Table of Contents

The below are the presentation notes reproduced (after a "M-x ispell") for your convenience. The below isn't intended to make sense without the audio/video above.

1. How do we self organize?

1.1. Why care about "Software"?

  • compute becomes a larger portion of humanity over time
  • we have always extended ourselves with technology
  • compute is a part of us
    • hardware is the rest of our body
    • software is the rest of our mind
  • we are primates
    • screens are brain computer interfaces
  • We don't control the software that controls our screens
    • our digital and biological minds are controlled
  • software (our mind) is the mechanism by which we think, plan, and organize
  • definitions have consequences; some are better (evolutionarily) than others
  • brain slugs

1.2. Decentralized Web

  • Internet is the physical interconnected global computer network
    • The Web is the information (culture) on the Internet
  • how to self organize without centralized middlemen
    • How do we allocate our resources, most importantly: time.
    • What do we choose to support or resist, and to what degree?
  • build free culture where participant's are equal and free
    • culture includes: software, hardware, media
  • bottom-up social credit
    • our values "bubble up" to impact species-level changes

1.3. Related works

1.3.1. Money

  • simple barter is terrible
  • other economies emerged (e.g. gift economies)
  • reality is difficult
    • Need constant accounting
    • trust doesn't scale (Dunbar number)
    • value subjective
  • systems break down as number of participants grows
  • money catches on as "trustless" alternative

1.3.2. Capitalism

  • supply chains for scarce resources
  • more of society runs on non-scarce resources
    • software, algorithms, hardware designs, etc.
  • non-scarce resources require scares resources (namely, labor) to generate
  • make non-scarce resources artificially scarce with IP law
    • can't make money on something without consent from all parties
    • participation means a piece of the pie, and they ain't sharing
  • each person (company) has to repeat most the work
  • freedom prevents scarcity: giving to one gives to all.
    • hard to monetize: crowd-fund or donation only

1.3.3. Blockchain

  • trustless global consensus
  • I don't want global consensus
    • Shouldn't disregard all minority narratives
  • I trust people
    • Human connection SHOULD be the basis of our society
  • Proof of x doesn't scale long-term
    • Eventually someone will dominate work, stake, etc.
  • recreates fiction of money but decentralized
    • Should deal with reality (subjective value + trust network)
  • may have some value today (free infrastructure) but not tomorrow
    • takes up all the attention

1.3.4. Group Income

  • opt-in communities (groups)
  • group sets basic income level
  • members set an amount they are willing to contribute
  • members can contribute other resources
    • money isn't the only thing worth contributing
    • labor, products
    • finally, some non-money…

1.3.5. Grassroots Economics

  • communities pool together resource designations in a pool
  • members can pull from the pool but must eventually give back
  • reinvention of credit without banks
  • groups still only about a Dunbar
  • more non-money resource algorithms!
    • but uses blockchain to track resources

1.3.6. Web of Opinions (WoO)

  • people vote on content along arbitrary dimensions
    • funny, accurate, interesting
  • can set trust for others
    • aggregate votes across your social network weighted by trust
  • useful for everything from feeds to deciding what you treat as truth
  • we will use this enable larger-than-Dunbar pools

1.3.7. Open Collective and Drips

  • should mention since it's relevant to Monetizing Free Culture
  • Identifies the correct problem
    • How do I allocate resources to support supply chains?
    • especially for software, which is the correct priority.
  • Funds projects, not individuals
  • Is centralized
    • A long-term solution must be decentralized
    • I am interested in the decentralized solution

1.4. Proposed Course of Action

  • generally what we should do
  • each person issues promises of non-scarce resources
    • person (in the Citizens United sense)
    • example promises: cup of coffee, seconds of labor
  • trust for the promise is tied to trust of issuer WoO style
    • facilitate trading of promises
    • promises have different value to different people
  • build algorithms to optimize resource allocation, dispersal, and acquisition
  • enable one to disperse value to maximize generation of free culture
    • build software to help you build software that empowers you
      • concretely, do this ^

1.4.1. Existing infrastructure

1.4.2. Problems to overcome

  • value assignment problem
    • How do I discover and weight contributions of millions of laborers
    • Labor to assign values often costs more than the gift amount
  • Identity verification
    • How do I know my support goes to the intended recipient?
  • micro-transaction problem
    • How can I support to a million laborers without losing it to fees?
  • milestone proof of concept
    • need working, understandable, example for people to believe it is worth perusing
  1. Example value assignment solution
    • While building system/environments on Guix, extract git history.
      • git history includes contributions and email
    • one commit = 1 weight per package
    • explicitly installed packages weighted equally
    • half of packages' value allocated to direct dependencies (recursively)
  2. Example identity verification
    • utilize the Decentralized Identifier (DId) email
      • whoever controls the email gets those contributions
    • email throughput is limited
      • Use WoO to share trust that a public key controls an email
  3. Example micro-transaction solution
    • grant promises (goblin pebbles) for USD to controllers of identified emails
    • many others also grant similar promises
    • laborers trade promises amongst themselves to consolidate
      • more of one promise type means lower transaction fees
    • Support backends with anything that includes an API,
      • Papal, blockchain-based backends, ACH
    • groups sending promises can similarly consolidate amongst themselves
      • then each laborer need not participate in the system to benefit
  4. What this gets us
    • reality gets us labor -> free software
    • this gets us free software -> labor and resource -> labor
    • allows (resource + free software) -> improved free software
    • example algorithm to help generate social credit
    • <end of tractable project description>

1.4.3. On-boarding

  1. On-boarding funders
    • maintain software/hardware/media in a way that facilitates contribution inspection
      • give surplus resources to laborers building free culture you use
  2. On-boarding free culture
    • laborers, in the best case, receive mysterious deposits in their Paypal account
    • laborers can participate in the network and possibly reap more diverse promises
    • laborers forced to create non-free culture for survival have a gradual off-ramp
      • can contribute free culture until income is livable
  3. On-boarding non-free culture
    • make promise dedications toward non-free culture
      • promises disperse on release of non-free under free terms
      • gives companies an on-ramp
    • dispersal to free culture increases trust in dedications to non-free culture

1.4.4. Features

  1. Potential future of the system
    • partially order your set of known promises
      • trade if the promises you gain are both of greater value and trust.
      • Not just about giving, also about getting (replace money)
    • Can value incremental promises differently
      • First 5 coffee might be worth more than the next 5000
    • partial order eg:
      • the first 5 Alex coffee promises are worth less than the first 4 Sam coffee promises
      • I accept a trade of 3 Alex coffee for 3 Sam coffee
    • When promises prove to be bogus, you report that in your WoO
      • donations for non-scarce resources create a replenishing source of trust
  2. Cheating
    • You can lie and steal, but you steal from those that trust you
      • eventually, people won't trust your WoO/promises
    • cheating commits
      • maintainers won't accept diluting commits
      • contributors will fork a repo that dilutes contributions
    • lying about ownership of free culture is illegal in the current law
      • especially now that there is monetary loss
  3. Other benefits
    • We are using algorithms to increase our Dunbar number
    • bottom up social credit
      • value partial orderings + trust constitute a social credit
      • just tweak partial orderings to support your desired cause
    • doesn't avoid taxes
      • money taxed as income, goods incur sales tax
      • government less likely to stamp it out
    • super general
      • can represent any scarce resource
    • more accurately describes how we compare resources
      • value is relative, and depends on trust.

Author: Zacchaeus Scheffer

Created: 2025-03-24 Mon 21:41

Validate