Communities, values and trust as the base layer of the new economy
The emerging human-machine economy and society
A popular image of the future of work views emerging technology as pushing human communities and values to the periphery of the economy. That the convergence of automation, artificial intelligence, the internet of things, blockchains and cryptotokens represents a new technology stack that increasingly bypasses people from routine participation in the new economic system. Sure, people will still design new technology and entrepreneurs will apply it towards solving unmet human needs and wants. But within this new order, notions of values, trust and communities appear as quaint concepts, of fading relevance to the primary economic engine. But there is an alternative vision for the emerging human-machine symbiosis.
Outlier Ventures has written two compelling papers advancing a vision of the fundamental role that communities and values play within the new economic paradigm. The first paper, Community Token Economies, outlines the importance of building ‘minimum viable communities’ (MVCs) as base layers to coordinate the development of open source protocols and upon which a group of new ventures and applications can be built. The second, the Convergence Ecosystem, offers a more expansive vision of five layers that constitute this new techno-economic system.
On the one hand both papers offer a vision of a technologically saturated new economy and society, where value is increasingly ‘open-source, distributed, decentralised, automated and tokenised’. Data, the ‘new oil’, is the fundamental resource that powers the emerging system. The current problem is that data does not flow towards its most efficient and productive allocation — it is either lost, hoarded or remains latent — given away for free by users or hoarded by the Web 2.0 giants. Crypto-currencies and crypto-assets are the keys that can unlock this suboptimal state, incentivising data to flow while attending to privacy and equity concerns through emerging protocols and applications that will give individuals sovereignty over their identities, wealth, and data.
On the other hand, almost counterintuitively, the base layers of the new economy rely on differentiations of values and trust in human communities. Blockchains and other species of distributed ledgers, critical layer of infrastructure upon which the entire new edifice is built, are only useful if there are a sufficient network of participants to maintain, evolve and build upon them. The open-source status of (most) of the ledger technology mean subsets of these communities can ‘secede’ anytime by forking the chain and following their own distinct vision and roadmap. All they need to do is convince a minimum number of participants to follow them. As the competitive advantages of lock-in effects and data platform monopolies recede, these networks can only be sustained over time by appealing to a coherent set of values and trust.
Even what we might call ‘pragmatism’ is really a set of values, one that not all communities equally share. Just as geographically bound ‘nations’ have become differentiated by different value sets expressed through languages and customs, this vision of the new economy sees multiple, geographically overlapping communities with differentiated value sets governing their own open source technology stacks. This is a vision of culture and values expressed through code.
If these assumptions about open code and open data flows do hold true, they will erode the business models built on vendor and platform lock-in that have dominated the technology sector to date. In the new world, brands secure their legitimacy and power through the values and trust held by the community that govern their underlying ledgers. Because global society is composed of differentiated sets of values, there will not necessarily be ‘one chain’ to rule them all. The technological convergence and community differentiation will see us continue to witness a cambrian explosion of socio-economic experimentation spanning technology, economics and perhaps most importantly, models of governance that will continue over the coming years.
The convergence ecosystem
Outlier Ventures posit five layers in their model of the convergence ecosystem. Here they are from bottom to top:
- Data collection: powered by a world where most devices and digital interactions are connected to the internet and sending data.
- Data authentication, validation and security: powered by blockchains and other distributed ledger technology that offer external transparency, provenance, tamper-evidence, and censorship resistance.
- Data transport: where interoperability protocols are being developed for messaging, value, data and state.
- Data marketplaces: where the now unlocked human and machine data (personal but also AI, IoT,) is traded, rented, bought and sold.
- Data process, analysis and automation: where data is transformed into actions and insights, powered by decentralised automation through machine learning and smart contracts.
Cryptotokens (cryptocurrencies, cryptoassets, cryptocollectibles and cryptoconsumables) structure the incentives that drive data flows through the entire ecosystem.
Alternative visions, values and models of community governance ultimately power the cryptotokens and their underlying ledgers and infrastructure.
A new era of human-machine governance
What is the best model of governance? There is likely no single answer, good governance must structure interactions and decisions that ultimately sustain legitimacy among its community of participants. How are these different value aligned communities currently differentiating in practice?
- The Bitcoin blockchain and community: with its libertarian emphasis on the balance of powers between miners, users and developers.
- The Ethereum blockchain and community: with its more pragmatic focus on development and growth, and the centralised(ish) influence of Vitalik Buterin.
- The Monero blockchain and community: with its emphasis on privacy and anonymity.
- The Sovrin blockchain and community: with its emphasis on self-sovereign identity.
There are a variety of new projects such as Holochain that are appealing to communities motivated by environmental and communitarian values, and we expect to see many more targeting other distinct value segments.
Different communities of value will prioritise distinct elements, such as privacy, censorship resistance, security, efficiency, scalability, or decentralisation. Design trade-offs mean it is impossible to optimise for all of these characteristics. The challenge moving forward is to look beyond ideological preferences towards what is actually happening among different ledgers and communities.
As technology becomes increasingly commodified, rather than displacing communities or forcing a homogeneous set of values onto people, we see a world where the ability to mobilise a value aligned community to participate in alternative technology stacks becomes more important than ever. We are entering a new and exciting era of experiments in human-machine governance arrangements and this will be an increasing focus of our research and thinking at Typehuman.
Many thanks to James Eddington and Tom Nash for helpful comments and thoughts on this article
At Typehuman we aim to accelerate the realisation of Web 3.0 through our products and advisory work. We believe humans, and value aligned communities will be more important than ever in the future of work. If you’d like to join us , we’d love to hear from you:
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