Holistic Value System For DAOs , a step towards a Resource Based Economy

For a moment here Id like you to step into the unknown

shed all beliefs and assumptions we have about the future,

bring to mind something that you truly value

your health, your mental clarity, a relationship or partner, a stable society

what if you suddenly lost that

In my last post I wrote about systems theory as a collective sensemaking tool and how to interact within complicated and complex systems. Now once we’ve figured out the structure of our project and our communication, how we do we move forward in agreeing on what we value and therefore how to make collective decisions.

I want to lay the foundation of what value is and why we need to question and redefine it today.

I want to put this in context, we are projected to plateau in world population and with the converging crises may even decline in world population within our lifetimes. the significance of this is unimaginable as our entire economic system was designed for the exponentially increasing population we’ve seen.

i want you to have the most open-minded understanding of what value is here. Money is simply an information technology and a belief system. it is designed as a map to understand and predict our socioeconomic future, and to incentivize behaviour towards this narrative we hold.

We’ve had a different socioeconomic maps of how value defined for the agricultural and the industrial revolution, and even today we are shifting towards an attention economy. On this population graph you can say these economic maps are linear approximations to the slope. And we can see that the rate of change is even higher in the coming decades.

Its not so much about whether or not we have a potential difference of 2 Billion people or not, its about the rate of change.

And don’t misunderstand this argument for anything about overpopulation or any claims about what population should be. I’m simply stating that regardless of what happens there will be radical changes to our economic system within our lifetimes and we shouldn’t cling to the current system.

This is particularly evident because our current system is a Ponzi Scheme and when we stop increasing in population a Ponzi scheme fails. That means humanity needs to question and redefine what value means. Additionally as a quick tangent there will be relatively more old people than young people, which is something we haven’t seen before to this extent. So what is valuable to us and what is the scope of possibility for value?

The process of questioning what value means to us is more important than the definition we arrive at, as it brings us into contact with all forms of value that are implicit, or done without reward. Living in this question instead of arriving at an answer of value is critical as any defined value system will become obsolete every decade or so in this changing time.

Not only because this population change, which I’m simply using as a single exemplary metric, but each value system will become obsolete because of Goodhart’s law.

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a useful measure“

When That Measure of Value becomes an “end” in itself instead of a “means” of exchange, it becomes corrupted, the loopholes are quickly found and therefore the system gets hacked and gamed. Its no longer a metric for proper incentivization, or predicting and understanding our socioeconomic situation, because you have now changed the system you are in.

We can see how counter Intuitive the result of this is:

• “Providing for others” becomes “creating dependency on your service”
• “attention economy” becomes the “Distraction Economy”
• “higher price intended to prevent consumption, creates an incentive to extract the resource”

Monetary Value seems to be increasingly diverging from what society and the planet need to be incentivizing and is losing its function as a metric. Yet somehow we have convinced ourselves as a species that we can measure the value of everything with one metric, and believe that it is a good measure for what society needs. There is so much that NEEDs to be done in the world today, that we should be incentivizing but aren’t. These are now becoming vital things which provide our life support mechanisms and will be an immense cost and therefore there’s really no excuse not to give value to. In otherwords Money as a viable metric has already long become obsolete.

So wait a minute, I’ve said we need to redefine value, but I’ve also said how counter intuitive value metrics are, so are were in a predicament , do we measure or not measure.

Of course the ideal would be to have our value system map directly with all forms of value and approach a “True Cost Economics” where creating social value is rewarded and negative externalities are accounted for. But we can barely define what value means generally, let alone measure it in any non-intrusive way. Explicitly creating new metrics to universally agree on is incredibly challenging, especially with rapidly changing circumstances and needs.

Ok, so lets not measure anything and live in a sharing/gift economy, yeah maybe for certain things but we cant naively pretend not to measure anything as we will fall into the trap of over-attributing money and preexisting implicit value systems. we can easily be playing an unconscious game which gets hacked in other unknown ways. And Locally we want a solid agreement on value for sensemaking, decision making and equitable society.

Now of course this is not a question of ideals but a question of improvements and applicability.

A partial solution to Goodhart’s law is to move towards a Multi-Variable Value System. This value system should fail in different ways, such that the aggregate is more neutral

A current and simple example of this is in certain jobs that can be hourly or piece rate (per task accomplished) to balance the pros and cons of each by combining the two, half paid hourly and half paid by piece rate. This system is much more difficult to hack and game, and therefore often isn’t worth the effort to find the loopholes.

But Going beyond this we should recognize that Time, Information, Material, Energy behave fundamentally different in the way they are created, shared and discarded, and therefore shouldn’t have the same value mechanisms

I think as a first step using these distinctions and having them non transferable may be an appropriate response. Either way, moving towards a value mapped closer to our reality is a valid aim, but to never take it too seriously, which means never to take it as an ends in itself.

Creating wealth in this new situation humanity is entering into will take many implicit forms as we don’t have the mechanisms for understanding or measuring it.

I’m not suggesting we use barter. Barter only ever existed amongst enemies, sharing and gift economies were primary, even between tribes.

Relationships were always the most tangible form of wealth and security, and they are built on generosity. we should see what value we can provide to the local community, recognize our current technologically mediated abundance and lead with a gift. Ancient world found it rude to immediately pay back a gift as it meant you didn’t want to maintain this relationship past the transaction.

Ultimately a Value System isn’t at the level of the Economy, its deeply rooted in Culture and Relationships that the Environment Affords.

Providing value through relationships and gifts and planting seeds for next generations to flourish builds the commons. “Commons”- A public good that no one owns but everyone relies on, and I think commons will become more common as we transition from one socioeconomic system to the next. Its Integrity relies on trust, trust is person to person which is great for community but doesn’t scale.

So how do we scale commons, and provide the flexibility of value systems to a growing number of people through this time of transition?

One tool I’d like to introduce is CommonsStack.

commonsstack.org/

It uses token engineering, with a foundation in systems theory, to create circular purpose-driven economies around various initiatives and community projects. Its essentially an open sourced DAO builder.

I introduce this because it is the most impressive DAO builder system i have seen, one which can adapt, and is rooted in many principles to avoid failure points, have polar processing and build our economic systems with biomimicry in mind. they have various open sourced tools to raise and allocate funding, to make decisions and measure impact for your unique application.

So far in our economic mindset we assume things scale linearly or exponentially which leads to catastrophic outcomes, absurd inequalities and entirely unreasonable predictions but nature scales like that.

all the things i talked about before or in my talk about systems theory; of how things scale, and how they change over time, can all be uniquely controlled in creating your own value system, so that someone who has 1000 times the shares doesn’t have 1000 times the voting power for example. Lets question how wealth scales, how voting in democracy scales.

This is one step towards a multivariate value system, and have aspects of systems theory as a basis allows for adaptability in value and not to have these exponential feedback loops that make our socioeconomic system further disconnected from the reality of things.

As I mentioned being context-sensitive in my Systems Theory post its important to recognize that Economic Systems can’t be injected upon different cultures and expected to work the same.

Each Bioregion and Historical Culture should have its own value system, this experimentation and diversity is needed. Having one Socioeconomic system try to spread itself through the entire population is the definition of fragility, as when one aspect of it fails (which is inevitably will), than we face existential threat. This is basic evolutionary theory.

Further more each bioregion will value things differently because some areas will have droughts and others will have flooding, and the value system of needs are entirely different for those groups. Being context sensitive and adaptive in our understanding of value is vital in this time.

Agreeing on value is important for sensemaking, trust and collaboration but lets not mistake the “map for the territory“ when it comes to value.

If we are convinced of the map then not only are we feeding an outdated game with our attention, but we are forfeiting our control to ones who’ve already hacked this game.

What does a value system which values the future and future generations truly look like?

How can we have a value system that embodies a growing circle of empathy beyond our needs towards the need for the deep interdependent ecology?