Distroid Issue 40
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
Platform cooperatives and the dilemmas of platform worker-member participation
Radicle: Design for community-led governance
Expansive and extractive networks of Web3
Exploiting Inattention and Misconfigurations in Composable Governance Systems
News
PATENT DROP: Amazon’s AI training camp
Decentralization Needs Contextualization: The Use and Misuse of Ostrom’s ‘Governing the Commons’
After the #EtsyStrike, Crafting a Co-op Alternative
Making DAOs Work
Politics After Subculture
Digital Librarian for and of the World
Superrationality and DAOs
What to know about Threads
Tools
Debate Tree
Mosaic
Hedgey
Events
Open Social Media: Origin Stories
Books
What are embeddings?
Videos & Podcasts
Odisea 04: Building the impact-led crypto ecosystem with Marek Olszweski
Short Talks 1: Theorising Web3 Governance
Tweets
Toots
Digest
Research
Platform cooperatives and the dilemmas of platform worker-member participation
Despite the surge of interest in platform cooperatives, we have a limited understanding of the dynamics of platform worker-member participation in these cooperatives. Drawing on interviews with 21 senior leaders and founders of platform worker cooperatives, we investigate the dynamics of platform worker-member participation, finding that these cooperatives experience some successes and many challenges. We then build theory about how four distinct features of platform worker cooperatives—the facilitation of multihoming, the physically untethered nature of work, the relatively high importance of scale as a strategic imperative, and the relatively low importance of initial platform worker-member investment—influence these participation dynamics. We find that the platform and worker cooperative organisational models are in tension with one another when brought together within a platform worker cooperative, leading to positive and negative effects on participation.
Radicle: Design for community-led governance
The Radicle ecosystem has an ambitious goal: to create the infrastructure for a free and open internet. To protect and further this mission over time, Radicle has been transitioning decision-making to its community of developers, users, token holders, investors, and founders.
Planning this transition prompted an important question: would a one-token-one-vote governance system advance or erode Radicle’s core mission? Without protections (e.g., voting mechanisms, more distributed voting participation, checks-and-balances, etc.) would the financial interests of token holders ultimately lead to decisions that threaten its founding mission?
To pre-empt this risk, Radicle asked Apiary to support in designing a governance system that would ensure the successful stewardship of its mission over time.
Expansive and extractive networks of Web3
The self-proclaimed usurper of Web 2.0, Web3 quickly became the center of attention. Not long ago, the public discourse was saturated with projects, promises, and peculiarities of Web3. Now the spotlight has swung around to focus on the many faults, failures, and frauds of Web3. The cycles of technological trends and investment bubbles seem to be accelerating in such a way as to escape any attempt at observing them in motion before they crash, and then everybody moves on to the next thing. Importantly, Web3 was not an anomaly or curiosity in the broader tech industry. It articulates patterns that existed before Web3 and will exist after. Web3 should be understood as a case study of innovation within the dominant model of Silicon Valley venture capitalism. Our focus in this article is on understanding how the movement around Web3 formed through an interplay between (1) normative concepts and contestations related to ideas of “decentralization” and (2) political economic interests and operations related to the dynamics of fictitious capital. By offering a critical analysis of Web3, our goal is also to show how any even potentially progressive (or as we call them “expansive”) forms of Web3 development struggle for success, recognition, and attention due to the wild excesses of hype and investment devoted to “extractive” forms of Web3. In the process, they provide us a better view of how different arrangements of technopolitics can exist at the same time, side-by-side, in complicated ways.
Exploiting Inattention and Misconfigurations in Composable Governance Systems
Many DAOs desire gasless voting solutions to make participation easier for members. Some gasless voting solutions that have been adopted by DAOs rely on easily exploited oracle systems to bring votes on chain for execution. A real world example is demonstrated where ~$20,000, or 50% of a DAOs treasury was taken through a fraudulent transaction. Other DAOs that have implemented the same system manage individual treasuries exceeding $10-20M. There are simple steps these DAOs can take to safeguard their treasuries, but the exploit highlights an issue in composable governance and treasury management where tools are adopted without thorough vetting and proper configuration.
News
PATENT DROP: Amazon’s AI training camp
Happy Thursday and welcome to Patent Drop!
Today, we’re checking out a filing from Amazon for a faster AI training ground; JPMorgan Chase’s customer service system that automatically detects when you’re annoyed; and Sony’s goal to make the cloud a little more secure.
One quick note: Patent Drop will not publish on Monday, July 3, but will be back in your inbox on Thursday, July 6.
Let's get into it.
Decentralization Needs Contextualization: The Use and Misuse of Ostrom’s ‘Governing the Commons’
Decentralized technology communities seek to disrupt centralized hierarchies and promote collective ownership and access to resources. In their quest, these communities often copy-and-paste ideas and design patterns from self-governing and self-organizing communities in the Global South. However, when decentralized technology communities source inspiration from local, provincial examples, they often overlook the context in which these example communities operate.
The use (and misuse) of Elinor Ostrom’s ‘Governing the Commons’ is one such example. Ostrom’s work is often used as a source of inspiration for decentralized organizations. However, her work is often copy-and-pasted into digital systems without understanding the historical and socio-cultural context which underpins how and why collaborative systems thrive. In this article, we highlight the importance of understanding the social, cultural, and historical context that underpins Ostrom’s principles. Finally, we put forth a recommended reading list for alternative sources and approaches to inspiration.
After the #EtsyStrike, Crafting a Co-op Alternative
Today we hear from Valerie, a leather crafter and Etsy seller based in Oregon. After excitement around the 2022 #EtsyStrike evaporated, she and other artisans grew frustrated with strike organizers insistent on repeating the same strategies against the giant online marketplace. So, taking a little-known page from union history, Valerie and two co-founders formed a co-op to preserve the traditions, politics, and livelihood of handmade crafts.
Making DAOs Work
We began our inquiry in the web3 work environment with an extensive literature review comprising three phases:
In the first round, we focused on academic and industry analyses of blockchains, DAOs and work in Web3 aiming to get a comprehensive overview of existing studies and understandings of DAOs as a work environment;
In the second round we mapped the fragmented landscape of DAO work to identify the primary elements that make up the human, organizational, conceptual and technical dimensions of this ecosystem and looked at literature in organization and management sciences, and institutional analysis for theoretical frameworks that would enable us to engage with the complexities of DAOs;
Lastly in the third round, we explored historical and contemporary non-DAO analogs for workers’ organizing that may provide useful models to think about “social security” in web3 context.
You can find our full annotated literature review here. Below we discuss the key insights from each phase that form the point of departure for our ethnographic research.
Politics After Subculture
According to a recent article from a digital publication for marketing, Gen Z expects brands to “champion social causes.”1 This is an abandonment, if not a reversal, of the originary expectation that “the whole reason subcultures emerge – groups of people, typically teens, actively separate themselves (to varying degrees) from the wider mass because their values are diametrically opposed to those of the mainstream.”2 In contrast, Gen Z “strives to represent brands that feel authentic to their identities,” thus, the values of the brands—mainstream or not—are the values of their consumers.3 Rather than subcultures subverting mainstream values, in the mid-2010s, brands position themselves against each other, with Gen Z staking out their values by choosing among the brands on offer.
Digital Librarian for and of the World
“Pick a BIG project that you won’t finish, that lasts beyond your lifetime.” Brewster Kahle expanded on the thought with a reference to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick: “Because if you achieve your goal, you may go down with it.” That statement remained with me since my meeting with him at the Internet Archive on 18 January 2023.
Brewster Kahle is a Silicon Valley maverick, a man on a mission, and founder of the non-profit Internet Archive. Inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame, he is an original and uncannily insightful deep thinker. Geeky and bespectacled, he never hesitates to speak his mind. It is not surprising that he is a voracious reader, loves books and wants to save them for generations.
Superrationality and DAOs
One of the common questions that many in the crypto 2.0 space have about the concept of decentralized autonomous organizations is a simple one: what are DAOs good for? What fundamental advantage would an organization have from its management and operations being tied down to hard code on a public blockchain, that could not be had by going the more traditional route? What advantages do blockchain contracts offer over plain old shareholder agreements? Particularly, even if public-good rationales in favor of transparent governance, and guarnateed-not-to-be-evil governance, can be raised, what is the incentive for an individual organization to voluntarily weaken itself by opening up its innermost source code, where its competitors can see every single action that it takes or even plans to take while themselves operating behind closed doors?
There are many paths that one could take to answering this question. For the specific case of non-profit organizations that are already explicitly dedicating themselves to charitable causes, one can rightfully say that the lack of individual incentive; they are already dedicating themselves to improving the world for little or no monetary gain to themselves. For private companies, one can make the information-theoretic argument that a governance algorithm will work better if, all else being equal, everyone can participate and introduce their own information and intelligence into the calculation - a rather reasonable hypothesis given the established result from machine learning that much larger performance gains can be made by increasing the data size than by tweaking the algorithm. In this article, however, we will take a different and more specific route.
What to know about Threads
Today, Meta is launching its new microblogging platform called Threads. What is noteworthy about this launch is that Threads intends to become part of the decentralized social web by using the same standard protocol as Mastodon, ActivityPub. There’s been a lot of speculation around what Threads will be and what it means for Mastodon. We’ve put together some of the most common questions and our responses based on what was launched today.
Tools
Debate Tree
Visualize the debate over a topic using AI
Mosaic
Where your crypto questions get answered.
Access subject matter experts across every Web3 discipline to assist in your learning journey.
Hedgey
Token infrastructure for
onchain teams.
Token vesting, lockups, and distributions for your team, investors and community. Everything you need, 100% free.
Events
Open Social Media: Origin Stories
In the aftermath of a chaotic Twitter takeover, many people have moved away from centralized social media platforms to a new set of social platforms that are open-source, decentralized, and user-centered—like Bluesky, Mastodon, and Nostr. This shift highlights a pressing need for more trustworthy civic spaces. But civic-minded social platforms are nothing new. The advent of Open Social Media has been many years in the making.
This webinar presents some of Open Social Media's origin stories from speakers who have been involved in the development, culture, and communities of their platforms. We will explore how queer experiences and activist movements, for instance, have played a vital role in shaping the design and direction of emerging platforms.
Speakers:
Christine Lemmer-Webber (co-editor, ActivityPub)
Evan Henshaw-Plath (founder, Nos)
Golda Velez (early participant, Bluesky)
Facilitated by Nathan Schneider, Skylar Hew, and Reily McGee.
Books
What are embeddings?
If you go to the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, you'll see many of the artist's early works. They're really interesting because they don't look like what we think of as Picasso's style. These paintings, completed during his early years, are displays of his technical genius - as a classical painter.
Some particularly amazing examples are "Science and Charity" and "First Communion". One of my favorites is "Portrait of the Artist's Mother." These were all painted when he was fifteen.You can see both the artist's innate ability to make art, and his immense potential future. But to get to the point where Picasso could reject traditional styles, he had to master them first.
This is also true for machine learning. There's a whole universe of exciting developments at the forefront of large language models. But in the noise of the bleeding edge, a lot of important foundational concepts get lost. If we don't understand the fundamentals of how we get from a single word to a BERT representation, and more importantly, why we do so, the models will remain black boxes to us. We won't be able to build on them and master them in the ways that we want.
Peter Norvig urges us to teach ourselves programming in ten years. In this spirit, after several years of working with embeddings, foundational data structures in deep learning models, I realized it's not trivial to have a good conceptual model of them. Moreover, when I did want to learn more, there was no good, general text I could refer to as a starting point. Everything was either too deep and academic or too shallow and content from vendors in the space selling their solution. So I started a project to understand the fundamental building blocks of machine learning and natural language processing, particularly as they relate to recommendation systems today. The results of this project are the PDF on this site, which is aimed at a generalist audience and not trying to sell you anything except the idea that vectors are cool. I've also been working on Viberary to implement these ideas in practice.
In addition to his art, Picasso also left us with the quote,
When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.
I wrote this text for my own learning process. But it's my hope that this document puts embeddings in a business and engineering context so that others including engineers, PMs, students, and anyone looking to learn more about fundamentals finds it useful.
Machine learning, like all good engineering and like good art, is ultimately, a way for us to express ourselves, a craft made up of fundamental building blocks and patterns that empower us and allow us to build something beautiful on strong foundations of those that came before us. and I hope you find as much joy in exploring embeddings and using them as I did.
Videos & Podcasts
Odisea 04: Building the impact-led crypto ecosystem with Marek Olszweski
Hey there dear friends, welcome to yet another episode of the Odisea podcast! On this episode, we have Marek Olswezwski, the Co-Founder of Celo and Valora. On this episode we discus Marek’s founder journey, how he got into crypto, where Celo and Valora are distinguishing themselves in the blockchain ecosystem, the impact they are having on people’s lives in the global south, and where both of these projects are headed.
If you’d like to join us along this journey, you can:
Join the Odisea Community on Telegram 💬: https://marcus.am/tgSubscribe and Mint the Odisea launch NFT on Mirror 💎: https://marcus.mirror.xyz/n6OpgyB1tz_...
If you want to connect directly, reach out on Twitter: https://twitter.com/marcusdotam
Odisea is produced with the support of Safe and Ambire Wallet.
Safe (https://safe.global) (previously Gnosis Safe) is a decentralized custody protocol, securing ~$60 Billion in assets today. It is establishing a universal standard for secure custody of digital assets, data, and identity.
Ambire Wallet (https://ambire.com) is an account abstraction-based, self-custodial gateway to Web3 that introduces a range of impressive features like transaction batching, a pre-payment mechanism, and the ability to pay gas fees in stablecoins. By being accessible on both mobile and desktop devices, with a browser extension version on the horizon, Ambire Wallet aims at streamlining the user experience and ensure convenience across different platforms.
Short Talks 1: Theorising Web3 Governance
The 'What's Governing Web3?' public conference was held at RMIT University on 14 December 2022.
This session includes the following presentations, followed by a Q&A:
Eric Alston, University of Colorado
'Web3 Governance in Organisational Perspective.'Understanding distributed networks’ transformative potential for voluntary
association first requires understanding two precedent questions: (i) what are the hallmark costs of collective action?; and (ii) what features of blockchain networks reduce these collective action costs in novel ways? Put differently, governance is hard, and blockchain makes governance easier on certain margins. Transparency and immutability of collective information are direct inputs to organizational resilience, yet the way in which distributedly-governed networks also attract those with intrinsic motives for participation is perplexingly a cause for both optimism and long-run concern. In describing applications of Web3 governance in the context of information fiduciaries, non-profits, and digital creatives in a future metaverse, I draw lessons about what animating purposes are tractable to coordination via distributed network governance.Morshed Mannan, EUI
'Towards Corporate Governance-by-Design.'This talk demonstrates how DAOs seek to address agency problems by way of ex-ante technologically-mediated governance mechanisms, which I term corporate governance-by-design. I discuss the promise and perils of this approach by explaining how it varies from traditional corporate governance and evaluating measures such as reputation-weighted voting.
Tweets
Toots
Thank you for reading Distroid!
I hope you enjoyed this week’s issue.
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