":1,"cited":{"source":"Venkatesh Rao's Blyg","author":"Venkatesh Rao","excerpt":"Reification, Cranes, and Bootstrapping The original idea of bootstrapping actual…","url":"https://venkateshrao.com/blyg/t/7bd91fdjz39gsbh0y3qzbdrv8j/","retrieved":"2026-10-15T23:57:15Z"}},"changelog":[{"version":1,"at":"2026-10-15T23:57:15Z","note":null}]}