Godin Metagov 20240103
Speaker 1: Wonderful. Alright.
Top Keywords
- diary 0.013
- voting 0.013
- seth 0.009
- votes 0.007
- diaries 0.006
- restaurant 0.005
- make 0.005
- work 0.004
- vote 0.004
- email 0.004
- time 0.004
- layer 0.004
Transcript
Wonderful. Alright.
Shall I dive in? Do you wanna set the stage? What do you wanna do? I'll I'll
set the stage briefly, and then I'll I'll pass it to you, Seth. Hi, everyone. Welcome to I think we were just talking maybe the one hundred and second, one hundred and third issue of the Medigap seminar. I'm Josh. It's my pleasure today to introduce Seth Godin. Seth is a I like to think of him as a OG of the Internet, one of the, you know, maybe first Internet marketers, author of many books, successfully sold a company to Yahoo back in the day, and, also runs a very, very well known blog, on various topics, I should say. It was fun kind of crawling through it and sort of seeing some of the various thoughts that have been sort of jotted down by Seth over the years. But today, Seth is joining us because we had a conversation around governance, actually, randomly about DAOs. And Seth has written up a document and various ideas on a governance layer for voting, and I thought this was actually a really wonderful way to kick off the year just because Medigob obviously has been dreaming about many people in Medigob have been dreaming about this idea of a governance layer for the Internet for a while, and I think this is a really wonderful occasion to bring back some of those ideas perhaps through a new lens that Seth can share with us. And with that, I will pass it on to Seth.
Thank you, Joshua. I am filled with trepidation and excitement right now. I work mostly alone. And I have periods of years where I think about problems. And every once in a while I run into a group of people who are so much further along who have thought so much more deeply, and are more committed than I will ever be that I'm thrilled, because other people have been thinking about what I've been thinking about. But I am also really nervous because some of the things I'm going to say are old hat, or ill informed, but I'm going in any way, you can get a refund just drop me a note at sethgodengmail dot com and I'll be happy to send you a check. Most of what I'm talking about today, I have posted on a page on my blog. It's not a post it's this page. There's URL, it's pretty easy to remember. Some people know me from the books. I've written 21 bestsellers before that, because book package, I wrote the very first book about digital cash and failed to buy any Bitcoin, even though I was first In 1976, I got my first email address. During the eighties, I was in all the online communities and built the most popular online game of its time on Prodigy. And in the nineties, I invented email marketing, not the spam kind, but the good kind. And in the 2000s, I launched one of the first social networks. With only nine employees, we became the fortieth biggest website in The US. And I think a lot about how the Internet is what it is and what it could be. And for the last few years, I've been playing hard with some thoughts about voting. And so when Joshua told me that you had been thinking about this more deeply and clearly than I, I volunteered to show up and share what I know. I have nothing to pitch. I have a project, but I'm not actively working on it because I don't have any co conspirators. If this strikes a chord with anyone, you should reach out to me and we can riff on it. So I'm going to start with this. Whenever I look at any project, any opportunity, it starts with a simple question, which is what is it even for? And having been in the Slack for a couple months and looking at some of the work that you're doing, this is a question that does not get answered or even asked often enough. And when Joshua was talking about a communications layer, a voting layer, I think we can all iterate a whole bunch of layers that are already on the Internet. When I started in '76, there was only one. There was the email layer. And then all of these layers have been added. But right here, right now, the world is ready for a voting layer. And I wanna answer the question, what is voting even for? Because I'm not focused on civic congressional voting. I am focused on all the other places where we don't have voting where we could. So here's where it came where it came to a fine point. I was at a thing a month ago and the restaurant was really loud. No one expected the restaurant to be as loud as it was. It was really loud. And the question in the old days is, how loud should the restaurant be? And the answer is, as loud as the owner wants it to be. And if the owner makes a mistake, people will vote with their dollars and not come back. But now that we all have a supercomputer in our pocket, that doesn't have to be the case. And in fact, we can determine how loud the restaurant should be based on giving a voice to the host of each table or give more votes to people who are regulars or give more votes to people who eat out a lot because they're more likely to come back or go straight to it and just say, we're going to give the most votes to the people who are going to pay the most to control the volume of the restaurant. So when I go through that list, I could argue that at its core, voting could be about one of three things, expressing preference, sharing insights based on your experience or your wisdom, or demonstrating actual commitment to what is going on around you. And we can think of examples of informal voting, non digital, in our communities that have been going on for thousands of years where any of these three things are in evidence. In traditional hierarchies where there isn't as much justice as there could be, issues of caste or class come up. And so, preferences of some people are ranked higher than preferences of other people. Status is another one of those drivers. But when we think about voting, why do we even have it? Why are we even talking about it? One of them, which you guys talk about a lot, is that it's a civic right, that if you are part of something, you should have a say. But there are at least four others. One is that the crowd has wisdom that an individual does not. A third is there's an information exchange where I'm learning from you or you're learning from me, we can earn buy in, which is part of this commitment thing. And the other one, which doesn't get talked about enough, is that what we really want is a dictatorship until we disagree with what the dictator is doing. And then we would like a way for the system to change. And so, my thought is that if we want to make a change in the way civic voting works, we should change casual voting first. That what we've discovered with so many other things that have become layers on the internet is they become layers long before we truly understand them. And long before we have worked out how they are going to work. And email is a fine place to start, but social networks and everything else. And if Mark Zuckerberg had guts, Facebook would be significantly better than it is because they could have learned as they went, as opposed to just seeking to profit as they go. But we need to put this in the world. I am parts of lots of communities online. And casual voting is almost never showing up, despite the hard work of the kind of people who are in this community. The number of times I've been asked to engage in any sort of rational digital voting with all or any of the permutations, less than one hand's worth of counting. So, what I wanna talk about is pluralism. And pluralism is currently just a white paper, it could become a DAO, it could become lots of different things. And pluralism is based on two giant ideas, one are tallies, which is what I'm calling casual votes, so it doesn't get confused with what happens in Congress, and diaries. And every person has their own diary. And we can talk about whether you can have multiple diaries, but for now, you have one diary. And you get to control the privacy of that diary. There are certain kinds of tallies you can engage in, where revealing parts of your diary, past votes, and how they turned out will give you a bigger say in future votes. And if we can enable this to occur, if we can enable people to easily be carrying around this diary that shows whatever level of identity ends up evolving, And where various kinds of fascinating tallies run by API and simple interactions can occur. We will discover that lots of smart people put lots of thought into what kind of tallies they can run. And the diaries are natural monopoly. We don't wanna have two different kinds of diaries. We wanna have one, one that is resilient, one that is transparent, one that is open source, one that gains in power over time. Because if we don't do that, someone in the private sector will, and they will use that to their advantage as opposed to the advantage of the voter. So five things that I think this kind of interaction layer could create. First is justice, which is creating voice where voice has currently been deprived of people because of their background, because of their status, because of their class, because of lots of it. Second is education. Lots of reasons why you'd wanna be better educated to vote, lots of reasons why you'd want voters to be better educated. The third one, which is surprising to see on this list, I am in favor of people voluntarily exchanging their resources, which is the original idea of capitalism, is we can make things more efficient by figuring out what people need, what they want, what they dream of, and serving them. Fourth one, which we mentioned is wisdom, because we can learn from what people are doing. And the last one, another surprising one is this idea of commitment. So some of the things that I cover in the paper. The first one, which is what started the whole thing, is I will, if you will. And I'll give you the simple example. People reach out to me and they say, I'm holding a conference. We're asking Liz Gilbert and Malcolm Gladwell and this person and this person to speak. If they come, will you come? And it would be very easy to create a very tiny kind of voting mechanism where I say, look, there are seven people on the list you just showed me. Five of them say, yes, I'm in. And once we create this, I will, if you will, dynamic, a whole bunch of generative things could happen. Another one is proxy voting, where people can sell or trade votes. Another one is this idea where diaries can, let's say I'm in a company with 11 people trying to decide something. And that quiet person who's usually right, maybe their vote should count for more than it usually does. Fully informed debates, where maybe you have to go through a quiz or some sort of interaction before your vote is offered, or maybe you have to put a certain number of hours into the co op. Quadratic voting, you know what all these things are, we would have not a lot of trouble creating the dynamics for these things to be easily executed. If the API was there, there was some sort of token to pay for the whole thing, and there was the diary that was resilient and fair, open source, inspectable, etcetera. So So I promised I would rant for fifteen minutes and I have done so. Mostly I came here to not even answer your questions, just hear them and be able to understand whether I should just put this file away and never look at it again or whether there's something here that we should talk about. So, Joshua, thank you for having me. Happy to talk about what everybody what anybody wants to talk about.
This is wonderful. Thank you so much, Seth. Why don't we get us started? If folks have questions, comments, maybe just, like, I'll just do it by to say, like, mark it in the chat, and I'll kind of order you order folks there that way. My first question and this is kinda reminds me of our conversation, Sasha. Maybe I already brought it up in our conversation a couple months ago. But you're talking about this restaurant example, voting in restaurants. And I love that example because I think I spent almost two months or some ridiculous amount of time working with these video game developers. The video game was not about restaurants, but somehow I was building a restaurant. I was like, how do we model a restaurant? And then how do we, like, implement all those, like, fancy fancy, you know, hijinks on top of it, like voting? And then it makes me think, like, you know, if we want to sort of, like, have a governance layer on top of restaurants, how do we, you know, does that basically mean that we have to have a model of the entire restaurant for us to effectively define voting on top of it? Yeah.
I don't think it's anything like that. Right? Like, I I look at I look at the existence of Mailchimp. I look at the existence of survey monkey, I look at the existence of all these tools that are built on top of tools that are built on top of tools that wouldn't exist if there wasn't an open API that we call email. Right?
Yeah.
And so you create the foundational layer, and then somebody is going to come up with a very simple app that talks to the diary and lets the owner of the restaurant do a thing, and they're going to plug it into resi, or they're going to plug it into open table or not. And but all that matters is that this diary gets more resilient and robust over time. Because you're just created a simple way without people having to more than once set themselves up to go say, Oh, yeah, boom, done. I just made it softer in here. You can thank me later. Right? And are quieter in here. So the I had outlined 15 different voting mechanisms in my paper, but there's 400 that I didn't even think of yet. And we don't have to know anything about the use case. We just have to have an easy way for people to raise their hand without doing what I did in safety patrol in fifth grade when we had the election for who could be in shock.
Love that example. I'll I'll I'll just mention this, and I'll pass it to another question. But on the question of voting, including in fact, this is voting on a blockchain, which you mentioned in your in the in the proposal, there's a really funny experiment by, among other people, my co organizer, my Zipak, who are actually, you know, in MediGo and, okay, and come to these seminars, unfortunately, not here today, called LampDAO. And LampDAO is kind of a hilarious version of voting because all it is, it's a bunch of people in a DAO who are voting on whether to turn on a lamp or not. That is it. It's it's a demonstration of how do we do, like, voting online in order to somebody here loves lap DAO.
Thanks, Matt. I mean Yeah.
It's it's actually kinda complicated.
Yes.
And there's a lot of, like, infrastructure that you kinda, like, take for granted. It's like, oh, wait. How does this work again?
Yeah. I, yeah, I didn't argue for blockchain in my proposal. I think that there might be much simpler ways to make this work. I don't care. The idea of the DAO was there is clearly a useful token economy here, which is that you can make a very inexpensive way for people to access the diary if they're holding tallies. And you can come up with ways that that money flows in a way that lets you sustain this thing on an ongoing basis. But I don't think you have to have the blockchain, but this is the extent of my technical knowledge.
Of course. Let me pass it to another person. Ofer, do you wanna ask her a question?
Sure. You know, I love these ideas. And in fact, in 02/2006, like, so many years ago, when I became a deputy dean in order to make a system a little bit similar to yours. And it was actually successful, and we published it, and people loved it and still use it. But one thing that happened to us is that nobody ever let us do it again. Nobody wants to get exposed. So and I tried it for many years, and I I keep thinking about it. No. We had an idea of meta browsing at that time, you know, that maybe we can add a layer to the browser that is imposed on websites. But now, of course, everything is apps and stuff like that. So I'm really interested about experimenting with those systems. Now we are experimenting just doing real experiments. But what do you think there is any way of doing it safely? Because so many things can go wrong, and I love this idea of doing it in casual, small. But on the other hand, you want to do it in the level that you can learn from it and see all the bad things that happen in very, very small scales and grow from there. And I still don't have a recipe of how to make it happen. I wonder if you have any idea about that.
Well, again, where I'm coming at it is if the diary is resilient, the way email ended up becoming resilient, the open API, particularly if you have to pay a penny to use it, the use cases will arise. And it's not our job, we have to seed the use cases. But it's not our job to handle all of the use cases, we just say this is what the diary is capable of. And so as a result, people are going to build stuff on top of it, the way I built email marketing on top of email, that will open the doors in ways that nobody ever thought of. Vint Cerf did not think that I was going to give away a million dollars using email. And the same thing is going to happen here. That once lots of people have the diary, people will invent ways to use the diary. And once people invent ways to use the diary, other people will get diaries.
But you're immediately starting this colossal scale, and and you say, okay. If I build something, a million of people will use it, but that's awfully dangerous. And and I don't think that's the right way to do it. I think it should start in a very, very small scales. But the question is how to do it in small scales?
I guess. I'm not sure it's dangerous. I think, there are lots of things that are dangerous. Four chan is dangerous. I think this is a thing that if it doesn't work, people aren't gonna have votes. And if it does work, they will. And if you find out why they're not having votes, you can make it better.
Steve. I don't know if that was a you have a question or that's just, like, a you posted there? Steve, you're muted. Steve, you're still muted.
That that little unmute button was really small today. What can I say? Must have been in the water. So, yeah, I was just saying that it seems to me that the diary requires a self sovereign data layer, which is to say, you know, personal control over over one's diary that, you know, can't be perpetrated or infiltrated in any way by, you know, adversarial agents. That's us.
You know? And No. Absolutely.
Alright. So, yeah, we're working on sort of graph structure that'll enable applications like this over at Dazzle Labs. So good stuff. Perfect.
Thanks.
And Sen had some other comments I was reading that related to mine, so maybe go to him next.
Sure.
If it's related. Sen, you wanna skip the queue? Come up and, talk a bit?
Sure. Yeah. I can, try to be brief. I'm just curious. You mentioned insectability, and I was looking at some of, Mark Potter's writing who's been looking critically over the last decade at e voting in Estonia and sort of points in the more nuanced way than I'll be able to articulate to this conflict between auditability and security. And that the these two concepts are kind of in conflict with each other. And Mark makes the argument that it's very difficult to have a truly democratic e voting process in the same way that in person e voting is run by the people, inducted by the people, or checked by the people, etcetera, etcetera. Because of the security issue of the data, oftentimes, the auditability of the system is either diminished or not made available to inspectors because of the security concerns. So I'm curious to hear you talk a little bit about how important auditability is in the system and how you think about security more broadly.
Yeah. No. I I think this is great. And I think what you have to add right next to it is some votes are always going to be anonymous. And some votes, there's no reason for them to be anonymous. So if I'm using my ATM card, I am not anonymous. And so you can build a different kind of security around an ATM card than you can around somebody who's going to a voting booth, and there has to be that air gap, right? It seems to me that, and I forgot the name of the person who was talking about starting small before, I apologize, that when we're talking about lots and lots of casual votes over time, you're going to build up a history. And it's going to be harder to just show up at the last minute and crash the into that and pretend to be somebody else. So let's imagine that one of the use cases is I've got six people on the board of meta gov that interact with each other using this voting mechanism over time, there isn't a real issue of impersonation among this small group, because we're all looking at each other in the zoom, and we could see it happen. But now I've just added some history to my diary. So now I show up in a different community. And this idea, sort of like LinkedIn, but much less prone to someone hacking it is that I'm weaving together my past. And my hope is that combined with the computer science wisdom you guys have of how you create these stacks, gives you more granularity and makes it more difficult for somebody to just take over somebody's diary. But, again, I don't know how to do this part. I have no idea.
Again, yeah, do we had this guy, Udi Shapiro? He was presented here a couple weeks ago, and the guy has got a lot of this stuff. I I I looked about two days into his work, and it's really, really good stuff. I will have to pass some stuff along to you. So
Yeah. I think Veronin actually, who comes here often is one of, Shapiro's grad students. But the yeah. I'll I'll just say, like, from the kind of a tech CS perspective just really shortly, at least my conclusion so far has been that, like, voting is, like, so contextual. Like, the meaning of a vote is just like a, you know, a very tiny interaction within some sort of, like, context, usually organizational. And that, like, trying to standardize voting is effectively means you kinda, like, have to standardize what is the organizational context in which this vote happens, which is effectively, like, where a lot of Medigob's normal programmatic work has gone in that direction. But, yeah, but that's that's not necessarily that's that's kind of a hypothesis that, you know, we've made certain judgments on certain bets on. That's not necessarily the only or the only case that can be made. I'm gonna ask this question. Oh, wait.
My fellow Seth, I thought had my fellow Seth had, I thought, a really insightful
comment. Yes. Let me ask it for Seth since he
can't biased to have Seths in the conversation.
Two sets. Yes. I'll I'll just speak out loud for the votes.
A bald, respectable the spectacle, Seth.
Yeah.
Wait. Seth, can you actually ask a question now?
Or I
guess can. I suddenly can. Yeah. So, Seth, are there Seth you've watched techno no. I guess not. Which ones of us? Are there Seth? Yeah. Well, you're on the
the Hoping Vision. Go ahead. Yes. You got it.
You've watched a lot of technologies emerge with a lot of Hoping Vision. You watched email marketing turn the spam. You watched you know, and and and so on, getting captured by power and profit. So how are you approaching design? How are you approaching this that can increase their resistance to drift?
I mean, I I see the
same thing with with blockchain. It's it's it's held up Yeah. Decentralized technology. But the most productive use of it is overwhelmingly by people who are
already powerful.
Yeah. And and so there's there's this way of of liberatory technologies. Sure. They actually do fulfill some of their liberatory potential, but they fulfill centralization power of it even more. And so your kind of net outcome is worse than you started. So what so what are you thinking?
Yeah. No. This is this gets at the heart of so many things that this community is wrestling with. First of all, like the Manhattan Project, you realize that you are right on the cusp of unlocking something that's really powerful. And it's it's tempting to hesitate and say, this is we don't want to get this wrong. This is really powerful. And so you want to research it more. And some of what you're doing is, is a little too academic in terms of not being in the marketplace. And my response is that when a profit seeking venture funded firm does this, they will make the very same compromises that Facebook made in the very same discourse.org, right, that watching what Joel did in building Stack Overflow and having it be what it was for so long, that we can go into the world and say, there are examples of institutions, Wikipedia is one that didn't optimize for profitability, but instead figured out how not to spend all day arguing in Zuccotti Park, but to ship work that gets used mostly for good. And that the platform itself is resistant to being turned into a force for evil. So will some people run votes that work against the voter? Of course they will. I can think of 10 ways I could do that right now. And that's humanity, and that's gonna happen. But if this becomes the dominant wallet for votes, and you build into it things that make it hard to use poorly and easy to use well, and the institution that controls it is not going to be swayed by figuring out how to sell it for a $100,000,000,000, then it feels to me like the best of all the possible alternatives. So I do not believe that we're going to live in a vote free universe on the internet in five years. This is an inevitable thing that is coming. The question is, is it going to be a lot of noise and a whole bunch of competing diaries and then somebody winning by shortcutting their way forward with the network effect? Or can we use this window in time to build the right kind? And, yeah, I was in many of my books, I was way too optimistic about the future of giving everyone a microphone. We gave everyone a microphone and we got a lot of bad stuff. I should have been more cynical about that, but I still would have given everyone a microphone because someone was gonna give everyone a microphone, and maybe we should do it with a little bit of resilience built in.
I wanna pass it to Aika. Daniel, was that your hand? You wanted to enter the queue?
Yeah. I I asked a question in the chat, but I guess I have more comment, which is I see that there is one problem, one challenge in terms of having the data secure. Another challenge in terms of having the structure of the organization behind it, be democratic, be not oriented going to profit. And the third one would be maybe easy to use and make it the adoption be quick. So I would say that soft to make it the latest here. I would see the biggest challenge would be in terms of getting the the product so that you can make different kinds of votes so that somebody creating a voting system would be able to feel it's really easy to create a certain kind of voting and different kinds of voting because there are many different kinds, as you mentioned, that people would want to use, and then for the for the users, the voters, to find it very easy. So what I would recommend, if you wanted to take this project forward, would be not to worry so much about storing the data and the security. I would see, can I can I come up with a wireframe and and the and the UI that is so intuitive and that encapsulates everything all functionality that I want for both the YouTube as well as for the voice process creator? And then in terms of the organization, I think you don't really need blockchain. We ourselves, I'm working in an organization which is all democratic. It's a cooperative. We don't have any investors. It's all investing. But, you know, I can I can if you want? If you're interested, I can post
Yeah. We lost you on mute. Zoom is a miracle, but it doesn't always work.
Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. I I was on mute. I'm mute myself.
I think we get the idea. I'm envisioning. There are three stacks. And I think you've highlighted what they are. The key in launching just about any project is you need the motive force and the forward motion. And at 63, I can't carry this whole thing by myself. So when fellow travelers show up who are eager to push the three stacks forward, I think they go in sync, right? There's a stack that says, the diary has to be inspectable and resilient and secure. There's a stack that says, we have to make it so that the interface for people who are voting is fun or joyful or efficient. And then there's a stack that says the middleware, which is gonna be built by all these people who aren't us, engaging with the API and user is worthwhile. I am confident as a marketer that the network effect here is powerful enough that if you got the three stacks right, we can get the first 20,000 people doing this in a 100 interesting use cases. And if we were right about the ease and the power of it, then it will spread the same way Facebook started in a college dorm at Harvard. This isn't about buying a Super Bowl ad. This is about simply demonstrating that the promises you're making are so beneficial to the middleware developers and to the end users that they want to do more. And it the organization that runs it. I think you have pioneered so many interesting ways that that could be run. I don't think it can be run as a simple anyone who shows up can vote kind of thing. But I do think there are ways to cause this change to be in the world that don't involve raising a bunch of money from market entries.
Dwayne.
Hi, Seth.
Hey, Blaine. Love your comments. Thank you for all of them.
Oh, I'm glad glad you were reading them. I yes. You're a long time listener or first time caller. I love Akimbo. I don't know. I guess I I guess you're reading some of these comments I'm making. And, honestly, I'm having a hard time even stitching together all the exact stuff that I want to kind of get out here. I'm really mad at myself for not having it all written up better in places where I can share it with you. Right? I don't know. I guess I've made it clear that, like, I have ideas here, and other people obviously have really cool ideas. There's lots of ideas. Ideas, ideas, ideas. Right? Probably the most salient question I have for you right now is you're saying, oh, I can't I can't lead this forward. Like, what kind of support are you looking to give? Or, like, what what's what are you seeing your role in this being? Right? Because you have this idea. You have this this kind of vague idea for, well, we wanna make voting a thing that's just part of life and is part of the Internet broadly. And there's a million different technical ways to achieve that, some of them are gonna be better than others and whatever. There's a million different ways to get people to pay attention to it or for it to have its own social force that it will carry itself forward.
Yeah. Like, how how what what
what are you what are you hoping to do for this initiative?
Alright. So I've written a 40 page doc. That's what I shared at that link. Right.
Right.
It's it's a it's a year's worth of thinking. A few smart people chimed in, but mostly it's my work. And I need people who a are smarter than me about things I'm not smart about and be want to do a thing that's gonna be pretty hard. And I'm delighted to dance alongside of them. But I am not starting this and hiring people to do it with me. I or for me, I am saying, you know, back in the early days of Wikipedia, I could have sat next to Jimmy and helped with him, but I didn't. Right? Because I didn't completely get the joke. You guys get the joke. If there are people here who want to commit and cycle, even if the commitments three hours to point out why it's not going to work. That's cool. And start a discourse. And we can discuss it. And it feels to me like there's a couple critical elements of architecture that I'm missing here. And if the architecture is correct, the same way building that first casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, ended up with Las Vegas turning into Las Vegas, the architecture of we need to put a casino right here. That thing from a tech point of view, I don't get yet. And I have a lot of curiosity. I have more free cycles than most people, but I'm not signing up to be the CEO of this thing.
Okay. So I guess you're holding court or you're you're being an impresario or
yeah. I'm an impresario. I'm trying to create the conditions for the right people to be in the room where something generative occurs, and we're glad we did it.
Yeah. I guess, you know what? I'll just I'll probably end my time by just being a vulnerable of, like, this this kind of stuff. I even have a couple software projects, right, that I've shared with Medigap people and then said, hey. I promise I'm gonna work on this. I promise it's gonna happen. And then kind of been like, well, you know, stuff happens, and I have to deal with my son or, you know, like, like, this life, and I have a full time job and blah blah blah blah blah. I've been trying to myself cook up ways. Well, how do I how do I make this my job? Or how do I make enough money that I can fund someone to just work on this stuff?
Right. And that's the arch that's an architecture question. So why don't you drop me an email, read the 40 page thing or 10 of the pages, and if anybody here wants has a lot of interest, it doesn't cost me very much to spin up a discourse, and we'll have a conversation asynchronously offline. And if it makes sense, we'll dance. Okay.
Alright. Interesting. Thank you, Seth.
Thank you.
Maybe I'll just add to that from a kind of, like, a architecture organizational side. How do we actually execute this? So Medigob is a nonprofit that is basically built or was started to build something like this, a technological infrastructure support for we try not to sort of, like, overtly sort of, like, sell democracy is the best thing for everything, because that's it's not always the case. Sometimes you do need, like, dictatorship in a particular project, but to make democracy more accessible on the Internet than it was before. And, of course, like, that's often through voting, not necessarily always, to be clear. And I would just encourage folks to you know, actually, the I mean, that's something we we don't talk about that often in these summers because we kind of approach it intellectually, kind of more act more academically. But part of the point, and especially this is reflected in, like, MediGo's more, let's say, programmatic projects in our grants is to effect it. Like, how do we actually build something like this? And it turns out there's, like, a lot of different, like, complicated pieces and people you need to talk to. And turns out the Internet is really big. It's, like, a really big thing. Going back to Ofer's kind of additional comments around, like, hey. How do you how do you actually get this started? The but, yes, I would just say there there is a group of people working to execute some version of this. And part of the rationale for Medigob is start coordinating more of these people, people like Seth, people like Blaine, who are interested in these kinds of questions. The okay. I think next up is Daniel.
Yeah. I'll go next. Thank you, Seth, for putting all this up there.
I can I guess I
sort of have two clarifying questions? One,
how
important because you talk a lot about the diary, and and so that sort of implies a a continuity or a public record, you know, and some votes and we we touched on this earlier. Some votes are are best off public, like your representatives voting record, whereas others are private, such as your personal vote for president. Is this vision one of of always a public track record so that people become credible, or maybe it's a mix of public and private? If so, private is have to be some sort of complex cryptography to hide the vote, like, whatever whatever. That's my first question is what can you clarify that? The second thing is how important is it for you that, these diaries are can transition across context? Something that Josh mentioned is that often these things are very contextual. And so is it fine if, you know, every single person, every group using this, it's just only in that context is meaningful and it doesn't translate? Or is it really the goal a sort of translatable voting record?
Yeah. This is these are great questions. I have I won so many lotteries, starting with the parent lottery and the cast and social justice lottery. But when I show up in a room, my vote counts for more. And it counts for more for a couple of reasons, because I'm slightly famous, because I'm a little bit more than slightly well off. And because mostly, I have done a bunch of projects in the past that have worked. And so people presume that the next thing I'm going to work on might be better. And there are other people who have just a good track record, but it's not visible, because they've worked in quieter, socially focused organizations or whatever. So where this began for me, is by being able to say, what you've done in the past, in this context, you could make public, but in that context, you can keep private. And that it unlocked so many things for me about that's missing from the typical each vote is a separate thing, and all votes are private. And to or all votes are public. In this case, I can show up, let's say it's in an organization like this one and show that the last five times we had a disagreement, my vote on the record ended up being the right thing. So now my vote should count for more. Because even though I might be quiet, I'm right. And so wisdom is exchanged. Or if I have an actual PhD from an actual famous university, and we're talking about actual issues involving Plato, my comment on this is different than some troll who just showed up. Right? So how do we bring what we all know intuitively into a data structure that is separate from cache, because cache is the data structure we currently are used to, which is sometimes private and sometimes flashed around in public. And it's used against us and fused awkwardly. So that's where my heart is. And so I just asserted that this was technically doable. But if there's an advantage to doing it a different way, or if it's technically not doable, then what I'm in love with is irrelevant. Thank you, Daniel. And in terms of my time commitment, I don't have any employees. And I spend fifty or sixty hours a week at work. I'm launching a major fundraising software platform in two months. So that's gonna take a bunch of my time. But I have plenty of time to spend on this. I have reputation to spend on it as well and a little bit, but not an enormous amount of money.
Let me jump in with a question that I asked earlier. I'm gonna just preface this by saying that this is, like, a dangerous question for somebody like me to ask. But how hard would it actually be just to build this? Like, is it really that hard? I mean because, like, what what are we asking for? It was because it was kinda just saying, like, hey. Let's get a okay. You know? Okay. The the the the part where we get adoption, that's hard. Right? You know? But, like like, a technical spec that says, this is what voting should look like or not not so much what voting should look like because people can come up with arbitraries for strategies and sort of setups. It's like, you know, all the game theory, you know, could just stop slide in there or all functions and sell. But, you know, you need effectively, what you need is just some sort of, like, reporting thing, right, to to get these diaries or, you know, aggregation slash histories up. Right? You need some sort of, like, common reporting infrastructure. And then there's the incentive for, like, why is that reporting happen? You know? Where is the data going to? Where is it coming from? Things like that. And it's, like, it's hard, but it's, like, you know, not that hard given the tools we have. Like, we know how email works. Right? But we have, like, activity pub and activity stream. This is essentially just a certain class of data that shows up in, like, very specific kinds of context or actually not very specific. It's kinda like a very broad class of context. Right? So it's less controlled than what we think of usually, like, for those of you who don't know what activity stream is, basically, the thing that underlies master on. So, like, Twitter like posts, social media shares, those kinds of things. It's basically all inscribed in a protocol. Right? It's free. It's open. You can adopt it. You choose not to adopt it. It's all that sort of fostering more interoperable and more resilient kinds of sharing of social media. And, you know, you can you can, like, literally do this as social media. Right? But that, you know, that that requires a certain level of, like, publicness, which, obviously, we don't necessarily want in all voting circumstances. That's not not quite the same application, but the point is, like, you know, if I look at it from a couple angles, it doesn't seem that hard. So kinda ask, like, so why didn't it exist already? Like, why isn't somebody already built this?
I think that there's already exist? There's different kinds of hard. Right? There are some very fundamental architecture questions here that even in this tiny group we could argue about. Is it federated? Is it centralized? How deep does the cryptography go? Do I have to make it so there's only one diary per person? Or can I have a diary that I use for some of my votes in a diary I use for my private life? How do I right, there are all these things that you want to make a leap around that have repercussions that will last for years. And so, you know, an example is, in '19, whatever it was, I had a meeting because I thought if we could put stamps on email, very cheap stamps, spam would go away. And, you know, it was the head AOL and was the head of Yahoo, and it was one of the things. It was more than half of all consumer email in the room. They couldn't make that decision because the architecture was so thoroughly ingrained in how we thought about how things work. So we've made all of these decisions about DNS and about all this other stuff that are now taken for granted. I don't see where the forks in the road are here. So, yes, this is doable, but there isn't a right answer. There are just answers.
Mhmm. Well, what what I'm saying is that okay. You know, if there are, like, a thousand decisions that needed to go into this and then a lot of them are very hard, then it's a hard problem. And then you throw, like, a bunch of PhD students at it and hope something happens. But if there are not that many decisions and, you know, like, you just have to make them. Right? You know? We make decisions all the time. Like, what can I screw it up? And, you know, future generations, they blame the people in this call for, like, why did you fuck this up so badly? But you know what? You just gotta, like, do it. Right? But I don't know. It's like when I think about it, it's like, it doesn't seem that hard. It doesn't seem like that many decisions. You're gonna take, like, you know, a week or so to come up with, like, a, like, a first pass. And then and then the issue is, like, getting people adoption, and that's like, yeah, that once again, that's a whole another issue. But anyways. Let's see. Yeah. We have people Daniel, you wanna bring yourself back to the stack?
Yeah. I mean, I guess I I think that on this topic of, like, going super general or specific, you know, I I did like the idea Seth mentioned early on about the restaurants. And, you know, I I would say instead of going super general and making all these long term choices at the very beginning, what if you focused on a very specific use case that was constrained? Because, you know, in in math, the more constrained a problem is, the more opportunities you have to solve it. And then generalizing is harder and harder. So say, okay. We're just gonna focus on restaurants. You know, all we're doing is people voting on specific things like the menu, the music, whatever it is. And then, you know, maybe restaurants can choose whether they wanna recognize other restaurants' diaries based on affinities. And so you have all these mechanics but in a very tight setting where people can sort of understand it, and it can become really fun. I remember, what was his name? The Snapchat guy. He had this line, you know, make it a toy, toys win. And, you know, if the first experience is not the sort of, oh, this is like a political project, whatever whatever. But, oh, this is like Rezi launched a little widget for jukeboxes. And now, wow, like, people like my music, so I get a discount at this other restaurant. It's like that I could see that being a lot of fun. And then, you know, that didn't solve every problem. But, you know, say, okay. What worked? What didn't work? And then we can generalize one step out. So I think that that's something that as I think about what this could look like, that seems very realistic.
Great point. Thank you. I'm gonna put the, the page up again right here. I'm SethGodin@gmail.com. And, if this tickles somebody, drop me a note, and we'll figure out whether we should figure it out. But, I'm just blown away by the kindness, generosity, and insight of the people on this call and in the Slack. Wow. It's just great.
Wonderful. In the last five minutes of the call, and we are gonna try to finish on time, I would encourage, anybody who hasn't spoken yet, any of you, people who have been silent and just perhaps listening to speak up and say something. Maybe you've been holding it in. Obviously, no pressure, but I think this is a we'd love to hear some additional voices. If not, we can
go back to
I'll hold the space for ten more seconds, and, otherwise, we might be able to just end it on time. We'll give them a little bit of orbit.
Oh, I just wanted to say thank you, and I really appreciate the format of the the open call 40 page manifesto. It's it's something dear to my heart, and I I really appreciate it, and I'm looking forward to reading it.
Thank you.
Wonderful. In that case, as per tradition, I would invite everybody to unmute. And then because of Zoom's, you know, noise detection things, please, in the next three seconds, clap vigorously for our guests, Seth, for visiting us and providing such a spirited discussion. So three, two, one. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Seth, for joining us.
Thanks. I
look forward to continuing any more of these conversations.
Thanks. Keep making your records, everybody. A real pleasure. Take care.
Pleasure. Take care, Ravi.