Engineering a Stellarpunk Future with Puja Ohlhaver

Transcript

foreign [Music] ation on the Pod today we are talking to Puja Oliver who's a lawyer innovator and technologist in healthcare and web3 she's a member of the getting plurality research group at the Harvard Center for ethics and you probably know her as the co-author with Glenn Weiland Metallica of the decentralized society paper finding Webster's soul Who's his writing has been featured in The New York Times Washington Post Politico and wired and she previously practiced law at skating in Arps and founded a women's health care company she writes and thinks about many issues and mainly focuses on the intersection of technology and politics

and economics and that is what we were talking about on the podcast today we are talking about Stellar Punk which is a synthesis of her thinking about the means of solar Punk and lunar Punk and incorporating them and extending them into this idea of Stellar punk what would it look like if uh if our memes were as plural as the the night sky our light came from many parts of the night sky and so we talk about some of the problems and criticisms of shoulder pump and lunar and we talk about what would be what would have to be true to transcend and include those paradigms into all of the light in the north north sky so plurality decentralization funding public goods and managing the differences between individuals and

collectives are big themes of this episode and I just think that Puja is this really impressive writer and thinker because we go deep in some spots into mechanism design I found myself Googling things that she was saying during the episode because they're they're she's so deep and and articulate on mechanism design but then we come back up to the memetic level and the aesthetic level of the world that we're trying to create and it's the synthesis of those things that I think is one of the beauties of this episode so what I'm going to do is I'm gonna play for the next five minutes the talk that Hoosier gave at the plurality conference about Stellar pumpkin and then you're going to listen to our interview about stellar so I think that you're really gonna enjoy

the conversation about Stellar Punk and without further Ado I'll give you fuja Oliver Valley Dao is an open Global Collective working to finance and democratize the governance of synthetic biology Technologies to protect the future of our planet research and progress into synthetic biology is critically constrained by the world of nation-state regulations and bureaucracy from middlemen but the potential that synthetic biology has for the world is massive it can produce a world in total harmony with nature we can grow stuff using cells like software it's awesome and the best part is we no longer have to pull carbon out of the ground to grow and maintain civilization don't you think we should be funding this Valley Dow does and that's what they're here to do to try and make the solar Punk World of Tomorrow a reality today so join

Valley Dao right now and save the planet at valleydow.bio okay okay so I think I'm probably the only speaker who probably took this question quite literally on what his pluralities North Star uh so uh plurali does not have one North Star it has many and like stars all of us are here in this room hurtling through space-time raiding out our beliefs and desires just like light so some might think the question of plurality is how do we keep our light as differentiated as the Stars we see in the night sky

some might say differentiate in markets okay well that's truly better than being told what we want which would certainly diminish our light but are all preferences expressed in this way in monetary trades well we ought to reveal what we want when we talk or trade time and increasingly we talk on digital channels which trade access for our data and this challenge is our plurality in several ways First channels make money by maximizing engagement and auctioning off our data As We Know and it turns out we are most engaged when we are in conflict so instead of servicing consensus today's digital channels nudge conflict reducing our plurality into polarity on

a collision course second channels Hoover up our data accumulating the powerable monolithic AIS that perhaps us know us better than we want and can manipulate our preferences in ways that we can't see or know this risk collapsing us from plurality into black hole singularity so how do we vote avoid both Singularity and polarity in favor of this Third Way plurality there are lots of open questions about communication channels what are they questions about speech Norms questions about privacy and the uses of shared data questions about even the structure of the pipes themselves and all of these

questions are actually interrelated so who decides and how do they decide one dollar one vote one person one vote one token one vote and how do we express and balance all these participants preferences well we can learn from the Stars it turns out actually that light intensity decreases inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the Star if brightness didn't diminish Vine inverse Square law but was for example linear light would indulge the whole sky and we would lose differentiation similarly rather than having people literally literally project the intensity of their preferences and drown out all other voices what we want is greater marginal cost more influence now quadratic voting is very interesting and

does this by making the next vote more expensive than the first proportionally increasing the cost of more influence and interestingly enough the same is also true of gravity if it didn't diminish by an inverse Square law Stars would collapse into each other but as quadratic voting really all that we need to find consensus across all of our lights in this room essentially Square rooting over the intensity of our brain's preferences or as something missing heart or the greatest mystery of the universe love where does our light our beliefs our desires our preferences which we project out come from after all well it turns out we are social beings born into a set of solidarities starting

with our family school and neighborhoods as we age we differentiate and broaden our communities growing a rich network of overlapping memberships with different magnitudes of affection which change over time as well as the communities themselves which are in Perpetual stochastic recombination and like stars as we age we contract our solidarities shrinking and perhaps our intensity increasing now these communities look like communication channels which I've drawn before and that's because they are Bound by norms and values and it's through these channels that we form and evolve our preferences and even language Norms to express them and because our preferences are emergent from these conversations simply making the cost of

our influence proportional to how much we care isn't enough we also need a discount Hub biased or influenced we are by the conversations and the channels themselves so returning to the analogy of stars on the macro level we look like yourself Sovereign Stars right flying through the universe emanating preferences which we square root over so we can differentiate and see the light from other stars but light is also a wave it can have properties instantaneously entangled other light waves across vast distances and so what we really want to know is underneath the intensity of our preferences how correlated or entangled are they with other peoples by this invisible messy stochastic social process we call communication

our light may seem differentiated in idiosyncratic on the surface but may be correlated with other light waves across vast differences that bath differences and distances so in fact digital communication channels do just that create greater entanglements across distance so recognizing this intimate connection between our preferences and our solidarities our light and our loves helps us guard against both the evil of bias or spin of correlated groups which threaten to collapse us into their singularity and profitable Collision courses which enrich one group or a set of groups at everyone else's expense

and instead we find a Third Way channels covered by consensus not only across many like but different kinds of light and different kinds of stars drawing on the shared wisdom of different kinds of light and different kinds of different many lives and many kinds of stars to continue expanding a possibility space for infinite recombination entanglements that rival with Pilates we see dotting the night sky welcome to Stellar Punk a new paradigm bring your brains hearts and your spare roots Hey Kevin going well thank you so glad to have you you here to talk about Stellar Punk maybe we'll work our way up to that with talking about solar Punk first so what what is solar Punk to you

this is by the way just generated from my uh observations on memes and Twitter and the internet but generally I would characterize it uh as being motivated by this desire for transparent infrastructure or finding public goods with this optimistic belief that public access to a decentralized transparent financial and non-financial system needs to better options and um a couple things I think solar Punk gets right this emphasis on regeneration and reinvestment with novel mechanisms to achieve that which of course git coin has been a major part of as well as other protocols like optimism um some of these mechanisms of course

quadratic voting and quadratic funding and uh I will just assume the listeners here don't have much exposure or just kind of quickly say what I think is great about these mechanisms um I think graduated voting is is fantastic because we moved Beyond this notion of one person one vote and let people Express the intensity of how much they care about an issue across a range of issues um and we like this because it introduces markets and voting about money or the concentrating cost of capital and it does this by square rooting votes to enable us to price influence proportional to Marginal costs so the next unit of influence costs more and I think this mechanism will become increasingly important as we enter a

future of increasing returns phenomena where you know marginal input leads to gradual greater marginal output like physical infrastructure and digital infrastructure like AI for examples and where other mechanisms like one token one vote or one dollar one vote you know leads plutocrats have outsized influence and power over what are essentially shared network Goods lose value arises from people using them and contributing to them um so I would say that's like one really important mechanism in solar Punk uh another one that has been less explored which I'm curious if you've seen uh explored more recently in web 3 is Harvard or taxation um and to sort of just quickly recap on

what that is that's when honors periodically self-assess their property and pay a tax on its value and anyone anyone else can kind of come along and purchase that property from munner forcing a sale and this is interesting because it's not private ownership it's not common ownership it's something in between partial ownership and what's nice about it is that Monopoly rooms that would otherwise accrue to owners and their Generations afterwards get reinvested back into communities you know that again regenerate that value to fund Innovation and education and so on um so I'm curious Kevin actually have you seen Herberger taxation much and and web 3 yeah there's a project that I'm aware of uh Nifty Apes that is using it

as a mechanism that it allows you to borrow against your nft and then its personal common ownership so I've seen it used in a couple places the the other example is Simon daily rubias this artwork is always on sale an nft that you can buy but then you've got to pay Harvard your taxes in order to keep it so I'm definitely more of the quadratic funding quadratic voting guy in in web 3 but I've seen a little bit of harder taxes as well yeah and so that's those are great examples it can be applied not just to monopolies and land but sort of any positional good or any Goods at accrue value because of status like are or like even ad space um so what I think solar Punk uh misses or or are kind of uh doesn't totally get

is you know yes the sun is this sort of similar regeneration but it can also be this symbol of Oppression right and there's some truth to that if there's no privacy uh then there's surveillance and surveillance can lead to manipulation which collapses us to some version of authoritarianism or technocracy by an elite um so exam for example in the case of quadratic voting if all your votes are visible and your preferences are known you can easily be bribed in some off-chain Communication channel or some side Channel um and of course the most vulnerable to this are those voters who are most likely to be indifferent and just vote like a coin toss so that's my criticism of solar Punk

um I'm not sure if you agree with that characterization at all but uh but that's kind of my starting point what do you think yes I mean I think just to read it back to the audience solar Punk is I first off I think these all different permutations of punk are more of a Vibe than they are a hard and fast category so solar Punk is this idea of like a High-Tech high Utopia High sustainability version of of the world that we could be building with web free that um that that basically uses mechanisms like quadratic funding quadratic voting and Harbinger taxes in order to support the public good to support sustainability and just to play that back um the weaknesses are privacy and you know what do you what do we do in which

there's an earth in a world in which there's an authoritarian government looking at which public goods we fund and creating a social credit system or something on top of that is the criticism of of solar Punk so that's what I heard from you and to answer your question do I think it's fair um yes and though I mean I think it is it is true that we want to have a world in which we fund public goods in an adversarial environment where there is privacy but I also think that solar Punk is more of a Vibe than a hard and fast category and and so it just really depends on how you put draw the lines in like Vibes don't really have Aesthetics don't really have hard and fast lines around around them so maybe there's a version of solar Punk that does have that does have privacy and it's just not

really well represented in the aesthetic would be my poly back to you yeah and maybe that's Stellar Punk because the sun is a star so let's let's work our way towards Stellar Punk uh maybe we should talk about lunar pug next yeah yeah so my friend you know uh solar pump is actually basically what the what the lunar punks are saying about solar Punk um so the lunar punks like to frame themselves as the Skeptics and this is kind of like the dark by group and they frame solar points as the Optimus and the major push and and the lunar Punk movement I see is going dark and building these private Anonymous systems to subvert surveillance and control by like nation states and big Tech and the idea here is for users to go dark and

hide themselves in dark force of encryption and lives in the non and litter Punk see this feedback loop between anonymity and surveillance you know that will ultimately uh legitimate crypto I would say the embodiments of this like ethos is actually like early Bitcoin which kind of considered itself as uh you know Community with Siva nons uh what do I see the weaknesses of this um well if solar punks we is according to lunar Punk is surveillance I would sing lunarpon's weakness is hidden collusion so civilization isn't coordinated by Stephen non so you don't know anything about each other in fact those parties that do choose to reveal information uh sorry Kevin I can hear some feedback

just FYI um and in fact you know so what was I saying yeah so civilization isn't really coronated by Legacy of the neurons you know it's those parties that choose to actually reveal some information about themselves to count parties that are better able to form agreements or credible commitments um in other words it's much easier to build economies wealth and cooperation on trust and it's pretty close to impossible to like repeat the names of pure an Integrity you know without reputation where defectors and Bad actors can strategically breach agreements and like spin up new accounts so what ends up happening with lunar Punk well the reality is where social beings with social ties we talk and even though Bitcoin is a sort of a sea of

announce right there telegram channels where Miners and pool operators can collude and we get Shadow governance and Shadow Arrangements between announce communicate and have social ties with each other in other words we get collusion and those that collude best to create power over everyone else which leaves us with dark hidden opaque governance games and you know who really wants that um I'd say that there's also this like other and you know as an extension of a collusion problem there's another weakness of lunar Punk which is its focus on the individual and individual privacy and anonymity and this doesn't really address the fact that people come together as groups and produce shared conversational data which they have to

agree on as a group what's private and in a sense the data already isn't private but public to the group that generated it so it's partially private and this group has to decide how much of that data do they want to expose to the rest of the world in what form and in what privacy preserving method so lunar Punk's emphasis on the sovereign individual and personal anonymity overlooks much of this shared data which requires groups thinking about governance and in my opinion getting privacy right means thinking about groups and how they can encode these privacy expectations together incredibly commit to how and under what conditions information was revealed and so what lunar pop misses is that coronation

isn't so much built on encrypted Sovereign individuals but is more built on these partial privacy games of individuals within groups and groups negotiating with other groups um curious if you what you think of that characterization forming about this molecule yeah I think it's fair and again I think that these things are more Aesthetics and Vibes than they are hard and fast categories but in in the lunar Punk criticism of solar Punk the weakness of solar Punk is privacy a lunar Punk has meant to address that by giving people these shrouds of privacy and bringing back individualistic protections against authoritarian governments with by by creating privacy Technologies but in that shroud of

Darkness what does what does that do for introducing the ability for people to collude unfairly route funds to projects that that the colluders or the attackers are um uh are in favor and and so I think that's a fair criticism of leader Punk but also you know maybe maybe there's there's there's configurable privacy in which you have privacy by default but there's there's some amounts of anti-collusion mechanism that could be built into lunar Puck again because this is a Vibe and not really a hard fast category or the narrative is like uh it feels like 100 miles ahead of the means

here ahead of the mechanisms here so maybe we'll come up with mechanisms that have both public goods funding and privacy and collusion uh in the future and I don't know maybe those meme those mechanism propagators we'll call them solar Puck lunar Punk or something else at that point it's hard to draw lines between these things yeah yeah so okay so um shall I move on to Stellar Punk yes let's get to the uh the meat of the episode so so Stellar Funk what is seller pumpkin why are you excited about it yeah so well should we should we start with some means first of course yeah seriously so if solar Punk is considered the conscious and

lunar Punk is considered the unconscious I would say Stellar Punk is the third eye or if solar plaque is light and lunar Punk is dark I would say Stellar Punk is a rainbow um if solar pocket is publicity and lunar ponca's privacy I would say Stellar points the superposition of both the partial publicity and partial privacy um these are very plural memes that you're coming up with here at yeah hopefully you can like you know build better memes and and move them into existence um so I let's let's actually like take this analogy of stars literally so on the surface we look like these cell

Sovereign Stars right and we're emanating these idiosyncratic beliefs and desires through space-time and just as light obeys this inverse Square law so it doesn't drown out the light of other stars we also similarly square root over the intensity of our lights our individual lights so we can differentiate and see other people's life right and so this is the quadratic aspect of solar punk you know the sun is actually a star uh so far so good yeah so um I I think that I was just I just think the analogy of quadratic funding in your votes decaying by the amount of capital that you have over time quadratically and this analogy of how Stars rating hitting out the light into the universe the brightness

of that decay is quadratically over the distance over time that's just like a really beautiful analogy to me but yes I'm tracking so far so I would love to continue it's not perfectly it's not quadratic it's like an inverse column it's close enough it's close enough right okay same logic um so Stellar Punk takes another step so we so we build on right this solar pod they build on this quadratic aspect but we do something else because light isn't just a particle right it's also a wave and has properties instantaneously entangled with other light waves or their spin across vast distances so what we want to know is underneath the intensity of our seemingly idiosyncratic unique preferences or what I'm calling

our light how correlated is our light or R spin or our bias with other people's light Waves by this invisible messy stochastic social process we call communication and we want to know these hidden correlations especially when digital communication accelerates our entire movements across distance as we enter social media spin zones or YouTube rabbit holes etc etc so what celery Punk does is rather than treat people as the same uncorrelated non-conversational sovereign individual or Sovereign star without social ties we take an extra step we cluster people by their conversational overlap and

similarity and then discount their influence based off the shared conversational memberships memberships as well as reveal behavior in other words we don't treat a hundred duped puppets or 100 mindless spots in the same Spin Zone having the same narrow clustered conversations the same as for example a highly intersectional person debating across very different groups instead we acknowledge correlated conversational groups and discount them against them in voting and so with this kind of correlation discounting we address the collusion weakness of lunar Punk and we turn governance into this prism allowing communities to bend and refract what is

otherwise incoming monolithic light into different and shaded colors so we can see the unique colors of less biased and less correlated perspectives sharply and in their full brilliance um so that that was a a mouthful I will pause and let you ask some questions well I mean it feels like in in this framing if solar Punk is the Sun and it's high Utopia in in uh High uh regeneration and lunar Punk is is the criticism of that that incorporates privacy it feels like you're positioning Stellar Punk which is the whole night sky is being plurality so it's not about one Central authoritarian sun it's it's about the plurality of of all the

different stars in the sky and I think that there's just sort of a beautiful metaphor there of this being something that transcends solar pumpkin and lunar Punk into the plurality of all the different ways that we're different and diverse from each other and um I I I think that it is just kind of it's It's A Beautiful metaphor maybe that's just because my dad's an astronomer that uh that I have an appreciation for the night sky but um in you know I'm wondering how you think it's different from solar and lunar book well so I talked about like just this you know so that it's different from solar Punk because you have a quadratic voting right but you have these correlation discounts that let you see kind of underneath how correlated our

lights are we're all different Stars right and lets you sort of discount against the correlated to actually seeing more colors and more Brilliance and see more plurality right but there's there's on the lunar Punk side there's this question still a privacy you know how does stellar Punk avoid lunar punks like total privacy and anonymity right that doesn't really recognize shares group shared group data right and also avoid this other extreme with solar pongs like total publicity right which which could open us up to right surveillance and control so um maybe I can go back to this idea of like wave particle duality um and and dig a little bit deeper here so uh in the same way light has this like whey particle duality you can see

individuals as like intersections or networks or groups and you can also see groups as networks of individuals right so Stellar punk in addition to acknowledging you know our individual particle nature we also acknowledge groups or our wave nature and importantly what we do is we represent membership to groups with socially programmable objects that confer rights of participation and importantly make explicit the communities governance mechanism is it governance you know one person one vote is it quadratic vote is it like token voting right and this governance mechanism helps us determine what information the community or group chooses to reveal and to bloom in

exchange for what money or information from another group for example right so in other words having this object confers the right to vote on a group's privacy and a constellation of these objects represents your access and governance over all the channels you've participate in and you can call them Soul bound because they represent your axis in no one else's or you can call them Community bound as communities Grant and program these objects so again like way particle duality individuals and communities are ultimately to the same phenomena and once we represent governance right the next step is to actually improve it to price influence right and here we use quadratic voting like solar Punk but we augment it with

correlation discounts so again rather than treating people as the same uncorrelated sovereign individual you know or isolated star without social ties without correlations Stellar POG looks at the way of nature of networked individuals and takes an extra step in discounts influence based off of shared conversational clusters right as I just previously discussed and so we get this collusion resistant quadratic voting letting people Express their intensity of their preferences but also correcting for their biases and this collusion resistance really matters for privacy because when a community is negotiating to share their data with another Community it may have overlapping members in a conflict of interest or when it decides to say auction off or

Federate some of their data to a third party the community may have overlapping shareholders but when communities rely on this prism of collusion resistance right as a governance mechanism the information that gets shared is actually more likely to be in the community's broader interest than any cluster's narrow private interest and this is really important a little bit when building you know decentralized systems because you don't want a cluster to gain an information or control Toe Hold over other clusters right inclusion resistant voting makes these hidden Tools in power that can grow into like black hole singularities much less likely um so sorry that was a a quite a bit of rant I will stop and let you ask questions

well is this true reductionist would it would it be fair to say that Stellar Punk is meant to overcome the problems with solar Punk which is privacy and the problems with lunar Punk which is uh collusion and and sort of bridge both of those divides to create a bets to both worlds yeah I think I think uh the sun moon and stars are all part of the same universe right and so solar Stellar Punk draws on the virtues of solar Punk and the virtues of lunar Pond but also compensates for their weaknesses um and in particular like it compensates for the weaknesses of solar pumps like say quadratic voting by having correlation discounts but also thinking about privacy from the perspective of

pollution resistance right and the same thing with lunar Punk like whereas lunar Punk has the sort of opposite problem of of uh you know total privacy and anonymity and hidden collusion right collusion resistance and quadratic voting like brings that out and surfaces that right but in but in a way that doesn't um you know swallow uh everything into Singularity the other thing that you said uh which struck me is quite profound is this idea in physics that we have a wave particle duality which is just basically just a way of saying that an electron can be uh or any or particles can be represented as a wave uh and then also as a particle and and one of the things I I think is

interesting in advanced physics is breaking this Duality um and and as we apply these metaphors to social systems to political economies this idea that um of like a whole lot breaks The Duality between an individual and a collective um we are both uh collectives of cells and individuals in ourselves and um and so the idea that an individual and a collective are part of the same stack and are part of the same ecology um and comparing that to wave particle duality uh I think that that's that's quite profound in in how we're using these physical metaphors

um for a complex social system so that's that's definitely a pickup for me yeah I mean it's I wouldn't necessarily say we're trying to break the Duality at least wrecking not but more so reckon with it and so you can get a phenomena in two different ways right and you can look at light and Its Behavior as a particle you can look at light and Its Behavior as a wave right and they're seemingly in contradiction but but you have to if you kind of look at it from one angler and not from the other then missing the full picture and so what I was saying is you know we as humans you can look at us as you know individuals but really we're individuals and we're differentiated by the conversational group and we're so individuals are

networks of groups right but you should also think the other you the community view or Community bound view right and look at communities as just networks of individuals and when once you take both of these perspectives uh then you can really start to build richer substrates that capture uh socially programmable privacy and plurality and expand the possibility space of not just one sun or one moon but to like many different Stars right um and key to doing that is recognizing groups and enabling groups to you know actually represent governance and acknowledge what is you know make explicit that they are

governed they're producing something together as a group and that group you know whether data conversational and giving empowering them to govern it in a collision musician way that actually you know making taking it a step deeper refracts out you know what things like maybe monolithic majoritarian light in a group different colors so we can get agreements now and consensus across reference to build shared network Goods that benefit many people rally them you know a cluster then it might just decree more power yeah I think there's another sort of analog here where you're talking about taking white light and breaking it out into its composite colors it just reminds me of a rainbow which I think

has been a symbol of plurality for many people and this idea of delighting in our basic differences and um yeah I'm wondering if you could say more about the rainbow and as a symbol of plurality yeah no I mean I think it's the perfect symbol um and it's I'm not sure if I could say more I mean I I was thinking uh I had this Insight that if you uh you know the problem with quadratic voting and you you know this with uh get coin right is groups that are just more coordinated can come and like take advantage of the mechanism so yeah if a group has a group with like 90 participation with everybody giving like one dollar can

swap a group that has 20 percent 20 participation even though they might be giving ten dollars each right and and so what you want to do is correct for these over-coordinated groups right and and and and and sort of surface them and in Bitcoin I'm sure you have you're struggling with this all the time to sort of surface the hidden collusions right and and once you do that um you actually start to see and see the different voices of the the actually different you know intersectional individuals or communities and if you kind of you know what what correlation discounting does is it it takes a consensus amongst these sort of very

different lights you know the the red blues and greens and say okay what what do these all these different lights colors agree on and then agrees to you know that on that as a proposal and that becomes the shared public good or like right or proposal most likely to advance a shared public um and so it's you know the challenge in in uh social processes is to always really kind of untangle or disentangle what seems like one monolithic light and actually see okay actually what's underneath here where are there differences um where is there a collusion um and correct for that to enable you know ongoing uh and building plurality so it feels like there's a thin line

between coordination and collusion and disentangling that is is a struggle well I would say like all coordination is collusion um and like all occlusion is coordination like it's and like it's not really a question of like you know great from your perspective there's some coordination that's like bad coordination but from my perspective it might be good coordination right depending on our different interests and different beliefs and different desires and our objectives and so the question is maybe um it's kind of in the eye of the Holborn then how do you actually figure out what is in the you know groups communities or Public's interests and what's in the communities groups or Public's interests

is what very different people who are conversationally very far apart agree on as being um you know something beneficial for the community um rather than kind of a hidden you know narrow private you know narrow conversational cluster agreeing on that it's more likely to be something that's you know beneficial to their interest but when you take very conversationally distant people it's moral likely to be in the general interest does that make sense yeah I think so so it's building um the idea of cooperation across social distance or in the Stellar Punk analogy I think getting the light of many stars over

but over one star uh into the mechanism yeah I mean the analogy sort of breakdown but yeah uh yeah you can say about many many stars but what's more like many stars that are not like you know uh entangled um right this is what uh what happens when you get two engineers and analytical thinkers trying to create needs uh is that we're pointing out already the flaws in in the analogies but um I watched your talk about Stellar Punk at the polarity conference and I thought it was quite profound and we'll link it in the show notes for the listeners who want to who want to check it out um I like this idea of having many North Stars and building plurality into into our punkness uh instead of solar pumpkin

lunar Punk they said you have Stellar Punk the whole night sky is is the vibe that we're going after and um I'm just so thankful to you for for creating this meme I mean obviously your contributions to the space have have been much much more to that but I think Stellar pumpkins is a really cool Vibe and happy to add it to the the to the to the punk series we've been running thank you thank you so much and um and again it's now to the exclusion of litter Punk or solar Punk but actually embracing those seeing their place in in the universe as well and they're part of solar Punk yeah they are part of stellar Kong there is a place for individual privacy and there's also a place for publicity as well but there's also this bigger place for you know partial

privacy and and um partialities and even like you can think about harburger taxation being as a case of like you know partial ownership in the same and and uh in the same uh line and when you get like you know a world of like partial privacy partial ownership or cultural information right no one star or no one person has kind of sustained perspective of anybody else and it's like you know Finding consensus across these many multiple perspectives that we can build more resilient networks um and and uh in a you know robust sustainable way that decentralizes power and doesn't let things you know get swallowed into a black hole yeah um I

love this picture that you're painting and you know maybe it's because my old man is an astronomer but um what would a more stellar Stellar Punk world look like so take us forward to 2030 in a world in which Cellar Punk is maximally successful uh are we Harbors are taxing in quadratic voting and quadratic funding all the things what does that world look like or collusion discounting like crazy now I mean I think I think it's I think it's actually um it's an interesting question you know so the challenge with uh Collision discounts is you have to get a sense of how correlated people are in their conversational clusters and that's like a combination of ex-anti and exposed social clustering looking at their commitments you know their commitments to groups

um but also their revealed behavior and so it's a super tricky problem um and so I can't say like how the mechanism uh it will evolve when we're still very early and I think Joel who you had on earlier is doing a lot of great work there um but how does the world look I would say it's definitely more colorful if you notice in my talks I use a lot of color um and let less black right less black and white more color um I you know there's you can also just see it when you start to look at the world and in terms of where are the hidden correlations um not just in like beliefs you know or which people are in the same sort of algorithmic Spin Zone right but also in

terms of like physical architecture or like art or like buildings right and like plurality we should see more uh you know diversity there and like uh richness right and I I've noticed as I like travel you know to some cities some cities are kind of like artificial and built and you can tell it's like the same contractor a set of contractors right or owned by the same Financial hold company that built that or you go to like a coastline in Cancun or something versus like another part of Mexico and you can see it's like okay like the there's clearly like one or some subset of people that just sort of own everything and like are imputing their preferences right on this and I think in plurality we see um not just an expression of more

individual preferences but social preferences recombining into like more novel and interesting um uh uh forms of Art and creativity and like novel forms of architecture and people expressing themselves and very cool and unique recombinatorial ways um so I mean the possibility I think and I will be happy is like in 2030 we kind of like move away from the Aesthetics of you know the Brooklyn coffee shop that ever that has just been replicated all around the world right copy and paste soon and we just see more like colorful instantiations that combine like local knowledge and local Customs like that

are intersectional with you know um you know other other cultures and more fusions and recombinations so not not sure if I painted a good picture there but that's what I hope to see yeah it's a beautiful picture I can taste the rainbow as you as you're speaking um is there anything I didn't ask about Stellar Punk that you want to say um sure actually I there's one kind of like cool announcement um there is a uh plural communication Cooperative while the PCC um and the group has made this like fun uh discourse Fork um which allows you to express the intensity of your preference with hearts

but at the same time it recognizes and discounts the social cluster you are part of based on correlation factors set by the community you are part of whether it be like workplace geography or maybe public affiliation and we've made this like open source and I'll send it to you um the the GitHub and we would love for communities to experience with it especially Dallas and web 3. um again the point is like so you know minority voices don't get drowned out and communities can Surface questions which multiple perspectives agree on it's interesting and it's a playful first up but um we think it's you know a nice experiment for communities to kind of get comfortable with collusion resistant mechanisms and what we call like

plurality scores uh which is just kind of a fancy or more familiar word for you know quadratic voting with correlation discounts so I will share that with you that's great yeah we'll put that in the show notes the audience can check it out and I just love this idea of making pluralism more practical by creating tools that that are more Stellar Punk that have plurality baked into them and just make it easier to coordinate in a more plural way so we'll add that to the list yeah and it's actually particularly great for um you know if you're a Dao or if you're in like a protocol ecosystem and you really want to uh run a kind of like pluralistic or decentralized uh conference with agendas right it's a

really great bottom-up way to get community consensus on what what should be the agenda you know that's multiple perspectives agree on and it's a great way to also sort of descend what you know decentralize power away from those who like own a lot of tokens and a lot of influence um and move move these systems in a more pluralistic Direction I love it like I said I can taste the rainbow that's what that's what I mean I'm gonna end on thank you so much for um appearing uh to do the seller Punk podcast also everything you've done in the space around decentralized Society plurality research uh really looking forward to to see how things evolve over

time so big fan project keep up the great work thank you Kevin bye bye is love [Music] foreign [Music]