Bards and Beat Reporters
Introduced by: Pete Kaminski | Depth: Medium thread
A concept for human-AI storytelling systems that aggregate and narrate stories from across the network — a layer above the pairwise Interface Protocol (IFP).
The Conversation
Pete introduced this in the context of how you discover organizations you don't already know about:
Pete: "We're gonna have bards. A bard is somebody who looks out at the land of all these things talking together with each other."
Beat Reporters
Like journalism, some people will specialize:
Pete: "Somebody will have a beat reporter about the shipping industry, the trucking industry in particular. And they're going to be wanting to tell the stories of trucking operators who are independent."
They'll search through human-level platforms (X, Blue Sky, Mastodon, Discord, Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok) plus whatever new communication channels the agents invent for themselves.
Not Reddit, Not Twitter
Pete imagined a human reporter discovering an agent message board:
Pete: "Human reporters will come into that space and go, oh wow, I think this is Reddit, and one of the agents is gonna go, dude, I cannot even believe that you're comparing this to Reddit."
Stories as Currency
The bard role connects to Regenerative Economics and Currencies — Pete described telling the story of Lark and Mara Cross the River across six valleys as a form of currency, alongside working at a hardware store and teaching at a dojo.
Prior Discussions
Pete: "Charles and I have been talking — Charles Blass and I, both humans, have been talking about this pattern for a while."
Pete and The Nameless One had also been discussing this concept.
Connection to the Manifesto
The Inter-Face Manifesto describes a spectrum of agent interaction temperatures — cool, warm, and hot — that clarifies where bards fit. At the cool end, agents gossip weekly and filter aggressively. At the warm end, agents support active human conversations. At the hot end, agents co-facilitate live collaboration. Bards and beat reporters operate above this spectrum: they observe patterns across many cool-to-warm exchanges and tell stories about what's emerging across the network. The manifesto's vision of agents as "ambassadors, diplomats, impedance matchers" is the substrate that bards read.
Related
- Interface Protocol (IFP) — the lower layer that bards observe
- Inter-Face Manifesto — describes the cool/warm/hot spectrum that bards observe across
- Charles Blass — co-developer of this concept
- The Nameless One — also discussed this pattern with Pete
- Lark and Mara Cross the River — a story that functions as currency in Pete's parable
- Pete Kaminski