issue número dos 💌
dears new and old,
I hope this messy world has been kind to you since my last issue. I welcome you with the attitude I wish to one day be able to manifest whenever I'm a host of sorts.
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In the past month I've been keeping myself busy with studying Solidity, working on updating the proposal for the gift economies project, and planning my stay in 🥁 🥁 🥁 Porto. In this issue I go over the connection between web3 and public goods (which are good), an overview of DeSci London, this month's poem attempt, before I wrap up with some minor mentions. I hope you learn something useful, find a piece of inspiration, or otherwise enjoy the stories.
funding the commons (next time)
After almost one year waiting for this moment, I was finally planning to attend my single most beloved event. At the end of March I was going to be in Barcelona for Funding the Commons (FtC) among those who inspired me to see there are sustainable ways of building for good that don't have to rely on inefficient, corrupt, or permissioned current infrastructure. It is the event that propelled me to regen web3 and the reason I overtalk about public goods. FtC is a roughly quarterly event that brings together those focused on making public goods more available and more regenerative specifically by leveraging web3 tools. Sadly, the event was cancelled which is a third devastating miss in a row for me. Better luck next time in what looks to be Paris. :crossed_fingers: Let me now explain how web3 can be even remotely related to public goods. First, what are public goods? Public goods are any goods that are (1) non-excludable such that no one can prevent another from using it and (2) non-rivalrous meaning that no one's use can prevent another's. One standard example from nature are parks: anyone can go to a park without preventing anyone else from joining at the same time of day (you can easily spot capacity issues though which is dealt with by securing appropriate supply, i.e, more park). By contrast, private goods such as our homes and smartphones are (1) excludable such that only those with access rights can use them and (2) rivalrous meaning that once the ownership is established, no one else can excercise control upon the respective good. The commons are public goods with some possible constraints. For example, the goods in a common can have some degree of rivalry if one's consumption reduces availability for anyone else which is the case of many natural resources such as wood. You can find an initial, more in-depth discussion in this article from the FtC organizers: What Are Public Goods and Commons?
Two of the main challenges concerning public goods and commons are the so called "free-rider problem" and the "tragedy of the commons." Most of the goods that fall into the category of public goods still need maintenance (care) or funding (or some equivalent form of financial support). Without going into too much detail, the free-rider problem refers to users of public goods who do not give back in maintenance, funding, or similar. Such as when torrenters don't seed 👀 The tragedy of the commons refers to cases of resource abuse to the point of depletion, crass negligence which makes it unusable, or other similar forms of miscoordination which leads to a huge economic loss for society. Web3 can aid in minimizing both problems, through aligned incentive schemes and more adequate coordination mechanisms. I'll go on with making a case for why a web3 attitude (first) and infrastructure (second) is helpful when it comes to sustaining public goods.
the case for web3 in public goods
I grew up in a neighborhood, or, as I like to call it, "in the hood" (in reality, next to "the hood") with one main playground. The one across the road, next to the valley was for big kids only. Despite the fact that we are some more than 300 direct and indirect beneficiaries of the playground, the responsibility and perhaps the permission of installing outdoor toys and other urban furniture belong to the local authorities. Sadly, after a joyous, borderline abusive beginning, the two slides installed during my generation quickly deteriorated until one of them broke. For years, this uninviting park seemed forgotten by the local authorities and the new generation of kids alike. The tragedy of the commons unfolding under our very eyes.
But surprise! This past summer it seems that a new set of swings and slides and toys I'm too old to know the name of were installed. If I walked around it now I would probably find the pretentious board explaining how the necessary funds were generously allocated through some program by some institution. Yet another generation of kids can now reap all the benefits of this act of urban governance.
Now, my neighborhood is decent by some approximate standards so I will not be complaining about the lack of quality benches beyond this sentence. However, I'd like to share an alternative, fully utopian world where my neighbors and I would have come together to replace those slides earlier. Let's imagine that the most vocal mom of the neighborhood would invoke an emergency meeting on the state of the kids' happiness following an increase in the waiting times for the now single slide. In reality, that single slide was impracticable for the tinier kids, completely excluding an entire category of participants from the playground life, but let's only focus on the waiting times to simplify anticipated engineering demands. The obvious solution would be to procure another slide and return to the previous system, the judgy old man in the corner so proposed. For those who cannot tell, I am walking the edges of a political commentary here.
Now that the upgrade proposal has been made and approved with >50% of the votes (in lack of neighborhood-tailored quadratic voting platforms which would reveal more granular preferences), we need to implement it. There are two such ways, one of which I'll detail to make my point, and the other being writing a petition to the responsible authority in the hope of action. I'm not saying the latter could not be the optimal approach now, but the jury is out on whether this is the most sustainable approach long-term.
When we want more trees, we have to write another petition. One more for street lightning. And then yet another one; all without any guarantees that the requests would be fulfilled. The other approach is to empower the neighbors to design and build their shared space in a way aligned with their preferences and optimized to their needs, while respecting and integrating the city-level legislature. Besides, these initiatives don't have to replace programming by local governments, but instead complement it to increase a community's agency. Knowing that they can have a direct impact, through proposals- which are mere spoken up or written down observations- or through hands-on involvement, neighbors young and old could start paying more attention to their public space needs and organize themselves around meeting said needs. Until someone who voted "nay" takes down one of the new benches. Anarchy ensues.
I'll leave the story of conflict resolution and its limitless possibilities to your imagination. Jumping out of the overstretched analogy, what we just witnessed was a neighborhood (a system of neighbors) coordinating for the hyperlocal common good. While imperfect, these are achievements to be recognized. The neighborhood, however, cannot even dream to tackle climate change, this global public good bad, on its own. This time, the world can act as a neighborhood coming together to prevent or mitigate large-scale environmental collapse.
Coordination is hard. Even deciding on a dinner place with five equally opinionated friends could give one a headache, let alone worldwide coordination. Among the many coordination mechanisms for diverse settings (see coordination mechanisms by supermodular.xyz for a primer), some are better equipped than others to serve us in the monumental task ahead. While neighbors can meet in person to govern their space, all billions of us could meet *dodges* on the blockchain, to encode our values and hopes in smart contracts that reward aligned actions.
For the full circle, one example of how Barcelona's Eeixample district dealt with the local issue of road safety and traffic pollution is bicibús, an initiative where every Friday parents join their kids to school in a bicycle convoy.
Imagine local coordination being this fun.
DeSci (London)
As mentioned in my previous issue, I travelled to London during mid-January for the local instance of a decentralized science conference (thanks to a travel grant awarded by the organizers). From the desci.global website,
DeSci (decentralized science) is an ecosystem of scientists, builders, and supporters laying a new foundation of incentive mechanisms to shift the future of scientific discovery. It's building towards a future where new and unconventional ideas can flourish by decentralizing access to funding, scientific tools, and communication channels based in transparency, resiliency, and accessibility.
If I were to rephrase and simplify the second sentence, I would say that DeSci is democratizing the science infrastructure. It is doing so by allowing broader participation and more equitable access to resources, without compromising on the core values of the scientific process, be it passing through an ethical approval process for clinical trials or satisfying replicability requirements.
I first encountered DeSci in this panel talk from Schelling Point Amsterdam, on the relation between DeSci and public goods/ImpactDAOs (which are crypto organizations that have positive impact on the world). It's the only place that mentions "DeSci" more than I do in this section. As someone who had at the time been in academia for a few years, I resonated with the part-disdain for, part-outrage at how some processes currently work in traditional science, the most significant absurdity of all being the. damn. paywalls.
Since stumbling upon this talk, I've been keeping an eye on the developments in DeSci, particularly in what concerns the so-called "meta-research" efforts which consist of a variety of processes to support research such as funding and peer review. Besides the infrastructure, there are organizations (in the form of decentralized autonomous organizations or DAOs) comprised of scientists who conduct research or support and connect scientists with funders, direct beneficiaries, and other stakeholders. Each organization generally focuses on researching one issue, be it longevity (VitaDAO), women's health (AthenaDAO), rare diseases (Vibe Bio), computational life sciences (LabDAO with their community's first preprint here), or hair loss treatments (HairDAO). As of October 2022, the DeSci landscape looks like this:
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In the meta-research category, my favorite talk and product comes from DeSci Labs which is building DeSci Nodes. In its most direct application, a DeSci Node replaces the standard .pdf with a research object containing an entire research project: its manuscript, any related code and data, and other project elements. My description can't do justice to such a substantial product and the variety of its functionality, so you can watch the very passionate talk and demo here: DeSci Nodes: Infrastructure for Verifiable and Composable Research.
One hilarious moment from London happened during the Happy Hour after the first day of the conference. I was chatting with some people, followed by a focused discussion with one of them on privacy-related developments in web3. They mentioned one protocol I had only heard of due to an infomeme categorizing web3 initiatives in the iceberg meme template, with more people-serving/privacy-preserving projects deeper in the ocean. I stumbled upon this photo months prior, when it appeared on my Twitter feed, and paid no attention to the OP's identity. After the protocol mention, I asked them whether they knew 'the web3 iceberg meme,' only to be told that they were the author. Don't tell me this is not a movie-like moment; with so many people in web3 around the world and all the content I consumed in this space, I referenced one creation of the very person I was chatting with. I later scrolled through my likes on Twitter to confirm it was the truth. (uni, if you ever see this, hi!)
This is one of my dearest places of the infomeme:
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A few more issues and I might end up discussing them all.
the random section
poem
the structure, the freedom
the closeness, the distance
anonimity
recognition
i stand in the center of all that could be
aware that choosing to choose
will amount to a living-
half a living
lived
instead of a full one
imagined
"every day i wake up and i'm like":
i have to build a wall-less future
i need to paint bandaids of hope
i have-
i need to
i want to run away from wanting anything i want
(if my body was a mountain, it would still not be enough)
I wrote this poem in response to being indecisive about the few paths and lifestyles I've oscillated between for years now. The title is in reference to Romanian poet Lucian Blaga's work Dați-mi un trup, voi munților (tr. "Give Me A Body, You Mountains") in which the lyrical ego asks for more physical space to contain his intense inner experiences. The point I half-make is that the solution of more or longer physical capacity does not address the actual problem of wanting too many, often contradictory, things. This wanting while aware of limitations creates a decision space whose solution can only be partially satisfying. The poem suggests that refusing to choose is an understandable stance.
news & reflections
I'm leaving you with a few curiosities and updates on yet again tech-related topics.
AI art. You've seen remarkable digital art generated with Stable Diffusion, and have prompted the quite-some-knowing ChatGPT to answer the most random of questions. Here is the future or music, with AI generated music coming out of Google Research: MusicLM. One day we can probably make entire feature films just by imagining them, have ChatGPT write the screenplay, some video-generating language model create scenes with full décor, costumes, and integrated lip synced dialogue, and lastly, have highly accurate foley and fitting soundtracks generated by MusicLM. One day they could even compete for the Oscars in the "Best AI Generated Picture" category. I might watch.
Blockchain-enabled donations. One of the main arguments I leverage in the gift economies project is that donations (equivalent to gifting) can be streamlined through the use of peer-to-peer infrastructure. Instead of going through financial intermediaries where transactions can be censored for a variety of reasons, money and resources can be directly transferred to their beneficiaries. For example, an unhoused person with a crypto wallet on their phone* could then directly receive USDC from anyone in the world. The fiat alternative would be to open a bank account which might require a valid residential address or wait for NGOs to provide them with food and shelter.
In addition to resisting censorship (e.g., when a bank blocks a transfer), cryptocurrency donations are also mostly** transparent. We can all check that a claimed transaction has indeed ocurred. For example, we can check that Ethereum's co-founder Vitalik Buterin donated 99 ETH to Ahbap Derneği, a Turkish NGO engaged in the relief efforts following the Turkey-Syria earthquake.***
Here is the evidence of the transaction, from etherscan.io:
See the full transaction details at: https://etherscan.io/tx/0x91298d449f193df13d1ba23e6ea55e9f50b88b4fb9b373571b8cb33a07c2f879.
Unlike standard bank transfers where we must rely on the word of the donors or recipients that the donation indeed occurred, in the case of crypto transfers we can just go look for ourselves since blockchains can't really lie. The above link tells us who to whom, when, and how much transferred and the veracity of these details is guaranteed by fun math called cryptography. If you want to do some digging, you can also find my modest donation (in USDC) in block #16613057, together with an address poisoning attack on my account a few blocks later. Real crypto beauty. Apart from this, many members of the crypto community came together to donate (money or resources). I'm particularly mentioning this community because, as someone with a stake in it and who wants to see it thrive, I follow its contributions to the real world more closely than those of other industries. To be fair, there is a lot of drama and risk in web3, a lot of which is documented here.
*) Assuming they have a phone, Internet connection, and the necessary literacy. Such requirements hold for most banking services nowadays too, but I agree that these systems are not entirely inclusive and we should do better.
**) For financial privacy reasons, there are mixing services that allow obfuscating transaction details. For example, Vitalik claims to have used such a service to donate to Ukraine and protect the identity of the recipients.
***) I do feel this vouch for web3 tools to be somehow inappropriate while aware of the amount of human suffering going on in the affected areas. Nonetheless, I believe in the power of these tools to support better coordination across several dimensions in both preventing and responding to this and similar events.
outro
Next month you can expect a few early impressions of Portugal where I'll be for ETHPorto. I'm still holding back on the gift economies draft (promised for this issue) as I am currently planning to submit it for feedback to Ethereum's Ecosystem Support Program.
until then
drink water and smile every now and then, will ya
bestest,
raluca