We often see stories of resources and governance being captured, so we accept it as a reality of life. An executive embezzled company funds for an extravagant vacation, a politician accepted "campaign donations" from an industry consortium in exchange for support in exchange for legal rewards, unfairly crowding out new competitors, the chairman of the company's board leads His company bought a friend's business/company at an exorbitant premium.
Constrained by the realities of the atomic world, the safest way to manage resources shared by many is to place them in the custody of a trusted few. An organization's internal governance policy strives to address risks that even a few cannot trust, and is supported by external governance policies implemented by the government.
Each of these governance systems, in turn, is forced to place shared resources in the custody of a few, creating opportunities for bad actors to acquire the organization's shared resources for selfish needs, or worse, to acquire resources designed to prevent Acquired governance mechanism, first place.
This "safe" model of centralized hierarchies of power has long been the status quo, and while it enables organizations to help create the modern world of relative luxury we live in, it leaves a lot to be desired. If humanity is to solve challenges such as climate change and public goods infrastructure, we must figure out ways to manage shared resources and significantly reduce the risk of capture.
Recently, with breakthroughs, blockchains and smart contracts have revealed a new model of trust in the governance of shared resources that relies on a combination of cryptography and broad distribution of power. This model enables a new category of governance called capture-resistant governance .
The promise of anti-capture governance is to manage shared resources in a way that prevents bad actors from capturing them. In doing so, it also opens up new frontiers of common possibilities. The astonishing fluidity, flexibility, and adaptability shown by the early web3-native community demonstrates that it is possible when our governance structures avoid capturing shared resources without the rigidity of traditional approaches.
This article introduces Anticapture, a framework for understanding anti-capture governance that aims to understand the fundamentals of anti-capture governance by examining how an organization (modeled as a network of agents) acts to manage resources to serve its goals .
When you finish reading, you'll have the beginnings of taxonomy and a set of terms that can be used in the context of DAOs, decentralized communities, and capture-resistant governance.
This article first defines the key components of the Anticapture framework and then tests them to answer a fundamental question:
Proxies and Networks
Share resource
Action and its four stages
Case Study: What Makes a DAO a DAO
Then where to go?
Proxies and Networks
An agent is an individual entity capable of taking action. An agent can be an individual, software representing an individual or group (e.g., an Ethereum client), or a group of multiple agents.
Anticapture models any group, community or organization of agents as a network. Networks provide the basis for formal analysis, including relationships between nodes, an example being how the strength of these relationships affects the capture sensitivity of the network.
Most networks with relationships between agents rely on game theory of repeated interactions to resist capture—in other words, trust. On the other hand, when the majority of agents in a given network do not have strong relationships with each other—such as in larger networks, when agents initially don’t know each other, or when some agents have anonymous digital identities— — The network must rely not on trust, but on stronger protection against internal capture, and the next section will explore where this stronger protection can come from.
Share resource
Anything we can use to make or get what we want—from basics like energy, food, and water to more complex things like financial assets, tools, and social reputation—is a resource.
When a resource is under the authority of a single agent, we treat it as a private resource . ¹By definition , private resources cannot be captured by internal proxies. They can be captured by external agents, unless the agent controlling the resource is autonomous (see the enforcement section).
When a resource is under the authority of a proxy network, we treat it as a shared resource . Historically, shared resources have been easily captured by proxies inside and outside the network.
An important difference between private and shared resources is their power structure. For example, money can be owned by a single person or by a company, government, etc.
Some resources can only be private, lack mind control, and no one can force you to focus or spend your time in a particular way. They may tempt you to do so by changing your motivation, but the actual resources of time and attention remain under your control. ²
Some resources can only be shared. Power over these resources is decentralized and cannot be privatized. We call these distributed resources. One reason many distributed resources cannot be controlled by any single agent is that they are emergent properties of some larger system.
Agents are the same as actions (as we will see in the next section), the Anticapture framework treats resources as recursive (recursion can understand the process of self-repetition, can go to Wikipedia or Baidu to understand) concept. An agent can be a network of agents, where each action of a given agent consists of smaller actions of subagents. Likewise, agents often use one resource to deploy a second resource with the intention of affecting a third resource.
The first-level resources in the previous sentence tend to be coordination mechanisms or governance structures, and while in day-to-day discussions these are often not considered resources at all, the Anticapture framework treats them as resources because actions taken by agents affect them, and They can be caught.
While it may be daunting at first, this approach provides an easy way to model complex dynamics, laying the foundation for formal analysis and concise terminology.
Action and its four stages
The four action phases in the anti-capture framework, notice how each phase itself is composed of smaller instances of all phases.
Actions are how agents use resources to achieve their goals, and all governance of shared resources takes place through actions. In the anti-capture framework, an action has four phases:
Suggestion: Delineate the options on the form
Decision: Choose Preferred Option
Execute: put the selected option into action
Assess: Analyze the impact of performing actions
These stages are periodic, and the evaluation stage of an action usually proceeds to the proposal stage of a subsequent action, which is also recursive. Each stage itself consists of all four stages, and the network actions consist of the actions of a single agent, which is true on many levels. Organizational actions consist of actions taken by individuals, and individual actions consist of actions taken by networks of neurons.
The following sections will examine each of these phases in turn, focusing on their role in the action life cycle and their relationship to power control and susceptibility to access to shared resources. As we step through each stage, keep in mind the underlying principle that power itself is a resource, and soft power capabilities are the forces that influence people to have basic resources.
Note that while agents can acquire shared resources by accumulating base or soft power, the greatest risk is related to base power. Networks are most vulnerable to capture during the action phases using basic powers, so these phases are the most critical for anti-capture mechanisms.
propose
The agent's agenda is set at the proposal stage, what problems should the agent try to solve? What options should an agent consider?
Participating in the proposal phase within the network, ranging from centralized to decentralized, describes how widely distributed the power is to add options to the network’s agenda.
In networks where agendas are informal and do not define what actions can be carried out, proposed powers are influential, not fundamental. Proposals do not affect the shared resources of these networks, so the risk of capture is low and some degree of centralization is acceptable.
However, in networks where actions must go through a formal proposal process—particularly those that use anti-capture mechanisms—the power of proposals is an expression of fundamental power, as it directly affects the list of proposals to share resources. A decentralized proposal stage is critical to protecting such networks from capture.
Decide
Select options on the agenda for execution at the decision stage. Should the agent execute the proposal? Which suggested options should the agent choose?
Participation in the decision-making phase, ranging from centralized to decentralized, describes the proportion of agents in the network that have a say in the decision-making process.
We often assume that decision-making is where the power lies. After all, the boss makes the decision, and the boss has the power? Bosses have power, but not quite. In the context of cyber actions affecting shared resources, bosses are indeed the ultimate decision makers, but more importantly they have the power to execute the actions they choose. On its own, decisions about what to do do not affect the network's shared resources, and for this to happen, decisions must be coupled with execution.
Therefore, the risks captured in the decision phase are not catastrophic. While decentralizing decision making is beneficial in many cases, it is not a strict requirement for effective anti-capture. We'll see why in the next section.
implement
In anti-capture governance, execution is king. The execution phase is the phase in which the selected action is performed, it is where the action is performed, and where resources are deployed and affected.
Participation in this phase ranges from centralized to decentralized, describing the proportion of agents in the network that share power to perform the actions chosen during the decision phase.
As we mentioned, in a network, agents that can participate in this phase exercise fundamental power in the form of direct control over the network's shared resources. If this power is concentrated in the hands of a few, the network can easily be seized by internal agents. No matter how decentralized the decision-making stage is, there is nothing structurally that prevents those with executive power from ignoring the outcome and executing the actions they want.
Even if such a network avoids capture, centralized execution has other negative effects. As we saw in the previous section, anyone involved in a decision without executive authority must win over executives to see their recommendations implemented. Even though the decision-making phase is technically decentralized, in practice, the centralized execution phase exerts a centralized power on the decision-making.
This is how many traditional organizations operate, and non-executives are subservient and have much less chance of having a significant impact on the organization. ³
Decentralized execution is a game changer. Decentralized execution is a strong support for other forms of capture where centralized execution creates a capture risk. The network has the flexibility to experiment with various forms of decision-making and evaluation as long as execution rights in the network are still distributed among the majority of agents.
In an anti-capture structure, the separation between decision and executive power is only possible. This is why decentralized decision-making is not strictly required. This is also why decentralized organizations can be fluid and adaptable. When executive power is dispersed, leadership can really emerge from anywhere.
Execution has a second dimension due to its world-state-altering nature. This occurs on a scale from dependent to autonomous, describing the extent to which external agents can stop, change, or otherwise interfere with execution.
Most traditional organizations rely on rules and regulations enforced by higher-level agencies to prevent internal capture. The actions they perform require approval from outside actors, which means they can be easily captured by these actors. On the other hand, networks that perform actions autonomously are difficult to capture by external agents.
evaluate
The agent analyzes the impact of performing actions during the evaluation phase. This evaluation often becomes an input to the proposal phase of the follow-up action, which initiates a new action cycle.
Participation in the evaluation phase can range from centralized to decentralized, with the degree of decentralization generally determined by the transparency of network operations. If the network is organized on a public blockchain and communicates openly, even external agents can participate in evaluating its behavior.
Assessments are informative in nature and do not themselves affect shared resources, so participants may exert influence but not fundamental power. While a decentralized evaluation phase is often valuable, it is not a strict requirement for effective capture-resistant governance.
Case Study: What Makes a DAO a DAO
The Anticapture framework can be used to investigate many issues related to anti-capture governance, many of which we will explore in follow-up articles. Today, we first examine one of the most pressing questions in the field: what makes a DAO a DAO?
To date, most approaches to answering this question have defaulted to either referencing a specific technology (e.g., "A DAO is an organization that operates through smart contracts") or prescriptive structure (e.g., "DAO members own tokens and use them to vote on proposals") . However, for a definition to go beyond existing implementations, it must remain calm and stick to first principles.
With the Anticapture framework, we can conceptualize DAOs as a powerful form of capture-resistant governance. In a sense, this means that the DAO inherits the basic properties of the parent class' anti-capture governance. As with any instance of anti-capture governance, DAOs are networks of agents that manage shared resources, and they have a purpose.
The purpose of a DAO does not need to be clear, a DAO may have multiple purposes. In fact, the purpose of a DAO may even stem from the different motivations of the agents in its network. To say that a DAO has a purpose is just to say that it has an intention.
Finally, like other forms of anti-capture governance, DAOs protect their resources from capture to some extent.
What differentiates DAOs from other forms is how and how strongly DAOs resist capture. Specifically, DAOs are difficult to capture at their most vulnerable point: the execution phase (described above)—the point at which the network takes action on its shared resources.
When a DAO takes actions that affect or exploit its shared resources, the execution of those actions occurs in a decentralized and autonomous manner. The decentralized aspect of execution requires that all agents in the network share the power to perform the operation, which is how DAOs are primarily resistant to capture by internal agents. On the other hand, the autonomous aspect of execution requires that no agent outside the network has the authority to perform or change the operation of the DAO, which is how the DAO is primarily resistant to capture by external agents.
To sum up, we can summarize into a single-sentence definition of DAO:
The DAO is a network of agents with a common purpose and is the only network of agents authorized to perform management and operate on a set of shared resources.
We will frequently explore this definition and its implications in subsequent articles. Meanwhile, if you're a DAO operator, you're probably wondering why it's nowhere to be found. This is intentional: because it is possible for executive power to be sufficiently decentralized without opening it to the entire world, it is possible to resist capture without permission. In fact, in some cases, unauthorized participation can actually threaten the DAO's resistance to capture by creating more attack vectors. Confusing decentralization with permissionless is one of the most common mistakes in the DAO space.
Where to go from here?
If you choose to accept, your task is to use the Anticapture framework in your thinking, discussions, and work related to DAOs and other forms of governance. When encountering a new decentralized community, or working in your own community, ask yourself how easy it is to get caught. What shared resources does it have and how does it manage them? How distributed (or concentrated) is executive power?
As you do this, you may find that many communities calling themselves DAOs do not meet the standards suggested by the Anticapture framework. Some of these aspiring DAOs may be built as tokenized communities, with multi-signature libraries “controlled” by Snapshot signals, where execution is concentrated in the hands of a small number of multi-signers.
If you come across one of these hard-to-capture organizations, consider two things. First , how does it change its structure to become more resistant to capture? Second , what valuable properties does it have to explore and possibly retain in the new structure?
In this article, we talked about the properties that make capture-resistant governance a powerful new tool for human progress, and we used the framework in an example to better illustrate what a DAO really is. In future articles, we will explore the Anticapture framework further and in greater detail to develop a complete taxonomy of many forms of anti-capture governance.
Until then, good luck resisting all catches!
final summary
In this context, "private" here refers to the general concept that describes power and control, not the specific exercise of power in the form of access control or obfuscation (such as "privacy").
However, sharing of such resources can be declared.
Social dynamics and reputation can moderate these effects, but only partially under certain conditions, such as when executives need to maintain public reputation.