They all say the same thing. Wow. It was exciting at the beginning and boring at the end. Oh, my gosh. It got really hard to get people to care and vote.

a representative

in your spread sheet of all of the tiny things that went on behind the scenes. How you see different technologies that are already coming up, whether AI or otherwise, that, you know, can make us effectively enhanced

participants in governance systems. Whenever I have any free time, I always wanna make a game. It's very hard for me to play board games because I get jealous of the people that made them, and I want to make them myself. So I always turn jealousy into creativity.

Hello, and welcome to governance futures, the podcast where we explore the past, present, and future of decentralized governance. I'm Eugene.

We just had the pleasure of talking to Amber Case, who is a technologist and start up entrepreneur, and I feel like too many hyphenates to quickly add into a simple introduction. But, Jamila, how did you think the conversation with Case went?

Yeah. Likewise. That was such a a fun conversation, and I realized that just in the first question when a case started talking about cyborg anthropology, and I believe case mentioned that it was an actual major. I'm like, hold up. If we start digging into this, we're just gonna spend an hour on Cyborg Anthropology. So I had to hold that follow-up back. But, yeah, it was just such a fun conversation. I really appreciate CASE's perspective at the intersection of just a lot of different disciplines. And CASE has such robust knowledge and always pulls from the historical and the anthropological in ways that just add such useful context when really trying to grapple with issues. So, yeah, the design element, the game and simulation element, like you mentioned, the cyborg anthropology element, all these were just such fun and different angles to get to talk about governance from. So, yeah, I really enjoyed the conversation overall as I hope will our listeners. And so please do subscribe, like, and listen wherever you're hearing this. Feel free to share with a friend. Feel free to reach out to us if you wanna chat about anything. And here's the conversation with Case. Thank you so much for joining us today, Case. Really excited to jump into the conversation. And to kick things off, I wanted to ask you a question, about your book in which you explore how technologies ranging from phones to different platforms that are used these days are all pretty much playing one way or another into turning us into cyborgs by shaping how we live, how we remember, how we interact. And, you know, given we're a governance podcast, we wanna extend that lens to the world of governance and start the conversation by seeing, you know, how you think our cyborg selves, so to put it, are reshaping participation, accountability, and legitimacy in online communities, and DAOs? Sure.

So, my first book is called an illustrated dictionary Dictionary of Cyborg Anthropology. It came out of a Wiki that I started in 2010 that someone installed for me as a birthday present. And I started writing these pages and, really talking about different kinds of words. So some of the words were like panic architecture when there's too much stuff that's that's happening in your life or, you know, like like the idea of I'm just looking at a couple of these things, like diminished reality instead of augmented reality, where you, where you make an augmented reality heads up display that, that cancels out the reality you don't wanna see. Based on Steve Mann's iTAP heads up display wearable. So he could say, I don't wanna see advertising. I'm gonna detect ads and billboards, cancel them out and put my own research papers that I'm reading on them. So I can read research papers while I'm walking down the street and use this one handed keyboard to type to people. And I was just really, really interested in in college when I took my degree in cyborg anthropology and anthropology and sociology that this was even a a field. So cyborg anthropology is the study of the interaction between humans and technology, how technology affects culture. It's also the, it's it's been midwifed into existence by my professor Deborah Heath, Ellerson Clark College. She's a very interesting person who studies things like biodynamic wine and foie gras. And she also, was one of two researchers on the human genome project looking at, networks of of science and information and how those flowed. Cyborg Anthropology, came out in 1993, I believe, is a subsection of the anthropology of science. The term cyborg is not robocop or terminator. It comes from a 1960 paper on space travel in which the definition goes exogenous components are added to organisms to adapt to new ambient spaces, which in clear language is any creature, any living creature that adds something to themselves in order to do something differently, is a cyborg. So it doesn't need to be permanently attached, installed into your brain. Anyone who puts on a pair of flippers to go into the ocean or a pair of glasses to see better is a type of cyborg. You would call someone wearing glasses a restorative cyborg. You would call someone with a heads up display that can see infrared an enhanced cyborg because it's enhanced over the norm line. And the, the definition that was about space travel, it was here, you're going to put on the space suit to go into a new ambient space, literally space to, to be able to be okay. And adapt. You can look at animals using tools. You can look at horses with saddles. There's all sorts of different shapes and systems that we could consider cyborg. Someone with an insulin pump might be a higher tech cyborg than someone who is wearing a hat to go outside to protect themselves from the sun. So I was really interested in that. Also a lot of these terms, I was originally putting them on a Wiki and usually in Wiki, if you look at, at the, the software Wiki itself, if you're not familiar, you know, everyone's used Wikipedia. The software behind Wikipedia is called MediaWiki. MediaWiki, came out of the very first Wiki, c2.org made by Ward Cunningham, who also helped make the Agile manifesto. He started Wiki as a way for him and his friends to make an online decentralized study group for Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language, which is a book all about how to make shared spaces, how to make group houses, how to make sure people don't go crazy around each other, and how to make human scale design. So it's a beautiful thing that in their study group, they created this software to help them study and in doing so make something that was very similar to both Christopher Alexander and the Tao Te Ching. The reason why is the Tao Te Ching is one of the, one of my favorite translations of the Tao Te Ching is by this person named Peter Merrill. So when I first met Ward Cunningham on Wiki Wednesday in Portland, Oregon in like 2008, which happened to be my birthday. And I thought for my birthday present, as I told the audience, I would like to meet Ward Cunningham because I love wikis. And he sat down with me for two and a half or three hours and just answered every single question. I showed him the software I had installed, and he showed me that Wiki is interesting Because on a blog, your blog comments tend to go to seed, as in there's a lot of spam or the blog kinda goes old over time. But on a Wiki, every error page is an opportunity. So every time you create a page, it's red and you click on it and it says, there's no text in this page. Do you want to make it? And so you end up having these beautiful, resilient communities that build. And then you also have a bunch of communities that just read. So it's, it's fantastic. I have my own Wiki. It's got about 3,000,000 views. It's got about over a thousand articles that I've handwritten, and I've been keeping this thing alive for a long time as kind of a knowledge garden. Now out of that, these weird terms that I wrote down, I worked with an illustrator and we produced this dictionary of cyber organ anthropology. So along the way, I started going to Wiki conferences. There was a thing called recent changes. That's a tab in Wikipedia where you can look at recent changes on articles, especially an article like let's say Michael Jackson on the date he died is going to have a lot of edits. Everybody wants to be the first person to change the Wikipedia article. If you're a Wiki nerd like me, heck yeah, that would be fun. So you need to look, you can look at the recent changes. You there's also edit history. So you can see who made the changes, what IP address they're in, what's their user account, what changes they made, and you can also reverse and roll back. So for trolled pages or very, difficult pages that might be controversial, you're going to be able to have Wiki admins evil either be able to lock the page for some time or even write bots that can go in and help. If you look at the insides of MediaWiki and Meta Wikipedia and all of these things, there's an incredibly well made set of governance. And even with my own single use single member Wikipedia install, media Wiki install, I was putting categories on pages that said draft and unfinished and finished and using that to work with the illustrator and the editor to produce the book. It made the process very beautiful. So I think about this a lot because, you know, going to recent changes camp, a camp just for a tab in Wikipedia was incredible because behind the scenes to bring something like Wikipedia to life, there is a lot of governance. So I was really interested in writing that book to, in a sense, make the invisible visible as we were transitioning out of a more analog or very much like a transmissive media era where the information is being delivered to you by a television or a rewrite, era into social media where we have a kind of container ship for our soul or a template itself that we're filling in, and there's kind of some database game of plus one like and plus one follower. I just wanted to create some new weird language or at least capture some of the existing language to get people into a metacognitive understanding about what was going on online and, how they could even govern govern the self. Of course, I read a lot of Dao De Ching. So part of it's about governing the self. Part of it's about governing a group. But on the other hand, you know, being able to present that self in everyday life, there's Erving Goffman's presentation of self in everyday life. There's also presentation of self in digital life. There's instas and finstas, you know, the, the, the thing you present to yourself virtually that, that looks like an influencer is very fancy. And then the real one behind the scenes that you share with your friends. Early on, there was an anime called serial experiments lane, which was made by some people who used to work at, at apple. They. Actually talked about here's this girl who's I think about 14 years old with some mousy hair, she's extremely shy and yet she becomes bigger online than, she is in real life. And so this was really interesting to, to look at that. And then this term that I found called hyper sigil, which is this idea that you can make something outside of yourself and that extended identity can then manage and influence your primary identity. So this is an idea of where this came from. And one more thing that's that maybe you could put at the beginning is the term Wiki actually comes from a Hawaiian term for quick. There's a Wiki Wiki shuttle at the, at the airport that Ward Cunningham was at in Hawaii. And it says the Wiki Wiki shuttle, the quick quick shuttle. So he named the software Wiki for quick. And I think it's just a nice little tidbit of it is pretty quick once you get used to it.

Yes. Yeah. And I guess as we're talking about these elements of, you know, especially with the way that you were framing it with the, you know, enhanced, say, cyborg elements. And I guess, like, leading into this general conversation where, you know, we wanna explore the future of governance. You know, it'd be interesting to hear what some thoughts are on your side of how you see different technologies that are already coming up, whether AI or otherwise, that, you know, can make us effectively enhanced participants in governance systems and how that can be, I guess, start with the beneficial side and maybe we'll we'll touch on some of the not so beneficial or scary sides later in the conversation.

You know, I I think everyone likes to quote Marshall McLuhan, the idea of, like, every affordance has, like, a a taking away on the other side that there's all all almost like law of conservation of effort and affordance. And there is a sense of, you know, why why I tried to make this game called DAO game, was that I noticed that people would participate in DAOs and they would be very excited at the beginning. Let's make a DAO, almost like let's make a new band. And then once you have to deal with the press and, you know, booking your tours and practicing, a lot of those same people who were so excited at the beginning, they're like, I don't really wanna do this anymore. This is actual work. And so there's that dopamine that's associated with the genesis of an idea that's separate from the doing of the idea. And so what I noticed in DAOs as I started to get really heavily into DAOs, like dinner DAO and things that have real money involved, and interviewing people who did constitution DAO, is that almost pretesting what you do before you do it can really help. I was very inspired by, some of the simulation tools that you would use to do circuits, like Spice from 1974 that someone showed me. The idea is that it's very expensive to build a circuit board in real life. So why don't you have a simulation of what's going to happen first so you can have a run through of it, then you can decide whether that would be the circuit board to implement. So with DAOs and DAO game, which I made in one night, I was staying up really, really late at a friend's house. They were moving out. They said, come over for complexity weekend, which is an online, conference in the, like, England time zone. So we're staying up really late. And then I was so excited about all of the ideas that I was seeing and the fact that Peter Mural was there. Like, I actually got to meet him for the first time. I I was so excited. We had eaten really good food, and they put me up in this room that's completely empty except for a salt lamp. There's nothing in the room at all. Now I brought almost nothing with me because I'm just staying at their house a night before before they move. And so I'm, I'm inspired. And whenever I have any free time, I always want to make a game. I'm very, it's very hard for me to play board games because I get jealous of the people that made them and I want to make them myself. So I always turn jealousy into creativity. And it's very rare that I'm jealous. I'm not jealous. Like if somebody says I went on a great vacation, I'm like, that's cool. But if somebody says I made magic, the gathering, I would be like, oh, I wanna make that. And because I know you, now I'll be more likely to be able to make a successful game. Success for me is not money. It's about, getting people in a room to be delighted or change how they experience the world. So early on when I was doing a software company, I made my own custom sellers of Catan game out of, like, craft store parts. It was fully articulated grass and sheep and wood and all of these little things. We we would play this a lot. But I wanted to make a new game. And so DAO game was let's have blank cards that are laminated. Let's be able to draw our ideas, start the DAO, have your governance tokens represent it really, really fast, and let's make it a party game. So it's even better if people are at a party, if they are on some psychedelic, if they're drunk, if they're stoned, whatever party things people do, oftentimes there's a big group house and people are all into crypto. So it's very easy to run. The idea is just to get people together to experience that joy at the beginning. And then just like real life, you can see the falloffs that person's in the bathroom, that person left the party. They have voting tokens. How do we get that to happen? We even have challenge cards where it says somebody lost their private keys. So it was all about trying to get people to experience what it was actually like over six months to two years in a very compressed space of maybe forty five minutes to two hours.

No. Oddly, every single time it's been played, the same thing has happened again and again and again, no matter who the people are and what their backgrounds are. So I can take someone who's never been part of a DAO. I can take people who, have been part of a co op. I can take super creative people and super uncreative people. At the end of the game, they all say the same thing. Wow. It was exciting in the beginning and boring at the end. Oh my gosh. It got really hard to get people to care and vote.

Absolutely. Yeah. Two two hours is definitely sufficient because forty five minutes in, you can already see what's what's going to happen. Governance is a marathon. It's it's difficult, and I love Eric Olsen's paper, you know, pre conflict as governance. You wanna pre conflict and get things out. Kirsten MacLean, who's a master chief in the coast guard and and, you know, Zargam's partner, who you know, I lived in the group house with with Zargam and everybody for a long time. I would always interview her about, you know, you're running the leadership academy. What are you seeing? And there is a whole method that they use to conflict. And there's a training academy that's, you know, two weeks long where you go through this and you also go through something very important. Doesn't matter if it's analog or digital, you really need to do it on paper first is memos. So every governance proposal, is a, also a memo. So I didn't want to go into dowser governance without experience. So thankfully I had experience being, I think the second youngest board member of any college in The United States. When I was, I guess, like 26 or 27, I managed a, I think it was like $350,000,000 endowment or something ridiculous. I served on the board for three years with old money people, learned a lot, and, you know, tried to make the best decisions I could with the information that I had. But I noticed a lot of different things. I mean, I noticed first off that governance doesn't happen on paper. The, the record of governance, the record on the blockchain is a representative in your spreadsheet of all of the tiny things that went on behind the scenes and the people that are able to write effective proposals, that are clear, that tell people what to do and gather that information are going to do well. Also, you know, behind the scenes on the phone tree, you might get a call at midnight. Hey, we're gonna vote this way. Vote this way. Right. And it depends on who your allegiances are. You can have a board of 20 people and 10 of those people think that they're actually voting, but the other 10 have talked about what they're going to do behind the scenes for the last six months. And they're all working in unison. So you can have different levels of understanding and information. And I see this on a lot of boards, actually. And I've started to interview, you know, people on larger boards and, you know, more exclusive boards that you can have your token hires on a board that feel like they're participating, but they're not actually part of the governance because the government's done at a country club. So if you get invited to the country club, congratulations. Now you can be part of governance. Or if you are really good at oration and public speaking, like I trained to do, I can be the last one talking and sway the vote. And so it's a it's a it's a completely strange thing. So I think there's there's a lot to be learned from government systems that have existed for a long time, whether that's a coop, grocery store, sororities, fraternities, a fifty year long hobby train club, a chrysanthemum club, Toastmasters for speaking, competitive speech and debate. There's so many different, systems that can be analog or digital. It doesn't really matter if it's digital, but you do need to have a quick way of calling everybody up. So, you know, the stereotype of like Lyndon Johnson, one of the presidents of The United States, having so many phones everywhere is, is important because you do need to have a fast way of getting in touch. And and a lot of times it's a phone. It's it's not like, oh, this person's in Venezuela on this, you know, yoga retreat finding themselves. Well, this vote that you've set up to close within twenty four hours is within the window of their silent retreat that's tech free. Well, you should have figured that out earlier. Well, that means that you need to be closer to the people that you're voting with. So it's a strange thing. I I I made this talk called how to eight ways to hack a DAO, which is that it's really easy to hack them because most people don't have governance experience, and they're not super resilient because that's a hard training to be metacognitive as well as voting. And what is it? You know you know, law is reason free from passion or whatever, the quote from, Legally Blonde. But, I think it is is really about that. How do you how do you have a community? And I think for for a lot of things, like looking at ultimate Frisbee, for instance, or sororities, fraternities, you have rushes, you have fun, silly events in which governance is done with pizza, and you have incentives to do governance, and a lot of it's in real life. And so the governance is really shifted into these rituals. And it's the same, you know, going out to Eastern Oregon and, talking with tribes out there, like, how's your governance done? Well, we take three years to do this, and you have to be this in the community. It's not like join our Slack channel, and we'll upgrade you to this thing within two weeks. It's watch how somebody participates long term and see if they're stable, and then slowly wrap them into the community as they're proving themselves. You can ask GPT about this a lot. Like what are some of the hidden aspects of country clubs that people don't talk about? Because there's the overt idea of joining the country club. And then there's the covert idea of joining the country club, which is join and don't sit at a table, sit at the bar. Someone will, someone has to tap you for membership. Of course. Right. You have to be a trusted member of the community or two people have to vouch you, which I'm seeing a lot of coa, you know, co living spaces start to do. And then you've got the, someone will give you a piece of juicy information, but not too juicy. And that is basically your stain test for cell. Like, when when you're when you're doing like a, you know, a cell sample, you're, you're, you're putting a stain to see where it goes in your body. Basically, this is their stain test. So it's, here's a little bit of juicy information, but it's not too juicy. Let's see where it goes. They want to see first, if you spread it. Two, where does it go? Who are you connected to? And then doing an analog sting test to see who you're connected to in the community. Now, if you go into lower class members of the community, older members of the community, those in bad standing, those in good standing, that's one thing. But two, if you don't share that info, they'll trust you with more and more pieces of information. And a lot of it's longevity. Have you been in the club for twenty years? You know? You shouldn't come in wearing a Rolex on your first day even if you have one. You should be demure. Right? Because you're signaling that you're willing to be part of a collective and participate over time and work within those rules. Right? So now there are all sorts of people like, we're gonna make everything from scratch. Let's not study the past. It's like all of the past is the same. It's all the same stuff. It doesn't matter if it's a Republican or Democrat. It does it it's all about humans and how they work, and we are collective creatures. So there are structures that are very slow, moving structures for a reason, and I am finding a lot of people from scratch who are governance scholars, who are first not studying country clubs and sororities, and two rediscovering all of the things that work, not to dig on anybody. This stuff is exciting. It's just there's oftentimes these kind of classic things that don't change. And as an anthropologist, I don't care who's doing it, what group it is. I wanna know. Is there some general principles that are the same, no matter what community you're part of as a human thing? And then can we also look at animals? You know, is there some general framework that works? And is, of course, why, you know, me and everybody else loves, you know, Elinor Ostrom and graduated sanctions and and all of these things because you're really looking at, like, cybernetics and you're really looking at, at, governance, and you're looking at economics. And she's such a silly, fun person or was that, you can really see how excited she is about it and and how fun it is, for her. There was a a conference, the Elinor Ostrom conference that I went to last year, and the librarians got really excited. They said, come to the basement of the library. We have, like, you know, 27 of her, what, however many boxes, 500 boxes. We found some cool stuff. So I read her paper that she wrote. I think she was nine years old about water and water rights. And it just went like this. Another cool thing about water and how people deal with water. And another cool thing about water, and it's super articulate. She's just nerding out about water. And I just love seeing that because there are a lot of people in many communities. There's some big person that's done a thing, And then they're like, I'm going to riff off of this thing. I'm like, no, what do you think? Well, this person said, no, what do you actually think? Are you playing with the substrate? Are you being silly? Are you exploring and discovering? Is that, you know, serotonin dopamine center attached to being on the frontier, or are you just LARPing as somebody else because it's too scary to go out on your own? And that's not to say everybody should do that. It's just a lot of this is asking the right questions. You know? Why why do we have DAOs? Also, where did the term DAO come from? Most people are like, I love AI. I'm like, where did the term AI come from? Where did the term DAO come from? And, you know, the term DAO came from a paper on home automation, about a decentralized autonomous organization in the home, where the home knows to turn on and off the lights. It's basically digitizing what used to be done by servants and castles. Turn on and off the lights, blow out the candles, close and open the curtains, turn on and off your HVAC system, open the doors, get your air in there. So it's a, it's a really interesting thing to see that it was actually about this and that in, in the, in the speech that I gave, it was, it was, you know, it's not decentralized. You often know who it is. It's not organized. It's often a disorganization and it's not autonomous in that it's extremely manual labor. But it's really cool to think about. I just think that it can hurt people really hard if there is a token of value associated and therefore a simulation can really help people understand this this the substance of what it is before you actually commit to doing it because the amount of conflicts that I've seen in these that have to be arbitrated, can dry it can really tear people apart worse than a game of risk. You know? Even in risk, you can have people upset with each other. So, so to me, it's really interested in in, to me, it's very interesting to look at the meta around these things and to try to zoom out and ask origin stories, examples, examples in analog, and then, you know, what what parts are are stated and what parts are not.

there's this sense we have this this and it's in a sense, this is what it used to be called. It used to be called nerd fallacy. Let's make sure we have everybody in this community. Even if someone's really disruptive, they should be here or there's this idea of inclusivity. Inclusivity and inclusive design, the definition I like of it is, you know, just in The United States, 21,000,000 people have some sort of temporary permanent or, situational disability. Like, you can't hear because you're in a loud airport, or you only have one hand because you have a kid in one hand, or you don't have an arm. Right? This is some temporary situational and and, and permanent. But the idea of inclusive design that I like from like a calm technology perspective is that you don't need to be super awake to use your home automation system. It's just a light switch that you can slap on the wall because you don't, you don't see it because it's dark. So temporary blindness. There's raised, there's raised bumps on the buttons on the back of the TV, so you can feel and touch. You don't have to, you know, turn your phone light on and turn the TV around to touch it. Right. So it's the same thing with governance. It's it needs to be, you know, if, if you have a huge long running group, wait, the chrysanthemum club, There's no one that comes into the group and says, like, I can't stand that we're using this type of chrysanthemum. We need to use this other type of chrysanthemum. Everybody should use that. Somehow those people either don't show up in the groups or the group because it's so long and so boring or something, really resist those kinds of people. You've seen this in software where it's like, well, we need to use this piece of software or those groups to me are very much like the, the article that I wrote on Design as Governance, which goes like this. I'm sitting there in a coffee shop in LA. All of the tables are put in a way that, that have no outlets associated with it. The wifi password is in the back in a way that no one can see. And now the barista has to tell the wifi password in addition to doing their job. And eventually everyone gets really mad. This cafe was supposed to be for relaxing yet everyone's in here on laptops. Obviously, the owner of the cafe didn't want it to be used for laptops, but this is going to make them the most money. And we all mutiny and we put the tables where they need to be. And thankfully, the tables are movable. And the analogy that I wanted to make in that as design is governance is many people from the top down, make either a governance shape or a system or a restaurant in which all of the tables and chairs are put on the ground. And this is the only way you can use it. And that system, while it works for some cases like McDonald's, for instance, it doesn't work well for many other spaces. So you can't do that in a country club, for instance, because you need to be able to have a gala and a wedding and your fundraiser and all the other things that you do. But a country club is a DAO. As much as we don't want to say that, it's one of the best examples of a DAO. Now you could say everyone is welcome to this DAO, and then you lever everybody in, and then you need everybody's phone number. You need somebody's on Telegram, somebody's on WhatsApp, somebody's on Discord, somebody's on Slack, somebody's on Blue Sky, somebody's on, you know, MAGA Social, somebody you know, it's like, what where are they? And it's super decentralized. It's not that the people are decentralized. It's that their communication methods are decentralized. And that's it's very difficult. So, look at, you know, how a country club, for instance, like handles funds and treasury over time. Now, is it inclusive? No, it's is exclusive. Are DAOs inclusive or exclusive? Well, you kind of need to know what a DAO is. Like, it's just the term is very strange. Is it, you know, all the group houses that I know that say they're inclusive group houses, it's we're inclusive as long as you check these boxes. So we're inclusive as long as you, you say the word inclusive. It's not it's it's, and that sounds like a dig. It's not. It's it's it's more like if you have this particular kind of upper middle class speech, you can join this group. Or if you, are part of this workhouse because you're, you know, a field laborer, then you can have this bed for eight hours. And the minute you get up, somebody else is going to take that bed because we have a trailer and we're going to put 15 people in it. So we're going to have shifts. Now that system has a pressure on it, time pressure, and there's governance inherently associated in that system. Right? So it it's it's a hard thing to really articulate. You know? I think I got the design as governance part, but it's really hard to get people to understand this as a continuum, instead of it being disjointed. Well, because it's not on blockchain, because it's not part of an official DAO, it can't possibly be digital governance, but it's all governance. And when one group makes decisions for another, you know, that's design as governance. When you're when you're building the system yourself, there's design as governance. And I think we need to really look at entropy. I don't know if you've read this, you know, the idea of into the cool and Gaia theory. Of course, we have to call it a different name because Gaia doesn't make sense, but the idea of the the second law of thermodynamics that everything goes into the cool. So you have the sun on a planet and there's no atmosphere. It dissipates really fast, or it's really hot or really cold, but, you know, it's whereas with Earth, you have the trees and the canopy in the Amazon. In the Amazon fifty years ago that has this cloud forest. And, you know, in South America, you have this beautiful cloud forest and it's a gradient softener. It takes the gradient, that sharp gradient of the sun and, Diffuses it in a way that that energy can be changed to different sources. So the idea is, you know, humans and trees and all of these things came about as gradient softeners as a way of like reducing that, thought law of thermodynamics, where everything goes into the cool. They're just making it slower for energy to go into the cool. So I think of things as people are trying to do things like live in a group house and they're naturally going into entropy and and making things messy. And so a really good governance model incentivizes people to reduce that entropy and to do nice things like clean the dishes or, or, you know, care for the space or those those rituals about saving a little bit of money in a community pot that trusted members can then use to do group group activities. These are all, you know, OG DAOs, and Yeah. They're really interesting.

And I wanted to kinda double click on a point that you're bringing up there, you know, in terms of the settlement of the realities of inclusion or exclusion and kind of the importance of, you know, just factoring that and factoring conflict in, right, of not treating these things as unwanted things or, like, the taboo topics that we shouldn't talk about. But, you know, I kind of like framing it when I talk to people about community that if you don't set some kind of boundary on who your community is meant to serve, then you're probably not serving anyone because you can't be everything to everybody. And so it's just going to be a lot of disappointment for a lot of people. And so I guess when taking that kind of design angle and thinking about governance, you know, how do you recommend that people handle these tensions? Because it's it's not easy to say of, like, hey. Oh, I want to be exclusive. Right? Most of us don't start off with that premise when starting community. But by being inclusive to a very clearly defined set of people, you're inherently being exclusive to those who are not part of that clearly defined set. So, yeah, I guess just what are your personal recommendations whether from the anthropological lens or the design lens? But

it's just an emotionally not comfortable thing for a lot of people to go through, especially if it's your first time being responsible for designing and building a community. Yeah. Any kind of recommendations there? Yeah. I mean, it's hard to even use the words inclusive and exclusive. I don't ever use them because they're heated. And, you know, words are aesthetics, and aesthetics is the realm of causality. So if you use different words or just don't use them, there's a lot of people, you know, so there's some really, I would just call them uptight group houses where, like, I would try to apply to this group house in Portland or even like a bar and I would come in and it was very obvious that I didn't have the freedom to just chill like in Europe. It's like, you can chill on the side of the street and drink. You know, I don't drink very much, but, you know, it's nice. And then maybe you could sit on the base of the statue and you can be in a plaza. And if you're really untoward, you know, you're getting, getting in trouble, but there's an idea that, you know, you guys are adults and we don't need to put a railing up with a giant sign that says, don't go over the railing. You could fall in. There's a lawsuit. Suit. So it's it's a very different there's this kind of collective understanding that you're going to behave. And because of that, you also have a lot of fun and freedom. Whereas I've seen these very stressful places where it comes in and it's like, here's your churr wheel, and you need to do this and dah, dah, dah. And it's like, but I haven't even gotten here. You're assuming I'm a bad actor just because I've walked in. Whereas all I need you know, the testing is very simple. Hey, let me watch you. Let me watch you clean some dishes. Let me see your technique. Oh, okay. And you hang out with them for a day or two and you see if they naturally, make things more entropic or if they make things less entropic. Do they clean up after themselves? Do they have good manners? You know, it's not just do they take off the shoes when they come in. It's, you know, I I know someone that, you know, we were in a good time. Many Americans don't.

Yeah. And and and it's just about, you know, if, yeah, it's a, it's a whole thing, but, it's really about, seeing if someone is thinking outside of themselves in a considerate space and if they've been raised to improve the environment. Now that doesn't mean people can't be trained, but just watch natively how someone is doing things, because you might find someone that's super messy and negative and making the space bad. And there's people that come in and very quietly do the very small labor of organizing things or making things nicer. And so for me, the community test is never about someone's ideology. It's about how they act. They can say, oh, I agree with this, and let's make this beautiful thing in utopia. And they, you know, order online delivery and leave the boxes everywhere, and the food rots, and they leave their foot their, towels, and they don't do laundry and they've never done laundry because they've been in a house where they've been coddled so much that all they can think about is ideology because they've lived in an abstract sphere and they've never touched anything for real and they've definitely never lived in a food service environment, yet they're all about the lower class and helping them lift up while they're actively taking resources away from the lower income people in the community that are actually doing the labor. I don't like that. It's very obvious for me to see when somebody walks in because they talk more than they do. Now I made a 60 system to understand whether to invite people to my weirdo conference, which is like, you know, they're playing a role. Scoring system? Yeah. It's a scoring system. It also Is there a minimum that's to give? Yeah. But how do you guys is there, like, a preset of, like okay. I love how,

Sure. It's really easy. It's, you know, watch people come over to a group house. And if there's such bad guests that, you know, they send my friend to the hospital, because he has a difficult immune system and weird stuff, weird entropy and trash and stuff can do that, then, you know, find out what they're doing versus somebody else. You know? Someone else might stay at the house for a month or two, and we forget that they're there, or they're just so awesome that they've landed to the house. Or there's somebody who's overstays their welcome, assumes that, you know, while they have COVID, they can use everybody's neti pots and, you know, that they, that they are entitled to the car and that they don't have to ever pay rent. And, you know, that they keep saying, no, I don't have any money. Like, can I have this? Or they eat all the food. It's pretty obvious once you live with someone for a while or, you know, you have one of my friends who, you know, when he was at the group house at Harvard, he brought an entire kit of stuff to clean with. And he said, it's so nice. You know, you just sat in the corner during the party and did the dishes and the sink was always spotless. That has such a huge effect on how we experience a space, because all of those things are peripheral attention and that peripheral attention really matters. So I have, I have this thing now. A lot of people might say like, that's terrible. How could you do that? But in reality, it's like, I would prefer not, you know, to have my friend not go to the hospital because he, you know, might not have, you know, he's super kind. And that's what makes it such a great group house, but sometimes people might overstay their welcome and it's really hard to, to tell them no. And that, you know, and it, it's not that, you know, you wanna do that on the way in. You just wanna see over time, this, this stuff has to be soft because if you assume everyone's gonna be a bad actor, all of the good ones feel terrible and all of the bad ones aren't really changed, but you can kind of see over time, like, what does it feel like, to be in a place with someone you can also have, you know, we have some friends that are super messy, but man, are they, and, and I'm messy too. And I, so I figure out how to do that within a house and when to leave, you know, and how to, how to do that. But then, you know, I find like, I say cool things and people like having me around, even if I'm a little bit messy. So maybe I should always show up with someone who's an anti entropy system, so that it's a net, net neutral on the environment of, of that peripheral, chaos. So I think there's a lot of it is just being outside of yourself and being really good or a space, you know, like the, the, the crypto commons gathering in Vienna, the commons hub, that was an amazing space because, there's loud music that gets played on a record. So it's like really good sound. And we all clean certain time of the week. And then everything's really sorted so that the people who are on shifts to make food, make the food, but we're all doing this at the same time. And, you know, I, I I'm practicing de enterprising a place. So I ended up just completely sorting the bookshelf and, you know, putting nice things together, which I've never done before. And, that was my task and I spent like two hours doing it. And the conversations that we had in that beautiful space afterwards were totally different than when it was chaos. So it is really interesting to see the cause and effect. And, you know, I I I would really like to give you an example of of some of these things that I wrote, because it's really the the nuanced stuff that then creates when you when you put a bunch of these people in a room. You can have one person that's kind of, like, annoying and the conference consisting in that one person and kind of help them understand. Or like, like I said before, watched how somebody washes a dish, you know, there's like a really cool way of doing it. If have, have your laundry machines in your group house, have two extra and have them in the kitchen. Have your rags, that anybody can contribute to for your clothes pile, that you don't want anymore. Cut them up. Have your nice dish soap and use rags to clean most of your stuff. It's so easy to clean. You don't have to worry about sponges and then you just launder them at the end of every, shift. Then suddenly you have a huge pile of stuff and it works really well. Those are like little tiny things, but, but you're not going through like paper towels and all these things. You're actually using less water and less resources when when you add it all together. But some people have never been trained to clean a dish. So what you need to do is figure out people's normal entropy systems systems and teach them in a supportive environment the stuff that they didn't learn when they were kids. And do it in a way that doesn't say you need to do this. Make it system two, you know, system one, system two type thinking. Make it the the the systemic thing where it's like almost as simple as air. You just find yourself doing it. And when everybody does that, you have a better space. Now that's hard to, you know, it's hard to do because because you can you can pick some people, but yeah. So I have I have this little system right here. You know, there's an overall score for whether they're additive or draining, tolerable in short bursts and dangerous. And you know, a lot of it is riffing and exploring or not. That's the first variable. So when you're talking with somebody, do they riff on it? And they're like, yes, Sam, that's cool. And you kind of have a fun time Or do they say, well, that that hasn't been quoted in the literature, therefore and it's it's that comes down to that scene, Good Will Hunting, where, you know, the guy comes in the bar and he's starting to, you know, quote Wood in Johnson, you know, page one seventy two. You know? And and Matt Damon's like, you know, are you gonna pair are you gonna plagiarize the rest of the book or you have an original thought of your own? And the guy is like, well, I'm gonna, you know, and quotes more. And then he's like, well, I'm gonna, you know, take my kids to skiing and and, you know, you're gonna be serving up McDonald's. And and, you know, Matt Damon's like, yeah. Well, at least I won't be on original, but if you want, you know, we could take it outside. And he's like, you know, the whole number is same with apples. But the whole thing about that is, like, it's you know, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are nerds. They made a movie. That is something that you that you encounter a lot. And there are a bunch of people that say, oh, well, that person memorized something. That must be smart. But then you see who's win the Nobel prize. And it's always these doofy doof balls, you know, when you really talk to them. And I've gotten to talk to a bunch them. They're doofy doof balls. They're great. They are not afraid of asking the question or moving the thing forward, especially when nobody cares. And they work on it. And then a lot of them are like, oh man, the prize actually sucked. I get a call early in the morning, and now I can't just go and nerd out with, like, 12 kids from a school. They gotta put me in front of an auditorium to talk about a subject that most kids don't care about instead of meeting with the 12 kids that could care. So a lot of that, you know, Richard Feynman, especially, winning Nobel Prize in Physics, it's it's this idea of now this prize has been conferred to you by Alfred Nobel, who is a snarky snarker himself, who, you know, didn't give any of his money to his family, but, I think he put the peace prize in, in Norway and then had the rest of them in Sweden because Sweden and Norway were fighting at the time, so it was a way of forcing them to deal. I mean, there's just all sorts of pranks that he put into this prize, so that he could reward, you know, not people who are Machiavellian and really good at looking like they did something, but the people who are actually doing the thing behind the scenes. And I think, you know, this list is very similar to, like, how you would identify those people behind the scenes that might be a bit more laureate worthy because, you know, it's the dynamic riffing. I have an entropy column. There's, there's a lot of options per column and I have it in Notion and I color code it. And so you can look at it and you can look at the average color. And then the average is out to, see whether it's like green or red. And so if it's more green, then, you know, it's gonna be better. And if it's more red, you know, it's gonna be harder. And it's all red, it's dangerous. So it's a calm tech guide, but, so there's entropy reducer, a creator, an external reducer, a creator internal, make their life easier, make their life more complex, drains resources from others. And this one's really long and drains resources from others and overstays their welcome. So some of them are all of them are based on real people that have come through all the group passes I've lived at. The category, you can have a creator, a consumer, or you can have a repeater, someone who just repeats a paper, but has no opinion on it. And they look smart because they've linked to a paper. That's kind of dangerous. You have to call them out and they really don't like it. Like I had some people at a conference and you know, this has happened sometimes where I didn't check, and it wasn't that they weren't smart. It's just that they took longer to do things and they weren't used to coming up with a thought. It's like when you have people play with a pile of Legos. I I will always have people join. I had a startup sometime ago and new team members. I would just walk around the office and then I would linger just a little bit, the Lego table. We always had a Lego table. And then if I saw them gravitating towards it and just started building things, that was one of the checkboxes. Boxes. It was all, I didn't care about resume. I didn't care if you finished high school. I cared about, you know, if we're in line at a store, tell me about like how this could be better and easier. That would be a good manager. If it's a Lego person and they like making something and they finish it, they're going to be, really good. If somebody says, you know, I only care about this new code base that came out, I would remove them from the company within like a week or two. I would get them their dream job at the company that only wrote in that language. And they'd be like, you removed our best Android developer. And I'd be like, yeah, but he wasn't interested in making apps for people. He's interested in exploring this particular language. That's a different type of person. He can go and make that language better, but we're making stuff for people and we have 5,000,000 people using our stuff. So we really need to make sure that we're more civil servants. We're making a sanitation system. If you wanna be part of the experimental department that does waste treatment, yes, please. But we actually need to make sure that we're pushing crap through these toilets and sanitizing it so that people don't die of, you know, terrible diseases. So, you know, these these are some of the things. It's like attention commitment as a column requires continuous attention and,

or when something good. That's why I love Meta Gov House because a lot of the people that kind of self select for the meta gov slack, It's awesome. Like I love meta gov people. Like that's why I love going to the house. Like there is a lot of magical stuff, You know, a lot of meta gov people play well by themselves, but if they don't, they're they're riffing and enjoying life and having fun. And also, like, people do pitch in and and de de do the entropy or they create, or there's, like, Shakshuka, you know, there's there's stuff going on, but I think it's one of the best places at East Denver. I also like how I got into Medigov. I was at the decentralized webcamp, a long time ago, which I got into because I gave that talk on eight ways to hack a DAO and then said I had this DAO game. And then I think sent was like, Hey, come to this thing. I got a little bit of sponsorship to come in. And then I saw the Medigov sweatshirts and I wanted one. And I think Josh was like, these are for members. And I was like, how do I sign up? And I hung out for, like, the whole time at MediGov because I wanted a sweatshirt. So for me, I'm very, like, a swag oriented. I'm basically a dog. So I want to be in like, I will behave. I will do tricks, whatever he needed me to do. I want a sweater sweatshirt, and I treasure that sweatshirt. Well, hilariously, then I got really in the community because of this sweatshirt that had great vibes. So, you know, I think, you know, there's also like, I just want to go through a couple of these and then, you know, you can cut whatever you want. Like, you know, humor, playful score, positive energy, humor, default, self deprecating. There's a lot of people who are really funny, but they're inherently really depressed and they might be self deprecating. It doesn't mean you shouldn't have them around. That's not a negative, but also that you should, you know, really hug them, make sure they're okay. Right? Like a lot of these tell you about their own cybernetic methods. Some people never have any slack in their lives, not not the software, but they don't have any slack. So they're always like, oh, I'm always overwhelmed. It doesn't mean that they're a bad person. It's just that it's really hard for them to make boundaries and they are really smart. And so sometimes, you know, those type of people, you need to have some sort of intervention. Intervention looks like having something nice with, with people to de stress them. You have to find out how they de stress. There's social awareness. There's socially neuroatypical and aware, which is fun. There's socially incompetent and unaware, which is difficult. One peep one person who is like in his eighties at Cyborg Camp one year, which is the little conference I run, We had to fight with him, and we had, like, two other 80 year olds and a couple other people, like, upgrade his understanding of what he was saying. And we had him be quiet instead of interrupting everybody for a couple sessions. And it was awesome. Like, we tag teamed in this beautiful way, and we got him into a shape where he I mean, he's also, like, a famous inventor of a very important piece of software. So it was really hard for him to, like, have people be like, stop. You might not know everything. Let's find out. You know? And thankfully my mentor was there who's, like, 84, and he was kind of helping this process too. And, you know, so it's really it's a lot of work to do that sometimes. So there's, like, extremely socially aware and terrified of everything, like over overthinking that's me. And then there's Machiavellian where they're like, they understand the entire system and exactly how they're gonna do things. I try to make Machiavellian type of people try to come to this conference every year. And so I have to filter that out very quickly or, you know, they might show up and then, use the information inside the conference to give bad advice to governments or something. And all these things have happened before. There are people around whom, you forget about your phone, which is a very specific one. It's get inspired want to be on your phone because you're bored. Get inspired to take notes on your phone. Want to warn others about, want to be outside or pay attention to, get inspired to take notes on paper and make things out of clay around. I mean, these are very nuanced things, but they're all very, you know, like, relational style, anxious, insecure, secure, anxious, avoidant, insecure, self centered, avoidant, anxious, paranoid.

But And I'm also confirm that. Yeah. Not

unique.

When you, when you interview hotel staff, you said, do you want me to make my bed upon checkout? No. I want you to strip the bed or just leave it. Because if you make the bed and it's perfect, it looks like you didn't sleep in it, and we don't know. And so it actually takes us longer to deconstruct the bed and we're like quizzing ourselves. Oh, no.

Yeah. If you put that a handheld antibacterial steamer and you're gonna sort that bed perfectly and clean those sheets and put it back on. Because sometimes, like, if I wanna be a really good house guest, I will clean my own sheets at a low temperature, and I'll, like, put them back on the bed, which is just completely crazy. But then there are some people, like, who's, like, hey. Didn't tell me this, but, like, likes order, and I should have known that, but I was only, like, 17 or something. Never told me, but it was, like, the idea of maybe, like, ten years later. Hey. When you're sharing my house and you're sleeping in this bed, you know, put the sheets back on the bed when you're out of the bed immediately in the morning. So I don't have to deal with looking at your entropy. You know, when you say make yourself at home, it's like make yourself at home to the level that the home surrounding is at, You know? So, and and now I have a guest bed in the living room and actually when guests stay over and they do make the bed after they get up, oh, it's so nice in that living room. Right? So it's interesting because if they had their own room and there was a closed door, whatever you want, I don't care. You know? But because I can see it, now I'm noticing, like, actually, you know and so it's totally different for different people. But,

Yeah. And I think this is a good time to bring up the book, The Phoenix Project, which is about kind of an IT disaster that this guy who got promoted to VP, had to deal with within four days of you know, is a total mess. And it doesn't matter necessarily what gender it is. You might say, like, system administrators at a company are always slung with a specific type of work or, like, women are associated with a Whatever gender it is, it doesn't totally matter. It's that there are sometimes labor that gets stuck in a specific individual because they're good at it. You know, like, when I come home, to my mom's house, there was an expectation doing system administrator and because I was working at a computer repair shop that I would maintain these machines. But then I realized, and and the the Phoenix Project book is really good about, they identified the bottleneck in the organization, and they had the IT guy that was the guy that everybody gave their problems to. They had him go on vacation for a week and he cried. It was because every time you sent a problem to him, you were training him to be good at that problem, and nobody else got to learn. Now everybody else could, over the last two or three or four years, become pretty good at it, and everybody could have been smarter in the organization. They're actually not making themselves so smart. Now we can talk about AI. If you give the problem to AI, you're not making yourself as smart either, but that's that's an exercise of the reader. And there are certain ways to use it and certain ways not to use it. But what was really interesting to see is that, you know, I would watch my dad do this, and he's like, oh, I don't know how to use this washer dryer. I'm like, bitch, you can build a synthesizer from scratch, and I've had to be your lab tech to do all the soldering. Like, that's smart stuff that you're doing good.

Sure. So Mark Weiser talking about CalmTech in 1995 talked about a future in which there would be pads, tabs, and boards. So there'd be these big boards that would give you situational awareness, and then you have these little pads and tabs. You could give these tablets around to people because they were on a local network and it was e ink. And so if you wanted to give somebody an article, you give it to them on a physical tablet, and they could read it and they could also erase it and put a new thing on it and give it back to you. But the idea is that these might be like 3 or $4. You would have badges that you'd wear around your neck to see where you were in the company. And on a little board, you could see if everybody clustered around a specific room. And they actually did this with Olivetti, the original typewriter company, the Olivetti smart badge. You could see on a big board, who was where. And so you could see them converging on somebody's lab and you could go and enjoy seeing what they did. And that was the analog social network. The same with Bell Labs, you had that infinite corridor and you used to walk up and down the corridor and see what people were working on. So the shape of space is also governance and, you know, the shape of space allows people to move and people can also influence the shape of space. And all of that is, you know, general theory of relativity, but it's also like how how things happen. So, like, Building 20 at MIT, which was very messy, that, you know, that was where a lot of really cool innovations came from because it was chaotic. No. So, so that's a hard thing. You know, we talked a little bit about labor and cleaning spaces. You can cut most of that out because I didn't get to a satisfactory conclusion and it still doesn't make sense. But you know, it's, it's the idea that, that sometimes these messy out of sight spaces that are kinda smelly and grungy outside of the, like, manicured perfect spaces are where actually this stuff happens. And if you read Richard Feynman's book, Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman, one school he went to had a very messy nuclear reactor set up, and the other school had a pristine perfect one. Guess where all of the really good, research papers came out of? It wasn't the perfect one. It was messy. And you can see institutions become museums of their former selves. And I think that's when it becomes very, very dangerous. Like I went to Banff Institute in 2009 for artist residency, and it looked like a museum of its former self. And that's why I was depressed because it was no longer messy in a way that you could be an artist and do work.

things. You asked about AI and I think in most things that people do, if you're learning woodworking, for instance, You're learning about not necessarily history of woodworking, but you're learning to learn it alongside yourself. It takes like a year to learn how to drive or less, or, you know, infinite time to learn how to write. And once you learn it, it's a pass through. A lot of people that say governance is very complicated and they're using AI tools have never been part of a functioning governance system. And so they just assume that they can swipe that complexity onto the rug and have it output. But it's almost like somebody on electrician crew that doesn't really know what they're doing pretending. And they're actually really scared. So a lot of times people who are, you know, in a group house or a group experience, if you turn on the really loud music and everybody cleans, they might not know how to clean. They might not know what they're doing. And so that book, The Phoenix Project is cool because it talks about if you expect everybody to put it to this one person, who's good at it. How do you get that person out of the way, regardless of what their background is, their position, their gender, whatever, the, these pockets get shoved into specific types of people. So how do you bring that out and how do you put people in a situation where they have to learn it and where they actually do it because they're good at it and it feels good. So how do you take that dopamine and and put it into it? Because when I grew up, I didn't know how to cook or clean. I just read books and I did homework. And, it was very stressful for me not actually knowing how to do those things. So, you know, who I dated needed to know how to do those things and put a lot of labor on them. And so, because I was thinking of writing books, you know, and they need to edit my books and they need to help me do, do, do, do. And it wasn't that I expected them to do it, but they naturally were good at things. And so they did all those things. And after a while, you know, especially in one, one of them, I needed to learn how to do it myself. And that was very difficult. So, you know, now it's like, I will ask for help after I've tried some avenues and I appreciate the problem. But now I'm getting much more self sovereign on that part. So I think with AI, it's it's if you know how to do the thing already, like, if you're a good lawyer, it's as good as a junior lawyer sometimes. But instead of helping that junior lawyer and and developing them into a senior lawyer, you're putting it into a system that's not the junior lawyer. So the junior lawyer is, is missing a lot of what they could learn. And then that's not uniform, but it is, you know, how do you know when to use it, and how do you do the the hard the hard work?

And so I feel like both of us just wanna keep talking to you about so many things. But, unfortunately, due to time, we'll we'll jump to the quiz. And so we'll do rapid fire couple of questions for each one looking for a one word answer, Atmos hyphen that's r o k. But the first one, so to start off with a more broad one, what's one thing you want people to change about their relationship with technology?

One word is hard. Understand why they're using it and if there was an original process before that they could learn. How can we rework that into a a one word answer?

I guess, is it essence kind of, of, like, getting the essence of why people use it in the first place?

Mhmm. And Feynman had this this issue about, you know, he called it computer disease where people were trying to make new stuff instead of just using what you have. So I, I would think constraint.

Okay. Constraint. Then what's most lacking in governance conversations these days? History. The key to scaling DAOs is?

Sobriety.

And finally, what is the future of governance in one word? The past. Love it. Well, Kase, thank you so much for joining. We really love the conversation and appreciate your time. Yeah. Hooray. Thanks for tuning in. The Governance Futures podcast is sponsored by the Scroll 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.