Spotlight Issue 6: Metagov
A newsletter spotlighting individuals, organizations, and projects at the frontier
The Metagov Project is an interdisciplinary research collective with a mission to build standards and infrastructure to enable digital self-governance (i.e., a governance layer for the internet).
Metagovernance, or the governance of many worlds
Online governance is evolving. Competition, ideology, and technological advances have created the conditions for a new generation of games (e.g. Minecraft, Seed), social networks (e.g. Mastodon), and collaborative platforms (e.g. Ethereum, Aragon). This new generation of online communities is changing the rules of online governance. In these worlds, users have the right to self-governance—the right to come together and organize their own social and political institutions. Our mission is to describe, support, and expand that right.
But on the internet, the right to self-governance is not a natural right; it is enabled and circumscribed by the architecture of the platform on which people interact. That same architecture also governs the interaction between separate user-generated institutions. Metagovernance describes these two related roles: (1) enabling and constraining users’ ability to create their own institutions, and (2) governing the interaction between separate institutions, whether they be small informal chat groups on Telegram, open-source communities on GitHub, billion-dollar protocols on a blockchain, or traditional institutions like courts and contracts that have been transposed to a new digital realm.