Other Internet 2018–2024 is finally shipping, and we are excited for two book launch events this week. Join Sam, Laura, Toby, and friends of OI at the following events:

1. Berlin, Germany at Trust (Kluckstraße 25, 10785), Tuesday September 30th @ 6pm

2. Lisbon, Portugal at Well Read (Calçada de Sant’Ana 92/94), Friday October 3rd @ 7pm

Trust is our spiritual home in Berlin, a deep part of Other Internet’s origin story, and the place where Sam, Laura, and Toby first started writing together. For the last 6 years Trust has been one of the absolute global hubs of creative technologists working with and theorizing decentralized technologies.

Well Read is a critically curious bookstore and event space started by our good friend and crypto-culture OG Kaitlyn Davies, featuring a fantastic selection of art and design books, radical texts, and contemporary literature.

If you’re in either city, we would love you to join us. These will be huge family affairs and a lot of fun. We’ll be reading a few selections from our book, sharing wine with you, and telling great squad stories all evening.

If you bought a book from us already, you will be able to pick it up at either one of these events.

Shipping Update

Books are shipping to the Berlin and Lisbon launches first, and then to our fulfillment partner in the US. This means they should be arriving to you, conservatively speaking, in 2-3 weeks.

Yours in transit,

Sam Laura & Toby

This conversation is part of a three-part series of roundtable discussions, mirroring the chapters of the forthcoming Other Internet book: New Institutions, Squad Energy, and Networked Spirituality. This conversation, between Christopher Goes, Trent van Epps, Laura Lotti, Toby Shorin, and Sam Hart, covers New Institutions, building commons and publics, and what emerging crypto researchers should learn from the past. Other Internet 2018–2024 is available for purchase on Metalabel.

Laura (00:02)

Hello and welcome to the New Institutions round table. So new institutions was a major cultural theme of the last decade, as well as a through line for much of Other Internet research. We think about it as a shift in power structures caused in large part by internet technologies as a cultural and infrastructural force. So the three of us — Laura, Toby and Sam — wanted to have a broader discussion around this topic with two experts that I'm very happy to welcome: Trent van Epps and Christopher Goes. I'll let you guys give a brief introduction about yourself before we get started.

Trent (00:48)

Sure, I can go. I've been in the Ethereum community for a long time and over the past few years, I've been fortunate to work with the Ethereum Foundation on a whole number of projects, mainly centered around core Ethereum development, the core protocol itself. And as part of that work, I've helped to bootstrap Protocol Guild, which is the leading independent funding institution for core Ethereum developers. We work on funding and ensuring that they have sustainable support for years into the future. And I imagine that will come up in this discussion.

Toby Shorin (01:19)

Thanks joining us.

Christopher Goes (01:21)

Yeah, thank you for hosting this. I feel like I'm woefully under qualified to discuss the topic, but hopefully I'll manage to prove myself wrong. I’m Christopher, I guess the most institution-like thing that I've worked on would probably be the IBC protocol, which is sort of this interoperability institutional substrate that at least to some extent has helped facilitate the institution of Cosmos, if we can consider that an institution, maybe a proto-institution. I want to wait more time before judging whether a thing can be called an institution or not. But you're the experts on that, so maybe I'm wrong. I guess the question, part of the question that I'm very interested in is what the relationship is between technology, particularly seen as the thing which is changing through history and the institutional possibility space. Hopefully we'll get to that.

Laura (02:15)

Thank you. Before we get started with our conversation, I want to briefly introduce the topic of new institutions from our perspective. And I'll do so by reading a couple of excerpts from a new essay that is part of Other Internet's anthology:

The late 2010s, were a time of unbounded institutional and infrastructural imagination. As legacy institutions struggled to keep up with the accelerated pace of a world becoming ever more connected, infrastructurally, socially and culturally, new organizational experiments simmered below the surface of mass social media. While platform cooperativism had already paved the way for rethinking the extractive paradigm of Web2, blockchains promised even more radical tools to power horizontal collaboration. Bitcoin made it possible to reimagine nothing less than the global monetary infrastructure beyond the constraints of age-old institutions like central banks and states and Ethereum promised for the first time the ability to build new organizations from the ground up governed by their participants through credibly neutral mechanisms. […] The desire for new institutions wasn't just about replacing outdated extractive Internet infrastructures. It became a quest to affirm the possibility of new worlds governed by their own space times and laws of physics. This is why blockchain protocols — as a new transcendental time machine for creating and distributing value across the planetary computational stack — offered a fertile ground for world building experiments to reimagine how communities and organizations could exist, collaborate and evolve beyond the rigid structures and hierarchies of the past. In these decentralized systems, the story goes, the architecture of trust, value and agency could be rebuilt from the ground up. This renewed techno-optimism sparked institutional dreams for self-sustaining dynamic ecosystems that could evolve within their communities and outside the linear constraints of the old web.

So these little excerpts try to capture some of the energy and enthusiasm for institution building through technology that was very prominent in those years and that in many ways shaped also Other Internet as an organization. But so to get us into the first questions, do we still need to build new institutions or should we prioritize fixing the old ones?

Christopher Goes (05:07)

Do you think we've succeeded? Do you think from the Other Internet sociological vantage point of vast scope and wisdom, said in all earnesty, do you think that we have built new institutions? I'm not convinced.

Sam Hart (05:23)

Yeah, it's a great question. We spent a year just talking about what an institution was, like whether this is the right term. And when you really boil it down, the bar is very low. We had a debate internally as to whether a handshake was institution. It seems like the lowest threshold that you could imagine but it potentially meets some criteria of being an institution. Yeah, I would say crypto is probably above that bar.

Toby Shorin (05:59)

I'm curious about your feeling that you're not convinced. I'd like to hear what, in your mind, what could qualify.

Christopher Goes (06:11)

I guess to me, and maybe this is coming at this from a somewhat crypto specific angle, but part of what I would see is the new institutional disillusionment of the mid 2020s is a lot of attempts to create new institutions having in some narrow sense succeeded, but in a broader sense failed. What do I mean by that?

If we look back to the Ethereum launch video, which I watched recently to prepare for a talk, there's this great vision of a world computer for everything from IoT to payments to commerce. The scope was expansive. It was not just like: build this specific thing that can be used not even for gambling, but just for sending stablecoin payments, like some pragmatic use case.

It was very broad and the aims were more sociocultural in nature, or at least partially sociocultural in nature, instead of just some narrow product or technology focus. Like the Bitcoin white paper has all of these, or the Bitcoin Genesis block has clearly a political statement about the banking system. And has Bitcoin dethroned the banking system? No. I mean, if anything, it's being integrated into it.

To me, the thing that brought me to some of this, that made me interested in this discourse in the 2010s was, or those things were, these kinds of broader, in scope, sociopolitical aspirations. And I think that some progress has been made, but I don't think that the revolution has been made. So maybe that's where my dissolution comes from.

Trent (08:02)

One thing I can add to this is that, well, I'm not sure where you define the point of evaluation, but part of building institutions is that a big part of it for a long time is aspirational, that your thinking about this thing will persist, or we hope that it will persist over a long time. And I think it's unavoidable that if you're at least claiming that you're building an institution, there's this sort of forward-looking possible future that you're trying to shape. And then the question, I guess, comes like: OK, how successful are you in actually reaching that goal? And who's capable of doing that evaluation? But I think it's unavoidable that it's a bit fuzzy when it comes to actually figuring out where that line actually sits and whether you've crossed it.

Christopher Goes (08:54)

Yeah, just one other point I would add is to me the question, and I'm curious for this, it feels like a thing that you might've thought about. To me, the question of institutional identity seems critical and even just evaluating what's going on. Like, let's say that we try to take Bitcoin as an institution. Well, in some sense, Bitcoin as an institution clearly exists. It has things that I would define as institutional properties. On the other hand, there's another institution called like the US financial complex, let's say, and that clearly exists. And it seems to me like the institution of Bitcoin is being sort of subsumed into it, almost to the point where I question if it really makes sense to consider it different, right? So whether the institution of Bitcoin is in some sense succeeding or failing or doing what it was set out to do seems to me to hinge quite substantially on how exactly you define the boundaries of identity.

Sam Hart (09:54)

Yeah, the identity issues don't even stop there, to be honest. Like when we got down to what we could confidently say constitutes an institution is something along the lines of a set of organizational practices that persist over time. That's about it. And, you know, if two or more people are doing something together habitually, you've institutionalized.

The other thing is the definition, something goes from a kind of ad hoc practice to an institution just by persisting. It's more of a byproduct than an intentional act or something. So institutions will exist in the future. It's not like they're going to go away. It's just like which institutions, which collection of institutions, will those be.

Trent (10:48)

We're saying this word so much that I'm thinking of other uses for it. Sometimes you hear famous athletes described as an institution if they've had a major impact on a particular team or collegiate athletics program. I guess you could say that's one person, but actually it's their whole team of support staff and their team that they play with. But they're sort of embedded within these two different systems.

Laura (11:24)

I was thinking also about the difference between all these experiments. There is this experimental phase that we’ve been through where a lot of these initiatives — a bit through LARPing, a bit through actually building tools and developing new practices — are gesturing to becoming institutions or definitely express a desire for the creation of new types of institutions. But I guess the challenge there is then exactly how do you sustain that practice or that desire and that willingness also through the changes.

Obviously, institutions that we know are what persists, but then there is also the question of adaptability, of being able to evolve. Maybe we haven't seen anything yet. We will only answer our initial question on what these new institutions are in another 10 years or more.

Toby Shorin (12:26)

Yeah, I mean, we've gone through 10 years. What have we learned about the criteria of persistence in that time? Have we learned anything meaningful about that among this group? Like, what does it take for a new institutional attempt or project to stay viable in like 10 years?

Trent (12:56)

Yeah, I mean, I'll just go first. The first thing that comes to mind is Bitcoin. We were talking about it earlier. And like the idea of stability and consistency, whether you agree with how the protocol is defined and the goals that they've decided as a community, they're pretty consistent. Again, depends on your perspective, whether you're inside or outside of it. And even inside of it, there's divergences, but they have been pretty consistent over the years in how they define this and then in turn, how the financial ecosystem and other crypto communities engage with it. Maybe consistency and stability are a good first stab.

Christopher Goes (13:51)

Yeah, I guess. I don't know if this is a thing that we learned or even agree with, not up to me to judge, but I feel like in the early days — I don't think it was just me in the early days of some of these new institutional projects — there was, if not exactly technological determinism, then at least a kind of assumption that certain values could be embedded in technological design choices and the technological design choices having been fixed in some kind of protocol, the values would just perpetuate themselves through people using this protocol. I consider that hypothesis to have basically been falsified. I don't think that it works in practice. I think that protocols manage to sustain themselves, if anything, by being somewhat flexible about certain values, like Bitcoin pitched itself, or even just the purpose of what they were intended to be used for. Bitcoin in the white paper is described as peer-to-peer electronic cash. This is not how most people describe or intend to use Bitcoin in the year 2025. And probably that adaptability has been critical in some way to Bitcoin's continued existence as at least the institution which it is today. But I also think that whatever attempt there may have been there to make it into an institution with a particular shape through protocol design choices has also not worked.

Trent (15:19)

Would you say that public-private key pairs as foundational element of many of these systems is cypherpunk values and ideals being born out? I guess you could argue, depending on the percentage of users that are self-custodying, or using a custodial service maybe makes it a little less clear, but that was the first thing that came to mind just now.

Christopher Goes (15:46)

Partially, I mean, I think there are some things that one could consider successes in this vein. Even with Bitcoin, for example, it is possible to use Bitcoin by running a node on your computer and use public and private key pairs and transact with people purely that way, and interoperate with this giant sprawling financial system. And say what you will about Coinbase, but they still follow the rules of the Bitcoin protocol. At least for the time being there's still some kind of supervening agreement that is, in fact, defined by the software and the sort of open source, clear, legible set of institutional rules that even powerful actors in the system currently follow.

Just viewing protocol rules, of course, anyone can choose what protocol rules to run. If you're trying to promote cypherpunk values by choosing to run and promote a protocol where there are public and private keys, then that having metastasized into Bitcoin in year 2025, I would consider that a partial success. Also, I think the values which cypherpunks, at least to me, have are not exactly: ‘We should use public and private keys,’ but more: ‘People should retain autonomy, some freedom over their choices, some freedom to disclose information.’ And for most people, does the system of public and private keys and Bitcoin full nodes practically provide that? The answer is no. So there's this discrepancy.

Trent (17:14)

Yeah, I just threw out the first exception I could think of.

Christopher Goes (17:18)

No, it's fantastic. Curing my depression.

Toby Shorin (17:23)

Yeah, your depression. You mentioned this new institution disillusionment of the 2020s. I think that is something that we've noticed when we do our book tour workshop, where we take people through these different eras [of internet culture]. And people tend to describe this period as one of disillusionment and giving up on some of the ambitions of a new institutional development. I think that's something we've seen is not just restricted to people interested in protocol design or novel economic systems or decentralized finance and crypto economic systems, but other kinds of institutions and efforts broadly. I'm curious how you situate yourself in that broader landscape as well, and what you see about new institutional efforts today as opposed to 10 years ago in this broader sense.

Sam Hart (18:37)

One thing is, if you actually take this view that institutions are more of a natural phenomenon, they're a byproduct, the assertion that Laura made at the beginning (that a lot of this is driven by a more network native culture and changes in information distribution and people's relationships with one another) that implies the existence of new institutions, so you can almost guarantee that new institutions will exist, and with that in mind it's more a question of: what control do we have over what those are and can we actually alter that trajectory? Yeah, I do think that new institutions are emerging. It's hard to pattern match on them because they operate on slightly different registers. You know, the TikTok algorithm is kind of an institution these days, and that's just not something that you would really think or you would have thought of 10 years ago. It's just that you didn't have the language or context to draw that boundary in the way that you might today.

Christopher Goes (19:55)

Yeah, I think your question, Toby, is great, and I'll get to what you said, Sam, in a second. I don't have a systematic or a systematically considered answer to it. One pattern that I've noticed that extends beyond crypto, sort of through this whole new institutional milieu is maybe a reckoning with power dynamics that were previously considered to be out of the design scope, as opposed to just trying to build a technology and offer it to people or build a company and offer people a product or, you know, write things on the internet in blog form or something like this. People who think about institutions across the political spectrum have been more willing to engage with existing institutional power structures both in theory and in practice. In practice, trying to actually lobby them or affect certain policy changes in the US government; and in theory, to reckon with how cypherpunk values or whatever are the thing that you're interested in, how does this relate not only to Bitcoin support of public and private keys, but also to the much broader institutional landscape? Much of which, at least in practice, impacts the degree to which this specific technical design choice is able to help your institutional project. I consider that to be at least, I think, a promising theoretical direction and that I feel like people are considering more. And I think they should be. Like if you design an institution in isolation in this very interconnected network landscape, you're not necessarily able to predict much about what it's going to become in the future, which parts of the institutional practices which might persist, which would not persist, et cetera. I don't know if that's in the direction that you're looking for here.

Toby Shorin (22:12)

It's a conversation.

Sam Hart (22:13)

All answers are valid. We're not looking for anything in particular, just your views.

Christopher Goes (22:22)

I mean, I would be curious to ask Trent. My only relationship with the Protocol Guild historically is that I at least somewhat organized a donation to it through the NAMADA Retroactive Public Goods Funding Program. Hopefully, are you still aware of that?

Trent (22:42)

We are and yeah, we were trying to check back up on our application and like where the where's the key is and yeah, but we are aware and following up. But thank you.

Christopher Goes (22:52)

Right. OK, fantastic. My question would be, I guess, do you see Protocol Guild as an institutional project, and how does it relate to the institution of Ethereum?

Trent (23:04)

Yeah, I'm smiling because we worked with Toby a while ago, well, a couple weeks ago at this point to help define what it is and the tagline I went with at the beginning is direct from him. So thanks, Toby. I used it in some presentations last week, so I'll make sure to send them to you. But yeah, it’s: Protocol Guild is the leading independent institution funding Core Ethereum devs, with a focus on long term maintenance and sustainability.

Toby Shorin (23:15)

That made me happy to hear. Beautiful.

Trent (23:28)

So yeah, I mean, I'm kind of locked into that given I've gone with that as the pitch. So I think it is an institution. One of the comments I gave earlier was very much about institutionality is also a belief or it's an aspirational thing. And obviously, I'm speaking from my experience where it's not an institution until it is. And you can lose this institutionality over time. And so as long as you're aiming towards this consistency and stability, I think you have a reasonable claim to actually follow through on that. So yeah, definitely aspirational. Same thing with norm building. I guess these are kind of, Sam, what you were talking about. The institution might be a byproduct of some other conditions.

Sam Hart (24:11)

Would you?

Trent (24:21)

I think the same about like norm building is that the norm doesn't exist until you just kind of yell it enough and just kind of bake it into people's heads that this thing is a norm where it should be a norm that's reasonable to follow. And these things are often paired with each other. Like opt-in funding, you don't get people to believe it's worthwhile until you demonstrate that it's a good norm that they should follow and kind of agree to contribute towards.

Sam Hart (24:50)

Would you call Protocol Guild a public institution?

Trent (24:55)

Yeah, I've also used the terms like a civic organization because I think maybe classically public would be, you know, the state versus public versus private enterprise. Civic is like these citizens or people who consider themselves stakeholders in a particular resource production system. This is why I like civic because it's a little more neutral. Public also works here.

Toby Shorin (25:20)

We actually had a question about that. What did we end up coming up with? Nice tea up, Sam.

Sam Hart (25:24)

I'm teeing. Yeah. So I mean, everyone here is like very fluent in crypto protocols. And the question is: should we call these public institutions? I would say Ethereum and Protocol Guild in particular are certainly making gestures towards this type of language of a public. And notably a public institution implies the existence of a public. And so you kind of need to talk about, well, what is that? What constitutes it? What makes it? We've kind of inherited an interesting lineage here where historically, a public was defined or tied to a government institution. That definition has been expanded with open access and open source into a kind of broader notion of media public and we kind of come full circle a little bit with crypto institutions where there's more enforceable structure with a crypto protocol and a notion of a digital media environment. This is one of the most interesting through lines with a lot of our work. It’s like observing that convergence where Vitalik and the Ethereum community started talking about public goods and, Chris, like you and I started talking about public goods. The Overton window was open to even discussing that topic in the context of a blockchain.

Trent (27:03)

Yeah, one thought that comes to mind is actually now that I'm thinking about it, I do maybe echo some of Chris's disillusionment, but specifically when it comes to the term public goods. I think most of us followed the beginning and the arc of that term and how it's been so watered down over the years that it really doesn't mean anything because people have applied it to anything. And we try very intentionally to not use it when we're talking about Protocol Guild.

Maybe we're early, but we use commons or shared resources to describe this. Maybe in another 10 years, we'll have to move on to something else. Public goods at this point has unfortunately been applied to so many different contexts to companies that haven't found product market fit or very, very niche small publics that it's really hard for people who are allocating funding to actually disambiguate what it applies to.

Sam Hart (27:53)

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. That said, feel like that just kind of moves the problem elsewhere. A commons also suggests some kind of cohort in which a resource is thriving. So... and Ethereum is like a very amorphous commons, right?

Trent (28:14)

Okay, so a couple thoughts. We've talked a little bit about how institutions maybe are different in the presence of networks or distributed systems. I think that obviously applies here. If you look at how Protocol Guild is structured, it literally takes into consideration, for example, client diversity. We have a spec with 10 total client implementations. And the reason we need this, or the reason this is very desirable, is because of reliability of this distributed system. It really only comes about through the interactions of these many different versions. You get fault tolerance. These are really good properties. And you see this directly represented in how Protocol Guild defines eligibility. And it says, okay, we want to fund not just one implementation or not just the specification, but we also think it's really important to fund the implementations, plural. So that's one interesting thing that came to mind. And then, Sam, you're also talking about open source software. And this is, again, a really interesting relationship when you take not just open source software, but in the network context. Like there's a huge gradation.

When I talk about the commons, it's very, very broad. And when you start to think about, what does it mean to be a part of this commons? Is it just projects that use the EVM? Is it projects that fork mainnet? Is it any project that uses some parts of the stack? Then you kind of have this gradation, as you move closer and closer to Ethereum mainnet, of projects that maybe could consider themselves part of the commons. Or from the perspective of a fund requester, is it reasonable to ask for funding for these resources? Then you can get even deeper like, does this Ethereum L2 use native blobs for DA or does it use a separate provider for DA? And then you just kind of get like more and more nuance as you get closer to this main net construction.

Toby Shorin (30:30)

I wonder if that analogy or that dynamic has analogies to the public realm of the state or the city or something where there's a spectrum of how public serving these things are, how much they address like public concerns or shared concerns in a way.

Like one thing that I've noticed in the IRL world is that in the wake of the collapse of this New Institutions energy, clubs are becoming very popular and they also like span the range. There's now like a lot of kind of elite private club spaces getting built in places like New York and LA, centered around different themes. There's ones for people who like to drive old cars. There's ones that are kind of like a new version of the traditional social club, like the Harmony, and then there's athletic clubs and fitness clubs that are private wellness clubs. And then there are also these run clubs and public fitness clubs that have a semi-public boundary. All of these things are kind of wrapped up in the narrative of social connection, which seems to be, it seems like, in the public discourse. It seems we've realized the bar around creating new institutions is very high and we've somehow lowered it to like, well, let's just like organize people collectively. It doesn't really matter what they're doing. Let's do that. And there's this Netflix documentary, Join or Die, which was about joining a club that kind of represents that. Well, it came out a couple of years ago. We're not calling those things institutions per se, but maybe some of the same questions around the scope of their engagement with the public, the scope of their actions on behalf of the public, and even what we were first talking about, criteria or potential for longevity of those organized bodies, not to say institutions, perhaps still apply in those contexts too.

Toby Shorin (33:14)

This is definitely in an American context, but Sam and Laura and Chris, you live in Europe. I wonder if similar stuff is happening there or if this discourse has taken a different direction.

Sam Hart (33:31)

I don't think this is strong. There is a little bit more state or city directed public infrastructure and a little bit more of a regional identity that's coherent and binds some people together. But certainly to some extent, when you're describing this, one thing I was thinking is, no matter what you're calling this, some kind of social cohesion is obviously like just implicitly desired and this is serving a specific need. It's kind of in this emergent view of what's going on. It's like there's an absence there that people feel like it is not being fulfilled by public institutions. So they're filling those holes to satisfy those needs.

Laura (34:20)

Yeah, would say that also here I feel it less or like there seems to be a base notion of a public that is still maybe more relying on the traditional types of institutions and notions of publics. Maybe they don't work very well, but there still seems to be a bit more an anchor to smaller kind of initiatives. But then I'm wondering whether all these new types of initiatives that Toby was mentioning, are they forming new publics or is like a further privatization perhaps of some kind of social space?

Toby Shorin (35:06)

Yeah, I'm not sure. Trent described going down the turtle ladder and trying to decide every layer of the stack, well, how public serving is this? And you might be able to perform the same kind of inquiry around these organizations where some of them are not public serving at all, or they're club goods, properly speaking. They might even use that format. There's like a club good oriented, like nonprofit, it's like a 501c4 or something like that. But if that same organization organizes weekly street trash cleanups or something like that. What are we looking at here?

It could be an institution. It is maybe not itself a public, like it's addressing the public. I guess this is where we're getting back into the semantic rabbit hole where we have trouble defining exactly what these things are. But if we think back to what Sam said about institutions at the base being collections of organizational practices, then we can evaluate their kind of public mindedness in a way.

Christopher Goes (36:32)

Yeah, to me a related question, and something that does seem to be different in this sort of highly networked world is that what might have previously been considered different institutional spheres are boring. Like, you know, clubs are not a new institutional type. I don't think anyone would really argue that. Clubs and the market, let's say, at least until recently, to me seem to be relatively separate institutional spheres. I don't know, clubs that were highly for profit or operated as large companies that had multiple instances in different cities. These were uncommon clubs were just very local things. Whatever exactly the legal structure they operated with maybe matters a little bit less, but the practical functionality was some kinds of shared services, social gathering place for members, et cetera. And I think much of the time, it was considered to just be in a separate domain than the market. Like you had your interactions with the club and you had your interactions with the market and maybe they need to interoperate in a limited way. You pay your club dues, but other than that, they're driven by different logics and goals.

And now it seems to me that in this very networked world, those lines are kind of blurring and we see a lot of experiments of mixing them. Sometimes it doesn't really work, but there's sort of more of that. There are a lot of attempts in that direction. Also I think the financial and media institutional spheres are blurring. This you really see in crypto, memecoins are an easy example to throw out, but I think it's also more fundamental than that. Even with the example of public goods, the institution of language is sort of blurring, how meaning coherency is maintained across a semantic graph mediated by the Twitter and TikTok algorithms is not an institutional question that users of language have faced until the last 10 years, right?

Toby Shorin (38:44)

That's interesting.

Christopher Goes (38:44)

And I think that it plays into the public-private distinction because the public-private distinction is like almost the OG case of two institutional spheres that are considered fully disjoint and oriented towards different purpose ends or something.

Toby Shorin (38:57)

What it makes me think of, especially when you mentioned the linguistic element, is Libby and Tiger's lore essays. Libby's essay specifically, which talks about how lore is this kind of linguistic matter which has an exteriority and an interiority to it. The interiority feels a certain way—it feels very private—and your trajectory through it really makes you feel you’re on the inside of something that you don't want to have interpreted and digested. But the stuff of it—the matter of it—is on the public internet, floating around everywhere on the timeline. So this thing has a weird public and private quality to it where it just actually totally depends on your positionally in the network to assess who is it for at all.

Sam Hart (39:47)

It's encrypted.

Toby Shorin (39:58)

So that's a really interesting point about the like the blurring of institutional categories, inside and outside.

Sam Hart (40:15)

It's really funny that you went to micro level linguistic constructs, I was going the other way. One thing that we talked about a ton during our writing process but never really published on, was the power that crypto gives individuals. Our shorthand for this was that “crypto gives everyone a nuke.” And there’s a similar phenomenon where you get peace through proliferation of weapons. Peace is a public good, but it only comes about through the paradigm of mutually assured destruction. These two different spheres carve one another out: war on one side and a global public sphere on the other, created through that armistice.

Toby Shorin (41:18)

I have to say, it feels that like now that we've entered the scam-or-be-scammed-economy, this is the Hobbesian “war of all against all.” And it doesn't really seem like the deterrent of “give everyone a nuke” really worked out.

Trent (41:36)

Yeah, I think some people have better nukes than others, or they've learned how to better weaponize them. We were talking about the overlap of media with other social functions. You guys can correct me if I'm wrong—but I don't think the New York Times has ever had a VC arm.

Quick fact check…

But today in crypto, everyone plays both sides. Media institutions used to be trusted sources. Now you have the KOLs who have monetize their following, monetize their brand. But even on a larger level, you have these institutional media organizations. I mean, I don't know if sometimes they try to skirt away from being an impartial source to a purveyor of entertainment. Many crypto media organizations have investing arms attached.

Toby Shorin (42:28)

So when we wrote the public goods essay, this kind of complexity, and the problematic nature of these interactions is what brought us to the definition of public goods that we landed on, which is basically creating positive externalities. Externalities that don't just affect your own organization, but are laterally scalable, or have positive impacts that are good for adjacent bodies.

I'm curious what other criteria we could have for “public goods,” because the whole notion of being civically inclined is kind of reaching for *doing good,* for not just yourself, but for others.

Clearly where we've gotten in this conversation (and I think this is generally true) is that the Habermasian language of the public sphere and these sorts of strongly demarcated institutional categories does not really work because now, because they're all kind of inside each other. that, We can't use the idea of the public to encode what's right or what's good. That means we need to evaluate the notion of what's *right* or what's *good* with some other criteria—or get more accurate about what we think is worth doing.

Our idea of positive externalities is one way of getting at that, but I wonder if we have other ways?

Trent (44:21)

The inverse could be: if a resource were fully captured, what set of people or projects would be negatively harmed? Then we might need to count every single person, or the total harms to them. But that's at least the first thing that comes to mind.

Toby Shorin (44:39)

That's a really great evaluative heuristic.

Christopher Goes (44:51)

I think an interesting twist here that might give us some more analytical muscle is to take the first derivative and look at the institutional dynamics. Like if an institution is trying to serve—whether it's a club or a public—maybe even to be accountable to that group in a changing institutional landscape—what tools does it have at its disposal to manage and react to that change. The reason I think this is a useful analytical lens for crypto is because it's clear that there is a vast discrepancy with respect to scale—as in the public and private keys are held by individuals, maybe some media companies, Coinbase in a custodial sense. But despite having the ability to print money by creating new tokens almost none of the large scale crypto institutions have discretionary power to do that, right? Like the Ethereum Foundation can't print ETH. Maybe you're lucky to receive some of the donations to Protocol Guild. But if we think about this situation outside of the crypto context, if the Ethereum Foundation were tasked with maintaining the public goods of Ethereum, we would have tied it in a straight jacket, right? We've taken away the key institutional power that an institution of this size would usually have—which is some discretionary control over value flows.

Maybe in a more traditional institutional context there wouldn't be a token, but the Foundation might have a giant government grant that it would get to dispense however it chooses. Crypto isn’t this. You’d need to convince 100,000 validators to change the protocol. There's more discretion on some levels and less at the scale of institutional decision-making. I think crypto has had a hard time figuring out how to blend goals at different scales. If arbitrary people can just mint tokens what actually supports the conditions required for sustainability? A competitive institutional landscape requires the power to do some of this stuff.

Toby Shorin (47:21)

That's definitely true. How do you see that relating to this question of how we find a moral compass.

Christopher Goes (47:52)

When we look at things in crypto as public goods, one thing that's missing is some clear aspect of an institutional body that’s consciously making decisions on behalf of the public. Sometimes it's there, sometimes not so much. We’re also missing a way for that institutional body to learn what the public wants and to be accountable to it.

Looking at dynamics can help us insofar as we talk about what an institution is capable of doing on behalf of different publics or different groups, and how it would go about collecting information to make decisions.

Maybe it doesn't address the problem that you're looking to solve, but I find it useful.

Sam Hart (48:47)

One thing worth noting: Chris and I have discussed this before, but we took parallel trajectories and both arrived at “accountability” as one of the core institutional dimensions that one should design around.

I arrived at this through Laura's post actually and kind of iterated on it. This accountability lens is quite powerful and let’s you ask question like who is it accountable to? What is the strength of the accountable relationship? How is that relationship projected? What does the supply chain look like? How robust is that supply chain to institutional change?

Toby Shorin (49:35)

Laura, maybe you'd want to say something about accountability and its role vis-a-vis the public and institution-building.

Laura (49:45)

I can try, yeah. I think what Sam was referring to it was part of a research that we did with Uniswap governance. This was when the DAO had just formed and questions about accountability were like starting to become really important—in the sense that accountability is not just a thing you can install, right? Also, accountability doesn’t exist solely within the realm of the mechanism at the end of the day, it involves how people actually relate to one another, how they share resources, etc. So what we found is that accountability creates this kind of feedback loop where someone is responsible for another, who then holds that person to account. So accountability always works both ways.

Looking at current institutions, you’ll find this loop is often broken.

The discretionary power is where I think accountability ultimately plays a really key role. It’s appropriate for institutions to have discretionary powers for many things. Not everything needs to be like the Bitcoin protocol. But exactly how to build also these accountability structures is really the key question. That's where still there is a lot of work to be done.

Toby Shorin (52:00)

It seems like so much of crypto, and I guess tech more broadly, puts the emphasis on credible neutrality or automation. Technology that creates non-discretionary institutional capacities is only meaningful if you point it at, say, the institutional corruption of the banking system and legally entrenched backdoor dealings.

I guess where the industry’s gotten to now, is that important human institutions like the Ethereum Foundation, and other foundations that modeled themselves after the EF, really took on the properties and affordances of the technology.

Maybe what we're getting to with this conversation about discretionary decision making is some kind of Aristotelian notion that the key criteria to have an accountable institution is to have an organization that pursues “the good.” You have to have decision makers who are more or less capable of using personal judgment to assert what good is on behalf of a public or a group, even if that’s fallible.

Sam Hart (53:49)

Well, I think this suggestion that Laura made, like, you can't just install accountability. There's some kind of contract that you enter into and it needs to be built and negotiated. And that's that's how that's actually how you end up defining what constitutes the good and to whom.

This is kind of more art than science, guess. In order to do that, you need to have a proto-institution that is willing to expose itself to being accountable. At least to have longevity in its commitment to aligning with its constituents long-term interests. And on the other side, you need to have some kind of latent constituency who's willing to participate in that system.

Trent (54:45)

I can add something from the world of practice. For Protocol Guild, this is a really difficult tension for us because obviously we want to do right by the donors and the people that are funding us. However, we ultimately serve a much, much broader public than just these projects that are making that decision to fund us. For one, we put all funding into an immutable four-year contract so nobody can claw it back. You can't revoke this funding, and this removes a significant bit of leverage that these projects would otherwise have. You know, in the extreme case, let's say a major funder donates a billion dollars and this is like, my God, we're gonna suddenly contort ourselves to meet whatever their requests are as the protocol is defined. And so if you put it into the four year investing contract, there's no way you can get it back unless at the other end, we decide to give it back to you.

But then this conversation about accountability is also resonating a lot with me because in theory, this accountability should be: we listen to and accommodate the requests of funders as like, a direct relationship with people who are funding this work. Again, do we accommodate their desires for how the protocol should be shaped? or do we have to condition that against what the broader five and 10 year needs of Ethereum, the broader Ethereum Commons is. We're currently like deep in this discussion of, how can we give something back? In the sense of, they hold us accountable and we understand what their needs are, they're unique to their specific context, but without going too far into a world where then all of a sudden this protocol is being designed for just people who have funds to give.

And this is something out, like I said, we're very much deep in this discussion of, okay, how much further can we go to, you know, we can give you, we can celebrate your contribution, we can recognize that it's important to follow these norms. How much further can we go beyond that before the broader non-funder community is like, that looks a little strange, what you're giving back in return.

And Toby, the final thing you said was, basically, we have a lot of trust bound up in this thing to decide what the right direction is. We can have very strict accountability measures inside of the mechanism. Like, if you're not doing the work, you no longer get funding. That's very easy. We can develop robust processes to actually manage the membership. But at the end of the day, we ultimately decide, OK, the protocol needs to go this way and we're not beholden to these funders in this particular dimension.

Christopher Goes (57:30)

To me, related to accountability, an interesting question to ask is what does accountability look like for or within in relation to a particular institution versus what does it look like in the broader institutional landscape? And sometimes I could even imagine that these would be in tension or opposed to each other. For example if we take Protocol Guild, suppose that you have various mechanisms to try to take into account some interests of the funders, but not too much, and also the Ethereum public, which is very hard to measure, and I have no idea what it means in practice. So from the outside, this is kind of illegible.

By contrast, if we imagine there are Protocol Guilds 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, and they build Ethereum 1, Ethereum 2, Ethereum 3, Ethereum 4, and Ethereum 5, and they are very clear, they're almost dictatorships. Like we will do X. If you give us your funding, it will go to fund X. If you don't want X, go somewhere else. In some sense, in this broader, even though there's absolutely zero attempts to be like accountable to some changing interests of, you know, the funders of each individual institution in the broader landscape, I would argue maybe there's actually more accountability because there's this very clear way in which outside participants can take their preference and express it through their choices and their interactions with these institutions. I'm curious what you think of that.

Sam Hart (59:07)

I mean, the result is kind of like turning a quasi-public or a commons-based institution into a market. And that has real trade offs. In crypto's drive towards like non-discretionary policy, I think there a lot is lost in just acknowledging the value of youthful enthusiasm and taste and people's intrinsic desire to put their energies towards doing things that are meaningful and have a large impact.

Creating that channel for youthful enthusiasm of putting your energies towards doing something for the public good, I think is so important. Turning that into a market that's extremely rigidly defined collapses that channel.

Toby Shorin (1:00:16)

The market is famously not that good at rewarding those kinds of activities. But I think that this is kind of an interesting moment to ask Chris about the Namada RPGF program because that was it. You know, it wasn't necessarily an ongoing thing. The allocation has already happened, but that's an opportunity that you took to basically express on discretionary principles, a perspective on what things are considered meaningful to you, to Namada, to your team.

Other Internet received an allocation, Protocol Guild received an allocation. There is also a broader set of organizations there too. How did you think about that as like a moment to create the channel that Sam was talking about?

Sam Hart (1:01:10)

I also think it was quite interesting, some of the information collection that you did in advance, there was a referential thing that you did in order to aggregate a lot of that.

Toby Shorin (1:01:22)

Yeah, maybe talk about that process too.

Christopher Goes (1:01:24)

Yeah, I mean, we went through a relatively simple process (and I think I could reasonably argue it was even a public process) of collecting nominations for a direct public goods funding, which could be placed on the forums. Some of them were sent to us in private and we assembled those together into a list which went in the Genesis Block proposal. Now, the amounts that were chosen practically were discretionary on the basis of not just my own opinion, but those of others involved in the project. We also consulted Gavin a lot, who heads the Minaro, which is now kind of a Namada public goods focused organization. Whether that meets some of our more theoretically rigorous definitions or not, I don't know, but he's certainly interested in the public good.

Yeah, I guess I mean, I didn't mean to suggest that we should just reduce everything back to a market. I think there are many possibilities opened up by a the ability to issue new, functionally to mark denominations of money in some form, and the ability to knit those together in the complex flow relationships that technologically crypto has opened up. But sociologically, the exploration is still I would argue quite scarce. It's not necessarily just that you know maybe if these things appear, alternative Protocol Guilds 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 just appear it's not like a market where you're buying a sandwich right? It's like a market where you're choosing what goods you want, what public goods you want to be funded, assuming that all of these Protocol Guilds are producing you know different protocols or other things like this. So I think that somewhat different, maybe it's more like sort of donating to different NGOs or something like this.

I guess, to me there's an interesting possibility where if we assume that people will continue to issue lots of new denominations of money with both different initial allocations and different flows over time, how do those interacting with this complex economic system craft their interactions in ways that support whatever it is that they want to support? And is there some kind of accountability flow that we can construct there?

To make that more concrete, let's imagine that they're just like lots of tokens, I have lots of tokens and I look at periodically who holds those tokens, what they're doing and where the new issuance is going and what it's doing and whether I agree with it or not, more or less. And then I change my parameters of interaction with the system accordingly. Like maybe if you pay it a token that, you I like what the Ethereum Foundation is doing with its Ether, so if you pay me an Ether, I give you a 0.1 % discount. Which seems like a very small thing, but over time this could kind of steer the system. But I don't think it has been thought about holistically from the monetary flow perspective or the like, what is the actual user interaction perspective. Crypto is mostly just still treated as an investment class. And when it's an investment class, it definitely doesn't have the systemic effect, right?

Trent (1:05:03)

One thing I just want to clarify is earlier, Chris, you said I assume there's something that Protocol Guild gives to donors. I just want to state that we don't, and this is kind of part of this accountability process. It's kind of just like a no-strings-attached contribution. For example, I have never spoken with you about what you want Ethereum to look like, and yet there is this funding grant. For listeners who have made it to this part of the episode or this podcast,

Christopher Goes (1:05:13)

Right, okay.

Hahaha

Trent (1:05:31)

Just wanted to be clear about that. No, no, it's okay.

Christopher Goes (1:05:32)

Sorry, my apologies.

Toby Shorin (1:05:36)

Respect the nerds who have made it to this part.

Trent (1:05:38)

Yeah, good job if you're listening.

Sam Hart (1:05:38)

Yeah.

Toby Shorin (1:05:41)

How do we, where do we want to go with this? Like how do we want to wrap this up?

Sam Hart (1:05:44)

Well, yeah, we're almost at end of time. We had a final set of questions, one or two questions, I think actually do kind of close this well.

The kind of mechanism design space that you described, Chris, it kind of assumes some kind of shared resource, although your framing of it is like Ethereum one, Ethereum two, Ethereum three. You could imagine those as completely distinct resources, but the...

Like our final question here is kind of like, well, how should we navigate that tension of a shared resource or a globally shared resource? A resource of like a certain size constituency? Like, is it important to be trying to put energy into creating like, you know, a global commons? Or at least a commons that has some reach? Or is localism where we should be trying to put our attention and energy and making those more kind of congruent with one another?

Like, I would almost say that like... This isn't 100 % true, but it's a good point of tension: Protocol Guild is trying to cast a relatively wide net around Ethereum and Ethereum L2s and there's a larger flavor of global commons. A lot of the Anoma project is, we're going to have some shared standards, but like, it's actually more, more a view on localism in some sense. So you've both kind of channeled your energies in slightly different like directions to like, to in service of a public good.

Christopher Goes (1:07:37)

I’m going to be contrary and say neither. I think the problem is institutional compositionality, which is the part that hasn't a that crypto hasn't quite got right, and that even the whole new institutional movement hasn't quite got right, which is how to compose institutions in a way such that, you know, A) maybe the original purpose is preserved and B) the right compromises are made. Maybe I would argue, not that localism, global or local institutions aren't helpful, but I think they're kind of clearly not meeting. Like there's clubs and then there's Ethereum. These things are so far away from each other, right? And almost, I mean, there are also lots of Ethereum meetups and stuff like this. Maybe they're like Ethereum clubs.

But there also seems to me to be kind of a gap in between, just from the perspective of scale, right? Like Ethereum's a big institution. There are lots of ETH holders. It's kind of a global protocol. And a club is sort of a little institution. And maybe you have like Megacorp clubs, which are somewhat bigger, but they tend to be very tied to the market, right? And I wonder if there's some mid-scale institutional design space that's not really being explored yet.

I’m not 100 % confident but that was my contrarian take.

Trent (1:08:58)

Yeah, I can just add to that. I think the gap between your local club and like you said, Ethereum, which in reality Ethereum is probably way down here still today and there's many other things in this zone. I think one reason that there's such a huge gap is kind of the accretive effects of network effects. And kind of going back to your idea of like Ethereum 1, Ethereum 2, Ethereum 3, like these different Protocol Guilds that are pursuing different visions, at the end of the day, they all collapse back into the same governance system. So you can have these kind of competing visions, but governance bandwidth or governance throughput is unfortunately single threaded. Like you have to make this decision at this point, release the network software releases and like there's no way getting around the practical limits of human time and you know, the time that stakeholders need to actually decide which decision tree to go with. And maybe this is just a practical limitation of distributed systems at scale.

I know people are now more and more talking about futarchy, and we should have these branching realities of different funding decisions. I'm still pretty skeptical about applying these in really technical domains. Not saying they'll never work. When Sam was talking about like, bringing in markets into these deliberative governance discussions. At the end of the day, there's still like a decision point that everybody sort of has to collapse to.

Christopher Goes (1:10:40)

Well, yea, I think though, to me, there's a question of like, what exactly must you agree on in order to achieve the kind of even institutional relationship that you want to achieve. And that's a question you can ask at the level of the protocol. I mean, to run a distributed consensus system like Ethereum consensus, you need to agree on actually a lot of things. Like you need to agree on a very exact protocol.

And if any one line of the very exact protocol is different, it's a long time since I read the Ethereum consensus papers, but for most of the lines, if that line is different, then you would no longer be able to come to agreement in the strict sense of “what is the state of this blockchain,” at block 10 million or whatever. I guess maybe the follow up question is like, what does coming to agreement on the state of a particular block mean for the institution and the kinds of agreements that we want? Ultimately the block is a block. It has some numbers, right? And those numbers only matter as they represent things in the real world. And the thing that we want to track are like agreements in the real world, which are somehow, you know, represented in this syntactical way.

So I would also want to ask the question of: through that mediating lens, can we almost minimize or be very precise about what it is that we need to agree on at these different levels and thus reduce the pressure, reduce this bottleneck pressure, if you have, no matter how sophisticated the social consensus mechanism you have? If there's one bottleneck and everyone needs to agree to all of these things or none of these things, then it sort of limits freedom vis-a-vis a system where you could pick and choose more precisely.

Sam Hart (1:12:32)

Maybe to close, so this New Institutions like chapter in the book, it kind of represents the early stages of Other Internet, although it's been a throughline, you know, throughout Other Internet's history. And I think can maybe speak for all of us that to some extent it represents a phase in our personal development where we got into the industry through kind of youthful enthusiasm and naivete of, “we can do something here.” I wonder if you had to kind of give a word of advice to someone who had that same kind of enthusiasm today? What is the one sentence that you would give them? Where should you best direct your energies?

Trent (1:13:29)

I hope the hosts have some pre-writings.

Toby Shorin (1:13:33)

Now we're going to make Laura drop knowledge bombs on you now. Give everyone a wisdom nuke.

Christopher Goes (1:13:53)

That's a very hard question. One sentence. mean, I think a thing that I wished that I had done earlier was, you know, I was interested in technological systems for socio-political reasons. And I read a lot about the technology and not a lot about sociology or political theory. I mean, I read a little bit, but I didn't have a good understanding of how, say, the technical details of a protocol and the social functionality of a complex social system could or should or might relate to one another. My understanding was blurry. And I think as a result of having that blurry understanding, I made the same mistake that I think other people made. I ascribed too much import to the technology.

I was optimistic about the ability to embed sociological values in some technological design choice. And I'd like to think that over the years I've arrived at a more precise understanding of what that boundary actually is. And I think that's true still of people entering the industry, often they're coming at this from maybe more of the technical background.

Well, either they're coming at this from more of the technical background and they might have blinders with regards to histories of social systems, or they're coming at this from the social systems background and they don't have quite enough understanding of how the technology actually works to distinguish the things that sound good from the things that are possible. And I think you really must be able to synthesize both in order to achieve new institutional design that sticks.

Trent (1:15:33)

Yes. Okay. I'm going to extend that again from the applied perspective. And one of the things I've seen over the years, again, specific to my experience, is that sometimes there's a tendency for people to anchor too much to the mechanism design. Kind of exactly what you're saying of like, if only I have this perfect technical unlock. But what I've seen is like, not to downplay it too much, but the design of the mechanism is almost secondary to the social and political infrastructure around it. So over the years, we've seen many mechanisms like quadratic funding, retroPGF, and now there are things like deep funding or using AI agents to ascribe value.

As it relates to like finding something to work on and how you shape your work, I sometimes see people focus too much on the allocation mechanism or the mechanism itself as being like, this will be the huge unlock that suddenly funds all public goods in perpetuity. When in reality, it's finding the right niche or the right level of abstraction to operate at. And that is a much more productive exploration. Just because you have a perfect consensus mechanism doesn't mean your chain is going to be successful; just because you have the perfect allocation mechanism doesn't mean that you will suddenly solve public goods funding. So for anybody new I would say: find the the abstraction layer that is missing this particular construction.

The final reference of Protocol Guild is that we created the thing, and only like two years later, we invented this thing called the 1 % Pledge, which as the name suggests, is 1 % of token supply. And before we even announced the blog post, we already had a project come to us and say, hey, we want to do this thing. And historically, this had never happened on that scale, because all of a sudden, there was a vehicle which could accept this funding. It operated at the scale of the commons, or at least a big approximation of it.

This was late in funding that would have never ever gone to Consensys or Paradigm or the Ethereum Foundation because they only represent small parts of what Ethereum is more broadly. And so when we designed this meta organization on top of all these other groups that represented the individual and took into account the breadth of Ethereum development, all of a sudden this funding appeared. So hopefully that's helpful for anybody getting started.

Toby Shorin (1:18:12)

Do we have Other Internet answers to this question too?

Sam Hart (1:18:17)

Yeah, yeah, we do. mean, the one of the biggest learnings of the organization is echoed in what you're both saying. Like there was a big emphasis on technological determinism, on mechanism design, on “DAO tools” as another way to name the whole category. and we were guilty of this too. We we participate in a lot of these things, helped think through a lot of these things, and the amount of time and energy spent on, on like new mechanisms is just like versus actually asking people and finding a constituency and understanding their needs. Institutions I think are built up from people first, thinking through: What are they doing? What is the mode of behavior that they have in common? And how do we want to enhance that? There's just like very little thinking from that perspective. And so that was kind of the shift that the organization made, I would say, trying to advocate for that kind of groundwork and dialogue happening first and then bringing tools in to satisfy those needs and enhance the kind of coordination or interaction within that community.

Laura (1:19:46)

Yeah, second that, like all you just said definitely deeply resonates with the journey of Other Internet. Doing some of the first studies of the social dynamics around the mechanisms was quite exotic, I guess, at the time. But we're seeing now that there's perhaps more need for these types of work. Let's not build tools or institutions in a vacuum, but actually first talk to the people that we want to build these things for and with.

Toby Shorin (1:20:26)

One more to offer that's somewhat in a different vein, and I think is more to the tune of the “discretionary” conversation we were having earlier. I think this is a win. This is a positive learning from the Other Internet experience, which is: large new bodies of funding like crypto and tech in general have a much more restricted set of concerns than the space of the public, or what was previously considered the public. And if you can build trust and credibility, it is possible to be a broker between those areas. Other Internet certainly did that successfully. I think Protocol Guild has also managed to do that within a slightly more narrow confine.

That’s less about the specific research you do and the mechanisms you build, but like more about how you go about building a reputation and building credibility within these wannabe new institutions that have a lot of capital and resources. If you can do that, then it is possible to like use your taste-making and your discretion to like divert and like route capital to things that are also worthy and maybe not being considered viable by those kinds of organizations.

Christopher Goes (1:22:02)

Well, I think it's amazing that you're releasing a book. I'm glad that this history will be chronicled for the future to learn from.

Trent (1:22:11)

Is it physical?

Sam Hart (1:22:11)

Yeah, it's a physical book. Maybe too physical. It's what? Six hundred and thirty pages or something? It got a little out of hand. I mean, it's got a lot of the previously published essays, a bunch of kind of internal writings to to one another.

Trent (1:22:14)

Wow. Awesome.

Christopher Goes (1:22:21)

Wow.

Sam Hart (1:22:37)

Yeah, I mean, you both, Trent and Chris, like you were definitely like a big part of the thinking of Other Internet and, you know, influenced us a lot.

Christopher Goes (1:22:48)

Do you consider this book a funeral?

Toby Shorin (1:22:53)

Have you seen the cover?

Christopher Goes (1:22:57)

No, no.

Toby Shorin (1:22:59)

It's got tombstone energy, let's say that. You know, I got an email from Laurel a few days ago. Obviously Laurel is a genius and like can just see these things intuitively. And like the first line in the email was like, “congrats on the book. I know you wanted to publish one. It kind of reminds me of a tombstone!”

Sam Hart (1:23:01)

Yeah, it's a death and rebirth. One of the reasons that I asked this question at the end was we want to put more of our attention into helping younger people start their own version of Other Internet, or whatever their flavor is. Not called Other Internet, but just the next generation of institutions. Understanding how to grow up in an ecosystem like this, how to navigate and make yourself legible or not. So it's kind of a new chapter, not an end, but yeah, just a different kind of role that we wanna play.

Trent (1:23:59)

I think the other answer is to really lean into it and just have a hand busting through the soil on the cover. The rebirth is there.

Sam Hart (1:24:08)

Yeah, that'll do it.

Toby Shorin (1:24:09)

Zombie institutions, that's our next essay.

Trent (1:24:11)

I know the zombie is maybe not the best association, but…

Sam Hart (1:24:18)

Well, this is wonderful. It's always so to talk to you both and to have you both in same room is a treat.

Toby Shorin (1:24:19)

Yeah, I think we got some net new ideas out of this too. This is good thinking, y'all.

Trent (1:24:24)

Thank you.

Laura (1:24:32)

Thank you.

Trent (1:24:33)

Thanks for having us. It was a lot of fun.

Christopher Goes (1:24:34)

I enjoyed this a lot. Thank you for hosting.

Sam Hart (1:24:38)

Thank you all.

Laura (1:24:39)

Thank you all.

What is Other Internet? A research organization? A learning institution? A time machine? A boundary object? We’ve embedded each of these powerful potential energies into our new book, Other Internet 2018–2024, out on Metalabel now.

When we first started working on this project, we conceived of the book as an anthology of Other Internet’s work over the last 6 years. We’ve been through many stages as an organization, and this easily could have been an enormous tome. Actually, it is an enormous tome. Our design and editing team asked us to put together a timeline documenting big events in in OI’s history.

We started with an internal timeline, beginning when Toby and Darren incorporated Other Internet, and passing through a lengthy Squad Era and a Full Time Staff Era. As we reflect on these, we got interested in how the stages of our evolution related to macro events, and how our essays were situated in their own cultural moments. The process of creating this external timeline reminded us of the eventful dramas of the Web3 world, but also the social, political, and economic shifts of the last decade. And it helped us see our place in the changing existential narratives of this period.

The timeline also helped us organize the material of the book around 3 critical themes.

6 years ago, was a moment of peak ambition to create New Institutions, and the hope that technology-driven organzations could deliver us from the crises of capitalism. Now that desire has transubstantiated into enthusiasm for new religions and Networked Spirituality. In the meantime, institutional ambition has been scoped down to networked forms of group agency which really kicked off during the pandemic: group chats, local networks of care, and other forms of Squad Energy.

These 3 themes - new institutions, squad energy, and networked spirituality - have been present in nearly all of OI’s work. They also nicely to correlate to the research mandates of the 501(c)(3) we set up in 2023, focusing on networked instututions, production, and spirituality.

When we consider the start of the ICO boom and reflect on where we are culturally, the difference is clear. We really are in a different era now:

• from “worlding” to “touching grass” in the ruined landscape of worlds

• from “new institutions” to the collapse of hope in politics (we date this to the Biden-Trump debate of summer 2024)

• from “utopian conspiracy” (the tagline of our sister organization Trust) to actual conspiracies (antivax, astroturfed political polarization, Ukraine, Covid lab leak, coverup of Biden senility)

• from ICO ponzis to real ponzis (FTX, Trumpcoin)

• from universalism (Bratton, accelerationism, social media) to localism (nationalism, ethnocentrism, hyperlocality)

• from software technology to bodies as the site of utopian visions

• from technology “space” and crypto “space” (disembodied discourses) to focus on “place” (locality, presence, couture software, pop-up cities)]

• from yield farmers to actual farmers 👩‍🌾

• from belief in a technosingularity god to belief in actual god

This timeline, woven between each essay in the text, evokes how this cultural evolution happened and documents individual moments within the shifting vibe.

Other Internet Book Tour

Recently we did two events that worked with the timeline. The first was at the recent Funding the Commons in San Francisco, and the second was with Protein, who asked us to facilitate an online workshop in support of our book launch. We had a lot of fun meeting folks in the Protein community and working with them to create their own “other internet” maps.

If you’re part of a podcast or media organization, a cultural institution, bookstore, or crypto-native org interested who might like to host Other Internet for a workshop of this kind, please get in touch! Toby, Laura, and Sam are available for a “digital tour” in the coming months, and we are hatching plans for a physical tour sometime during the summer.

Get the Book!

Book pre-orders are now available on Metalabel. The book is being proofed as we write, and should be shipped internationally sometime in June.

We’re particularly interested in making the book available to the next generation of young cultural researchers who want to start their own squad/digital institution. We’d love to work with educators and people running interesting spaces to make the book accessible! Email info@otherinter.net and let’s chat.

Preorder Now

It’s been a while… First of all, thank you for your patience 🙏 The time away wasn’t planned to stretch quite this long, but it’s been for a good reason—we are writing a book!

Since its origins, Other Internet has been a part of a subculture we’ve come to think of as the “kids-that-grew-up-on-crypto”. We, and you, are part of the micro-generation that was shaped by the rise of blockchain technology, its ideals, its shortcomings, and its cycles of experimentation. We’ve always felt it would be good to document our journey as a resource for others, and with this anthology we want to give a snapshot of that time, together with our learnings through it. The publication comprises our essays, published in print for the first time, along with previously unpublished material, and newly commissioned writings and interviews with squad members and friends.

Edited by Guy Mackinnon-Little and designed by Leïth Benkhedda, it traces Other Internet’s development from its early essays, through our experiments in squad-based organizing and internal peer-education formats, to our commercial engagements with crypto protocols. The text as a whole is a deep cut into the recent history of the crypto ecosystem and its lore, a reflection of the ideas and patterns it has generated, and a presentation of lessons learned by our group of cultural technologists and writers.

The book is meant to offer a snapshot of the onset of the blockchain era, while giving a window into what it was like to be a part of a cultural research organization at a pivotal moment during the emergence of a new internet technology. We share some of our tribulations and learnings, our internal organizational experiments, and bring closure to this chapter of internet history to make way for the next generation.

What’s happened so far?

First we found our wonderful editor, Guy Mackinnon-Little, and our brilliant designer, Leïth Benkhedda, who are helping us translate Other Internet into book form. We decided to partner with Metalabel to release the book, and are excited to be included in their seasonal collection alongside many of our friends and favorite artists.

Sam, Toby, and Laura organized all the material Other Internet has ever published in the past 6 years — from our essays and commercial engagements with protocols, to public talks, art collaborations, and residency program — and previously unpublished material, like Learning Garden, our internal peer education experiment.

Guy faced the arduous task of reading all this material and cutting it down to a selection of essays reflecting the breadth and depth of Other Internet’s contributions to the space. It was important to us to demonstrate the irreverent nature of our collective energy, but also our impact. Other Internet Technologies™ have penetrated all kinds of organizations across many protocol ecosystems.

We managed to do this by organizing the texts according to three thematic eras that track the evolution of the crypto narrative as well as how we came to understand our internal discourse: New Institutions, Squad Energy, and Networked Spirituality.

Toby, Laura and Sam have written three new mini essays that summarize how those key themes run through all of Other Internet. We also received wonderful new contributions from squadmates Kei Kreutler and Aaron Z. Lewis, and long-time friend of Other Internet, Nadia Asparouhova.

Leïth is now in the process of finalizing the layout before it’s sent off to the printer. It’s been so rewarding seeing the all the pieces finally come together into a (quite substantial) book!

With the evolution of Web3, Other Internet is also evolving — and for us evolving doesn’t necessarily mean ‘scaling up.’ At Other Internet we have always believed that organizations have a natural lifecycle, that their best parts should be used as compost for the seeds for future endeavors. As the organization is finding its new shape, negotiating members’ nascent and long-standing interests with our collective desire to foster new generations of independent research, this book is a way for us to organize and share the knowledge we’ve created, and offer a blueprint for the next generations of Other Internets to come.

Expect more updates from us soon, but in the meantime, get hyped. We have a monster of a book tour planned. You won’t hear the end of us. Yatú Espinosa once described Other Internet as a political party, and you’re about to see us canvassing. We’re knocking on every door. In this moment of maximum pain and maximum uncertainty, wherever there is a stronghold of Squad Energy—we will be there.

🔥,

Sam, Laura, and Toby

https://otherinter.net/research/three-body-problem/

Discuss this article on the Summer of Protocols forum: https://forum.summerofprotocols.com/t/rotw-cryptos-three-body-problem/52

What follows is a brief preamble for this essay—or a post-amble, if you’ve read it already. It explains a bit about how we came to our ideas and the twists and turns the project took over the last two years. To read the essay itself just click above.

In March of 2022, we started to think about whether it was finally time to write “our DAO piece.” Sam was deep into his tenure at Interchain Foundation, wrangling the largest blockchain ecosystem outside of Ethereum.1. Laura and I had recently begun governance work on a grant from Uniswap. And as a trio, we had just finished up a project with artist Hito Steyerl on remaking public arts organizations. With all this top of mind, we began to explore one of the fundamental premises of crypto: its potential for bringing new types of institutions into being.

The question of the “new institution” has been in the spirit of our work since the beginning. Our first essays, Headless Brands and Market-Protocol Fit, discussed the unique institutional properties of Bitcoin and amorphous cryptonetworks. In Squad Wealth, we depicted an internet-native proto-institution in our caricature of ragtag vibing group chats. And an important point of our essay Positive Sum Worlds was that “public goods are enacted by social institutions that reproduce patterns of behavior in the public interest.” In 2022, in a moment when the narratives of the last bull run had exhausted themselves, it seemed an auspicious time to tackle the “crypto institution” in a more serious way.

This effort led us to pursue a more traditional line of inquiry to our past work—an independent study in statecraft and power. For the last two years, we’ve submerged ourselves in institutional thought both classical and modern, from legal theory to political philosophy, and have tried on and invented all sorts of frameworks. None of these, however, gave us a satisfying answer to the question we started with: “just what sort of institutions are crypto protocols?” We’ll leave our findings for the essay itself. But here are a few reflections on the stakes and importance of this question.2

Some people compare blockchains to states. Others have it that blockchains are more like corporations. Still others say that blockchains are an entirely new way of coordinating people. These competing claims are not just an intellectual debate for crypto enthusiasts; they represent three different ideas about how to build blockchain projects, what they are for, and what values they should uphold. The conflict between these three “institutional traditions” has already had enormous consequences for how and what protocol designers and entrepeneurs build in the crypto space. Consider a small sampling of these different modes of thought.

Blockchain advocates have long promised that cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies like smart contracts would provide non-extractive, incorruptible alternatives to legacy institutions. Novel mechanisms, such as automated incentives, have been celebrated as foundational to new types of “autonomous organizations.” The overuse of incentives, however, has led to the launch of dozens if not hundreds of languishing copycat networks and vacant “infrastructure projects.”

Yet all the while, plenty of voices have stubbornly pointed out protocols’ similarity to corporations. Treasuries full of native tokens, says DeFi luminary Hasu, are more like unissued shares than assets, and heavy venture investment into crypto has indeed tended to create further equivalence between tokens and equity. Crypto “projects”—an industry term selected to avoid use of the term “company”—have, with a few notable exceptions, largely been operated by small teams, just like any other startup.

Finally, those who think of blockchains as essentially political institutions have had an equally large impact. Protocols engage in “public goods” funding, and the rhetoric of democratic participation has been influential on direct voting models and surprise token airdrops. In this tradition, one also finds projects like Bitnation, Aragon Court, Nation3, CityDAO, and Balaji Srinivasen’s Network State—attempts to bootstrap new civic communities on top of crypto infrastructure. The crypto-political rhetoric has no doubt been effective in recruiting both altruistically minded and libertarian supporters, but has demonstrated the fewest accomplishments of any of these three visions.

These 3 different strands of institutional thought leave us with a confused crypto lexicon. So what, then, was a DAO? They weren’t something new altogether, but an incoherent mixture of these forms. DAOs were ugly chimeras, entities trying to hold to state-like principles of public service while in practice being dominated by financial incentives and the politics of corporate governance.3

It is our opinion that without clearly parsing out these institutional frameworks, cryptocurrency technologies will continue to be viewed with bewilderment and suspicion by outsiders. Insiders need clarity as well—we’ll keep encountering problems until better mental models are reached. In those frothy market moments where capital inflows to crypto assets exceed outflows, exuberance about crypto’s inevitable success drowns out ambiguity around basic institutional questions such as sustainability and member rules. In the bear market these institutional design problems come to the fore.

States, corporations, cooperatives, platforms—each has its own traditions, modes of organizing, and privileged parties. It is the choice of institutional framework that will determine how history sees this technology.

In future ambles, we’d like to take you through how our thinking evolved. We explored too many frameworks to cover here, from Hannah Arendt’s philosophy of violence and power, the competing state formation theories of Weber, Schmidt, and Graeber, institutional competition and Herman Kahn’s nuclear deterrence theory, even pirate institutions and self-regulation in international waters.

These frameworks did not add up to a Grand Unified Theory of the protocol-as-institution. The fruits of our labor, Crypto’s Three Body Problem, relied mostly on Lawrence Lessig’s influential theory of different regulatory forces. We wrote about 6 drafts of different pieces, and this is the one we went with. We believe that our essay exposes something fundamental about crypto protocols that hasn’t yet been learned—that needs to be learned by protocol designers and builders. But we uncovered other mental models with equally important lessons.

Inasmuch as these different theories reveal how inappropriate comparisons between protocols and nation states are, they also show the ways in which crypto’s behavioral regulation capabilities are indeed powerful. Exploring these frameworks can show us the “source code”—and the consequences—of our own choice of institutional metaphors.

Read the essay, or join discussion on the Summer of Protocols forum.

1. Introducing Web3 Work

2. Making DAOs work: Literature review on DAOs and labor

3. Web3 Work research report: Findings from our ethnography with DAO contributors

Authors: Laura Lotti, Nick Houde, and Tara Merk.

To conclude our research project investigating web3 as a work environment, at the end of July 2023 we hosted Web3 Work Forum—a series of three encounters with aligned individuals and organizations in the ecosystem. We shared the findings from our ethnography with DAO contributors, and workshopped ideas to address contributors’ requirements for financial stability, psychosocial wellbeing and regulatory clarity.

Today we are happy to finally share the outcome of those sessions: a paper investigating the design and deployment of solidarity primitives for web3 social security through on-chain and off-chain mechanisms.

Abstract

This paper presents a preliminary exploration of the design and deployment of solidarity primitives for web3 social security, based on the insights generated during Other Internet’s Web3 Work Forum held in July 2023. The paper proposes a modular framework to develop solidarity primitives addressing the three dimensions of security for DAO contributors: psychosocial stability, financial stability and regulatory clarity. Additionally, it outlines a range of both on-chain and off-chain mechanisms and improvement proposals specific to each dimension. Lastly, it discusses current challenges to implementation.

📎  Read our paper here 📎

Since we’ve started this research project, many DAOs have died—and we helped commemorate their existence and learnings at Schelling Point during Berlin Blockchain Week. Still, the vision of community-led digital collectives remains strong. We hope that the next generation of protocol organizations emerging from the ashes of our dead DAOs will benefit from these insights, contributing to make web3 a viable and legitimate work environment through novel forms of institutional support for digital workers.

We are grateful to the participants of Web3 Work Forum for their insights and ideas, without which this paper would have not been possible. Thanks to: Alexa Lombardo (Gitcoin), Anja Blaj (European Crypto Initiative), Bianca Kremer (Wharton), Cheeky Gorilla (Protocol Guild), Chris Wray (COALA), Connor Spelliscy (Decentralization Research Collective), Eli Zeger (Exit to Community Collective), Fredrik Svantes (Protocol Guild), Hazel Devjani (DAOstar), Isaac Patka (Shield3), James He (Protocol Guild), Joshua Dávila (Breadchain Cooperative), Joshua Tan (Metagov/DAOstar), Kyler Wandler (Decentralization Research Collective), Marina Markezic (European Crypto Initiative), Mario Laul (Placeholder), Mehdi Aouadi (Protocol Guild), Morshed Mannan (European University Institute/BlockchainGov), Rich O’Grady (Chinwags), Scott Moore (Gitcoin), Tina He (Station), Trenton Van Epps (Protocol Guild), Vyara Savova (European Crypto Initiative). Any errors or misinterpretations are, of course, entirely ours.

Authors: Laura Lotti, Nick Houde, and Tara Merk

A Web3 Workers’ Inquiry

Contrary to previous research, limited to surveys or single protocols, this study aimed for an ecosystemic scope, taking the individual DAO contributor as the unit of analysis in order to identify common desires, challenges and aspirations across different typologies of DAOs. 

Our research was informed by the method of workers’ inquiry, which aims to generate knowledge about labor, capital and power relations from the perspective of the workers themselves. Through this approach, we wanted to:

• probe into the present and futures of work through DAOs from the contributor’s perspective; 

• identify the affordances of the different institutional logics that are implicit in the several metaphors that are used to describe DAOs (whether companies, or coops, or “network states”, and so on); 

• understand what job security means in the DAO context as it models itself around these existing organizational forms, but also what is novel about it.

We conducted 1-hour long online interviews with 21 contributors, as well as a 3-hour in person workshop with 17 DAO contributors. Together, the contributors represented over 50 different DAOs in the Ethereum ecosystem, equally distributed between infrastructure, service, and social DAOs. Among the people that replied to our open call, we privileged full time contributors (40+ hours a week) who have been in the ecosystem for over 2 years (with ⅓ of interviewees actually involved for over 5 years).

We conducted a diagramming exercise asking contributors to rank how they understand their role and the purpose of their DAOs in comparison to traditional organizational archetypes, and asked semi-structured questions about each contributor's motivations, their mundane day-to-day work life, and their needs and aspirations. Our main insights are summarized below. 

👉 For a more in-depth analysis of our findings and recommendations, read our full report here.

Insight #1: Both “DAO” and “DAO contributor” are multifaceted concepts, combining diverse roles and institutional primitives in novel ways 

• "DAO contributor" is a diverse role, taking many different shapes depending on context. Our diagramming exercise showed how the role of contributor combines aspects of being a learner, freelancer, open-source contributor, volunteer, politician, and even fan.

• DAOs are hybrid organizational contexts combining diverse organizational logics. Our diagramming exercise showed how different DAOs simultaneously encompass logics of other organizational contexts such as service providers, startups, coops, states, or educational organizations.

Insight #2: DAOs do not represent a single future of work but offer a container for a diversity of organizational experiments 

The interviews and focus group surfaced an archetypical DAO contributor journey across 4 different socio-technical scenarios for DAO work, which vary according to the organizational purpose and people’s temporal horizon of engagement. These 4 scenarios also correspond to different organizational logics.

• The journey typically starts with a desire for collaboration as the key motivating factor (which reflects dynamics in fandoms and educational organizations).

• It evolves through impact or “special purpose orgs” (i.e. labels, drops, governance projects) that use business logic to produce impact and systemic change. 

• As the engagement becomes more durational, the scenarios become more complex: freelancing 3.0 reflects the pleasures and pains of working as a remote contractor for companies or startups, but with the added burden of a lack of clear guidelines about compliance and regulations.

• And lastly, the vision of DAOs as mutualist infrastructures is still one of the core aspirations for contributors to stay involved in the space.

These scenarios also correspond to specific contributors’ expectations and needs, and addressing them at each step is key to move people along the journey, retain talent, and make web3 a viable and legitimate alternative to traditional work cultures. We describe each of these scenarios and corresponding challenges below.

Insight #3: Different socio-technical scenarios of the DAO contributor journey require organizations to focus on distinct areas of improvement

I. DAOs as an excuse for collaboration

The pleasures and pains of collaboration. While many in web3 are often portrayed as being “in it for the tech”, we found that building meaningful relationships, working alongside smart and aligned people, and exploring individual interests in a collaborative environment are the core motivating factors across all DAO contributors.

On the other hand, contributors face challenges at the level of inadequate and still impractical technical structures, that often conceal informal and opaque political structure and hierarchies. This is one of the key reasons why people lose interest and drop out.

II. DAOs as impact machines

Impact beyond technical innovation. DAOs and web3 are sometimes portrayed as a field inhabited by nihilistic degens. Nevertheless, we found that a lot of people join because of the desire to generate impact and systemic change and they see DAOs as a means to achieve that. 

We also found that over half of the people we talked to see a tension between their individual sense of purpose and the unclear and often opaque sense of purpose of their organizations, which led some to become disillusioned.

III. DAOs as freelancing 3.0

This is where we found the most tensions because this is the scenario that reflects the situation that most of our interviewees were experiencing. 

Individual brand vs. collective action. Contrary to the narrative of DAOs as new structures for collective action, the interviewees that had been working in web3 for longer faced the same challenges as freelancers with the added burden of regulatory compliance. DAO work is highly individualized and even more precarious than traditional freelancing so that it becomes challenging to navigate the boundaries between individual self-interest and collective benefit. 

Self-determination vs. self-exploitation. DAO contributors enjoy the sense of self-determination and flexibility that DAOs afford. However, without specific working hours/days nor clear outlines for what is expected from them, and coupled with the always-online lifestyle, many reported that they were prone to overworking and burnout; or what one interviewee called "contributor extractable value: the amount of free labor you can get from a contributor."

Transparent work processes vs. transparent technologies. Another issue that contributes to burnout and exhaustion is the lack of transparency when it comes to work processes, and the information asymmetries between contributors and former core teams. These issues cannot be addressed solely by transparent technology.

Predictable compensation in unpredictable environments. In contrast to the myth that DAO work is highly lucrative, we found that contributors are well aware of getting paid less than traditional tech jobs, but justify that with the wealth of intangible value they gain in terms of learnings, collaborations, and network. These, however, have not been enough to sustain engagement through market cycles. Contributors don’t need to get paid more, they just want to get paid in a more predictable manner.

Ownership ≠ equity. Relatedly, while the myth is that DAOs are owned by their contributors through tokens, our interviewees discussed their sense of ownership primarily in terms of work process (mentioning concepts such as reputation, pride, and impact) and not in terms of number of tokens owned. Anecdotally, two interviewees - among those that have been involved in DAOs for longer - said they refuse to get paid in DAO tokens and if they did they would take their engagement as volunteering.

IV. DAOs as mutualist infrastructures

DAOs vs trad orgs. Moving onto the last and more speculative scenario, we found that the promise of DAOs to bring about a more equitable future through community participation hasn’t exhausted its appeal. For the majority of the participants, this is the key reason why they are still involved despite the challenges. 

However, DAOs suffer a problem of definition that at times sets the wrong expectations, especially when it comes to community. What makes real DAOs unique - for the contributors we talked to - is the community aspect, which is also what causes the most tensions due to the lack of clear conflict resolution processes. As one interviewee said, “either you find ways to solve conflict or you can only ragequit.”

Org promiscuity vs ecosystem longevity. Lastly we found that, while DAOs are often portrayed as immutable organizations that can last forever, interviewees had widely different aspirations for the longevity of their orgs. Several contributors explicitly advocated for time-bound DAOs,  and none of them recommended working for a single DAO full time because it reproduces “toxic startup dynamics,” as one interviewee put it. However, most of the contributors expressed a desire to stay involved in the space. 

The challenge is cultivating an environment where people can participate in multiple, perhaps time-bound organizations, while retaining the collective memory to enable the ecosystem to operate and adapt in the long term.

Insight #4: Strengthening security enhances the DAO contributor experience across different scenarios. Security is also a core mechanism for building legitimacy and longevity of web3 as a whole 

From the literature review and the conversations we had, we identified the meaning of security for DAO contributors as a three-dimensional concept consisting of: psycho-social stability, financial and material security, and regulatory clarity.

Different mechanisms strengthen different aspects of security overall. 

1. Alliances build economies of scale and help to strengthen material / financial stability.

2. Bridges and anchors are intermediary tooling and organizational interfaces that enhance regulatory clarity.

3. Strong norms build psycho-social wellbeing and stability. 

🚨Get the full download on our findings and recommendations by reading our insights deck here!

At the end of July we ran Web3 Work Forum, a three-part event with aligned organizations and experts to preview our findings and brainstorm possible solutions toward the creation of solidarity primitives for web3. Each of the session was focused on developing security mechanisms for DAO contributors from the perspectives we’ve identified: 

• psychosocial stability through social norms and occasions for IRL encounters beyond conferences;

• financial security through on-chain mechanisms enabling cross-protocol alliances for funding and resource distribution;

• regulatory clarity through advocacy and interfaces with existing regulations.

In the next and last post in this series, we’ll publish the outcome of these sessions.

Authors: Laura Lotti, Nick Houde, Tara Merk

We began our inquiry in the web3 work environment with an extensive literature review comprising three phases:

• In the first round, we focused on academic and industry analyses of blockchains, DAOs and work in Web3 aiming to get a comprehensive overview of existing studies and understandings of DAOs as a work environment; 

• In the second round we mapped the fragmented landscape of DAO work to identify the primary elements that make up the human, organizational, conceptual and technical dimensions of this ecosystem and looked at literature in organization and management sciences, and institutional analysis for theoretical frameworks that would enable us to engage with the complexities of DAOs; 

• Lastly in the third round, we explored historical and contemporary non-DAO analogs for workers’ organizing that may provide useful models to think about “social security” in web3 context. 

You can find our full annotated literature review here. Below we discuss the key insights from each phase that form the point of departure for our ethnographic research.

1. What is DAO work?

What does it mean to work for a DAO? To begin making sense of this complex phenomenon we drew on existing literature, anecdotal evidence, and conversations with DAO leaders and operators to model what constitutes DAO work and how we might go about framing subsequent ethnographic research down the line. Our review included academic articles on DAO labor and protocol related research, crypto news articles, blog posts, industry surveys and reports, and painstakingly combing through various DAO governance forums to identify relevant discussions and proposals. In doing so, we set out to answer the question: Are DAOs really the future of work? Or are they just a glorified form of gig labor? 

Indeed, DAOs have been celebrated as “the future of work” due to their flexible organizational environment based on open membership and collective ownership via tokens (Wilser 2022, Salmond 2022, Jesuthasan and Zarkadakis 2022). But as the multitude of existing DAOs demonstrate, there’s not just one future of work inlaid in the idea of DAOs. From large-scale token-mediated protocols to human-centric organizations more akin to companies with on-chain elements, this organizational framework is being deployed in wildly different ways. 

Furthermore, as the space keeps evolving, the range of work that happens within DAOs is very diverse in both content (from code, to administration, community management, design, decision making, etc.) and form (e.g. bounties, project, full-time employment). For instance the Gitcon and Bankless survey of 2021 highlights that the majority of DAO work has to do with “keeping the lights on” (including activities such as community management, operations, marketing and governance), countervailing the early narrative of blockchain as an environment primarily inhabited by cypherpunks and open source developers. 

In short, just as the creator economy has turned every piece of media into “content,” DAOs have turned any type of work into “contributions,” often without a critical understanding of what this flattening out implies. Because of this, mapping the experience of contributing to DAOs is becoming increasingly crucial for understanding how and in which way DAOs could or should impact the future of work for the better.

An illustration of what collapsing this diverse work environment to “DAOs”, “Contributors” and “Contributions” does, that is heavily inspired by previous work in the “After the Creator Economy” zine.

Since the “DAO boom” of 2021, several other initiatives have started to analyze the working conditions of operators and contributors to the web3 ecosystem. Beyond the already mentioned Gitcoin/Bankless (2021) survey, Tally (2022) and ValuesIndex (2022) report that core challenges faced by DAO contributors are: unstable compensation (especially for non-technical skills), difficulties in navigating a decentralized work environment, and unclear on- and off-boarding issues, amongst others. MakerSES’s research in decentralized workforce (2022), on the other hand, focuses on the issue of technical talent retention through market cycles, highlighting that while vision and community play a key role in attracting people to the ecosystem, the lack of clarity around how to contribute and the complexities of this novel work environment are some of the key factors that lead people to leave the space.

These online surveys are a great tool to gain a high level understanding of the major issues that DAO contributors face. However they suffer a few limitations. First, most surveys don't distinguish between the different types of contributors (e.g. employed by the DAO vs hobbyist contributor vs freelancer) with respect to the contribution models of a specific DAO (how its value flows). Second, they do not allow for in-depth conversation that can sensitize us to the assumptions about how contributions, motivation, and value operate in this unique terrain. Third, and most importantly, surveys do not open a space for discovery of what mechanisms and working models are missing, such as social security or welfare mechanisms that would offer different forms of incentives to contributors than compensation alone, making DAO contribution a viable long term option for work. In other words, these surveys confirm a few assumptions about the overall state of DAOs but they do not provide actionable findings.

2. Organizational archetypes and the complex environment of DAO contributors

Throughout our initial review, we recognized that different articles invoked a variety of concepts, images, and metaphors relating both to DAO contributors and DAOs as organizations, as well as a variety of tools and technologies that mediate the relationships between them. 

We drew on situational mapping (Clarke 2011) to begin making sense of the complexities of the DAO work environment. We mapped out the human, organizational, discursive/conceptual, and technological elements that make up the DAO landscape. Beyond the array of tools and roles, a large part of the mapping involved the vast, and often conflicting, ideological, and discursive ecology around DAOs. Unlike more defined structures for working, DAOs present the unique challenge of combining web3 technologies with the organizational models and discursive elements of firms, start-ups, mutualist organizations, funds, educational institutions, or even fan clubs. Situational mapping helps us see how, why and when these more defined frameworks for work can be used as analog reference points for DAOs. Through this process, we came to the conclusion that in order to approach the study of DAO contributor experience, we need to address a more fundamental question: how can we most effectively frame the web3 work environment without missing any of the richness and diversity of its dimensions?

So we mapped, and mapped and mapped until we got to a somewhat coherent picture of the DAO landscape.

In academic literature token-mediated protocols have been discussed as an example of fluid organizations — that is, organizations “characterized by continually changing templates of boundaries, decision-making, and task and role allocation” (Schirrmacher et al. 2021). But as our “messy” situational mapping makes clear, DAOs are not only characterized by fluid structure. They are also examples of hybrid organizations, which combine multiple identities, forms, and institutional logics (Battilana et al. 2017) under a single organizational umbrella. While hybrid organizations have been studied primarily in the context of private-public partnerships (Jay 2012, Smith and Besharov 2017, Bogenhold and Klinglmair 2016), this framework fits DAOs well.

DAOs can be seen as hybrid organizations because, beyond the strictly defined logic of the protocol, they often do not have a single, clearly defined, institutional logic. Rather, they host a multiplicity of competing and conflicting narratives and institutional logics that come from the demands from the varied stakeholders: the token holders (“number go up”), the contributors and core team members (compensation and work environment, not going to jail), the discourse and self-fulfilling mythology of the space (“decentralization” etc.), public perception (“public goods”, “democratic decision making”), and finally regulatory scrutiny and societal improvements (legitimization, actual public goods etc.). These overlapping and at times conflicting social imaginaries have previously been researched at the protocol layer (Swartz 2018, Brody & Couture 2021, Dylan-Ennis et al. 2023), but they remain underexplored at the application /DAO layer.

The pro-social imaginaries of DAOs and web3 have played a key role in attracting contributors to the space. Yet, in the current market conditions, that vision is at risk of falling apart, when the space has been unable to provide the type of public goods mechanisms and social security needed for everyone to weather the storm equitably. Thus, rather than shoehorning DAOs into a single analytical frame or organizational imperative (whether profit-oriented or pro-social), it may be more productive to approach them as instances of hybrid forms in order to answer questions such as:

• What are the competing institutional logics occurring in the DAO ecosystem? 

• How do they affect and shape contributors’ experiences? 

• How do these change the organizational environment itself?

• What tensions and paradoxes do these generate?

• How can hybridity be harnessed in the most beneficial ways for all the constituencies involved?

These questions form the basis of the analytical framework used in our current ethnographic research.

3. Improving web3 work by learning from non-DAO analogs

After parsing the complexities of the web3 work environment, we have been conducting analysis of historical analogs (e.g. mutualization and social welfare mechanisms) which are not easily ported to the web3 contributor ecosystem, but which contain potentially relevant insights and useful metaphors. We looked extensively into the history of mutualist organizations, social insurance, and cooperatives. We then paired this with contemporary studies about fandom and the creator economy as new models for work, effects of corporate philanthropy and corporate social responsibility on employees’ wellbeing, the work environment of the non-profit sector, as well as the familiar challenges and opportunities of the platform economy and digital labor. Our goal was to answer the question: what do financial and job security mean in these different organizational contexts? What explicit or implicit mechanisms do they draw on? And what do they solve for?

Our analysis showed that, beyond the statutory social security provided by national jurisdictions, different types of organizations operationalize the concept of security in very different ways. For fandoms and political organizations, security is broadly associated with the longevity of interests and ideologies. Yet, for coops and mutualist organizations security primarily revolves around minimizing financial risk, which is achieved through various pooling mechanisms such as in-network financial services and employee swaps. Additionally, in both for-profit and non-profit entities, employee wellbeing can be interpreted as a form of security, which is performed through the reproduction and enactment of discursive commitments at the foundation of an organization’s mission or philanthropic initiative. These approaches serve as soft mechanisms to enhance intrinsic motivation, promote alignment among employees, and bolster the organization's image and reputation among external stakeholders. Voluntary standards, such as organizations' manifestos and principles, also play a key role in providing robust normative frameworks with a social orientation.

Out of this multitude of meanings and mechanisms, we distilled four main archetypes of “solidarity primitives” that inform our thinking as to what the basic building blocks of concrete social security mechanisms in web3 consist of: 

• Alliances between DAOs and contributors that enable the sharing of labor and access to special network services, such as in-network employee swap and insurance funds

• Bridges – that is, intermediator tooling and organizations that enables interoperability between DAOs

• Anchors, performing an analogous function to bridges, but focused on providing an interface with different legal jurisdictions

• Voluntary standards and strong social norms that provide good faith minimums for working conditions at the ecosystem level

We’ll discuss these models in more detail in a following post. Coupled with the findings from the ethnography, this top level survey of historical analogs informs the next phase of our research, focused on understanding and addressing the challenges of social security, talent retention, and longevity through a practical lens.

Based on these initial findings, we are structuring our research around three hypotheses that we believe will afford more clear paths forward for actionable knowledge and mechanisms development for better contributor experience:

🛤 Aligning organizational archetypes in DAOs unlocks how people perceive and structure their participation.
The stated purpose of DAOs often differs from how they operate. Yet the organizational metaphors used to understand DAO work have a significant impact on how people contribute to DAOs and what they see as criteria for added value. Comparing DAO work to familiar categories such as gig work, freelancing, open source development, or shareholding can limit our understanding about the unique characteristics of DAOs, preventing us from fully appreciating the potential of this form of work while creating misalignment between the organizational structure and the contributors, leading to exhaustion, interpersonal governance issues, and apathy.

⏳ Many of the challenges faced by DAO workers and DAO organizational structures have historical and non-web3 antecedents. We can learn from past use cases and existing solutions.
After reviewing research about mutualist organizations, funds, start-ups, and firms, a number of challenges have striking similarities to the ones expressed by DAO contributors. Translating these historical learnings into the unique context of the DAO ecosystem will accelerate our ability to adapt and find solutions; learning from experience rather than starting from zero.

📈 How work is valued and structured has a strong impact on talent retention, labor market volatility, and the succession problem.
Social security mechanisms, insurances, and other benefit structures are not only about safety nets; they also provide for essential incentives that organizations need to retain and maintain talent. Similarly, the long term health of an organization is oftentimes correlated with their ability to transfer institutional knowledge and mitigate labor volatility which can be a drag on productivity.

What’s next…

Inspired by the practice and method of Worker’s Inquiry, we’ve been conducting 21 in-depth ethnographic interviews as well a 3-hour IRL focus group with 22 people working in DAOs and web3 to map how these insights and metaphors from our research squares with the day-to-day experience of DAO contributions. In doing so, we aim to have a more profound sense of existing social mechanisms and value flows that underpin this contributor experience. This is the first step to developing new strategies for approaching contribution while guiding us in the development of web3 mechanisms that might satisfy the needs that legacy social security have served in other sectors or ecosystems. In our next post, we’ll share the findings from our ethnographic work.

Since 2021, Other Internet has conducted ethnographic work in DAO communities, designed web3-focused learning environments, and facilitated large-scale governance initiatives — in addition to developing a theory of the squad and pushing further the public goods agenda in web3.

Now we’re bringing this body of research and methodologies together in a new project called Web3 Work, led by program manager Laura Lotti and researchers Tara Merk (CNRS/Blockchaingov) and Nick Houde (European Graduate School). We’re exploring web3 as a work environment, with a focus on understanding the daily life of DAO contributors and the context in which they operate using the tools of workers’ inquiry. Our goal is to identify common challenges and collectively build web3-native structural support around them.

We know from industry analysis (e.g. Gitcoin/Bankless, Tally, MakerDAO SES, the forthcoming LaborDAO compensation report) that web3 workers — DAO contributors and operators, web3 creators, and decentralized service providers — face several organizational challenges. These include: unclear compensation (especially for social and care labor), contributor burnout, lack of clear frameworks for accountability and conflict resolution, implicit power asymmetries, uneven social discovery through social platforms, and a host of new tools whose affordances are not widely explored.

And yet, so far we haven’t seen any practical proposals to address these issues or actionable plans to provide holistic safety and welfare for contributors, economically and socially. We believe that is due to a lack of clarity as to what constitutes DAO work and a fundamental misalignment between individual contributors’ expectations and motivations, and the organizational frames that are evoked when discussing DAOs — that is, The Corporation, The State and The Co-Op as three primary socio-technical imaginaries of DAOs.

Social and economic welfare is more than the manifestation of good vibes. It requires intensive research to get at the heart of the DAO contributor experience and thoughtful design of supportive infrastructures, mechanisms, and policies. That’s what this project is about. 

Our research comes at a critical time. During market uncertainty, there is a tendency to revert back to the work cultures and funding models that DAOs were created to challenge. If the DAO space is going to remain a place of experimentation, it needs to retain its ability to produce paradigmatically new conditions.

Web3 Work operates on three levels: 

1. by collecting extensive background information on historical analogs in dealing with labor and social security; 

2. by doing an expansive ethnography of contributor experiences in the DAO space; 

3. by bringing these two elements into the design of deployable mechanisms.

Call for DAO Contributors!

We want to speak with DAO contributors and operators, protocol politicians and tool builders about their aspirations, motivations and challenges. 

Contact us HERE to be part of mapping the web3 contributor experience. We are looking to engage a number of DAO contributors in ethnographic work that could involve interviews, conversations, and digital shadowing (where we follow you around virtually for a day) to get an in-depth understanding of people’s day-to-day lives within the space.

This research is led by Other Internet Research Institute and supported by Station.

In Autumn 2022, Other Internet and Leave Room for Thoughts, two young learning institutes, came together to cultivate a new fellowship program named Campus Complex. It was a month-long educational experiment that unfolded across the City of New York.

The program turned a disconnected group of private offices and studios into a traversable network of learning environments for three builders, artists, and researchers. Each fellow received a passport, called a Learner Card, to our constellation of spaces and educators. Their mission was to use the tools and affordances of the Campus to further their educational endeavors.

Today we’re launching a documentary website, sharing the journey and our toolkit for creating similar educational networks. We call these networks schoolscapes.

We define “schoolscape” as an association of local organizations that augment their spaces with educational infrastructure, and encourage learners to explore freely across their network.

We put our Autumn fellowship schoolscape together by going to friendly spaces in our network—startups, studios, and creative spaces—and asking them to join the Campus. Each space got an onboarding kit, and in each a space steward provided office hours and access to materials for Fellows.

Between learner cards, the compass app, and campus-in-a-box, there are tons of wonderful interface design details that made this other internet come to life. We won’t spoil them for you here—you should explore them in the Placemaking section on our documentary website. But before closing, we wanted to share a few thoughts about the social form of “schoolscape” and how it fits into our work at Other Internet.

🗺 Navigate to the Campus Complex Documentary Website 🧭

On Other Internets and Social Forms

When OI was first getting started, the other internet we were inspired by was the internet of ownership, value, and community-owned finance. Now, after a few years of immersing ourselves in the cloud-based institutions of crypto-networks, many of us at Other Internet have been feeling the need to grow more roots into the ground. From exploring local governance to investigating institutional metaphors inspired by syntropic forestry, we’re finding ways to fully live and embody our research practices. We always return to the name when we’re soul-searching. What “other networks” can we weave in embodied reality? The Campus Complex project is an early expression of these impulses.

Campus Complex emerged out of ideas generated in an art residency at Other Internet, growing into a fully fledged Fellowship Program, equipping three fellows, a dozen spaces, and many more peer apprentices. This is testimony to the generative, permissive power of the “art residency.” The residency is a social form—a pattern—that anyone can make use of. There are as many variations of residencies as there are handshakes. Digital residencies, self-made solo residencies, residencies from the biggest art institutions to home kitchens, multi-year to single-day. The magic of working with social forms is that they are open source by default: meant to be shared and spread, they are owned by nobody and everybody.

Schoolscapes are also social form—and a literal other internet. While the digital internet obscures its own physicality, schoolscapes are a network you can readily visualize and be inside of. Learner cards and compasses show you where you are and where you can go. If the digital internet wants to get more cozy, well, the coziest thing of all is to make a place-based internet of your own and invite your peers into it.

As with residencies, we can imagine many different versions of schoolscapes. Some will be formal, some will be monetized, others won’t. While working on Campus Complex, we met and were inspired by projects like Powderhouse, City as School (a NYC institution), City as a School (a London startup), Polaris Fellowship, The Neighborhood SF and NYC, and more. What we want to do by sharing schoolscapes with you is to show how these other internets can be created and operated easily. We put the Autumn fellowship program together in about 6 weeks on a very small budget. If we can do it, you can too.

While Other Internet has a history of composing new concepts, this is the first new social form we’ve been involved with creating. The closest we’ve come is squad wealth. While not directly related, schoolscapes have the potential to bring squad energy to educational experiments. We can go from “students” sitting in front of “teachers” to roving squads of peer apprentices; from “schoolwork” to learning by employing leisure. Issuing learner cards like the ones we designed created opportunity for shared time and space, and collective learning experiences.

In this moment of moribund and debilitated institutions, we think that creative experimentation with social forms can be a powerful home remedy. How can we learn how to maneuver while we’re stuck inside bullshit jobs or in extractive relationships with platforms or cities? In a recent post, Alice Maz aims to remind us that “you can just do stuff,” a call to feel the agency at the tips of your fingers and lean into challenge and intensity. But sometimes it’s easier to give yourself permission to do new, challenging things when working with the constraints and affordances of a social form. The “residency” is permission to devote oneself entirely to a creative project without interruption; the “sabbatical” is permission to be free from the asks of workaday life. The “schoolscape” is permission to explore what’s around us and learn from it. Working with social forms—and inventing them—enables us to ask how we want to be and designing a container for that.

Beyond the micro-scale, experimentation with new social forms and other internets might be a source of institutional rewewal. We’re not alone in this idea. Venkatesh Rao and the Ethereum Foundation recently put out a call for scholars who want to study social protocols:

protocols form an unusually nebulous category of social reality constructs. The term is applied to everything from handshake norms and dinner etiquette rules among individual humans, to climate treaties among nations and cryptographic consensus mechanisms among computers.

And in private correspondence, Other Internet friend Chris Beiser says that “social forms are key to the structure of society and production, but because the value is (historically?) hard to capture, we don’t incentivize the production of new forms—which has led to skew as our social situations have stayed stuck or regressed even as the needs have evolved.”

By trying on new social forms for size, we’re also trying out new ways of relating to each other; new ways of interfacing with organizations; new ways of collectivizing. Some forms will fit just right, and maybe these will drive new institutional behaviors. Experimenting is low pressure. Nothing is permanent, everything is an experiment. Work is a feeling, and when working with social forms, you have permission to play.

We’re inviting you to join us in playing with Schoolcapes.

🗺 Navigate to the Campus Complex Documentary Website 🧭

If you’re creating a schoolscape in your city or town, we’d love to hear from you. Feel free to get in touch with the Campus Complex steward, aaron@otherinter.net.

If you want to find out about future schoolscapes created by Other Internet and friends, subscribe to the dedicated email list here: https://campuscomplex.place/subscribe.

It’s tradition for me to write an annual reflection at the end of every year. It’s a tradition of self-honesty, growth, and gratitude. As Jung said: that which we can no longer prevent or hide is our fruit.

While Other Internet has been around for a while, this year the organization took a new form: the squad grew a full-time staff. So we faced the timeless challenges of a young organization: finding our footing together as a new collaborative team, and seeking the firm ground of a renewed mission. It was difficult, joyous, heady, invigorating and tiring all in one. Throughout the year, it was conversations with you that helped us feel understood, encouraged and supported. Thank you—especially our close friends and advisors—for sharing your wisdom and guidance with us.

Fruit grew for us where we accepted the unique nature of our organization and built processes and tools on top of the learning practices that had organically emerged over the last few years. We began the year with our internal “Starting a Research Project” doc, outlining our heuristics for a successful project. By the end of the year we added a bunch more: OI Residencies, Timezone, Concept Trust, Campus Complex, Learning Gardens, Squad Digest, and more. We are energized about these tools and initiatives, and excited about opening up new ways to collaborate and be part of Other Internet.

This year was also about finding our place as a New Institution™ located in a complex milieu. We’re surrounded by startups and cult-ures big and small, economic headwinds, technological advancement and its characteristic moral panic, and timeless political challenges set on new stages. Because we seek to understand these issues, we find ourselves at their leading edges—and often seem to be in the position of influence. We are learning to embrace that position. Across all our projects, talks, workshops, and publications this year, we’ve consistently returned to one thing. To paraphrase something Aaron said to me, we aim to speak to a fully embodied perspective from inside tech narratives, threading the needle between “progress and innovation” stories while holding on to old-school traditions, values, and memories of who we are and have been.

Other Internet is a project existing in two streams of time: the very new (massively multiplayer online coordination games, post-legal institutions, molting digital identities) and the very old (the giving and receiving of knowledge, faith and spirituality, collective endeavors of self-governance). Let’s walk forward and backward, and be the bridge between the future and the past that our own timezone needs. Thank you for seeing our world and becoming a part of it.

Looking Back at 2022

DIGITAL GOVERNANCE

Uniswap Governance: After receiving a grant from Uniswap last year, we embarked on several applied research quests in their ecosystem and tried to kickstart more activity around this billion-dollar treasury. We studied governance incentive structures, wrote research reports on some key issues in decentralized org design, and facilitated a working group that is currently exploring how an on-chain org can form partnerships with outside parties.

Crypto philanthropy: Bryan Lehrer published a thorough report on the nascent world of crypto philanthropy—and an accompanying FigJam essay for all the visual learners. This was the fruit of a months-long collaboration with Toby and Nadia Asparouhova.

Governance Learning Forum: Led by Kara Kittel and in partnership with Orca (now Metropolis), OI hosted a 100-person learning forum on organizational design and collective decision-making. The forum was a bridge between worlds that don’t often speak to one another: governance scholars in academia and crypto governance experimenters in industry.

ANALOG & DIGITAL LOCALITY

Lore Zone: Libby Marrs & Tiger Dingsun published chapters 2 & 3 of the Lore Zone Series. They journeyed to the ends of the internet so you don’t have to, and returned with insights around how digital subcultures form and maintain collective memories.

Local Governance: Aaron Z. Lewis led a research study on the virtualization of hyperlocal civic associations, exploring how they’ve evolved and adapted in the wake of Covid. This project shined a light on neighborhood-building practices in Washington D.C. and questioned what’s gained and lost when local community groups begin to look & feel more like online communities.

Campus Complex: We branched into the analog world this Autumn by piloting a fellowship program in NYC with Leave Room for Thoughts. Campus Complex is designed to turn a disconnected group of private offices and workshops into a traversable network of learning environments for under-resourced builders, artists, and researchers. We built physical and digital infrastructure to support the educational journey our initial cohort of fellows.

INTERNAL RESEARCH

Summer School: OI facilitated an 8-week summer school for squad members on the themes of digital psychology and philosophy of technology. We deployed an experimental research methodology for these sessions—constructing “found essays” (like found poems) using screenshots people brought to the seminar table.

Learning Garden: We’re cultivating our intellectual infrastructure in a practice we call “Learning Garden”. It’s a weekly venue for growing & sharing longform ideas. At each session, two writers bring a piece to read aloud to the group. We discuss at length and log our reflections—creating an archive of analysis for this culturally turbulent era.

Our Year in Photos

We moved into a shared office space with some of our favorite people:

We gave talks and workshops at ETH Denver, FWBfest, and Likeminds…

… launched an experimental public school network called Campus Complex…

… and represented at Foresight, Pioneer Works, Kernel, and the Federal Art Museum in Bonn Germany.

And in a remarkable year of big squad energy, Kei shipped Zodiac’s DAO tooling and an important wiki of DAO pattern languages, John and the PartyDAO squad released long-awaited PartyBid V2, Nadia published a bunch of wonderful and incisive essays, Gary’s book is still coming, the new Civilian Climate Futures site from Bryan and Lukas is out, Matilde started a dev studio (hire her!), Ed and Jimmy launched the next version of Urbit Landscape, Laura & Black Swan LARPed, Sam published the Cosmos Hub 2.0 whitepaper, Tom set out on a new era of his work, I finally published my Life After Lifestyle essay, and Norm & Yatú have been relentlessly working on something new behind the scenes. Other Internet friends have done a ton.

2023: Scaling our Impact

After meditating on this year, we are planting seeds and looking toward the work to come. We increasingly see Other Internet as an idea machine. We recognize the responsibility we have: to channel our influence into community-building, to expand the footprint of our unique intersection of culture and technology, and to situate our ideological questions and goals in a far-sighted research agenda. To accomplish our programming goals, we’ve reincorporated Other Internet as a non-profit.

We view non-profit status as a critical and inevitable next step of our growth. What the world needs today is powerful, pro-social conceptual models for our technological society. This is work that can’t be done in siloed academia, or in a high-growth startup, but it needs the DNA of both. There is no organization like Other Internet—where technologists, theorists, and experimenters create genre-defying prototypes and category-defining articulations of the future present. It feels like we’re teleporting into the right legal vehicle for the way we work and the impact we aim to have.

Our research informs those who seek to understand and model new types of institutions and networks. Through our applied work, we provide infrastructure for network architects, and co-develop programs, blueprints, and environments with the foremost entities like Uniswap and Optimism. In 2023 our objective is to expand this work in our new non-profit vehicle. We are seeking to collaborate with new anchor funders, thought partners, and institutions we can grow alongside. We’re aiming to hire more engineers and researchers, increase the scale and scope of research initiatives, advance new applied projects, and release open-source primitives. Critically, new funding partnerships create more opportunities for people—fans, advocates, partners, and the curious!—to engage with us. If you’d like to chat about collaborative opportunities and our research goals, please reach out.

We don’t vibe with “endcore” at Other Internet. Things are always ending, and also always beginning. Plant seeds, bear fruit, hide nothing from yourself. This year we aim to bring more embodiment and locality to digital networks. Out: doomscrolling. In: getting fruit juice on your hands. Out: culture warring. In: local politics. Out: ketamine. In: encounter groups. Out: the Gregorian calendar. In: inventing a new holiday in the group chat.

See you soon,

Toby, Bryan, Kara, Laura, Aaron, Nikita and friends

Uniswap governance is quickly becoming an important venue for lobbying by groups whose goals extend beyond the bounds of the Uniswap protocol. Other Internet’s next research initiative explores how the Uniswap community is responding to ecosystem-level issues in web3, from scaling to metagovernance. If you’re interested in talking to us about governance topics that concern both the Uniswap protocol and web3 at large, please reach out to us via DM.

Authors: Laura Lotti, Joanna Pope

The Contradictions of Uniswap Governance

In the year since its activation, Uniswap’s governance has been characterized by paradoxes and contradictions. The first Uniswap governance vote, itself intended to lower the submission threshold and quorum to pass proposals, failed to pass precisely because it fell short of meeting said quorum, revealing the inaccessible nature of governance. Some commentators attributed this to the core team's desire to “protect the protocol from radical changes… even at the cost of community disenfranchisement”. While the proposal threshold was later successfully lowered, it is still too high for the average tokenholder. The controversial DeFi Education/Defense Fund proposal, intended to raise awareness of the importance of political lobbying for DeFi, instead threw the concentration of Uniswap governance power in the hands of a few large tokenholders into sharp relief. Today, both the number of proposals and the level of engagement with community governance remain markedly low compared to other protocols (Tally). 

Against this backdrop, the increasing activity around one particular issue area in Uniswap’s otherwise stagnant forum offers a productive lens through which to assess Uniswap’s current limitations and future opportunities for improvement in governance: scaling. 

Scaling by way of Governance 

In light of Ethereum’s growing transaction fees, scaling solutions have recently been a hot topic in the Uniswap governance forum. While Uniswap is the second largest DEX by TVL, it is lagging behind in terms of L2s having so far deployed to Arbitrum, Optimism and Polygon. In comparison, Curve Finance is already present on 7 chains and Sushiswap, Uniswap’s ‘evil twin’, exists on over 10 different EVM compatible chains, including non-Ethereum L1s such as Avalanche (DeFi Llama). In response to the slow progress on scaling by Uniswap Labs, these issues have been taken up by Uniswap’s community governance, as $UNI holders resort to pushing for deployment and incentivization on L2s and sidechains through proposals.

And yet, it is not self-evident that scaling solutions should be subject to community governance in the first place. In theory, it should be the core team’s prerogative to select preferred chains to which to deploy since this pertains to development strategy. In practice, the scope of governance is very loosely defined so that “anything” can potentially fall under its purview. According to Uniswap Labs’ original statement, UNI holders have control over: governance, treasury deployment, the hotly debated fee switch, uniswap.eth ENS name, Uniswap default list, SOCKS liquidity tokens and, with the launch of V3, licensing and protocol upgrades. But what pertains to “governance” itself is not clearly stated.

In the debate around these proposals, confusion abounds as to who should make these decisions, and whether a governance vote is required in the first place. In the proposal to deploy Uniswap to Polygon PoS chain, initiated by the Polygon team, one participant responded with: “There is nothing to authorize here. Uniswap Labs can just deploy if they are willing to.” By contrast, in the thread regarding a proposed deployment to the Avalanche blockchain, one community member replied: “The contracts are open source. Does it actually need a vote? Can’t any community member deploy the contracts on Avalanche?” This lack of clarity can be partially attributed to the core team's ambiguous position vis-a-vis the protocol, an issue discussed in greater depth in Other Internet’s Uniswap off-chain governance report. In short, Uniswap Labs has not set clear boundaries around what it intends its purview to be, and as a result, does not exercise authority where it could—a form of self-limitation further complicated by the protocol’s ongoing focus in the regulatory spotlight, which may have been causing additional wariness around taking executive decisions. 

Despite this state of confusion, efforts to push for action on the crucial issue of scaling have already produced results, with the Polygon proposal seeing some of the highest participation rates within Uniswap governance to date. We see opportunities for further improvement by leveraging community interest in this domain.

Bigger than Uniswap? Motivations for Participation in Scaling Proposals

The issue of scaling produces motivations for governance participation that are qualitatively different from those of a topic like the fee switch. On one hand, the growing momentum around L2s and sidechains is an expression of the community’s interest toward usability and, more generally, an awareness of the potential role Uniswap could play in driving forward the public good of scaling for the overall web3 ecosystem. As reflected in the argumentation offered by one commenter on the Arbitrum proposal: “I believe it is in the best interest of UNI holders, as well as the Ethereum ecosystem as a whole, for there to be an officially-supported instance of Uniswap V3 deployed to Arbitrum.” The proposal to incentivize liquidity on L2s is even more direct: “Uniswap governance should start incentivizing liquidity on its Arbitrum and Optimism deployments to kickstart adoption of Ethereum Layer-2.” 

On the other hand, while scaling is a web3 public good, it is also a battleground for private interests as projects and protocols increasingly compete to be the winning service provider. In the context of Uniswap governance, this is particularly salient in the case of the Polygon deployment proposal, which is as much a community governance proposal as it is a business offer insofar as it includes financial and non-financial incentives for Uniswap adoption. The boundary between community governance and commercial negotiation will likely become increasingly blurry, particularly as the conversation is already moving from L2 deployment to L2 incentivisation.

These shifting boundaries necessitate close scrutiny of the different political actors involved in such decision-making processes, and their nuanced needs, desires, and goals. We see three classes of actors within the Uniswap community whose participation could be motivated by desires to support ecosystem development and sustainability, incentives to profit in the provision of web3 public goods, or both.

• Large $UNI holders, such as whales and delegates: holders or representatives of large amounts of $UNI that have the ability to pressure Uniswap Labs to carry out certain actions in the same way that activist investors do for management, similarly to “attentive shareholders” or “activist investors” in corporate governance. 

• Governance discussion contributors: users of the protocol and beneficiaries of the retroactive token distribution that may not have as many tokens as the above group, but are able to make up for this in contributions of time, attention, effort, and awareness raising. 

• Protocol diplomats: people and organizations who may or may not have significant amounts of $UNI tokens, but whose interest in governance is determined by the prospect of becoming a service provider for the protocol (as in the case of the Polygon proposal). This set of stakeholders face different challenges than the previous two groups: just like traditional lobbyists, it is a difficult balance they have to strike between credibility and neutrality, and advancing their interests.

What are the inherent benefits and constraints of each of these groups? What opportunities and challenges do they face when setting to formulate a proposal to Uniswap governance? How does communication happen within and between them? In practice, the interests of these different groups interweave with each other on different occasions, but without a clear demarcation of scope and roles, evidence has shown that the economic interests of large token holders prevail at the expense of small governance contributors. By aligning interests over collective issues, these sets of tokenholders can synergize efforts and accelerate the development of governance at Uniswap and in the web3 ecosystem, enabling this dysfunctional system to overcome its impasse. 

Emerging Sites of Interest Representation in Uniswap Governance

Whether participants in these governance proposals are motivated by the progress of web3 towards the public good of scaling, or the potential to profit as a key service provider in the process, it is clear that Uniswap governance is fast becoming an important domain for interest representation and lobbying by groups whose desires, goals and concerns extend well beyond the bounds of Uniswap as a protocol.

In addition to scaling, there are several other issue areas that simultaneously concern Uniswap as a protocol and web3 as a broader ecosystem, while also creating lucrative opportunities for service providers competing with each other for market dominance. These multilevel issues, often grouped together under the umbrella term of web3 public goods, are also likely sites of interest representation and lobbying. They include the following:

• Cross-protocol relations: The importance of cross-protocol interoperability, within and beyond the Ethereum ecosystem, is a strongly felt issue across DeFi. As we’ve seen, the current governance impasse is preventing Uniswap from acting fast and deploying its protocol to other sidechains to the detriment of the overall DeFi space. Similarly, it may hinder Uniswap’s ability to enter into mutually beneficial DAO2DAO relations with other protocols, including with licensees of its v3 designs. 

• MEV: The proliferation of MEV bots that provide just-in-time liquidity and remove it within the same block has been seen as a possible reason for impermanent loss (IL) among LPs – an issue that v3’s concentrated liquidity model was supposed to address. On the other hand, MEV auctions have been proposed in the Ethereum ecosystem as a way to mitigate bots activity and fund public good development but no concerted effort has been made by Uniswap governance to integrate these ideas.

• Public goods funding: Within the Ethereum ecosystem several projects and individuals have raised the importance of funding web3 public goods. Even Vitalik has exhorted Uniswap to be more ambitious and take on more responsibility as a protocol with regards to its governance in the direction of supporting public goods and realize the vision of the Ethereum ecosystem as a “crypto state.” 

• Metagovernance decisions: For Uniswap to become a pillar of web3 and remain competitive within the fast-paced field of decentralized exchanges, it needs processes and mechanisms to enable its governance to adapt to changing conditions and evolve to better support its community and the protocol’s place within the wider web3 ecosystem. Decisions pertaining to a potential token redesign, or larger governance restructuring, need to be supported by the most appropriate processes and tools to facilitate effective decision making in these areas. 

Other Internet’s Governance Research and Contributions

In order to answer these questions, we will be researching and collaborating with the groups and individuals that have demonstrated a keen, strategic motivation to contribute to these multilevel issues that concern both Uniswap and web3 at large—from whales and delegates, to voluntary governance contributors and protocol diplomats. 

This research is a first step towards answering the following questions: 

• What is the most conducive organizational structure for governance-led action on web3 public goods? 

• What are the best approaches to the funding and development of these ecosystemic initiatives? 

• Which decision-making processes and voting mechanisms better suit different issues? 

Other Internet’s research will attempt to answer these questions in order to better evaluate Uniswap governance and enable wider and more effective community control. What might this look like in practical terms? 

• What if coordination around web3 public goods issues were led neither by Uniswap Labs, nor through loosely structured governance processes, but rather by a mission-specific working group of advisors and advocates drawn from both informed community members and the core team? 

• How could community decision-making around large infrastructural projects such as scaling or MEV auctions be better facilitated through purpose-built voting and fund dispersal mechanisms, such as conviction voting or quadratic funding? 

• What if Uniswap’s responses to multilevel issues were not directed by governance alone, but led by a special-purpose acquisition DAO that ensures that the protocol’s partnerships, collaborations and business relationships do the utmost to support pro-social projects that genuinely benefit the web3 ecosystem?

As we speculate on potential solutions, it is important to keep in mind that governance is not something to be ‘solved’, it is an evolutionary process in which cultural norms are as important as codified voting mechanisms. By studying the rise of interest representation and lobbying around the provision of web3 public goods and Uniswap’s role within this in the protocol’s governance, we aim to understand the decisions that Uniswap is currently facing, identify stakeholders that are affected by these decisions, and propose processes best suited to overcome these coordination challenges, in order to incrementally build a governance system for Uniswap that can serve as a model for other digital organizations facing similar challenges.

We’re initiating and inviting conversations with major delegates, past proposal creators, and active governance participants in Uniswap. We’d love to talk to you about improving governance agility, scaling and other web3 public goods issues, and Uniswap’s role in leading the charge. Send us a DM at twitter.com/otherinternet if you’re interested in chatting.

Additionally, if you’re considering a proposal to Uniswap governance, we would love to connect and follow your journey. Read more here.

Uniswap Grants Program Announcement

The Uniswap community has shown itself to be resilient and progressive beyond the immediate purview of being a funding body. Together we have also helped to diversify Uniswap deployments, lowered the formal proposal threshold, and even added a competitive fee tier. Although we’ve already surpassed early notions of on-chain governance, we can still go further, questioning the holistic governance process itself.

Could our framework for governance be updated to more effectively engage smaller voters and congregations? How could we formalize the framework for delegations and proposal campaigns? These questions only scratch the surface for the types of experiments feasible for Uniswap governance. Other Internet’s community report has been an eye opener for the dedication and enthusiasm of a larger community still trying to find its agency.

UGP is excited to announce a $1M grant to Other Internet to perform research and various governance experiments over the next year. Other Internet has consistently developed important insights and progressive ideas that move the needle on how communities in decentralized ecosystems interact. The thoughtfulness in their approach, capturing the individual’s perspective and role in the macrocosm of decentralized governance, is sorely needed. We are excited to support their continued research within the Uniswap ecosystem and advance their work throughout the broader crypto space.

— Uniswap Grants Program

Other Internet is an applied research organization. In the summer of 2021 we completed an analysis of Uniswap’s off-chain governance and Discord community. Now with this grant from Uniswap Grants Program, we are excited to extend our inquiry into what more effective governance practices for Uniswap and the Web3 ecosystem might look like.

Uniswap protocol is thriving, processing over a billion dollars of volume each day. While governance of Uniswap's protocol parameters is relatively constrained, there's wide potential for community-led experiments around ecosystem development and treasury disbursement. It is at this social governance layer that Uniswap faces new challenges. Some are classical governance problems: voting power asymmetry, overcoming voter apathy, and efficient capital allocation. Other challenges are novel to user-owned networks, such as distributing ownership effectively and designing functional participation models for multiple classes of users. 

Cryptocurrency protocols are fundamentally political technologies In a recently published essay, we argued that crypto protocols and communities must look beyond their immediate horizons to develop a definition of public that includes those who are impacted beyond the protocol layer. This expansive definition is not a product of idealism — it is the reality of disruptive software with zero marginal costs of distribution.

Today, Uniswap’s stakeholders include developers, traders, liquidity providers, mechanism designers, open source projects, Ethereum validators, MEV researchers, academics, and even blockchain climate researchers. It is not difficult to imagine a world where hundreds of millions more either use or are impacted by Uniswap. For this reason, it is imperative to set a scope of governance that is similarly expansive. 

In the upcoming year Other Internet will carry out a series of research projects and governance initiatives. This work will be action-oriented, culminating in concrete recommendations, governance proposals, and new products attempting to positively shape the Uniswap protocol. Our work aims to bring about a future where Uniswap's governance creates a positive impact for more than just its largest token holders. While Uniswap will be a central focus of our efforts, we aim to develop practices and learnings that benefit all organization that utilize crypto and Web3 technology.

Specifically, we will:

• Explore a redesign of the proposal process

• Suggest new programs and committees akin to UGP

• Publish insights into the treasury and how it is being used

• Foster new community leaders

• Experiment with new decision making methods beyond one-token-one-vote

There is no doubt that Web3 will be the site of governance innovation in years to come. But in order to truly innovate, we also need to take stock of what has come before. The classical governance challenges that Uniswap faces today have historically been sites of creative problem-solving for a wide range of public, private and third sector organizations. At the same time, new forms of experimental governance are currently flourishing in spaces outside Web3, from local mutual aid networks to highly coordinated online fandoms. Our applied interdisciplinary research approach will bring together these fields of governance knowledge from the entire spectrum of online and offline communities, past and present, to ensure continued innovation in Web3.

As a group of people, we are motivated by a future that is more free, fun, peaceful, and equitable. We imagine an other internet that that radiates these qualities. By no means is this future promised, but it is an option.

For updates on our research, upcoming experiments, and Uniswap governance work, please follow Other Internet on Twitter or this newsletter.

Sam, Laura, and Toby recently published a new essay titled Positive Sum Worlds: Remaking Public Goods. In the piece, we aimed to revive the powerful worldbuilding connotations of the term “public goods.” Instead of thinking of this term as a technical classification, we should work to activate it in its most potent sense: how can we bring what is good for different communities into our work? How can we make our work public by creating positive outcomes for communities beyond our own?

Our theory of public goods as positive externalities is one answer. But how should people begin to design and create these goods? When you write a critical essay, you are often asked to what the “next steps” are, or how people might take action on these ideas. In collaboration with Gitcoin, we are creating an opportunity to do just that.

Open Call for Public Goods Proposals

https://gitcoin.co/blog/seeking-a-new-kind-of-public-good/

This open call will reward written proposals, ~1200 words in length, that advocate for an existing public good or a potential public good project, satisfying the criteria of positive externalities and driven by values. Submission deadline is August 17th, and selected essays will be awarded 1ETH.

You can apply whether or not you work in crypto. In fact, we are especially interested in non-crypto people and orgs who have already been doing something in the public’s interest. We’ve put together a selection committee of people who are doing the most to work for the public across a diverse range of organizations. Check them out at the bottom of the above linked page.

Note that the modest award isn’t a budget for doing all the work; instead, it’s more appropriate to think of this as acknowledgment of work done in the public’s interest, or as an award for creating compelling, concrete ideas for public goods.

If you have a project or a project idea you’d like to write about, please apply, and tell friends and colleagues to apply as well. Submissions are due by August 17th. Apply at the link above!

The RFP is the most important message we have to send today, but while we have you, here are a few other things we have going on.

We received a research grant from the Ethereum Foundation to build the first cross-protocol body of knowledge about off-chain governance, “community management,” and Discord. Discord is one of the most widely used pieces of software in the space. Not many projects realize how key off-chain governance practices are currently structured by Discord itself. In effect, projects are delegating off-chain governance and the social dynamics of their communities to Discord and related tools like Discourse forums.

The project is co-funded by individual protocols who are providing us access and funds to research their specific Discords and social governance processes. Uniswap Grants Program was the first to provide us with a grant for this purpose, and our first report will be coming out soon. For protocols, this is an amazing opportunity to get an outside, objective analysis of how different parts of your off-chain governance and community infrastructure are working, or not working. Please reach info@otherinter.net if you are interested in having your protocol be part of our research project.

Finally, Kei published an incredible essay, A Prehistory of DAOs. Without a doubt, it is the most comprehensive piece of writing on the topic. It puts DAOs in context of related past organizational forms and technologies, clarifies many of the confusions about how the term DAO is currently used, and illustrates what they might become.

The best writing plants seeds, seeds which blossom through the nurturance of careful readers who understand the opportunity given to them by the ideas within, seeds which can grow into better worlds. This essay carries many such seeds.

This is a final encouragement to apply to the public goods RFP, and to send it to groups working in in the public’s benefit. Together, we can Become Good.

Have a lovely August,

– Other Internet