infrastructure grounded in distantiation between the actors’ creation and the audience’s mirror participation. Furthermore, to produce and perform a play requires policy definition; the rules of engagement, the form of interactions and the potential consequences. A number of theatrical elements go into the makeup of this policy definition. The dramatis personae constitute, at the most basic, a listing of the characters in a play. The mise en scene specifies the stage setting and environment within which action occurs. The script of the play defines the dialogue among the characters; essentially the interactions within the play, including the appropriate stimuli or motivation of the various actors during the various interactions. Finally, a play typically has a director; the person responsible for determining the details of a specific performance. As we have discussed in some detail, these elements are all found within the trust and policy infrastructures of social ecosystems of the world enlightened by theatre performance.

Metaphorical constructs of theatre are projected onto the physical or other social ecosystems, and match their characteristics. A central feature of a trust infrastructure is the registry of identities of entities that are known within the infrastructure. By known we mean that the identities found within the registry can be asserted and that assertion or identity can be subsequently proven to some level of accuracy through an authentication protocol, a process singularly exemplified by the use of masks and other guise and disguise. The environment of interaction must be defined, also an important aspect of setting the stage, which encompasses the specification of the boundaries of interactions. This specification will typically take the form of identification of the entities to be involved and the processes that these entities will use in the conduct of the play. Finally, we come to the script itself. Through the course of the three phases that we want to consider, it is the form, content and placement of the script that will undergo the greatest change. This will range from an application being the purveyor of the script to having the script be dynamically established through negotiation among the participating parties to the interaction.

Plots and Sub-plots

The plot is the storyline of a play. It is, in fact, the raison d’être for the play. It is the extraction of metaphorical understanding from the action of the play. It is largely the presence, allusion to or ambiguity of a plot that carries us through the three phases of evolutionary progression that we’ll consider below. As we progress through those phases, we’ll note that the plots become more complex and the sub-plots more numerous. With complexity come more interaction types, and therefore increased risk from threats. Hence, we will see more twists within the plots and sub-plots as we seek to ameliorate the threats. As we consider the three phases, we’ll consider in more detail the plots relevant to each.

But first, we need to return to the observation that with increasing capabilities to answer and create threats comes more distance between the competence of participants to interaction and their performance as afforded by previous experience. Consider in the previous chapter where we suggested prayer as a model for interactions involving both trust and policy infrastructures. Note that prayer considers the limits of the policy infrastructure, what happens when we want to change the rules during a transaction? Before examining how theater provides a model of such climb towards ultimate change, let’s consider shortly how computers themselves have built their competence over time, perhaps helping understand better in return our very human capabilities.

In earlier secure cores, the central machinery of the system, that which defines its competence, its operating system, was contained in read-only memory. It is a form of electronic circuitry that is imprinted only once with the operating system, and never changeable thereafter. In other words,

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