What we're doing is alerting as a city state. We talk about larping a lot because we do think there's value in the memes, right, of creating things that are called passports or printing things that look like a form of currency and thinking about what those sort of structures look like in the context of non-nation state entities. But, you know, we also talk about it as a larp because we're not like building walls with guns pointing out of them to like hold off the national guard or whatever, right, like we have no interest in that. I think when I look at what this sort of like rearrangement looks like, what you start to see with these sort of like network state frameworks is that we evolve past the Leviathan structure for how we think about the underpinnings of politics.
And this is why I got interested in complex systems and in collective action in the first place was because if you look at these like purely Leviathan structures, the idea is essentially that like nation states exist because they can apply coercive power. And I think the world we're headed towards, the world we've been headed towards for a while, but it is really coming to fruition now is a world in which those coercive structures are not as useful as they used to be. Greetings Future Fossils. This is Michael Garfield.
Welcomeing you back for episode 188 of the podcast that explores our place in time. Probably should change the slogan of the show because it's really more about exploring the edge of the known and the knowable. Although the way I think about time as a kind of abstract space of relationships makes that kind of loosely synonymous, but that's not obvious to people. You're just stepping into this program for the first time.
Anyway, I'm excited to share an episode that could not be more appropriate for American Independence Day conversation I had last November. We have Jonathan Hillis, zero ex-Zach, and Christian Lamp. John and Zach are part of the core team of the cabin dow, which holds private property in the Hill Country of Texas right next to one of my favorite spots in Chanted Rock and runs it as an artist residency and then uses a decentralized autonomous organization to govern that project and come up with other interesting community-oriented experiments. Christian, one of my good friends here in Santa Fe, whom I met through our mutual love of complex system science, is also part of the cabin dow, but is the co-founder of another blockchain-based project called the Diamond Dow, which is bringing the data science techniques that he's been learning in his PhD program to bear on data about decentralized autonomous organizations, and perhaps we will spend more time on that project in a future episode.
But for now, well, this was recorded in November 2021 when the cryptocurrency markets were insanely bullish and the world relatively stable, although I think all of us in last year would have struggled to imagine such a thing. But releasing it now in July 2022 seems more aptly timed than I could have anticipated. The United States Supreme Court has failed the great majority of American citizens, not just once, but several shocking and historic times in one week, hacking away at women's reproductive rights, the EPA, and gun safety all at once. The Supreme Court majority was largely appointed by presidents that lost the popular vote.
Our nation is embroiled in hearings about a violent coup, attempted to spearhead it by the former president and people on both sides of the constructed political divide seem more desperate than ever in living memory. At the same time, both stocks and digital currencies and economic possibilities they support are suffering through what seems like it will be a protracted winter. So it's a perfect moment to talk about the visions we commit to building through the hardship, and the new responsibilities we must assume as citizens, not just of nation states, but of the digital communities and cultures that we voluntarily participate in, the neighborhoods and cities that we live in, the civil society that exists in the shadow of everything that has been eroded by both market and state forces. When a big tree dies in the forest, it's falling lits in light that stimulates a contest between saplings, and we're seeing something similar now in this rapid looming of experiments in governance and finance, legal regulations, and privately organized society.
Suddenly projects like the cabin dallys, the Impression, and urgent. So I'm glad to share this potent conversation with John and Zach and Christian, three of the many people working hard at the frontiers of social innovation. In this episode we talk about what it means to live-action role play as a city-state, how physical geography and online culture overlap in their experiments, and what should stay illegible and wild amidst this wave of techy change. As acts as a very end of our conversation, most of the construction projects throughout the history of civilization have been coercive.
What does it look like when we actually build things in a really cooperative way? If you enjoy the show please take a moment to subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you prefer to listen. I've been extremely busy backstage working on a suite of future fossils projects that extend beyond this podcast, some of which you can glimpse on my Instagram and Twitter feeds. Big changes are coming soon, inspiration is flowing, and if you want the air track on all the music art and writing I'm cooking up or if you simply see the value in these conversations in my work at large, I hope you'll join the other awesome people shipping in with listener support at patreon.com slash Michael Garfield.
Right now I'm sharing an enormous folder of new AI artwork updated every day with patrons and there you will also find complete extensive show notes on this episode. There are many many follow-up resources worth investigating in this conversation. Please go check them out. Big thanks to new supporters Alpew, William Maastra, David Anderson, and Peter Serato.
I could not do this show at all without the support of Patreon and substac supporters, which reminds me last week I just relaunched my 13 year old blog on substac, so for roughly monthly digestive new work join 7500 other readers at micrographfield.substack.com Thanks more soon, deeply appreciate your listening, enjoy this fabulous conversation, and stay tuned. Do we do this thing? Yes, we are doing this thing. All right, we're here.
John, Zach, Christian, you are all in my lap right now, metaphorically speaking. Thank you all for being here or maybe I'm in your lap on future fossils and I'm glad that we were able to patch this together because I suspect that we're going to have a very fun conversation about creator cabins and decentralized autonomous organizations and all that sort of adjacency around that stuff. But before we do that, because this is effectively a panel discussion, there's four of us, can we just get a little bit of time to quickly introduce yourselves here, starting with John and Zach and Christian. Awesome, thanks so much for having us here, Michael.
So yeah, my name is John. I grew up here in Austin and spent a long time working in tech in the Bay Area before moving back out to the Texas Health Country after leaving Instacart to work on this project that we're going to talk about today, Cabin, and some earlier iterations of it around the creator economy and how to start thinking about how these big changes that are happening in society right now around decentralization start to apply to knowledge workers and all kinds of people in terms of how we live and work and interact together. So that's what Zach and I got really excited about and what we're working on. Zach, you want to take it over from there?
Yeah, so my name is Zach. I'm a software engineer by background. Since John says we're here, I'll say we're here. I grew up.
I grew up actually moving around. I was born in South Carolina. We moved to Texas, then we moved to Anchorage, Alaska, and then we moved to Aberdeen, Scotland, which is where I did elementary school in Anchorage, Alaska. And then I did high school in Scotland.
I spent a summer in Spain as part of that. Then I moved to DC where I live now, outside, you know, I have lived ever since I went to college, except for one year that I actually spent living in the Netherlands. And a lot of this year that I've actually, I have an apartment here at DC, but I've actually spent a lot of time in Texas that I have an apartment here at DC. Growing around software engineer by background, I kind of run down the gamut of stuff as a software engineer.
I worked at agencies. I was actually a teacher for a long time, which is what really got me interested in future work and actually thinking about the stuff from a very practical perspective. I was a teacher at a coding group camp, and then I started my own business, which is how I got connected to John. I was a part of some of the precursors to cabin down as a software engineer in my own business that ultimately became cabin.
All right, I'm Christian. In my background, in business, until recently at large companies, my focus was operations, analytics, data science, building up teams. And mostly I was working in the insurance business, which is interesting. It's sort of a collective business model by design, but I started to find it being very centralized in how it was managed and the operations internally were managed.
And kind of following my curiosity, landed in and found the field of complex systems, had the opportunity to go and do a winter school at the New England Complex Systems Institute. And that was kind of one of those catalyzing moments, when all of these exciting things are ways that I was viewing the world, they're looking at society. I had also traveled, spent a lot of time thinking about cultures and mapping cultures from one place to another and what's different. But in business, I really started to view the organization as a network, going to the Complex Systems Institute, like, maybe extremely focused on this, to the extent one of the professors there, I enrolled in his PhD program in system science, which I'm focused on now with a research direction in collective decision making, simulation, human behaviors, interactions with technology, John's holding up a book right now, which is great for complex adaptive systems.
And so recently, I got into the sort of web three, Dow world was introduced really to it by cabin. This project is like actually very uniquely special to me because it's sort of my intro into getting into the space, launched my own Dow, which I'm working on now to focus on community health and analytics, and these collective action problems through technology. So very excited by the space, very excited to be talking to these guys here today. Michael, I know you're the host, but I'm just going to interrupt there for a second and jump in because there's something so magical about what Christian just shared, which is that I also was a huge Complex Adaptive Systems nerd and got really deep down that rabbit hole in college.
I've got some of my books here, like, as you mentioned, then I thought I was just studying this esoteric corner of academia that was not necessarily going to apply to my life at any point after that or certainly apply to my work. And I briefly thought about doing a PhD in Complex Adaptive Systems, realized that there just weren't a lot of academic programs that seems like a great fit for what I wanted. But to now have the opportunity to get to connect with people like this group here and other folks in the Dow space that are as passionate about some of these previously obscure academic ideas is just a really incredible thing. Totally.
So I think we're all in agreement that we're demystifying this somewhat, or rather that there's a good deal of evangelism going on right now. And so far as if you're going to live at an age, made out of systems that are made out of systems that are made out of systems all the way down, then you should probably understand the science of those things. But I don't want to get too heady about this because I think that I have to start from a place of assuming that the audience of this conversation is naive to one or both of those things. And so I want to look at this mostly through the lens of not so much the mechanisms per se, like how this stuff works, but why it exists and what kind of effects we expect to come of this and also like the challenges in exploring and grappling with new technologies, particularly like social technologies like this.
So I mean, John, I think just to anchor this in a timeline and create a narrative around it, I would love to hear a bit from you about what happened between the first time you and I had a conversation and the second time, right? Because the first time I met you, this is so bizarre, like I didn't put two and two together, you did. I didn't realize until you pointed it out to me that all this time I've been orbiting around your project, I actually met you before and you come over to my house back when I was living in Austin through my buddy Charlie Cross. And I don't recall any details of the conversation that we had, but I'm sure it was something along the lines of cryptocurrency is cool, Rudolf Steiner is cool, art and creativity is cool.
And then like three years later, here you are. And there's this, and so this is an interesting braid and I'm curious where this came from, like what impaled you to do this, and then how that relates to I guess the narrative that has emerged as the so-called slime mold of this decentralized organization has started to, you know, flock together and like emerge in its own way as an agent. That's like not your project anymore, but it's this thing that's taken on life of its own. Totally.
It's exact wherever you want to patch in on that history, please do also. Yeah. Cool. Yeah.
So something that I think is so cool about Kevin and maybe just about, you know, Dao is generally right now is the people who have found their way into this corner of the world have done so for very specific reasons. And you know, people ask me like how, why I wanted to start a Dao or why I got involved with my three and the answer for myself and I think probably for everyone here and most people I've met in this space is that you don't necessarily like go looking for this sort of thing. Like it finds you and it resonates with you in some really deep and personal ways. And I think that's probably true for each of us.
We'll have to hear more about that from you all. But for me, you know, there's a strand of cabin that goes back to my earliest career aspirations of wanting to be an architect before I figured out that architecture was actually kind of interesting of a career path for like academic legacy reasons through both his act in my experience with scouting, right? With being in the Boy Scouts and spending time outdoors in nature camping, through college, studying things like complex and other systems and ultimately coming from them from the perspective of how do we overcome collective action problems? How do we bring groups of people together to solve these fundamental problems of human organization, which always seemed to me to be the most important question that not enough people were talking about.
So all of that is to say, yeah, last time I saw you, I don't remember exactly when this was, but I do certainly remember meeting you. And I actually went, what helped me remake the connection was your art, actually. I remember seeing your art in that house. And then when we crossed paths again in Dowland, I looked at your website and immediately recognized, you know, your art and your just soul vibe.
And I was like, Oh my God, yeah, I know this guy. But at that point in time, I was working in Web2 tech, I was working at Instacart. And I had found a lot of passion and excitement about the idea of building for the gig economy. Because at that point in time, it looked like, you know, the gig economy was going to be this incredible opportunity for people to get a lot more independence and flexibility and autonomy over their work.
And you know, I was super excited to build software that helped people do that. And ultimately, I think a lot of that did come to fruition. But it also was the case that, you know, a lot of that work became pretty commodified. And as it became commodified, it became more challenging to build economic models that were like really great for everyone involved all the time.
And what sort of brought me to originally an organization that Zach and I were part of called the Creator Co-op that eventually turned into, how did now was this idea of how do we take some of those structures of flexibility and autonomy and independence, but start to apply them in a way where people's work is not as commodified and where people have more direct ownership and control over the outcomes of the networks that they're a part of. Zach, what got you in on this? I think what John said about Dow's finding you is a very, very true. I think we were lucky to have a crypto shaman of sorts, if you will, a crypto spiritual leader who guided us into dahlians, literally.
There were no, I won't say there were no drugs involved, but there were no drugs involved. But, Zach, I feel like you got to tell a little bit more of the story there because I love the description of crypto, John. So for anybody familiar with John Gold, he was a member of Creator Co-op with us. And I think John Hill is here.
John and I were both in similar positions with crypto where we understood it conceptually and saw the technical aspects of crypto, but not necessarily the cultural and social aspects of it. And John was the first person who explained NFTs to me, actually, as a part of Creator Co-op, one of the calls that we had was just a time for John to talk about NFTs and he kind of crypto pillars on that. And then we all went out, everybody who was involved with Creator Co-op went out to the cabins to experience them for the first time, as well as to be together for the first time. And what kind of turned out to be the prototype of what became our residency program.
And that whole two weeks that we were out there, first week was all of Creator Co-op, including John Gold, John Hillis, and myself. And then the three of us ended up saying, for a second week, the first week we all kind of like, we spent a lot of time talking about crypto. And I think John Gold really guided John Hillis and I through the complexity of it into understanding it beyond a technical phenomenon, right? Really understanding the social side of it, or the organizational side of it, using it to organize and coordinate people, right?
And that was our first week there and then our second week there, he really, that's when I said that was the week that I got crypto, that we got crypto built. He really guided us into the whole process and that's how we started it out. And I think it was we made the commitment to do it around a conversation, around a fire on a Tuesday and by Saturday we had it out. So one thing you had mentioned was the understood, the sort of mechanics I relate to.
Like I was working operations, I was interested, I kind of understood this like sequencing of things, but I didn't understand the culture. Now you understand the culture. And one thing I think about with this relationship between digital and physical realm is what's small in the physical world can feel huge in the digital. So for example, my in-laws, we go down and visit there in a small town, so they're New Mexico, 700 people in that town, it feels very small, very, very small.
However, you go to, for example, like a Dow Discord server, there's 700 people there, that like feels actually pretty big. And I'm curious if you could sort of riff on this relationship between physical and digital, and what's the scaling of a physical identity to like a digital one? Why is a digital one maybe feel bigger? Yeah, I mean, another like interesting note that we can have in here not to take it directly to systems theories, but I almost think culture is a chaotic system, right?
For those familiar with the Senate framework. And so the second order effect of that is a chaotic system is that you can't understand it, you can only like interact with it, right? Yeah, this is, you highlight a really fantastic point, which is I think true of digital versus physical systems, which is, you know, your example of like a small town versus a Discord server is an absolutely fantastic one. And there's something about presence, right?
Digital systems are, digital communities are very flat, whereas physical ones are very flat and very concentrated, whereas physical systems are much more dispersed in actual physical space, as well as not flat, there's a geography to them. You think about your town, there's a main street and where you're going to interact with the most number of people is probably on that main street. I think about like everything's a pretty small town, and so that was the case, right? But in a digital system, like Discord, like a digital city, like this word, everything is right in front of you in a single display, and everybody who is active, all 700 people who are active, right?
Or right there, in a very flat and very concentrated way. And so that's my first guess as to why 700 people online feel is really big, just like a lot of people, whereas 700 people in a town or in a single geographic location doesn't feel as big. Yeah, this is a super interesting question, Christian, that resonates that I hadn't really directly considered it before. I think that another big piece of this is that in a 700-person town, you are getting not a completely random distribution, but like a more random distribution of people, right, than you are in a 700-person Discord.
And part of the magic about online spaces is that they are organized around something that is not just geography, that is inter-space or social graph-based or whatever, which means that like you get 700 people that care about the same thing and it has a very different feel than just like 700 people in a town. And I think that this is part of the real power of DAOs is you see this with like agent-based models or even just like organizational structures that like it's actually smaller groups of people are often more effective because you get this sort of like Metcalfe's law relationship of an expanding number of connections between nodes as the number of people increases. And so if you can keep the number of people relatively small or at least create high-density networks that then have a lot of loose connections going out, sort of one degree of separation out, that's a pretty powerful social structure that is a lot easier to create in an online environment where a bunch of aligned people or people with the same interests or contexts or whatever can like get together at the same time in the same place much more easily than they can in person. So I want to go deeper into what happens when, you know, because the way I think about this stuff is I brought this up in the conversation.
I had with Tyson and Caporda episode 172 where we're talking about William Irwin Thompson's notion of the sanguinal polity, you know, the political group that is defined by blood relations and then the geographic polity which is defined by proximity and then the noetic polity which is defined by affinity where you exist as a region in the space of like where people put their attention on things, right? And so those three things have always existed in some proportion to one another. It's easy to understand something like axial religions as large noetic polities. So in that sense, the way that communities of interest reshape communities of blood ties and of geographic proximity is something I'm really curious about.
And it seems that when you start looking at the, I mean, you're not taking it all the way to the line that some of these web three projects are like trying to establish digital citizenship. I mean, maybe that's going on, you know, but like I haven't heard you saying like, oh, we're gonna issue passports. Oh, I did hear you okay. Well, we are gonna issue that.
Yeah. Well, I guess what I mean is like, it's sort of related to this question about the smart contract, right? And like if people get married on the blockchain, who's enforcing that, like there are certain things that where it's like the interface between the digital and the I don't even like talking about physical because it gives people the, yeah, not to like go on a hairpin here, but it reifies the mistaken assumption that the digital is unward from physical constraints, which it's not right. There are good reasons for people to be looking into ways to emulate natural scarcity online so that it's not just human attention.
That is the only thing that determines the landscape of scarcity. You know, I was just talking about this with Jeff Martell just earlier today about NFTs and why I think art and the age of mechanical reproduction, we need to figure out other things that can be limited. But I mean, it's related to this thing, which is again, all of this stuff is a froth on top of a physical thing. And I want to double down on Christian's invitation to the both of you to share some speculation, let's say, about where you see new attractor basins or like balance points where we're gonna find new dynamic, new balance and a new relationship between those things.
There's a long question, super messy, but we'll fix it in post. Yeah, there's a bunch of great stuff there to dive into. So first of all, I think if you compare us to some of what you could consider to be the more extreme sides of the idea space here, what we're doing is alerting as a city state. We talk about larping a lot because we do think there is value in the memes, right, of creating things that are called passports or printing things that look like a form of currency and thinking about what those sort of structures look like in the context of non-mation state entities.
But we also talk about it as alert because we're not building walls with guns pointing out of them to hold off the national guard or whatever. We have no interest in that. And so I think when I look at what this rearrangement looks like, there's a lot of great thinkers on this, but I think biology is probably one of the most out there strong thinkers about what this world starts to look like. And I think what you start to see with these network state frameworks is that we evolve past the Leviathan structure for how we think about the underpinnings of politics.
And this is why I got interested in complex systems and in collective action in the first place, was because if you look at these purely Leviathan structures, the idea is essentially that nation states exist because they can apply coercive power. And I think the world we're headed towards, the world we've been headed towards for a while, but it's really coming to fruition now with some of these new tools is a world in which those coercive structures are not as useful as they used to be. And that new structures, which could be economic structures, or could be organizational structures, coordination and cooperation structures, are gaining a lot more power in ways that start to not undermine nation states in a direct war sense, but in a much more important sense of creating environments in which you don't have to worry as much about physical force as the limiting factor or structure for how you think about the ability for groups of people to come together at a large scale and organize themselves. Yeah, we're not trying to subvert the state anyway.
For the record, yeah, we're not trying to subvert the state here. LARPing is such a great analogy or example for what we're trying to do because it gives us so much permission, right? So much of this space is talking about permission and things being permissionless. And it's kind of like, okay, if we do things as a LARP, it's almost like a thought exercise that has that is practical or like has actual experience behind it, whether we can actually prototype and start to test out, right?
And the question around speculating what we're seeing in the future or how we expect this to go is such a good one, because there's just so much stuff that you're allowed to think about in prototype when you start to LARP what an internet network state looks like, right? One of the things that I think about a lot is this idea. I thought your three policies example was like a really great one, is like geography doesn't really matter anymore or it certainly doesn't matter as much as it used to and in the future it probably won't matter at all. And the example that I like to think about for this is the New York Times, right?
Like we all read the New York Times even though none of us live in New York City, but the same thing that makes it that we all read the New York Times even though we don't live in New York City is the fact that we all probably listens to biology's podcasts on Tim Ferriss, Tim Ferriss, right? There's this guy named Tim Ferriss who's just this brain of ground internet who has a publication that is really big, not as big as New York Times, right? But like it's equal in size to some people. The reason for that is geographic monopoly doesn't matter anymore, right?
You're not reading your local newspaper, you're reading whatever newspaper is the best for you and that might be the New York Times, right? The traditional newspaper or it might be, you know, Tim Dopplog or whatever, zero elements, right? So what does it look like? And we get because we're larking, whether one of networks it looks like here, we get to ask this question, but like what does it look like if you build a city that isn't confined to a single geographical location, right?
And I don't just mean we have a river running through it like you do and you know, Istanbul or something like that. But I mean one neighborhood is in Texas, another neighborhood is in California, another neighborhood in Costa Rica, another neighborhood is in Portugal, right? And these are neighborhoods that are part of the same state or city or whatever, but they're not part of the same physical geography. Yeah.
And you know, if you look at the history of cities, what you see is that they are organized around the dominant technologies of the time. And so the cities we're living in today are built around corners. And the cities we're going to live in in the next century are going to be built around the internet. And if the most important part of the internet is they don't have to be in the same place, then that's probably also going to be a really important part of cities, which I think again, biology has explored and explained pretty well.
One of those is that you move from a two-party system to an end-city system, which means, you know, are way out of the current political morass of just like constant tension in the middle, and no progress, is that you start to get cities that are really differentiated from each other politically and in terms of policies that they are experimenting with and trying. Another important piece of the puzzle is you start to move from the coercive business model of governments to alternative business models, which are essentially inflation and substrate. And if you think about what we're experimenting with at cabin, inflation is a monetary policy that we can design tokenomics around and subscription is a policy that we can design passports and other access structures around. And when you start adding those together with things like how we think about access to land and ownership of land in slightly more abstract ways, you can get some pretty wildly different outcomes from some of the current, essentially like personal need-based land structures that lead to a lot of the underlying not-in-my-back yard issues that are political structures.
So when you start to add these different pieces together, they can go a whole lot of ways, and that's part of what's really interesting right now. But I think the ones that we're most interested in are the ones that start to break down some of the sort of like red versus blue lines in the sand and just try to rearrange the whole axis and think about a much more experimental set of options across different nodes and locations and groups of people and performing different versions of self-governance. To what extent do you or have you experienced or sort of learned that centralization has its place? And does it have a place in time?
And does it ebb and flow? I would love to just kind of let you riff on what you've learned about the value of centralization, the value of decentralization, and the tension between the two? Yeah, what a great question. Look, I think Dow people will be the first people to tell you that they are not democracy maximalists.
I think that this is the downfall of the co-op structure. Co-ops are an incredible structure for getting groups of people together to have collective interests that are aligned. But when you have these purely democratic institutions, they get co-opted by union leaders or political parties. We've seen this at various scales.
And so what is actually a great framework here, that one of the previous cabin residents came up with as we were building trails out here on the property during his residency together, which was sort of applying the Aristotle structure of the kind of three forms of government to think about triangulating what makes the most sense for Dow's. So the classic Aristotle structure here, for those who maybe don't remember from PolySight 101 or whatever, is that you have essential dictatorships, like the rule of one. You have like Aristocracy's, like the rule of the elite, and you have democracies, the rule of many. And none of these structures are actually ideal.
They all have things that are great about them, things that are bad about them. And so I think what Dow's give us is a new toolkit to explore more granular or perhaps even fractal patterns for combining these things. Because in the classic Aristotle version of this in a Greek city state, you have to pick one set of rules. Even if you look at the Constitution, they went to great lengths to try to balance these various forms of executive power, rule of one.
And the court says this, stand in for aristocracy, and legislative bodies, and election of the, it's all this incredibly well-balanced set of these three structures. But they can only have one framework. They have to write it all down on a piece of paper, and then we all have to follow those rules. And what I think that Dow's and some of these tools start to unlock is just a vastly wider space or maze for exploring combinations of these things.
So you can have liquid democracy structures with algorithmically generated rule sets for vote delegation. You can have quadratic voting mechanisms. You can have various staking-based voting mechanisms. And we're really just starting to scratch the surface on how you can combine together these different models of governments to try to balance, cert trade-offs between centralization and decentralization.
The only thing I'd add is a lot of people new to Dow's, see these two things as polar opposites, where centralization is on one extreme, and decentralization is on the other extreme. I think that they're actually more like yin and yang, right? In decentralization, there is centralization, and centralization is decentralization when we're talking about us. So a lot of, if you do that pure decentralization with absolutely no centralization, you end up voting on everything, and you end up with all those problems that Joe was talking about with co-ops, right?
Like, you can't vote on everything. Nothing's going to get done. So what you end up with is this, like, what we ended up with right now is this delegating model, which I think a lot of other Dow's are exploring too. It's like decentralized, and that power is dispersed, decision-making is dispersed, et cetera.
But it's not everybody voting on everything. It's decentralized to focus groups of one to five that are on one level, centralized, very centralized, right? Just when you're looking at the broad picture, that's when you see the decentralized, but when you see them in just that one group that it looks centralized, right? On that note, I just want to riff on the small grouping for a minute, because there's something here that I haven't quite figured out that maybe you guys have some perspective on that would help me with this half-finished essay, which is basically like, if you just think about an agent-based model, or a network model, falling back to the Metcalfe's law principles we were talking about earlier, and then the small autonomous group principle that Zach was just talking about, you think about the ideal size of a group of people that have to sit around and make a decision.
And anything from one to three people, it's pretty easy. There's very few connections. The number of connections is equal or less than the number of people. Once you get to four, now you've got six connections, and then one of the time you get to six, it's 15, and it starts increasing geometrically.
At some point, it breaks, and you just have too many connections. There's this concept from Amazon of two pizza teams. It really does seem like for a lot of use cases, this four to eight people is about the maximum size where everybody can actually have a real relationship with everyone else in the group. And that's a really valuable group size for doing things, and for making decisions that can actually take all of the inputs from the people and come to a collective decision that makes sense.
And so you need structures that support that size, but that also allow that size to sit within a larger network of wide array of loose connections or other pockets that it can collaborate together. And I don't know exactly what the right network topology for that is, but I think that Dows are going to figure it out. So swimming around in everything that Yall have just been talking about is this question for me that I'm sure I brought up before on the show, but I'm with the right group of people to ask it again now, which is there is this, like if you live in a city, unless you happen to be just very wealthy, you live in a city, at least historically, right? I mean, people are more mobile now than they used to be, but by and large, there's still a place where you have a legal address, your driver's license says you live here.
And when you're talking about digital citizenship, that's not the case at all, right? I mean, I don't even know, I have like 45 tabs open or something right now. And that's clearly beyond the cognitive limits that you're talking about, John, in terms of, I think most everybody I know that's interested in these new structures is in more discord servers than they can actually follow. And so again, with this, this question about how's that going to shake out?
Because there's that nut, you can fork the code, but you can't fork the community. And so when you're talking about like basing a community on volunteerist incentives, rather than coercive incentives, the question of there's an A and a B, right? The first is what ultimately is keeping that from just like falling apart, because choice is this extraordinary solvent. I think about the way that birth control enabled women's movement into the job market and the way that that seems correlated with this like wave of divorces in America in the 1970s and 80s, and like a generation of kids grown up and broken homes.
And it's like, okay, that's good. But it's also bringing in all of this, you know, an opponent tended, but discord, right? It's the fractitious nature of all of this is one question. And the other question is like, assuming that we found the balance, assuming that we understand what cohere is, it's still the case to just sort of double down on the question I asked earlier, it's still the case that let me just pin this in a piece of pop culture.
I watched Wonder Woman 1984 the other day. I don't know if any of you have seen that film, but it's a film in which the villain acquires a wishing stone and then wishes himself to become the stone. And so he is going around the world, granting wishes to all of these world powers, and then taking whatever he deems is the appropriate payment in return. And so he's doing what Jeff Martell called, he likened this to Mark Zuckerberg and the whole like metaverse thing where it's like, this guy's Richard and Sin, what does he not have it he's trying to get?
And the answer is, he's not in between everybody all the time, right? And so there's in Wonder Woman 1984 spoiler, everyone in the world has to decide like it's a game theoretical sort of prisoner's dilemma type deal where they all have to renounce their wishes to prevent the world from just destroying itself, because everyone can't have what they want at the same time. And when I look at this space, and I think, oh my god, like, you know, John, I know you're talking about your participation in the Constitution, now, and like this idea that people could just whip up millions and millions of dollars to acquire something. Like on one level, I'm super excited about this because this means that things like, it's not going to be McDonald's and Disney buying a Tyrannosaurus skeleton to be queased to the Field Museum, like groups of people can get together and decide to crowdfund that kind of thing.
But at the same time, you know, some of my buddies, former Google buddies were talking about when terrorism down, this is going to happen. So the question of the rising prominence of the noetic policy and the ability of these things to outpace regulation and rapidly amass enormous treasuries in itself really, really promising, but also kind of like obviously potentially apocalyptic and it's disruptive potential. I would love to your thoughts on both of those and that's another huge nugget to try and like break down into bite-sized pieces, but all three of you, I would love your thoughts on how you imagine these things reconciling and finding a new level. Cool.
I can kick it off with like the most simple and obvious answer because I'm sure the other folks will have better deeper answers, but I think that like basic foundation of this is that every technology is like this, every technological movement or epic is like this too, right? And this is really important for us to look at the history on. If you look at web one, you look at the stuff that was coming out in 1992 to 1994, that sort of era at the beginning, it was like some people were kind of making apocalyptic predictions or whatever, but for the most part, the technologists were like extremely euphorically idealistic about what these technologies were going to do. And even same thing with web two, right?
I experienced this personally myself. I was so head over heels optimistic about what we were going to be able to do with web two and you see the same thing on web three, right? And this is not even just about the errors of the internet. It's really about like any technological cycle where you get these S curves of euphoria and excitement and people tend to think about all the great things that can happen and not think as much about that bad things that can happen.
And I think that's probably one of the most important things for us to do at this point in this movement is try to identify what some of the negative things are going to be because there's no doubt in my mind that these coordination tools that we're developing are going to be incredibly powerful coordination tools, probably the most powerful coordination tools that we've had in a very long time. I think that the comparable thing here is going back and looking at the early agricultural and irrigation systems that people came together to build that turn into the first cities. And so if we're talking about that level of potent technology, then yeah, it's going to be used for good and it's going to be used for bad. So that I think is probably obvious but important for sake.
We're about to hear what you guys have. Yeah, I think there's a way of looking at a lot of this stuff as an unbundling and a rebundling if you're familiar with that. But I think one of the things that's lost in that metaphor is or just that mental model is that the idea is when you go back to bundling again, it's different. It's not the same as the thing that was unbundled.
Whatever it is, it's something about it looks different. It has a different goal in order. I think when we go through these technology changes, there's a really fantastic essay called, Five Things Know About Technology Change that I would absolutely recommend everybody working in crypto, go read, honestly just anybody working in technology, go read. But one of the things that that article talks about is this idea that's lost between bundling and bundling is that technology change is not additive, it's transformative.
This is one of the things that's well or less to be the other four. But one of the things to know about technology change is that technology change is not additive, it's transformative. When Steve Jobs stands up on the stage and announces the iPhone, you don't have the old world plus the iPhone, you have a completely different world. There's a face transition.
It takes them off that whole new world to really come into its own. But when that new technology is introduced to the whole world is different. I think it's reconfigured. I think we're seeing that now, play out, which is really cool, but at a very big scale.
It means that when dows come into their own, really, things will be really different. The world is different now. We have crypto, we have dows, we have NFTs, we have these. A lot of new technology changes head back to back to back.
There are a lot of really new big changes that have been introduced in the last year. And so it's just like, it's really hard to understand or train how the world is different. But I think it is pretty obvious that the world is going to be really different now. As we do this unbundling and then rebundling, we go through this process where things are going to change.
And some institutions are going to break and some institutions are going to have to adapt, some institutions are going to have to maybe just not exist anymore. You mentioned marriage before. It's kind of like, what does it tell you about marriage that it worked when 50% of a marriage was not liberated. It didn't have a whole lot of options in marriage.
What does that tell you about the institution of marriage? And then what does that tell you about marriage now or marriage in the future now that women are liberated and women do have a lot more opportunities or access to opportunities. It's obviously a lot equal, right? But it's certainly a lot more equal than it was 50 years ago.
So definitely like, tears and doubt, that's terrifying. It's probably going to happen. It's going to be awful. The other thing that I will add is that my impression is that new technology does often get used for not optimistic or not net positive things, right?
Like tears and doubt. Certainly the internet has been used to organize tears, tears groups and do all sorts of cyberbullying, right? There's all sorts of terrible things that have come out of the internet. I think on net, most technology changes are positive.
And you know, you think about zoom out and you look at where we were when we were first building irrigation systems to where we are now and all the technology changes that have happened in between. Sure, every new technology change has introduced negative is not 100% positive, right? Big part of irrigation systems now we have a lot more grain in our diet and grains are not as good for us as whole vegetables and whole needs, right? But on net, overall, it's definitely a positive, Ben's towards positive, positive scope, whatever.
So I know. What I've started thinking about this technology with blockchain and having governance and decisions, unlike in a traditional organization, decisions are transparent. And so there provides a lot of autonomy to an individual to be able to understand how to work through decision for a collective group. Whereas in like a traditional org, it's hard.
You don't really know the power network. It's not clearly laid out in the process through which a decision gets made isn't clearly laid out. So like openness has all these benefits. But I'm starting to formulate this point of view that the frontier upon which the technology that block Jane and Dao's win and do really well is our treatment of privacy in which now there's an almost an inherent openness.
And so it kind of takes its responsibility to not be creepy because I could go. There's a lot of stuff that's accessible to me, but it's creepy to the person that I'm spying on. But it's not in the same model as Facebook probably knows a lot of creepy stuff about pretty much everybody, as is Google, as is Amazon, as is whichever company who's doing a lot with data and finding value in it. And sometimes it's good.
Because you can get recommendations or something. But now we're in this space where we have like open access to people's information, their transactions, their mistakes, their points of view, they made a vote on one thing sometime back. And that's like there. There's really not hiding it.
Whereas, you know, something I decided five years ago, it's kind of gone. I don't have to really like account for myself anymore if I didn't like my decision and I've evolved. So I'm really interested now in like how is privacy going to be treated and how are we going to treat information on people and how are we going to reuse information on people? I think a lot of the success is going to be based on how this trends.
And I have no clue how it's going to trend. It's going to be all these forces that can pull it in one direction or another. But I think that's going to be a core sort of tenant of the success is treating that with kind of reverence or respect it deserves. And a chance that I kind of redo it.
Yeah, that resonates a lot. And I think that's one of the core trade-offs here that we're going to see play out with people who understand these technologies much better than me, but just getting a sense of some of the zero knowledge proof stuff and how that starts to apply to the ability to create environments that do have some sense of privacy or lack of information to be sharing while maintaining these trust opponents. I think it's maybe part of how we start to square that circle. But I think that trade-off that you're pointing to is a really crucial one because think about how politicians behave.
Every vote that they cast is in the record. And that causes them to think very differently about their actions when it's all sort of public. And now if everybody is making these actions that are publicly available, it really starts to change probably how people make decisions and contribute to things. And I think that when you think about the other forces here that start to, I think a lot of it is about the scale, constitution now being a great sort of current example of what I think is going to be a lot more common in the future of these financial flash mobs, where it's like because you have credible commitments from people that anybody can go and look at, it's very easy then to start to build these open structures like you're describing.
And I think people probably overemphasize the decentralized nature of ours and underemphasize the importance of the open information structures as actually a core component of what makes them work. But when you have something like Constitution where tens of thousands of people can show up, they can see essentially all of the information, they can go look at the wallet, they can see how much money is in it, they can contribute to it, they can perform data analysis on who's in it and the size of all the contributions and everything. And they can be a part of the governance process of it. You can move really fast at a really big scale.
And so I think that's the part that's going to be kind of particularly crazy to see is not just how quickly these things start to operate, but how they can just go from nothing to huge organizations essentially overnight. So to linger here on this issue of transparency and open access, the question of what happens when everyone becomes a Congress person, you know, and has a voting history. Like, I mean, technically, I mean, who I voted for in the last mayoral election is a matter of public record. But like, when it becomes so granular, this dovetails neatly into the kind of contemplations I was dunked in when I got invited into the Google Glass Beta program.
I started thinking about, you know, what it's really going to mean if we get the mirror world that all these big tech platforms are actually building and how that, you know, there's been a lot of conversations on the show about the like performativity of social media and what happens to the self in that space. Again, I'm just sort of jazzing here, but like, I think the relationship between between that and the way that so many of us have become dissociated from our actual identities through having to like curate our own lives on social media. And I'm happy to just stand out in front and be like the premature grumpy old man here. But like, at the same time, I really resonate with the kind of sentiments that have been expressed by people like Woody Harrelson and Willie Nelson with respect to the regulation of cannabis, you know, and they're saying I would rather see it decriminalized and legalized.
And so like bring it full circle, there's something about the promise or joy and also the peril or challenge of what I see in this project, which is on the one hand, thank God, there's a way for people to come together and be like, you know what, we're going to grant small people that couldn't win this kind of opportunity with like a larger, you know, more prestigious kind of stately incumbent organization. We're going to give those people the time and the space to make amazing things because because we know that original research or creative work is in the language of James C. Scott, like seeing like a state, it's illegible to the economy, like precisely because it's new, it doesn't have a recognized value. So that's great.
But at the same time, there's something about that going on. And I talked about this with Tina Goyan in his episode, he was talking about value capture and like the inherent risks in like Fitbit and any kind of metric, you know, exactly what I'm talking about earlier about metaphors will reveal certain aspects, but they will conceal other aspects of the possible relationship between things. And so, I don't know, I'm just curious about your thoughts about like, not only what is gained, but like, what if any essential functions actually find harder to gain purchase within this regime? I guess really the question is sort of like, what should not ever be put on the blockchain, you know, it's not like we have to do this, right?
Because ultimately, I think, you know, the mystery is deeper than our efforts to explore it. You know, and there's Kevin Kelly's whole thing about a question answered just raises multiple new questions. So science is actually expanding the surface area of our ignorance faster than it's expanding the surface area of our knowledge. But yeah, like what, you know, where do you see in given your, your familiarity with all this?
Where do you see like, I guess another way of putting this, this is all ended here, is thinking about the way that civil engineers haved over natural waterways. And then now we're getting to that point where we realize we have to daylight these now subterranean waterways and expose them to oxygen and allow photosynthesis and all this stuff to happen. And there are certain things that kind of need to not be managed or need to not be financialized or need to not be subjected to this kind of thing, like childhood, you know, these poor kids that are getting shuttled from like the cello lessons to the soccer practice to like leadership pre-training, you know, no, childhood, like zoom back for enough childhood has its own purpose. And so like, what, what, what do you as a community, you as individuals recognizes that what should remain wild with respect to what you're doing?
Like, what are the conversations that need to stay off record? Yeah, I think, yeah, there's a whole lot there. I think one of the things I have been thinking about a lot but haven't necessarily voiced anywhere is similar to what you just described, which is sometimes we think about technology as taking a step forward, we take a step forward and then we are exposed to a whole new host of problems. I think that metaphor of science expanding the surface area of our ignorance is a really good one.
I haven't heard that explanation over that telling about that, Richard Hamming has a similar metaphor or whatever, which is that like science, scientific niches are created faster than scientists are, right? There will always be more, more new niches in science than there are scientists. And he does this as part of a thing, class of teachers, which is like, don't worry, science is going to get more complicated, but we're never going to reach a point where there's like too much science, right? It's just not a thing, right?
Or too much technology, right? So we create new technology, we take the step forward. I think as far as I can tell, throughout like the whole history of humanity, right? We invent new technology, we take a step forward at no point have we ever been like, we're taking a step forward, been like, ooh, actually, now that we've taken a step, the calculus of like whether or not this is worth it has shifted.
And it's actually not worth it. And what we should do is take a step back and explore different avenue, right? Think about these technologies steps as a decision tree, right? We should actually go back one node on the decision tree and try to do a path because now that we're here, this isn't what we want, right?
I can't think of it anytime in history, we're like, yeah, let's put this back in the box and try again. Sometimes though, I think we want to do that, right? If we haven't, if anybody can think of an example, I would love to hear it as far as I can tell there aren't any, at some point as a species, we should try it and put something back in the box and try a different path and see what that's like, right? I think the more broad point here to which your question is like, not every problem is a technology problem, or I shouldn't say that, so it may be not every problem is a technology problem, right?
And it's not a technology problem. And maybe when we're looking at a problem, whether it's one that, you know, generally I think they're all the ones that we created, right? Maybe the solution is to say, actually, what we don't need here is more technology, what we need here is less technology. Yeah.
I think about, I'm going to tee you up, John, actually. It's about an interesting thing here. So I think about, like, I reflect on some of the most like enchanting character building, nostalgic experiences of my life, and more than not, they're not technology related moments that I've had. They're actually been containers where technology was not allowed in.
So, for example, one, and this came up recently because John and Zachward had been talking about a cabin like a summer camp experience. And I think back to one where I did, and I spent, I was living in New York City, a lot of action, very busy. I left New York, and I went and I worked on an island where there was no cell phone reception, very small, tight community. And the community here was multi-generational.
So grandparents went, parents went, kids went, marriages happened, people met, partners, families, you know, emerged from this place where there was really no televisions, no cell phones, but it was about the community that was being developed there. And so, you know, experiences like that, I feel like there really is a place where you say, you know, we've allowed technology to do its job, it got us here. Let's take it away for a moment. And we can kind of just be humans together, experience each other, enrich each other in ways that technology can never touch the sort of like almost spiritual essence.
And then we go back and use technology to do what it does well, which is organized and helps communicate and like bring ideas together. I feel like there's this like ebb and flow that kind of has to happen. I'm sort of queuing up John here talking more about like where the summer camp came from, but then also answer kind of specifically or personally. Yeah.
Wow. What set of questions and what set of answers here, there's just so much to dive into. Yeah. I want to touch on two very particular questions that Michael asked, you know, that I think also speak to the two answers that the Zach and Christian gave.
The first one is, you know, about technology, what shouldn't be on chain. And I think the question that really is like, what is not going to serve us well as a species to put on chain? And we talked a little earlier about seeing like a state and legibility, you know, blockchains are highly legible structures. They create incredibly structured data about everything that interacts with them.
And that creates a lot of efficiency in certain ways, but you know, it also creates the opportunity for essentially like fractionalization and financialization of everything. And so you want to be maybe a little careful about what you start putting on there because you're going to fractionalizing, you're going to financialize it. So, you know, for instance, one of the paths that got us here to cabin via the creator co-op was thinking about income sharing agreements and like new structures for how, you know, creators could earn money and do it in ways where they weren't going into debt. And income sharing agreements are a fascinating bit of financialization that can really help people.
But some people get a little wary about them because at the far extreme, they start to look like a nendred servitude. And so like, what do you not want to put on Jane? Humans, because you know, that starts to look a lot like slavery. And so, you know, and that could be, you know, people being algorithmically controlled, it could be people having their time or resources overly financialized, you know, or fractionalized in ways that don't serve them.
So I think that's the sort of thing that we have to be really careful about. The other question that Michael asked, which maybe speaks more to what Christian was talking about, was what should stay wild. And I just love that question because, you know, what should say wild wilderness is what should say wild. And I think all of us have a deep love of and, and, you know, sort of almost spiritual commitment to nature as a core factor of shaping our lives.
And we've been talking about how some of these most important moments in our lives came from times when we didn't have to tell you when we just had nature and other humans. And, you know, I even think about that. I think this is maybe one of the central ironies of cabin is that, you know, it sort of sits right on this precipice in between Elden and, you know, 200 megabit per second high speed internet connections. And we have both of those things.
And, you know, we're, I didn't, I came out here to build a cabin in the woods because I was done with web two. You know, I was like ready to just ride off into the sunset and go with my happy little life in the woods, you know, and web three and Dows and Zack and Young Gold and this whole community really sucked me back in in a way that brought back a lot of life and excitement. But ultimately, I think that's what, you know, this whole cabin experiment is about is how do we try to find that balance between these things that should stay wild, these things that should be natural or illegible and, you know, spiritual and these things that really can be propelled forward by technology. You kind of went through a bundle and bundle in your life right there, didn't you?
So honestly, I really feel like we should probably do this again. But I don't know, this is tricky. It's not enough space in this conversation to really like ask all the questions. So I'd like to anchor it, you know, just to give this thing a little bit more of a, you know, human heart in the robot or whatever.
One of the premises of the show is about an inquiry with respect to our relationship to our ancestors and our relationship to the future as ancestors. And, you know, to step outside of linear time for a minute and just think about all of this, like you're looking at the sheet music for a symphony and you're seeing, you know, how the motif that is introduced in section one is like rearranged and repurposed and then, you know, folds into some larger thing in the last movement. I'm curious for the three of you to reflect on the work that you're doing within that broader frame as if you're in like dialogue with the people that came before you and as one of the people that came before. And, you know, to just wax a little bit about what that evokes for you with respect to this work.
Because I think, you know, one of the things I really admire about the slice of web three that is not merely trying to find out how fast they can get how rich, but is committed to building infrastructure, undoing the enclosures of commons that we've experienced over the last few hundred years, etc. It's kind of like a paradoxical thing where it's like we're, we're using these tools that other people are using for like the most ludicrous, avaricious commodification to do precisely the opposite of that thing. And so like that, to me strikes me as more in keeping with, and I think this is the thing that like a lot of the people who are encountering this phenomenon only from like mainstream media reportage, they're not appreciating the cathedral building aspect of this. And I'd love to know more about, yeah, like the parts of this that you see as like continuing work started by other people.
Actually, I meant to bring this up much earlier because you brought up co-ops and I wanted to hear kind of more reflection on how you see this as a continuation that is learning from all of the 20th century experiments in intentional communities. And like, whom do you believe you're planting the trees for? Like who are the people that are going to live in the shade of those things? Those kinds of questions.
Yeah. Hey kids, you're probably listening to this many, many years from now in the future, but it's me, your great, great, great, great grandfather's act. I hope you're spending time outside in the woods and I hope you're eating well and I hope you're spending time with friends and family and people you love. And I hope you're working on something that you find inspiring and meaningful because that's all that matters.
How's that for answer? I was in the conversation on the dinner table last night, which is one of my favorite places I have a conversation. We were kind of reflecting on family history and I have this philosophy that like a connection to our past gives us a further horizon into the future and how important it is to like reflect on our lineage. And so if I take this like question kind of personally and I think about, you know, my own history, it's always been through, you know, my family had a business since 1800s and my father still operates it.
And I think that what I draw in from that is being pragmatic and finding value in what I'm doing, but then the way forward is through following curiosity and using technology and never forget to keep having conversations at the dinner table without your phone out, wherever you are. Bring us home, John. Oh man. So, you know, this is what I love about our little corner of Web3, right?
The place where we all like to hang out is this is the vibe, right? That we're all talking about here. You know, you go to a big crypto conference, an NFT, NIC sort of thing, and you get the whole spectrum, right? It's easy for us to forget, but I think to your point there's a lot of the mainstream view of this is probably much more that the loud voices of like flipping NFTs and whatever, whatever all this nonsense, right?
But what gets me so excited is you get together with smaller groups of people, I think back to, you know, a conference I went to called Emcon, which was just a lot of Dow Builders. And two things really stand out about groups like that. And groups like this is that the first is that they look backwards and they do try to contextualize what we're doing, you know, in history, because it's so easy with a new set of technologies and tools like this to, you know, say, oh, this is like going to change everything, wipe the slate clean, like we get to reinvent the welcome scratch. And there certainly are some opportunities to do that.
But what that actually means is that when you're starting from a clean slate, you have a much greater responsibility to look at the long arc of history and to understand everyone who has ever thought about these hard questions before and how they solve them, you know, whether that's aerosolian political structures or the folks who are trying to figure this out, you know, in the context of the Constitution or, you know, Eleanor Ostrom, the study collective action problems or, you know, the folks building irrigation systems to be able to build the first sort of cities and societies. We have lessons to learn from all of these people and many more. And I think what I was so heartened by coming into this space was seeing lots of other people who were passionate and excited about learning about that context and learning about that history and trying to figure out how we can apply that going forward, because infrastructure creates path dependencies. And I think this ties back to what Zach was saying about, you know, these, the technology sort of, the clock always goes forward.
And so when you're in these big moments of sort technological, cambrian explosion, where there's a whole lot of possible paths that you could go down, it's a really important time to be intentional. Because if you aren't intentional about it, you can end up down paths that lead to local optima or lead to problematic outcomes that could have been avoided if you had just been a little more intentional about exploring the other available paths before the infrastructure became so baked in that it was hard to unwind. And what makes me most heartened and optimistic about what's happening right now in web 3 is the number of people who are taking those historical examples and stories and analogy and history and applying them in ways where they're trying to be very intentional about which apps we go down and trying to make sure that the infrastructure that we're laying down right now leads to a better future and not just a faster or, you know, different one. Awesome.
Okay, just quick bonus round question, which is, each of you, what, under the umbrella of this conversation and this Dow, are you most excited about as a kind of growing tip? So as to like date or timestamp this conversation, you'll be able to go back and like, oh yeah, that was block 112921. What is the thing that seems perhaps like small now, but that you hope is big in another year or like, you know, where are you most excited to nurture this and watch it grow? I think for me, it's just the experiments in governance and economic structures and in particular, really the governance structures because that's what I think is other root of everything.
The opportunity right now is, you know, typically you only get like, it takes like the founding of a new nation, right, or, you know, some other kind of grand event to create large scale opportunities to rewrite the basic rules of how people cooperate and make decisions. And now we get a virtually unlimited simultaneous number of those opportunities. And so I think things like liquid democracy structures and pod structures and quadratic voting and all of these things were just at the tip of the iceberg of the sort of governance legos that are going to allow us to coordinate in some pretty new and exciting ways. That's really good.
I don't know that mine will be as eloquent, but for me, the thing that I'm really interested in is what does it look like for cooperative groups and groups that are cooperating around a set of goals to build things together and maintain those things together in a non-coercive way, right? Somebody building a bridge was, you know, literally like stack bricks was instructed to do so, right? And didn't have much of a choice in terms of, you know, stack bricks here, stack bricks over there, right? So what differences make it?
What does it look like to bring people into the fold regardless of whatever their background or specific skill set is, right? Very aspirational way. And have us all decide what to build together, right? Going back to the John's example of governance, right?
What are we going to build and why and how we make those decisions? But then what does it look like for us to actually build those things together? And maybe this is a whole other conversation that we could have in a future episode, but the most construction, most of the things that we built has been fairly coercive. What does it look like to actually build things in a really cooperative way?
That could be like the flavor text on this magic card or something like that. Yeah, thanks you all so much. Three really interesting people. I'm really glad that we got the time to dig around in this sandbox together today.
And I just, I'm going to beg your forgiveness in advance for how long it's going to take me to edit this. But yeah, this has been amazing. We really appreciate the questions. They've been just very thoughtful.
And I hope this is one of many conversations that we all get to have together about this because I think it's pretty clear that we're all scratching around in the dark and just starting to feel out the outlines of these topics. Yeah, I completely agree. I hope this is one of many future sitcoms. It's a lot of fun and it's just like a great chat with you.
Yeah, maybe next time we'll just do a Twitter space and it'll be more like the weeds on the edge of the parking lot than like my little attempts at an Italian garden. You know, we can just like see what we find in there. That was a great metaphor. I love that.
Cool. Thanks again for listening, friends. For more future fossils, please dig in at patreon.com slash Michael Garfield or find me on Substack where you can subscribe to an email newsletter of much, much wider scope and is covered really in this podcast. You can also look me up at Michael Garfield on Twitter or Instagram.
I would love it if you tagged me in your reflections on this episode so that I can weave your contributions into a much larger public discourse about these very important topics. Again, thank you so much. Stay safe out there. Maybe go sit under a tree and I'll be back in a few weeks with another very fun episode.