I believe you’ve mentioned this concern a few times, but isn’t this an ecosystem problem rather than an object problem?
I’m as suspect about Kay’s biological analogies as I am John von Neumann’s brain analogies - but I think that Kay’s objects cannot be concerned with an issue as they are envisioned.
Maybe it is a bad idea. But if we’re looking for “what Kay meant,” I think we just need to accept the fact that all objects would live in a larger ecosystem with “good” and “bad” actors. Kay didn’t talk much about this to my knowledge, but he does believe that objects could someday communicate even without a predefined protocol using something called an ambassador.
I just have to assume that this ambassador is like all ambassadors - the intentions are not always clear.
Such management would have to happen at the ecosystem level. Not at the object level. In Kay’s mind, I think this works as it does in a biological system. And the discussion is maybe better suited for the Christopher Alexander thread.
I appreciate the effort on this thread to look at what Kay actually made (e.g. what’s actually in Smalltalk or Squeak), rather than on what Kay speculated could be made (e.g. what’s a Dynabook).