Web3 Is Solarpunk: Reimagining Public Goods

Transcript

right so it's getting better and better now we're going to have a talk about the future that we actually want to see um this presentation is called web free is solar punk reimagining public goods um and i would like to welcome to the stage score tomorrow of the git coin and uh i think uh scott is also embodying like the idea behind this conference and this whole movement because not only he's such a smart blockchain brain but also he's a avid piano player and composer and he just confessed to me that he even has got the addish number of free which i don't understand i don't know maybe he gets into this when he has time but anyway i give the stage to you welcome

and enjoy everyone thank you thank you so much tess everyone can hear me okay great thank you so much so today i'm here to talk about i think a very relevant subject for most the people in this room um when we talk about web3 i think in a lot of conferences we talk about the technology we talk about sort of the immutability the hope for the future and sort of that capacity but i think the future that i'm hoping we can talk about today is more around sort of the narrative vision that we're actually driving towards with web3 and what that means for the future both of the ecosystem and also just of you know hopefully society at large

and so i'll kind of break this into four sections um you know what is solar pump why does it matter why does this matter for public goods and the way we fund them in particular and then how do we build a more solar-punk future so when we think about sort of the history of these movements i think the most obvious to people here is probably cyberpunk and cyberpunk comes from sort of a rich history all the way back to sort of like the new sci-fi movement um in the 60s and 70s but we think of it principally as a movement that has existed in sort of the minds of a lot of filmmakers a lot of writers especially in the 1980s books like neuromancer movies like blade runner there's a lot

of historical reference to this sort of you know high-tech low-life sort of uh almost subterranean model of living in which we have you know mega corps that are governing most of our behavior and we're sort of you know hopefully even in that world just the fading rebel alliance that's sort of pushing back against that and that's you know kind of dystopian when you think about it i don't think that's actually a future that we want to you know necessarily end up in but it is the future that's most prominent in the media that we see today and the cypherpunk movement largely arose from that movement in the 1980s into the 1990s where you had things like the sort of cypherpunk manifesto that

led to a sort of conversation around privacy and around how we can kind of fight back against these theoretical powers that be and this was actually quite a useful movement in the sense that it gave us sort of a sense of agency and a sense of purpose fighting against these external forces but it did so in a way that actually sort of pitted us against each other and created a very individualistic way of looking at the world in which you have this sort of lone hacker who has the capacity to save the world on their own without the help of anyone else and ultimately that sort of led to a lot of the social movements we see that surround the way we think about technology today solar pump by contrast is fundamentally high tech and high life it believes that

we can actually work together collectively to create some of this change instead of worrying about ways to individually kind of be superheroes in our own stories and this to me is the narrative shift that we need to work towards in web 3 and it's actually kind of fitting that we would do so because the technology itself is fundamentally collaborative so when we think about this world i think we have to start to be more explicit that it's something we want to work against and move away from and when we think of this world i think we need to be more explicit about the fact that it's something that we should strive for and try to achieve so we want to emphasize this deep integration between the environment and and humanity and not sort of have this

constant tension between different groups or constant tension between ourselves and the environment that we exist in which i think historically is being what a lot of more sort of cyberpunk accelerationist sort of technology like technology perspectives have been about so conservation self-sustainability social inclusiveness are all kind of core principles of this philosophy which largely actually arose in sort of 2008 it's relatively new but i think is actually quite interesting for us to be able to develop independently and sort of evolve in the context of web3 when i say it is an important philosophy for us to think about what do i mean like why why do we care about this particular philosophy in the context of you know beyond the sort of cooperative

nature of the tooling that we're building i think we have the ability to actually frame the problems we face mostly as coordination problems vis-a-vis other existing institutional frameworks for coordination and those include things like nation states those include things like corporations they include other large-scale sort of institutions that we rely on even things like universities which have their own sort of like problems and and bloat today those institutions are not necessarily bad i will not go as far as to say that you know we should totally dismantle all of them um i'm not here to make that case today but i am here to make the case that we can push back on these

being the only means of social coordination and that by having for the first time a way to coordinate collectively while being decentralized rather than coordinating collectively while centralized or coordinating individually well decentralized gives us the opportunity to sort of just reframe and create a new beginning so we want to reverse these trends of increasing institutional power without really any checks and we want to do that well while re-examining the history that we've gone through because when we look back even at the history of the corporation and the history of the nation state these are things that are relatively new in their current conception these are not just themselves immutable kind of systems these are systems that have been built intentionally by people who are probably

no smarter than you know the people in this room we all have the power to actually create systems that are of this level of complexity if we work together and to do so in a way that is actually probably more fair and ultimately more just for the world at large so we need to move beyond this baggage this assumption that we can just kind of work with these institutions and leave ourselves focused on problems and and sort of solutions from the past and we need to think about ways that we can evolve our sort of models for the future and one model that actually is relatively new i think it was 2009 or so when ostrom was really recognized for this work is the commons management model which outlines kind of eight core principles

which i will admit i don't have full time to get into here but that actually allow local commons local communities to govern resources that might be you know on the face of the you know it's scarce uh towards their own ends so for example fisheries forests or even open source software and web 3 are examples in a sense of commons that we all sort of share we all rely on and we typically rely on large-scale institutions to govern those as well but that to me is actually something that even before web 3 we showed wasn't necessarily the only way to go about fixing or solving these problems so ultimately ostrim to me is just one of the things that we can start to lean on

as a model beyond those institutions that fits into this solar punch framework of being kind of collaborative with our environment a similar set of principles that i think is important to draw on is rosedale which is kind of the sort of original starting point for cooperativism uh in sort of modern society that we're familiar with and ultimately the goal of cooperativism versus commons management is that you're trying to create voluntary participatory open membership that is equal among members that allows anyone to have some sort of skin in the game and participate in basically a set of arrangements towards the kind of collective benefit of those cooperative members

and ultimately in turn which we'll get to in a second both of these models do a very good job of creating positive externalities for communities beyond their local kind of shared needs and this is important because it's very difficult to scale the two models i just mentioned relative to the existing centralized institutions that we have today those institutions benefit by the fact that after a certain amount of time or certain amount of scale with dunbar's number we sort of lose a sense of solidarity and connection to each other we lose the ability to coordinate we we start thinking about ourselves as kind of atomic units again or as part of our local community is not as part of a broader society

and what you see happen is that effectively over time we acquiesce to the idea that we don't you know have the power to work together in a decentralized way to solve these problems we start saying you know actually it's a lot easier for us to just rely on a large centralized institution to do this stuff for us and what i'm sort of here to say is that you know we can take back agency and ownership over our institutions we can use these coordination tools to fight for causes we believe in uh we can mint our own cooperative currencies to help fight in this direction and we can design novel incentive mechanisms with those currencies to be regen not t-gen so what does this actually mean for public goods well historically paul samuelson in the 1950s created this

conception of public goods which you see here which kind of outlines four main categories and they're kind of defined by whether or not the good is excludable or rivalrous what that just means is that you can you know can or can't take it away from people or you can and can't um basically you know one person's use of the good does or does not take away from someone else's use of the good the interesting note about samuelson's definition is that many things that he considers public goods are actually meant to be this almost extreme edge case and a lot of that historical reference the context was basically samuelson trying to make the case that a lot of these things should be handled by private institutions rather than by you know any kind of public uh public group

and it's interesting because like yeah even the examples here like infrastructure you know are largely local uh needs a road or bridge is only useful to those people that live in that community or that are able to have access to that community many people you know for whatever reason may not be able to access you know rotor bridge or they might have a license to access a rotor bridge or whatever any of those sort of things we consider public goods often are considered public because they're provisioned by some large-scale institution like a state rather than being considered public just because we have agreed that we're collectively you know in in sort of a shared uh a certain need with respect to that good what i think we should probably start to

do and what we've been talking about both on the bitcoin side and you know in other communities across web 3 is redefining public goods in this sort of solar punch conception to principally discuss the positive externalities that a good creates so when we think about positive externalities we're thinking about things that benefit a broader community than the group that is generating the good itself so an example would even be public education the more educated a society is the better off that society will be and it's not just the university that is benefiting necessarily from those those those educated students and we have many examples of this across society but we often fail to consider these things

as deserving of of our kind of attention or support because we assume that they will be provisioned by others but very often this is not the case um you know kernel is an example of a project that i think is is absolutely deserving of more funding and is sort of in this process of evolving in order to be a sort of web 3 university and i think that they're sort of looking at that model in this sort of positive externalities framework i think similarly there's a lot of web3 tooling that would not necessarily be funded in web 2 for example like most open source software because people don't see the reason to go and fund the maintainer who is kind of holding up the

the weight of these different institutional you know software solutions on their shoulders because they can just free ride on this for as long as they want whereas in web 3 you have shared incentives and shared currencies that allow people to feel incentivized to work on these things together and to basically share in the value that that software creates so if we redefine from this sort of model back here public goods into something that really is focused on positive externalities we start to increase the scope of things that we're considering good for the public in a in a real sense and by doing that we actually produce more things that we can fund via these shared currencies via web3 technology this to me is a fundamental kind of part

of the solar punk narrative and i think you know rather than worrying about these individual kind of like you know super hackers super shadowy coders that are doing work on their own we should be worrying about the shared libraries the shared technology the shared infrastructure and then even the shared sort of you know physical spaces including the environment that we all rely on and all we all work within and that is fundamentally what we would want to do if we were to follow austrian's principles and work within the commons framework so as the talk suggests i'm here to sort of say web 3 is you know not just this sort of speculative game it is actually building new kinds of regenerative ecosystems

and regen is fundamentally solar punk i think that this is a fundamental unlock for us in terms of how we think about the future we want to build and hopefully even for people in this room it's it's something that can guide you in terms of how you build your projects in the future and so here's a few examples of just projects that i'm personally excited about that are very much driving in this direction on the one hand you have digital identity tools like ens which are available to anyone can be defined by even sort of different community needs you can basically have people opt in and out based on their their ens you start to identify people as individuals but also for example through shared nfts as members of a of a

community ens of course has sort of done this with their dow and sort of evolved even just what it means to be part of the uns community on that front decentralized storage is really fundamentally about you know giving people agency over their data giving people um kind of what i would call like you know a shared ownership uh and and sort of like in context of the d web principles which i again don't have a lot of time to get into but i would definitely recommend people check out um and then of course the core things that i'm focused on and the things that i think are fundamentally important for all of us here are how we do more sort of retroactive public goods funding quadratic funding other forms of community first funding that don't rely on these larger scale pools of capital but rely on our own

sort of interest in solving for our own shared needs and ultimately to me this is you know kind of all reliant on what the governance models that we're making are so i really wanted to shout out to gnosis as well as being one of the tooling providers that's doing a lot of work and kind of creating these fractal governance models so people can fund and sustain themselves over time the big challenge to me with a lot of you know what we've done in the last i don't know 20 30 years um actually comes back to sort of you know david graber's work about like the the notion of kind of two things jobs which is a great sort of like piece by graber

and then also this notion that we we haven't imagined you know a future that we want to see in fact we've like done worse we've imagined these dystopian futures but if we collectively kind of map our preferences using things like qf using things like retro public goods funding which i can get into in a little bit more detail afterwards for anyone that wants to talk about them but the idea is essentially creating these democratic mechanisms to allow people to individually fund things that they care about and then direct pools of funding from other larger groups according to their preferences rather than as it often works the other way around we can actually start to design for that sort of solar punch vision in a grassroots way and i think that's

critically important we've done this a lot in get coin actually already we've done this 14 times the 14th round just ended in the 13th is the one that we kind of have the final results from uh you know given there's a few technical details that i won't get into around civil resistance and so forth that we always need to check at round end so the 14 results will be out soon but the idea here is that we're trying to basically let communities grassroots create their own rounds create their own pools and then support them with what we're calling kind of the main round and uh these cause rounds for things like the climate things like in the context of gr13 uh the crisis in ukraine and things like longevity that you know certain communities in web3 care a lot about having these different local needs

basically bubble up in the sense that ostrom kind of intended allows us to actually create uh kind of global commons rather than just one sort of like set of local commons and that to me is kind of the the interesting part of these rounds it's also the interesting part of the work that optimism is doing on that front but ultimately the goal is that by stacking these sort of impact outs together we all sort of benefit you know globally for our shared needs um and we actually have a lot of posts on our governance forum gov to code to go into more detail on this um but i would highly recommend people look at you know in their own projects how they can be part of this sort of stack and how their project can be a kind of

impact now that might you know run a quadratic funding around or might run its own retro pgf round or might even build its own modular tooling to do these things because ultimately then you become part of this collective movement and you're not just working on your own and of course we do have like some stuff that we've written about this um the public kids funny work stream along with kevin and alay who's here uh have written a great book um just about the ideas of impact dowse and what we're talking about when we talk about making impact one thing that is still an unsolved question in the space which i highly encourage people to think about and what we've been thinking about is how we measure that impact via things like impact certificates or via other sorts of web 3 on-chain mechanisms um for

the sort of like long-term understanding of you know basically just to ensure that we don't fall into the same traps as i talked about the beginning and actually check ourselves and make sure we're not you know over hyping things as may have happened in the last bull market to some extent so i would highly recommend people just take a look at this and review it in passing but since i only have 20 seconds i will say we can choose to build a solar punch i think as graber said we can choose to do better than you know imagining a future that we hate we can actually focus in on funding our shared needs building for a future where we're collectively working together with our

environment and i think in that sense as i've said web3 is solarpunk so thank you very much if you have any other questions feel free to reach me afterwards and thank you again [Applause] [Music]

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