Our new essay describing how decentralized technologies can strengthen democracy in government and the workplace was recently published by the Nesta Innovation Foundation.
You can read it here online: Taking the Power Back
Our essay is part of a collection of essay on Decentralized Futures. The full PDF is also available: Decentralized Futures Full PDF
By Ziri Rideaux and Brendan Miller
The spiritual and mythological lessons from Covid-19 are still unappreciated. We are confronted with the “Hero’s Journey” as described by Joseph Campbell. Other than in the Hollywood version of heroism, the mythological “hero’s journey” is about the “Dark Night of the Soul”. We are faced with seemingly overwhelming odds and come to our individual and societal breaking points, where we lose hope, abandon our dreams and can’t see a positive way forward.
In indigenous cultures, an initiation ritual is performed during adolescence to induce this breakdown of the ego. The individual realizes s/he has to surrender to nature and accept being a part of it instead of aspiring to rule and control it. Western societies have failed to offer this to us. American society as a whole has reached “grown up age” without ever encouraging a breakdown of the ego that teaches humility. Instead, men are expected to be loud-mouthed leaders and always claim to have the answers. For Western cultures, Covid-19 is the mass-induced initiation ritual into real adulthood. We need to break down to break through.
With excessive aggressiveness, Western societies have forced a male-dominated worldview onto human cultures all over the globe. Science, which is perfectly aligned with the male, reductionist and deductive perspective, is expected to answer all questions. In comparison, the female perspective focuses on the intuitive understanding of complex networks in societies and nature and allows for a wider, inclusive perspective.
By their very nature, men have been conditioned for 1000s of years to be individualists. Traditionally the hunters and warriors of the tribe went out on adventures, while women and children stayed behind. Women created complex social support systems to rear children and care for the old together, to gather, prepare and share food and services. Their natural instinct is to work together, to negotiate and share. The female idea of wealth stands in opposition to the current, male-dominated societies that create value by exclusivity and scarcity, instead of inclusivity and abundance for all.
The Covid-19 challenge has again been handled with an all-male attitude: We are being told by (male) scientists that “we are at war”. We have been ordered to “social distance” and separate from others as the only way to “fight” the virus. No efforts have been made to understand the role of the virus in our evolution. The male warrior approach wants to kill the strange and unknown. It’s the female approach to inquire and negotiate – and eventually integrate. Only a few women-governed countries like Sweden and Iceland have embraced the female approach: they have not shut down. As people are exposed to each other, they develop herd immunity. Strength in numbers, healing through mutual support. Their strategy has been successful and has not caused the trauma of separation, being locked in and scarcity.
True to their exclusive nature, the Western, male approach for how to deal with Covid-19 is only possible for a tiny segment of this world’s population: it only works for the wealthiest societies, dominated by male values of separation and control. It doesn’t work for people that live communally, in close quarters. Social distancing in India and Africa is nearly impossible.
The Covid-19 crisis is a healing crisis that encourages us to question the male approach towards governing, sharing and healing. The current “solution” has brought on loneliness and despair, panic, increased suicide numbers and poverty. The clear message is: “United we stand, Divided we fall.”
Covid-19 has been a very effective teacher to understand that our societies are only as strong as their weakest link: We learned that our health care system is only effective if EVERYONE receives equally adequate care. We learned that we have to guarantee each individual basic supplies of food and shelter. Otherwise, their physical or mental sickness will spill over, into us. We learned that we need to limit greed in the individual for the benefit of all: If the most predatory individuals hoard 100 toilet paper rolls, the rest of us will get nothing. We learned that we can act fast in a crisis – and to apply this resolve to avert global warming.
As above so below: We learned we cannot trust the elites to distribute our wealth evenly to end suffering. They have taken the lion share of our resources for themselves in bailout money and left us with taxable $1200 checks.
The feminine wisdom knows how to intuitively and gracefully act and live in the face of uncertainty. It adjusts with lightning speed. The masculine rigid logic demands certainty in numbers that cannot be obtained quickly enough to navigate fast-changing situations. It’s always a step behind.
The Covid-19 crisis requires a turn towards a feminine-system solution. It is an invitation for men to integrate their denied female side and learn to listen to their intuition. It is an invitation for women to integrate their inner maleness so they garner the courage to speak up and finally be heard. We are faced with the same challenge bacteria faced billions of years ago: to competitively fight each other and all go extinct – or to cooperate and build multicellular organisms (like humans), egalitarian societies and sustainably live together.
The aggressiveness displayed by the male scientists, politicians, media and even FB-commentators shows: they are collectively fighting for survival. To contradict the male interpretation of the Covid-19 experience is to shake the foundation of male absolute power. We are at a watershed moment: we can emerge from this crisis as a more just, green and sharing society. We can integrate feminine wisdom, learn, grow and change. Or we can return to the old masculine status quo and the next crisis (like climate change) will wipe us out. This was an important warning shot to learn from, not an enemy to defeat. Let’s take this opportunity and change!
by Brendan Miller and Ziri Rideaux, June 2018.
tl;dr
The blockchain has the potential to enable a revolution of decentralization, but only if current blind spots and pitfalls are addressed head-on. Major avenues of creeping centralization are outlined as well as ways to combat them. Perhaps most importantly, corporations as highly centralizing entities are part of the problem, not the solution. We describe a new, naturally decentralizing organizational structure called #coorganisms designed to replace corporations as the default way to organize ourselves in the age of the blockchain. Coorganism are possible today but more can be done to encourage their growth and advance the coming Fork and Merge Economy.
We are all excited about the blockchain because it decentralizes power but still provides trustworthy, transparent and enforceable contracts and enables collective decision making on large scales. We can create a new economy and society together in a free, bottom-up way. For example, the Ethereum Yellow Paper calls its protocol a new “social operating system.”
A recent summary from Consensys about the 2018 Blockchain for Social Impact Conference noted an emerging shared perspective “that blockchain is a new way of thinking about ownership, trust, and human systems. No one (everyone) owns Ethereum.”
This is a beautiful and inspiring vision, one we share.
There is another important word for this type of decentralized, non-hierarchical system: a democracy. Let’s ensure the blockchain is as democratic as possible by being mindful of our blind spots and examining potential pitfalls that erode our vision. The more diverse voices that are engaged in this conversation, the better the result will be. In a wonderful fractal, emergent way, that is the first real test of this new “social operating system.”
Direct democracy is the ultimate non-hierarchical decentralized system
There is nothing more decentralized than a direct democracy, one in which each person has one equal vote. Such a system has never before been practical beyond the scale of a small village, so we ended up with the compromise called representative democracy. In a representative democracy, we elect a small number of people to make decisions on our behalf, but our “representatives” quickly forget they work for us and abuse their power to enrich and entrench themselves. The cost of elections goes up astronomically as special interests do everything they can to gain control of the representatives, and the will of the people is forgotten.
Once the control over the “representatives” is assured, our public institutions succumb to “regulatory capture” by these special interests and what started as a representative democracy, in theory, ends up as an oligarchy in practice. This is where we are today. Princeton University researchers have demonstrated that this “Economic-Elite Domination” is what we have in the United States. Regular people truly don’t matter, which means we don’t really have a democracy… every Native American, African-American and woman knows that we never did.
This is what happens when the foundations of social systems are compromised from the beginning: they go awry. A poisonous hemlock seed will never grow into a delicious apple tree. We must design our social systems carefully and ensure their full integrity from the very start.
Let’s be clear: the blockchain is not just a cryptocurrency, nor just a computing platform – it is the foundation of a new social system. We find ourselves at the watershed of a historic moment. Now the question is: What type of system are we creating?
Whether we realize it or not, we find ourselves in a Thomas Jefferson-like dilemma. Are we willing to carefully consider what is truly fair for ALL people, or do we like our slaves too much? Or maybe you prefer the analogy of Christopher Columbus: Do you think because you got to the New World of the blockchain first that you deserve a huge land grant, or crypto wallet, as the case would be today? That’s not very democratic nor decentralized of you. 😉 If you think anyone anywhere deserves the benefits of the blockchain more than others, then you are not really taking democratization/decentralization seriously. The change must start with us!
These threats, which result partially from naivete and partially from greed, include:
These represent some of the blind spots in most conversations about the blockchain, and they are all critical to address. There are precious few voices warning to take these potential pitfalls seriously and protect the decentralized nature of the blockchain. This is surprising given the professed zeal around decentralization generally. If we are serious about decentralization and democracy, our goal can’t be to become blockchain billionaires!
One of the largest blind spots while developing a new platform for peer-to-peer exchange and direct democracy is the very organizational entity we choose to facilitate deep change in our social and moral fabric. It affects the way we relate to each other, do business and distribute power and responsibility. While representing perhaps the biggest challenge, change in this area might turn into one of the biggest opportunities.
Specifically, we argue that we need to reconsider the role of the corporation as the dominant organizational structure of the blockchain revolution. Corporations have several failings and are very poorly suited to fostering decentralization:
Is there an alternative to corporations? Yes, with the blockchain there certainly is.
A decentralized, emergent social operating system requires a less hierarchical, more participatory and organic method of organization. It is fitting that we pick a biological metaphor rather than a mechanical one.
To have a term to describe this new structure, let us call it a coorganism. Some of the criteria coorganisms should have include:
If you are inspired by the potential of the blockchain for true decentralization and democracy, these are some things you can do:
Can we create coorganisms today? Yes!
All of the essential pieces are available:
Public foundations with interest and experience with open source initiatives like the Mozilla Foundation, Free Software Foundation and Open Source Initiative can play a critical role in building the ecosystem and providing supporting services.
Foundations like these can create a “greenhouse” for incubating coorganisms, creating a climate controlled buffer between the coorganism ecosystem and existing institutions and government.
Unlike corporate incubators, these greenhouses should be open to all legal projects and initiatives. Screening should only be used to check for illegal activity so that screening does not become another mechanism of censorship and centralized control.
The core services coorganisms need scale very well and are not expensive to the foundation. Some beneficial services would include:
Thank you for being an advocate for true decentralization and democracy. We look forward to co-creating a better future together with you, from the bottom up.
Many of these ideas first appeared in our submission in September 2017 to the New Shape Prize from the Global Challenges Foundation.
This article was posted on United States of Mind, our blog. We look forward to the day when we can post directly to a censorship resistant, permanent, decentralized blog managed by the blockchain. 2Gather is our project advancing these goals. We can be contacted at info [at] 2gather.one.