DAPPCON 2025: Solidarity Primitives - Josh Davila

Transcript

Hi everyone. Uh my name is Josha Davila and I'm going to be talking about solidarity primitives a technocon conceptual framework for building alternative tech. Um I really appreciate the Naomi's presentation right before I think it really made the stage for what I'm going to talk about um for this presentation. Uh I think when it comes to culture uh kind of one of the things that I'm interested in pursuing in the uh in the hopes of improving the culture in the crypto space is to also provide kind of a material uh type of solution for what I think is the cause of the cultural problem. Um so let me explain a little bit. Uh, and so if in case you

don't know me, where do I where? Oh, is that me? Okay, there it is. Um, yeah, so I have a blog and a podcast called The Blockchain Socialist. I've worked in blockchain for uh quite a few years. Um, I founded a project called Bread Cooperative and I wrote a book called Blockchain Radicals in 2023, which I have a couple more copies, signed copies left if you do like to buy some. Um and yeah, so this conceptual framework of solidarity primitives is kind of the the way that uh informs the way that we build applications uh at bread cooperative. So I'll explain this a little bit. Um but to kind of uh prep and set the scene for people, I know

Naomi did a really good job of also pointing out a lot of the the bad things happening in the crypto world. I want to kind of contextualize that in the uh broader context of the world. We see um a lot of kind of uh kind of scary trends. I think we see for the first time ever the life expectancy in a place like the United States which is the richest country in the world has decreased. Um we now have uh we have had continuous uh kind of separation of productivity and wages since the 1970s.

We've seen an increase in inequality across all racial groups. If you're at the the top 1% then you're making more money and if you're not then you're you're stagnating or making less. Um we have profits continue to grow yet at the same time while wages are also still declining. We have climate change. We have this uh database that is now going to capture all of Americans data in a single place. Um this I would like to for me this is our these are manifestations of of Moolok which we used to talk quite a bit about in the crypto space um there on the top left and so I think it is not so surprising in a sense that crypto is also in a

similarly uh kind of cruddy place where we have as well um meme coins based on suicides. We have Coinbase uh sponsoring the silly uh military parade. We have Trumpcoin, uh, Libra, we got Malay created just open kind of like, you know, it seems like illegality is legal now, um, in a lot of places in crypto has been kind of a part of of pushing that forward. And I don't think that this is necessarily an indictment of all of what crypto can do, of course, but this is, as Nomi paint pointed out

earlier, that this is what people are seeing and it's also affecting uh there quite large amounts of money that are being um shoved around in the name of of a lot of these things. Um and so in the context of this, I think we have to kind of um come together and realize the reality that uh voting is not really going to fix a lot of these problems. That this liberal idea that we can vote away fascism is uh kind of moot, kind of silly. That we're going to need a whole lot more than that. And taking action by building alternatives is one of these things that we need to be um going forward with. But so to think about in my view at least kind of one of the uh

sources of where this tension comes from is that we have generally I think this false dichotomy going around where you have the markets and the state and depending on where you are in the political spectrum you're either pro market or you're pro-state. If you're on the left, you're, you know, you're pro-regulation and you love like the state doing everything for you. And if you're on the right, then you're very pro market where the entrepreneurial mindset is the the thing that's going to move us forward. But in uh reality, there is um more to this than uh in society, more than just these two sectors. Um while the market is a place that is uh organizations that are

forprofit or their purpose is to maximize profit uh the state is uh an entity that that regulates that tries to uh understand and segment uh society in a way that it can regulate it. There is also this third sector which is often called the autonomous or civil sector. Um also sometimes referred to as the solidarity economy. So this would include things like cooperatives, things like community currency, free and open source software I say would fit in that as well. Labor unions, community land trusts, mutual aid organizations, um not for profofits, and common resources uh amongst many other things. But these are generally uh types of organizational structures that do not fit under uh a market logic or a state logic. They are

neither trying to maximize for profit nor are they trying to regulate uh on behalf of the state. And so at least uh for me I would argue that this is the sector that crypto is the has the greatest amount of opportunity as far as improving the current state of the world um is by focusing on this sector of society. Um and so when we're talking about solidarity I kind of want to explain a little bit of what I mean by that because I think people oftentimes conflate it with something like charity.

Um so solidarity isn't just better charity. It's a fundamentally different approach to addressing community needs. So it comes out of the uh I mean one of the places where um it comes out of is the labor movement. Uh it's the it was the idea that during the industrial revolution while the kind of um the capitalist class and the royalty at the time were taking the land away from from people who were simply surfs on it and then forcing them to work in factories uh for wages that they would not necessarily know. Um the idea was to all collectivize together as one big union in order to uh negotiate for better wages or to take over factories to run

for themselves rather than at the benefit of just a few people. And so while charity is uh something that maintains existing power structures and often depends on them for funding. So what you often have is you have uh a philanthropist who makes his money by creating negative externalities for society and then creating a charity in order to uh try to mitigate the problem at the same time. Solidarity instead is one where you actively uh redistribute power and build alternative systems that are collectively controlled.

And so this is just like a a little table to help you kind of delineate whether something is more of a a charitable action versus a solidistic one. Is it something that is hierarchical where donors at the top are kind of mandating what is happening with uh the money and the resources or is it horizontal? Um is a sustainability simply the goodwill of donors or is there some sort of mutual interdependence? Um are there charity boards or is it communities? Um, generally charities will treat symptoms. So they will throw money at a problem to to mitigate its worst effects. Whereas solidarity is about addressing the root causes and building alternatives. Um, and so it's the difference between a

disconnected donation versus something that is communityowned and uh ran. And so something just to to add a caveat that this is this is kind of a spectrum that things can can are not necessarily very cleanly one or the other but that they can be in this mix a little bit in between where um something someone can treat something that has solidaristic intentions as a charity simply because that's the way that they relate to it. Um but it's important distinguish distinction I think to to keep in mind. Um, and so talked about this, what does solidarity actually have to do with technology? We haven't really talked about it so much. Um, so to kind of break it down a bit, uh, I would like to

bring up, you know, that technical infrastructures that we've been building like uh, peer-to-peer models um, and in comparison with the centralized client server model. They're two distinct technical architectures, but they actually produce very different results. and new possibilities. Um, and so we see this quite uh, viscerally in the way that peer-to-peer file sharing changed the music industry. Since 1999, the launch of Napster, music revenues have not been able to get back up to the same levels. In part, this has a lot to do with the the free movement of of files, right? um the peer-to-peer filesharing network that facilitated this created material effects in the economy. Um and

also produced a different type of culture around music as well for better or for worse. If you look at the way that Napster looks uh and then you look at how Spotify looks, they more or less look the same, right? Uh, basically corporations adapted to the new reality where they had they created music streaming in which you have basically the same library as a peer-to-peer file file sharing service but which with a much better user interface and experience and um yeah lack of getting the potential to be sued or wherever else.

Um this is also the case if we look at organizational structures. So if you look at a traditional corporation versus a cooperative in which uh workers are member owners, so they are also owners of the company besides not just uh working there. Um this also produces different economic effects. So we see that wage inequality is quite different in a traditional corporation versus a a cooperative. So in the US you have an average of 339 to1 CEO to line worker uh wage average which is a pretty high amount of inequality when you look at it um in the case of a cooperative if we take the example of Mandreon which is the largest cooperative or one of the largest

cooperatives in the world um they only do 6:1 or 9:1 so uh you can see that the organizational structure makes a big difference um and so if we combine these these two claims together that we're saying I'm saying that new socio technological structures allow for new possibilities. So this is in particularly uh visible in the case of web 3 where on a web 2 platform your profile your identity your information is attached to and owned by the platform owner whereas in the in the web3 space uh generally with some caveats depending on the application and its association with your wallet and account you have have ownership over the data that is um connected to it right so you are porting

your identity to a different place whatever you're taking the same identity one place to another versus you have your Google account, you have your Facebook account or whatever else and each of them have their own domains in which they are kind of um uh heavily influenced by those. And we see that this kind of setup also produces like interesting things that we were never able to do before thanks to crypto. we see a lot of there there is although a lot of uh financialized behavior that um Naomi did a very good job at at critiquing there also is a bit of um seeds of uh cooperative behavior that we've seen um in the case of unis swap which I think is a really interesting one uh a token airdrop based on the use

of the platform also simulates a kind of um cooperative like a a producer cooperative or something of the sort uh safes are multi- signature wallets like a joint bank account. Um you could collectively own NFTts through various uh platforms. Um and so not everything necessarily has to be individualized and it's something that clearly people want. Um and so what does solidarity what has it looked like in in crypto in the past? I think we see it actually in the very start. The kind of like um almost founding myth of Bitcoin was Wikileaks and their loss of their um their PayPal and their bank accounts where by accepting donations in Bitcoin, you were able to support uh the continuation of

Wikileaks. And so they were able to pay for their architecture for um being able to host all the information about the war crimes that the um that the US and its allies were committing in the Middle East. Um we also see this uh I last year especially was working a lot with ETH evacuations where we were sending crypto to Gaza for um evacuations while the border crossing was still open. It's a really interesting art project um that was in 2017 I want to believe called Bailblock where they took this concept of of cryptojacking which is where you where uh a kind of hacker will get into your computer and start mining a certain cryptocurrency through your browser. In this one, you can opt in to being

cryptojacked, but the Monero that was being mined would go to pay people's bail in the United States. Um, and I would also argue that circles probably as well, just because we're at Dapcon, is is a type of solidarity. Um, a version of solidarity in the crypto space potentially. Um, and so in order to explain what I mean by solidarity primitives, I think we need to talk a little bit about DeFi primitives or like the this is a common term to dis to talk about the building blocks of what um developers often put together and combine in order to make more complex uh largely financial products. That is kind of like the um a big chunk of it but not all of it. But we have accounts, ERC20s, multiigs,

NFTs, AMMs, DEXes, lending, flash loans, etc. etc. You probably know a whole lot more if you're a developer. You've probably messed with a lot of these things and took and combined them in ways to produce different types of products. Um, so when I'm saying solidarity primitives, I'm also talking about building blocks. Um, and I'm also talking about kit bashing. Kit bashing is this concept I really like. It's something that if you're into model trains or like any type of um yeah building models then you can it's the practice of taking different kits and combining the pieces together to make a different model to make your own customized model. Um it's something that was also a kind of practice uh as a way

in hacker spaces to kind of um fight back against the um corporatization of a lot of these things. It's also a very common practice in hacker communities, right? Programmers steal each other's code all the time and they don't really care. Um, it's something that's quite normalized. And so, kit bashing is kind of um uh uh what I mean when I'm talking about solidarity primitives, which is essentially taking development tools uh which help facilitate relationships of solidarity between individuals and collectives. So kit bashing is taking things like DeFi primitives and combining them in a way that produce a different logic um that don't have to do with profit maximization. They are um

rather than you know taking what I was saying earlier technology as a facilitator of relationships. It's being cognizant and being aware of the type of relationships that you're trying to build. Um, and so these are the types of things that I think you know uh when we're talking about um the the the malaise that we have I think in in crypto culture. Um solidarity prim primitives is a type of conceptual framework that I'm trying to to share with you as a way to think about how you build applications and how you also maybe build your own organizations.

Um and so to kind of differentiate again another table to make it easy for people what is the difference between a DeFi primitive and a solidarity primitive. Um on DeFi of course a lot of it has to do with financial relationship. So profit maximization is is built into it. It's why I think the the speed of capital, the way it can move on crypto rails allows for this profit extraction happen um in ways that we never thought possible before which produces I think the culture then of um of gambling and extreme financialization that we see uh versus a solidarity primitive which is not meant to do that. It's meant to facilitate uh relationships of mutual aid. Um, in a D5 primitive, the user

relationship is largely individual, whereas in a solidarity primitive, you have co-conspirators that are bu building networks that are more um intentional um and so on so forth. So I think that yeah, you can see how um how they different how they differ. There probably there are many ways in which you can use the same pieces that facilitate finance to also facilitate um solidarity. Um and this of course is also extremely relevant for privacy. I think there's also if I had another if I had another 20 minutes I would talk about the need for solidarity in the building of solidarity uh privacy um solutions um because you need uh you know a way to mask people's identity by having a pool.

There's some there's a requirement of collectivity in order to to provide privacy. Um, and so that's kind of the conceptual framework that we're using at Bread Cooperative, which is the project um that I co-founded with a couple of others. I think my my co-founder will be speaking a bit later on um stealth addresses, but yeah, we're basically a solidarity network of postcapist projects involved in crypto. Um we share labor power and much more. We are trying to build alternatives to struct uh alternative structures for a kind of post capitalism. So a kind of decrease in reliance in capital as a dominant form of relationship in which we um relate to one another, we relate to institutions and so forth. So the idea

is to uh kit bash all of these various DeFi primitives to um scale solidarity using crypto as an alternative to competition and extraction. And so uh this is our first solidarity primitive called our bread crowdstaking application. I also have this on my shirt which the designers made for me. Um but essentially uh very quickly it's an application where you give X die and however much XI you give you receive back the same amount in bread tokens. The XI in the smart contract gets converted into SI. So it earns a yield and that yield uh can get distributed by the to the various member projects in the network and as a holder of bread you

can vote on how you want to distribute uh that yield. So it mimics uh combination of a community currency and a credit union kind of in one. So, we've taken the same the same primitives that you can use to build ex hyper financialized, you know, poo poo coin stuff um to instead build something with a different logic um by kit bashing it together in a way that um were necessary for our need. So, this is largely a way for us to uh raise money without necessarily needing to take any investments or something like that. And so, I have a lot of conviction and solidarity. That's why I want to I just want to show this to everyone that this is something that um you can do and you

can accomplish quite a bit with it. Um we have uh now expanded the scope of the project quite a bit. Um what was really nice is that when you start from a place of solidarity then you tend to attract a lot of people who want to contribute to your project. So the picture kind of on the on the bottom right was at funding the commons where we had a uh two days of programming and sessions. So we had about you know I didn't even realize we kind of had that big of a network like over um over 20 people were in Berlin you know um working and talking and doing sessions together all who had some sort of connection with with the cooperative um and this has ended up being to where we have not just the

application we've created white label solutions on optimism um we're now building you know forprofit uh products as well um so it's all in large part because we had this type of trust relationship that we built up. Rather than starting in the place of trustlessness and thinking of markets as a way that will um discipline people in order to to do work, we started from a place of what is it that you actually want to do? What is the way that you want to contribute and let's go from there.

Um, and so this comes from kind of like a a big thesis that I have also for why um what exactly we should be doing with crypto and that's building collectively owned digital infrastructure. I think this is kind of the um if I had to give one thing that we should be doing is probably that and this is effectively what would strengthen the uh that third sector right the civil autonomous sector or the solidarity economy. Um, so yeah, thank you so much. If you want to learn more, uh, redchain.xyz, we have a subreddit, a Discord, um, Twitter, all that jazz. You can check that out. Thanks.

[Applause] Thanks, Josh. Um, any questions? No, no, no, no, no. Ah, please do. Uh, thanks for the talk. And I got one question because like what I've seen in Dows and like all these collectives so far is they become like highly politicized in a way that like it's about influence very often this hidden influence that you cannot even see in terms of people's position and do you have any ideas how to solve it long term or maybe you've seen some examples of good practices here? Yeah,

that's a good question. I think the so generally the kind of thinking that I had is we're trying to move at the speed of trust. That makes sense. So I think a lot of Dows had a lot of um big ideas about like scale that it was kind of like imposing a startup mentality on something that was meant to be collective, which is kind of a it's a hard it's a hard thing to square those two together at once and to be effective, I think. Um so for us uh I mean I follow I'm um a big fan slpractitioner of uh this thing called micro solidarity which is kind of like a a practice group for how to do

decentralized organizing. So it's a lot of people who are involved in decentralized organizing that don't have to do with crypto at all. Um, I found that there's like a lot to learn from people like that who have run other types of um things like cooperatives and and other types of collectives or purpose oriented types of organization that I've just gotten a lot of inspiration from. Um, so yeah, so generally I try to take it slow. Uh, we have um just different kinds of practices and how we interact and talk with each other. Uh yeah, I I guess my my critique a little bit of Dows as well is that um they frame everyone as a contributor,

which is a very broad term that can mean everything and nothing, which then ends up kind of hiding the fact that maybe someone's actually a worker. Someone actually is just like an employee. They just work, but they're calling themselves a contributor. So then there's no expectation of like how they get treated, how they get paid. So it's also about um yeah since we're a cooperative the what the thing that that we generally do is we have practices around how we how we share our treasury and how we pay each other that is uh yeah collectively involved kind of like a co-budgeting process but that would take too long to explain. We can talk about it after. One more the last one maybe. Yep. Thanks.

Hey Josh, thank you for your talk first of all and uh I have a question that is like in my opinion there is a risk of overromanticizing the concept of solidarity because like reality is harsh and when people need money they're selfish and uh like I love the concept of solidarity don't get me wrong but I think that it works it doesn't work on a global scale it works on a smaller scale so my question for you is at which level do you think like solidarity works because we cannot like you know it that doesn't doesn't work for like one million people it works for smaller groups so I just curious to know your opinion on that yeah I mean I think that's a really good question I think um I have kind of um so

there I think there's is a different form of practice right like you can you can practice solidarity in a at a at a micro scale and I think you know generally it's a good idea to do that as a way to um get people to come around and do a thing together in a way that's like healthy. But I think solidarity can also this might be a little bit um triggering for some people. But I do think that uh solidarity does exist in at like kind of larger scales that are um also potentially um abstract. So I mean I personally I do think that like a welfare system in many ways is a kind of manifestation or can be a manifestation of solidarity in many ways in which it doesn't rely on the

individ like I do think that um it scales but what it looks like at scale is kind of different. Um, so to me it's more so how do we It's not about like how do I make everyone be nice to each other? Like that's kind of not necessarily what I'm interested in, but it's using like solidarity at scale for me means that like you don't have to you don't have to be nice to everyone to make things work, but that like it's embedded in the relationships in which we are taking part in. Um, so it's not about policing you to be a solidaristic person, but that the you would rather be in a solidaristic system even if you don't

like that guy over there who's also