Introducing Commons
David Rangel & Vijay Sundaram
The world is only a few decades into the Information Era but it feels like something is broken.
Throughout history, technological, economic, and social systems have generally co-evolved. Farming, land, feudalism. Shipbuilding, trade, mercantilism. Manufacturing, capital, industrialism. But these systems don’t necessarily evolve in lock-step, and today we face a sharp disconnect: our world is being transformed by Information Era technologies — like personal computing, the Internet, and artificial intelligence — while its economic systems and institutions haven’t changed since the Industrial Era.
Information Era Companies are Breaking Industrial Era Capitalism
The joint-stock corporation and financial markets were formed well over a century ago as a way to organize the manual labor and scarce capital required to exploit new industrial technologies for mass-production and transportation. They proved to be wildly effective mechanisms, creating unprecedented wealth and progress through the 20th century.
These same mechanisms may now work against us. Equity-based companies maximize value capture for shareholders in a way that’s at odds with value creation for customers and partners. While technology corporations amass extraordinary wealth and power, the users whose contributions they rely on grapple with rising wealth inequality and anxiety about job security.
It’s little surprise that people are growing disillusioned with the promises of both technology and capitalism to achieve shared prosperity.
Upgrading Capitalism for the Information Era
The mechanisms that worked for capitalism in the Industrial Era are being pushed to their limits by information technology dynamics. We need new mechanisms designed for the Information Era. We believe these now exist in cryptotokens and blockchains.
Crypto enables a fundamentally new technical and economic model for information-based platforms and networks. One that tightly aligns value creation with value capture, and the interests of creators and investors with users and partners. One that, by design, can broaden society’s economic participation in the platforms and networks they support.
Central to this new model is an entirely new kind of entity — a spiritual successor to the corporation — designed from scratch for crypto-native projects and their philosophy, structure, incentives, organization, protocol and token design, ecosystem economics, financing, markets, and governance.
This entity is ultimately the backbone for the transformative social contracts, value propositions, business models, and organizational structures that promise to turn the corporation upside down and capitalism right side up.
Commons: Toward Crypto’s Long-Term Promise
The world is at an important juncture socially, economically, and technologically. Crypto promises a better future, but as an ecosystem we need to prioritize it while the technologies and culture are still in formative stages.
To do our part, we’re starting a project called Commons to work on three fronts:
- Developing an economic and human-centered thesis on crypto, including expanding on the points summarized above.
- Exploring ideas for new venture entities for crypto-native projects, as well as the varied systems and infrastructure to support them.
- Fostering a community of good actors to sharpen these ideas, nurture connections, and support the crypto ecosystem as it evolves.
If you’d like to follow along, we’ll be posting to our Medium publication regularly as well as sharing rougher ideas and notes via email. You can also directly reach out to either of us anytime.
