I’ve been spending some time contemplating what the final product of my master’s education will be, I mean my thesis. It’s like my past experience and everything I’ve learned in the past year or so were all independent strands of thoughts and observations and it’s all coming together weaving a story, a narrative, an idea or whatever. It’s like giving birth, weirdly. That was a metaphor one of my dear teachers used to use, the birth of ideas require a lot of mental pushing and they’re uncomfortably painful. Well, I feel like I’ve come to a decent point in articulating my problem and a blueprint of a solution strategy in my social scientific endeavors and I want to lay out the plan here. The ideas I present here are definitely not entirely my own but it's more of a synthesis of what I’ve learned from several other people/thinkers new and old. What does it mean to own an idea anyway?

We live in an age of massive complex problems that we seem to be unable to solve. When the stakes are this high, and the devastation of most of the global population so obvious; why can’t we do anything about it? I mean, is it just me or is the world falling apart? It’s like there’s destruction and disappointment and pain everywhere. So many causes to fight for, so so many unhappy people. Why can’t we just fix this? I believe the answer lies in the social structures that we navigate in. We don’t act randomly, we each are playing a game with certain rules that shape the strategies we employ. We are playing the zero-sum competitive game of neoliberalism, and this game assumes rational self-profit maximizing independent individuals. Now, it’s simply not true that the behavior of humankind can be reduced to this easy definition, we have the capacity to be so much more than that. But I believe the game creates the players it assumes, we’re being transformed into the “rational man.” Ugh what a boring thing to be. However, this doesn’t mean we have to go along with it, it is still us, and only us, who can change the rules of the game. Our structures shape us but we also have the power to shape them, we are the only ones who can do that. No one else is gonna do it for us. We have agency, we should use it.

I think one great thing I’ve learned at this school is the benefits of dissecting social phenomena into their macro-micro-meso level components and looking for mechanisms instead of looking for grand theories. So let’s consider our macro situation. The way I see it there are two important components of macro social systems: our economic and governance systems. Our economic system is the way we produce, distribute and consume goods and services and our governance system encompasses our collective decision-making processes. The first produces markets and the second produces institutions and social norms. What we currently have is capitalism and democracy in a significant portion of the world. But I think that we can combine the essence of both systems under the ethos of neoliberalism. The problem is that both systems don’t really work for everyone and they produce so many unintended negative consequences for the masses. The micro-level is the sphere of individuals, which we will get back to later. I think an appropriate meso level is the level of organizations. And I have a very broad understanding of organizations, basically any group of people working together towards a mutual purpose. You would think that given the infinite possibilities of forms of organization, there would be a rich diversity to observe in practice. Guess what? Our forms of organizing show more similarities than differences for several reasons I and others have explained elsewhere. Basically, we have the proliferation of the traditional rational bureacratic organization which is very much a product of the social systems it was born in. Well was this always the case? I’m reading Graeber & Wengrow’s brand new account of human history that actually makes sense and acknowledges the creative capacity and diversity of the human species. They claim, with anthropological and archaeological evidence, that the history of social life and organization is so much more diverse and colorful than we are led to believe. Across space and time and even within the same community, there is a multitude of different organizational practices that humankind has experimented with. Until they were wiped out by the exploitative and dominating forces of colonialism. Now, why am I obsessed with the concept of organizations?

First of all, I don’t think creating a whole system and enforcing it top-down is a good strategy for social change. I think solutions to social problems are very context-dependent. Which is why I think localization is a good idea, leave it to the people that actually live in and know the environment to make the decisions about how to go about their lives. However, designing whole new systems as a thought exercise is very appealing and admirable in terms of the imagination and creativity it requires. I’ve recently learned at a conference that sci-fi and fantasy worlds are actually a way to imagine alternative futures, and it’s beautifully brilliant! But I think I want to choose to be more practical. And the way I see it, a complete new system is too big to work with. We have to dissect it into manageable parts which we can consider mechanisms of collectively doing things. Experiment with those mechanisms and their social outcomes, design them, implement them, develop them, mix and match them for different contexts. How do we make decisions? How do we produce the things we wish to consume? How do we distribute responsibilities?… But if we go to the micro-level, the individual, we’re too zoomed in, we’re missing the social aspect of things. So this in-between space where I think organizations reside is perfect. Organizations are influenced by the larger social structures they are a part of and they influence the individual behavior of the people within these systems as well. As individuals, we may not have the power to single-handedly change a social system but we have influence in the organizations that we create and are a part of, they are our tool for collective action. Not only that, organizations provide us with something almost like a microcosm to experiment with alternative socio-economic systems. We can experiment and develop our ideas and then scale them perhaps. Or perhaps we don’t even need to scale them and we could have local communities that work the way that is appropriate to their context. Why do we even need a global world order? And by that I mean a one-size-fits-all plan. Of course, we are highly interconnected and interdependent and we need to make some decisions together, on different scales. But we have to consider the specific contexts of the different problems. Anyway, I think it’s kinda bullshit to claim to have the perfect alternative to capitalism or democracy. You can’t really know without trying it out and there probably isn’t one universal solution, so we need to have a micro manageable space to carry out our experiments, test them and improve our ideas. Traditional organizations have several problems associated with them: tendencies to hierarchical structures that promote relations of domination/subordination, bureaucratic structures that end up being inefficient and counterproductive even, meritocracies that legitimize competition and reproduce social inequalities, centralized power structures… and worst of all a neoliberal ethos that legitimizes and idealizes the pursuit of more and more profit above everything else and by all means. Without it, you can’t compete because this is the environment you’re competing in. Competition pushes organizations to be more and more uniform in all of these ways, and just a little bit different for a competitive advantage which usually has more to do with the product than the structure of the organization.

So how can we actually transition into a stage of experimentation when the general tendency seems to be in the opposite direction? Well, I think we may be in luck. I think that two important things that could give birth to a mass revolution are social discontent with the status quo and new technologies that offer new ways of doing things. Well, I think that social discontent is only on the rise given that we fucked up the environment, are overpopulating the world and depleting our resources, and there are social inequalities everywhere in so many different forms. A global pandemic is the cherry on top, it brought us face to face with some of the ugly consequences of a neoliberal ethos and it gave us some time to stop and think about what the fuck we’re doing as a species. Mental illness is on a rise and arguably more so in capitalist countries. I think it’s quite clear that we’re doing something wrong. But there’s another problem: capitalist realism (Mark Fisher’s concept, there’s a whole book to read with this title). People have lost the capacity for imagination and creativity in regard to alternative futures. Is a better world possible? It’s so depressing that so many people think it is not. The only viable option, to so many, is the current one. But why? I think it’s absolutely ridiculous. There is absolutely no reason for that to be the case. We will get back to this problem later.

I think we might be in luck with the technology aspect of the problem. Many know by now that the blockchain “revolutionized” finance. Well, it goes further than that and that’s where things get interesting, for me at least. Blockchain technology also provides us with tools for mass organization with properties that are fundamentally different from traditional organizations. Decentralized Autonomous Organizations are a way of organizing on the blockchain that eliminates the need for third parties. This brings us the advantages of decentralization and autonomy which we didn’t really have with traditional organizations. Arguably, one of the most problematic aspects of our current socioeconomic systems is that they somehow always end up centralizing power in the hands of a few: political power and market power. Hopefully, extreme centralization of power will become a thing of the past, but that’s not going to be easy. I do not actually believe that DAOs or blockchain technology will save the world. That’s too simple a narrative. I just believe that we need to understand human behavior and the social outcomes of the ways we do things, and continuously experiment and improve the ways that we live with each other. And I believe that rigidity in organizational structures makes it very had to do that. The cool thing about DAOs, for me, is that they’re like live labs where organizations of very different types are experimenting with very different ways to govern themselves. They’re definitely not perfect, but they are interesting in my opinion. And I think since they are already happening whether we’re interested or not, they are worth social scientific academic/intellectual attention, specificly because there is a lack of just that.

Let’s talk about some of the problematic aspects of DAOs and cooperative organization. Even though there are no third parties governing the organization with a DAO, there is the “rule of code.” Whatever the rules are, they are executed once the appropriate conditions arise, so there is no room for human interference which can be a good thing but it can be problematic as well. The rules can be changed based on a vote (the consensus rules of which are designed by the organization and also written in the code). This can make taking action slow, and we have to see what kinds of other things can go wrong. Also, trust in the code and the ability to understand this infrastructure requires some technological competency. I think initially this is a big barrier, but not one we can’t overcome. No one knew how to use a computer 100 years ago and look at us now. And finally, one problem that I want to understand more about regards the organizational environment. DAOs and cooperatives are at a disadvantage in a traditional competitive environment which will reduce adoption and produce probably not so great results for those that take the risk. If you judge them by the standards of a capitalist system, they might not be efficient enough or profitable enough to compete with capitalist organizations. But that’s exactly the paradigm that we’re trying to shatter. So adoption is necessary to overcome the problem of the environment. I have two questions here:

1. Blockchain technology has boomed in finance, why not organization? Why does everyone know what a bitcoin is but not a DAO?

2. Cooperatives have actually been around forever but have not been a big hit with humankind. Considering their benefits, why is that the case?

The first question I will attempt to answer through a survey in which I will hypothesize potential reasons an individual would not be interested in DAOs, and measure their actual involvement with them as an outcome variable.

The second question is a bit more complicated. Here is how I want to tackle it. Cooperation is a difficult concept and is related to collaboration and coordination. I’ve learned that, if you’re gonna do an academic study (especially a quantitative one) on this concept you can’t just use it as an overarching concept for decent human behavior. You have to specify what it means in practice and in the context that you want to look at. I’m still trying to figure that out because its more difficult than it sounds, but I’m also thinking about the different ways it’s been approached before. Game theory provides an interesting lens for understanding cooperation. Cooperation is defined as a group of individuals working together towards a common purpose and is opposed to competition in which individuals work against each other for their own self-interest. So what I want to know is: what individual factors make a person more disposed to cooperative behavior? And then which structural factors make an individual more disposed to cooperative behavior? So my outcome variable will be the level of cooperation which I plan to measure with a public goods game experiment. Initially, I want to keep the game design stable and see how different individual characteristics affect cooperation through a survey before the game. In a second step, I would like to play with the game design to see what kind of structures make people more cooperative.

So let’s talk a bit about games. Game theory is the study of interdependent interactions between adaptive players and it has three main components: the players, the strategies and the payoffs. Traditionally, it assumes the rational actor which is concerned with maximizing their utility. Rationality, however, just means behaving in line with a certain value system. So when you have a very narrow understanding of rationality that encompasses only material value you have a hyperrational agent that doesn’t really accurately represent what a human being is. But if you factor in other kinds of values that motivate people, you have a more general concept of rationality which is perhaps more accurate but I think still problematic given imperfect information and the existence of emotions. That’s another discussion. So anyway, a game is still a pretty cool way of modeling social interactions. The rules represent the abstracted features of the social structure you want to model, and then you observe how this affects individual behavior. I think that the problem with this method is that you really have to simplify some things which distances you from real-world situations. But why can’t we combine game theory with the actual game sector and design games similar to real-life that we can use to experiment? I think that would be very interesting. But let’s not get carried away for now.

So game theory distinguishes between two different kinds of games: competitive and cooperative. Competitive games are defined as zero-sum, with little or no interaction between agents and therefore no trust, and the strategy is simply maximization of individual payoff. It is easy to represent and understand mathematically but it's obviously not enough to explain all real-life social interactions. According to the logic of a competitive game, cooperation shouldn’t even exist. But that’s far from the truth, isn’t it? Cooperation is one of the strongest abilities of the human species, not that it’s absent in other species. But we’re just really good at it. Sometimes. Cooperation games have a potential win-win outcome which is essential in fostering trust and cooperation. So in cooperative games, the payoffs are no longer only individual, we now also have group outcomes that we have to take into consideration: individual behavior not only affects the utility function of the individual but with positive and negative externalities has consequences for the group. In such games, individual rationality can lead to collective irrationality. The social dilemma or collective action/coordination problem or tragedy of the commons is a situation in which if all agents cooperate and contribute fully, every agent is better off but the immediate incentive to contribute less and increase individual payoffs gets in the way of cooperation and the optimal group outcome. This is a model that is useful to represent many complex collective problems and illustrates the tension between self and group that is inherent to the concept of cooperation. The underlying problem is that individual behavior has costs for the group that the individual feels isn’t really their problem. Individual behavior has positive/negative externalities or benefits/costs for the system that the individual thinks is external to their own utility function. You think you don’t have to bear the costs of your actions. But as we will discuss, this is merely a matter of perspective.

Of cooperative games, I want to initially focus on public goods games because I think this is a good analogy to common ownership which is an important concept we need to get familiar with if we’re gonna abolish private property. Private goods are characterized by rivalry (meaning it can be consumed by one agent) and excludability (you can exclude others from access to it) so with private goods, you don’t have as big a problem of externalities as you do with public goods that are non-rivalrous and non-excludable. For private goods, the good’s value is easily integratable into the individual’s cost-benefit analysis whereas this is not the case for public goods. “The tragedy of the commons” explains the situation as such: when individuals have open access to a common resource they will act independently in their own self-interest and cause the depletion of the resource through uncoordinated action. But only if you consider human beings as selfish individuals who don’t have the capacity to care or communicate with each other, or realize that we all share the same world and are actually extremely interdependent. Especially now in such a globalized world. There is no social dilemma if the individual always bears the full cost of their actions so its a matter of reconnecting the individual’s costs to the organization/system with the individual’s utility function. But how do we do that?

Externalities are “a function of independence.” For something to be external to you, there must be a dividing line between you and others because it assumes your independence of other things. So there are two solutions (that I know of) to the social dilemma. Our traditional solution was to use top-down structures like governments to realign externalities with individual behavior: the only tool available to us was “formal centralized regulatory institutions of the nation-state.” So if you have costs to your environment you are punished for it by the judicial system and you are incentivized to generate positive externalities with various reward mechanisms. One problem with this is that in the case of negative externalities you are punished once you have already caused a negative externality and your punishment doesn’t fix what you did wrong but it just creates another negative situation within the overall system, it’s not solution-oriented — it’s just imposing an extra cost. Also, the third party institutions we use for this have overhead costs, are open to corruption and manipulation and have unintended consequences like the centralization of power as we have already discussed. So what’s the other solution? We could increase the connectivity between agents to create positive interdependencies. It’s a change of perspective: if we realize how connected and interdependent we actually are, we start to see externalities not as externalities but as something that affects ourselves just as much as it affects others. And that’s the truth, isn’t it? We just have to wake up to it. But how do we do that? For groups with high levels of independence and low levels of interdependence, cooperative structures must be imposed through regulation; basically you need to have rules for people to understand what they should and should not do. However, if you have high interconnectivity and interdependence people are more capable of understanding what they should and should not do for the common good without the need for rules and you can have self-sustaining cooperative organizations. So it boils down to two things: connectivity and values. Connectivity is the infrastructure we need, and our values will determine how we use that infrastructure. So the technology is the blockchain, the tool is DAOs and then we are left with the problem of values. How do we foster positive interdependence? Well, there are ways to design structures for it: ongoing interaction, identifiable others, reputation mechanisms, feedback loops and transparency. But what can we do on the individual level? How will people born and raised in neoliberal norms and values change their perspective? First of all, I want to know: who are these uncooperative people? Are there systematic differences between them and cooperative individuals? Which cultures did they grow up in? What socioeconomic statuses do they belong to? Are they gender-conformative? Do they belong to any minorities? How do they feel about competition? How do they relate to the world? How connected do they feel to their surrounding environment? Are they capable of trust and under what circumstances? Are they empathetic? How are they doing with emotional intelligence? So many questions…

So if there is really a correlation between the perception of connectedness and cooperative behavior, how can we increase people’s feeling of interconnectedness? I’ve recently read about the concept of “anti-self technologies.” This strict distinction between the self and everything else didn’t always exist, and its never been stronger than it is today. Some experiences have the power to help you realize your connectedness to the rest of the universe and give you a sense of responsibility because of that. Among others, the one that I find to be most promising is the use of psychedelic substances. As controversial as it may seem, these substances have played a role in societies since forever. I think it’s stupid that we aren’t reaping the benefits of this extremely promising tool. We need collective healing from the trauma we’ve inflicted upon ourselves as a species. The psychedelic revolution is happening, like it or not, and I think this is the final piece of the puzzle. The last ingredient in the recipe for revolution. Oh and by the way, this idea is called acid communism or psychedelic socialism, check it out! That’s it for now.

I’ve been spending some time contemplating what the final product of my master’s education will be, I mean my thesis. It’s like my past experience and everything I’ve learned in the past year or so were all independent strands of thoughts and observations and it’s all coming together weaving a story, a narrative, an idea or whatever. It’s like giving birth, weirdly. That was a metaphor one of my dear teachers used to use, the birth of ideas require a lot of mental pushing and they’re uncomfortably painful. Well, I feel like I’ve come to a decent point in articulating my problem and a blueprint of a solution strategy in my social scientific endeavors and I want to lay out the plan here. The ideas I present here are definitely not entirely my own but it's more of a synthesis of what I’ve learned from several other people/thinkers new and old. What does it mean to own an idea anyway?

We live in an age of massive complex problems that we seem to be unable to solve. When the stakes are this high, and the devastation of most of the global population so obvious; why can’t we do anything about it? I mean, is it just me or is the world falling apart? It’s like there’s destruction and disappointment and pain everywhere. So many causes to fight for, so so many unhappy people. Why can’t we just fix this? I believe the answer lies in the social structures that we navigate in. We don’t act randomly, we each are playing a game with certain rules that shape the strategies we employ. We are playing the zero-sum competitive game of neoliberalism, and this game assumes rational self-profit maximizing independent individuals. Now, it’s simply not true that the behavior of humankind can be reduced to this easy definition, we have the capacity to be so much more than that. But I believe the game creates the players it assumes, we’re being transformed into the “rational man.” Ugh what a boring thing to be. However, this doesn’t mean we have to go along with it, it is still us, and only us, who can change the rules of the game. Our structures shape us but we also have the power to shape them, we are the only ones who can do that. No one else is gonna do it for us. We have agency, we should use it.

I think one great thing I’ve learned at this school is the benefits of dissecting social phenomena into their macro-micro-meso level components and looking for mechanisms instead of looking for grand theories. So let’s consider our macro situation. The way I see it there are two important components of macro social systems: our economic and governance systems. Our economic system is the way we produce, distribute and consume goods and services and our governance system encompasses our collective decision-making processes. The first produces markets and the second produces institutions and social norms. What we currently have is capitalism and democracy in a significant portion of the world. But I think that we can combine the essence of both systems under the ethos of neoliberalism. The problem is that both systems don’t really work for everyone and they produce so many unintended negative consequences for the masses. The micro-level is the sphere of individuals, which we will get back to later. I think an appropriate meso level is the level of organizations. And I have a very broad understanding of organizations, basically any group of people working together towards a mutual purpose. You would think that given the infinite possibilities of forms of organization, there would be a rich diversity to observe in practice. Guess what? Our forms of organizing show more similarities than differences for several reasons I and others have explained elsewhere. Basically, we have the proliferation of the traditional rational bureacratic organization which is very much a product of the social systems it was born in. Well was this always the case? I’m reading Graeber & Wengrow’s brand new account of human history that actually makes sense and acknowledges the creative capacity and diversity of the human species. They claim, with anthropological and archaeological evidence, that the history of social life and organization is so much more diverse and colorful than we are led to believe. Across space and time and even within the same community, there is a multitude of different organizational practices that humankind has experimented with. Until they were wiped out by the exploitative and dominating forces of colonialism. Now, why am I obsessed with the concept of organizations?

First of all, I don’t think creating a whole system and enforcing it top-down is a good strategy for social change. I think solutions to social problems are very context-dependent. Which is why I think localization is a good idea, leave it to the people that actually live in and know the environment to make the decisions about how to go about their lives. However, designing whole new systems as a thought exercise is very appealing and admirable in terms of the imagination and creativity it requires. I’ve recently learned at a conference that sci-fi and fantasy worlds are actually a way to imagine alternative futures, and it’s beautifully brilliant! But I think I want to choose to be more practical. And the way I see it, a complete new system is too big to work with. We have to dissect it into manageable parts which we can consider mechanisms of collectively doing things. Experiment with those mechanisms and their social outcomes, design them, implement them, develop them, mix and match them for different contexts. How do we make decisions? How do we produce the things we wish to consume? How do we distribute responsibilities?… But if we go to the micro-level, the individual, we’re too zoomed in, we’re missing the social aspect of things. So this in-between space where I think organizations reside is perfect. Organizations are influenced by the larger social structures they are a part of and they influence the individual behavior of the people within these systems as well. As individuals, we may not have the power to single-handedly change a social system but we have influence in the organizations that we create and are a part of, they are our tool for collective action. Not only that, organizations provide us with something almost like a microcosm to experiment with alternative socio-economic systems. We can experiment and develop our ideas and then scale them perhaps. Or perhaps we don’t even need to scale them and we could have local communities that work the way that is appropriate to their context. Why do we even need a global world order? And by that I mean a one-size-fits-all plan. Of course, we are highly interconnected and interdependent and we need to make some decisions together, on different scales. But we have to consider the specific contexts of the different problems. Anyway, I think it’s kinda bullshit to claim to have the perfect alternative to capitalism or democracy. You can’t really know without trying it out and there probably isn’t one universal solution, so we need to have a micro manageable space to carry out our experiments, test them and improve our ideas. Traditional organizations have several problems associated with them: tendencies to hierarchical structures that promote relations of domination/subordination, bureaucratic structures that end up being inefficient and counterproductive even, meritocracies that legitimize competition and reproduce social inequalities, centralized power structures… and worst of all a neoliberal ethos that legitimizes and idealizes the pursuit of more and more profit above everything else and by all means. Without it, you can’t compete because this is the environment you’re competing in. Competition pushes organizations to be more and more uniform in all of these ways, and just a little bit different for a competitive advantage which usually has more to do with the product than the structure of the organization.

So how can we actually transition into a stage of experimentation when the general tendency seems to be in the opposite direction? Well, I think we may be in luck. I think that two important things that could give birth to a mass revolution are social discontent with the status quo and new technologies that offer new ways of doing things. Well, I think that social discontent is only on the rise given that we fucked up the environment, are overpopulating the world and depleting our resources, and there are social inequalities everywhere in so many different forms. A global pandemic is the cherry on top, it brought us face to face with some of the ugly consequences of a neoliberal ethos and it gave us some time to stop and think about what the fuck we’re doing as a species. Mental illness is on a rise and arguably more so in capitalist countries. I think it’s quite clear that we’re doing something wrong. But there’s another problem: capitalist realism (Mark Fisher’s concept, there’s a whole book to read with this title). People have lost the capacity for imagination and creativity in regard to alternative futures. Is a better world possible? It’s so depressing that so many people think it is not. The only viable option, to so many, is the current one. But why? I think it’s absolutely ridiculous. There is absolutely no reason for that to be the case. We will get back to this problem later.

I think we might be in luck with the technology aspect of the problem. Many know by now that the blockchain “revolutionized” finance. Well, it goes further than that and that’s where things get interesting, for me at least. Blockchain technology also provides us with tools for mass organization with properties that are fundamentally different from traditional organizations. Decentralized Autonomous Organizations are a way of organizing on the blockchain that eliminates the need for third parties. This brings us the advantages of decentralization and autonomy which we didn’t really have with traditional organizations. Arguably, one of the most problematic aspects of our current socioeconomic systems is that they somehow always end up centralizing power in the hands of a few: political power and market power. Hopefully, extreme centralization of power will become a thing of the past, but that’s not going to be easy. I do not actually believe that DAOs or blockchain technology will save the world. That’s too simple a narrative. I just believe that we need to understand human behavior and the social outcomes of the ways we do things, and continuously experiment and improve the ways that we live with each other. And I believe that rigidity in organizational structures makes it very had to do that. The cool thing about DAOs, for me, is that they’re like live labs where organizations of very different types are experimenting with very different ways to govern themselves. They’re definitely not perfect, but they are interesting in my opinion. And I think since they are already happening whether we’re interested or not, they are worth social scientific academic/intellectual attention, specificly because there is a lack of just that.

Let’s talk about some of the problematic aspects of DAOs and cooperative organization. Even though there are no third parties governing the organization with a DAO, there is the “rule of code.” Whatever the rules are, they are executed once the appropriate conditions arise, so there is no room for human interference which can be a good thing but it can be problematic as well. The rules can be changed based on a vote (the consensus rules of which are designed by the organization and also written in the code). This can make taking action slow, and we have to see what kinds of other things can go wrong. Also, trust in the code and the ability to understand this infrastructure requires some technological competency. I think initially this is a big barrier, but not one we can’t overcome. No one knew how to use a computer 100 years ago and look at us now. And finally, one problem that I want to understand more about regards the organizational environment. DAOs and cooperatives are at a disadvantage in a traditional competitive environment which will reduce adoption and produce probably not so great results for those that take the risk. If you judge them by the standards of a capitalist system, they might not be efficient enough or profitable enough to compete with capitalist organizations. But that’s exactly the paradigm that we’re trying to shatter. So adoption is necessary to overcome the problem of the environment. I have two questions here:

1. Blockchain technology has boomed in finance, why not organization? Why does everyone know what a bitcoin is but not a DAO?

2. Cooperatives have actually been around forever but have not been a big hit with humankind. Considering their benefits, why is that the case?

The first question I will attempt to answer through a survey in which I will hypothesize potential reasons an individual would not be interested in DAOs, and measure their actual involvement with them as an outcome variable.

The second question is a bit more complicated. Here is how I want to tackle it. Cooperation is a difficult concept and is related to collaboration and coordination. I’ve learned that, if you’re gonna do an academic study (especially a quantitative one) on this concept you can’t just use it as an overarching concept for decent human behavior. You have to specify what it means in practice and in the context that you want to look at. I’m still trying to figure that out because its more difficult than it sounds, but I’m also thinking about the different ways it’s been approached before. Game theory provides an interesting lens for understanding cooperation. Cooperation is defined as a group of individuals working together towards a common purpose and is opposed to competition in which individuals work against each other for their own self-interest. So what I want to know is: what individual factors make a person more disposed to cooperative behavior? And then which structural factors make an individual more disposed to cooperative behavior? So my outcome variable will be the level of cooperation which I plan to measure with a public goods game experiment. Initially, I want to keep the game design stable and see how different individual characteristics affect cooperation through a survey before the game. In a second step, I would like to play with the game design to see what kind of structures make people more cooperative.

So let’s talk a bit about games. Game theory is the study of interdependent interactions between adaptive players and it has three main components: the players, the strategies and the payoffs. Traditionally, it assumes the rational actor which is concerned with maximizing their utility. Rationality, however, just means behaving in line with a certain value system. So when you have a very narrow understanding of rationality that encompasses only material value you have a hyperrational agent that doesn’t really accurately represent what a human being is. But if you factor in other kinds of values that motivate people, you have a more general concept of rationality which is perhaps more accurate but I think still problematic given imperfect information and the existence of emotions. That’s another discussion. So anyway, a game is still a pretty cool way of modeling social interactions. The rules represent the abstracted features of the social structure you want to model, and then you observe how this affects individual behavior. I think that the problem with this method is that you really have to simplify some things which distances you from real-world situations. But why can’t we combine game theory with the actual game sector and design games similar to real-life that we can use to experiment? I think that would be very interesting. But let’s not get carried away for now.

So game theory distinguishes between two different kinds of games: competitive and cooperative. Competitive games are defined as zero-sum, with little or no interaction between agents and therefore no trust, and the strategy is simply maximization of individual payoff. It is easy to represent and understand mathematically but it's obviously not enough to explain all real-life social interactions. According to the logic of a competitive game, cooperation shouldn’t even exist. But that’s far from the truth, isn’t it? Cooperation is one of the strongest abilities of the human species, not that it’s absent in other species. But we’re just really good at it. Sometimes. Cooperation games have a potential win-win outcome which is essential in fostering trust and cooperation. So in cooperative games, the payoffs are no longer only individual, we now also have group outcomes that we have to take into consideration: individual behavior not only affects the utility function of the individual but with positive and negative externalities has consequences for the group. In such games, individual rationality can lead to collective irrationality. The social dilemma or collective action/coordination problem or tragedy of the commons is a situation in which if all agents cooperate and contribute fully, every agent is better off but the immediate incentive to contribute less and increase individual payoffs gets in the way of cooperation and the optimal group outcome. This is a model that is useful to represent many complex collective problems and illustrates the tension between self and group that is inherent to the concept of cooperation. The underlying problem is that individual behavior has costs for the group that the individual feels isn’t really their problem. Individual behavior has positive/negative externalities or benefits/costs for the system that the individual thinks is external to their own utility function. You think you don’t have to bear the costs of your actions. But as we will discuss, this is merely a matter of perspective.

Of cooperative games, I want to initially focus on public goods games because I think this is a good analogy to common ownership which is an important concept we need to get familiar with if we’re gonna abolish private property. Private goods are characterized by rivalry (meaning it can be consumed by one agent) and excludability (you can exclude others from access to it) so with private goods, you don’t have as big a problem of externalities as you do with public goods that are non-rivalrous and non-excludable. For private goods, the good’s value is easily integratable into the individual’s cost-benefit analysis whereas this is not the case for public goods. “The tragedy of the commons” explains the situation as such: when individuals have open access to a common resource they will act independently in their own self-interest and cause the depletion of the resource through uncoordinated action. But only if you consider human beings as selfish individuals who don’t have the capacity to care or communicate with each other, or realize that we all share the same world and are actually extremely interdependent. Especially now in such a globalized world. There is no social dilemma if the individual always bears the full cost of their actions so its a matter of reconnecting the individual’s costs to the organization/system with the individual’s utility function. But how do we do that?

Externalities are “a function of independence.” For something to be external to you, there must be a dividing line between you and others because it assumes your independence of other things. So there are two solutions (that I know of) to the social dilemma. Our traditional solution was to use top-down structures like governments to realign externalities with individual behavior: the only tool available to us was “formal centralized regulatory institutions of the nation-state.” So if you have costs to your environment you are punished for it by the judicial system and you are incentivized to generate positive externalities with various reward mechanisms. One problem with this is that in the case of negative externalities you are punished once you have already caused a negative externality and your punishment doesn’t fix what you did wrong but it just creates another negative situation within the overall system, it’s not solution-oriented — it’s just imposing an extra cost. Also, the third party institutions we use for this have overhead costs, are open to corruption and manipulation and have unintended consequences like the centralization of power as we have already discussed. So what’s the other solution? We could increase the connectivity between agents to create positive interdependencies. It’s a change of perspective: if we realize how connected and interdependent we actually are, we start to see externalities not as externalities but as something that affects ourselves just as much as it affects others. And that’s the truth, isn’t it? We just have to wake up to it. But how do we do that? For groups with high levels of independence and low levels of interdependence, cooperative structures must be imposed through regulation; basically you need to have rules for people to understand what they should and should not do. However, if you have high interconnectivity and interdependence people are more capable of understanding what they should and should not do for the common good without the need for rules and you can have self-sustaining cooperative organizations. So it boils down to two things: connectivity and values. Connectivity is the infrastructure we need, and our values will determine how we use that infrastructure. So the technology is the blockchain, the tool is DAOs and then we are left with the problem of values. How do we foster positive interdependence? Well, there are ways to design structures for it: ongoing interaction, identifiable others, reputation mechanisms, feedback loops and transparency. But what can we do on the individual level? How will people born and raised in neoliberal norms and values change their perspective? First of all, I want to know: who are these uncooperative people? Are there systematic differences between them and cooperative individuals? Which cultures did they grow up in? What socioeconomic statuses do they belong to? Are they gender-conformative? Do they belong to any minorities? How do they feel about competition? How do they relate to the world? How connected do they feel to their surrounding environment? Are they capable of trust and under what circumstances? Are they empathetic? How are they doing with emotional intelligence? So many questions…

So if there is really a correlation between the perception of connectedness and cooperative behavior, how can we increase people’s feeling of interconnectedness? I’ve recently read about the concept of “anti-self technologies.” This strict distinction between the self and everything else didn’t always exist, and its never been stronger than it is today. Some experiences have the power to help you realize your connectedness to the rest of the universe and give you a sense of responsibility because of that. Among others, the one that I find to be most promising is the use of psychedelic substances. As controversial as it may seem, these substances have played a role in societies since forever. I think it’s stupid that we aren’t reaping the benefits of this extremely promising tool. We need collective healing from the trauma we’ve inflicted upon ourselves as a species. The psychedelic revolution is happening, like it or not, and I think this is the final piece of the puzzle. The last ingredient in the recipe for revolution. Oh and by the way, this idea is called acid communism or psychedelic socialism, check it out! That’s it for now.