What will Governance, be?
What will governments look like? How will we participate? Who will be represented?
TL;DR https://cardsagainsthumanity.com/sunlight/
Governance in it’s purest form is to keep Law and Order over its jurisdiction. People tend to forget that. At it’s simplest and purest form, it’s there to make sure there isn’t chaos.
Over the decades, we’ve slowly started to spawn new responsibilities. Governments started to be in charge of creating roads. They became responsible for the distribution of scarce resources, food, water, energy.
All of a sudden, we find them needing to manipulate market forces, to regulate. To reach in, changing laws based upon a perceived moral and social good, or based on the views of Economists and Think Tanks.
The worst side-effect of governance has been what we all see in the news, on a daily basis, Politics.
Politics is deep-reaching and unfortunate, it leads to corruption, unfair processes, inefficiency and Market failure. Politics isn’t intrinsically bad, it’s hard to say anything is intrinsically bad, actually. Some may see it as a necessary evil. Perhaps even a good thing, it may be argued that it’s necessary for compromise within a structure such as a democracy. For, that’s how we come to the middle-ground.
But what is politics? We don’t just see it in governance, but also in business, big families and religion. In fact, most organisations with a substantial amount of people have their governance system affected by politics.
Ultimately, one may see it as ‘The Human Layer’ to any infrastructure. As humans have an ego, emotions and a need for social standing. If we were to reverse engineer the data collected by firms such as Cambridge Analytica, that was implemented on Political campaigns such as Brexit, we’d likely see them targeting by income (Social Standing), pain points and issues (Emotions), and ‘swing voters’ through empowerment messaging (Ego).
Humans don’t vote rationally, or even with a solid understanding or education around a topic. Unfortunately, that may never change, unless our education and media changes. They can easily be swung, targeted. Potentially, humans shouldn’t even be voting.
Moreover, those in government have their own concerns. Term limits may be too short within the economic cycle to show improvement. They may come to power in a recession, or given a ‘bad hand’. Such as Obama in 2008, or new governments coming into countries like Greece, or Cities with huge underlying problems, such as Flint, in Michigan.
They also, of course, have to constantly worry about their next campaign, what their constituents will think of them, what the media will say about them, what the party will do if they don’t walk in line.
Now, many of you may be reading this, thinking, ‘duh, it’s always been like that’ or perhaps ‘Get to the f**king point’.
But if any of you readers want to contribute to, or improve our current governance system, then first it’s very important to empathise with those in governance. Why can’t they implement their mandate? How do you balance lobbying interests coming at you, with your personal beliefs, with your party lines, with the massive bureaucracy?
It’s difficult, maybe it’s impossible.
Maybe, just maybe, this top-down, opaque system, just doesn’t work.
The Market has a Vote
We’ve all heard of the concept of voting with our wallets.
The idea that, by demanding a good or service essentially acts as a vote for this good or service. This drives business, markets, capitalism.
But what happens when groups such as the very large Egg and Dairy lobbying groups in the US, decides to try and increase their revenue for stakeholders?
We see paid for, heavily bias scientific research papers, big lobbying $$$ for politicians with huge leverage over them and things such as the ‘food pyramid’.
Suddenly, complete diets are changed. We’re told that ‘Milk gives us strong bones’, milk programmes go into schools. Milk and eggs become staples.
This exposes a huge vulnerability in our infrastructure.
It can be bought.
Meaning, the market is now failing, certain players have a huge unfair advantage. Take for example the Coal industry, in the US. An old, full of pollution and efficiencies industry. While other countries focus entirely on renewables, while Moor’s Law makes it sensible for the end-consumer to use such tech, governance and politics have pandered to an in-efficiency, a failure in the market. By running a Presidential campaign on pro-coal, in an important State for votes, they’ve pandered to an inefficiency.
Who does this hurt the most?
You. Me, everyone around us, except for those coal miners over the next 3 years.
Clearly, we cannot rely on voting with our wallets. We cannot rely on free market forces for governance, in its current state. We cannot expect anything to truly change, with these powers at be, in place. Intrinsically, human greed and first movers, incumbents, win.
Something fundamental has to change in our infrastructure, our industries and the relationships we have with them, in order to succeed.
Decentralised autonomous organisations
What does succeeding even mean?
I personally see it as tackling these core objectives:
- Efficiently distributing scarce resources.
- Creating Margin 0 on Natural Monopolies and Oligopolies.
- Destroying 90% of the value chain in every good or service.
- Politics becoming agnostic to big business lobbying.
- The Human layer becoming almost entirely non-existent.
Is this crazy?
Let’s look at a hypothetical, yet very realistic Case Study that I think we could all imagine soon.
It’s 2030 in the United Kingdom, to meet climate agreements, they’ve decided to subsidise Solar panels, much like in other countries.
10–30% of all homes now have solar and battery packs installed. The National Grid has now become decentralised, from a single structural entity with an oligopoly layer on top of it, to millions of homes now powering themselves. Backed up by shared community grids and wind farms. Efficiencies within the home, from toilet usage to kettles, have skyrocketed.
Homes are using protocols such as WePower, in order to actually, autonomously, buy and sell power back to the grid.
DAOs pop-up as non-profit foundations. This may look like 8 board members, compensated in Tokens, free energy, who oversee the process, the interlinking of the protocol for this specific use case. Technologists, mathematicians, engineers, who at the whim of a community can be voted out or in.
With a community owned, oligopoly now turned free-sharing-market, owned by all of the holders of the energy, that has been tokenised, the market finds it’s true price.
Energy companies are no longer needed to provide their service. There is no incentive, no profit. Their cumbersome management structures and need for humans mean they have to, they must, take value from the chain. They have to take margin.
But what happens when you compete with a Margin 0 business?
You can’t. You lose.
When every member of the network is an owner, voting with their usage, this is the new government. The board isn’t incentivised by profit. They aren’t held ransom by stakeholders to create revenue. Their incentives are efficiencies.
Much like a developer may earn his fame by contributing to Ethereum, Linux, Node.JS or a React Module, now they’re earning it by contributing to a community owned structure. That has far more impact or value than anyone can imagine.
Now imagine this as a service, such as a bank or the internet. Fees eradicated, expensive monthly costs eradicated to simply the cost of the energy provided to make the transaction happen, the bare bones, Margin 0.
Margin 0 will be the single most destructive and disruptive force we’ve ever seen.
It will change the dynamics of what voting is, how we vote, what the medium is. It’ll impact how we live our lives, the quality of our life, how much free time we have.
It’ll impact poverty rates. When all of the core services a human needs to be happy, content, are provided for basically free, or at cost, we can provide it to everyone.
How can one say that with certainty? It’s simply a matter of distributing resources. Once we have an autonomous way to distribute resources without government interferences, inefficiencies. Once we have a way to ‘get rid’ of the middle-man, then we have the key to our future.
It’s now possible. We have it.
An Outlook
Slowly current market forces will nudge us into changing over to margin 0 ways of life. Needing an incredibly large mindset shift. It will be hard.
The onus will be on makers, designers, to create easy and friendly to use products.
The new governments will likely be many mini-governments, running autonomously in the background. Needing just a quick tap on a pop-up screen when loading your home’s battery usage app.
Services the government are responsible for will converage back to what we asked of them thousands of years ago. To keep law and order, for diplomacy with other countries. Rescinding back to the bare bones of what we need a governmental structure for.
Smaller autonomous governments will appear, controlling specific jurisdictions. Things such as waste, public goods such as roads and public services such as firefighters will still be needed.
Or will it? ‘What does AI have in store for us?’, one may wonder.
Conclusion
If we were to analyse the true forces in today’s governance systems, it’s almost always going to include humans acting out of greed. Technology is iterating at such a rate, that soon even one of the most core modern day human characteristics, greed, may be rendered useless. In that, we can simply beat the system, without humans being able to fight back.
Many people are working hard on how to patch the current system. Anti-corruption, chains specifically for governance, new regulations, trade embargos, even complete transparency of data.
However and to paraphrase Ashton Kutcher ‘They’re moving to the puck, not where it’s going’.
The future is not human run governments. But many, mini, decentralised autonomous organisations. Incentivised no longer by money, but by the impact.
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