Network Societies, Civic Tech & Democracy

Transcript

So I've been reading Glen's works since he wrote Radical Markets in 2018. He also co-invented quadratic funding with Vitalik and Zoë Hitzig, and there is a project called Gitcoin where my co-founder Janine worked at before starting Zuzalu, so lots of synchronicities here. His latest book is called Duality, and he co-authored that with Audrey Tan, and I find that it is a very timely set of ideas. It feels like it's becoming more and more relevant every week. It gives a vision for how we can navigate some of today's hardest challenges, including radicalization, fractured democracies, centralization, power, and

technology, and just a word on why we're excited about this at Edge City. So I think that these ideas are extremely important, and I very much see Edge City as a value-aligned project. But I also see us as a place where we can take some of the ideas and make them practical and that sets the stage for this session today we will talk a little bit about concepts and the ideas and then we'll make it a bit more interactive we'll have Q&A and discussion ideas and the goal is that I would love to leave today with one to two concrete identity experiments that we can run at at Edge City and

specifically at Edge Esmeralda just coming up here in late may. So cool, let's start. We'll start with three areas of context which will be um what do you call the widely engulf between technology and democracy and I'd love to talk about the political ideologies century and then we'll talk about some practical examples of paralysis in action and I think that will give us a a really good shared context or top so Glenn you talk about this idea of the widening gulf between technology and democracy and I'm curious if you can talk about why you think that tension has

emerged um well I'll say it a little differently than I did in book because my perspective has evolved since then i I grew up in Silicon Valley uh and I was born into a family that I would call neotheist they sort of had the same attitudes towards like people of faith that kind of close to what like a white supremacist uh family would have towards like African-Americans you know there was lots of discussion of eugenics there was lots of discuss you know it was like this extreme hostility towards like the common people as you know denoted by faith right and um there's a long story of how I evolved in my attitudes towards that and desented from that etc

but one thing that was really remarkable to me is when I went to Taiwan uh and more broadly in Asia the relationship between technology and you know And the rest of society is just very different like technologists are actually more uh reserved in Asia on average than the rest of the society is and this like notion that there's like town corner and they're like in their separated locations and the social fabric connecting them to everyone else is like very very thin and the social fabric connecting them to each other is very thick is just like not the way that it's it is in Japan in Taiwan in India um and so religion is like more a symbol than like the only substance but I

think it's like a really nice indication of the way in which there's this like very deep social chasm between the people who develop technology and the people who it supposedly serves i I'll give one other like symbol of that that I think is maybe relevant to you guys which is that when I was growing up um maybe when some of you were growing up but probably was after your time but you know there was this whole like there was Star Trek there was um Epcot there were like these mass cultural things about imagining the future and you know there's lots of problems with mass culture

but like one great thing about mass culture is that if something is like completely repugnant and unappealing to like 90% of the population it's not going to be like a great optimistic mass cultural product you know what I mean and there there was this era that I that I very much grew up in when like that was the way I learned about the future was through these like mass cultural objects and then for like 20 years after like right around the time I became like an adult basically there the only mass cultural like objects about the future were like dystopic and all of the things that were

like more forming the views of technologists about the future were these like really really narrow things that only appealed to technologists and so you could get away with being like snow crash that's great like let's all go do snow crash like let meta awesome you know what I And like you could get away with that because like only people who were meant to read those things the people that uh could assume that they would be in whatever elite is spelled out in that book because like that's just not plausible to 90% of the population but to like the narrow set of people who read those things it was so there were like no need to like worry about what was going on with everybody else and so um anyway I think like both kind of the decline of the like Star

Trek Epcot whatever you want to call it thing and this like you know contrast between Asia and the US I think are like really sharp images to me of like how you can have different relationships between technology and society in different places you talk about how democracy is almost under pressure from two different sides two different sides that are enabled uniquely by technology um social media and to chaos that we live in side leading to polarization and and then AI leading to just unprecedented capacity for control population in more centralized way can you just touch on

those two things yeah I mean which of these is like less familiar depends on the audience and I think everyone here is probably familiar with the whole like you know network stay like you know uh type discourse um in most of the rest of the population that's like super news to people uh and they're kind of seeing it all break into the headlines for the first time in the last month um but they're much more familiar with the like big AI in the sky is going to solve all big mama AI in the sky is going to solve all your problems like everyone will get a basic income the analogy I often give for this is when I was in college there's a guy who um was named Aaron Spolan and

he ran for student body president and his slogan was keep the good times rolling and the good stuff flowing while all the hard work is done by Spolan you know what I mean and so so I feel like that's that's like the you know you know it's like it's like no more work no more responsibility just like party all the time you know what I mean like like and you know universal basic like you know beer vouchers or whatever you know what I mean um and uh and then there's the like you know like just like sort of He-Man like screw the system like I can do it way better like let's you know

[ __ ] is like wishes like you know people who don't get it like let's just go build something [ __ ] awesome you know um and uh and like you know that has a certain uh appeal to it and like you know you definitely see that sort of playing itself out on the national stage you also see some like challenges with that like whether they be or like you know USA ID falling apart Ebola spreading you know what I mean so like like so you know these are like I think becoming very visible to people but like I also think that like there isn't just kind of an option of being like nah

let's like not do the future thing because like ultimately like if you don't plan for the future then just like whoever is planning for it like no matter how many diseases they're bringing our way like is you know going to get it and so uh I think there's this really unfortunate thing where like most of the people who are like reasonably grounded in like the world and like culture and like you know thousands of year old philosophy or whatever are kind of like you know I just don't really want to think more than 6 months ahead and then like the people who do want to think six months ahead are like pretty like warped people you know what I mean and so like

that's the divide that like I think we need to overcome so that like we can get back more to the like you know start thing rather than the like you know weird conspiratorial like whatever thing and the like you know very presentist thing can you touch on why you are more excited about the idea of network societies rather than network states uh well I think network states is just an oxymoron you know like what is the idea of a network state as described in the book it's like we're all going to meet online and then we're going to go off be completely separate do our own thing and say [ __ ] you to everybody else um and like that's not a network like I I suggest people look

up in a book what the word network means like the whole concept of a network is that there's like partially permeable partially coherent entities that have like protocols to exchange a network with other partially permeable entities that there is no scale that is like the scale like every like networks are fra like anyways this is just like basic network science which like obviously people do not feel the need to like understand anything about in order to write a book called the network state um uh but but like like the whole point of like network science was that

like the notion of like we're off in our thing and we're doing it all on our own and like we've got our commandment and like screw everyone else and like whatever like the whole point in network science was like that's not the best model of the world and like that tends to lead to like very fragile systems and that like instead we might want to model things the way that like all of biology and all of like you know brains and like pretty much everything that is like a system that works is which is that like there are these partial interconnections and like things are not just the whole or like one separated off part but like a web of thing i mean that is literally the definition of a network so like that's what I am not a big fan of like I'm all for networks like

if networks could rule everything like I'd be that would be great the problem I have is when someone like uses the term network to destroy the concept of a network yeah that makes sense so just putting these to the things that you started alluding to earlier can you touch on the free political ideologies of the 21st century that you outlined i mean there's all sorts of different names that people use for these things but I I like I like taking them from Civilization so I'm like a total Civ addict um in fact I was like in the taxi over here playing the new Civ 7 game um which does not yet have a information era but they've hinted that it's coming so maybe we'll get another version of

this but um but in that uh like they they released an expansion pack in 2019 like after radical markets came out that included quadratic voting for the diplomatic mechanic and it had future governments and in it the three future governments are corporate libertarianism synthetic technocracy and digital democracy um so sometimes I use those names though they're a little bit obscurantist so sometimes they just call it democracy libertarianism and technocracy um which by the way like has just all kinds of like really hilarious uh historical intersections with our current

political moment that I won't ra rabbit hole on but anyway um uh you know basically these things are pretty familiar to you guys it's kind of like uh the you know governments are going to fall apart unions are going to fall apart religions are going to fall apart all there's going to be is like the market and like clusters of people online like doing awesome stuff like just basically Snow Crash you know um if any raise your hand if you read Snow Crash oh not that not as many people as I thought well you should read Snow Crash if you want to know where like all this [ __ ] came from like read Snow Crash like like Neil Stevenson made the mistake of writing a

dystopian novel and thinking it would be taken as a dystopian novel like never make that mistake like like if you write a really good dystopian novel like you're just asking for that to come true you know what I mean so um yeah so uh so that's like basically the snow crash you know like everything falls apart and like you know Uber mentioned like form their like cults and like dominate everything uh that's like the libertarian you know corporate libertarian NRX whatever you want to call it thing then there's the like you know all knowing AI you know benevolent like fixes all the problems and you get material abundance uh view and then there's like something else uh

which you know you call digital democracy i'm not sure democracy is actually the best word for it but it's one word you could use for it plurality is another word uh to use for a you know Star Trek you know Epcot like that sort of thing can you articulate why morality is better ex forgiven for thinking well libertarianism you know there's interesting ideas there everyone can do you know whatever he wants and sure corporate side of it it's kind of twisted but maybe we'll figure it out or in the case of the technocracy it's like well I'm see smart guy maybe he's just going to figure out all our issues and and we can trust him so what is it about that actually makes that

the more compell option Because like complexity science teaches us that like resilient systems are not either like little atoms doing whatever they want irrespective of the rest of the system nor is it like homogeneous control and understanding that just makes everything work the right way like your body is not like a bunch of cells like saying [ __ ] you to each other uh nor is it like you know every cell is an identicate thing processed and you know completely flexibly arranged by some top- down brain it's like a bunch of organs sending a bunch of really complicated signals

partially permeably interacting with each other it's just like every system that like doesn't go completely like off the rails is like that in fact like complexity science teaches us that all complex systems are like this they're like not chaos they're not order they are like complexity and they're right on the edge and they're constantly in danger of one or the other but like they develop richness through that so I just I I in some sense like I don't even think there's like an option for these other things like all there is is like you can swing back and forth between them you can completely clean off into something that's like not life at all or you can like do your

best to somehow do the hard job of like staying on the path of balancing between those things right so the intuition is almost that either of the extremes are not long-term they don't make sense in the long term because they are fragile and so the third path is not like a concrete thing necessarily but it is a almost a practice or a way of reading it it's it's a it's a phase transition so like uh if again from complexity science if you have like something as simple as a cellular automa there are like different parameters in there about like mutation rates and whatever and if you're

below that you just like basically get some like blocks sitting there the whole time and if you're above that basically like everything explodes and like and you can't make sense of anything and then you're when you're right on the edge in between you get like interesting little like you know gun shooter things like moving around the things that interacting with each other and creating other stuff so like that's where life occurs you know and uh another term for it in that world is self-organizing criticality uh that's you know that's where crystals form that's where like all the richness and complexity of life comes when you balance between those things and don't allow either of those simplistic views to full of yeah the bus and practical examples the book is frayed

very much in the experience that Audrey and the folks in Taiwan Brad about essentially being a democracy under pretty consistent threats yeah so they've had to figure out how to be a democracy um sorry could you just help help us understand some example the types of things that they've done that the ideas of for action yeah and you know I I would actually say in some ways the coolest example right now is probably in Japan so we can talk about that uh but and it was inspired by the book so that's that's been a really cool to see but um so like there was this movement in Taiwan called GovZero where the notion was that you download the government websites you create better

versions of them and then you like try to shame the government into adopting them uh and you do it at G0V instead of gov so like it's you know it's the OG Doge but but like but like you know you don't just take down the government website you actually copy the government website and you show that it's better and then you try to get people to adopt it and in fact it's funny because G0V like when you sort of in in the right way in Chinese is actually zero hour government which is the same as like shadow government so the website was both like a play on how to put up thing but also like doing this shadow government thing and um then there was like this occupation of

the national legislature in Taiwan and this was like sort of a mixture of the Occupy movement with like January 6th it went on for three weeks though um and yet it there there was not violence and what they did is they set up like a shadow government in the national academy which was about 2 miles away from the parliament that was occupied and they basically because problem was shut down showed that like using these methods that came from the uh IETF you know the internet engineering task force that they basically could like resolve the issues that were being debated in parliament

like more effectively than the parliament can and then those were adopted by the government and Audrey ended up becoming a minister for like doing that kind of stuff um he she was a hacker over the force actually right yeah she was she worked for Apple a little bit but she just did a lot of you know projects she was a Bitcoin millionaire though she gave away all of her crypto when she entered government um so um and uh they did all kinds of stuff so like they have this platform called Polus that raise your hand if you know about Polus half of people okay so Polus is like a platform that uses some very primitive AI to cluster conversations and display like what are

the things that are dividing people what are the things that are uniting people in the conversation um and they use this to do like deliberations about regulations but also to allow students and anyone really but especially students to propose new laws and reach consensus around them and then get them passed in the national legislature which helped result in the country um being the having the highest feeling of civic empowerment among uh students who are graduating because you know when you go to vote in the US it's like I've been disempowered no one's listening to my voice and

now I'm going to be really radical and I'm going to vote and whereas there it's like no I've actually like negotiated laws with all these different complex stakeholders and gotten it passed and now that I don't have time to do all that work I'm just going to vote you know so you have like the least the younger generation is the least polarized and most civically empowered in the world because they've actually had to do the work of having the responsibility of governance by the time they reach uh adulthood um another uh uh great example of the work that they do is that they have something called the presidential hackathon where people bring like local public goods projects and they then try to improve on them at the national level and by quadratic

voting a few of them get blessed by the president and then those become part of like the agenda for national public uh digital public infrastructure in the entry in those mo the participants but anyone from the public who has a verified SMS can can participate it's so cool can you touch on what's happening in Japan since the on yeah so there's this guy Ano Takahhiro uh who uh read the book uh last year he's a science fiction writer and ML engineer um and he's like a 33year-old guy with long hair uh for those of you who haven't been to Japan not very many men in Japan have

long here um so he's like sort of an unusual figure um and a month before the Tokyo election he said "I'm going to run for governor." Um and uh no person under the age of 40 no person without a formal political organization no one who had never run before had ever gotten more than 50,000 votes uh in an election at that scale in Japan and um over the course of a month he had a GitHub repo he had an AI avatar of himself um and he basically like ran Polless augmented by this thing called Talk to the City through this AI avatar so like anyone in the public could come

and like ask about the platform make suggestions and then like they would get portrayed back to them through this avatar interpreting the Polish results like you know what people think about this and then it would autogenerate suggested uh PRs for the for the platform that was that was his his git uh GitHub repo and he ended up accepting 90 PRs and then when uh they did a like deliberative poll among the public about which was the best platform his platform got twice the score of the person who was the incumbent um and uh at least four times as much as any other

candidate um and he uh only came in fifth with 3% of the vote or 150,000 votes but still much more than anyone ever had and everyone in national politics na noticed this so when the new prime minister came in he said that he was going to make this part of the nation's plan and he was appointed the head of the long-term plan for the city of Tokyo um and uh now uh all of the five largest political parties in the country have agreed to like use this as a centerpiece of their next uh campaigns uh and so that's like I think one of the most exciting examples of this it is

so cool to see to see it become actually has an advantage to use this principle and tools yeah in like a traditional voting mechanism or system um great so I think that was very helpful context i'd love to move into the discussion section we have a shared notes document that was on a QR code on a laptop that's what we were okay smoke need liner that's yours right um so shared notes feel free to drop uh notes in there questions obviously would prefer if you raise your hand and and um and ask questions directly but if you feel comfortable doing that and keep an eye on you but our way of

trying to uh let folks can see that it's kind of um but just on that context piece on the three areas we just covered curious anyone has any thoughts or questions for the lens before we move in some more of the deliberation Yeah John yeah um is portraying all that so you talked about you know how doesn't book it up is some and you got but this like biism libertarian died like me died and then like democratic you know and with the horrorism angle if that makes

sense but uh in general like you know a very strong to put the framing and dead beard but um I think it this you know like a lot of the implementations of that inside over the last like five years did not work that well you um particular a context about it but you use horizon for example the democracy first version that like the visual first versions of it the thousands or whatever yeah but yeah have been largely pretty disappointing to those of us deeper well they b the last couple of year and so as you talk about like looking beyond the six months you know like like what does the what is the like practable vision of that that someone alternative

to the like not working effective mandr so long well I just put out a paper called pro-social media there was a um there was a paper uh there was a um article in time about it and also an interview with Laura Loomer that you can watch and um uh the idea is that uh you take a social media platform you label content with the social context in which it's consensual as determined by the algorithms um and uh then that notion of being consensual is determined by uh you know these

protocols like think pull us like things bridging you know is it bringing this community together and then you have like a business model that is driven by communities paying for the highlighting to their members of the content that is consensual for that community um and also balancing but we can talk about that more but you know that to me is a illustration of something that might uh be a scaled version of this obviously ver you know smaller versions of that like community notes are already at scale um and uh I think that we're we're working on a pilot of that with blue sky um

project liberty is also very interested in that if they end up winning the bid for Tik Tok so that's an example of something that might be an atscale version of this uh relatively soon something I uh my intuition from look for a social media paper was essentially that you could conceptualize a social media that um that essentially up ranks and gets more people to see content that is liked by both sides I guess um say I have like community notes idea but you know at the actual curation level people just see much more stuff that is bridging rather that are siloed and and uh yeah I

the only notance I would put on that is everyone has in the back of their mind some notion of what community they're talking about when they say we need more things that bring people together but like of course almost every type of content brings someone together like you know lots of content that might be divisive in one context like is very unifying in like the Kulex clan community right and so like you you have to be context specific and I I think what's really missing is the context rather than like some content is good or bad like uh things that are uniting in the American context are probably divisive in the Ethereum context and things that are uniting in the

Ethereum context are probably divisive in the you know Republican party and things that are uniting in the Republican party you know whatever so like the the key thing is that people are part of multiple different communities and they need to have the ability to understand what is unifying where and what's divisive where i went to Nant like um one of my uh favorite maybe for my era uh movie source structures there reminds me copy story was Lord of the Rings and I think that it leads into a line question but I hope I'm not the lord Albert

dude yeah I don't know I don't know part And Frodo like he fail he fails to give back the e-hole that is like stun on his and it's a story of a man who weaker than a lot of the evils around him and is not this uh mythical figure that's going to solve everything but his role is to give back the evil that didn't belong to him yeah and I think that that has been a really guiding like to me as I think about where we go from here and so I'm I'm hopeful about that

on more than I am something like serial crash i'm curious if that leads you to thoughts about more interesting forms of gumi uh which I think this group also is in the sense that loss of money uh is typically thought of as like an asset collapse and asset and evil uh you can kind of link uh quite closely if you think about the tendency for most assets to lead to the human tendency to want to hoard and one thing that we'd be curious about at kernel and it's over like

it's over overlapped quite a lot in your work you know the idea of like thinking about the liability side which is what lots of early forms of bart and so be curious if brings of any thoughts both in terms of driver is but maybe beyond things like vote we we produce a question well Um you know the way I think about the origin of money is uh very influenced by someone who again many of you have probably read David Greyber turns out actually almost nothing in what you've read it from from David Greyber is like actually due to him there's like lots of other sociologists who

wrote about it way before which I didn't know until recently but anyways it's usually attributed by people in my world to David Greyber uh and it's like this idea that money is not about like you know facilitating exchange that barter would you know not allow or whatever what it's about is that people used to in informal relationships have all kinds of like complex social obligations to each other and then when you start meeting people who you can't keep track of that with you use this money thing as like a way to allow you to have some kind of exchange but that's not because it's like better or more efficient it's just because it's too complicated to keep track of all the

information you were keeping track of in the local community when you start interacting with people you know who are really far away and you won't see again and etc so it seems to me like money is not some like fundamental great thing money is like a really really really primitive information technology that's like insanely reductive and that we did because we just like didn't have access to computers before we had access to ships you know um and uh like there's so much more information you could be keeping track of uh and like one simple model of this is imagine that uh there

was no money all that existed was bilateral relationships quantified bilateral relationships like how much do I trust you or how much do I owe you or credit something like that um and then you meet someone you've never met before and you want to know how much can you trust that person so there's a network of bilateral relationships you only have relationships let's say with 100 people 150 people it's a Dunbar type thing but there's but the people you know know other people who know other people who know other people and that creates a network of trust and there is some amount that can flow through that network there are paths of trust

through the network that connect you to that person in fact there's many and you could run like a max flow uh over that network and then you might say well like why doing this whole complicated thing isn't money just a simpler way to do it and the answer is like probably not at least not if you want the same richness because um like the diversity of the trust matters like even just thinking about like a flow network it's not just the like total amount it's like all the different paths that go through because some of the paths can get blocked somewhere right because they like all rely on the same person uh or the same trust relationship right and so actually like the diversity of the paths and not just their amount matters and that money

doesn't capture that right it doesn't capture that like resilience and like this is I think what happened with a lot of the like supply chain stuff during the pandemic and during geopolitical things it's like no we don't just care about like who can do it most efficiently we care about like which thing is less least sensitive to strategic disruption you know and that's what you care about in decentralization as well right so like money has this way to actually centralize because it reduces everything to like one thing and you don't think about the path through the network it's like very non-net network again another example of like why the like things that are completely

focused on money and like think that like that's the basis for a network state are like completely missing the whole point of a network the point of a network is like resilience and diversity and you know whatever and money doesn't tend to yield that because it reduces everything to like everyone trusts the god almighty dollar and then the god almighty dollar trusts whoever has it so that's like a very centralized network right so anyways that's that's one direction to think about different forms of money cool so I'd love to shift into thinking about some of the potential practical experiments that we could run we have a month there'll be about a thousand people there throughout that time um they will be keen to try new

things experiments many have been technical uh you know by then probably the other everyone will be technical given how fast cursor is moving so um yeah I I'm curious for ideas from folks here thing that either were inspired by the discussion just now or maybe things you've been thinking about that relate to this um anything anyone has any thought i can start off with one so okay something I've been thinking about is we we have a lots of different people at our events and there is no real collective intelligence process yet um and I would love to understand the different sets

of opinion different sets of beliefs that we have in the ecosystem and I would love everyone who's there to also understand that and see what that inspires um I'd always love to run something like a police type thing but I'm curious if city Yeah I'm curious um so I did some pis when you rank a demonstration bit in BAR yeah um ideas your culture and um what has happened with Polish since then are there other are there improvements it been very static and now it's about to get like big Polish 2.0 in the next couple months so I I could set you up with those people and that

that's definitely a possibility the talk to the city stuff is really cool the ANO stack in Japan is really cool um there's a bunch of uh there's a bunch of things in that space that are happening this very dynamic space is just at a conference all about that stuff in Berkeley um so that's that's a you know very good option another thing that's sort of potentially related to this is like I love the idea of having some kind of like um GitHub um community rules or like community principles that anyone can propose and then there's some kind of interesting you know vote

process for approving them or whatever but then having like an AI front end to it so that like anyone can be like is it okay for me to like go piss on the tree behind my like cabin or like is that like not cool and like it can just like try to give you an answer based on the like git github you know uh or like can I go pick the fruit from the trees or like is there some process for that you know like and and then and then if you have like if you're like I don't like that real [ __ ] like then you can like say that back to the AI and it will like reflect that in to like whatever like polus type system you're doing and then like some PR will get created eventually based on that you

know what I mean like like enough of the alloing of bea trees you know be well yeah you yeah that's interesting and I like that this could be dynamic in the sense that obviously the like get allows for that to be dynamic but also the agent can understand like well a bunch of people just the riot cup really aren't so this thing I'm trying to y so like this week said not okay but next week maybe yeah and as I was mentioning there's this thing called deep springs uh which is this like very successful and famous college in the Sierras and they have every year their student body like votes on motions constantly and like you guys could do a way more tech sophisticated

dynamic version of that kind of thing the most wine people who's going to be here today went to that went to Deep Springs yeah i spent I spent a week with the people at Deep Springs and it's it's like it's a remarkable place that's definitely something you guys should like know about it has a lot of limitations but like it has a lot of relationship so he drew the octopi last night instead i I feel like you guys like a good very good aspiration for you would be to be like deep springs meets EP Epcot or something like that you know what I mean yeah yeah junior I'm curious if you had thoughts on the creative rules and principles side of things because that's something that we have um I think I say thus far we had a little you know we we maintained control over and

we had been trying to have an emergent uh take on it and just see what what comes out and things but we really do decide in the end and I actually feel this tension it's almost embarrassing to admit it but I'm such like intellectually so in love with ideas of plity but in practice is I I I want to keep control because I'm scared of of what happens when we you know let Kool loose and start suggesting stuff and voting on stuff and things like this um I don't if you have anything to add there i think something that I like just kind of holding back my head is like how many how how much can you push off like irreversible decisions from a like top down leadership standpoint versus like

let things be emergent and not necessarily be too quick to put them like well now this is a rule or this is a principle that we can't really go back on so but one good thing about open source is that you can change things and you can have a process for that and the other thing you know the thing we used a lot in the book was this notion of it doesn't need to be a binary between authority and like quote democracy like you can if you want have you guys start with like all of some type of kind kind of credits and then people can earn them for various things and then like you sort

of gradually decentralize as you get help from people on doing things and people earn that for having been credible responsible members of the community and then like you know the traditional way that organizations tend to run is like there's the senior you know authoritative people and then they delegate to people who like show basically by kissing ass or like you know otherwise impressing the people in power that they like deserve that power in the future right and like the thing is you can still do that in a system that's more decentralized it's just that you don't have to do it in a completely hierarchical way like what usually happens is like each of the authoritative people has the people underneath them but like you could pass it more broadly to the community and

they can sort of gradually get those credits and then without having to all report to one person get that so like I don't think you need to just be like I just want it to be completely flat you can just be you can use quantitative mechanisms to do that in a way that's just not all about the direct delegation and a hierarchy of authority yeah and I'm curious why your cults are on that with like vacuums of power existing and people trying to fill those vacuums so like a very you know for us like taking a very good example of like what happened with sizes loop where we tried very hard not to have like the planning team is just like cool let this thing run and let's get people

in the community to help make decisions yeah what ended up happening was where there were power vacuums and decisions that had tension someone tried to step into that role to try and impress someone who you know like the the team that weren't necessarily making any decisions anyway yeah how do you avoid the or how do you both give space to those people that want to fill that like power vacuum space to voice their ideas but not necessarily destruct what is happening around it or either keep it from perspectives um well you know I the principle behind quadratic

voting can be explained in very econ terms but it can also be explained in auditory terms so in fact it turns out I learned relatively recently that one father of quadratic voting was this like you know statistician political whatever person but another person was actually JCR lick lighter the father of the internet before he did all the internet stuff was an auditory engineer um and like one basic principle of auditory engineering is if you're in a loud room um and you're next to someone who's speaking speaking slightly higher you know stronger voice than the average voice in

the room but way less than the total volume in the room you can still hear them because all the other stuff kind of like cancels out as noise whereas like one slightly louder voice is like correlated and so it doesn't cancel out and like that's actually the reason for quadratic voting because if you take uncorrelated signals the average size of the sum of a bunch of uncorrelated signals is the square root of the number of signals you're adding up whereas the one correlated signal is linear and so like I think you can let people express themselves more but you and and they can be heard more but you the problem is you can't let that thing just like dominate everything else

as it naturally does you know what I mean because even if you're just a little bit louder you kind of get hurt above everything else so you just need to like yes allow that self-expression but then like modulate it by that understanding of that the dynamic is that even something that just stands out a little bit like quickly dominates you know yeah yeah something we've learned that uh through our experience with um Suzu and other things is that we we need to figure out what do we even you know grant to the community uh B or for governance because we tried to do this

with a couple of things for example choosing the next location of anu papuzu and it was like a very fun 10day process and by the end people were He's just decide like you don't want any mer input it's so insane to be in a room with a 100 people trying to figure out where the [ __ ] grow next um so I think that's some of the work that that we have to do and I'm excited to get some degation tools to do it uh technology and I want to add there is also like geoping tools like almost as quickly as possible be able to find tools so like for example with Zuzu I was like great we don't want

to necessarily decide who gets funding to build this decentralized movement left quadratic funding and the you know first round of it was okay of course with quadratic fun being b for so long to just see the sides of no one is happy ever the people that aren't making money and getting free money aren't super unhappy because they got led in someone else and the the people that are giving money they get to see exactly their project when a then they're unhappy and then the people who gave the original funds to like a matching pool are annoyed that they didn't have full control over it right so all in all no one is on the street side of market face was happy for the CEO side

of things and what ended up happening was they became a group that gated it like gated who would be allowed into a round y before the rounds even happened so it sort of took it took away using the tools for governance and brought it back to a centralized system of people so my question to you is like what is almost the like earlier stage of tool that keep it decentralized versus us in control if that makes sense um I mean I think like opensource forms of

interaction and transparency even if you have not yet brought in any like um formalism I think is really helpful because it makes things open to people and auditable and makes it hard for people to like it's kind of their fault if they didn't get involved so I think that I tend to find is like even more useful rhetorically and legitimation based than it is like practically a lot of people won't get involved but they could have been and so like rather than like

putting people into a room and forcing them to deliberate or um closing it off so they feel it's illegitimate just like having it be open and opt in uh and then see what comes of that and then as there start to be tensions put in the formalisms to make sure that you don't get what I just described getting captured by the person who like comes in is the stink bug um I think is quite useful like start start open and opt in bring in formalisms to like avoid stink bugging and then and then like sort of as the problems arise bring in more formalisms uh always with the

attitude of delegation of power but also with the attitude of like we're not freedom from politics matters too that's a term from Hana Arent like uh she says one of the greatest freedoms is freedom from politics so like if you like force people to like engage in some big deliberation they're going to hate it but if you have it be optin but then also like very attentive to like checking the power concentrations that can come through opt-in dynamics i think that's quite useful so like don't view the like opt-in framework as like the ultimate solution view it as like a cheap and

easy way to get started so that you don't need to burden people with the formalism and then bring in the formalism as it becomes necessary to like stabilize the system yeah yeah right all right i'd love to move on some of these ideas that people couldn't hear because there are few and we have me 20 minutes so someone works uh half an hour so missions uh community currencies and [Music] do you want to talk to Yeah yeah hey Devanch good to see you you were with Audrey weren't you a little bit ago audrey said she was good to see you yep okay great perfect we So just a contact

dishes paper yeah yeah I saw that yeah and he'll be discussing heard about this especially with Danch just in it i hope you'll explain that paper to me i don't really understand it so I' I'd like to understand it better you are Yeah I can go ahead and give you a detailed critique and review of it or a week uh so I think there's like four parts to the paper yeah the first part is that we currently have a pary system where private goods are governed by one shared one port and public goods are governed by one person one port so how do we change it from a binary to a sliding scale so what she calls plural goods things like healthy food is like neither a

private good pure nor a public good so how do we actually kind of represent and create a new system of governance called that so that's the first part the second part of it was uh kind of uh the way that we have the dominance model is that a trade-off between voice and exit so I can either keep my community currency liquid and convertible to a global currency or another community currency or I can irrevocably stake it and get permanent voice in that community like a soulbound voice in that community so that's the second part of it the token modem where you make a like I I probably paid 100 edges like 100 edge tokens I can keep 80 to pay my bills and 20 to

get a boy in edge cup so that's kind of how I work in practice so that's the second part the third part is the bing mechanism which is a kind of plurality and subsidiarianity so subsidiarity is that how much of how many edge tokens have I aable state the more I the more that I aable Okay the more closer I am to the community so someone like Pimour might have a lot and he's irrevocably staked a lot so he's closest to the issues on edge on on like matters of concern at city and that and this and like you have a corneratic function or that that he's not too powerful all that stuff the second part is plurality which is that um how many different communities are supporting

this proposal so if Timur has irrevocably st edge and maybe Ethereum and E and I revocably st like Bipcoin and E the fact that both of us agree on a proposal makes that get a bridging bonus because two communities are agree and if like Shanim who's also shrusted remarkably state e and ed if they if she and both vote there's a correlation this cop so that's the third part the motive mechanism plality and subsidiarity and the last part is the AI agents part where uh rather than let AI agents be a spaceless entity that's coming and trying to take part in governance we can differentiate

access to AI by how much had been irrevocably staked by AI so Timur member AI has irrevocably staked 20 edge Janit has only done five so we give more access to Timur because that is more a member of the community so that's the member AI and then you have like a community AI which is a function of all the different individual member AIs so Timour's might be like 0 like like a community AI draws 0.4 from Timu's AR 0.2 from gen Z and like 0.1 and these are like constantly changing based on how much I could be gay so that's kind of just the four part understanding that I had

it's probably actually different kind of my gays so what's the question do you want me to react to that or um maybe is the so okay in terms of community fences in general we've run two experiments so far edges we've done right for exchange organization Matt and Jack and um they've been you know relatively se so far but we already seen a lot of interesting activity and learnings and bunch has been bulging out doing awesome if we're starting to think about the sec experiment um all their ideas here that create sense to integrate well I mean one thing we

definitely used in the book which I don't know if you guys have used so far was the idea of having the community currency be the foundation for a lot of collective decision-m whether it be internal quadratic funding type things whether it be uh you know voting on community rules whether it be the thing in which you get rewarded for doing various kind of bounties so that's something we did used a lot in the in the book I mean in the book project yeah there were bounties there was no sense of governance here except the governance of the edges system itself um but that step is something that we could like cropen it up to um but this idea of you know

giving people the option to stay part of their uh you know collection in order to get more voice versus you know use the tokens in a more liquid way in order to you know do other things yeah i mean that's related to the notion that you might uh speciate the like community currency so there might be an overall community but then there might be sub communities let's say for each of the physical locations or for subgroups within it that don't want to be funible with everything else and they have their localized one and that has like more power over whatever localized decisions they make but then it has this plurality style relationship to the decisions

made in a broader community or a community in which they intersect with it but they're a sub community from the perspective of that community etc yeah just said I think something with Vitalik mentioned was that like he wants to he wants to see more permanent popups and we're probably going to see that with Edge Emerald and he's thinking the fundraising more that is Edge will become a yearround city like a real city yeah he is excited about that it's not the only like it's just an area of interest among a number of areas of interest of course like she sees the popups as being a very useful tool in and of itself and it would be sad if they all became pregnant so

just just to kind of make sure you well I mean so again just to tell the story of Epcot so like the idea of Epcot originally before it was like a park was going to be where the uh Disney uh Magic Kingdom employees lived and uh then people who came to visit would then temporarily be in this experimental prototype community of tomorrow Epcot um and they would uh uh experience it during their visit and there would be all kinds of experiments in participatory governance and you know different

technologies and whatever going on in this place that would be the town that you would be staying in while you were visiting and you would be sort of like a very small part local partial citizen but then the people who were like workers there would be like more seriously citizens and so there would be like a persistent thing of the people living there there would be a reason to go there that wasn't just to be part of that it would be to go to the park and then people would rotate through and experience it so I I think that's a very interesting model um I'm not saying it's by any chance the only model but like I have to say like just that thing like reading Walt Disney's

words much more compelling me to me frankly than anything I've read in this space was like it actually makes sense like people are going to come there to do something there are also people are going to be there permanently there's like a basis for notions different notions of like temporary versus permanent citizenship that come out of that and like I just could imagine that actually kind of like all holding together somehow you know so this is definitely a line of thinking that we we had and as we continue to work with Asian and that becomes a permanent town that will be potentially one of the nodes where something like that happens similar to this uh this concept of typo that demon survived by which essentially was that in St new York and what happens two months

out your summer uh around my home duty as well um but just just to tie a bow on this idea Debatch I think you mentioned the interest in permanent places and interest in potentially like launching tokens around that is that related to the community currency idea yeah I think it kind of fits in that if you want to create more Epcot how do we actually fund raise enough to be able to buy the land and debit up the space and make it into like a attraction for outsiders as well to come in and kind of actually have fun and be magical i mean the first thing I would just say is like I would love to see one Epcot before many like Epcot never existed like the closest thing to

Epcot was the Epcot Center thing that they created 15 years after he died which was not Epcot it was another park but at least it had the sort of futureoriented content and even that by the time I was an adult it launched right around when I was born had basically abolished all the future oriented content and it was just like Disney characters and international stuff so like it would be great to have one Epcot you know before we have multiple Epcots like uh because that did not exist sustainably it went away and we can talk about why it went away but like that would be really cool and like it obviously was grounded by its connection to an extremely mainstream cultural

object uh that attracted custom for other reasons so I think this is very important things to keep in mind you know what I mean um like what made it work at all to what extent it didn't work and how can those things be addressed because like to me if you are not bringing in significant numbers of people who for lack of a better term aren't crypto weirdos then you're failing yeah because you it's not just you're failing s in terms of sustainability which you will be but it's

more importantly that like you are not actually building a fabric that connects the future to the society you're actually building something that's separated from that society right and like that's what it is to be a network versus a network state like a network like Epcot was very much envisioned as a noded network there is a core of people there who are like hardcore and committed and there is this like permeable set of rotating people who's probably an order of magnitude bigger than the permanent connected people who are coming through being part of it getting something from it contributing something to it and taking off you know something something we talk a lot about is on our website this idea of integration not exit yeah or we actively we want people to kind of microexit

for a month yeah experience what life can be like if you're hella flourishing surrounded by curious people building the future there's robot dogs but also like kids and stuff and then you go back to me and you spread those ideas you know and you integrate them into your life you don't want to we don't want to steal people away from society we want them to actually experiment and then and incubate and then spread those ideas yeah so that's exciting intensity yeah of the various communities that one belongs to and the various you know obviously tribes and family and friendships but also I guess areas interest in our online community etc um

that resonates a lot to me personally and I see it playing out in pop-up cities um it's got always ones that we collect about people but we also collect all of the different intersections that those people bring and then also it touches on how we relate to other communities like you know Ftopia in France or um maybe deep springs or etc where we are interconnected and interdependent through the people that we share very um and so I had this dream of some kind of technological product or something that that can reflect but I didn't know what that

would look like or what well the pro-social media is trying to be an illustration of that and I do think social media kind of in its back end has that it's just not very transparent to people uh Dana Boyd back in 2002 had a um wonderful uh essay called faceted ID entity and it was her uh master's thesis and she proposed that like a core function of what was then emerging in social media wasn't called that uh back then was to help people sort of understand all these different sides of their identity that they need to that they need to traverse and

that's a big part of the um social you know uh this pro-social media IA project uh people in in modern society have to constantly be code switching and you want to give people a tool that helps them code switch by giving them a sense of like what things they believe are like sort of wildly inappropriate in one context and like totally okay in another and that's just like genuinely hard given like all the different spaces that you need to traverse yeah i feel like my personality is almost there's there's like the Twitter side of me impulse there's the Instagram side as say that obviously I'm family friends with whatever girlfriend and yeah I kind of even just

having an understanding that of the vocabulary to be able to talk about be really helpful yeah I mean the way the way I think about it is um if you want to like create some like really awesome super intelligence or you have some ambitious thing about that um what what we know from like cognitive science is there's this idea called fi have you guys heard of fi it's it's like a measure of integrative intelligence it's like a system is like intelligent to the extent that there's kind of like feedback loops that kind of make it aware of itself so like not

not necessarily self-aware in the like conscious human way but like even some very simple systems they're like observing aspects of their own you know being and sort of reacting to them to create homeostasis basically and that like you can quantify this degree of sort of like self- integration of the intelligence and like I think that there's been a huge problem in the last couple decades that like our machines for sort of observing and understanding society have advanced and yet our understanding intuitively of the internal states of those machines has like not

and so therefore like what's happened is that we were like "Oh we've got this awesome system." But the thing is we're part of that system and like if we're not aware of the dynamics of the system then actually the system isn't achieving that intelligence because like unless the system just erases us so we're no longer part of the system at all like the system isn't achieving that FI that it needs to get homeostasis you see what I mean and so like a big part of this is to like you know you take think of like neural network it's like a ma massively more rich and complex representation of the social fabric than any of us is consciously aware of and so like we need to kind of like

bridge the gap between those like make us aware of more of the social complexity somehow uh and at the same time I I if the models of it get way away from our ability to understand literally the place we play within that model then we're not actually like getting that self awareness you know what I mean that collective self-awareness that's necessary to like have some kind of cybernetic Gaia intelligence or something the whole thing with with deepseek was the interesting new possibility was yeah it it just opened up the UX to what the machine was thinking and yeah

16 paths would be case stud yeah was guessing between and then doing a few soft referential groups to try to choose the best of the 16 and of followed by allowing the reasoning to show yeah and that's cool but the thing is that your place like literally your place in that is not as clear and that dialogue I understand yeah like like you I mean this is also very related to the you guys know kaizen does that term mean anything to you it's the Japanese production system that um and like the whole idea of kaizen was that like you are part of a whole production system you need

to understand where you sit in that because like you want to be it's so like if you notice that the like rubber that you're attaching somewhere is a little bit soft like that might be totally fine or not fine at all but like if you have no idea what role it's playing in the car then like you can't actually have any agency right and so the point is like if you give people enough sort of awareness of the system in which they are a cog then they're capable of like improving that system and that was like the key to the Japanese production miracle and I think the same thing is true of like sociology like if we don't make people aware of like where they sit within

some broader system then there's like no way that they even if they wanted to could act to improve that system something really interesting here it's a bit of a side note but you had an amazing speaker called Ruben Laund City you published a paper called the beautiful loop that shows that the So what you're describing is what the brain does all your brain it's called active inference it's constantly making predictions about the world and cycling back making us act subconsciously to raise high-fi right right but and so his his paper from last year essentially theorized and showed that this process the awareness of that loop is what gives us consciousness yeah because you could

always measure the but that that that's this whole FI theory you know he's just expositing that right so yeah I'm I'm excited to to read more about that but just There's a great book on that called um uh the romance of reality for people like who it's by neuroscientist Bobby Aarian um so to make up to make this practical um what is something that we could do so I think identity is an area that we are uniquely placed to help people experiment help builders because we have lots of people coming we have a lot of information about them that is identity related and we can ask them for more if

you need it and then we can you know get consent to share that data with party builders we do in privacy preserving ways there's amazing team here called Cursive who are doing really cool stuff related to that um so I think that's an area where we can hopefully spawn lots of experimentation um I'm curious if people have thoughts or if you have any intuition about a something we could do that you know could run an experiment that would that would you know teach us something that So I mean one thing I'd love to see that I haven't seen anyone do is what I call community recovery so community recovery is like social recovery but um based on plurality ideas so in particular

what you try to do is based on your like overall understanding of the social graph auto help identify for that person the least correlated people in their social networks or the least correlated organizations or the organizations that you know are representative like that you could find someone to represent and then have that be the way they recover it so like imagine that you you know went to Deep Springs you are like an big Ethereum nerd you work at OpenAI and you uh um are like you know big uh trans activist and you're Taiwanese or

whatever you know or Taiwanese American so like what you'd like to do is like from all the different things you have in the person you'd like to choose like five areas of their life that like do not for many other people intersect and you'd like to basically be like those are five really good characteristics for you to like choose someone from or some organization from to be like the quorum for your uh social recovery because there's just like literally no other way that anyone else at at this thing is going to ever be able to like corrupt or steal it because like they just don't have nexus on more than one of those things that's so interesting i mean you could also

do that with I think people would just be curious to know right it's kind of the legibility point as well where you could I mean you could even you can even make a game out of it what you could do is like you could I mean there's some privacy issues and whatever or security issues but like you could both have that be the recovery thing but you could also be like that's a way to do you know self introductions it like identifies for you like what is the set of things that is like true of you that is like most surprisingly weird and distinguishing you from like everyone else there because like no one else is going to like like you always want to introduce yourself to someone like sound really interesting by being like here's the things about me that like is going to surprise everyone else

that's like simultaneously true about me you know what I mean and uh so it could be like a game and a security protocol it's kind of like sponsored by rap tells you you're on the 0.1% top listeners of like gravitate sweat and this give you like you're in the top 1% of weirdos who likes basketball we big and crash yeah that's cool i feel like you guys could do that please speak um interesting are there any other ideas identity related what I think I was wondering was if like similar to quadratic ving has like a mathematical notation does plurality have a similar mathematical formula

to actually quantify the difference between identities and other things that you could have i mean many uh and if you look at the procial media paper we like talk about like a whole bunch of different ones there's definitely ones that are more inspired by quadratic voting so like the the original quadratic voting was actually a uh for countries so like uh you know Germany has uh 10 times the population of let's say Belgium uh how many more votes should it get and the answer is square root of 10 rather than 10 uh and so you can use that principle um for

this because you can basically say um if uh you know people who are all in a group together vote together well that gets like square root over all of it um eventually though there's like more sophisticated versions of that like my guess is that there's some kind of vector thing so anyways I don't think there's any one answer to that question but there's a bunch of different ways to think about it and to experiment with three but I mean but like honestly neural nets are just basically plurality thing like just think think about what a neural net is like people just

don't think about the neural net as modeling data think about it as modeling people so people are in group different groups with different weights and then those group then they they basically vote in those groups and uh if that makes some collective decision then the group says positive or whatever and then that goes to another thing and again it's like effectively quadratic like because if we don't get things from enough different groups the thing won't fire and beyond that it doesn't do any good so like all neural network is is just like a very

complex set of like quadratic voting style or plural plurality style things this reminds me of another intuition for folks who maybe this could help which was very helpful for me is comment the way you wrote this or talked about on the podcast but imagine if the way that you know politics worked in the US is that things could only be passed if they had bypasses support and that was kind of a necessity or something passing versus you know a nice to have um do you remember how you freed well yeah i mean so the idea is like if you have only people of one party then it needs like 70% support to pass and if you have equal bipartisanship then it needs 50%

um or maybe even less than 50% or something and um if you uh so like that that's that's the idea um and so uh yeah I mean it could even be less than 50% because like imagine you got like all the people of one party and then an equal number of the other party and then the little bit of the other party was like left over then you could actually pass with less than 50% you know what I mean um and so the and then like but of course then like the people who voted on that sort of are kind of becoming a party right and so then in the future you should actually like downweight a

little bit them cooperating with each other again and so then like the incentive becomes whoever is able to like find a point of commonality with the people that they've never been able to work with before is the person who gains the most power that's so cool right any last Yeah we should probably start okay we'll we'll wrap up but any other questions okay so I'm just going to quickly summarize the ideas that we came away with and then um for folks that are sticking around would love to talk about ways that actually make it happen so in terms of actual takeaways that we can potentially implement we talked about antibiopolis talked in city type plus thing with maybe AI integrated maybe get some agents for folks involved who can help them digest what's

happening um there's something called Hannosac that you mentioned yeah that's this like GitHub based uh version of that stuff so you can update the platform but it could be the community rules or something you know yeah yeah exactly so that was my next thing which is GitHub community rules and principles and kind of voting processes for approving them and have a some kind of AI front end to it um I think there's a big design space of transparency which is yet to be explored in general and hopefully we can be a place But we continue that thinking and then there's these ideas around identity so either community recovery or you know make it fun make it a game

let people understand very different sides of them that make them unique by the way one other thing I would suggest is if you do some of these things like obviously one element is like the digital base but it but having like a physical digital interface would be really cool so like I've always thought that you could only do Polus in two dimensions on the website but if you had a physical space with stairs then you could actually do it in three dimensions so like people could go higher up depending on their opinions on things but also to different parts of the room you see what I mean at the very beginning of uh if we had like people stand up versus sit down yeah exactly yeah or sides of the room but I like a six yeah do you even have an auditorium all right

well thank you so much then yeah this is awesome