Arweave TX
Protector
The most impressive aspect of the cooperative movement is its coordination system that differs from capitalist characteristics (money, profit, consumption) - a distribution system that emphasizes fairness. Consider these examples:
Enspiral splits community service and corporate modules, with both contributing taxes to a collective fund pool, managed through community decision-making.
HUMANs operates its own currency network and marketplace, with currency minted based on work hours rather than gold or bonds.
Fairshares establishes four types of equity (workers, investors, consumers, founders) and designs relationships between them. The designers believe this structure will gradually transition ownership to workers and consumers for fair distribution.
REV employs a highly complex prototype model that deconstructs, records, and analyzes value flows between enterprises to achieve sustainability and fair distribution of social value.
The DAO movement has inherited these ideas, often swinging between mimicking cooperatives and traditional companies. When prioritizing fairness, it innovates with cooperative-style models and organizational structures. When emphasizing efficiency, it reforms toward corporate structures and promotes private ownership incentives.
I tend to reject cooperative-style social innovation. It falls outside my personal definition of innovation. It resembles how my grandfather's generation approached problems - clumsy, lacking technical sophistication, full of spiritual contemplation.
The basic cooperative model typically:
Breaks down people's decision-making behavior
Divides it into tracking pre-event information and post-event review
Essentially modifies how information is tagged and managed
While I accept its effectiveness in standardizing cooperation between organizations, this model faces significant challenges in our modern context of stranger-based and networked societies, where power and responsibility flow dynamically rather than existing in static, symmetrical relationships.
This relates to membership issues. If all members' information is recorded equally:
Excessive redundant data accumulates
Information flow and coordination costs skyrocket
Nobody can successfully extract actionable plans from the data
If only partial recording occurs, questions of data access, modification, and deletion rights remain unresolved. When information recording costs aren't distributed fairly:
If few people bear the burden, management eventually ceases
If everyone participates, the friction costs exceed traditional corporate management
Many organizations initially attempting fair distribution through information recording ultimately fail or abandon the effort
During recording and tracking:
Data can be compromised by noise
Organizational "conclusions" may reflect forced rather than genuine consensus
Information gets mixed with personal agendas, especially self-promotion and performance behavior
Voting processes incorporate private desires, including:
Dissatisfaction with others' expression
Questioning of values
Data distrust
The system of "forced agreement" resembles a panopticon, compelling people to expose their actions and thoughts. This disrupts normal work flow and creates constant feelings of distrust and surveillance.
Cooperative models often retreat to small circles, combining their approach with intimate relationships to fulfill their self-realizing prophecy. However, when expanded to complex, normal social environments, they address a false problem. The real issues are:
Prohibitively high information recording costs
Uneven value distribution
These are the two tragedies that cooperative-style organizations inevitably face. People cope with these tragedies through:
Psychological compensation - imagining that information costs will decrease in the future
Mere survival - accepting whatever works, choosing existence over ideological purity
