The Hózhó Network is a living treaty for a digital age that has lost its sense of social compact. An upshot of this is that we have lost our sense of humor. Or maybe you don't think so. So let's vote right now which way to include humor in our treaty:
The Hózhó Network is a living treaty for a digital age that has lost its sense of social compact.
Hózhó is a Navajo concept, grown out West in the Four Corner States that house Navajo lands. Hózhó means harmony, beauty, and balance. We are pairing Hózhó with the early East Coast Covenant Chain, the bicultural foundation of the United States, even more so in Canada.
The Covenant Chain is actually enshrined in the U.S. Constitution:
All Debts contracted and Engagements entered into, before the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be as valid against the United States under this Constitution, as under the Confederation. (Article VI)
The "confederal" principles of the Articles of Confederation (1777) mirror the structure of the indigenous relationship with the 13 original colonies and became known as the Covenant Chain. The Chain originated before the arrival of Europeans as the structure unifying the various Iroquois tribes. Benjamin Franklin explicitly marveled at the Iroquois system while proposing a similar union for the colonies: "It would be a very strange Thing, if Six Nations of ignorant Savages should be capable of forming a Scheme for such an Union... and yet that a like Union should be impracticable for ten or a Dozen English Colonies".
Historians, including Francis Jennings, depict the gradual decline and termination of the Covenant Chain in the 18th Century. The indigenous populations chose to break the Chain as a British dispossessed the tribes of land and rights.
But there is ambiguity between Francis Jennings’ revisionist view of the Covenant Chain as a "dying" legal fiction and its continued celebration in Canada is a central theme in modern scholarship. While Jennings focused on how the British manipulated the Chain to assert false sovereignty over land in the 17th and 18th centuries, Canadian historians and legal scholars have documented its survival as a moral and constitutional relationship. Affirming this modern scholarship, in 2010 Queen Elizabeth gifted silver bells to the Iroquois in commemoration of the 300th anniversary of the Covenant Chain.
We often think of treaties as dusty parchments—binary transactions of "I give, you take." But as the history of the Covenant Chain reminds us, the earliest American treaties were not merely documents; they were performances. For over a century, these rites were acted, sung, and toured across the colonies. Ben Franklin saw such value in them that he published thirteen folios of these scripts. These were not just legal maneuvers; they were "up-minding" rituals designed to provide sympathy to the "down-minded." In our current age of virulent divisiveness, we have plenty of contracts but no sympathy. We have "terms of service," but no "hopes, aims, and joys."
The Iroquois metaphor for the Covenant Chain describes a material evolution:
The Hózhó Network is the digital successor to this chain. While the modern web is a "rope" of fragile links and "rusting" centralized platforms, Hózhó proposes a decentralized structure that mimics the silver chain. It is designed to be brightened through constant interaction and "maintenance" by its members, rather than being left to the whims of a central authority.
To attract organizations and individuals, we must frame "joining" as an act of participation in a living drama:
We are looking for partners who are tired of the "purely entertaining" or the "purely transactional." We are looking for those who want to help write the next "folio" of American cooperation. Joining the Hózhó Network isn't just a technical integration; it is the act of grabbing a link in the chain and polishing it.
Walter Ong defined Primary Orality as the communication of pre-literate cultures, reliant entirely on memory, physical presence, and the spoken word. Secondary Orality emerged with electronic media, creating a global village where spoken communication was backed by written scripts and broadcast technology.
Tertiary Orality, which is just beginning, is the paradigm where human communication returns to a continuous, spoken, and screenless interface. OpenAI placed a big bet on Tertiary Orality. The project, called in the press a "screenless phone" began as a collaboration between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Jony Ive's hardware startup, io Products. In mid-2025, io Products officially merged with OpenAI to deeply integrate the hardware engineering and AI research teams. The goal is to create an "anti-phone" that moves away from traditional screens and app grids. It aims to leverage ambient computing, where the AI serves as a context-aware, voice-driven assistant that interacts seamlessly with your environment.
So maybe there's a piece of the future in which people don't read books anymore. Book reading is already in decline. Children will grow up asking questions to thin air, and, as if magic, thin air will respond. Prayers might more often come true. Whims maybe more so.
While Tertiary Orality promises a seamless, frictionless interaction with our environment, blindly regressing into a purely spoken, screenless paradigm risks plunging us back into the volatile dynamics of a pre-literate world. Walter Ong warned that primary oral cultures, lacking the structuring and distancing technology of writing, are sometimes inherently combative and reactive.
But literacy has also brought combative dangers. This has been well documented with many forms of organized religion. Religions built on scripture have sometimes become "persecuting societies". The term comes from "The Formation of a Persecuting Society" by R. I. Moore. So this is also a risk we must navigate.
But let's assess the risks of tertiary orality. We are already witnessing the regression into this "electronic jungle." The modern digital sphere, saturated with generative deepfakes, synthetic voice cloning, and sophisticated cybercrime, has become an environment where ambient deception thrives. In this space, fraud relies precisely on the erasure of analytic distance—manipulating the immediacy and intimacy of spoken interaction to bypass critical thinking. When the environment speaks back, and every synthetic interaction mimics human emotion, the protective skepticism cultivated by literacy dissolves. We are left vulnerable to an unseen, omnipresent wilderness of bad actors where truth is indistinguishable from manipulative noise.
The solution to surviving this reversion lies in the development of perimeter ecosystems. Rather than entirely abandoning the screenless future, we must structure it through decentralized networks that act as localized, intelligent boundaries. By integrating ambient AI at the edge of these networks, a perimeter ecosystem filters the chaos and malicious actors of the electronic jungle before they can reach the individual.
Crucially, these network nodes must be grounded in principles of fundamental balance—functioning much like the Navajo concept of Hózhó (harmony, beauty, and balance)—where the technology actively stabilizes the environment. In this decentralized model, ambient AI does not merely interpret semantic intent; it serves as a protective, harmonizing layer that discerns between authentic connection and synthetic fraud. The perimeter ecosystem essentially restores the necessary boundary and safety that literacy once provided, transforming the chaotic electronic jungle into an ordered, secure, and balanced lived experience.
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