Distroid Issue 38
A newsletter for curated findings, actionable knowledge, and noteworthy developments from the forefront of innovation, governance, research, and technology (i.e., the frontier).
Introduction
Welcome to this week’s edition of Distroid, a newsletter for curated findings, actionable knowledge, and noteworthy developments from the forefront of innovation, governance, research, and technology (i.e., the frontier).
In this issue:
Digest
Research
Toward Equitable Ownership and Governance in the Digital Public Sphere
Deep-Dive Into CityDAO: An Experiment in Collective Land Ownership and Decentralized Governance
Beyond collective intelligence: Collective adaptation
AI Chat Assistants can Improve Conversations about Divisive Topics
Work for Decentralised Autonomous Organisation: What Empirical Labour Economics Can Tell Us about the Decentralised Digital Workforce?
Blockchain based resource governance for decentralized web environments
Wellness Capitalism: Employee Health, the Benefits Maze, and Worker Control
Building Blockchain Frontiers: Ethereum as an Extension of the Californian Ideology
State of Defi Report 2023
News
The Open Agency Model
How (Not) to Look at AI Art
The Infinite Game of ReFi ♾️ 🕸️ | Roundup #55
AI Is a Lot of Work
Scaling Crypto Apps Not Infrastructure
OCLC introduces AI-generated book recommendations in WorldCat.org and WorldCat Find beta
Tools
FediDB
The Value Prop
Accord
Events
From Users to (Sense)Makers: open sourcing our collective sensemaking for healthier information eco-systems
Videos & Podcasts
Fluid Transformers and Creative Analogies: Exploring Large Language Models' Capacity for Augmenti...
Information and Knowledge, with Cherie Hu
💐📚🏛️ 204 - Jamie Joyce on The Society Library and Tools for Making Sense Together
Tweets
Toots
Lemmy
Digest
Research
Toward Equitable Ownership and Governance in the Digital Public Sphere
Executive Summary
We Have a Big (Tech) Problem
The harms of dominant technology platforms are manifold and include the exploitation of data and the mental health and safety of minors, the explosion of misinformation, and the negative impact on political institutions and behavior. Big Tech and especially social media companies have therefore become objects of public scrutiny and criticism. However, internal company efforts and external bipartisan attempts to rein in these harms have largely failed.
Potential Solution: Increase Competition by Enhancing Cooperatives with DAO Tooling
Cooperatives (co-ops) are organizational structures that are, unlike Big Tech companies, owned and governed by their users. Co-ops have the potential to provide equitably owned and governed alternatives to Big Tech but have been held back by issues which limit them from scaling effectively, including a lack of organizational transparency, effective governance systems, and member accountability.
However, the tooling recently created by and for Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) may help co-ops reach their potential. DAO tooling enables new forms of transparent and immutable co-ownership and governance, and technical and operational pathways for online platforms to organize around principles of equity at scale.
This paper explores how newly developed DAO tooling could help co-ops compete in the online economy. Specifically, we outline how DAO tooling could provide co-ops with:
Effective Voting—DAOs test novel and varied governance systems that appear to offer some unique benefits not available to legacy organizations. These include systems such as reputation-weighted voting, holographic consensus, conviction voting, and quadratic voting.
Increased Member Engagement—DAO tooling allows organizations to gamify milestones for their members, autonomously tracking the progress of members toward their goals, and rewarding them based on behavior. This encourages members to stay on task both for short-term gain and to develop a strong reputation in the long term.
Predictable Compensation/Patronage—DAO tooling can offer insight into the contributions of community members and the payment systems that are directly linked to those contributions. Co-ops could use these tools to make patronage more predictable, transparent, and equitable.
Organizational Transparency—Traditional co-ops, especially at scale, usually become less transparent to their members as they grow. In contrast, on-chain DAO activity like token voting, treasury management, and the payment of salaries and subsidies for public goods can be recorded on an immutable public ledger viewable by anyone with an internet connection.
Member Accountability—It is often hard to identify rule-breakers and enforce accountability as a co-op grows. In a DAO using on-chain reputation, a user’s reputation can automatically change based on the quality and quantity of contributions to a community. Reputation can be non-transferable, tied to a particular individual or organization, and recorded on an immutable public record.
Improved Capital Formation—Co-ops are at a significant disadvantage to corporations when raising the funds necessary to scale and compete. DAOs have started experimenting with alternative forms of funding that could ultimately be relevant to co-ops.
Deep-Dive Into CityDAO: An Experiment in Collective LandOwnership and Decentralized Governance
Executive Summary
In October 2021, more than 5,000 people from around the world who are part of a group called CityDAO pooled together over $8 million USD and collectively bought 40 acres of land in Wyoming to experiment with “building the city of the future on the Ethereum blockchain.” This unprecedented move made headlines in the crypto world, as it marked the first time that a DAO legally acquired and owned a piece of land on the blockchain.
DAO stands for decentralized autonomous organization. It is a digital-native organization that is typically governed by a set of smart contracts, or self-executing code on the blockchain, that enable members to propose and vote on decisions collectively, without the need for intermediaries or centralized authority found in traditional organizations. Members can interact with the DAO using digital tokens or cryptocurrencies, which give them voting power and influence over the organization’s decisions. DAOs have proliferated over the last few years, with activities ranging from making investments, funding public goods, conducting philanthropy, building new communities, and acquiring real assets. The versatility and uniqueness of DAOs have captured the interest and attention of researchers, investors, and policymakers alike.
CityDAO is one such example: it is a group of individuals who met online and collectively purchased a piece of land in Wyoming to experiment with collective land ownership and blockchain-based governance. The emergence of CityDAO coincided with a general concentration of interest and hype around the concept of “crypto cities.” From 2021 through mid-2022, mayors across the U.S. partnered with private companies to launch pilot projects exploring blockchain innovation for cities. These initiatives ranged from experimenting with putting municipal records on the blockchain to designing various versions of “city coins.” Meanwhile, states were eager to experiment with regulatory innovation to create favorable legal and regulatory environments for blockchain-based businesses and attractive locations for the formation and operation of DAOs. Although the fervor surrounding these ideas has diminished in recent months due to the collapse of cryptocurrency prices and certain prominent crypto companies, it is worthwhile to carefully examine and reflect on these experiences in order to extract valuable lessons for future best practices.
In this case study, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of the CityDAO experiment and explore the topic of DAOs and decentralized governance within the context of land ownership and community governance. Through a combination of gray literature review, semi-structured interviews with key members of the group, and digital ethnography of online activities, conducted between October 2022 and January 2023, we gained a comprehensive understanding of the project from the perspectives of technology, governance, regulations, stakeholders, and values. In the following sections, we first provide an overview of Wyoming’s DAO legislation, followed by an examination of the different phases of the group’s evolution, and conclude by extracting key takeaways and lessons learned from this remarkable experience. (Disclaimer: The authors of this paper are academic researchers who have no financial interest or stake in the DAO. The content of this post is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal or financial advice.)
Key Takeaways
Blockchain-enabled data transparency fosters scalable trust and coordination amongst strangers.
Security and immutability of votes ensure confidence of voters who participate and more dynamic governance.
Decentralization allows for more participatory democracy and turns members from participants to contributors.
Pseudonymity encourages participation, but disclosure of identities is required for greater accountability and trust.
Decentralized communication can bring challenges to accessibility and communication efficiency.
Token-based voting can lead to the “DAO Plutocracy Problem.”
Low levels of voter engagement leads to vetocracy and high coordination costs.
The current regulatory landscape in the U.S. places limitations on blockchain-based fractional ownership of land (or other real world assets).
When implemented in actual urban settings, the decentralized and “network state”-like model for property ownership may be infeasible and undesirable.
Beyond collective intelligence: Collective adaptation
We develop a conceptual framework for studying collective adaptation in complex socio-cognitive systems, driven by dynamic interactions of social integration strategies, social environments and problem structures. Going beyond searching for ‘intelligent’ collectives, we integrate research from different disciplines and outline modelling approaches that can be used to begin answering questions such as why collectives sometimes fail to reach seemingly obvious solutions, how they change their strategies and network structures in response to different problems and how we can anticipate and perhaps change future harmful societal trajectories. We discuss the importance of considering path dependence, lack of optimization and collective myopia to understand the sometimes counterintuitive outcomes of collective adaptation. We call for a transdisciplinary, quantitative and societally useful social science that can help us to understand our rapidly changing and ever more complex societies, avoid collective disasters and reach the full potential of our ability to organize in adaptive collectives.
AI Chat Assistants can Improve Conversations about Divisive Topics
A rapidly increasing amount of human conversation occurs online. But divisiveness and conflict can fester in text-based interactions on social media platforms, in messaging apps, and on other digital forums. Such toxicity increases polarization and, importantly, corrodes the capacity of diverse societies to develop efficient solutions to complex social problems that impact everyone. Scholars and civil society groups promote interventions that can make interpersonal conversations less divisive or more productive in offline settings, but scaling these efforts to the amount of discourse that occurs online is extremely challenging. We present results of a large-scale experiment that demonstrates how online conversations about divisive topics can be improved with artificial intelligence tools. Specifically, we employ a large language model to make real-time, evidence-based recommendations intended to improve participants' perception of feeling understood in conversations. We find that these interventions improve the reported quality of the conversation, reduce political divisiveness, and improve the tone, without systematically changing the content of the conversation or moving people's policy attitudes. These findings have important implications for future research on social media, political deliberation, and the growing community of scholars interested in the place of artificial intelligence within computational social science.
Work for Decentralised Autonomous Organisation: What Empirical Labour Economics Can Tell Us about the Decentralised Digital Workforce?
A decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) is a new type of digitally native organisation with a membership base that has been rapidly growing throughout 2022. A new organisational structure also leads to a new way labour is organised, hired, demanded and supplied. There are, however, some differences in human capital accumulation and employee decision-making. These issues fall in the domain of labour economics. Existing theories of labour economics are tested on conventional labour market data. However, DAO work differs from the traditional post-industrial labour market employer-employee relationship. It can be described as a hybrid of ownership, volunteering, freelancing and traditional employment in different proportions for different people. Whether those differences change how the labour market operates in DAOs needs to be examined. To understand this, we need more information on DAO workers, specifically labour and socio-economic survey data, which needs to be collected. This paper identifies the need for a large-scale survey of DAO workers, discusses the motivation and challenges of data collection specific to DAOs and some important labour economic policy questions that DAOs might face in the near future that rely on empirical data. Next, the paper critically reviews and summarises the existing small-scale data on work for DAO parameters. Lastly, the article outlines issues with empirical data collection and why current methods should be modified to gather and analyse economic data on DAO work. Overall, the paper aims to determine the way ahead for the applied labour economic analysis of DAO labour.
Blockchain based resource governance for decentralized web environments
Decentralization initiatives such as Solid, Digi.me, and ActivityPub aim to give data owners more control over their data and to level the playing field by enabling small companies and individuals to gain access to data, thus stimulating innovation. However, these initiatives typically use access control mechanisms that cannot verify compliance with usage conditions after access has been granted to others. In this paper, we extend the state of the art by proposing a resource governance conceptual framework, entitled ReGov, that facilitates usage control in decentralized web environments. We subsequently demonstrate how our framework can be instantiated by combining blockchain and trusted execution environments. Through blockchain technologies, we record policies expressing the usage conditions associated with resources and monitor their compliance. Our instantiation employs trusted execution environments to enforce said policies, inside data consumers’ devices. We evaluate the framework instantiation through a detailed analysis of requirments derived from a data market motivating scenario, as well as an assessment of the security, privacy, and affordability aspects of our proposal.
Wellness Capitalism: Employee Health, the Benefits Maze, and Worker Control
Employee health and wellness benefits in the United States have surged in popularity over the past half-century, with proponents arguing that when employers offer wellness benefits, everyone wins — workers are healthier and more productive, and employers ultimately save money. But there are real problems with this model. Government support for wellness benefits has outpaced their regulation, and there is inconsistent evidence as to whether these services and programs actually do what they promise. Companies in the benefits industry collect and transmit worker data in mysterious ways, while workers struggle to navigate an opaque and bewildering maze of benefits. Employers’ involvement in worker wellness raises a host of concerns about privacy, discrimination, punishment for non-participation, surveillance, and criminalization — all issues of intense importance to the US labor movement and workers in general.
In their primer Wellness Capitalism: Employee Health, the Benefits Maze, and Worker Control, Labor Futures senior researcher Tamara K. Nopper and research analyst Eve Zelickson explore how employee wellness has been promoted in the US through public policies and government support, and how this has led to a rapidly expanding, data-collecting industry. The result is what they call “wellness capitalism,” a model of public health involving the state, employers, and a wellness industry in which worker behaviors are monitored to improve society’s health.
By examining the histories and regulation of employee wellness programs and their realities in an increasingly digitized world, Nopper and Zelickson show how modern health and wellness benefits have produced a complex, privatized approach to public health. They argue that while new regulations protecting worker privacy and preventing discrimination are needed, regulation is not enough. To truly benefit workers, we need to question not only the value of increasingly invasive data collection in the name of wellness, but the promises of wellness capitalism writ large.
Building Blockchain Frontiers: Ethereum as an Extension of the Californian Ideology
The Ethereum blockchain has emerged as a new technology with particular affordances that lend themselves to entrepreneurial visions aligned with the Californian Ideology. Conceptualizing Ethereum as “the world computer” offers a compelling vision for those inspired by the Californian Ideology. This article examines two case studies—talks presented at DevCon4, the Ethereum community’s largest annual conference—to investigate some of the physical prototypes fueled by a supposedly ethereal technology. We focus on two distinct framings of Ethereum: As part of Silicon Valley elite Stewart Brand’s long-term futurist vision and crypto millionaire Jeff Berns’s utopian community in the Nevada desert. Through an ethnographic analysis of their frontier-themed visions, we argue that Ethereum proponents strategically use elements of the Californian Ideology to situate themselves in a successful history that also blends commercial success with countercultural elements.
State of Defi Report 2023
The State of DeFi Report 2023 is an annual survey that was conducted for the first time this year. The aim of the survey is to gather broad-based feedback about the state of DeFi from the perspective of users and implicitly their opinion on DeFi UX. The report covers various topics, such as the state of adoption, challenges faced by users, and the future of DeFi. The survey was open to all DeFi users, and we received approximately 325 responses, which comprise the findings presented in this report. The report highlights the growing trend of decentralized finance and its potential to revolutionize traditional finance. However, it also highlights the challenges that DeFi users face, such as high gas fees and concerns around unclear risks and suboptimal end-user experiences.
News
The Open Agency Model
This document argues for “open agencies” — not opaque, unitary agents — as the appropriate model for applying future AI capabilities to consequential tasks that call for combining human guidance with delegation of planning and implementation to AI systems. This prospect reframes and can help to tame a wide range of classic AI safety challenges, leveraging alignment techniques in a relatively fault-tolerant context.
How (Not) to Look at AI Art
If we can transfer van Gogh’s swirling brushstrokes onto a cat or a cowboy, does the fact that he once chose to paint the starry sky matter less to us? When facing questions about what we can learn or lose from enmeshing motifs and styles, I can’t help but think of the concept of “context collapse.” With regards to AI art, I propose what one might instead think of as “aesthetic collapse,” which consists of merging once distinct styles, historical contexts, and subjects into a souped-up aggregate that challenges our ability to interpret and understand art.
The Infinite Game of ReFi ♾️ 🕸️ | Roundup #55
In this week's edition, we'll be diving into the human component of ReFi: individual level of coherence and our collective capacity for coordination, and as always, we'll be sharing top news, events, and jobs from the ReFi world and beyond. Let's jump right in. 👇
AI Is a Lot of Work
Much of the public response to language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT has focused on all the jobs they appear poised to automate. But behind even the most impressive AI system are people — huge numbers of people labeling data to train it and clarifying data when it gets confused. Only the companies that can afford to buy this data can compete, and those that get it are highly motivated to keep it secret. The result is that, with few exceptions, little is known about the information shaping these systems’ behavior, and even less is known about the people doing the shaping.
For Joe’s students, it was work stripped of all its normal trappings: a schedule, colleagues, knowledge of what they were working on or whom they were working for. In fact, they rarely called it work at all — just “tasking.” They were taskers.
The anthropologist David Graeber defines “bullshit jobs” as employment without meaning or purpose, work that should be automated but for reasons of bureaucracy or status or inertia is not. These AI jobs are their bizarro twin: work that people want to automate, and often think is already automated, yet still requires a human stand-in. The jobs have a purpose; it’s just that workers often have no idea what it is.
Scaling Crypto Apps Not Infrastructure
Crypto apps don’t have this luxury. Unlike cloud platforms like GCP and AWS, general purpose crypto networks do not provide auto scaling as a feature. The ability of a crypto app to respond to increased user demand is constrained by the resources of its underlying network. And as we’ve seen, it only takes a modest level of adoption of a single app to actually degrade its quality of service for its users because the costs to use the app increase. For instance, as more traders want to use Uniswap, they begin to compete with one another over Ethereum blockspace and end up paying higher transaction fees to use the app. In order for crypto apps to be able to reach billions of users this must fundamentally change.
In traditional cloud there are two ways to scale an app: horizontally or vertically. Horizontal scaling refers to splitting the app workloads across multiple machines to gain performance through parallelism. Vertical scaling refers to running the app on a beefier machine with higher CPU, RAM, or disk space. While it’s early, we’ve actually seen some crypto apps try methods of scaling that look like these two familiar approaches.
OCLC introduces AI-generated book recommendations in WorldCat.org and WorldCat Find beta
OCLC is beta testing book recommendations generated by artificial intelligence (AI) in WorldCat.org, the website that allows users to explore the collections of thousands of libraries through a single search. Searchers can now obtain AI-enabled book recommendations for print and e-books and then look for those items in libraries near them. The AI-generated book recommendations beta is now available in WorldCat.org and WorldCat Find, the mobile app extension for WorldCat.org.
Tools
FediDB
Osmosis Proposal Simulator
The Value Prop
The Value Prop showcases the diverse and unique blockchain-based Internet applications that span verticals from social impact to education to security, among many others, all of which have been positively impacting people all over the world in different ways.
The Value Prop includes use cases and applications built on any blockchain network, reaching any part of the world, in numerous verticals. The Value Prop demonstrates the fundamental value – and utility – for blockchain (and crypto!), which will only grow over time.
Accord
No-code, no-token, pain free dApp.
Start tracking contributions for equity & manage governance in your web3 community or startup.
Events
From Users to (Sense)Makers: open sourcing our collective sensemaking for healthier information eco-systems
“The internet is a tool for thought and might as well get good at it.” - Gordon Brander
We’ll try to unpack that line, and discuss how our everyday activity on the web can actually contribute to collective intelligence — with the right tools and practices. To answer, we'll introduce the fascinating field of stigmergy, which studies how collective intelligence emerges from local environment modifications, such as ant pheromone trails. We’ll then present two stigmergy-inspired projects we’re working on that apply decentralized web technologies towards more regenerative information ecologies:
- Common Sense Protocol: A decentralized and interoperable annotation protocol. Enables self-sovereign ownership and sharing of stigmergic markers which facilitate cross-platform networking and curation.
- Portable Communities: Peer communities ‘mark’ each other with domains of expertise, creating networks of respect that enable new forms of collective sensemaking, coordination, and people discovery
Videos & Podcasts
Fluid Transformers and Creative Analogies: Exploring Large Language Models' Capacity for Augmenti...
Fluid Transformers and Creative Analogies: Exploring Large Language Models' Capacity for Augmenti...
Zijian Ding, Arvind Srinivasan, Stephen MacNeil, Joel Chan
C&C 2023: The ACM Conference on Creativity & Cognition
Session: B3: Method
Cross-domain analogical reasoning is a core creative ability that can be challenging for humans. Recent work has shown some proofs-of-concept of Large language Models’ (LLMs) ability to generate cross-domain analogies. However, the reliability and potential usefulness of this capacity for augmenting human creative work has received little systematic exploration. In this paper, we systematically explore LLMs capacity to augment cross-domain analogical reasoning. Across three studies, we found: 1) LLM-generated cross-domain analogies were frequently judged as helpful in the context of a problem reformulation task (median 4 out of 5 helpfulness rating), and frequently (~80\% of cases) led to observable changes in problem formulations, and 2) there was an upper bound of ~25\% of outputs bring rated as potentially harmful, with a majority due to potentially upsetting content, rather than biased or toxic content. These results demonstrate the potential utility -- and risks -- of LLMs for augmenting cross-domain analogical creativity.
Web:: https://programs.sigchi.org/c&c/2023/...
Video presentations for papers and pictorials at C&C 2023
Information and Knowledge, with Cherie Hu
Ep2: Information and Knowledge, with Cherie Hu
The music industry is infamous for its complexity and nuance. Experience and understanding are expensive to acquire and inefficiently transferred. Information and knowledge are hard to come by. Unfortunately, all too often, this leads to repetition and failures by music tech founders, due to a lack of frameworks for success.
But why is this the case? Is this an issue specific to music tech or more of a general challenge? And what can we do better?
This week Vaughn and Dan are joined by Cherie Hu, founder of Water & Music, to dive deep into the subject of information and knowledge.
Hosts: Dan Fowler, Vaughn McKenzie-Landell
Guest: Cherie Hu
Production: Dan Fowler
💐📚🏛️ 204 - Jamie Joyce on The Society Library and Tools for Making Sense Together
This week we talk with Jamie Joyce of The Society Library
Tweets
Toots
Lemmy
Thank you for reading Distroid!
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