HAUS Party LIVE🎉— Challenging Dualities in a World of Plurality!
Season 4 Episode 10 (3/31/2022)
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Welcome everyone to the infinite garden that gets ever more abstract as we go along. Following the discussions from last few week, we have arrived at dualities, dichotomies, binaries, and oppositions. Do they actually exist? Are they useful? Are they necessary for language? We don’t know. Let’s try to break this down. This is a continuation of an experiment that we’ve been conducting in this season of Haus Party. This conversation dates back to when Spencer was here talking about Anticapture, which evolved into a conversation on democracy and DAOs, issues of scale and the limits of growth, how to think beyond competition, to ruminating upon these dualities and how to think through them. How might we think towards an alternative to dualities? How might the Web3-DAO space offer us an opportunity to experiment with those alternatives? Does that mean a kind of pluralism? A multi-perspectivism? Might DAOs offer us the opportunity to think beyond these binary distinctions?
One of the core value props of a DAO is that no individual has control, per se. If power is properly distributed there isn’t one person that can make a final decision. The decisions that do get made are an organic aggregation of everybody’s perspective. So maybe DAOs provide a pluralist view by design. It’s valuable for an individual to share their opinion, because your voice has power and we should be incentivized to share it. These different perspectives are joined into a weird, amorphous blob that defies duality.
On the other hand, DAOs can become whatever the community designs them to be, even dictatorships. The duality here is that the DAO form or the DAO code should not be opinionated. Should we be writing constraints into the code that force a multi-perspective or pluralist approach? DAOs are a blank slate, so they are what we make of them.
We might consider that DAOs privilege or prioritize the autonomy of the individual. Through that autonomy, that increased sovereignty, different kinds of relationships scale up into the decentralized and autonomous organization, so we might consider avoiding creating rules that inhibit that autonomy, but instead think about how to maximize that autonomy. This offers us the potential of thinking differently and acting differently. Call it pluriversality or pluralism or whatever you want; the word isn’t so important. A DAO has the potential to be more porous, more diffuse, like semi-permeable membrane that avoids siloing information. There’s more of a diffusion and a dispersal of that information to be shared collectively. Does this allow us to break down this dualism?
So much of our traditional organizational capacity has been dedicated to identifying who is wrong, and then opposing that perspective. How might we approach this breakdown of right from wrong as it’s coded into our language? How competitive should we be? How collaborative should we be? It’s like a linear gradient. Individuals have limited cognition and we have even more limited cognition as collectives. Dualities are a strong influence on trying to reach for a shared understanding. In Web3, there just aren’t universal definitions for some core concepts, like DAOs or even what we are referring to when we evoke Ethereum. We are able to learn a lot from observing how all of us self organize and collaborate towards a shared understanding with these concepts.
In talking about right or wrong ways of doing things, we might want to consider the puritanical implications this moral code as prioritizing a kind of efficiency, related to industrial optimization and how economic concerns influence our worldviews. Let’s try to connect this with the striving for universal definitions as a striving for legibility, which is based on something primordial in our understanding of how we how we make meaning in the world. The foundations of logic are based on defining something by what it is not. This is ‘this’ because it is not ‘that.’ When it comes to universal definitions of our DAO templates, is it really about having one static and firm universally applicable definition? Or might we embrace some more uncertainty, some lack of clarity, to be more loose and plural with these definitions? On one hand, that might be a bit of a sacrifice of efficiency. It might be the wrong way of doing things, but maybe we should try to do things more wrong and unlearn the ways that we’ve done them in the past so that we might discover some other kinds of understanding.
If we consider Conway’s Law, the organization is going to recapitulate the communication structures that it forms and in that sense that we might be approaching another duality. As we push towards objective consensus, we’re trying to make a decision on-chain about a proposal, we’re going to vote yes or no so the result can be adopted by the DAO. That’s very different from considering a DAO as a list of agents and expressing their preferences, a DAO that is able to act autonomously because it incorporates all of the expressed preferences of the individuals. Those preferences could be focused on coming up with a definition, deciding on an allocation of resources, or expressing some shared opinions amongst the group. Each agent is evaluating their local portion of the network with their own subjective view. With DAOS, the intersubjectivity of the locality might be the collective entity that makes the decision.
We can have a much higher fidelity list of preferences as an individual. I don’t need a bunch of inputs to decide my POV, but it’s important to realize that my POV is a small portion of a much larger consensus that remains low fidelity. We want our organizations to have a super high fidelity expression of who we are and what we’re doing, but this threatens the autonomy of the individuals to interpret the results. How might we embrace this low fidelity intersubjective consensus system? The fidelity can increase as we move down into smaller groups, towards the locally affected environment.
Consensus implies it’s own flavor of duality by splitting votes into either ‘for’ or ‘against.’ It takes a very fuzzy thing and forces the choosing of sides, which is often very difficult. We usually handle this through layers of soft governance to address objections before the forming of consensus. What would a non-dualism proposal vote look like? Maybe a democratic consensus model forces a certain kind of conversation and might be considered not great for coordinating on certain topics, or in certain ways, in certain dynamics or at certain scales. We default to the romantic idea of consensus as the ideal, but maybe that’s simply not practical or undesirable.
When you’re in a smaller group, speaking face to face, we can voice the objections up front and more quickly move towards a vote. All these really small chunks that we’re solving eventually bubble up to a larger thing that we can push forward with an action, because we don’t want to fall into gridlock. People voice their concerns or objections and then we integrate as much as we can into the proposal so that the proposals can solve the tension. The risk that we face here is ending up with a watered down proposal that makes nobody happy. “The camel is the horse the committee approved.” We need a way to test if an objection or concern is actually valid, so that it is not arbitrarily decided. “The straw that broke the camel’s back.” Or is it about putting a camel through the eye of a needle?
Some problems have no solution. How can we do a better job at modulating between polarities as DAOs and in our governance styles? We might consider the utility of our proposals. What are DAO proposals if not dualities? In theory, a proposal could have multiple options and there’s a fairly large literature about how this breaks down into various flavors of strategic voting and all sorts of other issues. Quadratic funding offers a potentially very large set of options from to choose from. Instead of voting on one or five of them you’re allocating resources towards different options with the results determined by the aggregation of a bunch of individual’s allocations. In quadratic voting there’s a very specific algorithm that incentivizes people to make contributions in the first place and also boosts the amount to each of the recipients, but we could absolutely consider people allocating votes to many possibilities, or even creating their own possibilities and adding to those, without duality at play. The end state is really the aggregation of everybody’s individual perspectives or values, or beliefs or desires.
There are problems too. As we get more complex, it seems like the problems get worse. With quadratic voting and funding, its difficult to solve problems of collusion, Sybil attacks, and things like that. There’s an added layer of complexity to the governance process that creates a specialized class of people to navigate these problems. There are no solutions, only trade offs.
Iterative aggregation adds a lot of complexity. We can build crazy complex systems, but not everybody is gonna be able to understand or participate in them, so is that really any better? A proposal drafted at a lower fidelity does ultimately become more invitational, more inclusive, inviting people to iterate upon it and make it their own. On the other hand, shouldn’t we be trying to craft proposals at the highest fidelity possible to raise our collective awareness on the issues that affect us? We can get lost in the jargon or disoriented by the complexity, and then not everyone’s on board, but this also allows us to conduct a rarified conversation that builds upon previous primitives and go much further in the details. That’s a big trade off. How might we keep these two considerations in balance, with people working at different apertures, towards a decentralized modality of contributing to collective knowledge and collective awareness, to cooperate across those different apertures of understanding?
Have you ever read a book called The Suicide Bomber and Her Gift of Death by Jeremy Fernando? There are two really important points that are raised in this book. If you think about knowledge, the idea of remembering and forgetting something, it’s always there sitting in your mind. It’s only remembered once it’s no longer forgotten. Even though these seem like opposites, they are contained within the same concept. The second point made in this book points to what happened in the Garden of Eden. The author proposes that when Eve ate of the apple of the Tree of the Knowledge, her sin was not disobeying God, it was presuming to have the same knowledge of God. We should dismantle the hubris of believing that we have all the perfect solutions.
Let’s try to consider the other side of these prompts. Concerning a priori knowledge, the implication is that the knowledge is always-already there. We forget it, but it remains, and then recollecting brings it back to the surface. This is a pretty essentialist idea. How might we consider DAO knowledge as a form of collective remembering that instantiates a posteriori knowledge? That is to say, a knowledge that’s acted out in situ through our collective actions. We generate this knowledge through our actions and our behaviors and our relationships. We also remember through those actions and behaviors in relationships. We each individually serve as a point of memory for an entity that is greater than any individual.
Depiction of the original sin by Jan Brueghel de Oude and Peter Paul Rubens
Concerning the reference to the Garden of Eden, an alternative reading of that tale emphasize the act of defiance that led to a way of knowing that God prevented us from accessing. Eve was the first anarcho punk that said, “Fuck you, God, I’m going to figure it out on my own.” Is there another lesson here for the DAO space? Perhaps the serpent is the voice of reason, trying to give us the knowledge to free ourselves.
What is important is like being open to the idea of alterity, not erasing an understanding of something that you can’t conceive of, like presuming to know the mind of God. Are we are reading the story, or writing the story?
Let’s say something very explicit on this point that God is the enemy. This does not mean that we are advocating for an exclusionary atmosphere that would not be accessible to any particular set of beliefs or orientations. We should be clear that God evoked in this conversation is an allegory for a top-down tyrannical voice, an omniscient voice that prescribes commandments, and ultimately an apex of centralized authority.
This brings us back to our our meditation on dualism. Could we develop a multi-perspectival interpretation of the nature of reality and transcribe this into our daily governance activities? Perhaps dualities are the lowest resolution to understanding suspended in orbit. The contextual navigation is precisely that mapping out and sensing the texture of each hemisphere of the orbit and learning what are the control mechanisms to the cybernetics of activating each polarity as needed.
As designers, we have to empathize with people’s time and attention. If we need to make a decision, we should help them make that decision so they can get back to their life and stay immersed in the world. This means limiting the options as best as possible to avoid choice paralysis. Some people can deal with more optionality in a particular situation than others in that same situation. How might we contemplate DAOs as their own limitations of choice and attention? We need to make decisions. Sometimes they will be binary, and other times they will be much more complex. How might our DAO tools adjust to reflect the full range of choices of all the members without bombarding our senses and instilling this choice paralysis?
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