Global Order Has Become a Square Peg in a Round Hole — Part 1: It’s Time to Embrace Change.
We’re forcing reality to fit our socio-economic models instead of updating them.
A bit of context.
This article is not about COVID 19 or the way the pandemic is making us rethink everything: It’s about how we should have addressed fundamental issues with our governance, politics, and economics way before the world ever heard about the novel coronavirus. With that said, when it comes to shifting paradigms, timing is everything, and now more than ever, modern civilization is forced to deal with an overdue, hardcore introspect on several fronts. More on my vision for this blog, my background, and social change in this introductory post.
Critique is only half of the story — but it still is just as important as the other half.
The objective of this post is to characterize what a sustainable 21st-century free-market democracy could look like using tools and economic models that are being built today. This specific post will not dive into every solution, as each idea deserves a thorough review and discussion on its own. Instead, I will dedicate this first post to analyzing where we are and how we got here, providing a backdrop and context to the solutions I will be exploring. This nuanced critique is essential to breakdown the points of failure in our mechanisms so that the solutions can be adequately understood.
This is probably not the first article you’ve encountered on Medium explaining why the world is messed up, but bear with me, it is really not the point. It is simply crucial to frame a few specific negative processes that the solutions I will be covering in this blog are attempting to break.
The solutions I will talk about are organically formulated these days by various independent teams and research groups. To name just a few: RadicalxChange, the Ethereum ecosystem, Decentralized Finance pioneers, Aragon, Idea Markets, Idena, Democracy Erath, Cent, Augur, Z-Cash, Bitcoin, web 3.0 and many more. Some of these movements deal with the heavy macro issues that need to be redesigned, and some are novel solutions for niche markets. Some are mostly theoretical, and some are already integrating into real-world markets. Some are more open and some more concentrated around a specific school of thought. Still, the list above is only a fragment of hundreds of initiatives, putting a lot of work into trying to solve and market similar ideas with only subtle differences in approach or rhetoric. This diversity is great, but it is also the Achilles heel of our industry.
The number of teams dealing with the same challenges is overwhelming. Albeit in some rare cases, we can see the leveraging of this plurality by collaborative work that drives forward our shared narratives (like Quadratic Funding that came out of a collaboration between Vitalik Butterin and Glen Weil). However, under the current scheme, we also see redundancies and acts of self-preservation; Not out of selfishness but solely for the sake of survival in a quest to retain one’s legitimacy over others in an economy that is transitioning away from (but still modeled after) proprietary rights.
Parallel narratives of different projects often differentiate themselves, while also overlapping in core ideologies. Coupled with idiocentric terminologies adopted by different communities, things are getting extremely confusing to newcomers attempting to make sense of distributed ledgers, blockchains, radical economics, decentralized finance, and the decentralized web.
As an alternative, in this blog, I will attempt to piece together the relevant building blocks of these solutions from the perspective of building a better and feasible implementation of democracy and free markets.
I believe that such a narrative can only develop through a collaborative framework.
Collaborative Decentralization
Collaborative Decentralization is a proposed mindset that can hopefully develop into an actual framework, in which independent teams can share perspectives, develop a unified rhetoric, debate differences, collaborate on messaging and communication by steering the discourse, and developing a shared narrative.
To start somewhere, I propose the following set of objectives to draft a solution-set for navigating the sub-narratives of the distributed consensus ecosphere.
This is merely a summary of values that I think can help classify the various solutions and drive an industry-focused movement to map out and externalize the tools created by our ecosystems — I invite anyone who wants to take part in the process to reach out or join me both in the process of defining these issues and in getting industry leaders on board.
Principles of Collaborative Decentralization:
- Refresh our approach toward the global economy and social sciences; It is time we treat social design and economics as inseparable, and design policies as ecologists approach ecosystems: as researchers of organically occurring order. in complex self-regulating systems that produce sustainable conditions for interactions, rather than our current models of “social engineering”: designers of mechanisms that produce output to meet goals designed by economists. — this boils down to supporting chaordic and emergent properties of independent communities rather than forcing them into a predefined template or arbitrary geopolitical capsules.
- Decentralize the “Legislative branches” of our societies down to an optimum level, where participants intuitively signal their preference on any subjectively meaningful subject. As opposed to a maximalist decentralization approach, we should consider a moving target of “optimal” granularity. This “optimum” will need to be community-specific and collectively governed.
- Automate the “Executive branches” as much as possible; Removing the human factor from technical tasks of governing and administering public offices, contracting, and funding of public goods which too often are managed out of partisan (or personal) interest rather than the public’s best interests.
- Design transparency-centric systems and platforms, so they can be evaluated, critiqued, and monitored by anyone within the community, where change can be applied by well-informed members and based on broad public consensus.
- Develop free markets for regulators to compete in maintaining optimal levels of transparency, resource allocation, distribution of power, and distribution of economic returns. A competitive landscape built for incentivized public oversight can help progress sustainable models of governance, and overall public-centric economic and social practices.
- Document, index, and map each application and feature of decentralized tech and radical economics. We should connect between as many existing subsets as possible to allow our new breed of “socio-ecologists” (see #1 above) to paint a clear picture and allow visionaries to build interfaces for human collaboration on a global scale.
Elasticity became a fundamental property of economics — and our formal institutions are unable to contain it.
The most cutting edge approaches to socio-economic design are developed out of an understanding that our current systems are slowly breaking. Mainly because the models we use to describe our interactions are fundamentally outdated or flawed.
Globalization and exponential technological advancement are stretching our markets and social order to a breaking point. Individual markets and industries are more complexly intertwined and dynamic than ever before, creating unprecedented asymmetries in our economies. A long term process that conflicts with the narratives that give power and validity to our core values and belief systems.
And so the cycle begins:
The economic tension drives social and political fragmentation, leading minority groups of swing voters to push governments to the extreme ends of the political spectrum. Wishing to preserve their relevance, governments and institutions succumb to the populist rhetoric and deploy desperate schemes and diversions in attempts to control the narrative of why and how the shit is hitting the fan (blaming everyone and everything but themselves), only causing more political and social fragmentation.
This unfortunate and endless process is powering several dangerous (social and economic) feedback loops that I will present below. The solutions offered by the decentralized economy are trying to break these loops:
While they do build off of everything that came before them, these new schools of thought do not consider the systems they are building to be more valuable than the individuals they govern. Cypherpunks, Radical thinkers, and some of the leading blockchain developers create systems that, by design, will always reward human agency over pure systematic obedience. These new ideas do not force reality to fit a standardized model, but instead, leverage the emergent and chaordic nature of human cooperation and interaction. The pioneering work done by these teams both exemplifies and inspires large scale decentralized collaboration and self-organization to build a better world in a bottom-up approach without enforcing any top-down reform.
To promote social change through bottom-up reform, we need to power individual communities to govern technology and economic policy collectively.
Designing it in a granular way that will serve the pluralistic needs of our global societies, would incentivize optimal usage of our time spent and funnel the increasing returns back to our communities. The tools we are designing can help individual societies decide on how those returns are allocated and, maybe we can even start imagining freeing ourselves from the need of continually producing value, ultimately eliminating traditional labor altogether.
But that’s hard to do — No one expects perfect solutions to exist, and any success can only be examined in retrospect. Still, without embracing the morphological nature of these issues, we will probably never progress to an alternative future.
Before we can understand the building blocks of this alternative future, we have to look at how humans collaborated throughout history and how radical change has forced us to re-invent our concepts of society, governance, and markets, ultimately decentralizing our economies bit by bit.
All about that in the second part of this post: Part 2: Decentralization as an evolutionary process.
