S.1 Ep.11 Plurality, Community Currencies, and the Future of Networked Governance with Puja Ohlhaver

Speaker 0 0:00 – 1:05

Global currencies will be good for global communication. But if they're more valuable than local currencies, if then there's a problem where I risk selling out grandma, nobody wants to sell out grandma. Right? You have to choose, do I want one token or do I want one vote? That's another way to put it. I'm just assuming everybody read the paper and everybody comes prepared to our podcast. You know, everybody's taking, sorry. Sorry. I just have so many references that I really wanted to ask. The AI part of the paper was probably the funnest part of the paper to write. Reading that paper, by the way, is like playing Zelda. You know? It's like a hero's journey. We're just, like, picking up tools all the way. How does this change democratic governance, change corporate governance? How does it address their pitfalls? How does it, you know, augment? And then, you know, once you've reached that, then it's like, okay. Now let's talk about AI and, like, and it's an appendix and it's hidden, but it's, like, the richest and coolest part of the paper. We are in an age of antisocial media, but it's in our tendency to cooperate on the behalf of the people that we love and care for. So I don't have a choice but to care about communities. I wish we had time for a whole separate episode on what it would look like building pro social media.

Speaker 2 1:11 – 1:19

Hello, and welcome to governance Futures, a podcast where we talk about the past, present, and future of decentralized governance. I'm Eugene.

Speaker 1 1:19 – 1:20

And I'm Jinglebum.

Speaker 2 1:21 – 1:42

And this week, we had a chance to talk to Puja Oliver, who has both worked in a number of different spaces and done a whole lot of different things. But today, we're really talking and focusing on her most recent paper from earlier this year, called the Community Currencies Paper, at least colloquially known as. And, yeah, Jamila, how did you feel about the conversation?

Speaker 1 1:43 – 2:25

It was really great to hear from Puja, some of the reflections, examples, and connection to her previous research as well. And I feel like everybody who've heard of this paper, who always wanted to read it, this this conversation would be very helpful. And, my favorite part, I think it's the part on AI, which is an annex of the paper. So, don't be too scared when you see 60 pages. Dive into that and, some of the parts of the paper we try to dissect. And I felt like, yeah, I felt like it it was very helpful, and I'm very grateful that Puja, came to our podcast to share her reflections.

Speaker 2 2:27 – 4:20

How do you feel, Eugene? Yeah. I really love the conversation. You know, I think we both got a chance to dive in to this paper. We kinda talked about some of her previous work that built up to it from the d stock paper with soulbound tokens to the compressed to zero, the silent strings of proof of personhood, and kind of all these various, work that is kinda compounding and building up to this kind of new model that she presents here. And just on a personal level, you know, this has been, at least to me, the most exciting paper that I've come across this year that feels like it presents something really different. And I don't know, can actually potentially be a solution to a lot of problems that we're seeing with tech and digital governance and community governance at the moment. You know, I wish we had more time to dive into some more concrete, examples. I know Puja brought some up towards the end of our conversation and, you know, in a world of endless time, kinda getting into those and philosophizing more broadly would have been amazing. But, yeah, time is a, is a limited resource, and I feel like we we made the best of it as we could with diving into the paper itself, plurality, subsidiarity, and some of the specific features that she brought up. And I do really appreciate how much this is rooted in both plurality and subsidiarity. And, yeah, if you listen to the conversation and you enjoy it, please share with a friend. Please like wherever you were listening this. Feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions or comments or want to hear, any specific guests in the future. And with that, here's the conversation with Puja. Thank you for joining us today, Puja. I wanted to start off the conversation a bit on a personal note with getting a sense of where your interest in care for community actually came from. Well, thank you both for having me here, first of all. It's always a pleasure and honor,

Speaker 0 4:21 – 10:29

to talk about these ideas. That's you know, there's like so where did where did my interest in community come from? And care. I'll I'll give you, maybe three answers to that because in the, you know, the the the sort of obvious one is I don't really have a choice. Right? We're born into communities and families. This is this is the the nature of being a human. We for we're born into bonds and then we forge new bonds. And, naturally, it's in our tendency to cooperate on the behalf of the people that we love and care for. Right? So, you know, in some sense, I don't have a choice, right, but to care about communities. But I'll give you a more, kind of academic answer, maybe from the political side first. You know, communities in in in the face of authoritarianism are a, protective force. And so if you look at, authoritarian regimes in the past, and even presently, for example, the CCP, communities are actually a threat to centralized power. And I'm in the business of decentralization and and building cooperation across difference into networks. So controlling groups, controlling communities, elevating loyalty over the state, to then then say families or communities. I mean, that's what authoritarian and fascist regimes do. And so, helping communities express themselves, coordinate and cooperate, is key to actually preventing the centralization of power, and the homogenation homogenization, of humans that happens with that. So that's the sort of the political science answer. Communities and civil society, are key to decentralized power and, and democratic governance. Even corporate governance for that matter. The economics answer, and I always like to give you the economics answer, because I'm a, I'm a law and economics nerd, as you you probably gathered. You know, there's been this sort of history in economics, first modeling, say, private goods, that confer benefits to individuals, and there's lots of assumptions about that. And then there's Mhmm. You know, economics models around provisioning public goods. Goods that are, you know, reproduced at close to zero, you know, marginal cost or marginal cost less than average cost and therefore under provisioned. Now, I actually think I have a somewhat contrarian take, which is that most goods are neither public nor private, but on our spectrum in between. And those are goods that are generated by social groups and by communities. And so the challenge I think for the twenty first century, especially as we enter the information age and the digital age, is to actually develop economic models that, model actually the nature of of data and information goods, and and and provision them. Right? So, communities are are key to that and social groups are key to that and and understanding, and Elinor Ostrom of course, and her husband did extensive work on this, understanding, you know, governance mechanisms that have worked in the past, what hasn't worked, and also building new governance mechanisms for the digital age, that continue to provision, you know, goods that are neither public nor private, but something in between. Is that is that is that sufficient? That was great. That that was that was more than sufficient. Yeah. No. I appreciate the the third board and stuff. But, you know, this is really relevant because, you know, we have sort of like two technological trends happening right now. We have AI. Yeah. Right. And we have crypto. Yeah. And so far the model, the economic model in AI has been surveillance AI that just hovers up all the data inputs, Mhmm. Erases context without contextual integrity. And privacy is contextual integrity. Right? And and so one of my projects is to help actually groups and communities govern their shared data sets that will actually make AI more performative, and more communicative while also creating two sided marketplaces and information and data that doesn't rely on the surveillance AI economy, which really is kind of like a Venezuelan oil economy that separates the production and distribution question, right? The production of data inputs and the distribution of economic benefits, right? I think that's the wrong trajectory. So, you know, communities and giving groups, even us as a group here, we form a group, right? Some agency in how we, you know, govern the uses of this conversation and profit from it. Right. Whether you decide to put it on YouTube or whether you decide to distribute it to more narrow channels, that's actually key for helping make the AI economy something that is participatory and inclusive and not something that just happens to us. Right? And it's surveilled from us. So, you know, thinking about communities and groups is is key to ushering this this new future. Crypto, right, is the other trend conversion with AI. And, you know, the aspiration I would say of of crypto, I'm not saying this is a current trajectory, is is decentralization beyond state power. But obviously this notion of the sovereign individual is is incoherent, you know, your freedom starts where mine ends. So representing communities and factions and enabling consensus across them, you know, this is what's necessary to help build decentralized systems that yet are able to scale into complex coordination beyond nation states into, you know, global networks to solve shared challenges without dominating local communities, rather than just sort of the current trajectory of meme coins, which just, you know, fuel cynicism and financial nihilism.

Speaker 2 10:30 – 11:57

For sure. No. And I I very much appreciate that presence of the thinking of community and kind of grounding all of your, thinking about how to evolve tech and some of the major problems centered in community. And, you know, I feel like your answer was such an amazing setup for your community currencies paper and the p cares model, which is gonna be the bulk of the conversation. But I did wanna have one or two, kind of follow ups to set up some more context before we get there. And first on kind of discourse and, polarization in social platforms. And I remember, when Twitter launched their community notes feature sometime last year, you wrote on your Substack about this idea of community posts. And in case listeners haven't come across that, we'll make sure to link to that post in, the show notes here. But you mentioned that community notes only show up x post after a post has already gone viral and polarization has set in. Many have moved on and missed the correction by that point. So if community notes is ex post, is there a way to shift the process ex ante before a post goes viral? So when you're framing it that way, you know, if notes, did utilize what you had wrote about in that, substack in terms of using social graphs and observed behavior. You know, how do you think discourse and polarization might change? How can it kind of bring it back to those kind of, honest communal elements that get lost so much when we're in digital spaces?

Speaker 0 11:59 – 17:37

Yeah. It's a lot there. So I think the place to start is to understand well, first of all, we are we are in an age of antisocial media. I mean, in the sense of these are not prosocial behaviors. So the goal is to, of that post was to articulate, a prosocial vision of, of social media. Right? And I think the, the first step to understanding how it has become antisocial, is to understand that actually when you're, when you're on a platform, like for example, X, it's actually a tacit attention auction. And what do I mean by that? Well, there are mirroring kind of my theory of power here. Power is, is, is both information and control. It's, it's neither one or the other. It's both. There are several ways to win an attention auction. You can either control the channel sort of, which is what, you know, Elon has done, and elevating his post to the top. Like even if you unsubscribe to him, you still see his posts. Right? You can also control the information. So if you have, if you're wealthy, right, you can buy a lot of bots and spam everybody with the information that you want and people don't realize that these are actually the same set of accounts that are controlled, right, by the same set of actors or maybe even overlap or coordinating in some other channel, right, unlike Telegram. So you can either control a channel or or or spam with information in bots. Right? Or you can do something, else, which is just be incredibly antisocial in bad faith and stoke conflict and controversy and conspiracy and hijack our limbic systems to capture our attention, and put us in a fight or flight response. Right? And of course the worst actors, right, employ all three, you know, they're wealthy and antisocial. And they, and they win that they win that attention auction. And that explains a lot of the, you know, epistemic balkanization that we have today. So, you know, taking that theory, right, that theory of power and actually understanding what is happening in social media channels is cast at attention auction. What, what do community posts do? What's the mechanism? So what's the idea of community posts? So the idea is that, you have a set of followers, they're have, they're very different. Some are talking to each other, some aren't talking to each other, And that is going to translate into correlated and non correlated forms of behavior, who they follow, who they like, who they repost. And so the idea is that you can create what I call polarity subsets, which are subsets of followers who are very different from each other. And that's, that's sort of like the same idea around community notes, by the way, it's just the next post. You take, you know, followers who are more likely to disagree with each other and that disagreement is measured by their observed behavior. Right? Now what you do as a second step is you send a post to that polarity subset and that represents basically a diverse group of your followers and it's a ZK post. So they see that it comes from somebody who they follow, but they don't necessarily know who that is. And then they can like, you know, like or dislike and repost and then the same process happens that it gets if they like it and repost it gets pushed out to their polarity subset. Right? And so what ends up happening through iterated rounds is this post actually pushes through a tree of polarity subsets through the social graph, right, to new audiences. And with each push, you're able to actually gauge the cross tribal appeal of what you're saying. Right? And maybe you get information back, fit back to you, like ZK posted by n people you follow or don't follow, you know, you can get right statistics back at you. And then say once it passes enough thresholds, enough sort of diversification thresholds, it passes what I call a social stress test where, okay, this is a post that is likely to reach many people, it resonates across many groups, many, you know, people who behave and think very differently, right? And then it can go public, right? And so this reverses, right, the cycle of conspiracy and controversy and and helps, you know, surface more universal messages that reach many people. And you know, it's kind of, it's kind of interesting because in the process you're not just learning a lot about, you know, people and your audiences and their audiences. You're actually learning about yourself. Right? And your own internal divisions and your own contradictions where those disagreements happening, where the post stalls out. Right? That that's actually feedback for you too. And maybe you're using language in a different way. Maybe there's a communication gap. And so you can learn what those communication gaps are. And this is actually, you know, a mechanism to, to kind of restore context and communication, right? And help us bridge across those contexts. You know the the other really cool thing about this is that it enables social recombination because over time you know it's very unpredictable like who who actually resonates with your idea and who doesn't. Right? That actually forms an impetus for new groups to form around common ground, right, that they weren't necessarily aware of. Yeah. And and that's healthy social recombination of course is is very important for avoiding, you know, the kind of epistemic balkanization that we have today, beyond just forming common knowledge. So did I answer your question?

Speaker 2 17:38 – 18:11

Yeah. No. That was great. I feel like, I realized in hearing the answer to that, I wish we had time for a whole separate episode on what it would look like building pro social media, and what that could actually look like to incentive create the right incentive alignment for the actual platforms. But I don't wanna distract away from what we came to talk, which is more of your community currencies paper. So that's Just a quick thing on that. The community currency paper idea is not at all at odds with this. It's actually Pretty sure. It's actually a necessary scaffolding for it, but that's, that's another paper in another conversation.

Speaker 0 18:12 – 18:13

Yeah.

Speaker 1 18:13 – 19:03

I was curious because I feel like three years ago during DevCon Bogota, your paper on finding web free soul was definitely the most talked about paper. And to me, as a PhD student back in those times, it was like, wow. So many builders and people who usually don't really read academic papers, they were discussing those concepts. And I was like, wow, that is super cool. And, now we're talking right now and DefConnects in Argentina is approaching for years later. I was wondering whether your paper on community currencies is building up on your previous framework or the ideas that you've introduced within your paper on Solban tokens? Or is it more like refinement and diverging from that idea that you've expressed in finding Web three Sol?

Speaker 0 19:04 – 23:45

Oh, I I would definitely say this is all a cumulative process. So, you know, the Solebound token idea was just to you know, first of all, there's a lot of confusion and misunderstanding around where we can, you know, criticizing verifiable credentials versus soulbound tokens and on chain and off chain. And actually that wasn't the point at all. The point was to say, let's introduce, you know, we have in, in crypto economics, just purely transferable objects, which we call tokens. What happens if we change the game and introduce non transferable objects? And what if those non transferable objects are actually represent memberships to groups? And so they actually have some notion of governance about who gets those non transferable objects and who doesn't. Right? And and that was just like and then it was like okay now let's see what happens. And then of course it unlicensed like well you know you could do massive things with credit markets with pure prediction and like this will even introduce provenance into AI and like in a and like this will even introduce provenance into AI and like in a non dystopic, you know, scan your eyeballs in one credential way, right? It was like we can actually have a way to represent human identity that is as diverse as the associations and affiliations and conversations that differentiate us. And it was, you know, it was just a exploration of what happens when you just change the game a little bit. Right? But of course, there are as many questions raised by that as, you know, as as there were opportunities. Right? And, you know, there's questions about, well, how do you do this in a in a non panoptical, non surveillance way? Right? How do you build networks where no two set of participants have the same view and yet you can ping on participants with different views to form a picture, right, voluntarily, to form a jury. So you know that that was one open question. Another open question was obviously memberships to groups are not all the same either. Right? We have different degrees of commitments to our groups it's not always binary. You know for example I'm a member of the New York bar that is binary either you pass the bar and you take an oath to uphold the constitution or you don't. Right? But there are many groups where it's like okay I'm part of my church but I go every other Sunday or maybe once a month or maybe just on Christmas. Right? And so, you know, like so you have to remember, you know, represent degrees of membership, right? And then and allow for, like, degrees of influence. Right? And then you also and then there's another question raised, which is, well, what, what about the intersection of financial and non financial? So you have these groups, right? Memberships say non transferable objects that represent your membership and even your right to participate and govern in that group. But like, what's to stop members of the group from being bribed? Right? In, in different channels. And how do you, you know, balance this tension between like money and voting that, you know, that we even see in democratic governance and corporate governance, which was which was, you know, the the start of my community currency paper. So there are, you know, as many questions raised as as, there were opportunities in that paper. And, you know, following that paper, you know, I wrote I wrote Compressed to zero, which was a critique of proof of personhood. And it was consistent also with the critique of proof of personhood, which was which was made in DSOC. And that critique was like one paragraph, but it it it didn't seem to phase people. So I had to come in with the empirics and say, okay, like let's let's show empirically how what I'm saying is shown to be true. And let's also expand a little bit because it didn't land the first time on on, you know, a theory of power and how to analyze these systems. Not looking at just say outputs and control and I control my wallet but also the information inputs that go in into influencing sets of participants. So you know, even if you say, for example, achieve, you know, some notion of civil resistance where people control their accounts, well, if they're informationally controlled, right, off chain, then you're actually, you don't really have the kind of civil resistance you want. You have humans acting like bots, even though you differentiated humans from bots. And that's not what we want either in systems design, we want, you know, freedom and agency. So that was sort of the intermediate step. And then community currencies, you know, the community currency paper was building, on the insights of both of those and, and kind of reconciling the attentions of both to offer, a different, a different paradigm, you know, but an extension at the same time of those, of those paradigms.

Speaker 1 23:45 – 25:09

Well, in both, stolebound tokens paper and the new community currency paper, there's a notion of non transferability of at least part of the tokens. In your new framework, it's, dual model, so non transferable irrevocable stake that represents influence, and then transferable currency for exchanging resources and directing attention. I maybe have a rather cheeky question here. We had guests, earlier in the season, Jim Olskin and Danny Villardel. They are part of Cornell Tech, and they introduced their paper on liquefaction, which basically, I'm sure you're aware of of the term and with their framework, allows you to borrow land, something that we deem just nontransferable, like, you know, private key. And one of the use cases is take my ape experiment where they basically allow you to run the ape for fifteen minutes and, do everything that you would be able to do if you were an owner, basically. So I'm curious if you have any particular takes on liquefaction. How does that correspond? Or maybe where do you see those, like, tension points with your framework? And I'll be curious just to to hear your take on that if if you're comfortable sharing. Sure. I mean, this is kinda like liquid staking too. Right?

Speaker 0 25:11 – 25:21

But maybe bef you know, before contrasting it, I'll I'll give you a critique of that, but, we should probably spend some time introducing the model.

Speaker 1 25:22 – 25:28

True. You're right. You're right. Let's introduce the model first and then go into the the section of details.

Speaker 0 25:28 – 27:38

So, like, when I'm, and this is also the same thing with corporate governance. Like you can take the same phenomenon in corporate governance where, you know, you have it's, it's one share, one vote. Right. I buy a share, I get a shareholder vote. Now there's this problem called empty voting where I can rent out my vote and separate my economic interest from my voting interest. Right. But is that incentive compatible towards maximizing shareholder value? Well, no, because I can rent out my vote and take a position that actually profits on the decline. Right? And say somebody else votes to the detriment or maybe even I vote to the detriment with hedged economic positions and I'm not maximizing shareholder value. Right? So when you're talking about goods and community goods, what you want is alignment of your members with the enhancement of that community's good and the value of that. And if people can sell off their voting rights, right, and make their economic interest in the community good not aligned with their voting interest and take off putting, you know, puts, right, or shorts on their positions. Right? And say, maybe hold a position in a competitor, a competitor community that is say, you know, I'll give you an example. Say there are two communities fighting over a shared resource and they're in a bidding war for it. If I'm a member of both of those communities, right, I have a conflict of interest. And if my community doesn't know about it, then I could actually be voting to the detriment of my community and saying voting against or or saying let's bid less for this asset. Right? And be profiting on the other side of that because maybe I have inside information that actually the asset is more value than it is. Right? More valuable than it is. So this is like basic set of alignment. And so, you know, the liquid staking on liquification, I've gotten some questions about that in previous podcasts that I was like, you you know, people are really missing the point here on a decent of alignment, which, which I spent, so much time, discussing. But, you know, that that's my quick answer to your question. Eugene, do you have do you have a question? I think you you had some other things that you wanted to cover too.

Speaker 2 27:38 – 28:04

So in in February, you released your most recent paper that we've been kind of alluding to, and you included two titles. One of which was the price of attention and the cost of influence in a network date, and the other title was the price of entry and cost of exit in a network date. So to start the discussion in diving a little deeper into your paper, why does one title kind of center around attention instead of entry, and influence instead of exit?

Speaker 0 28:05 – 30:50

Well, they're actually equivalent ways of stating the same problem. So we're, we're in a communication channel right now. Right? And I'm trying to influence you. Right? And I try and I have my agenda by the way. And my agenda is to, you know, maximise the space of human freedom, consistent with with decentralisation and innovation and growth and all the kind of things that we like. That's my agenda. Now I had to expend some energy. I had to write this paper to get your attention. Right? And I'm also having to expend some energy to influence you right now. And you're actually doing the same thing back back to me. Right? You've, you, you've got my attention. Right? You have your audience and you've given me the ears of your audience. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. Right? And you're trying to influence them because you want better governance for the future. Right? You want a network governance for the twenty first century or something like that, I think. Right? So what we're doing here, this kind of push and pull is actually the basics of human communication. This exchange of information, right? This exchange of control. You've given me control here in this channel. Right? I've also given you some control. You know, and we do this at many different social scales. We do this politically, because not all communication happens in small groups. We are members to, you know, churches, as I said, civil society, universities, nation states, companies, you know, and in the future, maybe even multiple planets. Right. And these are all actually just different scales of communication and different channels. So the question is, you know, what is the price of entry into those spheres? Right. And what's the price of joining that conversation or getting attention and the cost of influence? So for example, to become a citizen, you have to def, you know, generally take an oath in The United States, an oath to uphold the constitution, you know, and the principles of the Republic, which should override your economic interest at time. Right? That's the price of entry and even attention. And for that reason, I'm interested in talking, you know, to US citizens maybe more than I'm interested in talking to, you know, people in other places when it comes to questions of like domestic policy and what's relevant. Right now, when it comes to questions of climate change, right? And that, which is a planetary issue, I'm actually interested in hearing from people who are say more disproportionately affected by that. Right? And so in, you know, in a very practical sense, we are engaged in communication and channels on many different social scales.

Speaker 2 30:50 – 30:51

And that, you know, the question of politics is how do we, you know, price that that entry and that exit? And so countries,

Speaker 0 30:57 – 39:34

very crude way, which is like an exit tax. Right? Yeah. But, you know, I don't which is sort of arbitrarily determined. But I actually think there's like much richer, you know, economic models that we can bring to bear that that, that that reflect sort of the realities and and and the trade offs. So, you know, maybe, maybe with those principles in place, and, and, you know, what we're actually doing in communication, I can, I can talk about PCare? So, you know, as I said, I'm in the business of networked cooperation, with decentralization. And I think decentralization is actually key to innovation and growth, and, and complex cooperation. Now what, what am I, what am I exactly decentralizing? I'm decentralizing power. And that, you know, begs the question, well, what is power? And I have a theory of power and that's power is both information and control. Right? As I've alluded to before, when we were talking about community notes. And so like, even before we talk about PCare, it's probably good to ask, like, why our existing models don't decentralize power, especially in crypto. Right? Which is basically just an economy of transferable tokens, which effectively is one token, one vote, despite attempts, right, to do otherwise that that's still effectively kind of what it is today mostly. Right? Yeah. And, and the reason why very simply is Pareto's law. And so Pareto's law is basically, you know, it's the eightytwenty rule is a way to simplify it, but it's the observation, made by an Italian economist that a small proportion of causes or inputs account for the majority or a large proportion or 80% of the effects or outputs. And he noticed this looking at, you know, economics like, you know, 20% of people control 80% of the land or 20% of the customers drive 80% of the sales. Right? Or even in attention, like in social media, 20% of the posts get 80% of the engagement. And maybe it's seventythirty, maybe it's, you know, ninetyten, but it's around right around that ballpark. And so this is called, you know, a power law distribution, where how outcomes are very unequal and clustered. Now I'm not trying to create equality here. I actually think a normal Gaussian distribution is, is desirable. I'm not trying to flatten the field, but, you know, there's there's problems if you just lean into Pareto, which is what anarcho capitalists and neo reactionaries, and many people in crypto do when they say let's just tokenize and transfer everything. Right? And the problem is, right, that 20% or 10% that gets control, right, of the system, like, well, what if, what if the king goes mad? What if they're not benevolent? Right? And what if, like, you know, their kids, you know, if they are even if they are benevolent and they're great, what if their kids aren't? What if they're mean and nasty? Right? Which Yeah. You know, seems to happen. Right? An unfortunate amount. Yeah. You know? Right? So, like, you know, and and and then there's also a practical reason to that. Right? A a practical dimension, which is that, you know, with anarcho capitalism and leading into Pareto, right, of course that 20% who holds, say, just economic power, at some point will realize that there are even greater gains to fusing that with political power. In fact, non linear returns to combining economic power with political power. And right, we're seeing that today. And of course, this is the stuff, you know, the deep irony here is a lot of people cite Hayek and Milton Friedman. You see this on the Bankless podcast. Right? And and the thing is, of course, Milton Friedman warned exactly against the wedding of big government. Right? And and big corporate power and big right? Big business. Big government and big business. Of course, Hayek warned against that too. Right? In their eyes, it was important to separate economic and political power. But when you have pure one token, one goat anarcho capitalism, the incentives to fuse the two are very powerful. And this is sort of what people in crypto don't understand. If you actually tokenize everything into transferable tokens without any notion of non transferability or irrevocability, then this anarcho capitalism run to its logical conclusion, you end up with a political economy that is is at best the CCP or Russia, the fusion of economic power and political power. Right? Yeah. And most people I know ironically in crypto are fleeing those countries, not running to them. Right? So, you know, what have we historically done to solve this problem? Right? Well, we've had forms of governance. Right? We've had democratic governance. We have had corporate governance. And this is kind of like a good segue into discussing the paper. Mhmm. And this is actually the opening and the introduction of the paper where where I point out the tensions of these systems in the network age and their failures. Right? So, you know, both systems actually rely fundamentally on two levers of of power with scaffolding around it, with checks and balances around it. And those two levers of power, those two levers of influence and control are money and votes. Right? And in democratic governance, you know, when when money buys votes, it it naturally breaks down. Right? Your system turns from provisioning private goods turns from provisioning public goods into unprovisioning private goods. And of course the public goods end up under provisioned. Right? And more subtly what's happening today with these, you know, tacit attention auctions and social media that I was talking about is actually convergence of financial auctions and attention auctions where you can actually, instead of buying votes directly, you can just buy human attention, right? Through information bots, through channel control, channel control, or antisocial behavior. And by capturing attention, money can also buy votes indirectly. And we see a mix of all of that today. Right? We see money buying directly votes and indirectly buying votes through attention and through antisocial behavior. You know, and corporate governance has, you know, very similar problems as well. I mean, sort of the the meme coin and meme stock phenomena is like one aspect of this. But as I said before, there's a vulnerability with empty voting where you separate economic interest from voting interest, and you can actually decline you can profit off of the decline of a firm whose value you should actually be trying to maximize. And this happens when you have a conflict of interest. Right? So these tensions are inherent in in in both of these systems. And PCare, and and of course the digital age is stress testing this all the time. And and, of course, we have, you know, epistemic environments that are that are balkanized, that are that are feeding into this as well. And so what PCare does is it says, okay, like, money and voting, there, these are the fundamental levers of influence. They're at odds. There's a boundary prom of financial and non financial interactions. How do we reconcile this tension? Right. And so the first step PCare does is instead of having two units of account, money and votes, right? And then having these communication channels where like money can buy attention and votes indirectly, right? Let's actually resolve them to the same unit of account and let's force a trade off between the two. So you can decide whether you want to use this unit of account as a medium of exchange to buy and sell attention, or if you want it to be a non transferable token with staked irrevocably staked influence to essentially buy votes and force a trade off between the two. I'll stop there and and let you ask questions on this sort of first step because I'm I'm slowly piecemeal walking you through the logic

Speaker 1 39:35 – 39:59

here. Okay. Yeah. So just following the flow, FYI, we're gonna be sticking to the question list if that is, more comfortable. So let me ask the second question. Is framing the two currencies in the dual currency model outlined in your paper as a voting currency and a spending currency at the community level, is there a reasonable oversimplification?

Speaker 0 40:00 – 41:43

In the in the sense of these are the, you know, the fundamental innovation here is making them the same unit of account. Right? So it's not like so you're taking that same new account and you're deciding, am I gonna use it for voting? Am I gonna use it for spending as you're putting it? Right. They're not actually two different currencies. They're not two different objects in the system from a computer science language. I'm not a computer scientist by the way. So, you know, if there are computer scientists, they can, they can email me and correct use of my language, but they're, so they're not objects, you know, the different objects, the only different characteristic of the object. Is it transferable or non transferable? Right. And forcing a trade off between that. And like forcing a trade off there, by the way, is it's not just a trade off between say money and votes. It's a, it's a trade off between, am I, am I buying attention to communicate? Or am I buying influence? And another way to even think about that more fundamentally is, am I buying the right to participate, to communicate and get new information or am I buying control? And so if information and control are the two sides of power, right back to that sort of first principle that I introduced this forces a trade off whereas in say one token one vote anarcho capitalism, right, money buys both information and control with compounding returns non linearly. So this does the first step of, okay, well, let's first divide that to resolve that boundary tension. Right? And and now we can avoid sort of this, like, capture, right, and overreach. Does that make sense?

Speaker 2 41:43 – 42:25

And just to and, sorry, just want a quick clarification there because I I can see how reading the peak here is it's very simple to think that there are two currencies. So the way that you're just to be super explicit about it, it's not that there are two separate currencies. It's that there is one with two features, one of which is spending, one of which is voting, and you can kind of pick and choose between which feature you want to activate. Is it kind of like I just wanna make sure we're very clear with listeners because I I think the oversimplistic read of it is just seeing it as two separate currencies and you kinda swap one and out the other. But it sounds as though that's mischaracterizing the intention behind the paper. So I just wanna make sure that we're catching that correctly.

Speaker 0 42:25 – 43:25

Yeah. So, like, another way to think about it is, like, there's three sort of characteristics of money, unit of account, medium of exchange, and store of value. And I say, let's take the unit of account function. And it's it can be a medium of exchange if you choose to make something, you know, your currency like transferable or it can actually be something that is more like a vote. Right. That's non transferable that implies you influence within a community. Now the store value now the store value question is actually really interesting because this changes what we I mean, it has massive ramifications for unlocking, like, new forms of credit expansion and creation. And so like, that's like another topic, another paper, but, you know, that's, that's one way to, to, to think about it, is, is kind of shoehorning money and voting into this paradigm of, you know, not just sort of meeting of exchange, but meme exchange or or or something or or something that buys you influencer votes, right, with the same unit of account. Right. But are we correct to assume that

Speaker 1 43:26 – 43:26

we can't

Speaker 0 43:27 – 43:59

turn, like, the voting feature into spending feature? We can't Yeah. Correct. You can't. I mean, that would defeat the whole purpose. Right? Then then that collapses to one token, one vote. Mhmm. Right? You have to choose. Do I want one token, or do I want one vote? That's another way to put it. Right. Do I want something that I can, spend to enter other communication channels, right, and buy attention? Or do I want something that is going to help me influence even more the communication channel a little bit within which I am in? Right?

Speaker 1 44:00 – 44:04

Why is it important to have that stake, irrevocable?

Speaker 0 44:05 – 45:55

Because if it's if it's not irrevocable, then essentially you're buying information and control and attention and influence. And this is one token, one vote, anarcho capitalism. And we get back to that problem of concentrated power that will seek to entrench itself and combine with political power and not have enough, you know, dynamism and social recombination to end up with a say dynamic, normal Gaussian distribution of power, right? Where you have new players, new winners, new losers, and, and re healthy recombination and healthy competition. You know, the, the, the, the, the trajectory of one Token, one Vote is either oligopoly, which is not necessarily stable and ends in singularity. Right? And surveillance AI singularity. So to put it in concrete, concrete terms, another way to think about it is when you join a community, you make certain commitments. Right? If I, if I have voting power and influence over that community, and they're expecting me not to sell it off, if I sell it off, that's actually a form of accepting a accepting a bribe. Right? It's the same as actually selling your vote in the corporate context or even in the democratic context. Right? It's not incentive aligned. So it's, it's a question of incentive alignment. So even forget like all this game theory that I'm telling you about, you make, you join a community, they expect that your interests are aligned with them. If you have your influence and your voting power and you're making side deals on it, you're effectively accepting bribes. Right? And you could be profiting off the community's decline. That's not that's not so nice. That's not honest. That's not prosocial. And that's not something that scales into networked trust and cooperation either.

Speaker 1 45:56 – 46:51

You talked, previously on the role of AI and some of the shortcomings. And in your paper as well, you go in detail on some of the positives and potentially, like, disadvantages that AI can bring. And, one question that I have is similarly to the question with AI. There's so many, you know, advantages, but there is also obviously so much potential for it's being used in the wrong way. And those people who are designing and launching those community currencies, they will have more information. They will have ability to decide who gets access to the currency and what are what are you do you have any maybe concerns or some of the ways of how to overcome this, this problem where the people who set it up, obviously, they'll have more control information, not just from the start, but also generally because that will be the design that that will be deployed?

Speaker 0 46:52 – 51:12

Part of the community currency design, there are two key principles to it in order for this to work. Subsidiary, which is local currencies actually being more valuable than global currencies. And the reason why that's important is otherwise people with, you know, who bought Bitcoin early can buy like local currencies and have too much leverage and influence. And that leads to vertical integration and oligopoly at best singularity at worst. So you need subsidiarity. Right? And, and, and subsidiary, by the way, is guaranteed by non financialized commitments. There's no amount of money that you can bribe me to sell out members of my church, for example, or members of my family. It's key. Right? It's key to increasing the the the the cost of influence. The other key principle in this community community design is plurality or diversification, which is that when you are part of a community, what you will want to do is, if you wanna have, say, judgments that are fair and just around what is bribery versus what is coercion, what is something that, you know, is legitimate for community recovery versus which is something that would be punished with, say, for example, burn stake or excommunication. These are context sensitive judgments. They're as sensitive as a judgment between is this cooperative or is this collusive. And so you want to ping as many diverse informational perspectives as possible. So this design actually enables, groups and communities to get a sense of within their members, not the whole social graph, what is the diversity and overlapping sub affiliations and ping informationally unique people. What this does is it integrates non obvious novel information from participants. It pushes information out through the network. This information that gets pushed out even in just this enforcement mechanism, right, encourages people to become informationally unique and make new bridges with other communities so they have more influence in their communities. Right? So part of this sort of game design here is to actually give people an incentive to get new information. And you get new information by talking to people who you wouldn't otherwise talk with. And when you talk to those people, you have social recombination and you form new coalitions. You might take, right, some of your community currency. And we should probably talk about inflation and community based income because that's a really key part of this mechanism. You take some say for example your inflation or community based income and you use it to form coalitions when new groups inform new communities, right, to solve new problems. And so that's how, you know, I don't fight Pareto's Law. I actually lean into it. You know, but I lean into it in a way where the incentive is for social recombination and forming new groups to have dynamism. So you're not stuck with your local community. Right? Like there's actually a, an oppressiveness there too. Right? People, you know, you could sort of grow up in a provincial small town like, you like I did. You know, the first thing I wanted to do was leave. Right? I wanna come back or, you know, it can be oppressive. Right? And and and and, you know, and then I sort of went out and, like, saw new frontiers and pastures, and now here I am, like, you know, living in a small town again and on a farm. But like you want to actually to, you know, to to to answer your question, the long winded answer to your question about social dynamism, and preventing sort of being locked in is is having this sort of plurality incentive through, right, through basically the justice and enforcement mechanisms, to push information out and expand the breadth of context. So you form new groups and we have this like very intense social dynamism that is sort of crisscrossing network overlapping and increasing in social complexity. And of course with that social complexity, it's much harder to, you know, to go to war with your neighbor because that, you know, they're on true social and you're on x and somebody else is on Blue Sky. Right? Does that make sense?

Speaker 1 51:13 – 51:17

Does. And since you mentioned community based income, Eugene, I believe you have a question.

Speaker 2 51:17 – 51:38

Yeah. I just wanted to double click into that and make sure we have a chance to kind of explain the CBI or the the community based income and what role it plays in the system. And especially, when people do receive it, you know, which, again, in that oversimplified of the the spending element of it or the voting element of it, which kind of part of the,

Speaker 0 51:38 – 54:03

the currency does it naturally come through in? Let me take a step back here because maybe the listeners are a little confused because I'm saying, okay. There are these communities, they're groups, and you, you know, have a choice. You have your community currency. Do you wanna stake it for influence, or do you wanna spend it, you know, to enter other communication channels or just to even talk more within your own communication channel? And I'm forcing this trade off. Right? The question is where the hell does this money come from? Right? Why does it have value? Right? And so this is where the idea of of, you know, the spectrum between private and public goods comes into play. Right? And so goods, you know, social goods that are between private and public, like even this data and this conversation, right, they're they're actually sort of it's it's valuable. Right? Under the current political economy we don't really know what that value is. But to the extent that say we took this conversation and like say we tried to enter into a two sided marketplace. Just imagine there's a two sided marketplace and we have some AI agents or maybe some, even some people who want to train off of this conversation. Like they would have to like negotiate with us some kind of fee for entry. Right, and training. And we can like specify what those uses and abuses of the information that we generate are. And that's a form of income to us, all three of us. Right? And so that's, you know, ways in which, you know, where does the money come from? Well, it's it's it's we're generating a valuable asset. We're generating data. And that data, if it's valued by other people, you know, we will get paid for it in some sense. Right? So, that's sort of like the idea around, right, community based income. But like in the paper specifically, you know, I offer a spectrum of ways in which communities can decide, because not all communities are, are financial, right? They're non financial communities and we have to actually accommodate the spectrum, right? Some communities will issue, say, community based income, say purely non financial communities, say for example, churches based off of the time. Right? And that time, and that will allow you to buy, say, influence within your church. Right? That's like purely non financial.

Speaker 2 54:03 – 54:04

Yeah.

Speaker 0 54:04 – 54:20

Some might be more financialized and just say, okay, every, you know, periodic time we're gonna every period, like, we're just gonna auction off these tokens to the highest bidder. Right? And, you know, peak here doesn't stop that. It just makes transparent,

Speaker 2 54:23 – 54:24

Yeah.

Speaker 0 54:24 – 56:43

And right? And then there's, like, another model, which is like, okay, we're gonna have periodic inflation, and inflation is good because it actually, it's kind of a measure for growth. You know, you know, higher inflation is more sort of community growth, lower inflation is lower growth. And they might say, well, we want to, we want to take a different approach. We want to actually apportion community currency proportionate to your stakes. So people who stake more, get more people who stake less get less. Now, of course, I'm very partial to the square root here. Right? So people who stake less actually, you know, get proportionally a little bit more influence than somebody who stakes a lot. That's what the square root does. Right? If I stake, you know, 25 tokens, I have five units of influence. If I stake a 100, I have 10. And so it's diminishing work. Right. And this of course avoids, you know, capture and overreach. I'm partial to the square root. And then you can even go further and do these kind of correlation discounts and, and, you know, plural voting. But, you know, you can you can apportion this community based income in many ways. Right? And if you do it, right in that way, in the way I just suggested where it's, you know, somehow proportional to your state, whether quadratically or plural, then, you know, or even linearly, then what you do is you actually give people as time goes on some income to decide whether they want to stake for more influence or enter another communication channel and communicate with another group. And of course they have to find a willing buyer and a willing seller. And then, you know, get more information there. So you can kind of, again, back to this trade off between information and control, you can either, you know, accumulate and get novel information or you can kind of get more control, hopefully with a square root, you know, but not necessarily both, right? And so community based income allows for these kind of entries and partial exits from groups to allow for this kind of social complexity and social recombination and dynamism, that I want. So we don't so we don't get stuck, right? So we're not just stuck with our groups but actually have some mechanisms to, like, push out and bridge across difference.

Speaker 1 56:45 – 57:06

Small clarification here. Would it be possible to set some sort of conditions which would allow someone to be, like, like, excluded, banned from the community and no longer receiving CBIs or just having some sort of clear structure where they would be penalized by no no longer receiving, community based income anymore.

Speaker 0 57:06 – 59:44

Yeah. I mean, of of course. And but the the the deeper question though is what counts as a fulfillment of those conditions. Right? And so this goes back to the plurality part. Right? And the and and and making judgments within a community around justice and fairness. Right? And versus bribery and coercion because there has to you know, I'm a lawyer by training. Right? And so, you know, our job as a lawyer is to take a set of facts. Right, and and argue, at least in The United States and our adversarial system, argue on the behalf of our clients, right, and say no. Right? Our client, did not engage in a bribe. Right? Yes. The money went from Bob to Sam, but Bob was coerced. Right? And then, you know, the other and then and right? And then the other side's lawyer is gonna say, no. He was bribed. And we we, you know, we marshal our evidence. Right? And then we present it to a jury, for example. Right? And those juries, you know, when we form juries, we try to get them across multiple perspectives. Right? So we just integrate as much information, not just about, you know, the facts, but interpreting those facts and interpreting. Well, when he said, yes, was it a scary yes or was it like a fearful yes? Right? And and these contextual cues. And like this act this actually brings me to, kind of like one of the other critiques I have of like crypto academic research is like people look at bribery and coercion as like different lines of research or they don't actually even see how they're different sides of the same problem. You know, the only difference, for example, between bribery and coercion, it's not the it's not the act. It's actually the mens re and the intent. And of course, pinging these multiple perspectives, interpreting the context is important to determining what that whether that mens rea was there or not. Whether there was intent intent to accept a bribe or whether it was coerced. And it's a sort of same, you know, scaling back up to our our conversation, you know, it's the same, you know, wallet recovery and community recovery is also, you know, that's what we do when we see injustice or a bribe. But when we see, oh, okay, well this was, you know, actually sorry, when there was coercion. But when we see, oh, wait a minute, there's actually a bribe. Right? And this is not, you know, an injustice, that's when we have enforcement and punishment and burn stakes. And so these are actually two different sides of the same problem enforcement and recovery and bribery and coercion. Right? And interpreting those facts are key to enforcing the conditions and whatever those conditions a community may have. Right?

Speaker 1 59:47 – 60:02

To to to your question. Does that make sense? I would really love to dive into questions relating to AI, but I also want to ask you, what would you prefer to prioritize before we can leave it to the end because we usually do that before the quiz, but up to you.

Speaker 0 60:04 – 63:49

Sure. I mean, the the the AI part of the paper was probably the funnest part of the paper to write. And it's sort of like the it's like, you know, it's sort of like reading that paper, by the way, is like playing Zelda. You know? It's like a hero's journey. You're just, like, picking up tools all the way, and you gotta understand, okay, why didn't write you know, how does picking up tools all the way, and you gotta understand, okay. Why did why you know, how does this apply to democrat how does this change democratic governance? How does this change corporate governance? How does it address their pitfalls? How does it, you know, augment? And then and then, you know, once you've reached that, then it's like, okay. Now let's talk about AI and, like, and it's an appendix and it's fitting, but it's like the richest and coolest part of the paper. But I felt like it would be intellectually responsible to lead with it, you know, because otherwise people are just very vulnerable to making the same mistakes and not understanding, you know, the incentive problems I'm trying to solve. But yeah, I mean, look, there's a very beautiful way in which, you know, if so AI models today are arbitrary essentially weights and biases. And there's a very beautiful way in which actually the stakes, right, of communities, translate to weights and transferrable currency actually translates to biases. So to make these actually non arbitrary and embedding the structure of social networks into neural networks and seeing this as an extent sort of extended social neuron in a way that doesn't invite surveillance. Right? And so, you know, that's like a a whole a whole conversation there, but I think maybe the the the way to, appreciate it is, is to actually talk about identity a little bit, you know, and kind of what we talked about in DSOC, which was, you know, the individual in some is actually you can have a view of and this is actually psychology too. Right? There's internal family systems therapy, which sort of looks at people as parts. Right? And you can think of me like what makes Puja unique? It's my affiliations, my conversations, my communities. And so and you can also look at communities, right? And the and nation states and planets the other way around as a constellation of their individuals. They're actually equivalent ways to represent the social graph. Right? They're just inverses. Right? And so you can think about the self as like a networked self. Right? And you can think about a community and a network as like a network of individuals. Right? And they're actually like computationally equivalent. And in the AI section, what I introduce is this idea of, you know, a personal AI being a coalition actually of many community AIs negotiating each other with each other. And so, you know, I'm a community. We're in a community here together. We're gonna have a community AI that is gonna embed a little bit. Maybe the stake is, you know, we're having one conversation. It's not gonna have a lot of influence, but it's gonna be in conversation with my other sort of commitments, community AIs, and commitments I have to them negotiating. I'm like, okay. What what what is what are the permissible things I can talk about and not talk about? Like, what are the commitments to secrets that I've made? Right, with family members or like what NDAs have I signed or whatever that I can't, right, that prohibit me from publicly speaking? And what are the things, what are my obligations, say as a public servant, right, to actually disclose as much information about myself because I have power. Right? And so this idea of a networked self and the interpersonal AI being actually a constellation of many community AIs negotiating with each other, keeping us accountable to our commitments, yet at the same time synthesizing information to help us, like, bridge to, say, other coalitions, other communities, and other individuals is super powerful.

Speaker 2 63:50 – 64:34

And maybe framing that if you're okay with it through this, lens of, say, reputation and how you see tenant people effectively bringing their having their digital identities based on certain types of community interactions. Right? Where they stake, for how long, the types of decisions, what you were mentioning in terms of their general affiliation, certain kind of actions within those, and, you know, like, those constitutions of the individual parts. And so, yeah, I would just wanna make sure to, kinda hone in on that and what you really see as the benefits of kind of embedding those reputational or identity components into such a system and what that really empowers or makes available for this kind of, for the broad, whole that it constitutes

Speaker 0 64:36 – 67:39

Okay. Well, if my identity is a function of the communities to which I have staked and influenced and communicate with, so a combination of, say, transferable, nontransferable, I'm a con you know, a constellation of all my communities and conversations, so to speak, Right? Across different points in time, which is kind of just intuitively true. Right? You are kind of what you eat, and you can think about eating and consumption and, you know, words, I'll do it as also as as as food, as Thich Nhat Hanh wrote. So, like, in that sense, your reputation is a function of the constellation of communities to which you have cooperative agreements with. And so Eugene say you don't know me at all, Like and you're just from a different part of the planet. You will what you'll do is you'll try to find the shortest bridge to me, some community which there is some social proximity to. Right? And try to, right, understand me through through the lens of that community. Did did I uphold have I been burned? Have I not been burned? Say we both are, say, partial members of that community. You'll have some information based off of that. Right? Based off of my history, was I cooperative? Was I non cooperative? Did I accept a bribe? You know, or not. Right? And that's how you form reputation. Now the thing here is it's not I want to I want to talk about this like surveillance problem because this was raised in DSOC. The model that I'm presenting here is actually one that maps on to sort of the structures of kind of the universe. It's like a good example, like a good analogy, to understanding how I'm thinking about this. You know, we're we're sort of like in different solar systems, some people are in different galaxies, and like the time it takes for you to learn about what's happening in different galaxies, we don't limit it by the speed of light, obviously, but it takes longer for you to know what's happening, right, in Alpha Centauri than it does to you understand what's happening on earth. Right. And that's actually good. That's like a desirable systems property. We don't wanna ride over that. We actually wanna embed that, in my opinion. And by the way, this is against the trends in in crypto as well, which is like right? Yeah. Right? And MEB games and the sort of latency games and right? And so what I'm actually doing is, like, taking the structure of social networks and expressing social distance and relational social distance. So no two participants have the same perspective. And, like, your ability to reach me is a function of, like, where our overlaps are and where where to the extent that we don't have overlaps, the extent to which you can find the shortest bridge, and you're gonna have to pay for that bridge. You're gonna have to pay to enter channels, the price of attention, and it's going to and tunnel your way down. And the cost of tunneling your way down to get to me and influence me will increase the closer you get to home. Right? And so the greater distance that you have to travel physically or socially, relationally increases, I mean, the price the price of the price of getting my attention or the price of influencing me. Right? So did did I answer your question?

Speaker 2 67:40 – 67:49

Well, I guess just then to to clarify, so that, that that distance, so to say, makes sense. And so how does that tie into the full kind of digital,

Speaker 0 67:50 – 68:29

reputation and identity element? So the idea is that like you there's no sort of universal reputation for puja. It's a function of where you sit relative to me in this network, right, of many currencies overlapping, recombining, increasing in complexity. And your view of my reputation will be very different from somebody who's closer to me. Right. And even two people who are say socially proximate to me might have very different views of my reputation based off of the overlap. Right? Because they have different kinds of overlap. So reputation is not a universal score. Right? Yeah.

Speaker 2 68:30 – 68:42

It's less about ticking certain, checks off a long list of potential reputation and much more the unique combination of your, constitute of factors and makes it much more relative and plural in that sense.

Speaker 0 68:43 – 69:25

Yeah. It also makes it richer because, say, like, you know, we're say I'm trying to form a coalition within a broader subnetwork and I'm trying to establish myself as being reputable. Right. And trustworthy. I want to be a leader of this subnetwork. Right. Multiple members of that subnetwork will have different bridges to me and together they can ping across the very different bridges. Right? And the very different members to get a picture of me that is more holistic yet at the same time, a picture that nobody else or any other coalition will be able to generate. Right? Because everybody has partial perspectives. Right? Does that make sense?

Speaker 2 69:25 – 69:28

And yeah. I think from here cosmological

Speaker 0 69:28 – 69:33

analogy, but, like, you know, I like I like to I like looking at the stars and talking about planets

Speaker 2 69:34 – 70:05

and, like, you know, but but maybe I lost people there. No. I I think it's an interesting framing because we can even for those right? I I'd like to think Webb three probably has a higher proportion of people who hopefully are thinking of things in systems and not just the, you know, individual parts. And it's easy to forget that, you know, like, when you're putting it in the cosmological perspective, the the distance feels much more real, just because it's hard to fathom just how far it is. And so, yeah, I actually see that as a as a pretty useful analogy there, at least personally.

Speaker 0 70:06 – 70:39

And, like, you know, it's kind of like it's it's kinda cool too because people who are far away, but maybe, say, super influential, right, within their communities. They'll they'll sort of disappear to me as kinda like dark matter. Right? It's like, I see there's something going on here. I don't really understand it. And then I'm gonna start of partially and incrementally bridge my way, right, to those to that group, through through the, you know, degrees of overlap and, like, you know, pay pay to get there. And, yeah. Anyway

Speaker 1 70:40 – 71:10

In your conversation with Teller, you mentioned that you see the idea of community currencies being nested under network currencies. Well, our podcast is governance futures, and if we were to fast forward to a world where all communities or many, launch their currencies and members understand and interact with PCare, how would that world look like? And, for example, would we still have the same currencies that we use today, BTC, if

Speaker 0 71:11 – 75:04

Yeah. They'd just be less relevant and less valuable. Right? So in the sense that those currencies are solving you know, global currencies are relevant for communicating. Another another title that I floated by the way for this paper was not community currencies, but communication currencies. Mhmm. But I settled settled on community because it conveyed the group. And all communication happens in groups, but people don't realize that. Right? So, you know, global currencies will be good for global communication challenges. But, you know, if they're more valuable, you know, than local currencies, if if, right, then there's a problem where I risk selling out grandma. Nobody wants to sell out grandma. Right? So you have to have some grounding in your in your local communities and have some degree of local control, but you also don't want that obviously stifling. You want it to be dynamic and recombining and, like, you know, not sclerotic, right, which is the plurality incentive tries to solve that. But, you know, there's a place for global currencies, just not as big of a place as they have today. If you if you if we kind of continue on this path of what I call money majoritarianism, which is, you know, wedding back back to this idea of an attention auction, financial auctions converging with attentional auction attention auctions to four oligopolies, right, then we're kind of stuck with just a handful of systems at best. And of course those systems will have incentives for conformity, to maintain control. Right? The, that 20% will want to maintain their control and that leads to, you know, things like ethno nationalism, and homogeneity, which is bad for innovation and bad for living forever if that's your thing, you know, since a lot of people are motivated by that and crypto. It's actually bad for the kind of scientific innovation you need to solve those problems. But, I've given talks about that at length. You know, so this this trend towards sort of global oligopoly, you know, will will have these kind of vertical integration effects and and attention and culture and art, which are just like and also sclerotic in their own way and maybe even a deeper way, than our current crises. And so, there is a role for BTC and ETH, but, not as big of a role and one where it's channeled towards sort of productive coordination, not, you know, speculation and zero sum zero sum speculation or at worst, negative sum antisocial behavior, which I think, meme coins effectively are. They they they don't they don't just create adverse selection in markets and keep good people out of it because they can't be differentiated from the bad people. They also tunnel our attention away from productive activities towards zero sum activities. And where our attention is tunneled away from productive activities towards zero sum act activities, that actually becomes negative sum. Right? So I would say that it wouldn't, you know, usher in a new economy and also change the nature of these currencies, more global currencies towards more and higher productive uses instead of engendering, you know, zero sum and and at at best and at worst, negative sum games.

Speaker 1 75:05 – 75:56

We've heard you use a phrase to the fact of legitimacy take root in local communities. And while a lot of our social time is spent in communities, whether it's in person or digital, it can be argued that tech and advertising attempt to influence us in a way that often pull us away from our local communities, both in person and digital. So what would be your take on that? Do you see, for example, PCare, the community currency idea, as something that can help us to reorient back or maybe maybe not? If, we're also bringing some of the examples of, you know, increased loneliness epidemic. People are connected, but are they really? So I'll be curious to hear your thoughts on that.

Speaker 0 75:56 – 79:59

Yeah. So there are two questions in there, actually. So the the first one on on can we bring back the local and, and then the second one on legitimacy and why, why legitimacy is sort of tethered to that. To your point, Jarmila, there's actually, of course, questions about the nature in which social media is changing our hearts, maybe pushing us into our heads too much. Right? And and as Steve Jobs said, follow follow your heart, but check it with your head. It seems like we're following our head and and failing to check it with our heart. Right? So, you know, bringing us back to, in person interactions is is I think, you know, very important, for for our health, the health of our heart and the health of health of our species. But, you know, the reason why it's also important for legitimacy, is in person interactions are actually so much more denser in information and less compressive than, being on social media, which is compressed to words or even just trading tokens. That's, you know, money in some sense is the most compressive form of communication. And voting is very compressive. Money and voting both are very compressive. So actual communication, is the most information rich, you know, in person communication. Because there's all kinds of things I can gather from you, you know, including your vibes. That's not obvious. Right? Including, you know, when you say something, are your palms sweaty? Are you, you know, are you do you have social cues that would suggest maybe that you're anxious? Right? Like, all of that actually you want the integration of that information into judgments about justice and fairness. Right? And so, subsidiarity matters for that reason in building enforcement mechanisms that build on these local interactions that are information rich, that with incentives to push information out and form new groups. So we're not stuck in our local communities inform new ones and recombine into new groups, but also scale up into network cooperation. So I would say it's it's yes, local communities are very important for legitimacy and in person interactions. But also incredibly important for the other side of this project, which is networked cooperation and stable cooperation. So we can keep solving problems and not just sort of get, you know, stuck in a balkanized epistemic environment, which is what we are in now. Right? And so we can form going back to the start of the conversation, Eugene, about common knowledge. So we can form common knowledge and bridge communication gaps and form new groups and refine language and refine coherence. You know, coherence not just as an individual, you know, as a self, but as a networked self, right, across communities. Coherence and commitments, coherence and what we mean by certain words, and that coherence and language scales into coherence and economic cooperation. And then we can and then we can do things like expand other planets much faster because we just have less communicative gaps and we have shared commitments, we're on the same page at different scales, right? So it's not just I don't I don't wanna create this impression that I'm like, we gotta go local, you know, and oog. Like, I actually do wanna get you know, I do wanna I I, you know, I like the I I love science fiction. I love space. I love exploration. If anybody who knows me is knows I'm an explorer and I'm, like, you know, very curiosity driven, curiosity motivated, and not just in the mental realms, but the physical realms. And so, like, how do we get there? Like, with legitimacy, with justice and fairness, making people feel like they're not, you know, their voices are heard, bridged, but, you know, dealt with in a legitimate way so we can move on and not get stuck in the sort of sclerotic corporate governance or sclerotic democratic governance that we have today.

Speaker 1 80:00 – 80:14

Yeah. I feel like a couple of questions, more towards the future of governance or future of experimentation. What research and experiments do you want to see that you think would help enable PKR based systems?

Speaker 0 80:15 – 83:40

Well, I think we've seen the spectrum of hyper financialization. So the most interesting experiments for me are the ones between, you know, that are nonfinancial and and or at the sort of nonfinancial slash financial. So civil society groups kind of have to grapple with this tension, right, and are facing also legitimacy crises, like, you know, churches, universities, think tanks. Right? They have to accept money. But, of course, if you actually work in a lot of these people, most a lot of people are, you know, especially in, like, think tanks are, like, non financially motivated. They, like, forego very lucrative careers to try to come up with the right answer for public policy or whatever it is. Like and and then their intention with their donors. Right? And so, PCare is an attempt to reconcile, right, those tensions and enable experimentation, you know, on on on the influence of of money and say, you know, and art and expressing, making very clear, not just to say members of a think tank, but even like, you know, the broader public audience, like what it what are the economic incentives? How is this think tank socially contextualized? What what can I expect its biases to be? Right? So I think civil society groups that have to straddle this, you know, both worlds are are very important starting point. Social media, you know, I've been talking about communication channels broadly, but very literally, you know, social media is a communication channel. And I think it could, you know, back to the common knowledge, point become much more useful, and expressive if we enable groups and express groups, you know, and there's there's the broad x channel, but there's also other nested channels. And that would also open up a whole new, opportunity for influencing the direction of these social media platforms that actually overcome the limitations of growth which they're facing. Right? We see this bulk balkanization, for example, happening. And it's actually like, on the one hand, people might feel good that they're with their tribe, but on the other hand, the reach of these platforms are far more limited because they have become balkanized. Right? And and so if you're if you're, you know, Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, the trick is to actually reach more people. And you do that by reducing your influence and allowing the influence of the participants and groups to come in there and find consensus across difference, take your polarity subsets, stress test them, right, with proposals. Right? And then you kind of approach the paradox of a decentralized monopoly. And so you get the benefits of both. Right? You get the benefits of decentralization and inputs and feedback from the set of participants. You get their context. You get, you know, bridging, but you also get the benefits benefits of everybody having a a forum at different social scales to engage in, right, and coordinate. And I think, you know, that's what actually, you know, charitably, I would say that people, you know, including Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg probably want. They just don't understand the information economics and control economics and the convergence of the two, which is why I spend so much time talking about, you know, both both sides of the equation. Does that make sense?

Speaker 2 83:40 – 84:19

Yeah. And I think to maybe double click into that a little more because I I love that vision. And, I mean, in general, everything that you're outlining in PCare just sounds like such a healthier version of society if we were built on that. But there's always just the, like, what's the first step? And so, I guess, to add the follow on question of, you know, in the next three, six, twelve months or whatever version of the near term future feels reasonable, you know, do you have or rather, if you could have any communities in the world start launching their own community currencies, where would you wanna see it start in in the near term? Civil society organizations,

Speaker 0 84:19 – 85:07

I think experiments in in social media that I'm not I'm not bullish on that because all of those actors are sort of stuck on the anarcho capitalist fontoquinone model and enter entering the mind majoritarianism game, which doesn't work. Music, I think, is very promising. You know, I think, fundamentally, you know, and this this kinda goes to a point in the paper when I when I when I get lost in, like, the cosmos, going back to the stars, you know. You can kinda think of stars in in in the universe as these shining points of light. Right? And that light takes some distance to travel. And and, you know, that's, you know, that's those are, you know, non financialized little objects. That's where family is, faith, love. Right?

Speaker 2 85:08 – 85:08

Yeah. And,

Speaker 0 85:09 – 85:25

and, you can't buy a star. And if you try to, then, you end up creating a probably a Dyson sphere and a black hole. And I do wonder how many black holes are failed AI poke and one poke route and just lost control. But,

Speaker 2 85:26 – 85:34

but, thought about it that way. That it that creates a different, frame towards looking to the stars at night. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a wild one.

Speaker 0 85:34 – 86:56

So like, you know, the faith and family groups are just the most unrepresented populations in even say social media and AI. Right? And and this is like the most important thing to like being a human. Right? Is your family and your and and even your faith. And and there's a you know, to the extent that we can build tools that are healthy for our kids, that that secure a better, more promising future and give them an inheritance, right, which we inherited, right, and improve and keep this notion of progress. Right? This is these are actually enlightenment ideas and continue the principles of the enlightenment, but transformed and renovated for the digital age. Right? And not push us back five hundred years to, you know, medieval anarcho capitalism, which ends, you know, with the global economy and CCP or Russia at best, you know, and and feudalism and right? Like, to the extent we can actually build something that is richer, more expressive, more dynamic, and more innovative, and more growth oriented, and, like, takes us out to the stars. Like, you know, we have to start looking at our as our at our children and our family and our connections as the sources of light, you know, and the stars in our own

Speaker 2 86:57 – 87:23

sky. And that that does feel like such a a beautiful note to end the the conversation before we transition to the quiz, which is the final part of how we do the podcast. But I guess before we do, I just wanna make sure to give you the opportunity because I know there are so many, you know, ideas within your paper, and that you worked on. Is there anything that you wanted to make sure to bring up during this conversation that we have not come across so far?

Speaker 0 87:24 – 92:26

Yeah. I wanna point to this, like, I'll get a little bit nerdy here, because I I am a law and economics nerd. And bridging and I'm not a computer scientist by training. Right? Like, I'm just bridging principles here, and intuitions and and, you know, I'll sorry, law economics and philosophy. So, you know, there's some, you know, history doesn't repeat, it rhymes. And there are some principles that we've learned in the past that we can import here. And I think there's this sort of methodological mistake, that was actually partially imported from economics and classical economics in particular, which just assumes that individuals are like independent agents. Right? And so this has motivated lots of, thinking, you know, around ideas that that are actually interesting and promising but limited, and and don't reach their full potential because you're just looking at the outputs, the expressed preferences, the revealed outcomes, of the participants in the system. And you're not looking at the inputs, the information, right? The attention problem. And when you just look at everything as like a control problem and it's like okay let's just assume that people control this, you know people control this and let's, you know, make sure they control it and build wallets which are self sovereign, but you don't actually look at the information side and what are the inputs going into those people's brains and what's the, you know, the structure of the communication networks. If you just end up solving for that, then you hit, you know, major roadblocks. And like the Idina paper was about that. It was about like, look, you can solve for civil resistance. You can have one person, one account, but you still have people being puppeteered like by bots because they're informationally controlled by people who know more and control more resources. And like that is not a, you know, a human it's not human agency there, right? That actually is, is worse because it's opaque, right? So you have this optics of control, you know, individual self sovereign control, but actually, you know, they're you know, the the reality is like puppeteering and none of that stuff shows up on chain. And since since this is largely a crypto audience, I just wanna point to limitations of designing systems for for, you know, for just, you know, on chain observable outcomes assuming, you know, homo economicus, you know, rationality and and independence. The reality is that we're interdependent and we talk and we converse and we have asymmetries of information and we can't eliminate those asymmetries, but we can leverage them. And, you know, so like one example of this and I give into the paper is like a critique of proofs of proofs of complete knowledge. And since you've had like, you know, some folks who've worked on that in your podcast before, like, I'll I'll just use that as an example. You know, a proof of complete knowledge is this kind of ex ante safeguard, which, requires participants to prove that they can use their private king whatever way that they want. And and the idea is that since they, you know, if they cannot deliver a proof of encumbrance to somebody who's trying to bribe them, that's evidence that, you know, that they control their account and the briber would never actually bribe them because they can't credibly sell or render voting rights. But like you can have these proofs, right? And they prove that the keys are, say, unencumbered on chain, but people can still relinquish control off chain, right, through coercion or information manipulation, as you know, the IDINA experiment showed. And so the kind of ideas that I'm talking about, you know, they, they actually help backstop these very interesting tools developed by the research community, and make them, you know, credibly backstopped by off chain agency. Right? You need to a lot of the conversation today, we've been talking about tensions between money and voting, attention and influence and information control. Well, you know, another tension is on chain and off chain, and you have to design systems that acknowledge all of right? Everything that I'm talking about, all those tensions to deal with this on chain, off chain problem. And to the extent that we enable the representation of communities, right, and social recombination and pushing, pushing information out through plural plurality and increasing, you know, the depth of information through subsidiary, so it's increasing the breadth and depth of context in human communication, we actually super linearly increase the price of influence and attention. So you can rely on a proof, you know, like complete knowledge to actually, you know, communicate information on chain and off chain. So, you know, I see this as like, these are two research agendas that need to be bridged, and I hope they are bridged. But, yeah, I just wanted to give you my law and economics, you know, nerdy perspectives. Sorry. I diverted us from, you know, the stars in the sky to a proofs of complete knowledge, but they are related.

Speaker 2 92:27 – 94:06

They definitely are. And, yeah, no. I appreciate the additional perspective that you presented there and for all the the work and thought you put into this broadly. But, yeah, unfortunately, we are, limited with time, and I appreciate you, going as long with us as you have. So So I figure we can transition to the last portion of the podcast, which is our quiz part where I'll be asking you four questions total. Please try to keep answers to one word. We know some of these are, bigger than one word answers. Hyphenates are okay if needed, but we do prefer one word answers as possible. And so the first question for you is the key ingredient for coordination is? Trust. What gives you the most hope when thinking about the future of decentralized communities? Plurality. What is the most misused word in a Web three governance today? Plurality. I love the speed we wish that came. And then the last but not least, what is the future of governance in one word? Oh, man. I don't wanna give the same answer. There's no rule against repeat answers. Say plurality again. Let me give a different one. Yeah. I know. I actually I can't I can't think of a better word than to than than the the pair the plurality paradigm. It's so rich. Got it. Well, yeah, Puja, thank you so much for joining us today. It was great getting to dive into to this paper and some of your ideas before and beyond the paper as well. So, yeah, thank you so much for joining us for the conversation today. Thank you so much, Eugene. Thank you so much,

Speaker 0 94:06 – 94:07

Jamila. Jamila?

Speaker 2 94:08 – 94:30

Yes. Yes. Thank you so much for coming. It was a pleasure having you. Thanks for tuning in. The Governance Futures podcast is sponsored by the Skrull Foundation and produced by the governance team at the foundation, Jamila Kamalova and Eugene Leventhal. Any music and photos are attested in the episode description. Feel free to subscribe, leave a review, or share with a friend. Until next time.

S.1 Ep.11 Plurality, Community Currencies, and the Future of Networked Governance with Puja Ohlhaver

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