Aligning DAOs and Cybernetics
For this episode I spoke to Kelsie Nabben (@kelsiemvn), a qualitative researcher on resilience in decentralised technologies and governance at RMIT in Australia. She recently co-wrote a piece titled Aligning the concept of ‘Decentralized Autonomous Organization’ to Precedents in Cybernetics with Michael Zargham whom you may know from a previous episode. Kelsie also publishes on her Substack about decentralised digital infrastructure, security, and society. During the interview we spoke ...
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Transcript
Hi, everyone. You're listening to the Blockchain Socialist Podcast. And for today's interview, I have Kelsey Nabin. She's a qualitative researcher on resilience in decentralized technologies and governance at RMIT in Australia. And she fairly recently published a really, really interesting article that, she cowrote with Michael Zargam called Aligning the Concept of Decentralized Autonomous Organization to Precedence in Cybernetics. And I really enjoyed the paper, so I had to ask her to come on and so we can talk about it and talk about her research. So hi, Kelsey. How are you doing?
Hey. Doing well. Thanks for having me.
So I think maybe just to start, if you want, because I I read a little bit into your background, and I thought it was really interesting. And I thought you could just share maybe the story on, like, how you got interested in in crypto cryptosystems, blockchains as a research topic and, like, what got you in there. As far as I understand, you worked in the blockchain industry a little bit, for some time.
Yeah, that's right. So I actually started out working in government, and I was interested, obviously, in theory and practice of governance and kind of societal coordination challenges and, sort of structural change and all those kinds of things. I very quickly moved into the world of startups seeing technology as a kind of scalable way to do some of those same things. And when someone, a colleague of mine actually, to their credit, explained Bitcoin to me as a public blockchain, it was the idea of distributed consensus, as well as the broader social implications of these technologies that really caught my attention and got me interested. So I'd worked in impact technology, and it was kind of predicated on these, the premise of how can an idea and an enthusiastic founder create massively scalable global change, you know, in agriculture or water tech or kind of any area. And in my view, crypto fell into that category. And so, very rapidly, I went to work for one of the first ICO projects in Australia, and then was offered to move overseas and work for quite a well known project at the time, where I really got to, yeah, dig quite deep into
the public blockchain community, I guess. And what was that experience like? Because, I mean, I remember during the ICO time, it was pretty, pretty wild and pretty strange, at least from from from my point of view, from what I was perceiving.
It, it was like living in a novel. I honestly cannot explain it, wandering around, sitting around with engineers and researchers and philosopher type characters, going to the houses of some of the early, inventors of internet browsers for conferences like DWeb in San Francisco. And I was just around people and in places I never expected to have access to, so coming back to Australia and shifting my perspective on the space to a research role, has been a really nice way to reflect on not only some of my personal experiences in the space, but some of those broader themes and kind of aspirations and promises around you know, participatory systems and DAOs and all of these ideas.
Was it like after having all this, at least however many years you were you were working for this type of company, you decided I wanted to like slow down maybe a little bit and do, do some, like, yeah, thinking and research on on the topic that they were maybe, like,
working on. Yeah. It was just time. I mean, classic kind of startup due to people and politics. The direction of the project wasn't going in its original way, or I guess as I had hoped, so I felt it was time to move on. And actually, as a non quote unquote technical person or as a non developer in the space, I found it quite hard to shift sideways in terms of moving roles. Like, people often, you know, wanna pigeonhole generalists in the space to community management or business development or marketing, and those weren't areas I was so interested in. So when I got offered a scholarship to research, I I took it up.
Okay. Fair enough. And then, so a lot of your work has been about, DAOs. But I was wondering in, like, the work that you've done so far, is there anything that you sort of, like, noticed in particular about DAOs and those who are working on them through your ethnographic works? I think, you know, there are a lot of claims by DAOs and, you know, the word DAO even itself is, like, very difficult to define and how people even think about the word decentralized and whether that's even a meaningful term in a lot of ways, in my opinion, or autonomous or whatever. Like, they can they can vary wildly, I found, in how people like to do it. So I was just wondering, yeah, is there anything that you've noticed in your work that are, like, are very, very interesting, things that you've noticed?
Yes is the answer to that question. And I guess, where where to begin. So I started my kind of venture into the, concept and practice of DAOs by doing a little bit of historical research, and I try and do open research. I find it's a really helpful way to process ideas and also get feedback and engagement on my work from the community as well. So a lot of this work is kind of published as you go and it's sort of available on my blog and whatever. But, I started looking at, yeah, some of the origin of these concepts, kind of first mention from the first mention of the particular phrase, decentralized autonomous organization, in the field of cybernetics in this paper on a smart home system in a random little IEEE journey journal by a computer engineer called Werner Dilger. But then its appearance in blockchain communities came through, forum posts by Dan Larimer, the founder of EOS and a number of other projects, talking about decentralized autonomous corporations, and then that gets responded to in a Bitcoin magazine post by Vitalik Buter, and then the concept find its finds its way into the Ethereum white paper. And what really fascinated me at the time was this idea, as you rightly pointed out, of autonomy or an autonomous system. And it wasn't something at the time that I had read anything or seen anyone sort of thinking about or talking about. So I went down a little bit of a rabbit hole to try and understand what this concept meant and what it meant by the people that originally spoke about it. And there's that sort of quite well known post from 2014 by Boudreaux on DAOs, DAX, and more, and has these great quotes like, you know, AI at the center and humans at the edges. And as a sociologist, I'm thinking, what does that mean? And where are we now in that projection, I guess, in terms of, like, is automation synonymous with autonomy? What does AI on a blockchain mean? And I still think that's a really ripe area for further investigation, especially from a social science perspective. So that really caught my attention. And then I was fortunate enough to be quite involved in some of the big projects that transitioned to becoming a Dower, as I termed it, you know, based on Nathan Schneider's work on Exit to Community. I called it Exit to DAO. And so, one major case study I've done for my thesis was on Gitcoin, and, credit to, you know, a number of their cofounders and core people involved in that process who allowed me to interview them in in very busy times for them or, invited me to be involved in the fraud detection and defense working group and so on. But so many interesting dynamics that I think it really helps to reflect on alongside the community. And some of those, in the theory are called, the politics of infrastructure and how does this manifest in these decentralized organizations? And so in a more recent piece, for a special collection on Web3, I talk about, DAOs particularly, but Web3 more broadly as kind of facing this challenge of how to infrastructure. And so building on the infrastructure scholarship of, Tuzan Lestar and and, Baukar, it's kind of like people are all out here doing the thing and wanting to do DAOs, and it's still not a defined concept or a defined technical or organizational framework. So we're kind of all trying to figure out how to infrastructure, which is sort of how to organize and govern, and what are the technical and social kind of institutions and processes and cultures and norms and artifacts that are part of that process.
Right. I imagine that because and I I imagine DAOs being a particularly difficult thing to research because of its lack of, like, a formal structure. Like, like, it's not easily identifiable that this thing is a DAO, and this thing is just a name that put DAO at the end of, you know, the name of their of what is really like just their start up. Do you run into issues like that? Or in your in your research, have you come to any, like, thoughts or conclusion on what, I don't know, what are basic properties of of of a DAO or something like that? I know a lot of people out there try to say, like, either it's just a multisig with a with a subreddit or something like that, or they say, like, oh, it's way more than a multisig. It's, you know, it has to be really decentralized, and they say there has to be a token. And people say like, no. Tokens don't really matter. You know? It's it's it's yeah. For me, that's why I kind of I struggle a lot when I try to explain DAOs to anyone because I I want to give them, like, 10 different definitions.
So my general working definition of DAOs is that they're a multi stakeholder community with a shared purpose. Now, that's obviously very general and could encompass a whole broad range of things, any local community, whether it's digital or not, and obviously it doesn't necessarily include this relation to blockchain. But I think there is something in coming back to that original use of the specific verbiage of the concept of a decentralized autonomous organization as this smart home system that I mentioned, and the idea that it's a fully enclosed, meaning autonomous from external direction or operation system. And that's kind of still encapsulated in what the blockchain concept of DAOs is trying to achieve. I should also point out that it's been really interesting for me doing research and work alongside lawyers. I mean, you talk about, you know, whether the idea of decentralization is helpful or not, but there's specific things that that means in a legal interpretation. And there's some really amazing people trying to advocate for legal personality, but not confining definitions in a corporate sense of what these things are to provide that openness to experimentation and evolution in the actual practice, which has helped me, navigate some of the definitional limitations, I guess, of of the idea.
Okay. That's interesting because so then you're using even a more general definition of a DAO because I think what I think is really interesting that I noticed is that people were first started off with decentralized autonomous corporations, then they realized, oh, no. Corporations is too limiting. Organizations in general could do something like this. And then it moved to, you know, well, what exactly is the definition of a DAO? Does everything have to be automated? Which then changed to, like, okay. Actually, no. Automation isn't that is not that helpful. Actually, we just use blockchain for very specific things, and, actually, we're like a a type of community that's just, like, tokenized or something like that. And then it's become as well, like, actually, DAOs have existed for millennia before. And that, you know, plenty of different types of, organizations in in human history have can be considered DAOs, decentralized autonomous organizations. But it comes through, like, this lens of what you're saying. Like like, it comes from a technological lens. It it, like, it almost like, it's like we've come full circle almost, which I think is very, very, very funny, but very interesting.
Yeah. I think partly I'm leaving my options open to, you know, like something you just mentioned around automation as a conversation, I have all the time with the research team at Blockscience, for example, around, you know, what is the role of automation in these systems, and what should be automated or what shouldn't be automated, and what is the relationship between humans and automated components or algorithms or machine components in these systems? And I'm still, I guess, in active exploration of a lot of those ideas. So I don't wanna confine myself to a definition that precludes, you know, potentially being able to positively influence or provide feedback on some of those ideas that you know, I mean, people talk about the Twitter sphere and the crypto echo chamber or whatever, but things very quickly become a zeitgeist, like the idea of governance minimization and a whole lot of people started, you know, tweeting that or putting that in their articles or whatever. But, actually, inspecting, you know, minimization of what? Because if, this argument comes from Aquas Argon, but if you're introducing algorithms into your system to remove governance, you're introducing more governance because someone has to determine the parameters of that algorithm. So actually you're talking about the reduction of human involvement and to what degree or at what scale in your system, and all these things are very contextual, according to the community and the culture and the purpose of the system. So that's why I don't tend to abide to something that's too confining as it is such a an open area of kind of research and exploration still.
Nice. Yeah. I think we're getting now, like, into the territory of the of the article that I mentioned. So I thought it would be interesting, to be in, like, talking more explicitly about it because I think you're using cybernetics as, like, let's say, like like a framework to understand DAOs, and it's a useful framework for understanding, I think, a lot of things. And, and for me, I've become really, really interested in in cybernetics lately because I kind of find it as, like, a a decent sort of generalized framework that can fit a lot of different things into it, which, I mean, can be problematic probably in certain contexts and in certain ways. But in other ways, I think it's very interesting as a, like, cross disciplinary, framework to understand, these types of phenomena. But, before we get into that, I think it would be nice for people who don't know what cybernetics is if you can provide me with, like, a a quick, a simple definition for for it.
Yeah. Sure. I I can try. I mean, it's kind of amusing to me as I'm not a cybernetician or a computer engineer or anything. But I'm really, excited and grateful for the opportunity to explore these concepts with you today, and share some of the research that I've been doing and some of the things that I've been learning. So, cybernetics, broadly, as you actually pointed out, is not so much of a discipline, but more kind of, intellectual aesthetic or tradition, which focuses on systems, meaning information systems and society. And so it emerged in the 1940s and kind of gained traction in some famous kind of meetup things in the fifties and sixties where some kind of protagonists in in that community, emerged, names that you might know, especially kind of Stafford Beer, Margaret Mead, Heinz von Forster, Glanville, and others. And it kind of coincided with the invention of computing, but was this inherently interdisciplinary field drawing on mathematics and neuroscience and engineering, and, of course my interest, anthropology. And so from this kind of intellectual tradition comes the modern day disciplines of information theory, control theory, AI, and a number of others, but they kind of, branched branched out from from those origins.
Yeah. And it's from what I understand, it's almost used kind of like a language for, like, basically people from different disciplines to be able to speak to each other, like, because of its like, the way that it abstracts to the system to the level of systems as a general abstract concept that you can talk about like the similarities between the system inside your body and like the system within a society and the system within a computer. And that can be useful in a lot of different ways. And so and it's especially, I think, useful for I mean especially computers, I think, in relationship to, humans. So, like, so now you can go, like, you can have a framework for thinking between systems or, like, things that are normally be, like, one particular domain versus another particular domain. But if there's, like, a very strong, link between those systems, then you can sort of have, like, a, the same language to speak,
so to say. Yeah. Absolutely. Multiple scales and, relations between systems, which is obviously very relevant when it comes to DAO to DAO relationships and, or relations in that as a nascent field of research in crypto communities. But also as you mentioned, acknowledging organizations and society as complex systems in the same way that nature already demonstrates, or, you know, biology. And so there's this famous book, by Stafford Beer called The Brain of the Firm. And he really, studied the functions of the body and how the nervous system kind of connects functions and how the brain, you know, controls the nervous system to try to come up with theoretical frameworks of how to organize organizations in the industrial era. And that's where this lovely framework called the viable system model comes from. And that's what we wrote about when we applied it to DAOs and absolutely credit where credit's due. I did not find that. That was a Zagun from from block science down there, and then we got to work on it together.
I mean, just say, like, because I I I studied neuroscience. So, like, the like, I think that's maybe partially why, like, Stafford Beer, brain of the firm type of stuff, like, really appeals to me because I think, I remember studying and being like, oh, there's similarities between this and, like, greater society, but I would always keep that to myself because it'll be a weird thing to say. But then, when I sort of learned about cybernetics, I was like, oh, other people have been thinking this too. I'm not a weirdo. And, as well, just for, like, maybe those who are maybe more on the left who are listening that, cybernetics was a really important, field of study or, like, discipline when it came to, like, certain experimentations, especially in Chile, especially with Cyber Sen Mhmm. Mhmm. Who Stafford Beer directly helped in build before it was, destroyed after the coup.
Yeah. Fascinating case study. People there's really great little documentaries and stuff about that experiment and a few papers reflecting on it as well. But, yeah, how do you organize an entire economy according to the viable system model? And, you know, in the words of the triumphant, they did it, and it was highly effective.
Yeah. And what I like about it is that almost at least in in my opinion, it's kind of like a it's rather than taking sort of, like, a overtly political view on the economy and how it should be run, it took it it takes it as a like, taking it as a as a cybernetic or think of it as a cybernetic system sort of leads to very, like, I I would say conclusions that that push towards something like socialism in the sense that, you know, your your system won't be very viable if you're, you know, if there's, like, a huge power imbalance and there's, like, a, you know, major inequalities within within your system. But then you have to, like, provide in other things that sort of, like, keep the system in place, but that's a whole complicated other, other conversation. I think it would be interesting maybe if we can talk a bit about what the viable systems model is,
and how does how does this stuff relate to DAOs? Yeah. So just coming back to your previous point, I'll leave the politics to the blockchain socialist, but I think it's it's helpful to contextualize these ideas in the broad category of steering systems. And so that's what VSM and kind of broader cybernetics was all about. It was about you know, governance as the direction of a system. And these, you know, in particular, kind of this idea that systems should be autonomous or as autonomous as possible while still being viable, meaning functional. And the language used is kind of around the system being harmonious or harmonious in line with the kind of shared purpose of that system. So how can those operational parts organize how they want, do what they want, be as productive or effective as they can be, with kind of really clear rules about when a different part of the system can intervene in their day to day operations if something isn't working, because there's sort of consent that that autonomy can be violated in certain operational circumstances, circumstances for the greater good. And that comes back to that kind of model based on how the body works. So the viable system model is really a framework for organizations. As I mentioned before, it was initially thought of in terms of factories in the industrial era, but has been sort of deeply applied in other areas, especially cooperatives. And there's a fellow by the name of, John Walker that has a fantastic kind of handbook on VSM and co ops and a number of case studies where, he was able to apply the model to cooperative organizational models as well, which is quite interesting in our case of DAOs. And so, I mean, it's clear why this is a useful framework for thinking about DAOs because it is about organizing autonomously. And I should point out, I guess, why cybernetics more broadly stood out to me, or I mean, the lack that you spoke about how it registered for you coming from a neuroscience background. For me, it was this anthropological influence known as second order cybernetics. So, you know, kind of the field is emerging and people are like, Oh my gosh, you know, let's think about computational systems and all of these things. And then the anthropologists came in and said, Hold on a second. You don't need first order cybernetics. You need second order, which considers humans in the loop, or looks, you know, it acknowledges the role of the system designer as affecting and as part of the system. And I love that. And I think that's so relevant for blockchain where there's that zeitgeist of, you know, code is law and it's automated equaling, that it's autonomous and, you know, it's objective in its governance and all these things. But if we're going back to these kind of origins of steering computational systems and trying to maximize autonomy and harmony in these systems, you have to acknowledge the role of the designer as part of those systems. And I think we're still on that journey as a blockchain community, and I'm really, really interested in, in that aspect of of this kind of broad approach and an application of the specific VSM framework.
Yeah. I think it sometimes seems that there's a danger in applying cybernetics in, like, a very narrow field or, like, in a never very narrow way of thinking. I think that just maybe stems from the fact that it came from a very, I guess, computer science maybe ish place or, like, where it's more commonly used in sort of, like, these highly technological systems as a way to understand very complex computing. But then I think there so, like, there's this tendency to, like, forget that the that there is a human that sort of built it in the first place. So there is this loss of, like, I guess, meta understanding of of of the system itself that you are part of that system. But I think there are when applied appropriately with, like, a second order cybernetics in conjunction with a viable systems model where you're considering the humans as part of it, I think it's then easy to look, I guess, to consider the the limitations of things like code is law or something like that or that, like, you know, we need to what whatever, like, the blockchain sort of decides is what is reality, and we all need to stick by that. It sort of provides a way to look past that limitation, like, look past the only technological side of things and sort of realize what is the the role of humans in in all of this, which is sort of like like you said, in the zeitgeist of DAOs is sort of like I feel like like a collective maturing is is happening where people are realizing this. Yeah. Past
past the dogma. And I think, I mean, doing a startup is so consuming, let alone doing it in crypto land where the volume of projects and people and activity is extremely fast paced. But I think that's largely what the role of, you know, quote unquote, this lovely little cohort of crypto academics is becoming is, this sort of arm's length perspective on the space, which is able to look a little bit more deeply at concepts like governance and help to surface and synthesize and communicate what can be learned from what is a long history in organising society and participatory systems and the politics of these things. So BSM is part of that, cooperatives that I mentioned is part of that. I've done work on data trust. So just looking at other, you know, governance models and and how they might be relevant, which I think is really important.
Hi, everyone. If you're enjoying this episode so far, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, share with a friend, and join the crypto leftist communities on Discord or Reddit, which you can find links to in the show notes. And if you're enjoying the interview or find the content I make important, you can pitch into my efforts starting at just $3 a month on patreon.com/theblockchainsocialist to help me out and join the newest patrons like Alchemist, Avanash, and Elise, which really helps since making this stuff isn't free in terms of money or time. As a patron, you'll get a special shout out on an episode like I just did and access to bonus content like q and a episodes where you can submit some bonus questions you'd like me to answer, and I'll give my thoughts in roughly twenty minutes. Of course, I'll still be making free content like this episode to help spread the message that blockchain doesn't need to be used to further entrench capitalist exploitation if we put our efforts into it. So if that message resonates with you, I hope you'll consider helping out. Yeah. And speaking about, cooperatives, I know that you, like, fairly recently ran a course with the Platform Cooperatives consortium that talked a lot about DAOs and platform co ops. So, like, to me, I think what is in like, the the cooperative world to a certain extent, in the past, I think, was probably, like I don't wanna say the extreme, but, like, they were it was mostly about, like, human interaction and governance, whereas DAO world is sometimes purely the technological governance and interactions where that tends to be, like, a a big focus. But, I was wondering from from your point of view and maybe in what you, like, covered in that course, what kind of overlaps, with these two worlds do you see as, like, being the the most fruitful?
Yeah. I just wanna say to your, previous point, and you can cut this and paste it wherever you like, but there are clear limitations to cybernetics as enthusiastic as I am about it as an approach for thinking about decentralized, organization or organizing, doing word. So it is I mean, as you correctly pointed out, it is still that engineering mindset and the idea that society can be engineered or perfected. So moving on from that, the question about co ops is, is very relevant. So I got to present, one session in a course run by Trevor Schultz from The New School, who's a leader in the Platform Cooperative Consortium community and has had a really open mind to explore the concept of DAOs and how it might relate to co ops, what it might what the DAO community could learn from co ops and kind of build bridges of shared literacy despite the kind of cryptocurrency skepticism from many, I guess, in the co op community and probably rightly so. And so that relationship actually started when I got to do a research sprint at the end of last year that was co organized by Trevor. And myself alongside a few peers wrote a paper about, thousand co ops, which was a really interesting initial exploration. And I guess some of the arguments that we make in that working paper, which is publicly available, talks about interesting areas of cross pollination as, I mean, the history of cooperative governance and participatory organizing is one major area in terms of what can DAOs learn, as in what are the challenges of cooperatives? Well, they're gonna be very similar to a lot of the challenges of DAOs. One of those in the co op literature is about scalability. And so this is where DAOs potentially become interesting because their organizing or governance at scale is still difficult, but there's this collective of kind of digitally native software development types and this active community doing software development, obviously. And it's really interesting tools emerge. So you mentioned before, like multi signature wallets. I think things as simple as that have the chance to be potentially really revolutionary in other areas, such as co ops, to enhance you know, transparency around fiscal management, for example, you know, at scale or in distributed scenarios, or I guess I'm thinking specifically about platform co ops, which are kinda digital, digital first cooperatives, or businesses. So that's one. So thinking about tooling, thinking about tooling for scalability. And then another thing we point out is that cooperatives have these kind of democratic founding principles. So to be a co op means to share these principles, and the co op community is really concerned about, it's called co op washing, where just anything and everything claims to be a co op. And we talked about that in relation to DAOs, but I would encourage people interested in the idea of cooperatives or DAOs calling themselves a co op or whatever, to go and actually look through these seven principles and think about how they are or aren't reflected in their own organization. And so part of that, that we talk about in relation to DAOs or what DAOs could potentially learn is this idea of kind of constitutions of care. And so because cooperatives share these sort of guiding principles around democracy and they're kind of clear about what that means in terms of like those that labor in the organization are those that own and govern it. Well, that's not so readily reflected in doubts, which might be more predicated on plutocratic models or meritocratic models. And so what could that look like? And I know Nathan Schneider has done some work since, on kind of there was a Noema article about encoding human rights in blockchain systems, but I think that's still a very, very nascent area that could benefit from more great minds, in terms of thinking about digital organizations, but ones that kind of constitute positive social outcomes for those that participate.
Yeah. I I I recently spoke to Nathan Schneider and published the interview, and we talked about this piece. And he made some really interesting comments or, like, theoretical musings that I thought were like, I I had not thought about it before. I'm I was surprised. But, like, having a, for example, a layer two blockchain that requires in order to use it, it's like like certain certain things to be met. So, like, having a certain level of decentralization, for example, or, you know, having certain things that encode human rights into that layer two blockchain as a way to start. I thought it was interesting because and when you were talking about, cooperatives, I think it, you know, could be interesting maybe to have, like, a a coop chain that is, that sort of somehow enforces, like, the seven principles or something like that of the of the ICA, I think would be really interesting. Perhaps difficult, but then Sure.
But then what I what I enjoy is that you talk to, like, the mutualists. I've had some conversations with Sarah Horowitz, who's been a real leader in that community and so on. She's spoke at one of the recent Protocol Labs events, and it was a really interesting conversation, actually. But, you know, like one of her comments, and I don't think I'm speaking out of turn, was like, cooperatives look great, but they're very general. Like, we need the mutualists, like, you know, more well defined in terms of shared purpose and clearer in their mission for kind of solidarity. So, you know, in the end, the point of of blockchains, I guess, is that there's, multiple ones. And and why I don't think I subscribe to exit politics, because there's always a cost of exit and and entry and and all of these things, which is a whole another topic in and of itself. It's interesting to think about, well, how can you participate in the communities that align with your values or politics, and what does it mean for those communities to relate to each other? But, you know, choosing according to constitution
is perhaps something that deserves sort of further inspection as well. I'm curious where where you lie in terms of, like, are you optimistic that platform cooperatives will perhaps use, some, like, tooling that is, like, more like, you would think of for DAOs and that would be, beneficial or that they could really gain from that?
Yeah. I think so. I wouldn't say I'm an expert in cooperatives by any stretch of the imagination. I try and, like, bring the DAO to the co op people and do the bridge building in those, communities or between those communities. But I think I mean, if there's an inherent problem, as it says in the literature around scalability, DAOs are addressing that in really interesting ways. And I mean, you introduced me as someone studying resilience, and I think that needs to be justified with somewhat of a definition. So I work off the basis of kind of associate technical understanding, which comes out of science and technology studies. It looks at systems in the broad sense of things that are comprised of social and technical elements that interact and co constitute one another. And so resilience is about that adaptability and transformability and kind of threat or crisis. And so the study that I do on decentralized technologies and DAO communities and with various projects, you know, looks at the way that these communities work through the technology to adapt and evolve and change or not. But some of those ways, you know, employing, you know, we've seen these ecosystems emerge of DAOs and sub DAOs and the kind of multilevel systems, and that could be seen as principles of subsidiarity, which comes from the commons literature, or polycentricity, so multiple centers of decision making power. Another term I like for it, also out of the commons literature, is kind of this idea of nested governance. And I am working on a piece with some colleagues at the RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub headed by, associate professor Marta Poblett on a concept called fractal governance. So kind of looking at how DAO ecosystems or DAO frameworks do or demonstrate properties of fractal networks in terms of recursion and self similarity, and we're doing some case study analysis. So the tooling is one part, but also the organizational models and how rapidly kind of innovation is occurring to adapt to changing circumstances, whether that be like tech fails or internal politics or wars between communities or whatever is really, really fascinating. And I think, I mean, yeah, what I'm trying to do is document those as qualitative experiences and surface the kind of insights that really it's the blockchain communities coming up with. So, yeah, I think there's, there's interesting things there that, that others can learn from.
Yeah. Just to, to mention the the paper again, like, what I really liked about it was this talk of resilience and adaptability and just cybernetics as like a framework for thinking about adaptability and how a system adapts to its like changing environment. And yeah one of the things that I think like co ops will also have, you know, dramas involved just like DAOs do and, being able to withstand I don't wanna say threats, but it could be threats. Could be, like, many different things. But being able to adapt to that can be, can be really useful in in various different aspects.
Yeah. Cybernetics has so many wonderful words and definitions. So that adaptability thing, it it talks about, reachability and how a system's governance should be as flexible as is required to serve its animating purpose, but no more flexible, because then you're introducing more governance than you need. And we also talk about concept of robustness, as in having really firmly set governance, which means it's not adaptive at all. But there's so many other wonderful words. I encourage people to look at wholeness, autopoiesis, which is this idea of a system capable of producing and maintaining itself, by replicating its own parts, and a number of others. But, yeah, very interesting and and very useful.
I don't know. I I feel I I may be, like, too much on the on the cyber pro cybernetics train, but, I do think it it would be a really interesting thing if everyone sort of had, like, a at least an intro to cybernetics course. Because I think it's a lot of just a lot of concepts that are very, very useful for understanding, like, your place in a system and thinking about the systems in which you are relating to. And I know you don't want to talk about politics but it's also, I think something that can be useful for politics or thinking about political systems, as well or even, like, thinking about your your little, you know, left wing group in which, you guys try to organize things together.
Well, it just like, VSM disambiguates the politics, and anyone listening to this should just Google VSM and look at the diagram of it because you have the meta governance, which is where the policy and everything occurs in system five and where the conflict resolution happens and where the external environmental scanning and internal scanning happens. And then you have the external environment, and we've talked about resilience and threats, and they can be external or internal, obviously. And then you have the operations, which is those autonomous functions, which should be able to go about their business until they're not working anymore, and the internal scanning and that meta governance is able to see that and pick it up and integrate it and reorganize resources and all these things.
I have one question on, your work on IPFS as well, if you still have time. Yeah. Shoot. So IPFS has obviously become a super important tool that a lot of different crypto applications, use, for decentralized file storage. And you recently wrote about the socio technical resilience of IPFS as well. I was wondering if you can talk a little about a bit about that because I sometimes hear people say that, you know, for example, IPFS is is not as resilient as you think and that there are various shortcomings of it and things like that. And actually maybe we don't want something that's so resilient with file storage because people can, you know, put different types of, files of media that are, you know, either illegal or, you know, something that would that people wouldn't want to have on forever or something like that. But I was wondering if you can maybe talk a little bit about that. Yeah. Absolutely.
I should just say your previous point. In terms of an introduction to cybernetics, it's a good place to give a shout out to, Jessica Zartler, who's compiled a governance track for the token engineering commons. I believe it's a free course, or maybe there's, like, scholarships or it's low barrier to entry, and there's a bunch of resources, including some of the things that I've written and Zagham and others, to think about governance. So, yeah, I would encourage people to take a look at that. So IPFS has been an incredible infrastructure to study. I should point out that, for people not familiar, it is around content addressing data. So the way that the Internet works is that things are location addressed. And so when something is no longer hosted at a location, you get a four zero four error. Whereas when you content address that, I mean, you have a persistent, hash of, the locate of of that content, I guess. That's my kind of like layman's definition. I hope it holds up to any engineers listening to this. And also, I guess, shout out to IPFS, who actually, or ProProProLabs, who brought me on as their first social scientist in terms of research grantees. So they have a kind of fellowship program for researchers, and someone in the ecosystem was bold enough to help facilitate this research where I got to interview a number of end users of the technology. And so what I was really interested in was their local context, their perception of, resilience in terms of their kind of threat perception and what they were trying to be resilient against in their use of this tooling, and then, their infrastructure, so how they actually set up their use of the network and what happened in practice. And so I got purview of a range of case studies from people trying to do participatory blogs that were censorship resistant against nation state level threats. So this kind of very like active model of resilience, to much more passive modes where people were trying to, document indigenous languages for, lingual training apps. So it's really important data to address and store, but it's maybe not someone trying to actively hack or compromise that data, and a few things in between. So it was really, really, interesting research, and I'm so grateful to the people that I got to interview and observe in that. But I guess, some of the high level, takeaways of that were, the relevance of resilience as a sociological concept. So we think about resilience. We think about cybersecurity and external threats. But, you know, really for, for people looking, to manage their data, it was, completely, locally contextualized to their circumstances. And so what I found is people have all these bespoke, infrastructures or kind of technical architectures and, processes around how the data is addressed, where and how it is stored and how it is kind of maintained or managed on an ongoing basis. And so I really saw in some cases, the breakdown of resilience in those, what I call gateway moments based in some of the literature and infrastructure studies. And so where people bridge from putting it on IPFS to storing it, if they're, you know, running their own servers across multiple geographic locations, and, you know, running a kind of backup, you know, periodic backup software, it is maybe quite, you know, resilient in in their case, whereas others are hiring a server from a third party provider and, you know, kind of paying €20 a month or something out of their own pocket, which isn't necessarily, resilient or as the context of the data that they're collecting changes, you know, isn't, a sustainable kind of infrastructural setup. So really, my research emphasized how important the social dynamics of infrastructure are for the resilience of decentralized networks. And so, from there, kind of my ongoing, research, focus areas are around, you know, local first or bottom up kind of flexible governance models, and institutional infrastructure, which is kind of the, you know, political, economic, and social contexts that surround, you know, the operation and the maintenance of technical infrastructure. And also looking at, you know, when should, resources like data be, localized and when can they be abstracted? So it's really nice to think, you know, we talked about scalability before and you know, you have like Filecoin as this like globally scalable storage network. And, you know, some of these things need to be professionalized. Like you want your storage provider to be well resourced and have expertise in, fiber optic cables and whatever, whatever. But, you know, your personal data about your local language should maybe be governed on some hard drives between, you know, local associations with a vested interest or a stake in that data, persisting to talk about, you know, the definition of resilience. And so, yeah, it's an ongoing area of research, but I have, a paper that's been peer reviewed and accepted in IEEE, and the working version of that is available online for people that are interested.
It seems to be like, a consistent theme that there's sort of we've created this technical infrastructure that is resilient in in some way, or another. And then there's always, like, there's always, like, a a discovery that's, oh, actually, like, the human aspects of this are more important than we think, or maybe than we initially realized.
Yeah. I guess that's my contribution, to the space as an ethnographer and a kind of qualitative methods person, but I really appreciate both. I mean, think that's why I try and do as much, work as I do with software engineers, as well as economists and lawyers and tax accountants and all these things is because you wanna look at, you know, we're talking about, societal systems, so you want to look at multiple sort of facets.
Nice. Yeah. And I, I really appreciate the work that you are doing. I think it's, super important and yeah, I think time will show that it is, very important. So, yeah, thanks a lot, Kelsey, for taking the time to come on and share your knowledge with us. Maybe just to finish it off, if you want to share with people where, they can keep up with you and your work.
Absolutely. So I'm on Twitter for sort of some of the the highlights. It's, Kelsey, k e l s I e, m v n, on academia.edu, and then just my full name. I try and keep a sort of digest of some of my publications. And then I sort of do that open source research thing across Substack, Medium, and more recently, Mirror, which I think is really cool because you can kind of mint one click NFTs and then anyone that's interested in supporting or, you know, one person reached out. They were like, what's the actual point of buying an NFT of your post except supporting you? And I said, maybe I'll start a DAO. Maybe I'll retroactively reward my supporters. Who knows? So there you go. The speculation.
Alright. Get ready for the the airdrop of, Kelsey Coin.
Sorry. Sorry. Very lucrative.
Alright. Thank you so much.
Thank you for having me.