Own the Value of your Labor with DAOs feat. Daniel Kronovet from Colony
This week I interviewed Daniel Kronovet (@kronosapiens) at Colony, “An Operating System for Organizations”. The Colony Network is a suite of smart contracts, running on Ethereum. It provides a general purpose framework for the essential functions organizations require, such as ownership, structure, authority, and financial management. Along the way, we talk about organizations and society as systems of information processing, the relationships of models to reality, and some classic (and moder...
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Transcript
Hello again. This is the Blockchain Socialist Podcast. And for this week, I had the opportunity to sit down with Daniel Kronovet, a research engineer at Colony, which is a pretty interesting project. They're making a suite of different types of smart contracts for the creation of DAOs, or what they call colonies. This is a pretty interesting interview, and it's a project I recommend keeping an eye on. But before we get started, I just wanted to remind everyone that this weekend, 05/02/2020, on Saturday, we are going to be hosting a Blockchain one zero one live session on the Discord group. So the Crypto Leftist Discord group is a community group with other like minded people who are left wing and really interested in Blockchain and other types of peer to peer technologies. So if you wanna join this live session, you will need to create an account on Discord if you haven't already and click on the invitation to the group that I'll leave in the description. But that's it for me. So let's get started with the interview. Well, hello there. Thank you. Thank you for coming on. I'm here with Daniel Kronovitz, a research engineer at Colony. And so in case you don't know, Colony is, it describes itself as an operating system for organizations. It's a really collection or suite of smart contracts running on Ethereum, and it provides a general purpose framework for the essential functions, that organizations require, like ownership, structure, authority, and financial management.
So hey, Daniel. How are you? Doing well. Good to be here. Thank you.
So I just thought we could just start with, you explaining a bit what Colony is and how it got started from a high level, and then we'll talk about some some other interesting stuff.
Totally. So yeah. So I think that the the way that I would describe Colony is, it's an attempt to allow for organizations to exist, which are able to capture the best of kind of top down hierarchical control with the best of knowledge from the periphery, worker autonomy, people who have their independence and agency. Right? I feel like each one of those models has something to offer, and Colony is trying to develop a way to blend them together, in a way that really gets the best of either and avoids maybe some of the pitfalls of either. So I would say that's kind of the vision, which I was very drawn to and I found very compelling. And, the history is actually pretty funny. Our founder, Jack DuRose, used to be a professional jeweler. He made very high end jewelry for artists and wealthy people. And his experience making jewelry involved a lot of working with independent contractors. And so kind of part of the vision for him was, can we create a a platform to allow a bunch of independent people to work together, to create something a high quality product or service the way that a regular organization could. And the name Colony comes from the ant colony, and and the idea there was, can you create a structure that is not a person in charge It still allows for all these people to be coordinated in a complicated way, which is the founding, which I thought was a very kind of a cool vision and cool idea. Yeah. So that's, I'd say, what Colony is is trying to do. And we use Ethereum to do so because by putting the money on the blockchain, it means that there's no longer a person who is holding the purse strings. And it makes it more possible to achieve the sort of decentralized ownership and control that we're sort of going for. It's kinda it's kinda how I describe the project.
Yeah. I I I think it's, it's really interesting because, at least for me, I sort of see the the potential for rethinking, labor relations and, like, it's especially with DAOs in general. I think what sort of reason why I find it pretty interesting. But I was wondering why you would think, you know, a leftist or someone who is anti capitalist who sees, you know, they think about blockchain or cryptocurrency, and they think of, like, Bitcoin, and they think of a sort of, you know, you know, a right wing sort of tint to it. But, of course, this is a different project, but I was wondering why do you think someone who's on the left should feel, who should be interested in Colony?
Totally. It's it's a great question, and I think that really the promise of something like Colony for Socialists, that it allows you to operate a effective organization with less of a reliance on a rigid hierarchy. It means that labor can have more autonomy without, and this is important, without sacrificing competitiveness. Right? And I think that you find when you look around at things now, there are some types of companies, some industries where where worker cooperatives, are very flat structures that naturally thrive. And two examples that come to mind are food service. I think that worker co ops or, like, worker bakeries, tend to do very well, and we can talk about why that's the case. But also very high end research organizations tend to do well when they're flat. So you have certain areas where flat structures now succeed well, and then you have many where they don't seem to be doing as well as more top down command control hierarchies. It's worth asking kind of why that's the case and if there's a way make it possible to, to allow more flat structures to succeed in more places. I think the answer to that is not the extremes of no hierarchy or strict hierarchy, but to develop a type of flexible hierarchy which can adjust and adapt kind of in real time according to to the situation, which I I think is kind of what Colony wants to provide. There's something that I wanted to share also. There's an amazing essay by Friedrich Hayek, who is a conservative economist. You know? So I know that your your listeners might not necessarily be such a such a fan, but I do think that he has a lot of things to say that we should pay attention to. And, specifically, one of his essays, The Use of Knowledge in Society, which is a classic. I would recommend that everyone listening to this read it. It's very short. He makes the point, and he frames the problem of running a country as one of, really, information processing. And this is written in the forties, so we'll come back to this. But at the time, he felt that the information processing capabilities of a communist government in the forties, remember, this is before computers, pen and paper, could just never never compete with the information processing capabilities of a market because the market we can think of as a decentralized computer if if you're willing to to to think of a computer as an information processing tool and not as something that is specifically running on silicon, which I think is the right way to think about it for this conversation. Information processing capacity. K. And so at at at the time, he felt like, you know, these these sort of, a lot of structures couldn't process information quickly enough to compete. And so it's a hierarchy which can be more efficient at processing information was the better way to go. And I and I bring this up because I think it's worth asking ourselves now when we have substantial computing powers if that conclusion remains relevant. I think a lot of what's happening now with The US and China and the conversation we're having now about sort of this rebalancing of power is whether in 2020, it is possible to have effective governments that do exercise more top down control than we could in the forties. I don't know the answer to this, but I think it's relevant to think about how Hyatt's ideas in the forties about information processing capacity remain highly relevant thinking about power in the world today. So that was something that I really wanted to to sort of share, and then I'll bring it back to what we're doing here, which is can we achieve information processing capacities that are as good as anything else while having more flexibility with the organizational form and the ownership of resources and so on. So for all these, we would like to bring to the forefront, more socialist sort of vision of the world.
Yeah. I I think that's it's, I mean, a bit ironic and kind of funny that you're we're using sort of, like, as far as I know, Hayek was pretty anti communist using an anti communist theory to say, well, maybe we can actually, prove you wrong in a way. Maybe you were right then, but now with the the processing power, the way that technologies have advanced,
your theory probably isn't correct if it was. I mean, his theory might have been correct. His conclusions may no longer be relevant. That's the thing. I mean, his conclusions just may no longer be correct because we're in a different world today. But using his line of thinking, his line of thinking, I I think, remains very strong. And there's something else I wanted to mention. You know, I've I've been reading I've been reading a lot of coronavirus coverage as I'm sure everyone is. And, you know, a point that was made about a lot of the companies that people think are gonna be shutting down was that, really, the loss is is is is more than anything else, the information that those companies contain. And and then the journalist made the point that so much of our society's information is contained inside of companies. And when a company fails, even if the same people or even if the same company could come up again later and do the same make the same product or service, that information was lost forever, and that is a permanent loss. You know? And so thinking about companies as ways of storing information, is is like just another another piece of this puzzle of society as information processing and the role of firms in this sort of information processing system. I think that at a high level, this is how we should be thinking about these questions. Because I think it'll allow us to compare things which currently maybe seem like they're not comparable, which is why I like the framing so much.
Yeah. I I think that even if you're, you know, socialist or communist, then you would still agree with that, that in firms today, there's a lot of knowledge kept in it. And there are a lot of people who are, you know, have certain skills and there's certain, you know, best practices that are kept in there. And it's a pretty good argument for, like, seizing, the means of production in a way just knowing that all of that that information is stored there as well. So Also worth asking, if you if you see as the means of production violently,
how much information is gonna be lost? Right? Like, you know, like because actually so Karl Filani is my favorite writers. He was a socialist. He wrote The Great Transformation, which is an amazing book. Everyone should read it. He made the point. He was talking about industrialization in England and social upheaval. And he made the point, which I think is really important, is that it is really not the change. It's not it's not the direction of the change that's the problem. It's always the the pace of change. And if if the change is gradual enough, we can develop social coping mechanisms for almost anything. So we can get from a to b, basically, all the time if the change is slow enough. Then we can say, well, can we make change if it's slow enough? That's also an important question. But when change is too fast, then we have social dislocation and and and and and we have real loss of knowledge and value. You know? And so this way to allow these change processes to occur more gradually to prevent information being lost, Because I think I think I think that fast change is probably gonna result in information loss more often than not. Although, actually, I wanna think about that more because I just sort of thought of that now. I can't I have a my intuition is that there's a relationship there that is worth keeping in mind as we turn to our information processing framing of society.
Yeah. I mean, I think there's there's something to it, but I think maybe it depends on the I think it really depends on the specific material conditions in which the the change happens and how it happens. I agree. Which is why I think Colony, going back to Colony,
is so attractive is that it allows for a sort of flexible shift between hierarchy and flat structure depending on what's needed. Right? So you're actually able to go from, we have a hierarchy where these people are calling the shots to everyone in the firm is basically a peer, kind of step by step. And and there's actually a whole design space now between those two extremes that we can explore, which I think is pretty new. I think, normally, it's been harder to have so much flexibility in that design space. You either had to be very hierarchical, which has its own cost, which I'll talk about in a second because I have a lot of thoughts about the downsides of hierarchy, or something that's totally flat, which also has its own costs. And so I think that really being able to kind of organically and and gradually shift between these forms, I think is really a very interesting and exciting idea. Because and what looks like yeah. I mean, so, like, the downside of hierarchy or the the up upside of hierarchy, going back to information processing, is that you can have people with a lot of capacity. You know, we're gonna call them capital. Ideally, they have a lot of capacity, and they do a lot of information processing. And then they leverage that through the labor force to to do work. So you're getting high quality information processing and leveraging that through labor to produce goods and services, which, when everything is going well, seems like a good idea. The problem is when the hierarchy when the hierarchy is too inflexible and you have leadership that is bad, self serving, not intelligence, whatever corrupts, they start to extract value for themselves, and then the whole organization starts to teeter totter and fall. Right? So when hierarchy is inflexible, you're always gonna get a bad egg eventually, which is why it's not a great solution, I think. Because you're always gonna get someone bad eventually, and then everything's gonna get real bad. You know? But but when it's going well, it's, like, can be fine. Right? You know? And then when something when something is too flat, you have the issue of it can be too slow. Maybe, you know, the information processing is not gonna be quite up to snuff. It just there there there there's there's a friction there, that can also make the organization not competitive. So figuring out a way to have the best of both worlds. Because, also, you know, when labor is has ownership, they're more motivated. There's so many benefits that come from giving labor ownership and agency. You know, no one's denying that. So how can we give labor as much agency and ownership as possible without sacrificing, ultimately, like, the capacity information processing? And I think it's possible that we can actually have more capacity information processing if we give labor ownership, which is why I think that, ultimately, this is, like, such a good idea because the potential is so much higher when labor has more of a say. It's just that right now, in a lot of cases, we're not reaching that potential. And why like, what can we what's going on there? You know, I'm like, obviously, there's a lot to talk about that, but I think that that's kind of another way to think about it.
Yeah. Yeah. No. I think I think that's a that's a good point. I mean, but at the same time, you know, a lot of companies, at least in in my experience now, my work experience, sometimes you get the, sort of the the veneer of ownership with with your work and, like, you they're you know, they sort of maybe they'll encourage you about pursuing something or another, but it's not like you don't own your work in the sense that I still have no say in what happens with, you know, the value that I generate with my work Yes. To my company. Whereas, I imagine with something like Colony or with DAOs in general, you can
sort of implement these type of policies to our workers, receive the the the value of their labor in a way. Yeah. I think that you make you bring up a great point, which is I think that companies now, there's like a veneer of agency. It's like, you know, you give I think, like, you know, you take, like, a classic large tech company. Right? You hire someone out of university. You give them free soda and, like, a massage chair, and you're like you make them feel amazing. You give them, like, perks that are really ultimately very cheap but feel amazing to them. And then you convince them to give you free labor and tell them that they're having a great time and they're doing a great job. And it's like, okay. Well, you're clearly, like, you know, these are not discerning this is not a discerning labor force, unfortunately. You know? They're just, like, take they're just, like, they're being told that this is amazing. And meanwhile, all their value is being, you know, extracted and, like, you know, like no one hates having their surplus value extracted more than me. Trust me. No one hates them more than I do. And they just, like, don't they just think you know, it's like they're not talking about this all day like we are. They just, you know, they're not thinking about those things. Yeah. One thing that I like about Colony, and specifically the direction that we take is that we make the agency and ownership very kind of deeply tied in many cases to control over resources and finances. And I think that that's exciting because, really, I think that if you want people to have agency, you have to give them a say in where the resources and the capital goes. So I really think that giving labor a say over what where we spend our money, I think is really the direction that we should be pursuing around creating new kinds of firms. And there are a lot of reasons why I think this is a great idea, which we can talk about. A lot of what it comes down to is that I think that and this is kind of my larger my larger sort of thesis in this point in my career. It's that if we want to give more power to labor, we have to move beyond voting on proposals. I think that in our in our era of abundant computational power, pass fail voting on proposals is, like, the most archaic bullshit, and we need to move beyond that as ways of making decisions because it's not gonna get us there. It's just not. And, I think the budgets are so appealing because I think there's so many more things you can do with finances, and there's so many more interesting ways to organize people's input information around budgets than there is around pass fail voting on arbitrary proposals. I just think we have to move beyond that. If you wanna have more effective organizations, it's still give a lot of power to labor. It's kind of my little thesis. So you're saying, like, instead of like, if you're in a work worker coop,
saying, instead of like, if you're in a work worker coop,
saying voting yes or no on different things, you can Over there. Expanding or you type There's a great Oscar Wilde quote about this that I wanna that I wanna throw out there, which is, the problem with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings. So that was very kind of rye and charming, but also accurate. I think that most people don't want like, when I was 21, I was I ran a student I ran a housing co op, and I was, like, mister meeting. Right? So I say this after having spent hundreds of hours running meetings. Like, I've I've did I've done a lot of it. And I was excited because I loved just being in the middle talking all day, you know. But I realized after a while that most people were not really that engaged, and this was kind of dumb. Yeah. You know, it's really Democracy,
takes takes work. You've just realized
But saying that, I think, is a is I don't think we should let ourselves off the hook and saying, oh, this is just, you know, vote like Robert's Rules is like is we've read the Robert's Rules is the end of democratic history. We've we've perfected it. There's no way to do better than Robert's Rules. We can just go home. That is not the answer. And there's a lot of space there's a lot of room now to experiments with mechanisms for doing these types of for doing decision making. You know? And I think going back to Hayek, you know, Robert's Rules was written in, I believe, the nineteenth century when they didn't have amazing computers, and voting on motions was there was there was no alternative. I mean, obviously, that was that was cutting edge at the time. It is no longer cutting edge. You have to be willing to think about what comes next. And I think that control over finances is very promising just because the design space for managing finances is so large and unexplored, which is why I think it's very exciting.
Okay. So then, I guess,
you guys have a plan for for doing that. We have a lot of we have a lot of plans. Something that Calmi does and I sort of wanna so I sent you a couple of links that I wanna sort of go through. Yeah. So talking about Hayek. The second thing I wanted to talk about was, this sort of monograph written by Stafford Beer, who was a British cyberneticist in the seventies. So now we're going from, like, forties kind of, like, you know, conservative economics to seventies kind of, like, techno utopian cybernetics. It's kind of our journey here on this podcast episode. And he was, like, seventies, very utopian, computers will save us, kind of his whole deal. Because, he wrote I mean, this this this monograph is excellent. Would recommend for you and your readers a lot of interesting ideas in there. He was actually working with Allende to set up the kind of, like, the what could have been, like, this place Cybercin. Cybercin. Exactly. You know, like, this is not the, you know, this is not the place to discuss my opinion about the legacy of Allende. But, it was IP. It was it was a cool idea. I mean, it's not the place for that conversation, but it was a cool idea. And, you know, one of his big themes one of his big themes was that it's important to model things correctly, which is kind of just a true which is just true. Everyone Everyone should just know that that's true. It's obviously self evident that we have true. But, specifically, he made the point that we should really, if we're trying to govern things correctly, frame things in terms of change over time and not static things that are fixed. And there's a lot to say about this particular idea, a lot to say about this idea, actually, which gets into, like, the foundations of mathematics and, like, pretty deep metaphysics around stasis versus change. You know? But I think that you can never step in the same river twice. I think that the idea that the the the the only constant has changed, the nature of the universe has changed, I think most people can, like, kind of appreciate. But, I mean, that's true and, like, that's relevant in mundane things like running companies. Anyway, Sanford Beer's point was that we should really be modeling things as flows over time, not as, you know, we have $5,000 in the bank, but rather every day $300 is being spent on this. Right? And that's how we have to represent these things because only then can we understand clearly what's happening. And one of the things about Colony that I like is that they really made a big emphasis on using time and change over time as a way to drive a lot of processes, as a way of as a way of as a way of making a lot of decisions sort of with the computer, letting the computer have agency. We use time in a lot of places to keep things moving. And I think that that's one of the reasons why I like colonies so much is that a colony is is really it has agency. A colony, even though it's just software, has an aliveness to it that I think a lot of other tools don't. I think a lot of tools are static. Nothing happens till you make it happen. But with a colony, things are always happening regardless of whether you're actively engaging. I think that that my hope and my intuition is is that will make it a very compelling way to organize a bunch of people without the need for a as much of a hierarchy. Because the software as a whole is playing a very active role. And because the role is based on change, it's the right way. I'm putting this in quotes. I know this is audio. But this is the right way, quote, unquote, to kind of organize or think about a company. It's kind of my, like, very booster like pitch and why I think this project is exciting. Mhmm. Yeah. And I think though that's kind of some ideas that I want people to also be kicking around in the back of their heads.
Is it is there, like, a specific example that you mean by, like, working with time? Yeah. So my favorite example is the way that we manage resources and funding.
Right? So, you know, instead of having an annual budget where every year, some people put together a budget for the year and they pass it with a vote, and that's the budget. At Colony, funding is always moving throughout the organization continuously in real time. Right? You can, you know, you can think of an org you know, our like an org chart. Colony has an org chart of different parts of the company, and funding starts off at the top. And then over time, it kind of trickles down. It's like a like mountain flowing down a water flowing down a mountain. It kind of flows down into more specific departments or domains and collects and then is paid out for different things. But because the flows are dynamic and real time, anyone in the company can, at any point, adjust the flows and say, I think we actually I wanna put 5% more into engineering and away from marketing or vice versa. Or I wanna I wanna I wanna I wanna spend less money here and more money there. And so you you actually have the entire the entire labor force now collaboratively in real time deciding where the resources are gonna be going. And then because time is what's driving in the background, it's actually a lot less work for the people. Right? You can have a lot of you can have a lot of information processing, going back to our opening theme, without the individual people having to do so much of that work themselves. So I really think it balances information processing in the person, which is the source of the subjective judgments. I think we should be putting more money into this and less into that. But the computer deals with the specifics, which is, okay, we're now gonna put a $100 into this, or I'm gonna I'm gonna reconcile everyone's opinions into a cohesive whole. Everyone individually provides their opinion, and then the software will reconcile it into a whole and and kind of keep that cohesion. I think that that division of responsibility between the human and the computer, I think, is the right way to think about technology. And this actually leads me into my third thing that I wanna talk about. I didn't really expect to get there so fast. But, so I have a background in machine learning and, also political economy. And so I find technology and society to be very interesting, the question of technology and society. And, specifically, how do humans relate to the algorithms is, I think, a very topical fun question for us to be thinking about. And I think that the right way to think about it or the the way that I would like to think about it, which obviously isn't the right way, again, that's in quotes, but just my way. But since you're listening to me, we're just gonna go with Sure. Sure. There's actually there's actually, so there's there's two people, Glenn Weil and Jaren Lanier, and they're like BFFs. They're like technology philosophers. Yeah. Say in Wired called AI as an ideology, not a technology, which I think gets a lot of really important ideas. And, like, they they work a lot on, like, digital like, valuing people's digital labor and, like there's a whole conversation about when people generate the data, you know, they own it. You know, how do we how do we how do we value data people generate versus the algorithms themselves? There's a big conversation now happening around this. I'm sure Shana Zuboff is a is a is a is a author that writes a lot about this. This is, like, very much a theme. And the point that they made, Glenn and Jaren, is that we really have to recognize that all the algorithm does is it takes the information that we generate and it reorganizes it into some other format. It does nothing except reorganize our information. And so we just like you just like you program a program by writing code, you program these algorithms by providing inputs. So, really, like, you can almost think of the budget as a program, and I program the budget by saying I wanna put more money into product and less into operations or whatever. Right? We're actually we're we can think of this as writing a program just as much as if I was writing I was writing code. And so kind of recognizing that people people provide the inputs and the algorithm synthesize them for us, but that they do nothing that is not a function of our inputs and really explicitly recognizing our role in providing the correct inputs, I kinda think is is is a very generative way to approach the question of humans versus technology.
Yeah. I I I think I've read that article before, and it was I remember being, pretty good. But one of the things that so then because the way the way that at least I interpret that sort of feeling that AI as an ideology is also as well that the people like, AI is also reflection of the people who make, who program the the algorithms and the code and everything else.
This is this is also very true. I mean, you know, every model is a is a is a small reflection of reality, and every model also makes assumptions about what's important, what's not, and how they relate. And if once assumptions are off, then no matter what the inputs are, the output will be off in the same way. So there's definitely a huge role for algorithmic design. There's a huge movement of fairness, accountability, transparency, and algorithms. I was a part of this. I was kinda peripheral to this when I was in graduate school. I went to these conferences about AI safety, and it's just it's, like, it's a very, very interesting area. And a lot of people are talking about it. And you're totally right. This is as much a part of the question as how do you value people's contributions. You're totally right. Because yeah. I there is this one article I read that, like, you know, some, I think, you know, police department in some city was trying to figure out who,
stole something at a at a store, and then, you know, they they use this AI machine to find out who it was, and it gave them, you know, it gave them a face and a person. They said it was this guy. The guy was black, and, turns out the guy was actually innocent. And, you know, they partially the blame was that, you know, the the the the data that was used to feed that that algorithm didn't have enough black faces and that, you know, is probably likely that it was all, you know, white guys making this, this algorithm, and so it wasn't very wasn't very good for for handling people. Well,
it's it's a great point. Actually, I'm I'm sending another language I wanted to share with the listeners about analyzing AI snake oil. This is it's just a couple of slides which talks about this. I do think I don't think it's not that the engineers were white per se, is that the data was biased. Yeah. And we didn't know how to account for that. I don't wanna I don't think it's because engineers were white. That that's that's too simplistic, of course. Yeah. But in no way more about the dataset than about who the team was like. But, definitely, if the team had been more diverse, they might have been more they might have had more intuition for things that and I I really think in this case, it's more of the data. But, in this, in this talk, it talks about recognizing AI snake oil. And it makes the points that some tasks are great for like, right now, we're good at some tasks, but not others. And to lump it all together under AI will make it difficult for us to to to kind of clearly understand what's happening. And he made the point that right now, AI is really good for perception. Especially neural networks are amazing at at making sense of sensory input like video and, video and audio. It's like there's a lot of progress there. Obviously, with the face recognition is biased because of the data. But as as a capacity to actually provide correct outputs given the right data, it works really well. And then kind of the second thing, which is we're kind of medium, is automating judgment. So things like spam detection, automatic essay grading, even, like, detecting, you know, misinformation online, that's where there's progress that's being made, but we're not really as good there as we are in, for example, recognizing images. And what is totally, totally dubious and we should not take seriously at all is predicting social outcomes. Like, who's gonna be, like, recidivism rates and all those things. Like, going back to the model. Right? Like, there's no way for us to really model all the complex factors that go into these outcomes. And so even trying to do it, it's like we're just gonna be so off base that we should probably maybe not be doing that yet. And because when you when you tell someone that it's possible, you give them the illusion of confidence, which I think is a dangerous thing. I think that the illusion of confidence, for AI that predicts social outcomes right now is is quite dangerous, and we should really recognize that it's really not much more than fortune telling. And, no, it's not we're not ready for that, and we should just not do it right now.
Yeah. I I I know what you mean. So then, like, I I I've been having this idea as well that AI I mean, the way that and as with technologies in general, I think, because it is just a tool, like, you know, AI in itself is politically neutral, but it doesn't doesn't do anything unless someone makes it do something. So then Yeah. Yeah. And and so then in that sense, it reflects the person, but also, I think it also reflects, ideology in general of society in a way. You know, it's it's how what our society prioritizes also sort of changes the direction in which we choose to apply technology and what to do it for. So, I mean, you know, I think it's pretty easy if you read around, you know, the majority of the reason why people use AI or whatever technology is to make money. You know, it's just that they they want to apply in some way in order to make more profit. But and so I think gives it then this people get afraid, you know, that, like, AI is going to, bring about big brother or whatever. And and in a way, maybe that's true, but that's largely true, I think, not because of AI, but because that's how it's going to be applied. Alright. And also, I mean, is there anything wrong with using AI to maybe not say make proper generate value
if that value is shared in a more appropriate way. Right? Let's what if we had a worker code? Value, you know, you can Yeah. It was amazing, and they all were sharing all that money. I mean, that seems like a pretty sweet deal. You know? So it's probably not that AI is generating value, which is, I think, why why we want technology in general to increase productivity. But it's that the benefits are being so asymmetrically distributed. Right. Kind of like, this is there's something this is not really gonna work out well.
Yeah. It's yeah. But then going with that same AI as an ideology, then sure other technology must be an ideology as well, including Blockchain. So then,
You're right. I think that I think that one of the cool things about the Blockchain space, at least kind of my perception of it, is that, you know, on one hand, it is a new technology and there's the technology people that are really excited about it. But there are also it's a place for people that are interested in new kinds of governance to kind of gather. Right? There are a lot of nontechnical people. They're just really jazzed about, like, like, like yourself. I mean, they're not technically like, you're stoked about socialism. You're like, this is a cool movement. A lot of people are coming together around this idea. They're they're interested in things beyond the specifics of the technology, but they see the potential. We're all coming together to talk about these things. I think that that's really cool. And and it definitely and I think something we talked about before we started recording was you made the point that you feel like a lot of crypto people are very, like, right libertarian, but there are also a lot of them that are very, like, left socialist. Oh, yeah. For sure. I think a lot of people that are oriented around I think that I think the people that are oriented around, like, the DAOs, are more of the are more of the more left leaning. I think I I think that they're very interested in creating more equitable kinds of organizations. I really think that I think there's a lot of interest in energy. And that interest in energy, I think, is very left leaning. Although, maybe it's not my place to speak for everyone like that, but that's kinda my read. That's kinda my read. I
I
would agree. And I think the people that are more on the currency side are to get a little bit more right leaning. It's it's kinda how I yeah. That that's my read. Let's put that one. I could be wrong. Yeah. Sure. I mean, I think
I've yeah. I think the like, Bitcoin,
and crypto itself sort of attracts the people who are really interested in, like, returning to the gold standard or something like that, which tends to be a more conservative position or something like that. Like like, you know, as you said before, like, I, you know, I take intellectual influences from everywhere. I think that everyone has something to say. The gold standard was a good idea in theory, it was not gonna practice, you know, but keep keep thinking these thoughts, you know, there's you know, I I mean, I think that, you know, like, the right has some good things to say. We shouldn't marginalize them, but also they have they don't understand some things either. Like, all of us have you know, no one understands no one sees a little picture. You know? No. That's what I feel.
Yeah. I think, I yeah. I sort of I I I view it more as, like, I get why they think that, and I try not to be overtly mean to them. Well, I'm interested. But, you know Yeah. It's something that I want to try and, like, slowly,
make my own case for why. I agree. And I think it also I think in this moment with the coronavirus, I think we're learning that the assumption of, like, radical freedom is not actually true in practice. I think the assumption that we are all truly independent, is I think, a, it was always false, but I think it's being revealed to be extra false right now. And and I think it ultimately so going back to Karl Polanyi, my favorite socialist, political economist. You know, I I was actually just reading over the end of, his book, The Great Transformation the other day, which is the last page is, like, so powerful. You should read it just so you can read the last page. It's really it's so good. But the last chapter is called freedom in a complex society. And he kinda makes the point, which I I see in a lot of places, which is, you know, the truth is, like, there's no such thing as perfect freedom. We all live in society. And, you know, and but the task is how do we preserve our freedom in a complex society? And the title of the last chapter is freedom in a complex society, which I just, like, like, I get chills when I think about it. You know? I was like, how how do we how do we live in a complex society where we're not really independent, but still asserts our independence and freedom to the extent that we can. Right? So, obviously, it's dialectic. Right? There's no you know, we have to just fight for this. We have to, you know, we have to fight for the center every day. And that's just, like, the truth, and it's never gonna be different. And that's just what we have to do from now till forever. You know? And so I kinda think, like, that's, like, I think the attitude that I'd like to espouse.
You know? Yeah. Yeah. For sure. I think, yeah, it's just a fact of life that things are changing, and you have to sort of take that into account and that, you know, I think there's a place for what you can call ideology, but there's needs to also be a space for I mean, like like Karl Marx says, honestly, of understanding, you know, the material conditions that, you know, revolution same revolution that happens in one place won't happen the same way in another place, and you have to consider specific.
Right. Talk about situations. Talk about hiding the contradictions. Yeah. It's like, you know, like, every ideology going back to to to fix versus motion. Like, an ideology is, you know, fixed, and the truth is that the world is always changing. Right? So we're we're always sort of in this dialectical process of ideology, this ideology, that ideology. And we're like, the truth is always somewhere in the middle, and the ideologies are, like, fixed but slowly changing. And we're kind of rearticulating and returning to assumptions and improving incrementally. You know, like, the ideology is the ideology is always a great anchoring point, but it never captures the truth as a whole. You know? And so how do we leverage ideology to help us organize our thoughts while being able to move past it into the ambiguous middle where the truth sort of lies in in the shadows? It's kind
of how I feel about it. The only true ideology is maybe the just change. Things are going to change. Maybe we can go back a little bit, back into, Colony. So I wanted to ask some questions, specifically because we've talked about all this now and thinking about democracy and giving labor, you know, their their fair share and their voice in terms of receiving the value for their work. But what are are there any, like, specific ways in Colony in which as a person or as a member of a Colony, I can express sort of democracy? Like, how how what does that look like if I were a member in a Colony, do you think?
So there's, I would say there's an interaction of a couple of mechanisms that come together, I think, in a really in a very classy way in Colony. One is I said, people have a say over finances. And I think that's that's the core of it. Right? As as a part of this organization, I have a a say in where the money goes. And because it's on the blockchain, it's like I have a say that no one can take away. It's not as if I have a say but, like, you know, the accountant can overrule me. You know, it's like I have a say from here to the end of time. You know, this is and like that. And I think that that guarantee, I think, is, like, not nothing. I think it actually means a lot. So any everyone has a say over the finances. I think is is most directly how they have control, and also they have a share in the in in the upside. Right? So you have a control over finances, you have a share in the upside. But the other thing is that kind of the the the weight of your say is not fixed. And this is something else that I like. It also goes back to our idea of time. Alright. With Colony, decisions are weighted by reputation. This is you know, we have a reputation system. And reputation is also, like, a very interesting, very juicy design space right now. There's a lot to say about reputation systems. Another one of my favorite topics, maybe for another day. Actually, I wrote an essay, which I will link just so that people can look at it. I thought it was it was decent about reputation systems. I think there's a lot to say about this. But, we have a reputation system. And, there's two things about it that I really like. One, you earn reputation by doing work, which I think will make it naturally driven by the real world and that the real world will demand things of the organization. You don't have to you don't have the real world will demand things of the organization. Nothing you have to do about it. And then people will do those things, and then people will earn reputation for doing those things. And so reputation will sort of naturally become, at least in some maybe noisy, but hopefully not that noisy way, a good proxy of what the world needed and what this person did. And so going back to kind of flexible hierarchy, people can rise and fall in their reputation holdings organically over time depending on what's going on. So it's not as if you vote to give someone reputation. It's like we had so so it kind of removes a lot of the politicking around the hierarchy because it's driven by work, it's driven by real needs, which I think is very exciting. But, also, it decays over time. So here we have time again. Reputation decays over time, meaning that, you know, if I did a lot of work five years ago but now I'm no longer active, my influence will decline, which means there's room for someone else to come up. Right? And so because these numbers aren't fixed, they're always going up and always going down, the hierarchy is always in motion, which I think gives makes it easier for someone to come in and have a place. You're not coming into an organization where everything is so fixed. Well, these are the people that are in charge and, you know, until one of them retires, I'll never get my chance. Right? I think I think having this be a lot more fluid and continuous makes it a lot easier for people to come in and participate, people to come in and out. It really makes the whole thing a lot less rigid, which which our hope leads to back to our first side, which our hope is that this leads to better information processing overall and does more competitive organizations. Because no one wants to do something if it's gonna make your organization less competitive. That's not the point. Right? We're not doing just on principle. We're doing this because it's a better way to do things. I think it's very important to keep that in mind.
Mhmm. Yeah. It's it's, essentially, a much more fluid hierarchy in a way. I mean and I imagine as someone who, who designs their own colony, is there a way to, you know, determine what exactly the role of reputation is for their specific colony? Yes.
So one thing that we've been pushing for in the last year or so is to make it a lot more flexible how you set up your colony. So at first, we were thinking, you know, reputation is the only thing that makes decisions, and that's how it's gonna be forever. We realized that, actually, there was potential to make a colony a lot more flexible. And so we moved to kind of a new architecture that allowed for much more freedom to have more hierarchy that's strict or more hierarchy that's flexible depending on what you want. So you can have if you want, you can have a strict hierarchy where I am the boss forever, and reputation plays no role. If you want, you can do that. Or you can have a full reputation from top to bottom. The only thing that we care about is reputation, and that's that. And in between those two things, you can have mixtures of maybe, you know, maybe maybe there's a CEO, but every department does reputation for itself. You know? Or flip it around where maybe reputation is used at the top level to determine the budget, but then every department has its own boss. Right? So all the workers will vote on the budget for the whole company, but then engineering has an engineering lead who makes decisions without using reputation. So I think that there are a lot of ways to mix and match your pieces to get the right organization for you and also to change these pieces and not over time. Mhmm. Because because, like, something else that we think about is, you know, I think that we have great ideas, But, you know, getting people to actually just figure out these new ways of working is not gonna be immediate. You can't just flip a switch and have you all know how to do this. So I think that letting people start with what feels familiar and then over time experiment with new things, Going back to our theme of gradual change being more stable than rapid change, I guess, by definition, I don't know if that was that interesting. That was probably talked a lot. But, it just, I think, will make it more, just more appealing as something to try.
Yeah. It yeah. Yeah. That's true. So then I the last question, that I have then is just,
if people are interested in Colony and they want to get involved, what do you recommend that they do? Well, you're all in luck. Now's a great time because we're actually making a very considered effort to open up the development of Colony to the community. And we're and we're really, like, really preparing to because kind of the vision for Colony was always to have a colony that was run by the community that creates colonies. So, like, we as a team kind of brought it to life, but then we kind of let we, like, open it up and then anyone who wanted to should come in and be a part of the team and be a part of the project. And we're really, right now, thinking that, you know, this is now is the time for this to happen. So there's gonna be a lot of opportunities for people to contribute to Colony, the code base, to Colony and marketing operations. We'll have a lot more to say about this in the weeks ahead, but now is a good time to get involved because we're really actively looking to bring in more of a community to build to build the projects. We have a Discord, which is a lot of fun. So I recommend that you pop into our Discord and say hello and, maybe look at our GitHub and see what the issues are if you're technically minded and you wanna do that. And, yeah, we and it's it's it's it's our priority now to bring more people in. So I would encourage anyone who wants to to come by because your timing is great. And I'll I'll send a link to the Discord, like, right now.
Okay. And then is, is Colony available on the
on the, test net or main net? They can can you just create a Yeah. So Colony has been live on main net for a while now. You know, we're still developing new functionality, but Colony is live on main and it's been for a while. And, yeah, you can just go to I'll give you the URL to go, and you can sign up and look at the colonies. Yeah. Tell me. If you wanna create a colony, you can. A lot of the functionality so right now, a lot of the voting and governance and budgeting, a lot of the the cool time based stuff that I was talking about, has not been released yet. We're working on it right now. It's coming up in our next release. So a lot of the really cool, mechanisms that I've been excited about during this talk are unfortunately not there yet. What we have now is a little bit more of a a simple, you know, hierarchical setting. But our you know, but the rest of it is coming soon. So you can make a colony now, but it's not gonna be quite as awesome as what I've been describing. But, it's it's live so you can just get started. And then the new stuff will be coming out probably in the next couple of months, which I think will be great.
Cool. That's super exciting.
Yeah. I'm excited about it.
Well, thanks again for, for taking the time to talk. It's been Nice. Really interesting and it's a lot insightful. Yeah. So, I hope you stay safe and are quarantining as much as you can.