Of course. It's a pleasure being with you. And,

Uh-huh. Well, it it was an idea that developed in collaboration and and conversation. And, you know, it was also very much involved in the early development of an organization that I whose board I now chair, MediGov, which is a research network of folks around the world working on governance and online space. And, one of the one of the early, drivers of this was, was was seeing work from a collaborator in in the Medigov context, Seth Fry, who who had studied done a big data study of, Minecraft servers and argued that, looking at the way in which they were governed, looking at thousands of servers, observed a kind of drift into, into oligarchy, into a kind of centralized control of the server. And, and it seems like a kind of natural outcome. And, you know, Seth is someone who's worked in cooperatives for many years, you know, who has very democratic impulses. And so it's not necessarily the finding he wanted, but it seemed to be a kind of scientific outcome. Right? The data was was saying that this is what people do when left to their own devices, like running Minecraft servers. They form centralized entities. And, you know, I thought this is a really interesting study, but at the same time felt that, it it was in some sense enabled by the limits of the platform and the the structure of, of the system. And and and, it it was kind of through this and some other provocations, you know, that I started developing ideas around, you know, what I came to call implicit feudalism, which is a norm in online spaces, that we accept a kind of centralized, even more, kind of hierarchical control of online communities and the servers that run them. And this goes back, it turns out, to the earliest online communities. But the basic architecture is very film familiar is that, you know, you don't even have to talk about big tech companies and things like that. We're just talking about a group chat, you know, a a a a Facebook group, a subreddit. You know, you you have somebody who has admin power, and they have essentially unlimited power over the space. And and, there are respects in which, you know, this is a kind of social norm, but it's also really built into the into the software, that that social life runs on, on the Internet. And, I got really interested in, you know, how is it that we got to a point where these became the defaults. And and in response, after kind of developing that critique, that recognition that there there's actually historical reasons that constrain us toward that all of that that outcome of oligarchy that guide us in that direction, that make it the most likely outcome. What else could we imagine? And that's where modular politics started to develop among the group of us who who were kind of the early, participants in in Medigov. We we started the organization in some respects just by meeting and working on this paper. And we were trying to figure out what, what what it could look like to have online spaces that were really designed for diverse forms of governance, not designed for a hard coded specific form of governance like a top down admin control of everything, but that would enable lots of different forms of self governance to emerge, that are culturally sensitive and, and flexible and and contextually appropriate. And modular politics was what we called the answer, which was a a a framework in which, in which you have a a a kind of platform, at the base layer that invites users to add, cobble together different modules, put them compose them together in a way that's appropriate. Maybe you want to have, you know, one kind of executive leadership here, but then you wanna have a referendum, that puts a check on that executive leader. You know, you could put the pieces together any way you like. But the, you know, the goal was to reimagine the construction of online spaces from a perspective of software design in a way that could enable this kind of cross cultural creative governance, design.

Yeah. Yeah. So I I always try to, test my my my my theorizing and practice. And, you know, I think it can sometimes be too easy to just sit in the armchair and tell people what to do. It's it's important to also, get your hands dirty and figure out, okay, what are the you know, why what how how easy is it really to to do the thing you're telling everyone to do? And and so, as we were developing this, this idea and and and especially after, you know, we kind of sharpened it, I, in my lab and with some collaborators at Medigap as well, started a bunch of experiments to try to figure out, okay, how could we, how could we try to implement this, in practice? And one one example is, Community Rule, which is a a kind of drag and drop web app currently being fully redesigned, to be much more accessible and and user friendly. But its its purpose is basically to allow communities to easily develop bylaws that are appropriate for themselves. So before you even get to the point of, you know, giving all the power to the admin, give yourselves a chance to just say, what should your organizational design look like? And that's the point of community role. It has some basic templates, things like that. Another example is is ModPaul where, this was an attempt using, a, an online game called, now called Lewanti. It's a open source, Minecraft like, voxel game. And, I built a, a mod for the game that, along with collaborators, like, Luke Miller at MediGov, to, to implement diverse governance practices in the context of, in the context of of of the game, enabling players to to design and construct their own governance systems. And this was a really, really useful exercise. It helped me realize just how deeply entrenched our assumptions about admin control are, how many things you have to rethink if you are to imagine online spaces that are designed really for co governance, and how many, kind of, assumptions you have to pull out of the software. We what we would often do is hard code in something that seemed right, and and then we would realize later, oh, that's, like, a particular assumption that voting is important or that, you know, this or that, political assumption going back thousands of years, like, should be universal, and we'd have to claw it out of this code base and and rethink it and and figure out how do we how do we build a code base that's really much more you know, of course, it's never gonna be fully neutral, but but, that that that carries as few of our assumptions as possible and is is as inviting as as possible to to diverse approaches. So, that made me realize in some respects, you know, what a what an interesting challenge, this kind of design is. And, and and, so, you know, it's useful for me as a fairly bad software developer. At the same time, of course, I'll just note that better software developers than myself have also taken on this challenge. And, I I've been gratified to see that, for instance, in contexts where online governance has actually been operationalized, and invited into being, such as when governments, do so with, like, the decedent platform that platform that the government of Barcelona in particular sponsored, or in the blockchain context with platforms like Aragon and Zodiac and OpenZeppelin, you know, in context where you have communities actually and and projects and companies and so forth actually trying to co govern, and do forms of collective decision making over with real assets and real, real stakes. They actually converge on something like modular politics. In many of these cases, they actually started building the platform one way and then ended up choosing a more modular structure, to enable precisely what we'd hoped for, which is that kind of composability and creativity.

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I'll just say from the beginning, I I just wanna be clear. I'm not, I I I think there's a lot of work to be done on this in this direction too, and, and that I think there's a lot of risk, in in trusting particularly the LOMs that we have, which are, you know, profit driven, fundamentally extractive tools, but nevertheless participate in a very interesting technology that I think could have really powerful consequences for how we think about online governance. You know, here's here's the basic challenge is is is the question of of whether at the heart of a, of a governance system, you want to have software, code, essentially, or interpretation. And, and the modular politics framework basically assume the former. It assumes that you're gonna have to have code running the system at some fundamental level. You know, maybe not ultimate power, but, like, you know, essentially, you need code to adjudicate what otherwise the server admin would have control over. You know, who has what authority, who gets banned, who gets removed, that sort of thing. You kind of replace that personal power with with software that enable that manages governance processes. So, you know, if somebody is if if if if somebody accuses somebody of doing of breaking a rule, then the software, you know, manages a process and then implements the outcome in a deterministic way. You know, it's written in code. I think there's there's some interesting advantages to this. It's perhaps has the ability to be incredibly neutral. It it it has a kind of, rigidity to it that could be valuable. At the same time, it can these kinds of systems can be gameable. They they, and they often kind of, lend themselves to being manipulated by people who are really good at manipulating systems. And, and we've seen that a lot in the context of DAOs, right, where where, you know, people come in, are able to, manipulate what's written in the code and violate the spirit of the of the code, to violate the purpose that the DAOs created for in order to, you know, obtain money or or, you know, undermine that purpose just by what's written, but, you know, making use of what's written in the code. And so those kinds of rigid technical systems, can be really vulnerable. The you know, another thing that really, struck me was actually very recently reading the new, anthropic constitution, the constitution for the coach, Claude Chatbot. It's a very strange document. But one thing that's really striking about it is that the company that the company that is most obsessed with AI safety among the big labs, you know, to a fault even, has determined that the best way to govern its models is to treat them like people, to to address them in very human terms. And that was a was a really striking, thing to encounter for me just in that it it it suggested that that maybe we're moving more toward a world, you know, and this is something I think many of us have been seeing for for a while now that that in which we are gonna have to encounter computers much more like we encounter people. And, and that that maybe the best way to communicate with the computers of the future is going to be to communicate in ways that people can understand too, rather than just writing in in kind of code and and abstracted language to actually talk about values, to talk about ethics, to talk about, purpose. And so it's it struck me that, you know, maybe there is maybe we need to rethink the strategy of modular politics, at least in some context, and maybe more for the future than for the present, and imagine that the goal is not to write code and mechanistic structures that facilitate community self governance, but to actually double down on writing the kinds of human readable governance documents, human readable constitutions, that are also gonna be, you know, LLM readable. And if instead of putting a a mechanistic deterministic system at the base layer of your community governance system, maybe the the the better path, at least in subcontext, will be to put, a a model at the at the center of that system or an agent, a model enabled, agentic tool at the center of it that's able to interpret that, that natural language constitution, rather than imagining that any piece of code is going to serve as as a as a, as a complete base layer for for that community governance. And that actually, if we, you know, if if if you have a human readable constitution as, like, the core code of of, of of community governance, it might be more accessible for the humans involved. It might be more easy for them to be involved in the governance practices, less, handing less power over to people who are happen to be technical experts. And, and and also granting, you know, the the the agent, managing the system, more ability to detect, the difference between, what is and isn't in the spirit of that constitution. And and, again, I I I would hesitate to delegate too much power, to the to to LLMs, but I think there are respects in which they can serve as really able administrators, or they could in the future. You know, I think we're we're we're seeing glimpses of where that might be possible and where actually this might be an easier path and a and a more fruitful path ultimately to, defeating implicit feudalism than a more deterministic approach to modular politics like like the one I've tried several times over.

Yeah. So actually, right now, I'm I'm working on testing this with a a Mastodon bot. So, I I got a a a bot that I'm developing right now that, is hooked up to an LOM, and, it, it has a a plain text constitution. I've tried a couple of different constitutions so far. I'm really building this on my own experience with, a platform called social.coop, which is, a cooperatively governed Mastodon server that I cofounded, years ago. It's, like, one of the great, kind of community, one of my favorite little communities, something I'm really grateful for. I've I've met a lot of wonderful people through it, and, it's been a place of experimentation, thinking, and and, you know, argument and so forth that I've really appreciated. But one thing that's always bugged me is that we can't do our own self governance on the very platform that we are trying to self govern, which is Mastodon, which is really not designed in any way to support community self governance. And so I've been, for years, trying to figure out how do how how could we actually change that. You know, we instead go over to another fabulous platform called Loomio, to do decision making processes and things like that, a very well designed platform for self governing communities. But I always imagine, what would it look like to really integrate that into Mastodon, or a platform like it? You know, the same same question could be applied anywhere else to a, you know, a Facebook group, a Slack, a Discord, whatever. But in this case, I'm I I'm playing with Mastodon because I I like playing with tools I know and with open source software and things like that. And, so in this case, the bot has admin, rights, on the platform. It can determine it can make other users admins or not. It can, there are some limitations for what the API allows, but it can it can, you know, ban servers, and it can carry out moderation actions. It can delete posts, things like that. So, for instance, you could have a situation where, okay, somebody posts something that another user flags as as offensive and and maybe the constitution of the of the server, you know, written in plain English, hopefully, or or whatever language actually, that the l one can understand. Hopefully, it's it's, you know, written, I think, by the people, for what they what their needs are, you know, a handmade constitution. And then and it says, well, if somebody, finds that a, post has violated the the, you know, our shared rules, they can flag it, and then it goes up for a decision. And then say the the the rule is, well, five other people have to agree that it violated the rule. And then the bot could say, okay. There's been a post flagged, you know, do five other people wanna stand up and agree that this post violates the rules? And, you know, if it receives five mentions and it keeps a memory, so it keeps a ledger to to keep track of of previous actions, then, you know, if it hits that, if it, you know, hits that that mark, then it can delete the post. Or it could say, well, we delegate, you know, that maybe the constitution says no. We delegate that decision to x group of users, and then the bot could facilitate the process among that group of users, you know, a supreme court or something like that. So there's a really wide range of things we could do. And again, one thing I'm encountering in developing this system is always trying to insist that we're trying to create a generalized tool. We're not trying to hard code in any assumptions about how a community should be governed. And and actually, my sense is that if you do this right, it could be a lot easier to develop creative, governance practices. For instance, on the on the modular politics approach, if I want to create a a system that, you know, a mechanism, a a decision making process, that maybe is part of my ancestral culture, but hasn't been implemented as a module yet, I need to find a software developer to implement that module. Right? The interesting prospect of an LOM supported, process is that I could just write describe what should happen in natural language, and, and hopefully, that LOM can figure out what that means and implement it. And and so far, you know, not without without obstacles, I've seen some pretty good evidence in my tinkering here that that that's that's possible. I don't think we're at a point where we can trust these with, you know, secure, processes, you know, as in any context. You know, these these things are still very, very new, and we're still learning how to how to build guardrails and so forth. But I'm really excited by the possibility of being able to allow people to implement, governance practices that they don't know how to write in code, but that they know how to describe in words.

Managing a country. You know, I mean, I I think it's it's, right now, an idea that's being weaponized in really dangerous ways. I mean, we we saw this in the early days of the current administration in The United States when Elon Musk took over the government and and, decided to or started saying that, okay. Now we have AI, so we don't need all these bureaucrats. There is no clear evidence that AI replaced a single, you know, administrator, in any trust trustworthy fashion. I mean, this is this is an excuse being used by tech people to to claim power for themselves under the guise that that techno their technology is actually working in this or that way. But what I would here's how I would put it is that governments already run on essentially automated systems. Bureaucracies, legal structures, these are all technologies and infrastructures of automation that create different topologies of determinism and nondeterminism, determinism and agency and interpretation. Okay? So an election is a kind of, in some respects, a deterministic system as nondeterministic inputs but as deterministic outputs. But a court, you know, has more inter room for interpretation. These things are check and balance each other. And and and so I what I would argue is that territorial governments already have infrastructures of of, for implementing governance practices. What I'm what I'm what I'm interested in is the fact that online spaces don't have those infrastructures. You you when you're in a a group chat, there is no fundamental infrastructure to carry out and actually especially enforce an election to unseat an admin who's been behaving badly. And so my goal here is not to so much to replace existing infrastructures that that do allow, collective self governance, which is, I think, an anti democratic orientation that that is is is quite strong right now in the world. What I'm interested in is is is creating appropriate infrastructures for spaces that do not have infrastructure for collective governance like most of our online spaces. So so in some respects, you know, one way I phrased the challenge of implicit feudalism is for online spaces to catch up to my mother's garden club, you know, which is a, you know, a collective organization in my mother's neighborhood where, you know, women get together and talk about gardens and do community service. Right? And I mean and they have, like, an infrastructure of self governance and bylaws and everything, things that virtually no online community I've ever been part of has. And, and so I've in some respects, I think what we're up to here is not attempting, you know, to to to replace the nation state right now. First, we gotta get our online communities, caught up to the basic expectations of of self governance that we have in virtually any other context of life. That said, I think there are some really radical consequences that can emerge from having democratic online spaces that do that do unsettle the foundations of the nation state, as the fundamental side of of, democratic governance. But, I wouldn't, you know, but but at this point, I think we're primarily at at the stage of catching up, not, trying to supplant. If if, in fact, we were to try to supplant, you know, current political democratic institutions with online practices and online politics, that would be a step in the in in the wrong direction. That would be a regressive step, a a a turn toward a kind of micro authoritarianism. And and we saw that with Elon Musk taking over the federal government. He was essentially trying to become the admin of the whole government and and assume a kind of, a a a unitary top down control over the whole thing. And that's, you know, that that's kind of where we are right now. Yeah.

Yeah. I I mean, I I I think that DAOs, right, reflected a kind of opening. Right? And and this is something that I I think is still yet to be kind of appreciated, for what it is, which is that, you know, in in, during the periods when when there was a lot of energy around something like DAOs, say, twenty seventeen first and then 2020, 2021, these were these were the, as far as I can know, the only moments in Internet history where there was mass investment in, the design of collective governing tools. This is a time where millions of dollars were being poured into, building tooling for people to make decisions together online. And I think we have to recognize how rare that has been, because there's never been a need for it, according to those who are running our online platforms. And that that for all the profound problems with the crypto ecosystem and blockchains and so forth, which, you know, I'm I'm, you know, very happy to to recount and and and criticize. Still, they broke the kind of fundamental logic of implicit feudalism by trying to disrupt the the server client relationship by trying to build networks that were fundamentally about peer participants co governing, you know, a network. You know, not to say that is a a dem it's a democratic thing. Not at all. You know, it's often essentially plutocratic, and I've, you know, I've written about that extensively. But, but nevertheless, in breaking that fundamental server client relationship, they had to figure out, okay, if we're all peers on this network, you know, how are we gonna make how are we gonna choose version updates together? How are we gonna allocate a treasury? And and so that's where platforms like, you know, Aragon and Colony and and OpenZeppelin and all all these things, emerged. And, you know, I think they they just show that when you, when you enter up into a space where you where where self governance becomes a problem that you have to solve, really an interesting creative stuff can start to emerge. And during those periods, you know, the ICO boom in the in 2017, the the kind of NFT craze of, you know, 2021, where people really started to feel, oh, there could be billions of dollars. There are billions of dollars at stake in these governance decisions. We have to build tools to make those decisions good. You know, we didn't get that far, but but already during those periods, it felt like every week you would hear about a new mechanism, you know, a new thing that could be, built and designed into being a new a new way of approaching this challenge of of healthy self governance. And, and I, you know, I found that that froth tremendously exciting. Not always because I love the projects that were using them or I loved what they were what their goals were or anything like that, but but that there at least people were trying to figure out how do we balance the incentives and and and help people, like, do collective intelligence in these in these contexts. And, and and it just to me, it it just whets my appetite for more. What could it look like if we had more spaces where that was an opportunity? And and, you know, I think if we allow ourselves into that possibility and into that challenge, I think it does it does start to unsettle, you know, the foundations of what we think of as democracy normally, in in in some in some powerful ways. And and I think we're just starting to begin to see glimpses of what's possible there, but I think I just wanna underscore that I think we're we're we've mostly not even allowed ourselves into that conversation of what online democracy, what what what what self governance in our, you know, that's native to to the networks we so often inhabit, could really be like.

Well, I'm I'm in the process of finishing a book on on protocol, the concept of protocol, which, of course, you know, has some, important resonance in Web three. I mean, I'll I'll, admit one of the major, motivators for me in in taking on this project has been the the conversation around the summer protocols community that was supported by the Ethereum Foundation and, you know, is very much, anchored in web three. But actually, the thing that really got me excited about this concept was not just that. It was it's it was seeing the concept of protocol being used particularly in indigenous contexts, around the world as a, a word to denote both, you know, sovereign practices, practices that, rituals, traditions, ways of being that, help people know who they are even in context of of colonization and oppression, and also protocol as the kind of membrane between a community and the the state. You know, a protocol as as, you know, for instance, in the context of a lot of Latin American governments, protocol is the word used to talk about the, you know, the appropriate relationships between the state and indigenous communities. As a researcher, when you're interacting with indigenous communities in Latin American context or in Canada, you know, in places that, you know, where there has been some developed, you know, policy, you know, protocol is the word that kind of mediates that relationship. And, and and there's so much more. You know, protocols are climate protocols. They're they're Internet protocols. They're they're, protocols now being used to create guardrails for AI. And this this concept, I think, is, is a tremendously interesting and powerful form of human organization and and and more than human organization, that we tend to neglect, or kind of demean, as just like, oh, it's just a tool we're using. But what I argue in the book is that it's it's actually a really, a really central, form of human organization in in human history, and that its importance has never been greater, and that we we need to learn or relearn how to, how to operate this, you know, this way of of organizing ourselves and and organizing in relationship to our environment. So I'm I'm, you know, excited in this very kind of, in some respects, theoretical way, to to honor this this set of practices, that that have accumulated around that name, around that word. While at the same time, of course, I'm always playing around with practical experiments, you know, trying to think about what, what kinds of protocols we need in our world right now in my lab. Right now, we're we're really interested in protocols for, managing conflict in online spaces. So, once again, I I I try to balance my theorizing with with practice and and make sure I'm not kind of getting to, falling too much in love with my own ideas.

What in particular?

I mean, there's lots of ways to to, to, you know, to begin and end, but I I grew up in Virginia in on the East Coast Of The United States, and and, you know, I I part of my family is from Colorado. I'm grateful now to live in in the state of Colorado, right at the right where the mountains meet the Plains. But, but, you know, one thing I'll I'll, share that I think might be worthwhile relevant to this conversation is is that, when I was a teenager, you know, I was around 15, 16, I I had the opportunity to attend a a school, which was a, you know, public, you know, school in my in my area that, but was kind of an alternative program, and that, had just a a a a part of its what made it unique was it it, encouraged students to participate in self governance. So we had a weekly meeting where everyone was welcome to attend. Nobody had to, but you could that was where all the business of the school would be discussed. So the the principal would come and talk about what what he was doing and, you know, teachers who had issues would bring them there and students who had issues would bring them there. And, you know, through that, I got to participate in some interesting processes and help shape a change to the admissions policy for the school, and things like that. And, you know, that I I think that experience among a few others just kind of left me with a with a, at least so far, a lifelong belief that self governance is possible and fun and empowering. And, and I I think that's, a really important thing that I I try to remember and hold, which is that, having those experiences of self governance is crucial to having faith that this stuff is possible and recognizing the power of it. And so out of that experience, one thing that I'm really eager to do with all of the the the things I do around online governance. I also do a a ton around online offline work with particularly cooperative businesses, working here in Colorado and elsewhere, to support conversions of businesses to worker ownership so that, you know, workers have power and stake in the in the places where they work. And, you know, what that's all about to me is is is enabling democratic experience, enabling people you know, democratic in some respect is kind of too fancy a word, enabling people to to have a real stay say and stake in their lives. And I think when peep when we have those experiences, when we feel our own power, it's it's a it's an incredible, you know, it's it's transformative. It you know, we we see ourselves, I think, as as much more than we thought we were. And, and and, you know, I I got to experience that a few times early on, and it's, you know, it's it's stuck with me and, you know, in in all of these little games I play with with ideas, with software prototypes, with with, you know, community organizing work, you know, to me, that is kind of the ultimate goal is to help seed those experiences, to to help others and to continue helping myself, you know, see what we as human beings are capable of, what what dignity we really have, and and, creativity we really have. And and I think too often that that, richness is is just not visible to us.

I I just, I mean, for for the, the it's like the choir here. You know? I'm, someone once told me that if you don't preach to the choir, they won't come to church, and and I I think that's really right is just keep doing what you're doing. And, and I think remember that the best, you know, defense of democracy, of human dignity, of of of rights is is not just defense, it's offense. It's it's continually deepening that practice, that you cannot democracy does not live in stasis. This is something that philosophers like Alexis de Tocqueville or Adrienne Maree Brown or, CLR James or, W. B. Du Bois, have all Derrida, you know, have all all recognized that democracy cannot function in stasis. It must always be developing. It must always be, challenged and deepening. And and so folks who are trying to push the the boundary of democracy, push its possibilities rather than just, try to protect what was established hundreds of years ago, you know, they are they are the ones who, I think, give us the best hope that we'll have a, you know, a democratic future.

No. Thank thank you so much for your your questions and your interest in this work.