nathan on opp
nathan schneider on opp via nathan tweet [https://x.com/ntnsndr/status/1803468381443465566]:
My essay “Web3 is the Opportunity We Have Had All Along” is now available, along with its excellent companions, behind the full glory of an academic paywall: https://emerald.com/insight/publication/doi/10.1108/S0733-558X202489… You can still get the free, carnivalesque version here: https://cryptocarnival.wtf/schneider
notes/quotes from free version:
Crypto comes by these democratic associations honestly; its distributed ledger technology enables novel means of circulating wealth and power among a system’s participants..t
need ledger tech for nonjudgmental expo labeling to enable means of circulating people
how we gather in a space is huge.. need to try spaces of permission where people have nothing to prove to facil curiosity over decision making.. because the finite set of choices of decision making is unmooring us.. keeping us from us.. ie: whatever for a year.. a legit sabbatical ish transition
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
ie: imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness)
Crypto meanwhile has the wherewithal to enable new degrees of consolidation in wealth and power.
Available data on blockchain activity is plentiful and precise, but it rarely reveals much about the effects on real human lives..t
plentiful, precise and non legit (like data on whales in sea world)
we need a means/tech/whatever to facil the dance of real (aka: free) human lives.. not to effect them
I offer this essay as an explanation for the cautious but determined hope I have for the opportunity that crypto and its cognates present—even if we shouldn’t need this opportunity, because the possibility for more democratic ownership and governance has been with us all along.
exactly.. as we keep perpetuating sea world.. need something legit diff..
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of m\a\p
None of this presents a guarantee of equity, fairness, or justice. Achieving those will require intention. For instance, protocols can ensure that token allocations accrue to contributors of labor and use-value, rather than just to those who can afford to pay for them at the outset.
any form of m\a\p as a cancerous distraction
This is not for lack of opportunities. Recent decades have seen social movements and technologists develop numerous experiments in more textured, responsive, and participatory forms of collective decision-making. These include participatory budgeting (Cabannes 2004), liquid democracy (Hardt and Lopes 2015), sortition (Gastil 2000; Bouricius 2013; Pek 2019; Fan and Zhang 2020), citizens’ assemblies (Niemeyer 2014; Chwalisz 2017; Giraudet et al. 2022), crowdsourcing (Hsiao et al. 2018; Bernal 2019), and various alternative voting systems..t (Posner and Weyl 2014; Emmett 2019). A growing field of platforms for online citizen engagement has emerged to facilitate these processes (Stempeck 2020). Yet in even the most advanced applications of technology-enabled governance, from Madrid to Taiwan (Hsiao et al. 2018; Smith and Martín 2021; Tseng 2022), the new mechanisms serve in solely advisory roles; participatory budgeting processes, while more likely to be binding, apply to only small fractions of public budgets.
cancerous distractions
the finite set of choices of decision making is unmooring us.. keeping us from us.. ie: whatever for a year.. a legit sabbatical ish transition
For crypto to usher in a democratic renaissance, it needs to be designed that way. For example, even leading advocates of cryptoeconomic designs have begun calling for systems with “soulbound” features that center people, not tokens, as their basic unit..t (Buterin 2022; Weyl, Ohlhaver, and Buterin 2022). This is an important prerequisite for fostering spaces of political, rather than just economic, deliberation and decision-making—for imagining a common good, not just an optimal return on investment.
need: oikos (the economy our souls crave).. ‘i should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.’ – gaston bachelard, the poetics of space
ie: imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us
If people building, regulating, and using crypto are serious about advancing democracy, they will need to design for democracy with determination comparable to what they now apply, for instance, to system security. Tremendous energy—intellectual and computational—goes toward securing property rights on blockchains. What if similar energy were also devoted to ensuring these systems produced more democratic outcomes than their predecessors?
need to let go of any form of democratic admin if we want the dance to dance
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be you. 