Yakcollective Metagov
Speaker 1: Okay. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the weekly MediGov seminar. Today, we are joined by four, five, maybe six members of the YAC Collective who are gonna have a discussion about a paper that they recently published called the YAC Online Governance Primer. And typically, the seminars are a twenty minute presentation followed by discussion. For this one, it's gonna be a little more of a...
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Transcript
Okay. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the weekly MediGov seminar. Today, we are joined by four, five, maybe six members of the YAC Collective who are gonna have a discussion about a paper that they recently published called the YAC Online Governance Primer. And typically, the seminars are a twenty minute presentation followed by discussion. For this one, it's gonna be a little more of a discussion throughout, and then we'll open it up a little more towards the end. But as we go, please, leave comments in the chat, and I can help to moderate the discussion. To give a little bit of background on the Act Collective, according to them, the Act Collective is an online space for collaborative tinkering towards life in a post weirdening world, a world where anomalous and outlier events are an everyday occurrence. And so the ACT Collective is an eclectic group of people who are working on technology, research, writing, and art projects, occasionally trying to make money together as well. And some of the current experiments that they're conducting include building open source space rovers, crafting experimental web infrastructure, publishing speculative fiction, and studying emerging decentralization. And then I'm gonna share a link in the chat to the ACT Collective for anyone who wants to follow-up on that background and that mission. And then so today, we're joined by Sashan Deni, Brian King, Grigori Milav, and Vikatesh Rao, and also Jenna, who they have all worked together on the online governance primer. And so the way that, we'll do this is I'll screen share, me kind of scrolling through the, primer, and I'm gonna pass over to Sachin, who's going to give a brief overview of the primer, some of the motivations for it, and kind of help to get us a little bit level set. And then I'm gonna ask each, person who contributed to the text to talk a little bit about their contribution and, how they see it fitting within, the overall, study that they've conducted. And then, like I said, we'll open it up for some more discussion. So let me go ahead and start sharing that screen. And then I'm gonna pass it over to you, Sasha, and then I'll let you pass it to the next person when you're when you're finished.
Hey. Is there a lot of background noise in this case? Can you hear me?
Yeah. A little quiet. If you could get any closer to the mic, that'd be great.
Okay. Yeah. Can you hear me now?
That's much better. Yes.
Okay. Cool. Yeah. Sorry for this background noise. I was on a delayed flight, and I got in a coffee shop to get take this call. So yeah. I think to give some context, the basically, this paper came out of these weekly calls that we have been doing for close to two years now. And when we so when the Yacht Collective started in around to March 2020, We had a couple of talk tracks that had started, like so if we sort of followed the the the Amazon meeting model of somebody would share a reading at the beginning of the call, and everybody on the call would read for fifteen minutes, and then we would discuss what was read. And and it I think it sort of the the online governance topic or track sort of emerged from a lot of readings that we were doing. And so I think Venkat yeah. Venkat was the one who started hosting those. And I think around seven or eight months into these weekly calls, we did we sort of saw that there was enough sort of, like, common patterns in all the things that we have read to sort of write paper around it. And and and so, essentially, the yeah. The paper had four different writers and also a lot of sort of production support from on the collective from Jenna and Nathan, who's not here. And and yep. Also, the calls themselves were attended by, I would say, around, like, varied from around, like, five to 15 people across the year, and we have added some of some people who are, like, who are regular participants to as contributors as well. And I think sort of, like, the core idea of it, and I think probably, yeah, probably Venkat should explain this since, Venkat came up with the two by two. So, Venkat, do you wanna do that?
Yeah. I can, do that. Can you show the two by two on the screen so people can see it? Can you scroll
down? Sure thing.
Can everybody hear me okay? Alright. So the two by two, the idea was we had about, like Sachin said, approximately 50 readings, I think 49 to be precise, that we'd been reading over the past year. And the idea was, can we find some clusters or something in them? And we went through this collective exercise of putting them on a spreadsheet, trying to, like, attach tags and so forth, so a kind of collective sense making exercise. And then we kind of did a round of people suggesting axes that might be good for organizing them, and then we picked two of the axes that seem to, like, capture the most clustering intelligence. The axes turned out to be from managed to wild on the x axis and low alignment to high alignment on the y axis. The point here is that whenever you read an article or a paper or an interview about governance topics, it turns out that the people typically have a particular sort of context in mind. So, for example, you read Valves culture handbook. It turns out that they have a fairly, Hopisian, mental model of what an organization is or could be, And everything they say should be read in the context of they assume that the context is gonna have a certain degree of management and a certain degree of alignment among participants. So, you can kinda usually see from a reading that, they're making these assumptions, and it seemed a useful way to cluster them. And that's how we ended up with these four illustrations are, by the way, by Grace Whittrell, who's done a lot of illustration work for me. She's great. So she came up with these illustrations. So the four quadrants are the ones you see on the screen. Wild and high alignment is what we call Gaia. Then the other four are Habeasian, Muddler, and Fidele. That's the clustering and each is between, I think, 10 to 15 articles. So that's the logic of the two by two scheme. So back to you, Sachin.
Yeah. So I think what we can sort of do is go through all the, quadrants and the different people who wrote them. So each one was different written by a different person. And, so I wrote the the probation one, while then low alignment. And so yeah. So, essentially, the yeah. The idea behind Hobation was that there is very little sort of, like, organizing management structure and, like, also very little alignment among the people who are sort of part of a probation organization. And and you can't even sort of, like, call it an organization. I guess it's something. And I think the most the the most interesting example that drives the point is sort of this case study of this town called Grafton in New Hampshire. New Hampshire has this big history of, like, libertarians, and Grafton was a town where, basically, libertarians in the town wanted it was basically, wanted it to be much more libertarian than it was, and there was a lot of defunding of public infrastructure and parks and things like that that happened. And what ended up happening was that the town started getting invaded by bears. And so because there was no park management, the town was sort of, like, overrun by bears. And even after that happened, there was a lot of disagreement within people of the town. Some wanted the bears to stay and, like, feed them and stuff like that. So that sort of, like, it drives the point of, like, basically, this sort of ideologically driven in like, a small group of ideological driven people who are opposed to sort of, like, everybody else living there plus, you could say, nature itself. So that is sort of like a wild low alignment. Yeah. And I think sort of, like, the more the cases in which it has sort of produced something interesting is where it's it's either sort of, like, smaller groups or people who are people who are sort of, like, skeptical or skeptical about sort of organizations themselves such as I think Ernst Junger is a a good example. He's this he have sort of he, I think, took part in the first World War, and then he has certain some novels and bit sort of philosophy around this concept of the Anark. And and I think he sort of defines the Anark as somebody who is not, who sort of understands the need for authority, but and but also sort of doesn't like, I understand the need for authority plus wishes there was something, like, larger to believe in, but it's sort of, like, skeptical of those structures. And but I think what happens in those cases is that, like like in the case of Ernst Junger, he got persecuted by both both the allies and the Nazis. So so that that that that sort of, like, the the risk of that sort of position, I guess. And yeah. And I think the other interesting part that we did while we thought through this was I think it's interesting to think about how organizations could move from one quadrant to another. So so if if a probation group sort of produces enough common good or value, then they would need to have some sort of management structure around it. And so then it could go to, you know, the model of quadrant. I think I think, you know yeah. I think, like, maybe, like, the early two thousand tens are, like, were full of, like, lot of examples of, like, small startups that were started by, like, five or six people working on, like, a side project and in a messy way. And then vendor vendor also, kind of, profitability, they had to sort of figure out how to build a company around it or have organization structure around it. I think, yeah, that could and yeah. Yeah. Do we wanna go to the next one, Guy? And I think it was written by Brian. Yep.
Yeah. Thanks, Sachin. So this this guy guy in quadrant, I'll I'll come back to this, but Gaia is we we derive that from James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, which is kind about how ecosystems co evolve over time, but I'll come back to that in a minute. I think, like, broadly in this movement of decentralized governance, there's a very, like, underlying distaste of structure of any kind. Like, there's a lot of anarchist tones to to things and certainly a lot of anarchist intellectual inspiration behind it all. And I think it was the like, Ivan Ilyich and the iron law of bureaucracy were kind of a couple things that points couple of readings that we did that point at the reasons why people develop these opinions towards structure. And a lot of it's, like, just stems from loss of, like, individual autonomy and dignity and how kind of in in organization's quest for to achieve its goals. Like, it builds systems and systems kind of breed metrics and specialization, and you kind of end up with this runaway bureaucracy that just kind of discourages everybody from from being themselves and deriving their own joy or meaning from the work or their involvement in in organization. And another particularly interesting one, I think it was one of the four lighthouse reads that we called out was Jo Freeman's tyranny of structurelessness. And she wrote a lot about women's movements. I think it was, like, in the nineteen seventies ish time frame. I think there's a I'm not sure if there there's a one of the waves of of feminism is is attached to that. But she basically wrote about how these these groups kind of get together with with great intent to make change in in society or, you know, politic or lobby to to make things better for certain groups. But often these groups kind of abided by these anarchist ideas that prevented them from laying out formal structures, or or rules or procedures or or anything that that even smells like like a traditional organization. And, really, what happens when you do that is informal structures tend to tend to pop up and, you know, there's different norms and different procedures and a whole lot of unwritten rules. And nobody is is quite sure, like, how things get done or what the goals are or, you know, who is who is responsible for making decisions. So the the most kind of charismatic people tend to rise to the top and and grab that authority. And then instead of getting things done, the organization just kind of devolves into game games of status. And then everybody gets kind of burnt out and, you know, the whole thing just kind of falls flat. So I think that's that's kind of where the Gaia hypothesis comes in. The the idea behind that is that a given ecosystem, all all of the organisms within that ecosystem don't exist in a vacuum. They they don't evolve in a vacuum. They're all part of that ecosystem, and there's a certain balance that it's always always seeking. And different organisms are searching for their own niches to fill in, you know, different ways. And and a big part of it is that organisms will transform their environments. And that's kind of where you see, like, if you go into a forest at the forest floor, like, you really can't see a lot of structure. But if you looked at the forest from, like, a a higher level view and you you've really been able to to to spend time and research the whole the whole ecosystem. You you clearly see, different structures where, you know, different plants are are leveraging each other to to grow in different places or, you know, animals are are leveraging another animal's byproducts for their own good. So you just kind of get this relative stasis that that forms. And I think where, a lot of the the readings more case study kind of readings that we did kind of fall into this Gaia hypothesis and some of the the ways that if you click through the references, I I really suggest reading tyranny of structuralistness if you haven't because I think she has, like, seven modes of seven ways that that organizations can can kind of avoid that structurelessness and find balance. But I think the the ones that we kind of outlined in our readings are and most of the case studies that that are listed in the paper are having clear metrics or not really metrics, but measures of success. So, like, understanding what success for for the organization looks like and that that's, like, really, really big on on alignment, especially when you look at a lot of, like, DAOs and and other orgs. Like, what is the what is the kind of tip sits at the top of the the pyramid of of priorities? Like, why are why are people there? Are are we here to make money? Are we here to to soak up the vibes? Or, you know, if if you can't agree on that, then it becomes really hard at, like, our is what we're doing here worth all of our time? And then part of understanding those those measures of success is is that kind of falls down to, like, what does an individual's contribution to that success look like? And one of the the the really cool examples that we saw was, there's a company called Morningstar. I think they're in California. They're the world's largest tomato processor. All of their employees signed, colleague letters of understanding. I think that's colleague is the c. Yeah. Which are negotiated every year by the employee, and they kind of, like, carve out, you know, they under each employee understands their own competency and where they can contribute to the company's success and, you know, what what that looks like. And those those are kind of reviewed by peers and everybody kind of agrees, like, this is for the next year kind of what we're we're doing. And there's a certain level of of transparency into individual motivations there. And also along the same lines of transparency of GitLab has kind of been one of the pioneers in, like, the open source organization. They published their their handbook using their their software for the world to see. So you can see all the all of the procedures, how how things work. They they really stress the importance of documenting the decisions that that have been made and then kind of focus on synthesis of of decisions. Because when you have just vast amounts of of artifacts that anybody can can stumble into and read, you have to understand, you know, prior context and, you know, kind of the implication that whatever, you know, whatever you're looking at has had on on the organization. Another another good read, which I think has since been changed a little bit in terms of format, is the Netflix culture deck. And they they have, what they call an informed captain, which is somebody who, kind of fields grievances amongst the people at at Netflix. And I really, really encourage people to voice dissent and make rock solid cases for their dissent. And then that that case just kind of gets dropped on the captain, and the captain makes makes the decision kind of in a benevolent dictator kind of way just to to keep things going and prevent things from from stalling out because, you know, they they can't reach some kind of quorum. I think, really, the okay. I guess there's two more here. The the valve handbook
kind of
outlines bringing in the right people. Like, all of this is is all of the kind of Gaia ideas are really good. But if you bring in, not necessarily just bad actors, but people who aren't, good fits for this kind of environment, you know, somebody who is more, like, managed or, you know, maybe not onboard with what success looks like for the organization, that can become a problem. And spending spending time bringing the right people in was another thing that they focused on because it's it's costly to to bring new people in. And I think the last was delegation and rotation of responsibility just so you'd prevent, you know, people from capturing a certain specialty within the the group. So, yeah, I think the muddler was next. Was that Venkat?
Yeah. The muddler was me. So each of these quadrants, by the way, we've picked out, like, an anchor reading. So this one, the name of the quadrant itself comes from a reading, the which is Charles Lindblum's 1959 article called The Science of Muddling Through. And it's a really good paper even though it's so old. And there's another book called Obliquity by Alan Kaye. It's not mentioned here, but that's where I found this article, which is a nice little book on problem solving and sort of in unexpected and unintuitive ways. But, yeah, the modeler regime, the idea is that there's two big approaches to problem solving. One, you can think of as kind of a waterfall hierarchical comprehensive planning approach, and the other is iterative, try and solve a little bit at a time, agile type approach. So that's modern terminology, waterfall versus agile in software engineering. He uses different terminology. He calls it, I think, rational comprehensive planning versus method of successive approximations. The point he makes in the article is that a lot of people think about managing in the former way, which is this whole comprehensive look at the big picture or understand everything way, but the way it actually effectively works in practice is this other way of people look at a subset of the problem, try and solve it. If it doesn't work or it works partially, they try again with a slightly tweaked solution, and you muddle through. So that's where the phrase comes from. You kinda muddle through trying one thing after the other. The reason this maps to a managing style is it's the default everybody falls into when they have good intentions and want to do the right thing, but may not necessarily have the super high level of alignment, but do kind of want to work together. It's managed but low alignment. The phrase that I think of when I think of muddling through farm management is herding cats or herding butterflies. Pick your favorite unruly animal. So the idea is, you're muddling through trying to solve complex problems where you don't know everything. So that's the characteristic of this regime where, you don't know everything about the situation or problem you're trying to solve, but people are still trying to work together. You kinda have to herd cats to get things done, and you have to kinda iteratively do it. So that's the broad team of the readings in this section. And I just wanna call out a couple of them that are particularly interesting and have been sort of easy citations for us in the Yacht Collective. One is what we call the hurling fruit make principle. So this is a reference to an episode of the Hitchhiker's Guide. So if you scroll, back a little bit, it's something yeah. So the reference 32. So the, idea there is there's this fictional publishing corporation in the Hitchhiker's Guide, which publishes books including The Hitchhiker's Guide. And that company works on a weird principle where, basically, everybody's out to lunch for really long periods, and the office buildings are abandoned. And some anybody can wander in, and what ends up happening is people wander in off the street randomly when everybody else is out to lunch. Everybody officially employed is out to lunch. They see something worth doing, and then they do it. And that's how things actually get done in that corporation. So that seems kinda like both a very amusing idea and not a bad description of how to add things actually work in Discord and DAO like environments where it's fairly open structure. There's not much management going on. There's some people who persist and have organizational memory and can help herd this method of successive approximations along, iterative and try again and again. But a lot of stuff gets done by people just passing through, and that's actually something it's worth getting used to as a good operating mode, where traditional organizations have this heuristic of you have to be a member of the organization and commit to it long term to do good things. Otherwise, we don't trust you. I think naturally we are seeing DAOs emerge as an open structure where, yes, there's a core of participants who have long term commitments and participate over a long period, but the system is kind of open to people passing through, hanging out for a short time, making some contribution, and disappearing. Often, they're, like, more high energy active than the people who are there in a sort of, persistent mode. So we've had that happen in the Yakhalin too a few times where somebody comes and contributes effectively for several weeks in high energy mode and then moves on, and they may or may not come back. So it's kinda interesting to set up for that. So that, we think fits the modeling through broad principle. The other one, that I wanna call out is, this wind in the willows principle, which is right after number 23. And this is, again, a reference to a work of fiction. So the wind in the willows is a popular children's book from, I think, the late nineteenth century, actually. It's like a bunch of animals that live by the riverside and so forth. But there's a cute little principle there, which, this is our term for the wind in the willows principle, where, they mention a rule, which, they call animal etiquette, which is animals that are friends and hanging out together, they follow this rule that any animal can disappear at any time and nobody comments about it. It's like and the scene is, I think, the mole and the rat are talking to each other and they're talking to the otter that's popped out of the river and is talking to them. And then the otter suddenly disappears, dies under the water and goes away and nobody says anything. And the comment is, yeah, that's animal etiquette and you kinda don't comment. And if they come back, you just pick up the conversation where you left off. Again, this is another interesting principle to apply in situations like discards and DAOs where people appear and disappear and you kind of don't question, you kind of don't ask them to account for themselves when they're away. You understand that it's kind of like ongoing, intermittent, partial commitment, and they have another life going on elsewhere that you don't necessarily have a right to interrogate. But when they are there, you're kinda like, thankful for their presence and accept what they can do at the time. So it's kinda aligned with the hitchhikers guide principle as well. So those are kinda the, I don't know, salient features of the muddler quadrant. So I'll stop there and pass it to Gregory to talk about the citadel quadrant.
I will try to be short, and I will start with a little backstory. I first started learning about platforms when a bunch of Russian capitalists made an investment into companies like Facebook and Twitter. And it was, by all standards, a very weird view because they get the demand to any governance rights. Basically, they got some shares. They got some monetary rights, but they got zero governance. Right? It's not how Russian business typically operates. It's not how you buy an oil and gas company, for example. If you want to buy an oil and gas company, you need a lot of governance. You want to have a control. So it was something weird going on, and I started to be curious about all this platform being set. A little bit later, I learned about the Chinese company Alibaba. And their governance structure and in this case, it's a partnership and a whole batch of of partners. And, again, in standard classical organizations, this is not how you run a business. So I got even more curious about platform business. And when I joined the Yacht Collective, at one point, I proposed to to do a track on platform thinking. And, basically, this little part is an end result of this track. The track lasted probably fourteen or fifteen weeks. And I had to came up with a a little short list of articles. It was probably a little bit more than 10 articles one. And then I sneaked in a couple of newer articles and a couple of people including Sachin and Dollygir team purported their own teams. So we did that. The whole idea of Citadel or a platform or an ecosystem is based on a paradox. And our artist showed this perfectly on a little picture. It's a paradox between defense and trade. You want to defend your business, so you build the strong walls. But you also want to have trade with your neighbors. So you kind of you want to fight and you want to trade, and they are mutually exclusive. And they if you take a look at the Great Bazaar in Turkey, it looks exactly like that. It's a building, these strong walls, and it's kind of awkward to have a market in there, but they do have a market in there. So Citadelle is a really paradoxical place. There are a lot of paradox. And one of the basic one is that in many platforms, the very foundational building blocks of every business value chain does not really hold water. A lot of platforms do not have traditional value chains. They have value networks. It's a different picture. It's complete completely different picture. So if in traditional business, you can easily guess what kind of management and government structure a typical company has. In case of platform business or statistical ecosystems, it's impossible. You have to learn as you go. There are a lot of tensions, of course. And, basically, this tension, sir, should inform managers and business builders about what to do next. That's how tensions help you to navigate. And finally, in case of ecosystems, a lot of our regions are showed, there are no best practices. You really cannot derive the anything from my experience of others. All you can do is build that as you go. And on that, I would like to pass it on oh, I am the last one.
Thank you so much. Yeah. So I wanna open it up to the room for any questions. You can either unmute if you like or put them in the chat. Does anyone have an immediate question that comes to mind that they might wanna voice out? Otherwise, I can get us started.
Yeah. I guess my question is sort of I can imagine a lot of ways that organizations might, you know, look at this and apply this. Maybe upfront when you're starting an organization, you pick a type of governance that you think will work for you. Maybe you, like, self identify and learn from that or realize you're doing a type of governance that you didn't, you know, you defaulted to or there are, you know, there are various ways that I can imagine that, but I'm curious if how you imagine folks interacting with this, both kind of descriptively, I guess, but also normatively, and if you've noticed interesting things in sort of tracking that process.
Yeah. I can maybe try answer part of it. I I think since we wrote it, I've been sort of, like, thinking about this on a basically, like, with respect to my day job and stuff like that. And I think rather than, like, an organization belonging to a particular court and it feels more like organizations either move from one court and to the other or they sort of, like, pretend to be in one of the more managed quadrant. But, like, day to day reality is more more, like, modular or Hobbesian. So yeah. Yeah. At least the the feeling that I get is, like, with a lot of modern corporations, everybody pretends it's either Citadel or Gaia, but, like, in in practice on a day to day basis, it it's probably more closer to, like, Hobation or Modular. And yeah. And and and and and with respect to I think Venkat had this point on an earlier call, which was about, like, the difference in Web three is that you can you can sort of, like, not pretend. Like, you can you can admit that, basically, you you are in the model or quarter, and then that's how work gets done, which feels yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which I which I found interesting as well.
We have a question here from Thomas. Would you like to unmute and speak your question, or would you like me to?
Yeah. I'm happy to say it. Hey. Thomas Cox here. So I've got a particular interest in corruption and anti corruption as kind of the one of the systemic forces that's always acting against collectives. And I'm wondering what from your readings in in your document when I when I say corruption and anti corruption, does anything in particular come to mind that you either saw or did that not come up?
I I can try to speak to that very briefly. We didn't pick at corruption as a particular thread in the readings, which is kind of not surprising because most people who write articles on management and organizations tend to kind of, like, default to thinking about a relatively idealized, regime of operations.
They wanna run out all
the ways it's gonna work, not all the ways it's gonna break.
Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. But but the tyranny of structurelessness, I think the reason it's become such a classic article is because it's one of the rare exceptions. And it's not about corruption per se, but more about, like, human nature reasserting itself in the face of, like, failing idealism. So the tyranny of structurelessness basically says that if you have this idealistic notion of there are no leaders, no patriarchies, no hierarchical command and control, and you pretend that everybody's equal and egalitarian, what'll actually happen is that the very absence of structure will kind of create a vacuum and then sociopaths will kind of move into the vacuum and take over. That's kind of, to my mind, a deeper kind of corruption. You don't need an explicit kind of cabal taking over the grift or rob the organization or loot its treasury. It's kind of a deeper level of corruption of they kind of, like, treat it as their own little society to manage. And you see these similar examples happening happening. The Valve handbook itself paints a particular view of how Valve was managed, but But then you read industry chatter of the bad period of Valve, I think 2016 to 2018, and you read the accounts of people who left there feeling like it was a massive, toxic environment. So that's a different kind of corruption. And as far as, like, it's not in this framework, but this year we've been doing, like, more detailed case studies, that are more into, like, regimes of complex corruption in, like, in one case, we did a case study about Mexico and the Zapatistas versus the government. It's like there's a spectrum here from, like, the organization doesn't work as you idealistically think it does and starts to deviate and the subtle realities emerge, which is one kind of corruption. Somewhere in the middle, you have, like, criminals taking over and looping the company or organization. And at the other extreme, you literally have open political conflict and civil war, and there is no clear indication of who's the good guy and who gets to call who corrupt. Right? And then you have a civil war, basically. So my I I I don't know. I wanted a little bit there in that response. But I would say the primer kinda tries to keep the sort of meta awareness of, like, all these models assume a particular idealized context and can break the in ways that you don't recognize. And you kinda have to be a literate reader of this literature to be aware of that and how that happens.
Awesome. Thank you. We
have another question here from Val. Val, did you wanna hop on and speak your question?
Sure. Yeah. Yeah. My house quieted down a little, so I can speak now. I'm Val. Hi, everyone, and thanks for having me here. I was just thinking about sort of the quality of the individuals involved in some of the in the quadrants that you outlined and, you know, qualities of those individuals that might sort of spur them to be a part of one of an organization that falls within one of these congents and the quality that I was sort of most interested in in my work is like this open mindedness or willingness to evolve, change their minds, you know, I guess just see new information and and take that information into account rather than more of like a cult mindset stand strong in their beliefs. And, did you notice in your research, you know, where might those types of people tend to head toward? In what quadrant and what types of organizations?
I'll take a stab. I would say by default, unless they have some kind of, like, greater purpose of reason why they're they're getting together, they're probably, like, open minded people. I would I would probably bucket them in the the wild category whereas, you know, somebody who's close minded and maybe more willing to join something like a cult. You know, it's kind of a more of a top down vantage thing. I would say if if they can they have, like, a a purpose, like, the tyranny of structurelessness kind of, I think, outlined that exact problem of, like, open minded people, you know, trying to do good, but they didn't really have, like, higher aims or any structure in place to help them achieve those higher aims. So I think that's like, the the move would would potentially be from Habesya to to Gaia. I don't don't foresee a open minded group of people who are willing to to grow or change or whatever, shifting to the left two quadrants on that graph into any kind of managed territory.
To add to that, I think one thing we saw repeatedly in many of the readings was groups of open minded people who are willing to listen and change their minds are often vulnerable in how in their groups or communities being taken over by people who might not be as open minded but are extremely sophisticated at manipulating groups. So two readings I'd point you to is I think one is geeks, mops, and sociopaths, and that's about how groups that start out with in a in a spirit of sort of open minded discourse and changing your mind kind of, like, become vulnerable to, enterism and a particular kind of sociopathic takeover. And the trinity of some structuralistness, which is kind of an anchor to many of these ideas, also has that same, point. So I would say the way to foster groups of that sort, if that's your sort of organizational intent, is the people who are open minded and wanna take, or change their mind, they'll do the right thing for that context as they like, and that part will take care of itself. So the part you have to work on is actually protecting that context from people who wanna take it over in more autocratic ways. So you kinda have to build an immune systems and defense mechanisms, I think.
Okay. Thank you, Val, for your question and for the answers. We have time for one more question. I see that Von has their hand up.
Hey. Yeah. Can you hear me? Mhmm. Awesome.
Please. So the question is, I guess, when you're considering the quadrant and you're considering those two dimensions, it it seems I could be wrong here, but it seems that the thing that shifts you over to a highly aligned and, I guess, more civilized, like, top left would would really be energy. And so kind of the idea that entropy just means you shift over time back towards this more like Hobbesian community. Suppose the question is, let's say you're a designer or a community designer. You're trying to actually shift shift in any direction across any dimension. Then is there kind of a locus of control you see being there that allows you to shift or gives you some depth kind of control over that move? Or does it or is it really just energy that pushes you in one direction?
I can take a quick stab at it. I think on the yeah. I think on the paper towards the end, we mentioned sort of, like, some common modes of failure plus common pattern patterns in which, like, organizations move from one to other. And I think one like, energy itself is sort of like I think we talk a lot about, like, yeah, energy and the what the temporality of all of these organizations are. So, for example, the yeah. Collective, it's more we would put ourselves more in the muddler quadrant on on like, yeah. Muddler quadrant usually where things are sort of, like, moving, but, like, managed, but moving sort of, like, slowly. But sometimes, basically, shift into, like, sort of, like, the high energy gear based on so a lot of our work gets done around these weekly calls that we have. So that I would say are, like, sort of, like, high energy spikes that we have. And I think during the project, while writing on this towards the end, like, basically finishing this project, like, I guess, towards the end of a project, everybody sort of gets, tired of it or, like, it it like, getting it to the end is pretty hard. So I think we used to refer to it as, like, a BDFL for the day, and that was, like, a reading that we had a BDFL, a benevolent dictator for life. It's like a thing that reading around open source projects and how open source projects all have this one person who sort of, like a lot of open source projects have this one person who sort of makes the final decision on things. So so when we are getting things done, like, each editor would sort of play a PDF for the day. So, like, their decisions were off to them, and it it was communicated to everybody else that that they would be making edits for the day. It sort of worked well. So I think it's I think these are, like, sort of, like, one off small things that we sort of that increase energy spikes or, like, affect the temporality in different ways, I guess. Yeah.
Yeah. Thank you for that. And thanks everyone for for coming in for your questions, and thanks to the folks in the act collective for presenting their research. I'm gonna share the link one more time in the chat for anyone who wants to follow-up. There's also a really wonderful lexicon at the end and an annotated bibliography of all the 49 texts that we're engaged with. And I believe there's a tradition of everyone unmuting and giving a round of applause to the participants. So we can carry that on and the kind of three will all give an applause. Three, two, one.
Thank you all.
Yes. Thank you all. And then also just to you can stop the recording, Nathan. But