Conversation

It’s early days yet, but I already see signs of “all legislature/judiciary, no executive” patterns of governance failure. Everyone wants tokens to moon, almost everyone wants to be governed (anarchy is an acquired taste), few want to stake/vote, vanishingly few want to run things
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Which means we’re already starting to reproduce the governance deficit of the regular world. The world is just not as governed as people want it to be. They mistake nongovernance for misgovernance.
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In traditional governance people often conflate *big* government with *strong* government. Around the world the norm is mostly big and weak. There’s a lot of government but little governments can do, for various reasons.
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What little capacity for action they have tends to get divided between: a. Policing b. Stop loss of visible decay c. Crony spoils distribution Everything else is left to decay in a musical chairs mode. Person left standing when music stops is the bad guy who “broke” X
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Governments getting steadily bigger and weaker is a counterintuitive thing. I mean they have drones and surveillance state now. The Man must be getting stronger. Not so. The world is leaking governability fast, despite newer toys.
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Problem is complexity demanding meaningful governance is growing far faster than capacity to actually do it. “Bigger government” is relative to historical size trend, but “weaker government” is relative to current demand for governance.
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At first glance Web3 holds promise to increase both size and power of governance. Millions of DAOs on Discord, yay. But look closer and again size is increasing but power not so much. Demand for governance is showing up, supply not somuch. Despite tools that stretch capacity.
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“Decentralized” and “leaderless” are shorthand for quietly acknowledged lack of capacity for governance that casual observers mistake for appetite for anarchism. Nope. Anarchy remains a highly unpopular thing. It’s not what we want but what we get when nobody wants to govern 🤣
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Hypothesis: anarchism is often the right question, but never the right answer. Humans just have too much desire to be governed. Governance is about reducing the complexity of life. Via lots of defaults. Hopefully sensible, but we’ll accept senseless defaults over no defaults.
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This stuff is on my mind because tomorrow the will be releasing an early draft of a paper on online governance, at our second annual meeting. We’ve been grappling with these issues for 18 months now, as have most other such communities.
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Undergovernance is at the root of things we misdiagnose in many other ways: meaning crisis, burnout wave, great resignation… Nobody is being led, managed, supported, or complemented as much as they’d like to be, in the ways the want. “Not paid enough” is the tip of an iceberg
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What people want is benevolent, nurturing environments. What they get if they stay in society (voice) is benign neglect at best, oppressive exploitation at worst except if close cronies are in power. If they leave (exit) they get anarchy.
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Not the nice Ursula Le Guin kind, like Annares in The Dispossessed, with beautiful, functional mutualism among responsible adults, but the “hey where do I find this link on this discord” kind 🤣
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I'm bullish about what Web3 (the technology) can do in principle, but bearish and pragmatic about what Web3 (the people) will do with it in practice.
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tldr of this thread… Web3 is shaping up to be a major macrotrade for me in terms of time investment, but my expectations are not simple.
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The best macro trades combine boundless optimism about technological progress with bottomless cynicism about human nature.
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