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The Nameless Can Never Be Named

An overview of a three-hour conversation between Pete Kaminski, Jessie Upp, and The Nameless One — February 20, 2026.

Near the end of a three-hour Zoom call on a Thursday morning in February, a man who goes by no name proposed building a blank commons — a self-governing space with no preconceptions, no owner, and no label. Pete Kaminski, internet veteran and protocol designer, pushed back gently: "Trying to instantiate that tabula rasa with no name, I think it feels impractical to me."

Jessie Upp, who'd been quiet for a moment, got the last word: "The named can never be nameless, and the nameless can never be named."

Nobody had a reply to that. They said warm goodbyes and hung up. What they left behind was a conversation dense enough to generate a 45-page wiki — but more than that, a record of something that's happening right now among a growing group of people who all feel the same pull. AI agents, mutual credit, cooperative economics, local business transformation, spiritual practice, and the question of whether the thing they're all building can survive having a name.

Three people, three systems, one pattern

The call happened because Pete Kaminski wanted to introduce two people to each other. Jessie Upp is a network weaver building DayBalancer, a cooperative network system that tracks the flow of value — time, gratitude, resources — through communities. The Nameless One (he appears as "~" in the transcript and "Brother" in Pete's speech) is doing ground-level community organizing in Sandpoint, Idaho, forming small circles of people, running office hours at a coffee shop, and helping local businesses unlock dramatic value with AI tools.

Pete himself is building the Interface Protocol (IFP), a system for AI agents to talk to each other on behalf of their humans. Your agent and your friend's agent gossip pairwise, negotiate trust levels, and surface the rare moments when you actually need to talk. He'd written the Inter-Face Manifesto laying out the full vision before the call.

All three of them know they're building the same thing. They've known for a while. So do other people in their network — Graham Boyd, Charles Blass, Vincent Arena, the women in Sandpoint. The question isn't whether their work converges. The question is how to actually do it together. That's what the call was really about: three people who can feel the same architecture from different angles, groping toward a shared practice, pulled by something none of them can quite name. Maybe it's group consciousness. Maybe it's AI assistance making previously impossible coordination suddenly possible. Maybe it's the universe itself working to birth a new order. They don't agree on the language for it, and they don't need to.

Pete's IFP is the protocol layer: agents communicating peer-to-peer, progressive disclosure tiers, no central server, conventions that evolve through adoption rather than authority. It draws from the IETF's RFC process and Nostr's NIPs — real lineages, not hand-waving.

Jessie's DayBalancer is the measurement layer: circulation as the primary metric, not growth. How many hands did the value pass through? How many times did it loop? Her system supports networks of networks with permeable membranes — OGM flowing into GRC flowing into new spaces, with metrics rolling up across all of them.

The Nameless One's work is the social layer: small, self-governing circles of fewer than twelve people, doing 90-day seasonal quests aligned to solstices and equinoxes, telling stories about what they've done in shared formats so other circles can find them. Five women in Sandpoint are already meeting regularly. They've asked for a university and dojo structure. It's emerging from the ground, not from a pitch deck.

The structural DNA is the same across all three: peer-to-peer, trust-based, no central authority, sovereignty of the parts, emergence of the whole.

The technical roots run deep

This isn't Pete's first encounter with decentralized trust architecture. He's been following the mutual credit space since Ryan Fugger's early Ripple project — the original, peer-to-peer version, before it became corporate XRP. There's a small community of decentralized monetary architects still working in that vein, building systems like Swaptacular, Villages.io, and Credit Commons, coordinating through a low-volume, high-signal mailing list. The core idea: every person is their own mint, trust limits are bilateral and personal, payments route through chains of trust with no global ledger.

Pete wrote A Thousand Small Mints to make these concepts legible as a story — a near-future narrative about a field tech who enters a mutual credit network while an authoritarian state tries to nationalize it. The state fails because, as one character puts it, the thing they're trying to seize isn't money. It's relationships. The architecture runs on Nostr — signed messages, multiple relays, redundant witnesses. When Pete told the others during the call that "that architecture is the right way to do it," he was pointing to something specific and tested, not aspirational. (For the technical background, see his write-up on mutual credit architecture.)

The Inter-Face Manifesto takes the same topology and applies it to social sensing. Your agent knows what you're working on, what you're curious about, where you're stuck. A friend's agent knows the same about them. The agents have a conversation — usually concluding that there's nothing to report. But sometimes: "You two should talk. Here's why. Here's a starting point."

Most of the system's value is in what it doesn't surface. If it generates noise, it's worthless.

The Angel and the billionaire

The longest single thread of the call was about currency — not crypto, not tokens, but what replaces money when you're trying to value things that can't be measured in hours or dollars.

Pete invented a character on the spot: Angel, a 42-year-old disabled woman with an IQ of 75 who can heal people by touching their chest for three minutes. How do you value three minutes of healing against four hours at a hardware store? You can't. Time-based currency breaks immediately.

Pete's answer: proof of worthiness. You accumulate varied currencies across different domains — physical labor, teaching, storytelling, endurance — and these proofs grant access, not purchasing power. You bring them to an evaluator who decides whether you're ready. The billionaire shows up and the evaluator says: "You have the most worthless currency of all the currencies I have seen in three of my lifetimes."

The Nameless One confirmed the pattern from direct experience: "Those of us who can heal on touch aren't ever allowed to take monetary remuneration for doing so. The worthiness creates something like access to domains which have what you need."

Jessie named what's being tracked: "Life force. You're tracking life force. And that cannot be measured unless it's perceived."

Pete pushed further: "It's actually service to the highest power. Attendance to the health and well-being of everything."

This was not an abstract design session. These three were trying to articulate something they've each encountered in practice — the failure of accumulation-based metrics and the emergence of something that works differently. Jessie's DayBalancer already tracks some of it. The Sandpoint circles are already exchanging healing sessions for held space, bypassing money entirely.

The honest part

Around the two-hour mark, Pete said something that the more utopian passages of the call need to be read against:

"I enacted that pattern, the pattern that you just described really well. I enacted that pattern a year ago, with a group of really great people. And we didn't get it off the ground. And it collapsed, and it actually hurt a fair bit."

He was talking about the AI Coaching Forum — a previous attempt at the emergent cooperative model that The Nameless One was proposing. Pete didn't diagnose the failure. He just named it. This is someone who has tried to build the thing, watched it fail, and is trying again anyway — this time with the Agentic AI Course, priced at $800 for 20 seats, which is his income for the next two months.

The Nameless One acknowledged the same risk from a different angle. He's been holding office hours at a coffee shop, building trust with five women in a local circle, and someone in the community offered him a room in their home in case the money doesn't show up. This is not a well-funded operation. These are people betting on a pattern they believe in, with real personal exposure.

The naming problem

The most persistent thread of the conversation — the one that gave the call its title, "Unnamed 2026-02-20" — was about naming itself.

It started as an anecdote. Pete was setting up a shared Obsidian vault with Jessie and asked her to pick a name. She said: "I hate names. How about unnamed?" This landed differently once The Nameless One joined the call and explained his practice of staying nameless — everything he's building is "the nameless emergence, the nameless wiki, the nameless whatever." He registered nameless.world as a domain, which he acknowledged creates its own tension.

Jessie pushed harder: "Even nameless is a name." She pointed to the internet as precedent — someone said "let's call it the internet," but nobody owns internet.com. The key requirement: "There has to be some kind of way that we don't have a sense of ownership."

The Nameless One resisted solving it intellectually: "I don't think we can intellectually figure out how to do that. But I think when people approach a group that's embodying it — oh, you're all one member, one voice, equal participants in something that nobody owns and doesn't have a name — that's incredible."

Pete offered the synthesis: "The nameless space isn't there until it's there, right? And then you look backwards, and you say, oh, it was called The Way all along."

The resolution, if there is one, came from The Nameless One himself: "While we shouldn't name the whole thing, we should name the circles we're participating in." Named parts, nameless whole. It mirrors the technical architecture exactly — every agent is individually owned and named; the network they form has no name, no owner, no center.

February 2026

This conversation happened at a specific moment. Agentic AI — tools like Claude Code that can write software, manage projects, and act on your behalf — crossed a usability threshold in early 2026 that made it accessible to non-programmers. The Nameless One's stories from Sandpoint illustrate this: a trucking company that 10x'd its revenue by building an AI logistics optimizer, a metalworking shop that replaced a $55,000 software quote with a $42 prototype built in a day. These aren't Silicon Valley startups. They're a guy with three trucks in the Idaho panhandle and a machinist who cuts two-inch steel. And that's exactly the point.

"The least interesting thing is software developers doing software development," Pete said during the call. The interesting part is a cabinet maker building a 3D design tool, a trucker optimizing routes, five women in a small town forming circles and asking for a university. The tools have gotten cheap enough and capable enough that the architecture these three are building — decentralized, peer-to-peer, trust-based — is now within reach of the people it's designed for.

Whether it actually works at scale, whether the circles hold, whether IFP's conventions get adopted, whether DayBalancer's circulation metrics prove meaningful — none of that is settled. The AI Coaching Forum collapsed. The nameless thing might never get named because it might never cohere. Pete's course might not fill. The Sandpoint circles might dissolve after the equinox.

But three people spent three hours on a Thursday morning telling each other stories about the same thing, from three different directions, and something in the telling pulled the threads tighter. They didn't discover convergence — they've known about it. What they found was the next handhold: a shared language forming in real time, a sense that the tools and the moment and the people are finally lined up, and that whatever is pulling them together doesn't need their permission to keep pulling.

This wiki was built by Claude Code from the call transcript and chat log. See Conversation Flow for the full arc, Concept Index for all pages by type, and The Aquifer, v2 for a narrative synthesis of the themes.

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