OTNS: Scaling Collective Action for Millions of People

In this episode we spoke to co-founder of DAO Stack now working on Common, Matan Field who joined us at Zuzalu. During the discussion we talk about the need for scaling collective action, using fractal organization, and moving beyond economically based interdependence.

Check out a previous episode to learn more about our framework for out network state alternative,  coordi-nations.

JOIN THE BLOCKCHAINGOV DISCORD SERVER HERE IF YOU WANT TO TAKE PART IN THE CONTINUED OVERTHROW AND CONTRIBUTE TO THE RISE OF COORDI-NATIONS.

Overthrowing the Network State (OTNS) is a series in collaboration with Blockchaingov where we critique The Network State  by Balaji Srinivasan while also pulling out the salvageable parts and concepts in discussion with a variety of guests. You can find the first episode of OTNS where we give our initial criticisms and  alternatives here.

Blockchaingov is a 5-year long, transdisciplinary research effort aimed at restoring trust in institutions at the community and global levels, by promoting better on chain and off chain distributed governance practices. Throughout the series, each discussion will include me and a member of Blockchaingov with either a new guest each episode or a discussion between us to tackle various topics from the book.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:14

Alright, hello everyone. You are listening to the Blockchain Socials podcast. I'm Josh and I'm here with my co-host, primavera. We are back for overthrowing the network state and for this interview, we are speaking to Matan Field. He was a theoretical physicist back in the day, but he is now known for having been a co-founder of LaZoos, which was a ride hailing application that was built on Bitcoin Backfeed and DaoStack, which he co-founded with Primavera, and now, most recently, a project called Common. Matan is known for having been very early with a lot of the many ideas that have been explored in the crypto world. He was also with us at Zuzalu, where we built out the conceptual framework for coordination, which we used to bring as an alternative to the network state. From Bellagy, matan, would you like to say hello and give an introduction to yourself? I think it would be interesting to maybe recount the story of DaoStack as well, because I think that's sometimes lost in the crypto history.

Speaker 2: 1:33

Okay, hey, so thanks for having me here. As I said, I've practiced theoretical physics for quite a while and in 2013 I was doing my post-doctoral research and during that time, I had an idea to do a ride hailing social ride, hailing app just as a hobby, for fun. And through that project, quite from the first week, I discovered the blockchain, and Backfeed was Bitcoin blockchain. And at the same time, vitalik came with the idea for smart contracts in Ethereum and I get really excited about that. And a few months later, I decided to quit the academy and focus on this area, and firstly with Zuzalu, the decentralized ride sharing project.

Speaker 2: 2:28

But quite soon after I really got fascinated with the notion of DaoStack, which was back then just a kind of like vague idea, and together with Primavera, we founded Backfeed to build technology or platform for Daos. And around 2016 you were asking about DaoStack. So around 2016 we both kind of like ran out of funding and roughly at the same time DDAO that some people may remember came out, burst out.

Speaker 2: 3:04

In the beginning it had a lot of problems or issues which were acknowledged around like protocol issues, around like game theoretic, I would say like wrong incentives. And then we started to this was still in Backfeed we started to work on proposing a new governance system for Dao and, quite like, right after, what happened was the big bug and the hack, and then the whole space was kind of like, I would say, in a post trauma, if you just set it down. Nobody was wanting to hear about the Dao and at the same time, we ran out of funding and it seemed almost impossible to raise any funding for a Dao initiative at that time. And yeah, so that's and then the second half of 2016, for me I was all like already then I was three years into this journey and all in interested and passionate about Daos and it was clear that I would continue the journey. So, like for about six months, I was trying to take lessons from Backfeed and trying to understand what would be the next building block or next thing to start from. I mean maybe to say, in Backfeed we've tried maybe five different products to develop, and all of which I mean still the technology the blockchain and smart-con technology was still very, very early. So then, looking at all of the insights taken from that journey, after like six months I've started again, and that was DaoStack. That was started with a few co-founders and yeah, so that was that was early 17 January 17. We started back then. I was there, was.

Speaker 2: 5:10

This was kind of like the the peak of the hype, of the ICO hype, and I really felt bad about it in some sense and I, like I had I don't know I had dual, dual attitude towards it, because I wanted to raise funding and you know, and develop technology, but then I felt bad to raise funding by a white paper alone alone. So we decided that we will only start raise funding after completing a pilot of the technology. So for like about a year, we worked to build technology, the baseline technology, and we started from already. Then probably we'll get back to that, but already then we realized that we were, we were interested to focus on large scale coordination. So how? How do we scale? A million people, let's say? And we realized that this landscape of DaoStack is so big, so vast, that each DAO will need different governance systems and also, within a single DAO to have many different sales, likely meeting different governance system and also appreciating or acknowledging the fact that we are so early that we have no idea of what governance system will actually work. So what we decided to build was to build a framework for governance system, so like like smart, like smart contracts for any code. So here, a high level framework on top of the smart contracts of Ethereum, so high level framework for different governance system, basically for any governance system. So it was really like a language for how to build governance systems. And on top of that language or top of that framework, we've built the first interface that shows how to utilize that framework and we've built that technology.

Speaker 2: 6:57

And at the middle of 2018, we both made our own token sale and raised a bunch of funding and also launched at the same time we launched the first version of this app it was called Alchemy, with the first DAW experiment Back then I think it was the first on-chain significant DAW experiment was mid-2018. We called it the Genesis DAW and it was practiced. Today, to sound funny, we were practicing this DAW with, or playing around with, this DAW with a funding of $50,000 a month. So over a course of 18 months, I think it was between half a million to a million dollar funding. In today's scale it's like miniscule and back then it was huge. It was. People thought that we are crazy to play with so large funding with this early technology.

Speaker 2: 7:53

So that was the first part of DAW stack and then during the last few years we made some shift again, learning more insights from this first wave, and then we turned a bit more to the social impact direction and also, I would say, also developed or started from other angles to deal with large coordination. I'm not just running through it and probably we can go back to it, but basically we both touched upon large-scale decision making protocols we called the Horeographic Consensus and nowadays we are focusing on a common app which is focusing about the way that a large-scale organization is looking more like an organism. So it's not really a single body that agrees about everything altogether, it's not a single-government system, but it's more like an organism that can be made of organs, which themselves can be made of suborgans, which themselves can be made of suborgans and eventually cells. So this whole network structure, or fractal structure, is something that we are now manifesting in the common app. So this is a short, I guess fast forward.

Speaker 1: 9:19

Yeah, I think we'll talk about common more definitely in a bit, but I'm curious Primavera, how do you feel having your fellow co-founder from Daustak on?

Speaker 3: 9:31

Very happy.

Speaker 3: 9:33

Yeah, I think that, with Matan, I think the reason that we started working together is because, even though we didn't have yet the terminology, we've been both obsessed by figuring out this question of how do you help people coordinate themselves without having to rely on central authorities, and I think that's what brought us to the blockchain to begin with.

Speaker 3: 10:07

So, yeah, I think it's interesting because now that we can have a retrospective and now that we are developing those new, I guess, theories or concepts around network state and networks of renties, the path that we've taken actually start making a lot of sense. And yeah, I don't know if it was like. I think it was about being too early and trying to provide Dao tooling at that time, in which Daos didn't mean anything to anyone. But also, I think the world not only was not understanding Daos, but I think the world was also not as greedy as it is today to understanding the possibilities of new networks of renties, and it seems that now the ground is actually very fertile for both of those and, in fact, now there is demand for those technical tools, because there is demand for those new government structures that Daos can be announced for too. So, yeah, I think now we can start the work finally.

Speaker 1: 11:29

I think one of the things that, for me, the network state is kind of like a sign or a symptom of now, I guess, a larger mass of people being more interested in these types of things and questions that you guys were just like much earlier and much before For example, bellagie was thinking about this, but yeah, so maybe I don't know. Next, would you like to talk a bit about the question that I think, like you said, that attracts a lot of people to blockchains is how do we scale coordination of more and more people? How do we scale millions of people to coordinate with one another to achieve shared collective goals? Why do you even start with that question? Because it seems like it's a massive one.

Speaker 2: 12:27

Yeah, that's actually a really good question that we often skip. I mean, I personally believe that that's the most important task right now mission to be done, and that's why I at least for me, that's my motivation, and I also have to say that that driver has been changing in the past decade, but in a way that just made it much more urgent. So when I started it was more from the place of seeing the potential of it. It was obvious to me. I looked around and I saw there are so many causes that people would like to organize around If they just could. They don't think about it because they don't have the idea that it's possible, but if they just could organize easily 1,000 people, 10,000 people, 100,000 people, 1,000 people.

Speaker 2: 13:22

There are so many causes that will be executed on and I would just say it was obvious to me that the world would be a thousand time better. I think what changed over the course of the past decade was that and that we didn't. I personally didn't see that 10 years ago, but now I think it's very, very obvious in the past five, seven years that the whole system that we are now tapped to the regular state system, the regular corporate system, the regular economic system and global system we are tapped to is completely fault and collapsing and driving off the cliff.

Speaker 2: 14:13

And I think now it's actually a matter of existential matter.

Speaker 2: 14:19

I think that the only way that society can correct itself is if a million people would be able to organize, to self organize together for action.

Speaker 2: 14:30

It could be both a one time action for a specific cause or an ongoing action like a nation. And I mean I think it's now understood very well how the current system are captured, the current system are corrupted, even though they are trying to be somewhat decentralized you could say democracy is decentralized, but actually people have captured the seats and and the only way to uncapture that is if the next step in the next step, society, the economic power, the center of gravity or the mass where the mass is in terms of economic power, would be held by large networks and not by centralized authorities of any kind. Because large networks in their nature they take into account, for why their interest, for why their incentives, they are less capturable or corruptible. So now I really see that as a necessity, like it's not just any longer a bonus that we may increase the potential of humanity. I actually think that's the only thing that will, you know, in a way, free us from the, from the, from the moon. You know the train that is now running off the cliff at this moment.

Speaker 2: 15:52

And I think every year is just accelerating and of course, there is much, much more theory about how this acceleration, this running off the cliff I'm not going to talk about that more because I think there are people who are, you know, teaching about that much better. I'm just learning from them. But people like Daniel Schmachtenbeger and Jordan Hall and many others, I think, have beautiful writings and podcasts and everything and videos explaining the current problem and I think by now there is quite a consensus that the only logical solution, that is, a large scale coordination.

Speaker 3: 16:31

And actually I want to add something to this, because in some way, like I think it's also the, the institutional structure that we use is is very delicate, is like is very important, in the sense that you know the core. The core problem is, like how do you achieve collective action? And and it's not that, it's not that we haven't tried right it's like we have companies, we have organizations, we have governments. Those are all created in order to actually achieve collective action, and the challenge, though, is that many times, when you create those institutions, then the institution become this kind of alien being, which actually brings people to do things that they will never do otherwise. Right, and it's very interesting, like because you know, I resonate a lot with what you say that if we had people like most people are good people and if those good people were to collect, to do collective action, good things will come out of it, but the good people that will do that are the same people that today are actually doing like harsh competition, exploitation, wars and so forth, because of the institutions that have been created.

Speaker 3: 17:50

And for me, like when we're talking about coordination and networks of entities and so forth, there's also the question of how do we ensure that, as we create a new structure, a new institution that enable people to engage into collective action, how do we ensure that this doesn't actually lead to the same outcome of distorting somehow the collective action problem into creating something that the institution is doing for its own benefit, as opposed to actually instrumental, being instrumentalized by the collective action that the people want to do?

Speaker 3: 18:32

Right, and I think when we're thinking about states and governments, the origin is a great origin. It's like we want to live in a society, we want to coordinate the society, and then we create those institutions that also then live with, acquire her life on their own and then can become very oppressive to the people that actually created it. So it's like I think it's not enough to just talk about collective action, because I think we need to admit that we have achieved very large scale mechanism of collaboration, but somehow they are, they are easily corruptible and they are corrupted by the institution itself. And I think when we're talking about those new types of coordination and networks of variety, we want to avoid this and so we need to design the institutional fabric in order to remain true to the original intention of why the institution was created to begin with.

Speaker 2: 19:36

Yeah, I agree. I would just say I mean I agree that the problem is not people the problem, or, to large degree, the problem is not people the problem. People mostly are good. I think the bad thing is not people, it's the institute, it's the system. However, the way that the institute collapses is through people.

Speaker 2: 19:58

So some people capture and abuse the structure and a structure that we thought that is fairly decentralized. As people's capacity to impact other people has increased, some people learned how to use it in a centralized, in a very centralized manner. So even bodies or institutes that we thought before are pretty decentralized ie democracies, I think, are now are very, very catchable, much more catchable than we thought they are 30 years ago. So the question is really so one way I mean it's not the only way you can ask it, but one way I think to phrase your question is how do we build new infrastructures or new systems? They're not that easily catchable, or they're not catchable, or they even antifragile to capture a realty. That's even better, right, and so that's one way to look at it.

Speaker 2: 20:53

I think there are other ways to look at it. For example, another way to look at it is from alignment of incentives. How do you create a system that automatically align incentives, for example? And I think all these things are somewhat similar to when we look at organisms, right? So, for example, in organism, you're not asking whether an organism has alignment of incentives. It's built into the system, right?

Speaker 2: 21:21

The collective, in a way, pains or feels the pain of the cell. Right, I'm the being, I'm the collective, Me, the consciousness, I'm the collective and I feel the pain. I literally feel as my pain when my cells are burning. And the opposite right, the cell feels pain when I'm sick. Right, and there is some sort of building alignment of interests. We probably will touch more about this. But I also think that and I just mentioned in the title and then let go I also think that this fractal nature of things and the right balance, balance of forces, is very, very critical for this organism-ness to appear.

Speaker 2: 22:10

And when I say balance of forces, what I mean is that, if you see, if you look at this nesting, at this fractal of organs and cells, you can look at the balance between, at every level you can look at, you can ask to what degree the child is autonomous versus is responsible to the higher level. Right, there is always like if it's too autonomous, if it's totally not responsible for anything else, you just get tons of cells with zero responsibility, you get chaos. But if it's too much, if it's too less autonomous, it's too much responsible or under the power of the parent, you get authoritarianism. So you need to find a way to create the balance, the right balance, between the independence and sovereignty of the cells and organs and the responsibility and the alignment of interest between the organs and the cells in a certain level. So I think all of these are different ways of understanding.

Speaker 3: 23:21

Yeah, and in some ways this is highly correlated with point seven of a recipe, which is this type of alignment of interest is achieved by interweaving, right? If I am interwoven with another actor, then I cannot but wish for this actor to do as well as possible, because then I'd also do as well as possible. And so, in some ways, like, the traditional way of scaling up is centralizing things, because decentralization leads to potential conflict of interest or competition. And what we're trying to do with this coordination system is actually how do you scale up while maintaining the alignment and while actually increasing cooperation, as opposed to competition, between the fractalized nodes? And my hypothesis will be that these mechanisms of excessively or intentionally creating a additional interdependencies is one of the solutions that will ensure that you can scale fractally while ensuring that every single fractal node in the network is acting in the interest of itself and therefore of the whole.

Speaker 2: 24:47

If I can add on that. I totally agree with that, but also want to add that it's actually critical that you scale up in a fractal way, because you're talking about interdependence and sometimes you call it sharing blood and this sharing. Let me make an example. If you try to, if you have no fractal, let's say you take a million people and they're only in single vessel and then you're sharing blood.

Speaker 2: 25:12

Sharing blood means that some success or damage of the collective is corresponding with success or damage of the individual. And then you're saying, okay, so now I have the interest to make the collective success. But we all know that that doesn't work because of the tragedy of the commons, because that individual says, okay, I, you know, everyone else will take care for the success of the collective. If just me, if just me is not going to do that, you know I will gain both my free energy that I just reserved and as well the success for everyone else. So the tragedy of the common is that everyone said that and the whole interest game collapse.

Speaker 2: 25:55

So but that's not true. When you have fractal, you have many levels and then each level is actually quite intimate. So then then actually you get that actually fixes the tragedy of the commons, so the sharing blood or the interdependencies. And actually in reality I think it's much more complex than just a tree, a nested tree. It's actually more like a graph because you know, different organs can be sub organs to several components and different cells can be sub and cells can be sub system to different organs.

Speaker 1: 26:34

So it's really like a whole mesh network such that from at each level the alignment of interest is actually quite intimate to some degree in an economic sense, and so, speaking about this, I think it would be interesting, maybe as well because you're working on a project called common, and this is you're basically referring to a lot of the, I think, concepts that are crucial for the applications that you guys are building there. Would you like to talk a bit more about common and how you see scaling coordination fractally via technological infrastructure, I guess, or using the blockchain?

Speaker 2: 27:16

Okay. So first thing I want to say it's we tend to think about that in terms maybe I mean I'm a bit detouring, but just it's, it's a common. And then I go go back to what we're asking. But it's related. So we are talking about nesting or fractalizing, right, and usually when we think about that we think about it in a physical sense. So, for example, you have different states and in different states you have different cities and different neighborhoods and different neighborhoods. You have different blocks. In different blocks you have different buildings, different buildings, you have different apartments all the way to the cell. So this is, this is a let's call it a physical fractal, and can be all very distributed, but still it's a physical like. It's less and smaller and smaller. And in the community space, community dimension, in the people dimension.

Speaker 2: 28:07

Another way, another chapter, another idea I want to bring in is that we're also talking about the fractal in the content they mentioned in the code scheme. If you want to, if you want to collaborate across a large number of people, it means that the collaboration, the action, the collective action that you're generating is very complex, so that collective action can be broken down to sub-actions. We can work broken down to sub-actions and so on and so forth, and that's not exactly the same. They're related but they're not exactly the same. You can do a fractal in people's scape and space and you can do a fractal in content space, and that's not quite the same.

Speaker 2: 28:49

And I think that that's actually an important note. I think that the right way to scale up a large scale collaboration is by doing a fractal on the content dimension. It's, of course, naturally, will organize to some sort of fractal at the people dimension, but not exactly quite the same. So that's maybe one comment Going back to like asking okay, so how that relates to technology, how that relates to an app, to a platform, to user interface. So I mean, we all have a notion of a group space. So the most simple example would be a WhatsApp group or a Telegram group.

Speaker 2: 29:43

So if you want to have now a certain scope of action, you would open a Telegram group. If you have a slightly more complex scope of action, you might open a Discord channel, because then you can embody 30 groups, 30 channels, in there. And now, by the way, telegram has a new feature. It's called Topics. So we can embody inside the Telegram group 30 topics, such topics. So in a sense, I think it's not very different from that. So we need to start from something like that. We need to start from the notion of.

Speaker 2: 30:17

I like to call it a space, you can call it different words, I mean, you can call it a group. I don't like the notion of group. That's connected to the comment I said before. I don't like the notion of group Because when you say group you are hinting that the encapsulated space is differentiated by the people in it, and actually I want to say that the encapsulated space is diffused by the content scope in it. So that's why I like less the wording of a group for that. But from a technological application purpose it's the same.

Speaker 2: 30:49

So imagine that you have a space, again like a Telegram channel, a group. You have a space for specific content right or a specific scope, specific missions, specific scope I think that's the most general terminology. And now, in the sense of that fractal, imagine that you can now have daughters or children to that group or to that channel or to that space. So now you have subspaces which are then encapsulating a smaller and narrower part of the scope. We have yet subspaces and subspaces all the way until you have the most tiniest scope. And so, firstly, with that you can span a very large scale collaboration. Maybe I should say OK, what do you have in each node on that graph? What do you have in each node on the graph? You have a scope of action. That scope of action can contain the regular chat that you are used to, Just a chat room, that's basically. But you can also have its own governance system, membership system, funding, incoming funds, outgoing funds, anything. So anything is basically every node on that graph. Every node on the graph is what you would call a DAO, basically, or a sub-DAO.

Speaker 2: 32:12

Now, when you have this fractal of nodes, you can both go, and I think usually we are tending to think how powerful it is that we can go upward. We can go to a broad scope, because we can build up certain small scopes into a bigger scope, certain bigger scope into a yet bigger scope, and so on and so forth. I think what is more surprising is actually that we can break down further downward. I think that's actually more surprising, although it's actually more trivial. What do I mean by that? It means that the thing that you're usually thinking about them as a single group the usual scope that you think would be in a single group you can actually break down into 10 subspaces and even then you can find out they can break them down yet to more subspaces, all the way until eventually the cell, the very cell of a scope, is that scope is very, very focused. You're just having a single conversation in that cell.

Speaker 2: 33:16

If you just think about any telegram chat that you've seen recently, you remember that there is dozens of conversations are trying to merge in that room and because of that they're all breaking each other and none of them is actually. Have you ever seen a single conversation going on for a month in a telegram chat? I've never seen such a thing, because the conversations are stepping on each other and if you actually want to have a space which has a specific scope, which has longevity, that it can go on and on and people can come in and go out and it's open and 100 different people who don't know each other can all contribute to the same scope. If you want that, you need the scopes to be the most well defined. They can be A single conversation and a little bit saturated. So I just in that comment I think it's small but important comment I was trying to say that just as this fractal structure of cells of spaces that maybe would look like telegram channels or telegram groups, just as they are powerful that you can scale them up, they're actually powerful that you can break them down into a very granular cells of action.

Speaker 2: 34:38

So eventually, if you're asking how that looks, like it really looks when you're standing on a single node, what you see is just that activity of that node. You see a chat. That chat is the chat of that node. You can see the tasks of that node. You can see all of the daughters of that node. You can see which daughters, which subscopes are connected to it. You can see the parents of that, which parents this node is part of.

Speaker 1: 35:04

And you can see also the dynamics around that.

Speaker 2: 35:07

You can see incoming transaction, outgoing transaction, evaluations and so on and so forth, contributions made and so on and so forth. I totally get that. It's abstract in that way. So I hope that it conveys something, but I'm talking about a very specific user interface.

Speaker 1: 35:28

Yeah, I mean, I think maybe an easier way to explain that would be to just say kind of like a wiki, but it's also. It is not just one direction, as in. You're not just creating fractalization in one direction, but things are also being related almost horizontally as well, so that there is this kind of like. Thus you create this kind of hierarchical diagram of related topics and concepts or things that are related to one another, which is similar to on a Wikipedia. You can, there are links to horizontal things on one single Wikipedia page. You don't necessarily go just in one direction, deeper and deeper into a rabbit hole down, but you also go, you explore the expanse around it.

Speaker 2: 36:24

Yeah, totally, and the other difference is that it's actually a living cell or organ.

Speaker 2: 36:32

So it's not just a static page you're coming and reading, but you can have a conversation in there. People can different people that don't know each other can find themselves in that node and have conversations. They can open new conversations and it's very dynamic. I mean you could say also Wikipedia is dynamic, but it's slowly moving. This is very fastly moving. You're coming into a node, you're just proposing a new question, new sub-question and like that there is a new node with a new conversation, a new outcome, maybe a new purpose, maybe new definition of that. If it's a project, a new sub-desk and so forth, it's a very dynamic system.

Speaker 1: 37:15

It's a living system.

Speaker 2: 37:17

So it's like a collaborative, not collaborative about just writing. Yeah, it's like real time, it's a real time Wikipedia, something like Wikipedia time, telegram channels, times, train-up, something like that. Times governance of each node. I think that's kind of like the max I can try to explain the UI without showing a UI, but that's a.

Speaker 1: 37:41

Yeah, so it's a knowledge management system to be able to create a kind of collective intelligence to where people can have context about certain things and certain specific things if action needs to be done or understood.

Speaker 2: 37:56

Yeah, yeah, plus the live conversation around all that context and content in actions.

Speaker 1: 38:03

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Speaker 3: 38:54

Yeah, I think maybe we can also discuss a little bit. To me it feels like we discuss the tools, but I feel like Matana, I would love if we can hear more of your protocol thinking about what are the various ways in which you think that this fractalization, this scaling up of fractals, can be done, and what are the various ways in which this interweaving can be enabled, via blockchain or without? Via blockchain, I don't know, because right now we spoke mostly about the tool, for I guess, I mean, I guess that's deliberation, but I think we need to sort this out. But we also need to sort out many other technicalities and I'm curious if you have some ideas or some suggestions of what are the various ways in which interweaving can be achieved, given specific communities, of course.

Speaker 2: 40:00

So one maybe a pretext to this answering that. So I tried, you know, in the previous exercise I tried to exemplify how a large scale coordination or a complex donation would be broken down, would have structure right and a fractal structure. That's what I was trying to give example for. So the outcome was sort of the graph and, as you pointed out, it's not just a nested graph, it's really like what I call DAG not I call, but people call the signal graph, so you can have different trajectories to the same point. So, and then the next step is to understand. Okay, but what is the point on that graph? And I tried to kind of like explain what is the point on that graph. And I said the point is like a space with a certain scope, with a place for conversation, deliberation and maybe also place for tasks, missions, funding and everything you need to have, like for any part of the collaboration, right? So I described what the point is on the graph. And then the next question is okay, if we understand what the point, then what is the link between two points? Right? What can link be? And that's related to interweaving. Now the link can be. I think I understand what you were asking, prim. So you were more interested about the interdependence, the sharing blood piece of that, the protocol part of that. So I'll come to that in a minute. But just to say that the link is a more, is a wider concept in that that's part of what a link is. And some parts of the link are very technical let's say Less protocol but they're also protocol in a sense. Let me give you examples of it. It doesn't stay too abstract. For example, let's say that you have a sub-scope of a bigger scope, right?

Speaker 2: 42:08

The notion of membership is actually quite tricky. For example, you could say that the link, the relationship between this node and that node, this node decided. If someone is a member of some sort of that node, I want him to be automatically a member of that node, of this node. So membership inheritance is actually a part of what we define as a link, the definitions of membership inheritance. If someone is a leader in that node, we want him to automatically be a leader in that node. Some has some reputation X in there, we want to account for reputation YX in there, and so on and so forth.

Speaker 2: 42:47

So everything around membership and properties of membership, such as reputation and the inheritance between nodes, this is part of the notion of a link, for example. Another part of the link is reputation of one node inside the other. So if one node has governance rights, the collective around that node has governance rights in the other node. That's also something which is part of that link. Then you can go to interweaving to. I mean that's also part of interweaving. But then you could go to interdependence, for example, and I think the most easier, the easiest. The first thing that comes to our mind is economical interdependence.

Speaker 2: 43:29

I mean the problem with that is, I think we are too much driven into economical interdependence and I think we're not thinking enough about non-economical interdependence, but nevertheless it's the easiest to think about. So let's stay with that for a moment. So we think about economic interdependence, so, for example, and then there is a lot of ways to manifest that, but the simplest way and again I'm trying to be to say the simplest at every chapter so the simplest interdependence, economic interdependence between nodes. Let's think about them as part of this.

Speaker 2: 44:02

Child is thinking that we have the token of the parent, you have the token of the child, right, you have the economy of the parent, you have the economy of the token of the child. And now imagine that they token swap in some sense and there are different ways to do token swaps or something like a token swap. You can also say that the only way to mean the token of the child is by staking the token of the parent. That's another way. There's some different ways, but they're all different in manifestation of some sort of token swap. Basically. So if you token swap between parent and child, of course a success of the economy of the token of the child token derives a success of the parent and vice versa, and also failure too. So I understand that that's not most general and maybe not the best way to think about interdependence between nodes, but it's definitely the easiest way to think about it. So I think that's the.

Speaker 3: 45:00

Yeah, exactly, I think the baseline, especially when you're thinking in a DAO model. That's the low hanging fruit, I would say, and then you can choose which are the token that are being interchanged. Is it like economic tokens? Is it government tokens? Is it whatever? Is it a particular type of token which actually lead to inducing, practically creating, interdependency on some aspect? But not also. So there's like I think the token is the. I would say it's almost the means by which most likely things can be done, because the token is the representation of something. But yeah, I think there's a lot of thinking to be done in terms of what are the consequences of sharing a particular resource rather than another and what is the optimal combination of interdependencies that can be designed.

Speaker 2: 46:02

Yeah, I think we are very far from understanding optimal or anything like optimal. I think we can just start playing with building blocks and seeing what's happening. But if you want to make all this very tangible, not stay abstract.

Speaker 2: 46:16

Let's take a very particular example. Let's say that you now have a DAO or a collective, whatever A collective. That collective is trying to, is competing against whatever other collectives maybe, and in a hackathon okay, in a big hackathon and it needs to achieve certain goals, certain to build something. Okay. And if it wins, if it's successful in building that something quickly, then it gets a million dollar, okay. So now imagine that that's something, that something that you're building has three components, right? And then so you're building the A component, the B component, the C component and maybe there's a D group that connect all those components together. And now imagine that each such component is a sub, it's a sub concept, it's a sub scope, it's a sub group, if you wish, sub DAO, whatever you call that. Okay, but then I don't like it to call it a sub group, because then people can play also here and there and be in several groups. It's not really sub group, it's more like a sub scope. So there is the scope of building A, scope of building B, scope of building C and the scope of connecting A, b and C, which is D, and then imagine that you have a way to sort of define eventually and let's say that eventually, if they win right, they get the million dollar. But there is also this understanding how that million dollar will be distributed towards the contributors of A, b, c and D right.

Speaker 2: 47:48

And this is something like holding a token of the parent right, the notion of how much value you've accrued, how much value you've contributed and how much value you will see back upon a success.

Speaker 2: 47:59

You can manifest that with holding of the token of the parent. So now, if I'm working on a component C right, I mean I can be very successful, but successful, but then if component B is not achieved, I will see nothing right, at the end I will see nothing. So I have the interest to help. So, although I'm kind of like competing with component B to get a larger share of the win, I'm also and to be bigger I get a larger share of the win. I also have a very strong incentive to make B and A and D successful, otherwise I will get nothing right. So that's a very although it's maybe you'd say it's a stupid example, but it's a very particular example where we see kind of interweaving, economic independence and alignment of interests happening. And if you break it down to manifestation, if you will go down into some sort of token swap or token hold or mutual token holding and so on, so forth.

Speaker 2: 49:05

Something of that sort, I think, will be appearing more and more, but the problem will be different manifestation, different combination, different value, valuation mechanisms different stakes, so on and so forth, and I don't think there is, we're not even close to, I don't think it's even in the stage right now to think about optimization. The state we are at is to think about building blocks in particular use cases, trying to advise them.

Speaker 1: 49:36

I think, a lot of the things that you said and that you've kind of explained. I've seen similar things in other types of crypto applications. I think there is this trend more and more towards fractalization. People like to use the term sub-dow as a way to explain a sub-team inside of a Dow. Basically, it sounds like to me. But yeah, I think it's this need to keep things to allow a human to be a human, because humans can only interact within a particular sized scope, while also trying to control for what is being reproduced at scale. So, understanding how, at the kind of the level of the human, is able to interact with other humans because that's the only way we can really re-interact with other humans that's what comes naturally to us, I guess, but how that can be translated into larger collective action, using this communications network that we now have over the internet and using blockchains to facilitate those types of interactions. Yeah, I think. I don't know if, primavera, do you have any other questions you want to dig into? With Matan, we've talked a lot about coordination.

Speaker 3: 51:02

Yeah, I mean I think we covered a lot of the cons.

Speaker 1: 51:07

I think what I like about when you were explaining coordination which is in line with some of my writings in my book, which is now out is that a lot of that like coordination for me is not just like people working together, it's also like acknowledging, I think, power relationships and the fact that there is authoritarianism in the world and we don't coordinate just to coordinate, but we coordinate to achieve goals. And then acknowledging kind of like the power, the power imbalances that exist in the world already is what makes coordination worthwhile or useful, necessary in fact, for, like climate change and all these other large problems that we have hurtling towards us.

Speaker 3: 51:54

I mean, I think it's also a way of reconfiguring power, right? Because right now we have a lot of power accumulated into a few actors and if we find ways to engage into proper collective action, then we can reconfigure power dynamics so that what the majority of the people who aren't actually gets done.

Speaker 2: 52:18

Right, I mean it's also I think it's both that and also utilizing much better the resources that we have in terms of humans and good intention that right now just cannot coordinate to produce better results.

Speaker 2: 52:32

But, yeah, these are both different sides of the same token. I think what's? I'm trying to think like, what's the? I don't know if I would call it a lesson, but I feel and that's very much related to what I've been doing in the past year or so, maybe a bit less mostly with common, with the work in common that is pretty much now getting out, I mean, as a product. Is that I mean we were talking about? I mean, prim, you definitely you would agree with that. I mean we were talking about these fractals and nested and sub-dials.

Speaker 2: 53:11

We were talking about this like I don't know, like eight years ago, right, and we've heard so many people talking about them, but it always stays abstract, always stay. Like you can say a fractal a thousand times, it doesn't make it more concrete. I mean you can say, okay, it's kind of like Wikipedia, it's kind of like Reddit, it's kind of like other things. If you know workflow for those who know what's workflow, it's like workflow. It's like Rome research, if you know Rome research, it's like nested bullets. Just now they ask okay, but what is a bullet? In that sense, what I came to appreciate when starting to work in common is was saying was how do we bring that I mean, it's enough talking about that but how do we bring it into the ground? Like, how do we actually make it a UI, something that actually can people organize with, can really people can organize with, into action? And it's really, I mean, eventually, and I don't know yet, right, there is doubt, the product will be out soon and we'll see if people can use it to achieve large scale goals or not, and I don't know, we'll see the future, but only when actually asking, looking at the screens and saying, okay, we need a platform to do that. And then suddenly there's so many question come ups, so many question come up. We actually try to make it from an abstract idea into an actual user interface that interact with you.

Speaker 2: 54:44

Yeah, now, I appreciate that. I appreciate that trying to build something to actually make it work, no, where, even if it wouldn't work, like really fighting that battle, like fighting that battle to bring this abstract idea that we're talking about so many times into an actual interface that you click and it changes and you click and you interact with people and seeing what works. And I think that's something that, yeah, we have to go through and I really believe in that. Like I really I don't know, I can't wait to play with that. That's what I'm saying. So, for example, the first thing we're going to do literally that we're starting next week just happens.

Speaker 2: 55:27

The first thing that I'm interested to do is to start work as a common, to continue developing common like to practice and to eat our own dog food. Like I just can't wait to play with the product and see what doesn't work, what works, what missing. I just feel that this is this kind of like complex product making you cannot make without playing with it. You cannot make. There's so much you can achieve. And likewise I'm saying that also in regard to your question about the protocols Like I just feel that there's just so much you can go talking about in theory before actually taking a real world example and breaking it down and building a bad protocol and changing it to a better protocol and so on and so forth. So my bottom line is that I just can't wait to take a real world community, a real world scope, real world collaboration and so on, and start playing with such products, these other products, and even if it's like manually devised protocols, rewarding protocols, anything I just really playing with that on the ground. That's what I'm really passionate about right now.

Speaker 1: 56:40

Cool. Yeah, I wish you the best of luck with common maybe the last thing for people if you want to leave places where people can find you, your work and keep up with common as well.

Speaker 2: 56:53

Sure, I mean it's just place just to get to the homepage, which is still the old homepage, but nevertheless it's commonio. There is a link there to the app. But yeah, you need a link to a specific common, to. Yeah, actually I'm going to write a blog post about it, so you can also just follow me on Twitter or anything, or you can also just mail me if you wish. Matanio or matanio.

Speaker 1: 57:25

Cool, great Well. Thank you so much and yeah, it was a pleasure to have you in Zuzalu to help us with the workshopping for coordination. Thank you so much.

Speaker 3: 57:35

Thank you, matan.