HAUS Party LIVE — Competition! 🎉
Season 4 Episode 9 (3/24/2022)
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Synopsis
Do you try to compete? Do you surrender? Do you compete with yourself? Do you surrender to yourself? Is competition fun or not? How do we evaluate competition, through a metric of fun and entertainment or a threshold of health? Over this season of HausParty, we talked about Anticapture, which led to Democracy, which led to Scale, which led to Competition, today’s topic.
Competition and Cooperation
Are competition and cooperation two sides of the same coin? This is a duality that people get hung up on, but maybe we can’t have one without the other. How can we approach the utility of either of these concepts?
What could competition be or how it comes to be? Let’s overthrow Carthage! The Romans were cooperating together to do something horrible and competitive that we don’t want to repeat.
How is Competition Defined?
Do we define competition in terms of a success strategy? Might we describe a threshold of competition? When is competition healthy and when does it become unhealthy, or grotesquely rivalrous as an urge to conquer? Can we make positive incentive mechanisms to take competition back into our own hands? Are we replaying traditional finance and Web2 traumas? Where did we inherit this competitive spirit from?
What is the lore of competition? Is it always about opposing forces of good vs evil battling to the death? What are we competing for and who are we competing against? What are we optimizing for?
Where Did Competition Begin?
Perhaps competition is akin to gene propagation, with some strategies surviving and others dying out. In seeking the origin, let’s consider that it’s more algorithmic than human nature. Things that persist persist and things that don’t persist don’t, thus things that have persisted are things that are more geared towards persisting. But is this just circular logic, spinning our own wheels?
Where does language come in? Is there a pre-linguistic competition that we can contrast with post-language competition? Is there any evidence that there is purpose to cooperating? How does skepticism factor? It seems like what we’re doing is good and we’re not being competitive, but someone else might not agree with our perspective, so it’s hard to avoid competition.
Competition and cooperation are not a duality and it can be difficult to tell one from the other. Can we align behind a common goal? We might agree that we’re in competition with traditional organizations. Maybe it’s like craft beer brewing; we’re friendly, but still in competition, lightly with each other and strongly with traditional organizations.
Competition and Innovation
What is competition’s role in something like innovation? If no one is doing anything different, is there innovation? When is competition healthy? With rivalrous competition, information remains excludable and doesn’t get shared and secret’s are kept private as a competitive leverage, wielded as a weapon.
Might we consider an open vs closed source competition? One shares information and the other doesn’t, but — oops! — now we’re back to dualities. Information sharing is a very big part of whether competition is healthy or unhealthy.
Cooperative Gaming and Wargames
What are the stakes of our competitive games? Cold War propaganda made Darwin seem like competition was occurring within species, but he didn’t say that. Darwin said species cooperate to compete with another species or the local survival challenges they encounter.
How might this be considered through the lens of cooperative or competitive gaming? Here at DAOhaus, these questions hit close to home as we continue to ruminate on a reboot of our Wargames series. How are the games designed? Is capture the only goal? How might we devise rules to change the rules of the game to evade competition altogether? How might we align players to play against their own negative incentives? Partial Common Ownership points towards a potentially cooperative element.
DAOhaus Wargames was an experiment in pulling HausParty attendees into a DAO to see what would happen. It ultimately decayed into a capture-the-flag game of treasury grabbing. We would play around with adding new rules, forming rules that stacked with previous rules, and forming teams to see what else would happen. We want to bring back these games to test governance and see where we can break things on various scales of the platform and social dynamics. Wargames test our social formation in the DAO space while allowing us to battle test the UI and code of the underlying contracts.
On one hand, we wanted to see what humans would do when dropped in a DAO with no purpose. There was some minimal coordination that emerged around different strategies, but the organization seemed to happen organically. It was interesting to observe players figure out who they can trust and there were some contemplations on how to play altruistically, but the teams ultimately defaulted to survival mechanics do to the precarity of that trust.
Healthy competition starts when we recognize the need to challenge systems, like when a large part of the community leaves to build an alternative. The only way to win is to not play the game.
Competition and Scarcity
Why is competition even a thing? In a word: scarcity. Scarcity can be a drive for innovation even as it increases inequity. Selective attention creates scarcity algorithmically. We might consider finite and infinite games in thinking about how finite games could be played repeatedly, which encourages sportsmanship. How might we design an infinite cooperative game?
Innovation has happened with competition in the past, but is that the culture of innovation that we still align behind? Without competition would we stagnate? It could be argued that competition has also created stagnation. We should consider the order of winners and losers and the size of wins and losses. Tech leaders, once large, begin to smother innovation from new tech companies. Like boxing, once you have the belt, you defend the belt.
How does this discussion and what we’ve explored affect our experience in DAOs?
Dualism and Language
We continue to come back to dualism. Competition and cooperation, winning or losing, centralized or decentralized, etc. Brian Massumi is the author of Parables for the Virtual and What Animals can Teach us About Politics and is known as a philosopher of intensities. Massumi asks us to consider wolf pups in a pack. How can the pups understand that a play nip with their brother isn’t a violent bite of a competitor? Learning to play with each other and learning to hunt is a matter of gradients that are impossible to render clearly visible. It’s all grey area; not a duality but a range of intensity.
We might adopt the usage of divergence and convergence as an alternative to competition and cooperation. What if we change our mindset instead of changing the language? The Latin root of competition means strive. How do we collectively surrender? How do we kill the striving within us? A key in the Prisoner’s Dilemma is that the prisoners are colleagues that are pitted against each other, blocked by the guards and walls of their captors. If they could share information they wouldn’t be in opposition. Incomplete information is the issue in this scenario.
Competition and DAOs
There isn’t an optimal strategy, but this shouldn’t inhibit us from imagining alternatives. If you think you’re in the prisoner’s dilemma, remember there is a bigger force pitting us against each other. Analyze what you believe might be limiting you, because it might not actually be there.
🌱 “My only limiting factor is my own cognition and the capacity to imagine myself to go to a different place and actually give myself permission to go where the life force wants to go.” 🌱
How can we increase the interaction threshold? How might we balance the relationship between identity and personal energy? DAOs have so many part-time contributors and often suffer from not having enough deeply invested people. Is avoiding depth a solution for competition? What about burnout associated with the complexity of navigating the DAO space?
Will you choose breadth or depth? Is going deep dilute our efficiency? Your attention continues to be the scarcest resource in this economy. The war is inside all of us. We calibrate ourselves and revise our behaviors based on identifiable outcomes, calibrating or tuning ourselves towards excellence. As we increase the resolution of our relationships DAO tech will evolve to better fit our complex concerns. Competition exists at the individual and organizational level. If competition is considered a tool, does it continue to have purpose in our ongoing self-tuning? Are you tuning for excellence or for a bigger bag?
🌱 “When I don’t weed my garden, it quickly becomes a competition for space and nutrients. If your garden is not weeded, your veggies will stunt and the winner will be the weeds.”🌱
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