Digital Symmetry Coursing through the Network City
As we continue to white knuckle the steepening technological innovation curve, equal access to information is becoming exponentially more important. Sadly, due to data stockpiling and gatekeeping, our current societal systems have been engaged in a slow and steady deterioration of collective agreement. If Network Cities arise and publicly record their operations and transactions on-chain via a cryptographic oracle network (among other means), real-time decentralized information would be freely accessible and verifiable by any citizen in the community, which would begin to repair collective agreement in the process.
Societal information is a public good. The unequal access to information routinely causes myriad pain points and is zero-sum: conflicts in international relations, insider trading profiting the few over the expense of others, the sketchiness of used cars which leads to poor market conditions, uncoordinated pandemic responses, etc. Governance innovations are needed, but without an agreed upon foundational root of information, it’s like building on a fault line. A Network City that employs information symmetry would help community alignment and level the playing field. This would foster a positive-sum environment, which would raise the average knowledge levels of its citizenry. The population could be brought closer to a hive mind state at a city coordination level, and this type of system would enable powerful crowdsourcing of ideas and solutions.
Imagine if we had decentralized, digital health platforms on the blockchain, and everyone in a city (or country or the world) had equal access to cryptographically verifiable data regarding the current state of a pandemic or other calamity. There would of course still be different viewpoints on how to respond, but at least we would begin from the same agreed-upon foundation of information. From these real-time roots, we could deploy different strategies and report our datasets back to the blockchain. We could see mathematically which strategies are working and which aren’t. Our responses could be more nimble, flexible, democratic, with faster iterating.
A Network City built with a blockchain backbone can help build back not only collective agreement but collective action, which may arguably be the most important resource we have at this moment of human history. If the Internet built out the skeleton structure for information symmetry, the Network City would activate it and send collective, digital truth through the wires. It will be thrilling to see what we can do in this new era of coordination.
Note: This piece was originally a submission for a CityDAO community contest.
This is now the first article in a four-part series that focuses on information and voting in DAO and civic landscapes. Here is the series list:
Article 1: This article.
Article 2: DAO Voter Turnout and Other Impossible Feats of Humankind
Article 3: Universal Basic Information: Mining the Renewable Public Good
Article 4: The Universal Basic Information Dashboard Framework
UBI Dashboard Github Repository: Back end — Deployed to Ethereum Goerli Testnet. Instructions on how to interact with the contracts are in the README.
Live “Minimum Viable Product” website: UBI Dashboard dApp
