Season 8. Episode 5: Governance W/ Ethan, Mia & Will

Transcript

Welcome to the Green Pill podcast. This season of Greenpill is all about Ethereum localism. Your hosts are Alex, Max, and Josh of the Ethereal Forest, which is a placebased DAO, which brings localism to the blockchain and the blockchain to localists. Ethereal forests are the creator of a conference which explores how to do that. Gel, the general forum for Ethereum localism, which gives its name to the meme Ethereum localism. They're also the organizers of the local Dow summer and the producers of the Ethereum localism book. They're exploring the big themes of Ethereum localism, how localist coordination works from neighborhoods to bio regions, why it matters, which frameworks localists are using, and how blockchains can horizontally scale their

impact. This season, you'll hear about strategies for bringing local change makers and global developers into deeper collaboration. Why that matters for the future of a free and open internet and how it impacts the shape and function of future network states. We're talking about whether or not blockchain create recreates the extractive and asymmetric systems we know and what must be true to usher in a revolution of global sovereignty and decentralization. To navigate this novel space and complexity of the intersection between technology and localism, you'll hear a different style of podcasts. Your host will be weaving into conversation interviews with experts and practitioners while supplying context into its relation with Ethereum localism by making localism accessible to technologists and

technology accessible to localists. This season serves as a primer you can share with your family and friends to help explain the revolutionary potential you see in blockchain technology and the ways it can impact daily lives in local communities. The next voices you will hear are your hosts, Alex, Max, and Josh. Enjoy this season. I think that what I was saying earlier about if money is not working for us, let's redesign it. I I think the same thing could be said about organizational types or entity types that there's an offtheshelf set of configurations. You can have an LLC or

you can have a 501c3 or you can have an escorp and sometimes those are a great fit for what you want to do and sometimes they very much are not. I guess one other increasingly off-the-shelf option are cooperative forms. So if we're looking at that pallet of options, Dows add a whole other realm to explore there. And I think that there's a lot of instances where maybe a DAO makes a lot more sense than a traditional entity type. And especially when thinking about bio regionalism, you get into situations where a network or a collective is much

more appropriate than a centralized corporation or organization. And so in those instances, I I think that's a a great situation where Dows can come in. I mean, this is already happening, for example, in Wyoming that allow you to legally incorporate a DAO. And one of the things that that's doing is evolving entity law itself. So, it's it's not just trying to get Dows to fit in the existing boxes, it's creating some new forms with new rules. So I would say that there's also an interesting interesting dynamic there where local Dows can have the ability to start

shifting societal rules on how can people engage with one another and and share resources across place. This is the fifth episode in a series covering Ethereum localism, where we explore the ins and outs of localism, how it's practiced, why it matters, and the role that technology can play in creating a more local and grounded future. We're your hosts. I'm Alex. I'm Max. And I'm Josh. And we'll discuss why we believe the future of a free and open internet depends on a localist first approach.

The network state must be built bottom up if we don't want web 3 to end up like the walled gardens of the internet as we know it. Last episode we talked with Ethan Buckman, Julio Lonadis, and Alana Kanei about economics. How we understand and interact with the flow of resources around us and not just money, but the relationships, agreements, and cycles that hold our communities together and build real wealth. This episode we're continuing our deeper dive into Ethereum localism and turning to the other side of the coin. We're talking about governance. Governance is the Whoa, whoa, whoa. Governance? I thought we were supposed to be ungovernable. Well, only if you feel like the governance systems don't represent you. I wanted to

highlight in this episode that we can make new, more democratic and just systems of decision-m ones we actually want and need for the challenges we're facing today. Okay. Yeah. Well, I don't feel that represented in most of the decision-m happening in our society right now. And when I talk to people across the political spectrum, it seems like nobody is. All the time I hear people talking about not having enough say in their collective decision-m systems like the government. That isn't surprising to me considering how we've set up these systems. They're honestly a lot better than what we've had in recent centuries, but we still have some big strides to take. I mean, people have the governance that they deserve. That doesn't sit right with me. We've had pretty much every guest so far this

season talk in some way about how inequitable different aspects of our society are and how we need to decentralize power. Most people in the world don't have much say at all in their decision-making systems that govern their lives. And it feels like it's been this way for a while. For sure, I'm saying that we can and should redesign our governance systems. We're literally talking about how to do that this episode. And our two main guests, Ethan and Mia, do an amazing job at breaking down governance from two important perspectives. in our organizational and work lives and in our neighborhoods and cities. Okay. Okay.

Well, last episode we heard from Ethan Buckman on economics and you can check out his full intro there. He's also great on governance because he's been thinking deeply for a while about how humans make decisions, work together, and allocate resources. He co-founded Cosmos and is part of a worker cooperative that's developing it. We also interviewed Mia Wther Tamaki, an urbanist working at the intersection of open spaces, open access, and the open web. But before we jump in with our guests, we need to do some context setting on what we mean by governance. In the broadest sense, it's a shared pattern language of protocols for identifying mutually optimum compromise.

It's the control surface of our resource environment. Okay, that's great. But in plain English, it's humans just trying to make decisions to work together and distribute resources. We see and participate in governance everywhere and every day. We govern ourselves as individuals, regulating our time and emotions. We govern our interpersonal relationships with families and friends and colleagues. We govern the resources within groups like businesses, nonprofits, co-ops, our clubs. We collectively administer and maintain public goods through state municipal governance. And we even govern the ideological realm, participating in an education, discussion, and disscent.

Right? Humans have been participating in governance since the very beginning. It's something inherent to our being and survival. It's everything from voting in national elections and how we structure our organizations to deciding what we get for dinner and how to split the bill. It's about managing shared expectations and maintaining accountability. It's about the promises we make which change the way we think and relate to ourselves and others. Both in terms of the governance structures influencing our behavior by holding ourselves and others accountable and in terms of participatory decision-making processes which produce internal and group reconciliation around desired future outcomes. And while governance occurs at many scales and should be contextual to each of them, the process of decision-m has several key steps that

are always present, right? like deciding which signals to collect, which essentially means deciding who gets a voice in the process. Exactly. Then there's collecting those signals, often through some form of voting or consensus building, followed by analyzing the signals through whatever vote processing method you've chosen, and then executing on the outcome in a way that's transparent. And don't forget the reflection phase where we look back at both the outcomes and the process itself to learn and improve. I think that's what's so interesting about governance. These patterns repeat whether we're talking about a family making vacation plans or a nation setting policy. But scale is important. In most of our episodes this season, we've talked about the principle of subsidiarity. That decisions should be made at the most

local level possible by the people most directly affected and where the values and risks of those decisions occur. So we should put most effort into governing the things immediately before us where we have the highest effort toreward ratio. Yeah. And when we think about governing what's closest to us, it's interesting how that principle is evolving as our digital lives become more and more important. That's right. The spaces we need to govern are changing and so are our tools for governance. Specifically, what happens when you take these governance processes, identifying signals, collecting votes, analyzing results, and executing decisions, and then building them directly into computer code. So that takes us to Dows, which you've heard us mention a bunch already this

season and we'll hear discussed at length today. So we probably owe an explanation. Definitely. So Dows are basically digital collectives or at least the software we use to make them. They could be cooperatives, clubs, corporations, whatever. It's just the structure and logic of an organization published to a blockchain where operations are mediated and automated by smart contracts. Uh-oh. What? That's another word we've mentioned but haven't explained. Oh, right. Right. Okay. Well, just briefly, a smart contract is just some if then logic published to chain.

Like if Josh completes this task, then distribute to him the previously agreed upon funds from the treasury. Any arbitrary logic can be modeled in a smart contract. So DAO DAO stands for decentralized autonomous organization, which says more about what they're capable of offering than what anyone DAO does. Pretty much the digital nature means contributions to an organization or project could be done by anyone anywhere in the world. Or it could be more restrictive. The upper end is uncapped. And that's the decentralized part of DAO. The autonomous part originally referred to smart contracts ability to automate operations. And while that's still true, many point to how the decentralized part enables

participants to be autonomous in how, where, and when they choose to contribute. And as before, the automation or autonomy part is fully open-ended. You could design a Dow that is fully automated or entirely open to contributions or do just the opposite. And so the O in Dows organization is pretty straightforward. As mentioned, they're very flexible in their structure and operations. So it could be made to resemble any type of organization, even types that we haven't even thought of yet. And that's the basics. And from there, you can program your DAO to reflect whatever criteria you want in regards to defining membership, roles, decision-m, voting, all the things.

They're super flexible and open-ended. It's basically just project management software that can be made to work with projects of just about any form. They're trying to solve the age-old question. How do we coordinate effectively as a group while preserving individual agency? But we'll leave it there for now and come back to this shortly. And now our discussion with Ethan Buckman. So Ethan, the company you're CEO of, Informal Systems, is a worker cooperative. I'm curious to get your thoughts on that decision. And maybe you can also speak to some of the trade-offs around workplace well-being and the incentive systems between cooperatives and other models. Yeah, I'm happy happy to talk about the co-op thing. I've um you know, I've oscillated on this point a little bit. I do think I do think co-ops are really important and and

missing. But anyway, so so people tend to think about consumer co-ops and uh and and consumer co-ops do have, you know, certain certain benefits and there, you know, there are even consumer co-op banks which are called credit unions and, you know, people tend to love their credit unions much more than they than they like their their banks. Um even though, you know, the technology might be a little bit behind or whatever, but but you're you're an owner in the thing, right? And and you have, you know, kind of direct stake that it that represents you as an individual rather than just like a capital holder, right? as as like a shareholder. But there's another kind of co-op that is much less prominent, which is the worker co-op, which is where the employees themselves have that have that kind of direct stake. You know, the worker the

cooperative movement actually started with with worker co-ops with a guy named Robert Owen in the late 18th century um who like you know built an extremely successful worker co-op based uh like industrial production facility. you know, the industrial revolution is happening and people were like astounded by how well his operation was was running and stuff. And maybe one way to put this as sort of a cautionary tale is he his worker co-op went great, but then he got the grand idea to like go start a utopian commune and that did not go great, right? And so I have a lot of interest and respect for Robert Owen as for kind of kicking this thing off and for being a successful industrial let's call it you know capitalist but but one

who really took care of his workers which are you know the base of any any kind of production you still need you still need people to do stuff. Now what's interesting is that Markx killed the worker co-op movement. Markx dis you know dismissed all the socialists that came before him as utopian socialist. Right? Markx was the great scientific socialist that that really had a rigorous theory of how everything was going to work. And anything short of like a proletarian revolution was was silly and had no basis in in reality. Of course, it's the opposite, right? Like the the utopian re the proletarian revolution is the utopian thing that has just led to like mass genocide and and you know, maybe more death than anything else. And it's the it's the the what he called the utopian socialists who actually may have been on to something.

You know, those are the guys like like Robert Owen and and and others around that time, you know, early French socialists and so on, who were more thinking about like, you know, anarco socialism, right? Who weren't all about, oh, we need some big daddy state to like take care of everything and to own all the needs of production. And it was more like no, the humans are capable of like self-organizing and and and you know, representing themselves in their workplace and and so it's a much more empowering approach and and fully compatible with what you might call capitalism or what certain people might might call capitalism, which is just, you know, more of a private ownership over over the means of production with the idea that that the worker should have direct stake in their in their enterprises, right? And nowadays, no one can argue with that. I mean any startup

is issuing equity to its employees, right? And and issuing equity to employees is is very common and is, you know, table stakes for any any kind of startup and has sort of been uh, you know, standardized in in that kind of way. But there's still a very significant gap typically between what the employees are granted and what say the founders and the and the investors get. And there's there is justification for that for that gap. But there are also problems with it. And you know, startups are very like heavy risk-taking. They tend to be unprofitable for years. They require the founders to, you know, pour every inch of their, you know, existence into them for for years at a time. And so it makes sense that they should have outsized

returns to to compensate and and incentivize them for that. But not every business needs to be like that. Not every business should be some crazy, you know, thousandx, you know, risk return kind of thing. There are all kinds of businesses that are just, you know, required for the basic services and and and to keep kind of society alive and do things that are just like critical critical services and and infrastructure and and and even goods and and and so on. And so, you know, it seems to me that there's there's sort of a missing kind of substructure in the capitalist architecture, we could say, which which are these kinds of, let's say, service businesses that are more directly owned by their employees. And what we do see is that in succession planning like when you know a familyrun business or

something the proprietor is is trying to move on and you know the kids don't want to take over or something like that one of the most successful things they can do is sell the business to the employees and have the employees collectively take ownership of of the business and it still has a CEO you know it still needs to have a CEO and it still need might be run in a hierarchical fashion but the employees get this more direct representation and and and ownership you know I All the research shows that that that leads to allow much higher uh chances of success when you have that kind of succession, right? And and typically the cooperatives tend to have, you know, higher incidence of of employee happiness and less turnover and stuff like that, right? So the worker co-op, it doesn't work for everything, right? And so you can't just like run

around with a stick and say everyone should be a worker co-op. But I do think the worker cooperative is is an important model. And Markx, I think, has done arguably, and this is kind of a, you know, a funny thing to say, he's arguably done more damage to the progressive cause than than anyone else. And has set back the effort to, you know, empower individuals, you know, by, let's say, 150 years because now we have to like resurrect the ideas that came before him and like, you know, cut work through all the sludge and the mess that he's created. both in terms of his his theories which are you know many of which are just wrong and uh and in terms of his politics which is just like outright outright genocidal. I mean I like to say about Markx he did he did sociology, economics and politics. The

sociology was actually okay. The economics was just wrong and it's useful from a pedagogical perspective to like understand why it's wrong and then the politics is just outright genocidal, right? So so so that's his track record. It's not very good but but more importantly I mean there are important progressive causes. You don't have to you don't have to be like a you know hardcore socialist or something to like care about people having good working conditions and being you know well taken care of and being able to afford their lives and you know be satisfied with their work. I mean, none of that, you know, none of that should be uh contentious to just any empathetic person. And arguably, Mark's made all of that harder because of the like maybe reactionary turn against him, right? And so I think worker cooperatives are uh

you know, somewhat of an antidote to that and are are missing as like a critical minimal structure and I would love to see more of them. And you know, I was learning about all this stuff and studying kind of political economy and and and history when we started informal. I was like, you know, let's, you know, I really wanted to have a worker cooperative because I wanted to build a core sustainable service business. I wanted to build something that the foundation wasn't a high-risk activity. The foundation was like we know we can do highquality, you know, engineering work and and security services, right? And so we should we can build a worker cooperative around that where you know we we have a little bit more even distribution of of the risk and reward of that of that enterprise and use that as a jumping off point for

spinning out more risky more quote unquote capitalistic enterprises right and startups. And so I sort of kind of conceived of a an an idealized model of like worker co-op services businesses that spin out you know more Silicon Valley style startups you know that start with some ownership by by that kind of you know parent incubator service business incubator. Um that also helps you know distribute risk and risk and reward but the individual startups can still be you know very much um you know inequal in the distribution of of uh of of equity and and so on. So, so the journey, you know, informal journey has been interesting in that regard. The thing is like some worker co-ops, they really lean into the like socialist

element of the thing and they're like, "We're going to make every decision as a group and you know, everything's by consensus and and blah blah blah." I mean, that's all if you're small enough, I guess you can make that work. If you're tight enough, whatever. Like, we're not I'm not interested in any of that. There's there's absolutely a hierarchy at form when I'm at the top of it. I'm the CEO. Um, and that's been that's been kind of clear from from the beginning. Maybe sometimes I'm I'm less effective or or or whatever. But you know, we understand the hierarchy at businesses in terms of the graph of promises that people make. Again, I'm talking about graphs of, you know, graph theory of of promises. What is a CEO? The CEO is the person who makes the longest term and the broadest scope promises to everyone else in the

organization. That's what puts them at the top of the hierarchy. That's what it means to be at the top of the hierarchy. The broadest scope, longest term promises, right? And everyone's making, you know, what it means to work together is to make promises of different scope and different time horizon. And some people are only comfortable making smaller scope promises and and and so on. And so, you know, just because you're structured as a cooperative, it doesn't mean there can't be someone who makes a broader pro a broader scope and longer time horizon promise than everyone else. And it so it doesn't mean that there there can't be hierarchy. So, in terms of the informal cooperative, it doesn't matter day-to-day. It doesn't come up dayto-day. It's not like all the decisions go I mean informal is like 50 people now. So, you know, it'd be ridiculous if we had to have, you know,

consensus among 50 people to do anything. But everyone at the company knows that they in important matters in the you know overall organization of the company they each have one vote. Of course at informal you only get the vote after you've been with us for 9 months. That's the gestation period of a human being. So that's how long it takes to get uh to get a vote at at informal systems. Um and the only time they exercise that vote or have to date is at the annual members meeting where you know we vote on the board of directors or or whatever. We we it hasn't really been put to the test, but it's there as sort of like a safe fall back to know that if I go crazy like certain other founders have gone uh uh before me that the employees have some recourse, right?

They can throw me out and you know I do uh I do I do live with that fact and and so maybe that you know changes the culture and we have a a much more transparent culture. We share our finances with the employees and and and stuff like that and employees can advocate for change and but you can do all those things whether you're a co-op or not. you don't have to be a cooperative to to be a internally transparent company and and you know for employees voices to be heard and so on but but what it does do is it like institutionalizes that that representation and again you know I think a lot you know going back to the kind of bioysics I think representing the things that that drive you is very important for sustainable systems right in order to be a sustainable system you

have to act you have to represent the stakeholders in the state machine of your system right and the problem with modern corporations is the only stakeholder that they'd really represent in the like core structure of the state machine is the shareholder. And while there are, you know, many arguments and many potential benefits from kind of shareholder-driven corporate structures, I don't think they're the only thing that society should be organized around. They're kind of incomplete. They're important. They're critical. I wouldn't never get rid of that. You know, I think there's so much that couldn't happen without them. But uh I I think they're incomplete in terms of there are many other parts of the economy that you know need to be driven by more than just you know returns to shareholders and and and so on. Could you speak to the relationship between Dallas and co-ops?

You know it's interesting everyone in crypto talks at big Gabe about oh decentralization and you know empowering people and whatever and you know how many worker co-ops are there on among crypto projects? I mean there there's a couple there's informal there's Hifa that's another actually Toronto based co-op that's worked in Cosmos for a few years now been a great great partner of ours. Um but you know there's not that many. So, I'd love to see more of them, but I'd also caution that they're not for everything. Um, often people want to start a project. Having additional politics or like consensus required just gets in the way, right? And I totally appreciate that. And so, it's not always right to uh, you know, if you're doing some high-risisk thing where you need to like really incentivize and make sure that, you know, because the problem is

you need a crazy person to be able to pursue a crazy idea for an extended period of time. you know, if you have too many checks and balances on that, you're just never going to get breakout success, right? And so, you need a way to balance that. Now, you don't need everything to be structured like that because not everything needs to be about, you know, breakout new ideas. There's many parts of society that just need to be about maintenance and good quality work, right? And that's not necessarily a high-risisk reward kind of endeavor. And so, those sorts of things ought to be more, you know, cooperatively structured, which again doesn't it doesn't have to mean socialist or communist, right? It it just means that there's representation, right? It's more say democratic in in in ownership, but you could still have, you

know, centralized decision-making. There's just more accountability to it. So, I'm curious for your take on this. When reading the cycles white paper, I noticed that Dows weren't mentioned at all. Is there a need for governance in a system like cycles? And if so, how would that be approached? Yeah, I think Dows kind of kind of beca I've been sick of them for a long time. And I think they kind of became an excuse to like do whatever and to not be clear about the promises you're making. You know, what matters about organizations are the promises that we make to each other. What are you what are you going to do and when are you going to do it by and how are you going to do it, right? And with who will you do it and and and and things like that. And what I saw in kind

of the DAO discourse is, you know, everyone was all excited to, you know, be decentralized and work together and whatever, but then then it falls apart. Anytime someone's like, "Oh, we need a leader." It's like, "Oh, we're a Dow. We don't need a leader." I mean, okay, what promises are you people making? Who are you making them to and what are you making them about? It's all leadership is. I kind of got sort of discouraged by all that discourse. It's like, there's something missing here as sort of an excuse to just be amorphous. You can do a lot with amorphous organizations. I mean, you don't you don't need to be there's many open source projects that are just like, you know, it's like the the cathedral in the bizarre kind of thing, right? You can just have a bazaar of people kind of working on things.

Something magical comes out of that. It's kind of incredible. I mean that's uh certainly that that's possible but with the DAO kind of discourse and culture and so much of it was like financialized as well it just didn't feel like it was moving and then everyone got obsessed with tooling. It's like, "Oh, if only we had better governance tooling, then we'd be able to coordinate." Like, no. The problem isn't the tooling, though. The problem is language. The problem is culture, right? And and and people like to get hyperfixated on like governance mechanisms and all that stuff. And I don't think I mean it matters to some extent, but I don't think it matters nearly as much as the language and and the culture around it.

And and often that stuff means much more than than the governance mechanisms. And and you know, you also see this like disdain for for kind of leadership or you know, for CEOs that that kind of roles. Oh, we don't need CEOs. We're a DA. But again, like that's not true. You need people that are making promises for the organization to move forward otherwise nothing happens. I mean, everyone sees the like, you know, the the tragedy of of things just falling because no one wants to pick it up because no one is making promises about what they're actually responsible for, right? And so seeing all that when we started informal we were very you know aware of of that kind of stuff and and the discourse and and wanted to do something a little bit different and so we were like you know explicitly not talking about being a DAO and I don't

think I've used the term DAO in a long time uh unless someone asked me about Dows uh which happens frequently enough I guess I go on some spiel about you know promises and organizations and and and so on. So I think yeah what what really matters are is is the language and you know informal kind of um developed or we're taught we're were taught a language for talking about and making and managing promises right and we still use that to to some extent and it helps cut through some of the challenges with accountability in in organizations. you know, it gives you like handles to talk about accountability and and and things and, you know, people have the competence to achieve the promises they're making and to be able to ask that question without

it being offensive or, you know, to to review how things are going and and to be able to, you know, to think about every meeting. Every time you get on a meeting, you're making a promise about something happening out of the meeting. I mean, we're not just having a meeting for kicks. I mean, maybe we are, but usually you're trying to get something done. So, what are you trying to get done? And then at the end of the meeting, like, you can ask about it. Was it a good meeting? Like, did you get value out of the meeting? And and sometimes the answer is no. And then if you if you like have a framework and like a language for talking about that then it's not offensive when you're like hey I didn't really get any value out of this meeting like can we talk about what

went wrong or can we not have meetings like this because you know why are we wasting our time here right and that's been useful and if if things are small and and they're just working and you know you know a ton of cooks in the kitchen or whatever like you don't necessarily need that. It just just kind of works and you vibe and and and and you can you can move on stuff. But having that language has kind of helped a bit to uh to work through challenges and and accountability and stuff in in more you know remote and decentralized um decentralized org. So yeah there's no mention of Dows in the cycles paper because I don't think the term is that useful and especially since you know the DAO of the famous DAO of 2016 or whatever that precipitated the ETH classic fork. um you know I've been a

bit dismayed about you know what people are trying to do with with Dows but governance is important and does play a role in in cycles and I think is mentioned in there that there are parameters of the system that need to be governed and the reason for that is that the results of the graph algorithm have distributional consequences by which I mean some people might benefit more than others and those benefits are somewhat random. Because when you the optimization algorithm that or the optimization problem that cycles defines does not have a single unique solution.

There are potentially many solutions and when you pick among those solutions they all have the same global benefit or you know welfare or utility or whatever you want to call the the the optimum that you're measuring but they might benefit different people. And so how you pick between the different solutions or or how you even define the optimization criteria in the first place are things that are somewhat open for governance. And and so whenever you know you have these actual like political economic parameters, you know, there needs to be some way to govern that or to say and this is a form of governance to say that no, we're going to lock them in and they're just going to be fixed. That's a particular, you know, that's a particular thing you can do. And of course, you know, like Bitcoin's

inflation model or or whatever. Okay. Now, in my view, that's probably going to have to change or or, you know, Bitcoin is not going to be able to afford to pay for its security, but that's a that's a different uh that's a different discussion. All right, Joshy, uh what are your thoughts on this? Yeah, a couple things come to mind for me. First, the discussion and history of co-ops feels super similar to what Dows are iterating on today. I also thought that Ethan's critique of Bitcoin was pretty compelling. Like the decision to have fixed economic parameters or to avoid having to make governance decisions being a form of governance is pretty interesting. Okay. Yeah. I'd like to drill into each of those. Yeah. So Dows can be anything you want.

Plutoaucratic, democratic, or something else completely. They can be designed with any voting logic. You want one person, one vote, you can do that. You want quadratic voting where people with less tokens have more say, that's possible. You want a non-tokenized governance where voting isn't based on money or stake at all, but on shared commitments or rotating stewardship? Yep. Some Dows are doing that, too. Yeah. It's like Dows are helping us reimagine the rules of coordination, just like co-ops did in the 1800s, but now in a digital native programmable form. And this is a sandbox where people can build the governance that they want rather than just inheriting the structures that they were given. It's interesting because the co-op model is one of the oldest coordination technologies we've got. People have been pooling resources, sharing surplus, and

governing democratically for centuries. And Dows are not a replacement for co-ops. They're an evolution. They let us from mix cooperative principles into scalable digital infrastructures. And we're just at the beginning of exploring this pluralistic governance design space. Some communities will want strong egalitarianism. Others will have value contribution-based hierarchy. Some will operate like federated councils and others with swarm intelligence. Dows are not one thing. They're a canvas for collective imagination where governance is not a static structure, but a living evolving pattern that communities compose together in response to their needs. I really think that more localist organizers should try out using a DAO.

Even just playing around with the tools helps break open some of the ways that we understand building governance structures in our organizations. And I like how Ethan reiterates the importance of the organizational form to follow its function or its design should be shaped by its intended purpose. Like co-ops are great and Dows can be that, but co-ops aren't ideal for everything. And sometimes you might need more hierarchy and fortunately Dows can do that as well. Okay, cool. So the second part, fixed parameters being a governance decision. The Bitcoiners thought that they were minimizing governance, but what they actually did was just create a governance nightmare. Oh, like the Bitcoin block wars. Hard forks resulting in new chains, difficulties in upgrading. Or I guess you could say that

the decision to not have governance processes is a governance decision itself. Yeah. And the usual result of that is referred to as the tyranny of structurelessness, which basically describes how supposedly leaderless or non- hierarchical groups inevitably develop informal power structures that can be more problematic than the formal ones because they operate without accountability and transparency, which Ethan also described as a problem with many Dows today. But it doesn't necessarily mean that all of these organizations will fail. It's just that if the power dynamics and governance systems are not directly stated and made clear, you're going to create more problems than you thought you were initially avoiding. Right? It's about trade-offs. More structure and clarity can mean less governance labor overall,

while less structure often means more deliberation and confusion. But one is not necessarily better than the other. Again, it depends on goals. Clear governance structures leading to predictable outcomes sounds like a win-win. Unless spontaneity and creativity are needed for quick pivots in say an environment that's rapidly changing. That's what we call metastability and it has its benefits too. All right, those are my two main takeaways. What about you Max? What interested you about Ethan's comments? Yeah, I was intrigued by Ethan's story about how co-ops had provided this opportunity for a gradual process towards improvements in worker welfare and other such things, but was ultimately blown up or derailed by other social movements which claimed to advocate for the same but couldn't

deliver. Right? And in episode 3, we mentioned this term protopia. Unlike Utopia's impossible perfection or Dystopia's hopeless decline, Protopia embraces the complexity of positive change through ongoing refinement, acknowledging both human limitations and our capacity for creating measurable improvements to society over time. It goes back to not letting perfection becoming the enemy of the good. But I also think it's good to point out it probably wasn't Marks alone that killed the co-op movement. Like modern corporations were becoming a thing at the time and federated cooperatives just couldn't compete with the efficiency of centralized systems. And thinking about how decentralized technology can mediate and improve the efficiency of federated systems relative to the centralized ones

makes discussions around co-ops feel important to me. They fit into this protopian concept. Right. Okay. I also really connected with this concept of governance as a shared language around how we make promises and decisions and that organizations are basically these promise graphs mediated by the mechanisms we use to make and keep those promises. Yeah. And when you look at an organization's governance as just the guardrails for a group of people making decisions together and being accountable to each other, it helps you see that governance isn't just some abstract bureaucratic system imposed from above. It's really just the practical scaffolding that enables coordinated action. And while that takes work and work sucks, it's the kind of work that makes things suck a little bit less down the line. Wow, so eloquent. Anyway, our

next guest is Mia Winthther Tamaki, a proud urbanist based in New York City with an academic background in urban planning. She researches spatial justice and civic infrastructure and has jumped into the web 3 ecosystem, seeing the decentralized digital infrastructure as another important piece for building communitydriven urbanism and civic systems for lasting liberatory public spaces. And without further ado, here's Alex with the story. We've been grounding all these conversations asking folks like where do you find yourself and how does that inform your work? Yeah, I mean place and and where I'm located I think has informed everything that I do and stand for in a way. The reason why I got into urban planning in the first place was I think growing up

in a suburb and living in such a car ccentric place and until I had the experience to live in a vibrant urban place and have access to really wellresourced public transit and walkable green spaces and even little things like bodeas I think kind of reframed a lot of things for me cuz I grew up in a suburban California, you know, where your right of passage uh into adulthood is when you get your driver's license, you know, my my family members when I was like a teenager, they're like worried for me because they thought I was becoming like a vapid teenage girl because all I wanted to do was stop and

go to the mall. And then I realized only more recently in a way that like radicalized me. I was like, okay, I literally had nowhere else to go with my friends. I didn't have any other gathering areas other than parking lots and shopping malls. And that's actually a tragedy. And and I think being able to leave that and find that there's so many wonderful cultural spaces and pockets that happen in cities like Berlin and New York. Berlin was the first city that I lived in outside of or yeah since California and and that was like wow your built environment makes such an impact on your day-to-day and encounters you have and I think that's that's what just made me so interested in thinking

about infrastructure and from there I just became an infrastructure girly all I wanted to do was learn about how uh different types of infrastructure intersect whether it's digital infrastructure broadband equity trains to social infrastructure. And so now I'm in New York, a wonderful place to be thinking about all of these things. I went to grad school at Colombia thinking about urban planning and just got really interested in yeah things like wow you can't even access a bank account if you don't have internet, you can't apply for a job, etc. So just started thinking about this digital component. I think also the past year with I think ever since graduating uh

have become a lot more involved in local activist networks and just sort of on the ground things and have felt so much community in the hyper local and um have really kind of felt that oh wow there's truly nothing more important than this and it feels so good to build community and be able to take a bus and see my best friend. And so I feel like New York City is kind of the first place that I've have kind of cultivated a home on my own. And I'm so grateful to things like buses and trains and Prospect Park for enabling that to happen and bodega guy and the mailman who knows my name

and the local blackowned flower shop, you know, two doors down from me. It's like these things are so important that I I never had access to as a kid because I had my mom my mom had to drive me 15 minutes to to go to like the strip mall, you know? So, it's it's kind of that that pipeline that got me here and I think a lot of people have that experience. So, yeah, I'm I'm really happy to be thinking about and learning all these things in the context of New York. I'm super curious to hear your thinking on how transposable um are of these ways of building or how specific is it to a place itself defining self-defining and describing the features that are possible for for human life to move through. I think that's a

great question and I also I think about that a lot. I think there are lots of things that aren't transposable because they are so New York City or like so so place specific. That's something I think about like, oh, like because I'm half Japanese, I have Japanese citizenship as well. And I think about potentially wanting to spend some time with family, maybe longer periods of time, and I start to think about planning things and I realize how New York City centric my urban planning knowledge is, but then you realize there are lots of similarities and lots of values that sort of carry over. And I think that's

what drew me drew me to thinking about networks and you know what components of infrastructure what sorts of like nodes are thinking like what transit hubs do we see centralized in one area what emerges from around that I feel like everything always comes back to um Alexander um what's his Christopher Alexander he wrote an incredible book called like pattern language architects and a lot of people in the built enir ment consistently refer to this book. But he's saying that um just simply by being humans who innately behave in a certain way like you know like thinking about how we congregate in public space and what sorts of things we need and how

social interactions happen simply by building around those behaviors and those natural inclinations and tendencies and needs then we can build a really wonderful well functioning place. But a lot of times the cities are planned from the top down. The way New York City is built is crazy because it's the grid structure that goes from, you know, it's completely all these right angles going from the bottom to the top of of Manhattan. That was because the planners wanted it to be built in the fastest way possible in a very costefficient way. Whereas if you think of a lot of older cities, cities in Europe for example, they sort of have more of this organic network structure

um where you see like areas of congregation and then you see little spidering out pathways and roads that follow organically the the the pattern language of human behavior. And um so I think those things are transposable, but when you get more into the nitty-gritty and start to think think about like permitting and and zoning like zoning in Tokyo and New York is is different and that's why the city looks so different like for example in New York in Tokyo it there are many more categories of zones that are made possible. So that's why you see so much more possibilities within mixeduse developments whereas in New York and in the US it's much stricter and it's much harder to make

flexible zoning. Um I think that is a little bit less transposable and takes some more location specific expertise and I think that's the beauty of it too. That's why you bring in the locals and you bring in the voices of people who have been working in that hyper local place for gener for for decades you know. So yeah, it's definitely a combination of the two. I'm curious to hear like what technologies are you really excited about adding to our ability to live with each other in community and maybe stay aware of one another outside of our direct community?

What technologies are you fearful of or where do you think maybe like we're using a technical solution where an old-fashioned humanto human one might be a better fit? I guess there's two sort of components to this for me. One is just like better sense making that would lead to things like better like flexible permitting. Dark matter labs sort of like what their theory and mission is to is like it's the they call it the boring revolution. So they're very much you know we don't need these super flashy technological advances. We just we sort of need innovation in places like bureaucracy and permitting like sort

something that's brought me to a lot of this work is um something I talked about in the local DA presentation I I did with you guys where I was working with Bla1 Backer. He's he's worked in business improvement district world in New York City for a long long time. Um it's like a public private entity essentially that governs public space in certain neighborhoods and that's how a lot of city street beautifification operates and things like sanitation and a lot of the more supplemental things that the city doesn't take care of is all managed by bids. The thing is it's a complete headache. It's such a mess in terms of like who makes decisions, how these efforts are funded,

uh the relationship between DOT, Department of Transportation, Department of City Planning, people who run the bids, the people who actually live there, property owners, and then like third party organizations and um nonprofits and like placemaking type nonprofits, and then horicultural society. there's just so many orgs involved that it's really hard to make informed decisions and to have deeply participatory decisions. And then there's also it's really hard to flexibly to allow for certain things to happen. So I think in New York City there's really a lack of complexity and like sort of sense making in terms of

like infrastructure like this that citizens can access. Why isn't there a better way for citizens to understand what they have access to, what parts of public space they can make decisions about and like what they can come together and do. All of that information is so far removed from citizens. And it's also really hard for people who are actually getting paid to make public space decisions to do like place governors have a really hard time accessing this information and knowing what they're permitted to do. So, I think if there were a way that made this information uh much easier to access and made the actual permitting process like

easier and more open and more flexible, that would be something that I know place makers and place governors really really need in this city. People who are just trying to like make their streets more livable are like fighting every single day, wasting precious time fighting with the city to get funds to do really really really simple things that other cities have done long time a long time ago. So there is that like more creative component like how can we flex our infrastructure to adapt more creatively and and bring more joy into our spaces. Also thinking about the climate crisis and why we need to be more flexible, but also just simply in

terms of place governance like we just need more access to information and and like that sense making about our public space to make better informed decisions and not have them take months and years to do. It should be quick and it should be nimble. And um I I know people whether it's in bids, whether it's they're working for the city, whether or if it's just regular citizens, they're they're thirsty for this type of access and um decision-m power. So I know there's a huge need there. I've been really interested in sort of like the cooperative platform movement. How can we use the cooperative model and use sort of like platform thinking and

infrastructure to give people more access and ownership to things like in a city where everything is so privatized, it's so stifling. So, it's like, how can we take cues from places like the Park Slope Food Co-op, which I used to be a member of, um, where you have to work three hours every six weeks, like you have to sort of be an active participant in this community in order to reap the benefits. I think we're so used to just having everything be really easy and just sort of be able to order from Amazon next day delivery that like we forget that it's innate in human civilization to like be part of something and contribute labor and not necessarily like get money back but like get value back in the form of maybe

really fresh fruits and vegetables that were grown up state. Like that is something that's so valuable to us. But in a capitalist system, we become so numb to like like if I'm not getting paid for that hour of labor, like I don't want to waste my time sort of thinking. And I understand like I get it. New York is expensive and our time is is so precious. But um just getting more comfortable with alternative forms of giving back to your community and like participating in hyper local things is so valuable. So, um, that's something I want to learn more about and like tie into this discourse, especially when it comes to like placebased things because there's lots of models in like taxis and sort of like ride share co-ops. I'm

interested in thinking about like that and applying that to maybe sort of the place governance aspect with those misimprovement districts. I'm wondering if you can expand on this issue of what sounds like too much red tape at the city level. is the solution to that deregulation or maybe how do you think about moving power from the centralized level to folks who are more local or at least closer to where the problems and solutions lie? Yeah, that's a great question. I think the answer varies depending on who you ask. For example, the office of the public realm in New York City, they think the answer is to create another public private partnership to be like another party to like mediate everything. But

unfortunately, I don't think that would work because that would sort of just be like another bid, a business improvement district, and create more sort of like orgware complexity that we don't need. My opinion would be again just making it easier to do stuff. I don't think that means deregulating. Maybe it does in the context of flexible permitting, but like I think something like a huge pain point is, for example, if a business improvement district wants to put a simple intervention on like a sidewalk.

I don't know. Imagine like a ramp being connected to something that they're doing to activate a public space. There's like a huge legal component. Like if someone to trip on that and get hurt, the city would try and make the big pay for it. So there's like not a level of risk the city is willing to like take for things like this. And I don't know what the answer is, but the city needs to make it easier for place like the smaller organizations to test things out, to pilot them, to do them, to not have to wait months to get permission from the top to do something and experiment with stuff. Because the reality is like yeah we do know often

like what works and what doesn't but because stuff is so hyper local like it's so neighbor neighborhood dependent like this is maybe sort of talking to the point you hit on earlier about like transposing things like some neighborhoods are different than others and some things will work in some and some won't and you sort of just have to like test it out and pilot them and that's going to be a process of trial and error and the city needs to be able to absorb some of that risk. I I mean it definitely is giving these sort of like smaller groups like business improvement districts more power and and resources to be able to do these public space

activation and interventions without having to pay not only the cost to resource them but for things that could happen like you know for a legal thing that would happen further down the road cuz they just that risk is so heavy that it prevents them from being able to do things like that. So, I don't know if that's an answer to your question. I I don't think I truly know the answer either because there's so many different parts of this problem. Also, like the data thing, too. It's like one business district doesn't know what another business improvement district has done across the city, even even though maybe that bid has made the same mistake.

There's no like way to effectively share information with each other. There's no like portal. There's no sort of like I want there to be something like a a Wikipedia like an online transparent to everyone sort of actively updated thing where like these place governance orgs can share information, share that wisdom and be like, "Hey, I'm an export expert in Harlem. Like this is something that we tried. It did not work. maybe it would work for you all over like something like that um is so valuable but there's nothing like that and so all of this operates in silos um depending on the the neighborhood and I think

that's a huge problem so I think that's that's another problem not just of like the flexible permitting but also like the information sharing and the data and and like that sort of that component in addition to you know maybe the more like bureaucratic part of like the city not giving enough power to the smaller groups. So I think it's a it's a problem that has to be addressed on multiple different components but it's really complex and I think it depends on who you ask. I'm curious about your thoughts on what roles can blockchain tools like Dows, participatory budgeting, quadratic voting play in placemaking and decision-m in the city. Well, so like

something that really excited me was when I was at um it was like a placemakers roundt. I was so excited when this guy, he basically started the um uh the parking day movement, which is this movement around the world where it's like one day where they take parking lots and like transform them into like people will take over a parking spot basically and just hang out and and reclaim this the space in a way. When he was talking, he holds up an image of like an a decentralized network and he was like, "Dows do this. As placemakers, we need to share information with each other and not

centralize so much of the power in the hands of like corporations. It's really devastating how much say private companies have in what happens in public space. not only private companies like commercial companies but private land owners like that's sort of the deep flaw with the business improvement district model is they get their funding from the property owners of that place. So obviously those property owners have a vested interest in their profits over time and so often that goes handinhand with gentrification and displacing people who have been there because it's not profitable to them. So, how do we

take the decision-making power out of their hands? And I think we can the DAO model is really valuable. I don't, you know, I'm still I don't know if a DAO exactly is the answer, but I think there's a lot we can learn from Dows and I I think it would be something that should be piloted or just tested out in a way. I think it would be really interesting if a bid were to try to warm it down. I would love to see that happen in New York City just to kind of put the power back in the hands of uh you know like renters for example because they're the people who walk on the sidewalks every day too but they really don't get a say in like any sorts of like

pedestrian pedestrianizing decisions. Um, another really sad thing about urban planning is that oftentimes the people who come to community board meetings, for example, um, are the people who are most vocal about saving their parking space. And so that's just like the nature of a lot of community meetings, unfortunately. Um, but that's a big problem in urban planning. And I think that was something I was excited to see about the quadratic voting uh, part uh, for participatory budgeting experiment. Participatory budgeting is so wonderful and I'm really excited that it it's to kind of give nuance to how funds are distributed and

to have quadratic voting kind of add I don't know what the word is heaviness to someone's vote and like kind of let someone decide how strongly they feel about something is is so important and and even just thinking about like theoretically how things happen in a often gets so yes no like blanket policy this it's weird because the city is such a you know that's not how life works so I think once people realize they can like add weight to their decision that is something that gives you a huge sense of agency and so I I I think these are still question marks but again like these things have to be tested out

cities are extremely complex places if there's one known thing it's that they're complex places and nothing stays the same. So, I think what's really cool about the Dow model is that it it kind of allows for that flexibility for people to weigh in and and change the rules and the agreements as needed and vote on them together and participate in that like evolving organic way that cities need. That's I think the heart of everything we've been talking about today. It's very inflexible. New York City and the policies are rigid. They take forever. It's very top down and I think that emergent uh sort of like way that cities can you know like the pathways like I was saying that follow

behaviors Dows kind of make space for that and I think if we can bring that into the orware component and like the decision making component about decisions that get made about places there's so much we could do and I I'm excited for for that to happen in the foreseeable future and I hope to contribute to those efforts. So, I think there's a lot we can learn and do. So, Max, what are your takeaways from Mia's interview? Yeah, some interesting parallels here. Like Mia's discussion of the slow boring revolution, iterative improvements in existing processes, right? Like that mirrors Ethan's critique of revolutionaries unintentionally inhibiting the progress worker co-ops were making by slowly evolving or subverting the system from

within. Yeah, small tweaks can profoundly transform outcomes. We can't entirely reinvent the wheel. Reimagining established strategies within fresh frameworks can serve as a bridge towards change. And whether pursuing reform or revolution, you're contributing to the systems evolution by adapting time- tested techniques reflecting the pattern language concept Mia discussed. Yeah. Yeah. The pattern languages discussion is interesting because while we can use it as a lens for constructing the built environment as Mia was, I think it also speaks to the process by which we influence our environment. The governance processes she described either working or failing are themselves patterns in a language we use to coordinate and govern like Ethan's

framing of governance as a language to communicate, avoid issues, and improve processes to strengthen the promise graphs of our organizations. Right? And there's something there too about Mia's mentioning how we should design our built environment to reflect natural organic behaviors and patterns that the structure should be emergent based on its needs. Bottom up and fluid for flexibility instead of top down and rigid for speed and efficiency. Which also reminded me of Ethan's provocation last episode and he mentioned briefly this one that biopysics flows and natural design should be reflected in how we design our economic systems. But also, as Ethan points out, sometimes you need speed and efficiency and it's not wrong to design structure to match its function. Yeah, it's like how do we

develop a pattern language of governance where we can align the right approach to the specific task at hand as will Zal whose voice you heard in episodes 2 and four said at the start of this one, we have some out of the box configurations for organizations, but Dows give us the flexibility to meld entity types or create whole new ones. And as Mia said, we can experiment with thousands to find ways to draw down power to improve our workspaces and governance of things that are close to us. Right? Governance is what we make of it. And if we don't like the existing systems, we can create new ones. When me and Ethan talk about governance breakdowns, they're actually naming a deeper problem. We haven't built the governance capacity to match the complexity of the systems we're trying to shape. And pretending

otherwise just kicks the can down the road. And to be honest, governance feels like a drag. Meetings, procedures, burnout. But more often, what we label as governance failure is really just the absence of governance altogether, the void where thoughtful coordination should have been. And good governance doesn't mean abandoning power. It means drawing it down to where the impact is felt. It's not just about decentralizing. It's about nesting, creating layers of action and accountability that align with reality. Zoning decisions don't just affect your street. They ripple through the whole city. So subsidiarity is hard, but it's the work. It asks who actually bears the risk, who benefits, and who decides. We

also need better permissioning, clearer signals about who gets to speak, how people enter, and how they learn the ropes. Open systems don't mean chaos. They mean thoughtful design. And crypto gives us a wide pallet of membership models, but we still need to draw boundaries. Clarity is not exclusion. It's an invitation to meaningful participation. And then accountability. Not just accountability as punishment, but as shared language and story. Do people know where decisions are made? Can they understand them? Can they trust them? We need transparency, yes, but also clarity. And we also need resolution, not escalation. Systems where conflict isn't buried until it explodes or dealt with through heavy-handed moderation, but resolved

early, often, and fairly. That's what graduated sanctions look like. Scalable consequences and proportional responses. Let's be clear, centralized systems can be efficient, but they're brittle and prone to capture. When we decentralize, we don't do it because it's trendy. We do it because it builds resilience. We do it because it aligns power with impact. And here's the kicker. Governance doesn't stop happening just because we stop designing it. If we don't choose how power flows, it still flows just through opaque unaccountable channels. Governance minimization, the idea that we can do less governance is a bit of a misnomer. What we need is governance intentionality. Designing systems that are clear, legible, nested,

flexible, fit to purpose. That's how we get to polyentricity. That's how we honor autonomy while still coordinating at scale. And as Ethan alluded to, governance isn't just structure. It's the culture. It incentivizes us, changes us, and teaches us. Governance is how we collapse the space of potential possibilities into a shared vision so that our collective goals may be collaboratively advanced. It all depends on how we govern the graphs of promises we make to each other. Okay, zooming out now and looking forward. A lot of our focus in Ethereal Forest has been in thinking about place-based Dows. How Dows rooted in place can play a major part in the

future where communities can self-organize, govern resources, and coordinate action at the local level. By embedding global digital infrastructure into local contexts, these Dows can enhance participatory governance, economic resilience, and transparent decision making tailored to specific geographic needs. And as these networks mature and adoption grows, playbased dows could serve as a foundational unit in a broader cosmolo community that balances autonomy with cooperative coordination. Next episode, we're talking about network states, pop-up cities, and placebased dows. How the future of parallel network societies and

the regenerative transition are being built. We will discuss the roles that each of these intersecting movements are playing in creating the societies of the future. How they complement each other and how they differ. To learn more about informal systems, cooperative structure, cycles, region network, or to get in touch with our guests and follow their work, check the show notes for links. If you would like to learn more, check out athereumism.xyz, which we'll also include a link to in the show notes. If you want to support this work, share this podcast with a friend. It's really one of the best ways to support the movement, which now you know why it's as much a social movement as it is a technological one. And finally, if you'd like to get in touch, follow us on

Twitter at ETHF Forest Dow or find our handles in the show notes. Thanks for tuning in and see you next time where we'll bring it all together. We're zooming all the way out, unpacking the intersection of place-based organizing, global coordination, and where the risks and benefits of economics and governance decisions occur. We're talking about network states.