The individual mind is immanent but not only in the body. It is immanent also in pathways and messages outside the body; and there is a larger mind of which the individual mind is only a sub-system.
Gregory Bateson, Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture 1970
While the vision may date back further in the minds of some prescient few, more recently there has been a gradual mass realization unfolding, a realization that we are indeed working to redefine society at local and global scales.
If we define society as an ecosystem of social institutions cross-populated by social actors, and if we equate DAOs to on-chain social institutions, then this vision of a decentralized society has already been realized to some young extent. While certain technological advances, such as the Zodiac expansion pack for DAOs, should help us progressively decentralize in terms of infrastructure, I suspect such advances will not suffice if we are to make any sufficiently meaningful changes to society.
If we want to “build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete” we will need more than a technological movement - we will need a psychological one as well. We will need to demonstrate how the incentive mechanisms of decentralized society better align individual interests with local collective interests, and global collective interests. This change ultimately needs to happen in our minds, to change how we go about the pursuit of fulfillment.
Technological innovation aside, we are arguably in a unique position, culturally, to administer this change. Specifically, the isolation and alienation experienced during lockdown, by the relatively lucky among us, has driven what seems to be another pandemic unto itself, one of depression and neuroticism. Those of us who have experienced these things can testify to how prone one can become to getting stuck in their own mind, constantly preoccupied with concerns and anxieties that keep one’s attention fixed on oneself. This mass solipsism has been a trend for longer than lockdown has exacerbated it, but lockdown seems to have amplified it enough to leave us not only wanting something different, but willing to actually do something differently.
One way to address this sense of isolation is to genuinely invest your attention in other people, to actively listen to them. Conversely, one may feel more heard as a result of being treated this way, and less alone.
How does this relate to decentralized society and incentive mechanism design? If we are trying to build a societal infrastructure that actually lets us look out for our own good as a species, without encroaching upon the sovereignty of the individual, we will not only need tools to better enable community-managed capital, but we will also need to better relate to one another.
On a technical level, there are innovations taking shape which arguably point us to a possible synthesis of the two great models for society at scale: communism and capitalist liberal democracy. The former can be seen as one extreme, with a totalitarian state as a central planner, while the latter can be seen as the other extreme, with a neoliberal obsession around individual sovereignty. The former sought to abolish private capital, while the latter has insisted that free markets around private capital can create a better society than any interventionist central planner could.
While the above characterizations may be too simplistic and generalizing, the point is to illustrate a dialectical opportunity which may be rendered more feasible by distributed ledger technology. Namely, the publicly verifiable automation of administrative operations, via smart contracts, may allow communities to better control assets. Here, the community is a middle ground between the totalitarian state and the individual. That is, between totalitarian communism and neoliberal capitalism, there may be an opportunity for a communitarian capitalism, whereby communities, as on-chain social institutions operated by empathic individuals, can be more politically and economically enabled to exert influence on their surrounding ecosystem of other such institutions.
If we are to reconcile the interests of the individual with the interests of the community within which the individual belongs, we may also need to bear in mind the community analogue of empathy. That is, if empathy can enable a community of individuals to arrive at decisions that address the shared interests of the individuals, communities themselves will also need to be able to arrive at public policy decisions that address the shared interests of the communities. Here there are three levels of decision-making entities: the individual, the local community, and the ecosystem; none can be understood outside of the context of the others, and finding ways to reconcile individual, local and global interests is arguably the purpose of statecraft and public policy. Totalitarian communism and capitalist liberal democracy have been the two largest examples of attempts to reconcile these interests, and now we may have an opportunity to learn from both attempts, and utilize a new set of tools, as we continue to explore and engineer decentralized society.
To be sure, reconciling the interests of hundreds of millions of individuals is no simple feat, and to expect technology alone to address it is naive at best. We don’t need a perfect reconciliation, we just need a better reconciliation, one that does well what the current system does well, while also addressing the bleak and sour lack of empathy exhibited by the current system, thus making the current system obsolete. Doing so will require leaders of this new age to step outside of their own minds, their own opinions, and listen to others.
To do so may require the disarming of one’s own egoistic preoccupations, in order to grok that one’s own values, which may be shared with others as a basis for a community, are not necessarily universal, nor are they even permanent across one’s own psychological development. These values differ extravagantly, and such difference is the chaotic beauty of our situation as social and conscious biophysical constructs, billions of years in the making. The task of reconciling these values and interests is a profound one, which we each have the empathy within us to undertake.
