A great many ideas come to mind here, which I will attempt to casually address in some arbitrary order, with a view toward eventually refining them into more substantive discourse. These ideas build from previous notes, such as Notes on an Ethical Hermeneutics of Machiavelli, Intimations of a Post-Machiavellian Moral-Tactical Calculus, Intimations of a Post-Machiavellian Moral-Tactical Calculus, Part 2, Malattunement before Malice, Notes on Methodology for Communities of Practice, as well as my notes on Discourses on Livy (r-NM-DL-Hub) and The English Face of Machiavelli.

Schizoanalysis & Optics

Speaking only from micropolitical experience, good diplomacy involves understanding and speaking to multiple perspectives. This ability often requires the diplomat to simultaneously entertain conflicting, or at least ostensibly conflicting, narratives and optical frameworks around the matter at hand. To be able to sensemake within and across separate world models is, in a sense, an example of applied schizoanalysis, in Deleuzo-Guattarian jargon. Or rather, such a diplomatic approach can be called schizoanalytic if it seeks to preserve the plurality or multipolarity of the political arrangement in question, rather than seeking to reduce or reconcile things into a single unified narrative.

In my experience, there have been micropolitical circumstances wherein the promotion of a single coherent narrative is advisable, and circumstances wherein the co-existence of multiple conflicting narratives is advisable. In the latter case, sometimes this disharmony is a benign and tolerable liability, and sometimes it even bears a certain utility, such as those systems of checks and balances wherein interpolar conflict can play a stabilizing role at the macro level.

In any event, the ability to hold several different worldviews in superposition can be an invaluable skill for the politician, regardless of their disposition. Whether one chooses to synthesize these worldviews and promote the synthesis, or preserve their separation and promote a multipolar regime, I would argue is a matter of circumstantial pragmatism. In this sense, the politician can cultivate a certain perspectival breadth which serves to deepen their optical insightfulness and thuswise expand their strategic affordances, be they disposed to diplomacy, supremacy, or what have you. Personally, I generally default to diplomacy.

Deep-Network Diplomacy

On the level of micropolitics, be it merely a regional subculture, a network of industry leaders, or a congress of politicians, one can discern various spectra of context-specific de facto political clout, which may or may not directly correspond to official or formal designations. One can then discern a nexus of protean political dynamics between actors in a given milieu, as well as the plurality of optical complexes informing each actor’s conduct within this milieu. This conduct can be seen as exerting a stabilizing or destabilizing influence, the discernment of which is subjective and viewpoint-dependent, resulting in a nebulous and undulating micropolitical landscape.

There is a certain degree of embodied knowledge which comes with the prolonged observations of these dynamics, which often proves ineffable. I would argue it is on this level of embodiment and attunement that one can most substantively calibrate to the micropolitical vicissitudes of a given milieu, and that the level of conscious reflection and conceptual frameworks can, at best, serve as heuristics to guide one’s cultivation of this embodied knowledge. It is also quite clear, at least from my limited micropolitical experience, that most people seem largely ignorant of these matters, and, even among those who are aware, strategically and tactically imprudent at that.

Now if one is concerned with the political stabilization of a given equilibrium deemed ethically favorable, diplomacy will likely play some role in one’s strategy. If one is highly predisposed to diplomacy, as I am, one can go quite a long way without needing to adversarial conduct. Likewise, if one is highly predisposed to transparency, as again I am, one can even go far without needing to resort to duplicitous means. That said, everyone has their limits, and I believe everyone is better off in full anticipation of these limits, i.e. the points at which one allows oneself to resort to adversarial conduct or duplicitous means. This is to say, one should be in touch with the ethical extremities of the means by which they seek to promote a certain end, and how these extremities may vary according to circumstances. Concrete precision in this awareness isn’t as important as a general awareness, I would argue.

So, given the goal of micropolitical stabilization of a given status quo, and a predisposition to diplomatic strategy and to operational transparency, one can then begin to operate in a positive-sum fashion with respect to the various interests at play in the milieu, and in doing so can accrue some reputation as a trusted and beneficent entity, without engaging in any duplicitous conduct. With this reputation may come some level of pre-eminence, as well as an expanded set micropolitical tactical affordances. For example, one’s approval may carry a stronger weight and may be sought out as an optical boon, one’s instinct may be deferred to more readily or substantively, and various simple acts begin to constitute favors and sources of additional clout, acts which cost one little and once carried only trivial political significance.

There is the question of intentionality, or at least perceived intentionality, i.e. whether others in the network trust and align with you, but there is also the question of competency, or at least perceived competency, i.e. whether others in the network are willing to operationally rely on you in some capacity. Given the appropriately proven intentionality and competency, one can amass micropolitical clout and, in doing so, tend toward the political core of the network. From this position, one is quite empowered to promote certain target equilibria across a given milieu.

Conflict & Prevention

In my considerations so far around the ethical application of realpolitik in the tactical dimension, it seems generally advisable, as a guiding axiom, to take a minimalist approach with respect to duplicitous or forceful means toward the end of political stabilization. In addition to the moral cloudiness of these means, they also tend to constitute optical liabilities, and even if one is able to put on a convincing performance in feigning moral bearings, it is considerably more difficult, if not virtually impossible, to likewise fool an entire milieu. If the task is to maintain some stable political equilibrium which enshrines a certain status quo, say a certain balance of individual and collective rights and benefits, one should have an understanding of one’s own tolerance for the usage of duplicity or force in the promotion of such an equilibrium. The self-awareness of this tolerance, and the diligence involved in operating within one’s boundaries of moral integrity, is required for any viably ethical operationalization of a given political acumen.

Something I’ve found to be micropolitically advantageous is a decidedly stoic combination of emotional composure and patience. This, coupled with some astuteness in observation, can allow one to remain more or less optically stable, while inevitably various other actors in the milieu, owing to the circumstances of life, succumb to this or that fit of passion, potentially entailing crises which constitute opportunities for change in the status quo of the social fabric. This, again, is entirely irrespective of the disposition of the politician: one can seek to mend these tears in the social fabric as they form, or exploit them to sow division.

More proactively speaking, one can seek to prevent these tears, in the interest of conflict prevention. With enough observational experience, one can develop an instinct for detecting the latent fissures in a milieu, which can sometimes be addressed before irrupting into actual conflict. Once conflict irrupts, various factors come into play which are not as consequential during the latent phase.

For example, actions taken by actors involved in the conflict, such as someone making a statement of what has thus far remained their private thought, carry certain optical implications. After all, actions are certainly harder than thoughts to walk back. Additionally, actors then have their reputation tethered to their own actions and to the optics of the scenario at large, such that diplomatic concessions which seem modest and reasonable to a neutral observer come at the subjective cost, to those involved, of losing face. This is all to say that, once a conflict manifests, it is much harder to resolve than when it is latent. Thus there is an exquisite science to be discerned in this domain of micropolitical relations, upon which, I’d argue from a perspective of realpolitik, the entirety of our legal and institutional society constitutes a superstructural complex of social constructs.

This particular conflict involved a chronically controversial individual lacking established relationships in our community, an individual toward whom the community at large nonetheless felt some degree of sympathy and willingness to tolerate. There are various idiosyncrasies distinguishing this community from others, such as its pluralistic ideological profile and its collective expertise in various emerging technologies, but overall many of these considerations ought to generalize to community writ large. The community in question is also operationally active on a volunteer basis, hosting various collaborative projects involving a couple dozen of its members who engage as a labor of love.

The core tension here can be expressed as such: how can a community practice tolerance and forgiveness vis-a-vis members who introduce conflict, while also ensuring the safety of its other members and the operational coherence of the group as a whole? In other words, how can restorative peer-to-peer conflict resolution be facilitated without degrading the operational efficacy of the group as a whole?

Personal Context

This note regards my personal conceptual navigation of such issues, within both the lived context of my involvement with this community, and the auto-discursive context explored in various previous writings:

• Wu Gwei, or Going with the Flow of Governance

• Notes on Methodology for Communities of Practice

• Notes on an Ethical Hermeneutics of Machiavelli

• Intimations of a Post-Machiavellian Moral-Tactical Calculus

• Intimations of a Post-Machiavellian Moral-Tactical Calculus, Part 2

As such, my considerations on this matter will be colored by my ongoing attempts to reconcile the tactics of realpolitik with one's subjective moral integrity, resulting in an embodied sensibility or intuition regarding the moral-tactical navigation of micropolitical turmoil in any arbitrary operational context. In this particular case, the tactical orientation of this sensibility is geared around the particular operational circumstances and exigencies of the community in question, such as the project of creating and managing a community knowledge base. All in all, this attitude could, I believe, be justly considered "post-machiavellian" in that it takes realpolitik as a point of departure for tactical consideration, and then assumes some degree of enlightened self-interest on behalf of the subject.

Lastly, in terms of the spirit in which such considerations are expounded, I will be proceeding in the method of auto-discourse (see [[A Primer on Auto-Discourse]]), largely as an experiment in cognitive transparency.

Earned Reciprocity

One of the factors which characterizes this particular conflict is the apparent assumption, held by the controversial newcomer to the community, that one is automatically entitled to the trust and solidarity of said community. The community in question prides itself in being open to newcomers, and being pluralistic in its composition of backgrounds and beliefs. That said, for communities like this to be completely porous is to for them to open themselves up to interlopers who, consciously or not, endanger the existing social fabric.

A key consideration for members of such communities, is the manner in which trust is dispensed to newcomers, the manner in which bonafide solidarity spreads its roots through an expanding social network. This needn't necessarily be handled in a dogmatic fashion, as a matter of community policy, but it can instead be approached on an individual basis. How willing are you, personally, to assume that a given newcomer has the community's best interests at heart?

Additionally, beyond how we allocate our trust, we also have the matter of how we allocate our attention. Attention is a sacred resource, especially in volunteer communities wherein traditional forms of compensation may be scarce. In this respect, to abuse the attention granted by members of one's community is to signal that one does not value said attention. This abuse erodes trust, consciously or unconsciously, and if it prevails throughout community messaging channels, it promotes a general disengagement unto burnout.

Sadly, this is a path many of us have experienced time and time again, when our communal bandwidth is not respected. One grassroots approach to address this problem is to promote a philosophy of reciprocity, where peers respect each other's attention and earn each other's trust over time, by collaborating and cultivating relationships. These relationships constitute the backbone of the community, and arguably determine the endurance of a community as its social fabric inevitably undergoes turbulence.

Micropolitical Flux

From a perspective of micropolitical realism, any social fabric by nature experiences constant disruption, sometimes constructively and sometimes destructively - and even this depends on the beholder. To expect constant harmony is arguably to neglect a certain reality of how we socially navigate our worlds. As individuals we experience shifts in our priorities, our affordances, and our emotional bearings; and these shifts can ramify outward unto social interference patterns, in most unpredictable fashions.

In this context, social coordination is as much an art as it is a science, if not more. For a community to achieve and maintain a social coherence, this sort of flux ought to be accounted for preemptively, not just by organizational policy, but in the anticipation of its members.

This can be a difficult sensibility to instill in lieu of experience. That is, if the community is composed predominantly of individuals who lack experience dealing with governance takeovers, hostile interlopers, or various other forms of community disruption, the naturally sanguine predispositions of these individuals may culminate as a broader culture of micropolitical fragility, susceptible to such disruption. After all, experience is the oracle of truth¹.

Such a sensibility may better orient the individual to prudently allocate their trust and attention in the spirit of reciprocity, and in anticipation of inevitable social conflict. When members of a community embody this more refined standard by which trust and attention are granted, said community becomes better protected against abusive actors², while still remaining accessible to those who are willing to earn the trust and attention of their newfound community.

Malattunement before Malice

One key aspect of this sensibility is the interpretation of the intentionality of other individuals in and around a given community. It is a common wisdom, to assume incompetence before malice, but for our purposes I would like to specify the pithiness in a particular direction: social attunement³.

A great part of the work of relationship building is the ability, and willingness, to understand where the other person is coming from, to meet them on a common wavelength as it were. It is a largely preverbal social phenomenon, and the ease with which it is undertaken varies drastically from one relationship to another, owing chiefly to the sheer diversity of human experience. To feel attuned with another person is, in many respects, to feel less alone, less encumbered by the communicative friction of language.

This attunement is a key phenomenon in matters of social coordination, and it sheds a light on why communities historically tend to take more parochial forms: all else being equal, people of similar upbringings have a narrower gap to attune across. Indeed it can even be cultivated as a preverbal social skill, whereby one consciously equilibrates their present consciousness to that of another.

This becomes even more interesting when seen through the lens of neurodiversity, and how the degree to which one exercises (or neglects) this skill can determine, to some margin, their placement on certain neuropsychological spectra⁴. Deeply relating to other people can be hard, and it is increasingly common in our day for individuals to be, one way or another, socially isolated and deprived of opportunity to exercise these skills.

In this sense, many of the disruptive behaviors discussed here can be understood as improper attunement between the disruptive individual and the wider community. Because these matters are usually implicit and purely vibe-based, this can be exceptionally difficult to remedy, especially once conflict has irrupted from a latent stratum of the social fabric into a more overt form. Then, offense may have already been taken, sides may have already been drawn, and complex optical considerations often render earnest engagement tactically unviable.

It's a delicate matter even to practice attunement oneself, let alone to monitor the aggregate attunement of a diverse community, and the various vectors of latent conflict which invariably reside under the surface. In this micropolitical framework, a post-machiavellian heuristic would be to assume malattunement of disruptive actors, but to brace for malicious intent.

Here, 'malattunement' is taken to refer not only to an outlier relative to the community, but an outlier which is functionally detrimental to the wellbeing of the community. A restorative approach would be to assist the disruptive individual in their efforts to attune to the community; that is, to learn and embody the language and values of that community.

The tactical sphere of considerations concerns the assessment of how operationally costly this attunement aid will be, and the lengths to which this aid will be provided despite continued disruptive behavior. That is, if the disruptive individual is considered to be well-intentioned but merely malattuned, rather than malicious, community members may elect to talk with them and help them align with the community at large. Of course, this assessment is no blithe matter, and a false negative here could cost the community valuable time and resources, or even further degrade the social coherence.

Ultimately, every individual has autonomy over their assessment of character, and how they choose to respond. Worth considering, however, is how these individual sensibilities influence the culture of the community and, by extension, both the vulnerability of that community to disruptive actors, and the accessibility of that community to earnest newcomers.

Footnotes

1. From James Madison, [[The Federalist Papers#Federalist No. 20. The Same Subject Continued (The Insufficiency of the Present Confederation to Preserve the Union)]]

2. At least, the duller among the bad actors, who are tactically incapable of longer-term social engineering - but that is a concern for a different discourse.

3. No relation to the so-called "energy medicine" known as attunement. Rather, I mean it in a purely secular and common sense of deeply relating to other people.

4. See [[A Rhapsody on Neurodiversity]], wherein I document a relatively extreme traversal of neuropsychological states, which led me to better understand the practical importance of social attunement.

.mdc files are special configuration files that help Cursor’s AI understand your project structure, conventions, and constraints. They live in the .cursor/rules/ directory and automatically provide context when relevant files are accessed.

The framework consists of four fundamental .mdc files that work together to help Cursor’s AI understand and navigate your project:

• Purpose: Root-level project definition and constraints

• Scope: Entire workspace

• Content: Define core architecture, key directories, and main constraints

Description: Brief overview of project purpose and main functions
Globs: /**/*

• Body text should define:

  • Core project functions/components

  • Key directories and their purposes

  • Primary constraints/rules

  • Keep under 25 lines, be concise

• Purpose: Defines how .mdc files work and should be structured

• Scope: .cursor/rules directory

• Content: Standard template below:

Description: .mdc files describe specific rules for how certain files, file types, and directories are to be understood and used
Globs: .cursor/rules/*.mdc

• Body text standard template:

.mdc File Structure & Best Practices:

File Naming: NNN_name.mdc (NNN = 001-299)
- 001-099: Core/workspace rules
- 100-199: Integration rules
- 200-299: Pattern rules
Higher numbers take precedence if rules conflict

UI Components:
1. Description (top)
   - Brief purpose summary
   - Appears in AI context

2. Globs (top)
   - Comma-separated list
   - Example: /dir1/**/*,/dir2/**/*,/dir3/**/*
   - Use standard glob syntax

3. Body Text (this section)
   - Keep under 25 lines
   - Use concise/shorthand
   - Tag files with @
   - Focus on key directives

Best Practice: The assistant may propose changes to .mdc files for the user to copy into the UI. The assistant should not attempt direct file edits to .mdc files.

• Purpose: Organizes project documentation

• Scope: .cursor/docs directory

• Example Structure:

Description: These files contain reference documentation and guides to aid in development efforts
Globs: .cursor/docs/**/*

• Body text should define:

  • Documentation categories

  • File organization rules

  • Cross-referencing conventions

• Purpose: Manages development tools and scripts

• Scope: .cursor/tools directory

• Example Structure:

Description: This folder contains tools and scripts to aid in workspace efforts
Globs: .cursor/tools/**/*,.cursor/tools/temp/**/*

1. Initial Setup:

2. Create Core Rules:

   • Create each .mdc file through Cursor’s UI

   • Start with 002_cursor_rules.mdc (use template exactly as shown)

   • Then create 001_workspace.mdc (customize to your project)

   • Add 003 and 004 as needed

3. UI Navigation:

   • Access rules through Cursor’s Settings

   • Use the Description and Globs fields at top

   • Use the larger text editor for body content

   • Save changes through UI (not direct file edits)

4. Testing Implementation:

   • Verify rules load when accessing relevant files

   • Check AI responses reference appropriate rules

   • Ensure @ tags work for cross-references

1. Hierarchical Understanding:

   • 001: Understands overall project scope

   • 002: Knows how to interpret other rules

   • 003/004: Understands where to find/place resources

2. Context Loading:

   • Rules automatically load when relevant files are accessed

   • Higher-numbered rules take precedence

   • @ tags create cross-references

3. AI Behavior:

   • Uses rules to guide suggestions and actions

   • References appropriate documentation

   • Places new files in correct locations

   • Maintains project structure

1. Keep rules concise (under 25 lines)

2. Use @ tags for file references

3. Make changes through Cursor UI only

4. Maintain clear separation of concerns

5. Document rule changes

6. Test rule effectiveness

7. Use consistent naming conventions

8. Keep globs specific and targeted

1. Changes Not Showing:

   • Always make changes through UI

   • If changes vanish, close Cursor

   • Select “Override” on unsaved changes prompt

   • Reopen Cursor

2. Rules Not Loading:

   • Verify file names follow NNN_name.mdc format

   • Check glob patterns are correct

   • Ensure no syntax errors in YAML

Remember: This framework is adaptable. While 002-004 can remain fairly standard, 001_workspace.mdc should be thoroughly customized to your project’s specific needs and constraints.

My Best Practices for MDC rules and troubleshooting

I've been exploring how Cursor's MDC rules work by experimenting with the AI. I wanted to share what I learned by feeding different files into context and asking the AI what it saw. mdc_rule_system Situation: What's the current state of MDC rules?

https://forum.cursor.com

The following content is a discursive “canvassing” exercise intended to:

• process ideas and prime them for more formal publication;

• foreground thought processes in the spirit of auto-discourse;

  • see: A Primer on Auto-Discourse;

• garner feedback from peers;

• establish conceptual provenance for ideonomic archiving purposes.

An organizational form I am seeing across a few overlapping socio-professional spheres lately is the community of practice. Loosely (and so far largely implicitly) defined as an informal and recurring gathering of individuals who share a common occupation or interest, these communities convene primarily to facilitate knowledge exchange, peer feedback, and professional development, all with an underlying emphasis on practice.

Seeing as these communities often coalesce in an entrepreneurial or otherwise enterprising context, be it nonprofit or for-profit, they often default toward a startup-like operational mindset as they navigate opportunities of growth. That said, I wonder whether the organizational modality of the startup, or even of the corporation or shared enterprise more broadly, truly lends itself to the types of value creation and exchange particular to communities of practice.

That is, individuals who find themselves in a nascent community of practice, may feel the need to formally organize along conventional lines (e.g. setting up shared platforms/workspaces/websites, forming legal entities, drafting membership agreements, etc) in order to realize the latent value of the collective talent of the community. In this respect, we can trace the gradual formalization and even institutionalization of otherwise informal or protean social structures.

In my experiences with these nascent communities of practice, this formalization, without realistic prospects of compensation, tends to result in some duration of well-intentioned but uncompensated administration efforts, which tend to burnout and result in the dissipation of the community. This, I believe, is partially due to a disconnect in methodology and language around how these particular social structures are best sustained, wherein we default to pathways forged by more traditional social enterprises with value models which generally don’t lend themselves to communities of practice.

What if the community of practice, as a distinct organizational modality, is better served by non-traditional organizational initialization techniques? What sort of value is created by these communities, who is this value intended for, and what is the nature of the exchange? Below I will list a variety of considerations pertaining to this inquiry, in the interest of informing a practical dialogue around the definition, formation, and sustainability of communities of practice.

The communities of practice I have been a part of (Sensemaking Scenius, Opus Collective, certain aspects of OpenCivics, etc) have been successful in attracting individuals who share my passions and interests, thereby motivating me to stay connected with these groups. In other words, these groups have maintained a high signal-to-noise ratio, in terms of the quality of character of its members, and the degree of alignment between its members.

Naturally, the manner in which the community admits new members is critical to the maintenance of this value. It takes time to get to know new people, to learn about their projects and their needs. If a community of practice is not careful about who they admit into the group, it may dilute the value of involvement for existing members, and this dilution can drive disengagement and dissolution.

Does this mean that communities of practice need to be exclusionary, and is that a bad thing? It depends on what a given community is aiming to achieve, but much of it depends on how the community presents itself to the outside world, and who it effectively appeals to. If the group presents itself in an intentional and specific manner, it raises the likelihood of attracting people who are genuinely aligned with the existing members. From there, the community can limit and process admittance of new members however it sees fit, with some degree of confidence in the average quality of applicant.

If communities are the sum of their composite relationships, communities of practice arguably ought to prioritize the formation of meaningful relationships among its members, relationships built around a common practice. Because individuals have natural limitations around the number of meaningful relationships we can form and maintain, any community attempting to leverage the value of relationships may wish to take a conservative approach to growth. While Dunbar’s number pertains more directly to the stability of social relationships, it is also an insightful concept in the context of the degree of meaning we derive from our relationships.

In light of this, and depending on the aims of a given community of practice, it may be in the interest of the group to limit its own rate of growth. If a community wants to retain some level of intimacy between its members, this does not necessarily mean the group should strictly constrain its growth to accommodate the social bandwidth of each of its members, but it is nonetheless worth considering how the growth of the group may result in the dilution of the average relationship in the group.

Relationships are enriched over time, provided the individuals involved have the will and bandwidth to invest in these relationships. Every time a new person is added to the group, the number of relationships in the group increases superlinearly, which has implications on the average quality of relationship. That said, if the group maintains a healthy rapport, and members continue to find value in participating, the rate at which the social cohesion of the group deepens may permit some rate of growth without diluting the collective chemistry.

In other words, in terms of the rate of change of the social cohesion of a group as a function of its growth, there appears to be a fuzzy threshold, a tipping point at which the social forces shift from centripetal to centrifugal, from promoting enthusiasm to promoting ennui. However, this dilutive effect of growth may be offset by a sustained environment of intentionality and value exchange which preserves the sense of belonging felt by existing members.

In reality, there is likely to be some level of churn among members, with different people exhibiting different levels or phases of engagement, owing to the the particular circumstances and obligations of their lives which demand their attention. This drop-off or intermittent disengagement of members may result in increasing the capacity of the group to admit new members without overwhelming the social bandwidth of its engaged members.

Whether it takes the form of money, equity, or a sense of personal development or belonging, compensation is necessarily for a healthy collaborative environment. And while personal fulfillment is important, while labors of love can be rewarding, most people need a more economically tangible form of baseline compensation to justify major commitments of time and energy.

Arguably all forms of collaborative enterprise, whether operationally intensive like a startup or more passive like a community of practice, require some form of facilitation or administration, and this means work. Seeing as communities of practice, at least the sort explored above, tend not to involve financially lucrative prospects of value exchange, but instead operate more as nexus for mutual development, any commitments made to administrative work should be made in light of realistic expectations of compensation.

In other words, because most funding sources, in anything approximating normal market conditions, will not be financially motivated to invest in communities of practice, and unless said communities can manage to appeal to nonprofit funding sources, it is arguably in the interest of such groups to dial back their administrative overhead to accommodate more realistic commitments of bandwidth.

More specifically, if the prospects of financial compensation for administrative work are slim, and the form of compensation is more likely to consist of some sense of personal fulfillment, it is in the interest of the group to temper its collective ambitions wherever administrative work is involved. Then, as the affordances of the group’s collective bandwidth increases, and as the group encounters funding opportunities, this administrative overhead can be expanded to accommodate a greater scope of operations.

What is important is not that this administrative scope is minimized at all costs, but that it is only expanded in response to realistic prospects of adequate compensation. While some degree of administrative burden may potentially be abstracted in the form of protocols (see Notes on Extitutional Theory and Progressive Protocolization), there will likely always remain a need for social processes to facilitate some portion of collective action.

Another factor which contributes to the burnout of these communities, is the undue concentration of work allocated to particular individuals, often tacitly or by default.

In more traditional enterprises, operational responsibility tends to revolve around centralized agency, and often for good reason. A unified sense of direction can, if handled properly, minimize the risk of wasted or redundant efforts, and ensure that all constituent efforts of an enterprise amount to something compelling and coherent.

Even if a good portion of such centralized direction consists of efficient and incisive delegation, it still involves a considerable amount of administrative effort and executive complexity. Again, this all amounts to more work. In situations where prospects of compensation are modest, the workload tolerance should be as well.

One operational approach which may lend itself to communities of practice, is a joint model of do-ocracy and consent-based voluntarism. Do-ocracy is a mode of collective agency whereby individuals are empowered to take action with minimal need for group consensus.

Naturally, the virtue of do-ocracy is circumstantial, and mostly pertains to actions which are minimally consequential with respect to other members, and which are easily undone if the group reactively decides to undo them. If you conceptualize the whole sphere of operations required to sustain a given collective enterprise, some portion of those tasks can be considered conducive to do-ocracy. As an applied form of governance, do-ocracy often amounts to the path of least resistance, and its efficacy ultimately depends on the average discretion of the individuals involved.

With respect to the portion of tasks which do not lend themselves to individual discretion, some degree of consensus is required. Various consensus models can be employed to facilitate this phase of decision-making, but what is especially relevant to out present inquiry is not the decision-making process itself, but the execution of the decision.

It is here where this notion of consent-based voluntarism may apply, at least for some subset of tasks warranting group consensus. In this scenario, the person who suggests a project or undertaking is the person who ultimately administers said project or undertaking, provided consensus is reached. The objective of this approach is two-fold: firstly, to distribute executive agency among the group; and secondly, to reduce the rate at which people suggest actions which they themselves are unwilling to execute.

This latter phenomenon can be seen as a chronic yet often unrecognized factor contributing to scope creep, collective fatigue, and ultimately burnout. It is much easier to support the idea of some project, and to support the idea of someone else in the group handling it, than it is to volunteer to handle it oneself. Instead of promoting a culture where members passively suggest action items with the assumption that other members will volunteer for it, communities of practice may wish to promote a culture whereby action items are owned by those who suggest them.

The purpose of this shift in expectations is to encourage members to duly consider the importance of the actions they suggest, and to diminish the amount of unimportant work which tacitly falls upon the group facilitators to handle. By adopting a culture wherein whoever suggests an action is the one expected to execute it, we may expect to not only filter out some of the less important actions which clog up collective bandwidth, but beyond that also to distribute the more important or interesting projects among those with the capacity to suggest and execute them.

Communities of practice can provide a sense of belonging and an opportunity to learn from peers in an environment of mutualistic development. However, their organizational character arguably sets them aside from the more traditional approaches to bootstrapping collective enterprise. Thankfully, the unique purposes they serve can be fulfilled in low-overhead manners, provided members take a careful and conservative approach to administration and growth, bearing in mind the groups limitations. The considerations highlighted above will hopefully serve to inform generalized, yet operationally viable, protocols for communities of practice.

In a largely unstructured manner, I will list the methodological difficulties encountered over the course of my establishing this zettelkasten system.

One of the major difficulties, which I suspect may largely be artificial qua non-substantive, is the file-keeping and codification schema of the zettelkasten itself. I find myself formally drawn to the notion of having a uniform and canonical file-naming system to encompass more or less the entirely of the zettelkasten, but I run into several practical issues entailed by my particular circumstances.

Choosing concise non-content-oriented file names, like 'log-2024-09-18' for long(ish)-form notes like this or 'r-JK-GT-7' for reference notes like those I've taken for Keynes' General Theory, is appealing for formal (and potentially non-substantive) reasons, but is also appealing for a more substantive reason, namely that it could enable unforeseen rediscovery of notes in unexpected contexts. In this respect, one may view the zettelkasten as an epistemic landscape through which one may take a dérive, insofar as it permits the ability to navigate ideas without a pre-determined destination.

Seeing as I am also publishing these notes, using Obsidian as the primary text editor and Quartz for the mechanism of systematic conversion from markdown to HTML, I also have to consider the mechanisms by which these notes will be publicly accessible and discoverable. This adds no small complexity to the determination of a satisfactory naming system, mostly owing to the challenge of linkrot. That is, if this were a purely internal zettelkasten with no public aspects, I would feel at greater liberty to adjust codification systems in an ad hoc manner, especially seeing as Obsidian preserves internal links much more robustly than could be expected of an analog zettelkasten.

This difficulty of preserving a viable public interface is one example of the challenges of a multi-purpose zettelkasten. In my case, I do not even reached a stable understanding of what purposes exactly this is serving, but so far I intend this zettelkasten to constitute:

• an internal knowledge management system for various non-sensitive domains of information, with an emphasis on discourse;

• a publication of this discourse, and other select content, with a view toward inviting feedback from peers and establishing publicly verifiable provenance of said content;

• a personal and professional website to showcase portfolios, prior experience, and anything else which may be relevant to future professional enterprise;

• a digital garden (hence "Zettelgarten") which serves as a canvas for aesthetic expression and collation of cool stuff I find on the internet.

Many of the aspects of these challenges are technical and ostensibly trivial in nature, but which nonetheless may be worth contending with earlier on, if this system is to effectively serve the various purposes for which it is presently intended. For example, with regards to file naming, I would like this zettelkasten to include:

• personal notes of arbitrary length and subject matter (e.g. [[Notes on Keynes, Hayek, and Fiscal Protocols]]);

• exegetic notes made in reference to books I read (e.g. [[r-JK-GT-9]])

• finished publications (e.g. [[Recuperate the Vanguard]]);

• external publications which I have publication rights to (e.g. [[Keynes_GeneralTheory]]);

• the various non-note pages of my website (e.g. [[index]]);

• any miscellaneous configuration files needed by Quartz or any other technical components of the system. Many, if not all, of these such files are not markdown files in nature, and thus they are not displayed in Obsidian, which effectively serves as my primary filing and navigation interface.

As far as file naming systems go, I think I don't have as much of a need for the atomic notes which the folgezettel naming system seems to be optimal for.

Rather, at least so far, I primarily have a need to draft publications and extended notes like this (which function as proto-publications), and various other pages (such as web pages) which do not seem to benefit much from such systematic naming conventions. That said, I am starting to think of this "publication machine" as having strata of sorts, with polished publications being the outward-most layer, extended notes constituting the internal layer, and potentially some ideonomic note network being the innermost layer. This latter notion, of ideonomically atomic notes, is a novel idea and one which deserves its own elaboration and potentially own flavor of folgezettel.

As for now, while I do not have much of need for non-reference atomic notes, I do have a need for reference notes, atomic or otherwise, and in this respect I am undecided regarding whether a naming convention like folgezettel will prove adequate. I also need to configure an adequately navigable tagging system for the purposes of semantic organization of notes.

In piloting [[Keynes_GeneralTheory]] as a book my notes on which will systematically processed into a zettelkasten, I have incurred considerable complexity above and beyond what is already proving to be a challenging exercise in reading comprehension. That said, such a rigorous notetaking system is, I am finding, aiding tremendously in said comprehension, which is to say I do not regret incurring such added complexity.

In certain respects this comprehension exercise is a continuation of the Modular Generalist Program I had started developing a few years ago (see [[Modular Generalist Program Background]]. Specifically, I am attempting to process (qua intuitively comprehend) a given work of discourse from a given domain, in this case macroeconomics. My notetaking priorities in general are to:

• develop comprehension of the subject matter by re-articulating the content in my own terms, via atomic notes containing section summaries, general reflections, questions and uncertainties, etc.;

• build a body of notes which can eventually be reviewed, potentially even by way of methods like spaced repetition, which Obsidian has plugins for;

• incorporate these notes into a larger body (i.e. zettelkasten) of notes take from various books, such that I can comparatively analyze books and my notes taken on them;

• preserve the book itself in markdown format in the zettelkasten, provided the license grants such rights, such that I can directly reference sections of the book, and use transclusions and embedded notes;

With respect to Keynes' General Theory in particular, my comprehension priorities are:

• to better understand how highly developed liberal economies operate, and specifically the circumstances under which they can be expected to self-regulate and self-correct, and those under which state intervention is warranted even by classically liberal standards;

• to better understand how classically liberal values can be balanced with pro-social communitarian values, a topic I have explored in [[Recuperate the Vanguard]] and [[Prospectus of the Reconciliation of Individual Liberty and Collective Welfare]] (also see [[Notes on Keynes, Hayek, and Fiscal Protocols]]);

• to better understand how Keynesian economics is a discursive departure from the classical theories of economics, and in turn to understand how more recent theories have departed from conventional Keynesian premises;

• to inform practical strategies of designing organizations and mutualistic economic systems using peer-to-peer (see [[Notes on Active Discursive Efforts]] and [[Notes on Extitutional Theory and Progressive Protocolization]]);

Given the above priorities, I'm thinking it may be best to locate these notes in the innermost stratum of this zettelkasten, alongside their reference material. Additionally, I would like to be able to display my annotated versions of texts, perhaps using transclusions of corresponding notes within the page of the text itself.

If the zettelkasten is to be optimized around a central function, that function would be the facilitation of writing and publishing. In this respect, my priorities are largely aligned with other zettelkasten proponents, such as Sonke Ahrens and Niklas Luhmann himself.

Where this particular methodology may differ is in how the publication process is structured. As of now, I am drafting multiple publications in parallel, while also writing and publishing extended notes (which I have been calling 'logs'), such as this note. These extended notes serve primarily as a personal sensemaking exercise and and internal discursive context, and secondarily as an external feedback facilitation mechanism. Publications, on the other hand, primarily serve the purpose of communicating these ideas to the public, in the form of polished discourse.

In other words, the primary function of these extended notes are internal, whereas the primary function of publications is external. Because they are both public, and thus considered publications, the polished publications are considered the "outermost" layer because they are outward facing in their purpose, whereas the extended notes (as proto-publications) constitute the middle layer insofar as their function is more internal. More atomic notes, and their accompanying reference material, constitute a still more inward layer and are also public.

What remains private are notes and files containing information I am not at liberty to publish. These files will remain in the zettelkasten, but will not be included in the publishing flow. Thus, the zettelkasten, across all its strata, ultimately revolves around publication, and is not entirely public. That said, I do find the approach of "drafting in public" to be appealing, in the spirit of auto-discourse.

This particular zettelkasten stack consists, at present, of Obsidian as a text editor, Quartz as a site construction mechanism, and Github Pages as a site hosting solution. Beyond Github Pages, I plan on hosting either on IPFS (via Fleek) or Arweave (via Fleek or Protocol.land or something else). There is also the potential to utilize Seed Protocol to index this content onchain.

In the case of my Quartz publication, I have introduced several custom typescript components, thanks to the help of Perplexity and Cursor. This configurability, and how it can all be engineered into the frontmatter of the markdown files being published, opens a wide field of functionality potential.

Still unclear to me is the extent to which a website like this can operate purely on peer-to-peer infrastructure, instead of relying on institutionally managed platforms which can more readily be deprecated.

Beyond this particular publishing stack, this process can be replicated and repurposed for a variety of purposes, such as group publications or libraries. Based on preliminary testing so far, it seems feasible to have multiple people, each with their own local Obsidian vault, contribute to the same Quartz publication.

Keynes as Prosocial Statist, Hayek as Stigmergic Whig

Being now more than halfway through Keynes' General Theory, and having read some of Hayek's work (Constitution of Liberty, Road to Serfdom, The Use of Knowledge in Society), I am starting to form a more substantive understanding of the discursive relation between the two authors' bodies of work. Naturally, I am inclined to take a dialectical approach, largely in terms of individual liberty and collective welfare, along the lines I initially sketched out in [[Prospectus of the Reconciliation of Individual Liberty and Collective Welfare]].

So far, there are central aspects of their work which conflict in certain respects but which don't altogether seem necessarily antagonistic. Keynes seems to be arguing that the classical school tends to inaccurately assume that markets are self-correcting and that this self-correction tends to lead to optimal employment arrangements, when in reality markets are prone to destabilization and suboptimal employment arrangements, thus warranting intervention by the state (qua fiscal and monetary authority) to promote national income and employment. Hayek, on the other hand, at least in the works of his I've read, seems to primarily be arguing on a philosophic basis for minimal state intervention and for empowering markets as distributed knowledge mechanisms for economic self-organization.

One of the major points Hayek makes is that the state, as a human-led institution, is fallible and subjective in it judgement of economic affairs and promotion of pro-social values. He argues that a free market is a better determining mechanism than the state for most economic affairs, except for certain matters (such as certain infrastructure and other public goods) which do not lend themselves to private return on investment.

Keynes, according to my present understanding, is arguing that markets, by their nature, are not optimally self-correcting and are (if I may extrapolate) somewhat agnostic as to the welfare of citizens, thus warranting an activistic state to strategically intervene in the economy on behalf of public welfare.

In respect to the above details of the lines of inquiry perforating the select discourses of Hayek and Keynes, it seems their central (ostensible) point of contention is the degree to which, or at least the particular capacities in which, the state should involve itself in what would otherwise be considered "natural" or "spontaneous" market phenomena.

One may, at the risk of taking a hermeneutic liberty, assume that Hayek's reservations about empowering the state to proactively control key aspects of the economy may, to some extent, be quelled, provided that the agency of the state was rendered more neutral in its subjectivity and more holistic in its comprehension of economic data and phenomena. That is, if there were a more "impersonal" (or non-institutional) method of strategically intervening in the market to counter otherwise destructive tendencies, a method which entailed less risk of totalitarian capture of the economy at the expense of individual economic liberty, Hayek (as a proxy for the larger liberal and neoliberal schools of thought) may conceivably be less opposed to such intervention.

In other words, if the forces of strategic economic intervention were more programmatic, qua more deterministic and foreseeable than the discretionary judgement of human institutions, such an arrangement may constitute something of a reconciliation between the prosocial statism of Keynes and the pluralistic market-based liberalism of Hayek. Specifically, at least based on my working understanding of the pertinent discourse, it seems Hayek is less opposed to welfare-oriented intervention as such, and more to the subjective fallibility of the institutions tasked with such intervention.

In his defense of the rule of law, as a framework constraining the state monopoly on legal coercion such that the circumstances of this coercion are well-defined and predictable, Hayek demonstrates an aversion to unchecked discretionary authority, an aversion arguably generalizable to political and economic liberalism at large. In light of this, it would seem amenable to classically liberal beliefs to suggest that democratically decided prosocial measures can be taken to ensure collective welfare, so long as the mode of economic intervention involved minimal institutional discretion, especially if said discretion enjoys the privilege of the monopoly on legal coercion.

What implications might this supposed reconciliation have in respect to the potential utilization of peer-to-peer protocols for financial settlement and fiscal authority?

Given the advent of peer-to-peer financial settlement via globally networked virtual machines, we face some vague yet promising prospects regarding not only the elevation of economics to a properly experimental science, but also the implementation of impersonal protocol-based economic infrastructure.

Indeed, what is exciting about these prospects is the potential for peer-to-peer protocols to supplant some portion of the state's role as a fiscal authority, thus conceivably satisfying certain Keynesian imperatives of prosocial and strategic economic intervention, while also minimizing the degree of discretion entailed by this new programmatic authority, thus also appeasing certain fundamental values of classical liberalism.

In other words, given an economy built on a shared virtual machine capable of peer-to-peer financial settlement, say a fiat-backed stablecoin economy, we may be able to democratically implement a programmatic fiscal protocol to automatically and efficiently collect taxes and programmatically appropriate said funds to pre-determined expenses in a completely transparent manner, thus lessening the degree to which such fiscal operations depend on the discretionary judgment of institutions.

What is less apparent to me at present is how, or if, such technology may similarly function in the capacities of a monetary authority. It is conceivable that a state monetary authority may, in lieu of an adequate protocol-based alternative, subsist in its present institutional form even while the fiscal authority of the state is sublimated into a peer-to-peer protocol. In other words, this technology may more naturally lend itself to fiscal authority than to monetary authority.

In addition to potentially functioning in a central fiscal capacity, this technology can also operate in a plurality of parafiscal capacities. Indeed there is already one example, namely [Optimism](https://optimism.mirror.xyz/ciJzgxmb_fJU8wgiqrEXG_XYnAkuBrdG1biVk0BseiU), of a planned private (qua non-state) implementation of this technology to collect usage fees in a [parafiscal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parafiscal_tax) manner. Based on examples like this, one can imagine a heterogeneous patchwork of parafiscal programs built upon common peer-to-peer economic infrastructure, each with their own particular algorithmic fiscal policies. For example, there may be one sub-network where transactions are taxed and overseen by a private institution to fund additional software development for the underlying infrastructure, and another sub-network where taxes are allocated to a common treasury for participatory budgeting by network participants.

Technically speaking, these sub-networks can allow users to opt in and exit at their discretion, enabling a novel paradigm of fiscal pluralism. Even with some degree of variance as to how these fees are collected and allocated, there can still be an underlying unity with respect to macroeconomic state policy. In other words, there can be an arrangement whereby new sub-networks comply with macroeconomic policy determined by some state legislature, and within the constraints of this compliance, enjoy some measure of fiscal freedom.

While any implementation of such technology toward such ends seems, to my awareness, quite remote in its potential, there are already various such experiments underway, albeit in niche prototype capacities.

Specifically, the term 'wu wei' refers to the state of being in harmony with one's environment, rather than enforcing agendas which seem at odds with it. There is a certain acquiescence with nature to be discerned here, a recalibration of one's agency rather than a simple abdication of it. As such, the concept is foundational to Daoism and related philosophies.

In this article, we will explore the implications this state of mind may have in the context of participatory governance, for DAOs and other such organizations, and how the concept of wu wei may mesh well with certain principles of sociocracy. Here, I will not be prescribing any solutions per se, but rather paving some lines of inquiry, with the intention of aiding the reader as they make sense of their governance challenges.

Social coordination is difficult, especially at enterprise and civic scales. The reasons for this are manifold, and while DAOs and other virtual organizations do face some novel challenges, this matter of social coordination has always been fraught with difficulties, be they political or logistical in nature.

Even when financial security and political liberty are not at stake within the context of a given coordinative effort, people nonetheless have opinions and egos. This is natural. To assume that individuals will rationally and comprehensively assess their own circumstances and those of their peers, to make optimally informed governance decisions, is arguably to commit the fallacy of homo economicus. Indeed this ideal mode of conduct is, often, all the less to be expected when the individuals in question are engaging in voluntary or otherwise under-compensated work.

Even if we were not beholden to our own humanity, and could operate on a purely rational basis, we would still be met with a great deal of complexity in our sensemaking and decisionmaking efforts. Whether it is a matter of delivering a product to market, or governing a polity, goal-oriented social coordination entails a wide breadth of challenges. Admitting this difficulty and facing it with humility can be important, as is recognizing that all social coordination projects, be they empires or enterprises, eventually come to an end. In fact, many don't even start.

'Aporia' is an ancient great term describing a state of perplexity one may experience when faced with a complex or confounding situation. In some of Socrates' dialogues, he systematically and humblebraggartly guides his interlocutors from a state of ersatz knowledge to a state of humble aporia, forcing them to recognize that they didn't know as much as they thought they knew. This recognition can be practiced without admitting defeat -- it just involves an adjustment of expectations. In fact, the embrace of this state is arguably a vital stage to overcoming the Dunning-Kruger effect and advancing one's knowledge.

Creating and running a business is hard, especially if it is to be done in an open, ethical and consent-driven fashion. Creating a geopolitical sovereignty is exponentially harder. Successful social coordination often requires sound governance systems, as opposed to more ad hoc styles of decisionmaking, and these systems need to be intentionally and consensually constructed to be seen as legitimate by participants.

For such systems to adequately meet the needs of these participants, in response to their shared circumstances, the participants need to understand their situation. Thus, a great emphasis falls on the social sensemaking processes informing the construction of these governance systems and the ends to which they will be mobilized. Accordingly, any substantive sensemaking effort ought to begin from a realization that things don't already make sense.

From an coordination design perspective, this evolution can be schematized to some extent. Governance is mostly about sustainably and prudently facilitating decisions in light of the various interests of individuals in a group, and as such it can be instrumental for certain social coordination efforts. Before such a system is activated via legally binding contracts and/or necessarily onerous bureaucracy, those involved, especially the leaders, ought to have a comfortable sense of what this system is designed to respond to. And yet, such a system needs to be in place for the group to effectively coordinate and make decisions.

Accordingly, there is a sort of feedback loop to be discerned between sensemaking and decisionmaking. And because decisionmaking tends to become more constrained by formal governance, it is arguably imperative that the group reaches alignment on key organizational matters before those constraints are imposed.

A joke I enjoy sharing, especially with those whose experience testifies to it, is that the term 'DAO' actually stands for dudes arguing online. While we may want a more gender-neutral phrase to acerbically make light of these ongoing coordination challenges, the demographic reality of DAOs is what it is, at least according to my experience. However, some research indicates that groups with a more even gender balance exhibit greater social sensitivity, and that this empathic attunement empowers the collective intelligence of the group above and beyond the average IQ of its members.

This distinction between empathizing and systemizing (E-S) psychologies, and how it may statistically correlate with gender, may shed a light on challenges faced in collective sensemaking and governance efforts. Speaking just from my experience, all of the DAOs I've been a part of have been male by vast majority. Might this have something to do with the prevailing tendency for DAO governance discussion to revolve around game theory, mechanism design, economic incentives, and other systems-oriented epistemologies? As what may be considered an invisible epistemic predisposition, might this highly systematic approach to governance be a yang to the under-established yin of a more empathic approach?

Of course, it is worth noting how the technology industry naturally attracts people who epistemologically skew toward the systematic side, and how this may constitute something of a selection bias baked into the nature of the domain itself. In other words, if technical fields tend to skew toward the neurodivergent, and if the "extreme male brain" hypothesis of autism is accurate, it may help explain why these fields are especially male-dominated. However, this line of inquiry can run the risk of cementing an epistemic gender essentialism into our discourse.

Social coherence in a group is arguably what allows that group to scale its operational efficacy beyond the sum of its parts. Whether or not we take the position of the E-S theory, and the implications that has regarding gender, a substantive part of this coherence is a balanced psychological diversity of the people involved. Where many of the existing governance conversations are dominated by systems-oriented psychologies, perhaps we would benefit from a greater presence of communication-oriented and facilitation-oriented psychologies. Here, it is worth considering sociocracy as part of the solution.

One of the popular methods for DAO governance has been optimistic governance, or lazy consensus, wherein a proposal passes by default, unless stakeholders actively vote to stop it. This method seemingly gained prominence as a reaction to the challenges of voter fatigue and poor governance participation. Quorums introduce friction by design, in that it demands participation and scrutiny to guard against imprudent proposals, but sometimes enforcing a quorum entails unnecessary friction. In this respect, governance design is a largely circumstantial matter.

Where lazy consensus passively assumes the consent of stakeholders, other methods actively court the consent of stakeholders. One example is sociocracy, a school of governance theory and methodology driven by consent, aiming to integrate and align the various interests of stakeholders. While most DAO governance thus far has involved technologically elegant systems to facilitate governance in a trustless manner, perhaps what has been ironically lacking is the trust-building involved in methods like sociocracy. Here, communication is critical, as is the manner in which this communication is facilitated. The process of critical dialogue requires not only the logic-oriented efforts of analyzing and reconciling arguments, but also the empathy-oriented efforts of actively listening to people and, just as importantly, letting them feel heard.

These consent-seeking processes of sociocracy may entail some scaling difficulty for larger organizations, even if the organization in question takes a pod-based or holacratic structure. That said, such an approach may prove useful for appropriately sized teams which stand to benefit from greater alignment and coherence. There seem to be some natural limitations on the number of meaningful high-trust relationships a person may maintain, and if effective sociocratic collaboration builds and builds upon trust, then it may prove difficult to scale such practices beyond such natural limitations.

In the context of DAOs and other horizontally integrated organizations, consent between stakeholders is especially important. In these contexts, a governance framework may owe its skeleton to formal legal structure, but its meat consists of the social legitimacy obtained by intersubjective consent. If people don't fundamentally consent to the governance framework defining the bounds of their participation, then the depth and breadth of participation may suffer.

While smooth facilitation methods and elegant governance processes may set the stage for substantive and efficient collaboration and governance, it ultimately relies on the will and conduct of participants. In this sense, a well-designed organizational framework can stigmergically prime its participants to efficiently collaborate; but beyond this, how should individuals conduct themselves as governance participants?

This is where the concept of wu wei reenters the picture. Given a sociocratic facilitation context, and a participatory governance framework, individuals will face opportunities to consent or dissent to proposed courses of action. Where wu wei generally describes a state of alignment with perceived flows of nature, in the context of collective agency, such as DAOs, these flows can be understood as social currents or momenta.

To embody wu wei as a governance participant is not merely to concede to perceived majority will, but rather to be cognizant of such trends and to be intentional about when to consent or dissent, in light of the costs these decisions have on collective momentum. For example, if a given proposal is picking up momentum among my collaborators, but I have doubts about how beneficial its consequences would be, I would ask myself whether my reservations are strong enough to warrant dissenting to the proposal, jeopardizing its execution, and costing us whatever positive outcome it may have had.

In other words, embodying wu wei in the context of participatory governance means only introducing friction and criticism when necessary, and otherwise supporting the momentum. The intuition around gauging when and how to express dissent, to best advance the shared mission of the group, is a skill refined, above all, by experience. For early stage organizations with minimal funding, the opportunity costs of expressing dissent may prove expensive, and entail higher risks of burnout than in organizations with longer funding runways to justify a greater depth of deliberation behind operational decisions.

Effective group coordination is complex, especially in a consent-driven manner. People operate at their best when they feel their efforts are purposeful and duly recognized, but facilitating this at scale, while also productively coordinating these efforts, is often prohibitively expensive and complex. Organizational methodologies like sociocracy offer various techniques and practices, for DAOs and other participatory governance contexts, but ultimately it depends on the individuals involved, and the psychological diversity thereof, to build and sustain a culture of empathy to undergird the more analytic and operational work of their shared enterprise. Wu wei presents a useful philosophy to guide individuals as they co-develop this organizational culture which lets everyone operate at their best.

This all amounts to no small task, and indeed a great deal of human conflict can be understood in terms of this difficulty; but the resulting feelings of collective purpose and productivity are no small rewards.

I would like to thank Kristen Pavle, Michael Strumberger, Ronen Tamari, CStreet.eth, moreReese, Alex Soto, as well as Opus Collective and the Sensemaking Scenius, for their insights and expertise regarding various topics included in this article. This article was first published as part of a collective publication of the Sensemaking Scenius.

Prefatory Comments on the Semantics, Intentions, and Method of the Discourse

Much of the evolution of our economic regimes over the last few centuries, and particularly during the twentieth century, can be understood as a dialogue between the values of individual economic liberty and collective economic welfare. These values are often embodied in policies and ideologies in such ways that present them as inherently antagonistic to one another, but such is not necessarily the case.

Indeed, one could meaningfully interpret the great geopolitical conflicts of the twentieth century as a contention between an economic order prioritizing individual economic liberty, namely liberal democracy, and the orders prioritizing collective economic welfare, namely the various forms of statist collectivism such as communism and national socialism. In choosing to understand this portion of our history this way, namely in a dialectical fashion, one can argue that liberal democracy erred too far in the interest of the individual, entailing widening economic disparities, whereas communism and national socialism erred too far in the interest of collective, entailing a suppression of pluralistic individual autonomy. 

This discourse aims to provide a conceptual framework for understanding how the values of individual economic liberty can be reconciled with the values of collective economic welfare, and to set the stage for some more distilled and cogent discourse to follow. Toward this aim, a certain degree of terminological clarification is warranted, as well as an explanation of the epistemological approach taken toward constructing such a framework. Cursory definitions will be provided for the following terms: individualism, collectivism, progressivism, liberalism, market fundamentalism, and capitalism.

The terms ‘individualism’ and ‘collectivism’ are here understood largely in distinction from one another, where individualism refers to the set of values, economic or otherwise, pertaining more to individual interests, whereas collectivism pertains more to the interests of the collective in which the individual is a member.

Individualism, in the economic sense, is commonly associated with the freedom to conduct one’s own economic activities and business enterprises, relatively free from the coercion of some sovereign or collective state entity. Individualism here is understood in the foregoing sense, and not in the pejorative sense in which it refers to selfish behavior. Indeed, individualism so understood is arguably the basis of the western trends of the enlightenment and the industrial revolution, insofar as the individual became empowered, as an autonomous agent, to engage in free trade and pursue knowledge in manners relatively unencumbered by dogma. 

The term ‘liberalism’ is understood in its classical economic sense, referring to economies where the state or governing authority exercises minimal intervention in market dynamics, and instead allows competitive markets to shape the economy at large. It is worth noting that the term ‘economic liberty’ is not interpreted as freedom from want, as it is understood from a collectivist perspective, but rather as the freedom to make economic decisions, as it is understood from a classical perspective. That is, the freedom to create businesses, develop products, and set prices in a competitive fashion, rather than in a fashion entirely prescribed by a central institution planning the economy.

The term ‘market fundamentalism’ is here used to refer to a set of values and mode of logic whereby markets are treated as the ultimate determinant of the general welfare of society. Some degree of market fundamentalism tends to undergird liberalism in general, but this degree varies, as will be addressed later.

The term ‘capitalism’ thankfully will not be used as heavily in this discourse, but it will be interpreted as shorthand for an industrialized liberal political-economic order wherein companies and individuals practice the profitable deployment of capital. The term ‘capital’ is taken in its classical sense, namely that portion of a person’s wealth which that person uses to generate revenue, as opposed to that portion of a person’s wealth which is consumed or otherwise spent in consumptive fashion.

The term ‘collectivism’ is taken to refer to a class of ideologies and value systems in which the interests of the collective are widely prioritized over those of the individual. This term can run the spectrum from the more totalitarian forms of collectivism, where individual opinions and pursuits can be suppressed by state institutions, to the more moderate forms of collectivism, which are concerned with protecting basic interests of the collective, such as the democratic rule of law and certain social welfare provisions. 

The term ‘progressivism’ is here understood as a set of values concerned with the advancement of human welfare and, at least lately, the promotion of greater equitability across demographic disparities and the empowerment of historically disenfranchised communities. While progressivism is not necessarily a form of collectivism, it often involves collectivistic means, such as certain state programs, toward its desired ends.

While certain collectivistic means employed toward progressive ends can render progressivism incompatible with liberalism, progressive ends can also be pursued by means more amenable to the values of liberalism. Indeed, the conceptualization of such means is a chief aim of this discourse. Before that, however, a word is warranted on the epistemological nature of this discourse, to prevent the risk of my discursive methodology confusing the reader. 

The mode of this discourse can be understood as a sort of auto-discourse, insofar as the discourse is not only about its topic of choice, but also about the development of the author’s understanding of said topic, the methods employed to aid such development, and how the reader may choose to emulate said methods. 

The term ‘rhizome’ is a concept taken from post-structural continental philosophy, referring to an epistemological approach where, instead of attempting to distill everything down into a single absolute understanding, a plurality of possible understandings are advanced, accommodating an assortment of perspectives. The discourse itself can be understood as a rhizomatic prospectus, tasked with laying out a variety of related lines of inquiry jointly geared around the unifying topic, namely the balancing of individual economic liberty with collective economic welfare. The reasoning here is twofold: firstly, that the subject matter at hand involves a number of conflicting value systems which may each suffer disservice if a monolithic discursive approach is taken; and secondly, that proper liberalism is fundamentally a pluralistic regime insofar as it empowers individuals to pursue their varied interests, rather than conform to some authoritarian set of values.

The term ‘prospectus’ merely designates an exploratory and prognostic mode of discourse, in which solutions are worked towards and suggested for consideration, rather than definitively prescribed. That is to say, this discourse is chiefly tasked with aiding the reader in their own sensemaking efforts regarding the reconciliation of individual economic liberty with collective economic welfare. Given the complex, multifaceted, and often terminologically ambiguous nature of the subject matter, the reader may benefit from a discursive approach which presents solutions in provisional and circumstantially qualified capacities, rather than in absolute capacities. It is also worth noting that this discourse is intended to resonate with readers from a variety of ideological perspectives, indeed socialists and capitalists alike, which is arguably the primary forcing function justifying this otherwise byzantine format.

What is perhaps most fundamentally important in understanding neoliberalism is the distinction between its intellectual basis and its reality as a globalized political economy, and the manner in which the former has diverged from the latter over the course of the twentieth century. 

Intellectually, neoliberalism is a return to classical liberal economics, or ‘liberalism’ in the classical economic sense. In order to understand neoliberalism, and how it constitutes a novel intellectual and political regime, we must first address liberalism. While the history of markets and their structure is much older, the origins of liberalism proper are mostly associated with 18th century economic thinkers such as Adam Smith. The primary thesis of liberalism is that markets, when left alone by sovereign powers, naturally tend toward arrangements in which the general prosperity of the people is best promoted.

This notion that markets should be “disembedded” from their local political contexts, and should operate independently from the sovereign powers who would otherwise control them, is what distinguished liberalism from the prior feudal economic orders. Here it should be noted that there exists a certain potential for fallacy in this thinking, namely this tacit assumption that markets can naturally emerge without conscious technical and managerial efforts of particular individuals and bodies of individuals, whether that be the organization of faires, or the development of stock exchange software (Peters, 2021, Excerpt 1). 

Placing this fallacy aside, while the premise of liberalism has generally panned out successfully, in terms of the general advancement of prosperity among nations which have adopted such economic modes, this prosperity has been accompanied by considerable wealth disparities. This phenomenon can be considered the grounds for the primary line of argument against liberalism, namely that liberal economic orders, as such, tend to be indifferent to the welfare of the weak and disenfranchised.

Because liberal economic orders involve varying degrees of market fundamentalism, and because markets are more defined by commercial efficiency than by empathy, liberalism tends to be more optimized around letting individuals exercise economic autonomy than around ensuring the welfare of these individuals. To extend the criticism of liberalism, one may argue that economic liberty, namely the freedom to engage in business as one wills and not according to comprehensive commercial mandates issued by governments or sovereigns, is relatively moot when economic security is lacking. That is, if one lacks basic resources necessary to subsist, the full breadth of the value of economic liberty cannot be enjoyed.

Nonetheless, the central argument for liberalism, namely that the individual freedom to participate in competitive markets enables greater economic efficiency and prosperity than if the economy was centrally planned, remains strong, provided it does not extend too extremely toward the end of market fundamentalism. Given that the primary tenet of liberalism is the enablement of competition to shape markets, the absence of proper regulation entails the potential for monopoly, cartels, and other forms of market capture which compromise said liberty. In other words, at the precipice of market capture, laissez-faire is illiberal. Insufficient regulation can also entail the potential for markets to destabilize and ramify ruin across economies, often without sufficient institutional recourse to hold perpetrators accountable. Such was one of the primary contributing factors to the rise of radical collectivism in the early twentieth century, which can be considered a response to the increasingly hegemonic order of liberalism.

Indeed I do not find it unreasonable to frame the Wall Street market crash of 1929 as an example of the excesses of liberalism, particularly as an instance of the potential for minimally regulated and volatile markets to destabilize and externalize losses. By extension it may be asserted that the ensuing global depression, and the perceived correctives of authoritarian collectivism resulting therefrom, are consequences of said excess. That is, the excesses of liberalism, specifically the poor regulatory circumstances of the crash, created the global conditions whereby radically collectivistic political platforms, promising economic security and stability, seemed appealing. Appealing enough, indeed, to justify violent degrees of nationalism and state coercion over individual autonomy. Markets and even entire economies were collectivized and nationalized, in stark distinction to the sort of liberalism which these collectivist orders vehemently opposed in reality and in rhetoric.

Even the United States saw a turn toward more collectivist policy, albeit of a much milder form, in the era of policy ensuing the depression. Due to probably a number of reasons, including the relatively libertarian ethos of the United States and the fact that wartime economy enabled faster economic recovery than those nations more directly impacted by the wars, this turn toward collectivism nonetheless constituted an internal response to the aforementioned market crash. For example, the Securities and Exchange Commission was created as part of the New Deal to help regulate financial markets. This policy framework shift, away from the laissez-faire attitude and market fundamentalism of classical liberalism and toward the strengthening of social and institutional control over certain markets, would later become known as “embedded liberalism” and was largely informed by the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes.

It should be noted that there existed certain collectivistic and progressive trends which preempted the global depression, such the Progressive Era in the United States and the Bismarckian welfare state in the German Empire. What is arguably different here is that the major collectivistic trends of the early to mid twentieth century, namely communism and fascism, can be understood as world-historical responses to the growing hegemony of liberalism. To be sure, one can extend this logic of world-historical dialogues quite far, but beyond a certain point this historicist framing ceases to be useful to the effort of the present section of the discourse, namely understanding the history of liberalism.

Over the ensuing few decades of Keynesian economics and embedded liberalism, various strains of economic thought began coalescing around a return to liberalism. Pioneering this trend was a group of liberal economists known as the Mont Pelerin Society. Perhaps the primary impetus driving this return was the aversion to governmental capture of markets, a risk most prominently enunciated by Friedrich Hayek and other thinkers who would later be referred to as proponents of neoliberalism.

Hayek largely viewed the progressive and social democratic movements of the early twentieth century as nascent forms of totalitarian collectivism, movements which saw citizens of liberal economies incrementally ceding more and more control over markets to governments, thereby sacrificing more and more of their freedom. In the critique of such movements, the argument is that we should avoid granting too much control over markets to institutions, because institutions are composed of individuals who not only have special interests which may compromise their ability to neutrally shape markets, but who also cannot realistically be expected to possess a comprehensive understanding of the markets they are regulating (Hayek, 1940, Excerpts 1, 2).

As a brief aside, the reader may notice how there are valid and substantive arguments to be made from various perspectives on these matters. It is a methodological decision on my part to convey the legitimacy of these ostensibly conflicting views, to extract from them their essential justifying tenets, and to attempt to dialectically reconcile these tenets in an abstract synthesis, in hopes of eventually deriving a more actionable set of policy suggestions from said synthesis. As has already been described, this methodology is necessarily rhizomatic and dialectical in how it chooses to navigate discourse and develop knowledge. While I hope such epistemic tactics do not have their value lost on the reader, one may nonetheless choose to progress with little concern for such scaffolding, if they merely want access to the central ideas.

As regards the emergence of neoliberalism beyond the academic sphere of discourse and ideology, and into political reality, it is argued by Damon Silvers that the 1973 Chilean coup provided an occasion for the germination of neoliberal policy and its ensuing globalization into what we would now call the neoliberal world order. That said, it is also true that Ludwig Erhard, then Minister of Economic Affairs in Germany, joined the Mont Pelerin Society in 1960 and used his office to implement liberal economic ideas in efforts to rebuild portions of the German economy at the time.

While this earlier German implementation of classical liberalism does predate the Chilean implementation, the latter saw a joint influence from the Mont Pelerin Society and from the Chicago School of Economics, which expounded macroeconomic theories in opposition to Keynesianism. This combination of the values of classical liberalism with novel macroeconomic theory is arguably what best characterizes neoliberalism as theoretically distinct from classical liberalism, and as such it may be argued that the Chilean implementation of these ideas into policy, along the lines retrospectively defined by the so-called Washington Consensus, marked the onset of the neoliberal order we know today (Peters, 2021, Excerpt 2).

At this point it may be worth reiterating the central purpose of this section, namely the delineation of how the theoretical basis of neoliberalism differs from the political reality of neoliberalism. The gist of the difference is that the theoretical framework of neoliberalism, if taken sincerely and on its own terms, has at its core a return to the central tenet of liberalism, namely that competition should be enabled to decentralize economic power in markets, toward the end of ensuring the efficiency of said market and the economic liberty of those involved, toward the general prosperity of the public. This, as a good faith argument, seems to have become a decreasingly tenable defense of the reality of neoliberalism, as said reality has proven gradually over time to be less about the preservation of the economic liberty of the average person, and more about the extended accumulation of wealth and power of elite actors in the global economy and their de facto exemption from social accountability. 

This trend has also been referred to in terms of the privatization of power, a phenomenon which can be understood as the excesses of liberalism coming into conflict with the values of democracy, insofar as private power is, perhaps by definition, less institutionally accountable to public interests (Silvers, 2023, Item B, 31:25). Silvers argues that the accumulation of wealth is an upstream determinant of real political and economic power, seeing as this wealth can be deployed in realms of advocacy and legislative influence toward the ends of reinforcing favorable regulatory and economic arrangements (Silvers, 2023, Item B, 1:17:15). Relatedly, in the following section, I will attempt to reconcile a variety of starkly conflicting arguments about the role of lobbying in an economically liberal republic, with the intention of arriving upon an arrangement whereby the interests of individual economic liberty are best balanced with those of collective economic welfare.

As regards the maturation of the neoliberal era, I will now highlight the emergence of certain corollary trends which are criticized from those perspectives, such as progressivism, concerned with collective welfare. Here again I will reiterate that the term ‘progressivism’ is here taken to mean a system of social, economic, and political values oriented around the general improvement of human welfare, and which frequently but not necessarily involves governmental programs which actively intervene in the economy on behalf of such welfare. 

Liberalism, and in turn neoliberalism, on the other hand, are theoretically oriented around individual economic liberty and minimizing the role the government plays in shaping economies. Again, the key thing to understand about the development of the neoliberal era is how the reality of this era has become increasingly detached from what could be justified as its theoretical basis.

Nonetheless, one can see how even the theoretical basis of liberalism and neoliberalism can appear antithetical to the values of progressivism, insofar as liberalism is not fundamentally concerned with collective welfare, but is rather concerned with individual economic liberty, with the assumption that such liberty will, in turn, result in the general prosperity and welfare of the public. The reality of neoliberalism demonstrates that liberalism, when it develops too far in the direction of laissez-faire and market fundamentalism, does not actually promote general prosperity and welfare, but instead, by virtue of the absence of democratic institutions capable of protecting free markets and actively ensuring welfare in manners compatible with free markets, merely promotes the private accumulation of wealth and power, often at the unjust expense of general welfare.

As to how, precisely, the development of the neoliberal order demonstrated a systematic inconsistency with the underlying theses of liberalism, Damon Silvers provides multiple examples. The 2008 financial crisis, and specifically the ensuing bailouts, demonstrated the state actively intervening in a market, picking “winners” in a manner antithetical to liberalism (Silvers, 2023, Item A, 18:27). This is an example of neoliberalism not playing by its own rules.

The absence, however, of a proper regulatory environment to oversee lending practices and prevent speculative market meltdowns, is more construable as a fault inherent to an excessively liberal economy, rather than an example of liberalism not abiding by its own maxims. That is, even if neoliberalism was consistent with the underlying tenets of liberalism, and did not involve the state picking winners, it would still run the risk of being excessively fundamental in its adherence to the tenets of liberalism, in that it still may have resulted in a housing bubble in which the losses were socialized. A point of academic conjecture, to be sure, but such is meant to illustrate a matter of logical nuance, namely that market fundamentalism, even when it stays true to its own justifying tenets, threatens to neglect collective welfare, yet alone when it abandons these tenets. 

This returns us to the understanding of liberalism as prioritizing individual liberty, such that finding the proper balance between individual liberty and collective welfare may require one to take certain principles from liberalism and reconcile them with certain principles of more collectivistic economic models, such as progressivism. Neoliberalism, such as it is, arguably demonstrates no meaningful adherence to classical liberal values, and indeed it hardly seems concerned with collective welfare. To pursue lines of thought in defense of the neoliberal world order, with respect to the reconciliation of individual liberty with collective welfare, seems strenuous at best and disingenuous at worst. Therefore, I thoroughly denounce the whole shebang.

Before offering a reconciliation of the values of liberalism and progressivism, let us first, in the interest of maintaining common language, return to what is here meant by the terms in question. Liberalism is here meant in its classical sense, as an economic set of values wherein individual economic liberty, or the ability for the individual to exercise free will regarding their economic choices, functions as the foundational principle. Progressivism, being grounded in the improvement of human economic welfare, is here taken as more of a collectivistic order, concerned with the welfare and security of a population at large. 

To be sure, this is not to assert that liberalism is hostile to or necessarily negligent of collective welfare, nor that progressivism is to individual liberty, but rather that each is defined according to its own principles. That said, one can easily understand liberalism and progressivism as being opposing forces in an argument about how society should be regulated, with each having a critique of the other. The liberal may argue that the progressive is all too willing to dispense with individual liberties in the institution of certain collective welfare policies, whereas the progressive may argue that the liberal is all too willing to ignore the welfare of others so long as their own welfare and liberty is maintained. 

One may argue that the social contract of any functional society requires some concession of individual liberties, in the interest of moderating the conflicting interests of individuals, and such would not be a controversial argument. The controversy concerns the degree and the nature of these concessions, such as the degree to which private enterprise should be permitted within a society, and the circumstances under which certain activities involved in such enterprise ought to be regulated or prohibited by the government. 

The liberal may also argue that economies are more efficient and less opinionated when shaped by market forces rather than by central planners, while the progressive may argue that, by so doing, we risk neglecting the welfare of those insufficiently enfranchised to meaningfully exercise such liberties. Given the reality of the uneven landscape of inherited wealth, and the fact that the economic nature of individuals operating market-based societies cannot always be relied upon to surface just and equitable arrangements, to what extent should governments intervene to guarantee certain aspects of collective welfare? And can such welfare provisions be facilitated in such a way that do not integrally jeopardize the essential liberties of the average individual? So long as private enterprise does not entail anti-social or anti-competitive consequences, it may be argued, governments should allow such enterprise. But in the determination of what is considered anti-social or anti-competitive, certain positions need be taken, positions which may not reflect values universal enough to represent the general will, which such a regulator arguably ought to represent.

Hopefully the above manages to illustrate how this contention may be extended indefinitely through particular considerations, and how deeply rooted it is in the logic of civilization itself. The matter at hand, however, is to conceptualize how these seemingly conflicting principles, at essence, can be held in some degree of harmony, and how the bulk of their apparent conflict is contained in the particular means employed toward their ends, rather than between the principles themselves.

To conceptualize a system wherein the principle of individual economic liberty coexists with that of collective economic welfare is not, I argue, difficult in the basic philosophical sense. One can imagine, in vague and abstract terms, a societal arrangement whereby markets can spontaneously and autonomously develop under the relatively passive stewardship of a republican government which intervenes under circumstances of anti-competitive and anti-social activity, and which provides for the basic welfare of citizens, thus empowering them as market participants, in manners that do not compromise the spontaneous nature of free markets to drive innovation and industry.

This conceptualization of the state, as both the steward of the free market and the guarantor of the basic welfare of market participants, can be understood as a synthesis of the defining tenets of liberalism and collectivism. Hopefully such a conceptualization may serve as a sound basis for the concrete prescription of policy suites, but such is beyond the scope of this discourse, which is more abstract in nature.

To what extent could this arrangement embody the values of progressivism, without compromising the values of liberalism? While the precise implementation of welfare programs may vary and require certain iteration, so as to ensure minimal infringement upon spontaneous market dynamics, such policy efforts would constitute one front of social progress, namely the statist front. In addition to this statist front, there also exists potential for a coordinated private-sector front for the promotion of collective welfare and public goods, but such will be addressed in the following section of this discourse.

A word may be warranted on how one should understand this liberal argument that markets should remain “spontaneous” rather than planned. The distinction is ultimately between a market which is consciously managed in its entirety by a state body, whether said state body is a republic or something more autocratic, and a market which is shaped more by the uncoordinated, or spontaneous, economic activities of a number of market participants. In the former case, the economy is the object of state management, and the onus of efficient economic planning is on the state, thus requiring the state, and specifically the officers within it, to maintain a comprehensive visibility into economic affairs.  

This distinction between two extremes, between total state management and total laissez-faire, is not a realistic distinction, so much as it is a conceptual distinction, useful in terms of conveying the ideas at play here. In reality, at least in most liberal economies, some degree of state management and regulation is involved, but within a wider context of otherwise spontaneous markets. It is in this sense that the term ‘mixed-market economy’ may be understood. 

If the globalized status quo of the mixed-market economy already consists of a blend of governmental planning and “spontaneous” market development, what is the point of working out these conceptual frameworks oriented around an end which, in some manner, already exists? It is ultimately in the interest of sensemaking, of developing a greater comprehension of what may otherwise remain a confounding admixture of historically loaded and rhetorically polarizing ideas. For market participants to develop a keen and discriminating sense of when government intervention actually bolsters their economic liberty, is indeed a prospect characterized by classically liberal values. 

Because classical liberalism, at least as it is depicted here, is largely agnostic about collective welfare beyond the scope of individual liberty, one can advocate for collective welfare in manners which do not violate the axioms of liberalism. One’s advocacy for collective welfare tends to violate the axioms of liberalism when one also advocates for coercive means in order to secure some degree of collective welfare. The tricky part, it seems, is to identify means toward collective welfare which comes at a minimal expense of classically liberal values.

So how may collective welfare be promoted so as to minimally infringe upon the fundamental values of individual liberty? Any practical policy prescriptions are not only beyond the scope and nature of this inquiry, but also beyond my present knowledge of the matter. What has been offered thus far in this inquiry is, instead, a mode of distilling and reconciling the key values at play, and what is offered below is a variety of trends and experiments perhaps worthy of the attention of those concerned with such values. 

At the periphery of institutionally adopted economic thought and practice, reside a number of mechanical curiosities and promising, if utopian, theoretical prospects. What follows here is a succinct expose of various developments and ideas which may go on to inform efforts at promoting collective welfare within the larger constraints of preserving individual liberty.

For all the confusion it arouses, and despite what criticism it deserves, blockchain technology just so happens to embody a certain harmony between individual liberty and collective welfare. Indeed it likely comes as news to many that there exists a vibrant and global ecosystem of organizations utilizing this technology to experiment with novel processes for funding public goods. 

Here, it is worth clarifying that the term ‘public good’ is meant in its conventional economic sense, namely as a non-rivalrous and non-excludable good; that is, a good whose benefit may be enjoyed freely and inexhaustibly by the general public. Also worth noting here is how the systematic creation and support of public goods can constitute a model for promoting collective welfare without injuring individual liberty. 

Having established what is meant by the term ‘public good’, it may now be worth elaborating the manners in which this particular ecosystem of organizations has been promoting public goods. First, it should be noted that the public goods in question primarily consist of open-source software, often but not exclusively involving smart contracts. Because open-source code can be copied freely and infinitely, it qualifies as a public good, however niche its beneficiary base may be in a particular situation.

One particularly interesting class of smart contracts in this domain are those enabling quadratic funding. Similar to how an institution may contribute a fund to match the donations from individuals within a given fundraising campaign, the quadratic funding model involves sourcing funds from matching donors and individual donors alike. A number of grantees accept donations from individuals and, after a set period of time, receive an additional amount of funding from a matching pool, according to the number of individual donations each grantee receives. The matching fund itself is a smart contract, which institutional donors deposit currency or assets into, and which is managed by the grant program manager, who is able to trigger disbursements from the matching pool to the grantees. 

Because the smart contract is open-source, and because the underlying blockchain constitutes a public ledger, every movement of funds into and out of the matching pool is public. Over the last few years, this technology has reached a level of adoption such that, while still niche in terms of its user base, it is able to sustain an entire subculture and ecosystem of public goods projects, ranging from environmental preservation efforts to pro bono legal counseling services. All of the organizations which receive funding from this system have their treasuries in the form of blockchain accounts, which are all also public. 

Here is perhaps a good time to take a step back and address certain downsides of the underlying technology, so as to avoid depicting it in a utopian manner. By and large, blockchain technology, insofar as it enables self-managed financial accounts, radically embodies certain values of self-sovereignty associated with liberalism and the enlightenment. Running on a global peer-to-peer network of computers, it constitutes an economic framework governed by agreed-upon protocols, rather than institutions. Such impersonal economic protocols can qualify as classically liberal insofar as they can set the conditions for emergent market developments, wherein all economic actors, through instant and "permissionless" creation of accounts, are equal vis-a-vis the protocol.

The above is intended to provide a basic sense of technological and cultural context with regard to the topic at hand, namely the particular experiments using this technology to innovate upon models for funding public goods. In the case of the quadratic funding protocol briefly outlined earlier, because it takes the form of open source software, anyone can copy it and run their own quadratic funding program, and they will be able to do so for as long as the underlying network persists. 

It is not my intention to proselytize this the reader into embracing this technology, but rather to provide a critically optimistic perspective on some of its more prosocial applications, for the purposes of informing the imagination of the reader as they consider such dilemmas as how collective welfare may be promoted in manners consistent with the values of classical liberalism. The example of quadratic funding is but one, alongside other similarly prosocial applications of this technology, such as public impact certification and retroactive public goods funding. In the last year, between the numerous grants programs managed by organizations like Gitcoin and the Optimism Foundation, over $100 million has been distributed to individuals and organizations creating value in the form of public goods.

The increasing prominence of these novel public goods funding mechanisms has also sparked industry-wide critical discussion around public goods, such as how they are to be qualified, the manner in which they can be sustainably funded, and various other considerations having to do with the systemic implementation of these collectivistic economic models. Indeed, here there may be observed some degree of conceptual and ideological resonance with certain ideas popularized by and commonly associated with Henry George, especially the land value tax. More specifically, if one were to take the land value tax as a point of conceptual departure, and from there generalize an economic principle of public goods yielding returns to their corresponding communities, one could understand many of the aforementioned blockchain mechanisms as experiments in the application of a generalized Georgism.

It remains to be seen, at the present stage of this ecosystem, the extent to which these non-state mechanisms for funding public goods may scale beyond the scope of a highly technical community of users and donors, and whether their accessibility will expand to include a more general audience. At any rate, it all strikes me as a promising example of how collective economic welfare may be promoted in a manner compatible with individual economic liberty.

It is hoped that the content of this discourse, piecemeal as it is, may serve as a sort of sensemaking fertilizer for the formation of more cogent theses regarding the economic topics at hand, and as an constructive and exploratory iteration on the mode of writing I here refer to as auto-discourse. What began as an attempt to succinctly explore a question of reconciling certain economic tenets has evolved into an exercise of epistemic methodology, perhaps at the expense of the initial impetus, or perhaps to its long-term benefit. 

While a dialectical historicist reading of the development of western society may breed risk of dogma, one can begin to imagine a world-historical synthesis of the individualist and collectivist economic orders, characterized by the spirit of a generalized Georgism, enabled by novel peer-to-peer economic technologies, and jointly loyal to the values of individual liberty and collective welfare.

Hayek, F. A. (2009). The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents: The Definitive Edition

• Excerpt 1, Page 51 - "There would be no difficulty about efficient control or planning were conditions so simple that a single person or board could effectively survey all the relevant facts. It is only as the factors which have to be taken into account become so numerous that it is impossible to gain a synoptic view of them, that decentralisation becomes imperative."

• Excerpt 2, page 65 - "The effect of the people agreeing that there must be central planning, without agreeing on the ends, will be rather as if a group of people were to commit themselves to take a journey together without agreeing where they want to go: with the result that they may all have to make a journey which most of them do not want at all."

Peters, M. (2021). “The early origins of neoliberalism: Colloque Walter Lippman (1938) and the Mt Perelin Society (1947)” 

• Excerpt 1: “Indeed, Walter Eucken and Franz Bohm developed ordo-liberal social philosophy centred around the concept that the market itself was a juridical construction and not a naturally occurring phenomenon.”

• Excerpt 2: “Neoliberalism as a term and discourse of political and economic liberalism and set of policies, originating in the late 1970s, that wielded together classical liberal political theory as exemplified by the Mont Pelerin Society following World War II (WWII) and neoclassical economic theories that represented the so-called Chicago school. It is ultimately a moral doctrine based on a classical account of political and economic freedom that became the basis for government administrations and policy regimes based on the minimal state and free market, often brutally established with force and coercion, against the rule of law, and in an antidemocratic way, such as in Chile in 1973.”

Silvers, D. (2023). Item A: “Understanding Neoliberalism as a System of Power” (Lecture, UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose)

Silvers, D. (2023). Item B: “Beyond Neoliberalism: How to Think About Rebuilding the Capacity of the Democratic State” (Lecture, UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose)

The realm of public goods funding has recently seen a variety of technologically innovative models emerge, engineered in the interest of more sustainably and intelligently funding the commons. Philanthropic mechanisms such as quadratic funding, retroactive public goods funding, and impact certificates are being advanced by institutions such as Gitcoin, Giveth, Octant, and Endaoment. Moreover, these mechanisms are increasingly being built onchain, allowing for greater degrees of transparency and collective governance, as well as interoperability with one another.

This explosion of open-source invention has unlocked a fascinating new technological dimension of a much older challenge, namely the matter of how to best allocate funding toward public goods. In the economic sense of the term, public goods refer to goods that are non-excludable, meaning they can be accessed by everyone, and non-rivalrous, meaning that their usage doesn't require people to compete for it. One generally thinks of public goods as being funded by state institutions via taxation, but they can also be funded within private sector by established or experimental means.

In this piece, I will briefly survey aspects of the design space for funding public goods, with an emphasis on the novel technological mechanisms above described. Additionally, I will suggest a framework intended to 1) address some of the problems we face in this domain, and 2) reconcile the virtues of some of the different approaches thus far taken to address them.

One approach taken to funding public goods, largely pioneered by the technologists at Gitcoin, can be described as proactive public goods funding. In this model, teams working on projects apply to join a grants program, describing the nature of their project, how it qualifies as a public good, and what they plan on doing with these funds. This information can, and generally is and ought to be, public, especially if the grants program involves quadratic funding, wherein individuals on the internet can browse the applications and donate to these projects.

This model can be understood as proactive in that the funding generally precedes, or is permitted to precede, the impact. There are examples of projects, which have secured funding in this manner, and which already have a history of execution and impact, in which cases the funding can be understood as rewarding previous as well as future work, but my point here is to draw attention to how projects are here able to secure funding for impactful work that has yet to be done.

There are positive and negative aspects about this arrangement, generally speaking. One positive aspect is that the team does not need to risk putting in much work before the potential for getting funded, as is the case in the retroactive approach. This aspect may be appealing for those who cannot afford to dedicate much time to philanthropic efforts based only on the prospect of potentially getting paid. One negative aspect is that there are not always assurances that the team being funded has the ability to execute, or that there are the accountability measures necessary to encourage such execution. In other words, an impact project may proactively receive funding based on a compelling application, but sometimes the team may not follow through or use the funding in a tactful manner.

On the other hand, we now have the approach of retroactive public goods funding, as pioneered largely by the technologists at Optimism, wherein projects apply for funding for work that has already been done. Where the proactive approach permits funding to precede impact, the retroactive approach requires that impact precede funding.

The positive and negative aspects of this retroactive approach can be understood as an inversion of those of the proactive approach. Here, the positive is that the impactful work has already been done, so there is little risk of allocating funding to projects that don't execute. The negative aspect, however, is that it requires teams to do the work before, and without any guarantee of, getting paid. Naturally, this is an arrangement not everyone can afford to participate in. But how can we ensure accountability and execution, while still remaining accessible to those who cannot depend on the mere potential of eventually getting paid for their impactful work?

If we frame the dilemma of the proactive and retroactive models, with their respective positive and negative aspects, in a dialectical fashion, we may attempt to reconcile them.

• Thesis: Proactive Public Goods Funding

  • Positive: Is accessible to those who cannot afford to dedicate much time to impactful work without a strong likelihood of being compensated.

  • Negative: Does not involve sufficient accountability measures or assurances of execution.

  • Summary: Better for grantees, because funding can be secured before work is done, than for donors, who do not have strong assurances that their donations are likely to lead to execution of impact goals.

• Antithesis: Retroactive Public Goods Funding

  • Positive: Impactful work has been done, so there is no need for additional measures to assure accountability and execution.

  • Negative: Is not accessible to those who cannot afford to dedicate much time to impactful work without a strong likelihood of being compensated.

  • Summary: Better for donors, who want to reward impactful work which has already been done, than for grantees, who did that work without any guarantee of funding.

• Synthesis: Progressive Public Goods Funding

  • Positive: Funding is amortized across a series of impact milestones, balancing the needs for stable compensation of impactful work with the needs for accountability and execution assurance.

  • Negative: More of a procedural and reporting burden for the grantor and for the grantees.

  • Summary: Grantees can incrementally receive proactive funding, minimizing the risk of uncompensated work, while donors can track progress toward impact goals and have confidence that further funding is predicated on such goals being met.

While the above may constitute a sanguine oversimplification of the models in question, it may yet suffice to illustrate the logic of a particular attempt to balance their redeeming qualities. Many would-be grantees cannot afford to dedicate much time and work without compensation, while many would-be donors will not provide much funding for projects without proper assurances around accountability and execution. The two interests are often incidentally situated at the expense of one another, but not necessarily so.

In the United States, and doubtless many other jurisdictions, non-profit organizations are already required to publicly report many of their operational and financial details. One example is Form 990, which requires non-profit organizations to report a variety of details regarding their funding, expenses, and activities. What is arguably lacking here, however, is meaningful public insight into the progress non-profits make, with regards to their impact goals.

As a donor who wants donated funds to contribute to successful impact, it can be useful to assess the track record of the organization and individuals involved. Many times, this information is sufficiently documented via the announcements, articles, and interviews surrounding the organization's efforts. This information, coupled with public filings, can constitute a solid informational basis for a decision to donate. But how can this arrangement be improved?

One approach, which remains theoretical, is to track impact milestones, along with the various claims and certifications surrounding them, on a public peer-to-peer database. This notion of an onchain semantic web has interesting implications for philanthropy, insofar as it may render philanthropic efforts more programmatic and transparent, beyond the existing reporting requirements. Below, a basic framework is suggested for how grant programs may implement attestations and certifications to contribute to an onchain semantic web, to the benefit of the philanthropic commons.

The following series of diagrams are meant to illustrate the cycle of a given grant program. The intention is to enable the grantor, or the institution managing this grant program, to run a series of grant-giving rounds, and to track the milestone-based progress from one round to another. The following architecture utilizes Gitcoin's Grant Stack, Hypercerts, Ethereum Attestation Service, and Karma's Grantee Accountability Protocol.

Many of the ideas explored above are posited as potential solutions to perceived inefficiencies in the existing philanthropic sector, while other ideas are more experimental and innovative in nature. In both cases, experimentation is required to discern how effective these technologies and techniques are. Fortunately, at the time of writing, this very methodology is about to be implemented for a grant round, with the hope of not only allocating funding to non-profit projects, but also of innovating upon the very nature of the allocation of such funding.

Clinamenic LLC is available for hourly consultations and service retainers regarding onchain governance and operations.

The following does not constitute financial, legal, or accounting advice, but is intended purely for informational purposes. It is worth bearing in mind that, at the time this piece was written, the best practices around crypto-native accounting are still emerging.

The Frontier of Accounting

Across the first few waves of DAOs and onchain communities, the matter of compensating contributors has often been vague and handled in an ad hoc fashion, given the absence of a clear regulatory environment and the "permissionless" nature of the emergent underlying technology. As a result, the manner in which contributors and core team members are paid is often poorly accounted for. While the transactions themselves are public, contextual information around these transactions is often lacking, even in terms of private record-keeping.

In addition to this, many DAOs and similar onchain organizations have operated without a legal entity, which can complicate the compensation and reporting processes. For example, if a DAO does not have a legal entity, it may not be able to issue the appropriate tax forms for contractors it engages with. Thus, a DAO contributor who receives a payment from the DAO treasury, in the manner of an contractor, may need to go about reporting that income in lieu of traditional client-contractor reporting practices.

While using an invoice to document this transaction may not solve some of these reporting issues, it does help both parties account for their business activities, and provide a basis for future auditing. Another practice which contractors may wish to adopt is the usage of dedicated accounts for client engagements, as distinct from accounts used for personal or other non-business purposes.

A Crypto-Native Invoice Template

Paying for services in crypto is often the default for DAOs and onchain organizations which lack a legal entity, because without a legal entity it can be difficult, if not virtually impossible, for said organization to set up a bank account and go about payments in fiat currency. While some crypto-native commerce is borne of this necessity, some organizations and individuals may elect to pay or be paid in crypto, even if fiat is an option. In both cases, a crypto-native invoice template can be useful.

The primary distinction between a fiat invoice and a crypto invoice is the information about the payment type and account type. Where a traditional invoice may specify the account and routing number of the service provider's bank account, a crypto invoice would need to specify pertinent information about the service provider's crypto account. Here, I suggest some information fields a service provider may want to include in their invoice, if they want to be paid in cryptoassets.

• Network: [e.g. Ethereum Mainnet]

  • Note: It may also make sense to specify parameters like ChainID, depending on which blockchain is being used. This matter may be explored further in a later version of this template.

• Payee Account Type: [e.g. an externally owned account, or a smart contract]

• Payee Account Address: [e.g. 0xeAa47a3563a91B4016eF8C8e9504Aa3CB0A764C7]

• Payee Account ENS: [e.g. bureaumancy.eth]

  • Note: This field may introduce unnecessary redundancy or even the potential for conflicting information. It might be best to leave this field out, and wait for some invoicing tool which can automatically resolve ENS domains for addresses entered into the payee field. In the template provided, this field is left out

• Accepted Assets: [e.g. the following:]

  • USDC (Contract: 0xA0b86991c6218b36c1d19D4a2e9Eb0cE3606eB48)

  • DAI (Contract: 0x6B175474E89094C44Da98b954EedeAC495271d0F)

These five fields, in addition to the rest of the fields contained in a traditional invoice, should provide sufficient information to prevent payment ambiguity and enable proper accounting measures. Below is a screenshot of an example invoice containing the above fields.

Documents

• Crypto-Native Invoice Template

  • Version: 1

    • Google Document (for comments/feedback)

    • Rich Text Document on IPFS (No watermark or license info)

The State of Onchain Invoicing

While the above template regards using standard invoicing practices, only with cryptoassets instead of fiat currency, the advent of onchain invoicing is yet another interesting prospect. Projects like SmartInvoice and Bulla Network are actively exploring these prospects, and there also remain opportunities for regulators to implement onchain compliance and reporting mechanisms. There also remains an opportunity for regulators and/or practitioners to decide upon standards for onchain invoicing, but that too is better left for a dedicated article.

Clinamenic LLC is a solo consultancy and service provider. The above content is intended as a public good, freely accessible for informational purposes. If you wish to support Clinamenic LLC, please consider collecting an edition of this post.

If you seek consultation or other services from Clinamenic LLC, please feel free to browse available services and reach out to ssc@clinamenic.com with your inquiries.

Epistemic Intentions

Science involves an experimentally falsifiable thesis, informed by reproducible experimental results. That said, there is also a role to be played by the more purely theoretical side of science, where experimental constraints may be dialed back in favor of greater theoretical maneuverability.

What follows is not only skewed toward the theoretical side of science, but skewed further yet toward philosophy, wherein these values of falsifiability and reproducibility often have even less weight. The intention here is to explore ideas, in case they have downstream consequences of broadening the imagination behind experimental design.

As far as philosophy is concerned, the approach taken here is in the rhizomatic tradition of Deleuze-Guattari, and is something of a rhapsody in terms of toggling between epistemes instead of taking a consistent approach dedicated to any one of them.

This is all to say that the following is not supposing itself to be science, but is still oriented around science in its own way.

Identity vs. Diagnosis

It is also worth noting that, while I was never diagnosed with any Autism Spectrum Disorders, and while I personally have a limited understanding of the clinical bases of these diagnoses, I do identify with some of the defining features of ASDs, especially the extreme systematic-over-empathetic ability ratio and the predisposition toward solitary activities.

In other words, for what self-diagnosis is worth, I would place myself around coordinates (3, 0) in the matrix below, as presented Simon Baron-Cohen at the First Symposium of the Evolutionary Psychiatry Special Interest Group of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, Oct 4th 2016.

As far as my experience is concerned, parsing out other people’s emotions based on their tone and body language is not especially difficult, but this kind of empathy, if it can even be called that, for me relies more on cognition than affection. There is also some residual noise in these considerations, owing to my ongoing exercise around the stoic concept of ataraxia, which is basically an attained state of deep equanimity.

This is worth drawing attention to, because it illustrates the noisy psychological circumstances this text issues from, and how these circumstances, by virtue of their noise not being distilled away, are more conducive to the sort of “schizoanalytic” philosophy mentioned above than to what I consider true science.

In fact, a brief detour into the intersection of clinical psychiatry and the theory of schizoanalysis may bring some interesting flavor here.

Guattari’s Anti-Psychiatry

Felix Guattari was a Marxist psychoanalyst who studied under Lacan, and devised his own divergence from the Freudian orthodoxy to which Lacan himself ultimately stayed loyal.

Drawing from clinical cases and ancient myths alike, orthodox psychoanalysis attempts to boil the diagnosis down to some central, originary childhood trauma(s), the kernel(s) from which blossoms the current psychopathology of the analysand.

Schizoanalysis take the opposite approach of exploring a plurality of explanations which co-exist and shed different lights on the psyche of the subject. At least, that is my understanding of the key difference.

The analogy used by Guattari, and his symbiotic co-theorizer Gilles Deleuze, to illustrate this difference, is the distinction between the structure of the tree and the structure of the rhizome. The former has a figurative center, from which the rest of the structure emanates, and which the latter lacks.

Unlike Deleuze, Guattari was a clinical practitioner, and even conducted some controversial social experiments among his patients at the La Borde clinic.

While I’m not sure if Guattari himself considered these experiments, and his wider theoretical efforts, to be in the tradition of anti-psychiatry, they nonetheless exemplified a radically unorthodox approach to understanding the psyche, and drew from a profoundly diverse field of discourse. One could even argue this psychological approach was a progenitor to the theory and attitude around neurodiversity.

Neurodiversity and Psychoplasticity

Oh yeah, its neologism time. Although honestly, I’m sure someone else already cobbled this one together.

I’m not familiar with the discourse around this concept of neurodiversity, but I understand that one of the more radical shifts it calls for has to do with the attitude taken toward those diagnosed with certain psychopathologies. Instead of monolithically stigmatizing atypical psyches as pathological, these neuropsychological differences can be seen as each entailing their own set of strengths and weaknesses.

In the presentation referenced above, Baron-Cohen uses the analogy of apples and oranges, and how we don’t judge oranges in terms of how apple-like they are. He also employs the following anecdote attributed to Albert Einstein:

“Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

This way of thinking is similar to the rhizomatic epistemology proposed by Deleuze-Gautarri, in that a plurality of equally valuable perspectives can be simultaneously recognized and advanced without collapsing them all into a single mode of evaluation which privileges a given standard.

The concept I’d like to introduce now, which is more in the spirit of philosophy and western esoteric discourse than the spirit of science, is that of psychoplasticity.

Minds can change, in ways we can control and in ways we cannot. This, in and of itself, I don’t believe is controversial, but what may be controversial is my claim that the plane of neurodiversity can, to an extent, be willfully navigated - that it is possible to enter and exit states of mind comparable to those which would be diagnosed as mildly to moderately pathological.

There is another quote of interest, also of dubious historical truth, here attributed to Dion Fortune, who was a practicing follower of Aleister Crowley. To paraphrase a statement which may or may not have been uttered:

“Magic is the determination of conscious experience, according to the will.”

The qualia of one’s ongoing conscious experience is determined by a continuously developing array of influences, of which another given conscious agent is only one.

In other words, we exert an influence on the conscious experiences of others, but our agency in this regard is quite narrow within the wider context. Moreover, even what influence one ultimately does manage to exert upon another is not comprehensively guided by one’s conscious will. We do not always deliberately and willfully steer the influence we have on the conscious experience of another person, but when we do, we are practicing what Fortune allegedly considered magic.

I would stipulate that, because of how frequently our interactions would qualify as magic under this definition, an additional criterion should be met before the term is warranted. Namely, I think self-awareness is essential here.

Wanting to make a friend happy, and telling them a joke which makes them laugh, would qualify as magic in this regard only if the person telling the joke was self-aware of the scenario from a second-order perspective. Wanting to make your partner existentially dependent on you, and manipulating their self-image accordingly, and doing so with a similar self-awareness, would also qualify as magic, arguably even as black magic.

Here I admit that I am not familiar with almost any of Fortune’s discourse, so I cannot be certain of the degree to which these ideas align with hers. In any event, this is not an exegesis, but rather an extrapolation.

While using the term ‘magic” to describe this field of technique is interesting in light of the body of esoteric discourse it may render actionable and tangible, the whole attitude and lexicon of esoterica can just as easily be dispensed with, in favor of a more palatable and less unnerving diction.

What is also interesting, is that this concept of willful determination of conscious experience can just as easily be turned inward. One can attempt to steer their own consciousness, that fuzzy vehicle in which one’s own will is embedded, to yield some deep insights.

As I mentioned before, I believe one can willfully navigate the plane of neurodiversity, albeit primarily on a psychological level, a level quite limited compared to the level of one’s engrammatic architecture, the willful reengineering of which I think can, at best, be fragmentary and highly clumsy.

That said, one can, to a limited extent, steer through what could be called mindspace, or a figurative n-dimensional field of the various states the human mind may occupy, with actual minds being vector-like instances, or actualizations of certain coordinate paths. I’ve done it myself, albeit in a manner only slightly dictated by my will.

What follows is an imperfect and abridged documentation of my probe into an extremely systematic and mildly psychotic mindspace, in the interest of cultivating a generalist curiosity which, in turn, was intended to lubricate my processing of vast amounts of technical discourse.

Becoming-Atypical

During the time I spent designing and utilizing what I called the Modular Generalist Program, my state of mind was characterized by an obsession with unifying theories, codification systems, and extremely compact data visualization methods. I effectively lived in the following graphs for several months, essentially attempting to systematize my own mind.

During this period of time, I experienced and exhibited a borderline disability in terms of social skills, largely because my subjective world had become so singularly removed from the intersubjective world inhabited by those around me. I also exhibited at times a mild neurasthenia, which I gather is an archaic term but which means a psychosomatic exhaustion induced by sheer cognitive exertion.

One way to understand the social alienation experienced by someone in such a state of mind, is actually quite simple: this was all I cared about for months, and almost nobody else understood it or was interested in understanding it. The cognitive hyperactivity also culminated into a mild social anxiety, which reinforced the existing predisposition toward solitary and intensive activities.

This experience may or may not have phenotypic correlates such as the prefrontal overgrowth exhibited by certain subjects diagnosed with ASDs, as referenced by Baron-Cohen in the Royal College presentation. That said, while I am unfamiliar with this study, it does seem to describe phenomena at an earlier developmental stage than I was at, being 21-23 years old during this period.

As I persisted deeper into the Modular Generalist Program, I gradually became more and more involved in DAOs. This involvement demanded mental bandwidth, at the expense of watching lectures all day, and also demanded better people skills than those which I had let atrophy over the course of this deeply solitary experiment.

Becoming-Typical

Consciously observing my psychological development as I transitioned from this hermetic and hyperintellectual mode of existence, back into a more socially-integrated and well-adjusted state, has been one of the most fascinating experiences of my life.

As my information diet shifted away from consisting almost exclusively of lectures on YouTube, and toward a much more typical diet of social interactions and television shows, it felt as if I was retracting the probe back into relative normalcy, albeit with a whole new acumen of insight which I was lacking before the excursion.

In a sense, I temporarily lost touch with the common sense of reality, which is more or less how I understand psychosis: as the spectrum of degrees to which one’s subjective sense of reality is divorced from the aggregate, or intersubjective, common reality which constitutes their local social world.

While I was at the apogee of this development, farthest removed from what could be considered the center of gravity of normal reality, I exhibited, and more importantly I subjectively experienced, both a greater degree of social difficulty and a greater compulsion toward systematic thinking. In the empathizing-systematizing matrix, it was as if I moved from the middle-right, down to the bottom-right, and back up to the middle-right.

What is also interesting, and the reason why I believe neurodiversity can be understood as a plane or a space which can be willfully navigated to some extent, is that I viewed this excursion as a two-way trip from the start. And despite not nearly having full, willful control over my conscious experience throughout this transformation, it always felt like I was on a track which would eventually bring me back to a more typical state of mind, a state of mind wherefrom I could more easily communicate with other people and connect with our shared reality.

What, if any, light this sheds on clinical psychiatry I know not, for want of expertise in that area. While I do suspect that certain “syndromic” ASDs and other extreme neuropsychological disorders may well reside beyond the realm of willful navigability described here, perhaps less extreme cases, or cases more characterized by environmental influences than genetic influences, may be more conducive to therapies derived from the ideas explored above.

This article was originally published a exactly a year ago, on Clinamenic's personal Mirror account.

This piece will explain the key innovations of onchain organization design, highlight a few of the most versatile smart contracts available for such design, and illustrate an example of combining these smart contracts to facilitate organizational processes, all with the intention of being accessible to readers who are new to blockchain technology. What follows is not to be considered financial or legal advice, but is intended purely for informational purposes.

Why Onchain Organizations?

This technology can be complicated. The terminology is dense and quickly evolving, the best practices are still nascent, and the means of interacting with these tools are not always that accessible. Is the cognitive burden entailed by all this worthwhile? What value does this technology add, to warrant the steep learning curve?

Much of this technology, namely smart contracts, reevaluates principles of governance and social enterprise so fundamental to human affairs that they may not, at first, seem tangible or even recognizable. How can groups of people collectively make decisions, while minimizing the opportunity for corrupt or extractive intermediaries to exploit trusted positions of central authority? Is it possible for an economy, at scale, to operate in a transparent and peer-to-peer digital framework which is open for everyone to participate in? These are among the questions this technology is being engineered in light of.

Philosophy and political science aside, what is the value add of this technology, from an operational perspective? Payments can be made instantaneously with negligible transaction fees, shared accounts can be created quickly and inexpensively to send and receive payments and to jointly interact with smart contracts, and community/stakeholder oversight can be practiced transparently due to the public and open-source nature of this technology. The term "onchain" refers to anything that resides on a blockchain, be it a user-controlled account or a smart contract.

What does it mean to "interact with smart contracts"? Here, we will walk through a few examples of smart contracts which can be viewed as open-source "building blocks" for organizations, and which constitute the very infrastructure in which these organizations are embedded.

Shared Accounts

Anyone can freely create an account, through which they can operate in the digital economic framework, or the onchain economy, described here. Normally these accounts are for individuals, but there can also be shared accounts, similar to a shared bank account but without the need to get permission from a bank or similar institution.

While a normal account requires the individual user to provide a signature to take actions, in order to send payments or to take other onchain actions, these shared accounts require multiple signatures, from multiple of the users attached to it. This is why these shared accounts are known as multi-signature accounts, or, more colloquially, multisigs.

A multisig is, itself, a smart contract. Smart contracts are like accounts in that they both have public addresses which uniquely identify them, similar to how email addresses work. Your email address is unique to you, and represents you within the email system. In fact, email addresses are to Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, what these account addresses are to blockchain. However, while email addresses only exchange information in the form of data, blockchain accounts can exchange currency, assets and unique digital objects in the form of data.

One difference between these systems, which helps explain why email is much more widely adopted than blockchain, is that the former has been around long enough for highly accessible user interfaces to be developed by software companies, while the latter is still at an earlier and less accessible phase of development.

Putting aside the question of user accessibility, multisigs are an integral component of the onchain economy. They can be configured in a number of ways, specifying which individual accounts are to be listed as signers, as well as the percentage of signers required to approve and execute a transaction.

For example, a multsig can be created to include Alice, Bob and Cate, each of whom have their own unique individual address. None of them need institutional approval to create either their individual account or their shared multisig.

Their individual accounts are similar to their shared multisig account, in that both have unique addresses (those long clunky codes of numbers and letters), both can send and receive assets, and both can interact with other smart contracts. That's right: the multisig is a smart contract which can interact with other smart contracts. It is an algorithm which can act upon, and be acted upon by, other algorithms. In this case, the multisig is a smart contract primarily being interacted with by Alice, Bob, and Cate.

What do these smart contract interactions look like? Smart contracts can have certain capabilities, called functions, which are triggered when certain users, or certain other smart contracts, take certain actions on them.

When Alice calls the "Execute" function on the multisig, to execute a transaction that has 2/3 signatures, it is as if she is pressing a button that only she, Bob, and Cate can press, because they are the three accounts which have access to this multisig. In doing so, Alice will pay a transaction fee, similar to if she were just making a normal transaction. In both cases, she is changing the state of the underlying ledger; she is making a change to the public database which all other accounts are using and making changes to. The record of Alice executing this multisig transaction is public, but will display only has her account (represented by her unique address) calling a certain function on this particular multisig (represented by its unique address).

In the diagram below, the individual accounts of Alice, Bob, and Cate are shown as having signer access to the multisig. In order for them to jointly take action through the multisig, whether that action is making a payment or interacting with another smart contract, the following process needs to unfold:

1. One signer "submits" an action. This means Alice, Bob, or Cate can initiate a transaction, by specifying the recipient address and the asset(s) being transferred. This action can also take the form of a smart contract interaction, in which case the address of the smart contract will need to be specified, as well as which function is to be called (i.e. which button is to be pressed) on that smart contract.

2. The specified threshold of signatures need to be reached. This is determined as the multisig is configured, and can be adjusted at any point. If there are three signers, the signature requirement can be 1/3, 2/3, or 3/3.

3. One signer "executes" the action. Any of the signers can execute an approved action, and doing do involves a transaction fee (transaction fees are native to the underlying infrastructure, but that topic is beyond the scope of this article).

In the above diagrams, the accounts are shown only as containing funds, but they can contain arbitrary assets, such as digital collectibles, "badges" which grant access to content or which enable holders to interact with certain smart contracts, or any other sort of digital object which can be represented onchain. The sheer diversity of potential onchain objects, from certifications to complex financial instruments, is a topic deserving of its own article.

The industry standard for multisig accounts is Safe, a particular brand of multisig. So widely adopted is the Safe multisig that the term "Safe" has become a popular eponym for multisig accounts themselves, even though there can be other versions or standards of multisig accounts.

At this point, before we dive deeper into what can be built with multisigs, as organizational design components, it is worth remembering that multisigs (or at least the well-engineered ones like Safes) themselves cannot be taken down or blocked by third parties such as private institutions or governments. Alice, Bob, and Cate can have their accounts hacked (if someone obtains the private key which is needed to cryptographically facilitate their individual "signatures") or they can have their accounts seized by governments (if the government compels them to disclose their private key), but the multisig itself, being a smart contract, will exist for as long as its underlying digital infrastructure.

There are extenuating exceptions to this, such as network forks and smart contract vulnerabilities, but those are beyond the scope of this article. For our purposes, it is enough to convey that multisigs, like other smart contracts, are open-source and practically permanent. Signers may remove themselves, or be removed, from a multisig, but that multisig itself will still exist and will still technically be able to receive assets.

Governance Frameworks

Governance is a, if not the, key process of onchain organizations. Who is included in the decision-making process, and for which decisions? Where is the line drawn between constitutional decisions which need to be ratified by entire stakeholder bodies, and operational decisions which need to be made by nimbler teams of experts or executives? When push comes to shove, who actually has what powers? In the interest of practicality, we will reserve the political and philosophical dimensions of these questions for another time, and approach them instead from a more operational perspective.

Many onchain organizations actually use smart contracts for some or all of their governance processes. While you can use "off-chain" voting to make some decisions, like using thumbs-up emojis to vote in text channels, implementing governance processes onchain brings with it certain benefits and certain risks.

The benefits include the potential for structural decentralization and censorship-resistance. Stakeholders can rest assured that proposals which are passed in a fully onchain manner will be executed, whereas with off-chain proposals, there is always the risk that some executive figure, usually a multisig signer, will circumvent or ignore the popular opinion.

The risks of onchain governance include the difficulty, or even impossibility, of intervening in situations of bugs or unforeseen technical circumstances. There is also the risk of an unscrupulous stakeholder making a dangerous or illegal proposal, and gaming the system to force that proposal through. That said, there are onchain methods, such as the failsafe committee, to enable manual emergency intervention to prevent such malicious acts.

If onchain governance is of interest to your organization, two of the leading industry standards are the Moloch framework and the Governor framework, both of which are smart contracts which facilitate voting, proposals, and member onboarding.

How can a smart contract facilitate such a broad range of bureaucratic processes, and why would you want to use a smart contract for doing so? Governance frameworks like Moloch and Governor facilitate these processes by determining which user accounts have permission to submit and vote on proposals, and this enables a transparent environment wherein stakeholders can rely on a well-defined governance process. In other words, by configuring which users can press which buttons on the governance smart contract, an internal system of governance can be established. By existing and operating onchain, an organization can, like individual accounts and multisigs, interact with the wider system of smart contracts.

That is, a large group of users can jointly and directly take action en masse, without the necessity of trustees or representatives. It should be emphasized that, while governance can be engineered in this dis-intermediated fashion, such is not always advisable from an operational perspective. That said, the very possibility of such governance models, which again operate on open-source peer-to-peer economic frameworks, enables community-driven and cooperative agency to arguably unprecedented extents.

One key example of how these governance frameworks, which are themselves smart contracts, can interact with other smart contracts, is how they integrate with multisigs. Both Moloch and Governor contracts can "plug in" to a multisig, and in doing so allow large numbers of users, who have voting power, collectively approve and execute payments or other smart contract interactions.

To take a step back before taking a step forward, perhaps a recap is in order. Users have individual accounts, through which they can send and receive payments and interact with smart contracts. One example of a smart contract is a multisig, which can be used for multiple users to collectively send and receive payments and to interact with smart contracts. Another example of a smart contract is a governance framework, which can facilitate stakeholder proposals and votes and executions, and which can be used for many users to collectively send and receive payments and to interact with smart contracts.

Now that multisigs and governance frameworks have been covered, we can look at a third example of a multisig, having to do with "onchain roles" and their management.

Role Management

While multisigs and governance frameworks allow groups of users to collectively take action onchain, such an arrangement often isn't sufficient when it comes to nuanced business operations, especially at scale. With governance frameworks, members are often treated as homogenous in terms of their access levels and their permissions within the organization. How can onchain organizations identify specific roles and assign specific members to those roles, in the interest of delegation and specialization?

One solution which has emerged to address this problem is onchain role management, pioneered largely by Hats Protocol. This protocol enables individual accounts, multisigs, or organizations to create an dynamic hierarchy of roles and positions, each of which can be deeply customized and transferred between users. The idea is that someone holding a certain position, such as a social media manager, wears a certain "hat" in an organization, insofar as they have specific responsibilities and authorities within that organization. With Hats Protocol, these positions can be represented by onchain objects, called hats, which function similarly to keycards or clearance passes, insofar as they can grant the holder certain responsibilities and authorities.

It is worth remembering, here, that the holder (or "wearer") of a hat can be an individual account, a multisig with a few signers, an entire organization, or even other kinds of smart contracts. This dynamic, of human users being identified by the same unique addresses as smart contracts, is what enables onchain organizations to operate in novel fashions. Not only can group decisions be made in more transparent processes, but some processes can be automated altogether, such as payment streaming and payment division.

With Hats Protocol, a hierarchy of roles can be created, called a hat tree, and this hierarchy uses terminology and logic similar to those of a family tree. The wearer of a hat can create "child" hats, and those child hats can themselves create child hats, thus entailing a dynamic hierarchy of administration wherein "parent" hats can manage child hats, and each hat can have its own particular set of responsibilities and authorities.

For example, one hat can be configured to give the wearer signer access to a multisig, whereas another hat can give the wearer permission to submit proposals in the organization's governance framework. This first example, of a hats-integrated multisig, is one of the more versatile examples of combining smart contracts. Normally multisigs have regular individual accounts attached as signers, but with hats-integrated multisigs, that signer position becomes abstracted into a role, a hat which can be transferred from one user to another.

Yes, depending on how the organization has configured its internal governance processes, these hats can be transferred from one user to another, or they can have their settings adjusted, or they can be revoked. If an onchain organization wants to enable a community of stakeholders to elect signers to their multisig treasury, they can use Hats Protocol.

To take a step back, hats are assets that are held by individual accounts, or smart contracts (because they can both hold assets), and which can be programmed to grant the holder certain levels access or authority. They are called "hats" as a nod to the colloquialism of a person "wearing a hat" by operating in a certain role or position. To create and manage hats, you create a new "hat tree" which starts with a single parent hat, below which you can create a large number of child hats, allowing you to engineer an intricate system of roles. As such, Hats Protocol is a very interesting example of a smart contract which can be used as a building block for onchain organizations.

Organizational Building Blocks

To take another step back, to the metaphor of building blocks, hopefully it is becoming evident how smart contracts can be used as modular, customizable components for onchain organizations, and how this technology, by virtue of operating on open-source peer-to-peer infrastructure, can revolutionize the field of organization design, and perhaps even democracy itself.

But instead of waxing on about democracy, let us instead return to an operational perspective of onchain organization design. What would some of the aforementioned processes look like, in concrete terms?

Let us say there is an onchain organization, which uses a Moloch framework for facilitating votes among stakeholders, and which has a multisig for its executive committee. In this arrangement, the stakeholder body effectively constitutes the board of directors, because the organization itself (represented by a "higher" multisig which is linked to the governance framework) wears the top hat. Lower in the hierarchy sits the executive committee multisig, and each executive wears a particular hat which grants them access to the executive multisig.

Below is a diagram illustrating the process whereby a community or stakeholder group may directly reappoint an executive or representative figure. This process is an example of what can be done, with a fully configured onchain organization.

In the above diagram, the big round logos are multisigs, where the white one has a Moloch framework attached to it, and the yellow one is connected to hats, such that a given set of hats enable their wearers to be signers on the yellow multisig. Individual users are represented by the small circular silhouette logos. This yellow multisig is here understood as an executive committee, or core team, whereas the white one is understood as the total set of voting members.

It may be worthwhile to go over the above diagram one more time, before getting started on the guide for how to create such an organization. Individuals have agency onchain, in that they can send and receive payments and interact with smart contracts, all through their individual account, which is identified by a unique code. Smart contracts are open-source algorithms which run in the same environment as these individual user accounts, and they can be programmed to hold assets, issue assets, or take other actions, based on which of their "buttons" are pressed by users. Certain smart contracts, called multisigs, can facilitate shared accounts, wherein multiple users need to agree on the action they take through this shared account. Once they agree, one of the users can press the "Execute" button. Multisigs are the industry standard for organizational treasuries onchain. Some multisigs can actually not have individual user accounts as signers, but other smart contracts. In the case of the multisig attached to the Moloch framework in the diagram above, the Moloch governance contract can be the sole signer of its associated multisig, thus effectively rendering that multisig a shared account for everyone who has voting power in that governance framework, i.e. the sixteen users displayed at the far left.

All of this is intended to demonstrate how smart contracts can be combined in useful ways to facilitate sophisticated and transparent governance models, some of which present profound implications for how humans do business and do politics.

Clinamenic LLC is available for hourly consultations and service retainers regarding onchain governance and operations.

This exposé highlights a number of fonts which aesthetically encapsulate certain elements of the solarpunk ethos. Some lean into organic or floral themes, while others opt for more psychedelic or techno designs. These fonts use a variety of open licenses like the Open Font License and the Creative Commons licenses, but I nonetheless encourage readers to familiarize themselves with these licenses before utilizing these fonts.

I would like to thank the following individuals and institutions who, doubtlessly among many others, contributed to and/or enabled the beautiful open-source typographic work surveyed in this exposé: Julie Debeuf, Amira Karam, Lucas Descroix, Cédric Rossignol-Brunet, Raphaël Bastide, Wei Huang, Lucas Le Bihan, Walid Bouchouchi, Jérémy Landes, Dries Hamels, Olivia Marly, Florjent Nuhiji, Eva De Luca, Sangyé Bay Santos Ferreira, Muskan Jaffar, Spenta Parsa, Hasan Halilov, Birgita Siim, Alexander Le Sage de Fontenay, Kertu Kibal, Sigrid Liira, Maksym Kobuzan, Ariel Martín Pérez, Studio Cryo, the Lithuanian Cultural Council, the Estonian Academy of Arts, Creative Commons, and SIL International.

1 - Plantasia Bioma (Italic)

https://gitlab.com/bonjour-monde/fonderie/plantasia-typeface 

By: Julie Debeuf

License: CC BY-ND 4.0

“Plantasia is a typeface family created by the students of the G5 Communication 360 class (LISAA Graphisme, Paris, Fr), during a type design initiation workshop given by Lucas Descroix (Bonjour Monde) in September 2022. Students were asked to create a display typeface based on a type of plant. In order to get an interesting conceptual distance they first gathered words and images, then explored abstract rhythms by hand.”

See also: Fantasia (music), phantasmagoria

2 - Plantasia Myrtillo (Regular) 

https://gitlab.com/bonjour-monde/fonderie/plantasia-typeface 

By: Amira Karam

License: CC BY-ND 4.0 

Another font from the Plantasia family, Myrtillo is inspired by the myrtillocactus geometrizans and is evocative of psychedelia. Arguably another pillar of solarpunk culture is the therapeutic and enlightening potential of psychedelia, whether in new-age recreational capacities or in traditional ritualistic capacities. While solarpunk is still far from a mainstream subculture, its treatment of psychedelics, drawing from new age bohemian culture and more sober clinical studies alike, embodies a mature and well-adjusted perspective on the matter, as if asking “how can the alterations engendered by these substances contribute to our collective attempts at solving societal issues?” 

It may be argued that solarpunk has a fixation on systemic technological solutions to perceived societal issues, despite the risks of more advanced technology enabling a more advanced control society. Arguably, the naivety of such an outlook is rooted in the likelihood of such technologies being developed, at societal scale, with primarily philanthropic motivations, as opposed to profit-maximizing motivations. Here, proper systems for funding public goods become integral, to ensure that the efforts going to support the public can be compensated and encouraged. Luckily, the solarpunk movement seems to aptly recognize the importance of establishing funding pipelines for public goods.

See also: Gitcoin, Giveth

3 - GottaCatch Water

https://gitlab.com/bonjour-monde/fonderie/gotta-catch-typeface/-/tree/master/fonts/otf?ref_type=heads

License: CC BY-ND 4.0

“Gotta Catch is a typeface family created by the students of the DNMADE ‘Graphisme augmenté’ (Lycée Jacques Prévert, Boulogne-Billancourt, Fr), during a type design initiation workshop given by Lucas Descroix in March 2021. Each student was asked to create a display typeface based on a type of Pokémon. In order to get an interesting conceptual distance they first gathered words and images, then explored abstract rhythms by hand. The idea was to delve into influences and inspirations outside the field of typography, in order to create new and surprising letterforms.”

4 - Berzulis Pizius 

https://berzulis.com/

By: Studio Cryo

License: SIL Open Font License

“Beržulis is an ongoing experimental type foundry project created by Studio Cryo with a focus on Lithuanian mythology and alphabet. Completed kerning, lowercase letters and other glyphs are still in the process. The project is funded by Lithuanian Cultural Council."

“Pizius in Lithuanian mythology is a God who protects love, marriage & sexual relations.”

One aspect of the broader solarpunk ethos is a respect toward regional customs and traditions, and how this localism can manifest via participatory governance. In what is arguably a paradox, solarpunk ostensibly embraces the prospect of technologically-facilitated global coordination infrastructure to solve planetary problems, while also emphasizing the need to allow local and indigenous people to participate in their own governance. Is there a way to reconcile these values into a cosmopolitan federalism, or would one, in reality, come at the expense of the other?

See also: Bioregionalism

5 - Berzulis Žaltys 

https://berzulis.com/

By: Studio Cryo

License: SIL Open Font License

“Žaltys (pronounced zhal-tees), or the Grass Snake, is a household spirit in Lithuanian mythology, guardian of the home and a symbol of fertility.”

Another font from the Berzulis family, Zaltys embodies the solarpunk emphasis on flora, vegetation, and nature in general. Much of this emphasis is framed, implicitly or explicitly, as a ‘return to nature’ from the cloistered online existence which has become the norm over the last decade. In this respect, solarpunk rejects the claustrophobic alienation characteristic of the cyberpunk and dystopian visions which recently have tended to dominate our collective conception of the future. Zaltys also enters a graffiti-like territory of anti-legibility.

See also: Art Nouveau

6 - Regular Durandus

https://cedr_r.gitlab.io/regularfont/

By: Cédric Rossignol-Brunet

License: SIL Open Font License

“Subpixel rendering is a way to increase the apparent resolution of a computer's liquid crystal display (LCD) or organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display by rendering pixels to take into account the screen type's physical properties. It takes advantage of the fact that each pixel on a color LCD is actually composed of individual red, green, and blue or other color subpixels to anti-alias text with greater detail or to increase the resolution of all image types on layouts which are specifically designed to be compatible with subpixel rendering.”

See also: Braindance (music)

7 - Avara (Bold Italic) 

https://typotheque.luuse.fun/specimen/avara

By: Raphaël Bastide, Wei Huang, Lucas Le Bihan, Walid Bouchouchi, Jérémy Landes

License: SIL Open Font License

The reason this font struck me as a solarpunk font is less obvious than the more forwardly organic or techno fonts. Here, there is a clean but playful riff on the classic serif style, and this sort of formal experimentation and tone I think are fairly representative of the wider solarpunk ethos. Like cyberpunk and various other punk derivatives and subcultures, solarpunk does fundamentally involve a subversion of conventions. Where punk was subversive as a statement of disillusionment and disenfranchisement, solarpunk subverts the gloomy despondency felt when faced with global challenges and irresponsible industry and political leaders.

8 - Barlow

http://typotheque.le75.be/ 

By: B2-Dries Hamels, Olivia Marly, B2-Florjent Nuhiji

License: GNU

Barlow is another example of formal subversion, this time with a subtle psychedelic expression. It’s also a good example of how a given expression can be subversive without taking itself too seriously, not unlike solarpunk at large.

See also: Metamodernism

9 - Scorpius 

http://typotheque.le75.be/ 

By: B2-Eva De Luca, Sangyé Bay santos Ferreira, Muskan Jaffar, Esa le 75

License: GNU

“Scorpius is a zodiac constellation located in the Southern celestial hemisphere, where it sits near the center of the Milky Way, between Libra to the west and Sagittarius to the east.”

Scorpius riffs on the conventional pixel font, bringing more of a sense of fluidity, as if seeking a middle ground between the digital and the natural.

10 - Squared 

http://typotheque.le75.be/ 

By: B2-Spenta Parsa

License: GNU

Squared is another overtly techno font, and another example of formal subversion bordering on anti-legibility. Anti-legibility itself is arguably not characteristic of solarpunk, insofar as it reflects an esoteric attitude and inaccessible status, whereas solarpunk is more about inclusion and participation. That said, there is an art to bordering on the anti-legible, in the spirit of critically deconstructing established signifiers. 

See also: Lettrism

11 - Hypha 

https://www.suvatypefoundry.ee/hypha/ 

By: Hasan Halilov

License: When using fonts featured on SUVA Type Foundry platform please give credit to the author and if possible share your work with us.

“Hypha is a typeface that explores organic movement and shape. It is based on different fungi development and their specific filaments that make up the fungi’s body. The typeface also draws a lot of inspiration from archival Greek and Bulgarian typefaces and letterings from the second half of the twentieth century.”

See also: The Mycopunk Manifesto, the Common Mycelial Network

12 - Ketchup Addict

https://www.suvatypefoundry.ee/ketchup-addict/ 

By: Birgita Siim

License: When using fonts featured on SUVA Type Foundry platform please give credit to the author and if possible share your work with us.

“The font reflects emptiness in stomach and soul of a Ketchup Addict, who is constantly dreaming of ketchup.”

Ketchup Addict embodies the playfulness and formal subversion of solarpunk, with an aesthetic hint of psychedelia, but does not enter the territory of nature or technology. 

13 - Heavy 

https://www.suvatypefoundry.ee/heavy/

By: Alexander Le Sage de Fontenay

License: When using fonts featured on SUVA Type Foundry platform please give credit to the author and if possible share your work with us.

“Heavy represents my understanding of “contemporary”, by channelling 1960s and 1970s history, youth- and subculture movements, music and film. A display typeface which references the past to create something better.”

Like Ketchup Addict, Heavy isn’t solarpunk by virtue of aesthetic reference to technology or nature, but by virtue of a playful and unorthodox defiance of the status quo. Heavy is more overtly psychedelic, embracing the history of counter-cultural movements while conveying an optimistic attitude about the future. 

See also: Oz, “the most controversial magazine of the 60s”

14 - Flowstate 

https://www.suvatypefoundry.ee/flowstate/ 

By: Kertu Kibal

License: When using fonts featured on SUVA Type Foundry platform please give credit to the author and if possible share your work with us.

“In positive psychology, a flow state, also known as colloquially as being in the zone, is the mental state in which a person performing some activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.”

Flowstate is like Barlow-elasticc in that it has an irregular cadence and off-kilter form, arguably another example of formal defiance. It also borders of psychedelic in that it makes reference to heightened mental states, and it also represents solarpunk’s embrace of science and scientific modes of understanding the world.

See also: Flow (psychology)

15 - Chaos 

https://www.suvatypefoundry.ee/chaos/ 

By: Sigrid Liira

License: When using fonts featured on SUVA Type Foundry platform please give credit to the author and if possible share your work with us.

“Relationship between humans and technology and everything in between.”

Near the apogee of anti-legibility, Chaos pushes the boundaries of what we can interpret as glyphs and text, and does so in quite a cyber-positive fashion. The tone here is less clearly playful but still quite subversive.

See also: Hyperreality

16 - Nyght Serif 

https://www.tunera.xyz/fonts/nyght-serif/

By: Maksym Kobuzan

License: SIL Open Font License

“Nyght Serif is a contemporary serif with a spicy character. Its contrasting forms combine smooth and sharp curves, like blade serifs and spurs. Work on it began during the study of the well-known typefaces designed by William Caslon. However, under the influence of calligraphy and modern serifs, its design has been greatly transformed.”

Nyght Serif is a fluid and funky subversion of the otherwise stoic serif style, but does not thematically encapsulate the organic, psychedelic or technological elements of solarpunk beyond this. If anything, it touches on some of the austurbane-adjacent strains of solarpunk aesthetics. 

See also: Austurbane

17 - Brassia 

https://www.tunera.xyz/

By: Ariel Martín Pérez

License: SIL Open Font License

“Brassia’s design is inspired by Solarpunk, a science fiction genre that looks towards a brighter future based on clean energy production, usually with a distinctive art-nouveau aesthetic. Its letters were drawn by taking a freestyle approach to the latin alphabet, intended to look ancient and futuristic at the same time, with a translation contrast that is typical of pen writing. Some of the letter's designs are also based on ancient and vernacular signs found in the city of Brussels.”

The author here even explicitly references solarpunk, albeit as more of a science-fiction genre than a proto-political or cultural movement. This marriage of the ancient with the futuristic is arguably another calling card of solarpunk, indicating a respect for cultures and traditions across space and time.

This exposé was collated by Clinamenic LLC, and originally self-published on t2. If you enjoyed this exposé, please consider subscribing to this newsletter, and following Clinamenic LLC on X, Farcaster, and Lens.

When it comes to bootstrapping these procedures, it is often necessary to conduct such decisions in transparent and well-documented fashion, in the interest of lending such decisions a sufficient degree of legitimacy. Without this legitimacy, there may remain doubts and ambiguities regarding the foundations of the organization, which may add unnecessary complexity to ensuing operations.

This entry will suggest a platform-agnostic approach to bootstrapping governance structures, and a template which may prove useful as a bureaucratic backbone of sorts.

Unstructured Milieus

Many organizations, be they DAOs or traditional start-ups, start off as a loose association of individuals with a shared interest or mission, but with little formality in how this association, well, associates.

One benefit of this can be understood as a lack of bureaucracy which may enable a certain nimbleness in decision-making and executing early-stage operations. A drawback is that it may be difficult for individuals to remain on the same page, feel adequately included in collective decisions, and avoid duplicating or complicating each others efforts. As such, at some point more formal and systematic processes need to be introduced, to ensure that efforts are well-allocated and that everyone is operating by a common set of rules and guidelines.

The transition from unstructured to structured, in this sense, may at times feel artificial or awkward. Which color thumbs-up emoji constitutes a vote in favor in a certain Discord channel? Who decided to use that channel for voting, and where was that decision made, and who decided to use that location for that decision?

It may be argued that, while a nascent organization is bootstrapping its internal governance system, legitimacy is something that gradually amasses as collective decision-making becomes more formalized, rather than something which is either totally present or totally absent from the beginning. In this sense, legitimacy is intersubjectively and contextually defined, and takes shape as stakeholders each develop confidence in the group's ability to responsibly and thoroughly reach consensus.

Pre-Constitutional Governance

By and large, a given association of people pursuing a given goal, be that goal profit-oriented or philanthropic, will benefit from having a legally viable and thoroughly precedented framework for internal processes and decisions. Depending on the nature of the organization, such a framework usually consists of some combination of founding documents such as bylaws, operating agreements, constitutions, and more.

Because such documents often tend to involve complex legal considerations, having to do with liability and compliance, it is best to consult experts in legal entity formation and other legal domains relevant to the organization's goals. That said, such counsel can often be expensive and, depending on the nature of organization, a more lightweight antecedent framework may be desirable - a framework which a group of people can easily and freely adopt, to get them to the point where a more thorough framework becomes advisable.

In such scenarios, it can be as simple as collectively drafting a template for proposing and voting on these early decisions, and designating a channel or platform in which these proposals are made and voted on. So long as this initial decision-making framework clearly explains how amendments can be made to it, a given association will be able to iterate on their internal governance process(es) as they encounter edge cases and other ambiguities which demand clarification.

This approach should not be considered a substitute for a set of legally-binding agreements between stakeholders, but rather an intermediary "on-ramping" phase from unstructured association to legal entity. Additionally, it may also alleviate some of the complexity (qua billable counsel hours) of an eventual legal entity formation, insofar as many of the operational processes will have already been defined to some extent.

Governance Framework Template

Below is attached a boilerplate document which may be used by an association of individuals to ratify a minimum viable framework for internal governance. This document includes a template for proposals to follow, and a lightweight framework of guidelines around how to make these proposals, and how to amend the proposal template and framework itself.

Please feel free to copy the google document and fill out the designations as appropriate for your organization. Clinamenic LLC is available for billable hourly consultations, if you would like to have your particular framework reviewed.

Pre-Constitutional Governance Framework

1. DEFINITIONS & DESIGNATIONS

   1. Proposal-Authorized Person

      1. DEFINITION: Persons recognized as able to make proposals

      2. DESIGNATION: (e.g. core team)

   2. Vote-Authorized Person

      1. DEFINITION: Persons recognized as able to vote on proposals.

      2. DESIGNATION: (e.g. community members)

   3. Designated Drafting Platform

      1. DEFINITION: The platform or channel where proposals are drafted and edited.

      2. DESIGNATION: (e.g. Google Docs)

   4. Minimum Drafting Duration

      1. DEFINITION: The minimum duration for which a proposal must be available for feedback in the drafting stage.

      2. DESIGNATION: (e.g. 5 days)

   5. Designated Voting Platform

      1. DEFINITION: The platform or channel where proposals are voted on.

      2. DESIGNATION: (e.g. Snapshot)

   6. Designated Voting Duration

      1. DEFINITION: The duration for which an active proposal may be voted on.

      2. DESIGNATION: (e.g. 5 days)

   7. Designated Voting Method

      1. DEFINITION: The method for calculating or weighting votes.

      2. DESIGNATION: (e.g. 1 person = 1 vote)

   8. Designated Voting Quorum

      1. DEFINITION: The minimum number of voting persons needed for the outcome to be considered legitimate.

      2. DESIGNATION: (e.g. 5 votes)

   9. Designated Voting Majority

      1. DEFINITION: The percentage of votes required for a proposal to pass.

      2. DESIGNATION: (e.g. 51%)

   10. Default Voting Options

       1. DEFINITION: The voting options which are to be used by default, unless the proposal necessitates other options.

       2. DESIGNATION: “For” and “Against”

2. PROPOSAL PROCESS

   1. Preamble: With this agreed-upon proposal process, any proposal-authorized person may draft and post a proposal for all vote-authorized persons to vote on, in order to formally facilitate group decisions. This process may evolve over time, and may eventually be further formalized through the establishment of bylaws or other operating agreements. 

   2. Process: The proposal process will follow the stages below:

      1. Drafting Stage: As it is being drafted, the proposal will be formatted according to the Proposal Template, made available to feedback from [proposal-authorized persons and/or vote-authorized persons], and will be made accessible on the designated drafting platform(s) for the minimum drafting duration before it can advance to the Active Stage. All vote-authorized persons will be notified when the draft is made accessible.

      2. Active Stage: The drafted proposal will be posted on the designated voting platform for vote-authorized persons to vote on. The default voting options will be used, unless the proposal requires other options. For a proposal to pass, it must:

         1. be active for the designated voting duration,

         2. use the designated voting method,

         3. meet the designated voting quorum, and 

         4. the designated voting majority must be in favor.

      3. Execution Stage: Once a proposal has passed, the action items specified in that proposal may commence under the auspices of approval by the organization.

3. PROPOSAL TEMPLATE

   1. Proposal Name: The name of the proposal, which may or may not follow a codified naming scheme.

   2. Proposal Author(s): The person(s) authoring the proposal.

   3. Proposal Team: Conducting the affairs detailed in the proposal

   4. Draft Start Date: The date the proposal draft is started.

   5. Proposal Description: The main body of descriptive text explaining what the proposal is about.

   6. Mission Alignment: Explanation why this proposal is in alignment with the mission or goals of the organization.

   7. Brand Usage: Description of if/how this proposal involves the usage of the organization’s brand.

   8. Financial Implications: Description of any disbursements or costs associated with this proposal. This section would specifically reference the organization’s treasury or other relevant budgetary accounts, if there are costs involved in the proposal

   9. Success Metrics: Description of how the success of this proposal can be gauged, during and after the Execution Stage.

   10. Next Steps: Outline of the action items entailing the passing of this proposal, and who will be responsible for them.

4. MISCELLANEOUS 

   1. Amendments: Amendments can be made to this framework by including an edited version of this framework in a proposal, to be ratified by vote-authorized persons.

   2. Revised Proposals: If rejected, proposals may be redrafted and resubmitted for another vote.

Economic liberalism has become the incumbent world order over the twentieth century, with its logic so deeply rooted in our globalized culture that it has become difficult to imagine an alternative. Widening wealth disparities fuel skepticism about liberalism’s ability to equitably increase quality of life, and social welfare initiatives aiming to address this disparity often involve mobilizing the government in ways which may threaten individual economic liberty. Can economic welfare be promoted in a manner which does not compromise individual liberty?

Such a solution may involve private sector social welfare programs; that is, privately managed (qua non-governmental) non-profit and self-regulatory initiatives which systematically benefit the public good. This notion is not new, but it does challenge the assumption that the private sector is reserved for self-interested enterprise and private wealth accumulation, while systemic efforts to support the collective good must find expression in the public sector through legislation and regulation.

Here, I will elaborate on this idea, with the intention of reconciling the intellectual traditions of capitalism and communism into a new politico-economic praxis which aims to preserve the virtues of both.

The Dialectical Method

There exists a great body of philosophical discourse about the dialectical method, much of which remains so academic as to not pertain to the inquiry at hand. That said, the key methods and concepts are not only pertinent here, but useful at large in terms of navigating and reconciling conflicts between value systems.

The dialectical method has roots in actual dialogue between people holding opposing views who nonetheless wish to learn from one another, in order for each to develop a more informed understanding of the situation. This process was formulated and theorized extensively over the centuries, especially in the 19th-century school of thought known as German idealism. Here, it took on a more modern and abstract character, pertaining not just to literal dialogues between people, but to abstract interplays between ideas. 

It is in this era that the model of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis was formulated. Here, a given conflict of ideas could be framed as an interplay between one position, the thesis, and a conflicting position, the antithesis. From here a dialogue would ensue wherein both sides would express themselves and attempt to identify a reconciliatory solution, the synthesis, which satisfies both sides’ values.

This model could apply to two debaters who are each consciously trying to reach a more informed argument, wherein the strengths of each of their individual arguments are combined, or it could be philosophically applied, as a conceptual framework, to the study of history. In the latter sense, the history of human civilization could be understood as an evolving dialogue between different value systems, representing civilizations with different societal models, with stronger and stronger civilizations emerging along the way, learning from their shared past.

This evolutionary trend could then be understood in almost metaphysical terms, as if guided by a spirit which encapsulates the era, seeing as this dialectical process is usually not consciously driven by world leaders seeking to satisfy each other’s values, but driven by a species-level force by which the synthesis naturally emerges from geopolitical conflicts.

In response to this worldview of idealism, wherein history is driven by a metaphysical interplay of ideas which manifest as geopolitical relations, Karl Marx (et al) developed a new theoretical framework for understanding history. Instead of history being driven by ideas, which were causally upstream of material reality, history was instead driven by material reality, with the role of ideas being more epiphenomenal, or secondary. 

In other words, Marx understood the history of civilization as an economic interplay of class dynamics unfolding across various societies. Particularly, he framed this in terms of an interplay between the capitalist class and the working class, an interplay which would entail an ever-widening wealth disparity and inevitably lead to the proletarian revolution. This revolution would usher in a new, synthetic form of society which took the strengths of the thesis (namely capitalism’s industrial powers of production) and reconciled them with the antithesis (namely the right for all workers to receive the full benefits of their labor), to amount to a utopian synthesis, where the means of production would be collectively harnessed to share the wealth.

Marx’s theory of history is known as historical materialism, or alternatively as dialectical materialism, and is squarely in response to the theories underpinning German idealism. It became the foundational theory for communism, at least as Marx envisioned it, and by extension inspired the multi-decade movement which culminated in the dissolution of the Soviet Union. As we know, the dictatorship of the proletariat didn’t work out so well, and that utopian synthesis was never reached.

Regardless of how seriously one takes its theoretical application to history, one can understand the dialectical method as a means for arriving upon a practical solution for a given conflict. It can also be understood as a sensibility one may uphold when faced with the very concept of conflict. In this latter sense, one may approach conflicts we suppose to be eternal, natural, or otherwise larger than any particular scenario. 

Recuperation and Détournement

Related to this model of class interplay and dialectical dynamics are the techniques of recuperation and detournement.

Borne of the avant-garde Marxist culture of the situationists, these techniques pertain to the ongoing dialogue between an incumbent political force and a revolutionary political counterforce, with the former seeking to stabilize the status quo and the latter seeking to destabilize it. Where recuperation describes the dominant culture reappropriating the tactics of the revolutionary counterculture, detournement describes the reverse. 

Within the context of art, an example of recuperation would be the industrial manufacturing of socks featuring Basquiat artwork - a pair of which I happen to own! - whereas an example of detournement would be Warhol’s subversive framing of consumer aesthetics.

Basically, these two techniques describe the methods by which culture and counterculture assimilate each other to further their dialogue, whether that be adversarial or constructive. Whether or not this furtherance constitutes some sort of advance in the status quo is another matter, and a subjective one at that. For the sake of this inquiry, let us consider how the Leninist praxis of vanguardism can be recuperated by capitalism, in the spirit of one world learning from another.

Vanguardism

The Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party underwent a schism in 1903 at the party’s second congress, splitting into the Bolshevik and the Menshevik factions. 

The Bolsheviks, constituting the majority and being led by Vladimir Lenin, believed the revolution should be led by an elite and professional revolutionary cadre, or a vanguard, to overthrow the incumbent bourgeoisie. The Mensheviks, constituting the minority and being led by Julius Martov, believed in collaborating with the incumbent bourgeoisie and going about the revolution in a more grassroots fashion. 

Almost irrespective of its original communist intentions, the concept of vanguardism, despite it originally being conceived in opposition to capitalism and the bourgeoisie, can nonetheless be extracted and recontextualized within a free-market context. This would involve generalizing the concept of the vanguard beyond the particular context of communism, and then re-particularizing it into the context of capitalism. In other words, capitalism can recuperate the vanguard.

But toward what end could a capitalist vanguard be mobilized? In this recuperated context, the term ‘vanguard’ would no longer refer to an anti-capitalist revolutionary elite, seeking to steer the populus to overthrow some incumbent feudal or capitalist power, but rather an entrepreneurial elite pushing the bleeding edge of free market industry. More specifically, this capitalist vanguard may place a special emphasis on technological innovation, with such an emphasis perhaps being informed by macroeconomic theories of growth and disruption.

Technological and Related Innovation

Classical economics holds that the two essential factors for economic growth are labor and capital, and that economic growth requires at least one of them to be increasing in certain ways. For the purposes of this inquiry, let us use the classical definition of capital, and the Georgist definition of wealth. Wealth is the product of labor exerted on natural resources, such as the cultivation of corn or the building of a house, and capital is that wealth which is used to generate more wealth, such as if the corn is sold for a profit or if the house is rented by a tenant. Money is a liquid representation of wealth.

In the middle of the twentieth century was formulated a new model of economic growth, associated chiefly with Robert Solow and Trevor Swan, which incorporated technological growth as a third factor. Because labor can only be increased to such an extent, given natural limitations on worker-hours, and because capital can only accumulate so fast given these limitations, the role of technological innovation can be framed as the factor which enables exponential productivity increase and, by extension, economic growth. 

Here, technological innovation chiefly consists of advances in industrial engineering, whether that involves improving an existing technology, developing a new technology altogether, or some combination of the two. As such advancements are made, free markets are disrupted insofar as yesterday’s best practices are rendered obsolete and new business models attain competitive advantages. 

The competitive landscape of virtually every free-market industry is subject to the potential of such disruption, as if the ante of production is perpetually being raised by advances in our collective productive capabilities. This dynamic is central to the thesis of capitalism, namely that the free market is conducive to innovation and that such innovation results in the betterment of average quality of life. The uneven distribution of this betterment, however, is arguably the primary criticism of capitalism. 

Synthesizing Capitalism and Communism

Other prominent criticisms of late-stage capitalism include the perceived unsustainability of globalized free market industry, and the alienating effects consumer culture can have on individuals and communities. However, seeing as economic equality is more central to the dialectic between capitalism and communism, that will remain the focus of this inquiry. The question, posed in dialectical terms, is as follows: how can economic liberty be preserved while also harnessing industrial innovation to more evenly benefit the public good? That is, how can the primary virtue of capitalism be reconciled with the primary (attempted) virtue of communism?

The working synthesis proposed here is that the free market foundation of capitalism be preserved, while building private nonprofit initiatives on top of this foundation to benefit the public good. More specifically, such initiatives should focus on emerging technology if such philanthropic efforts are to be ramified throughout society through technological disruption. The communitarian spirit of communism, as embodied by the vanguard, can be injected into this free market context, not to attempt to commandeer the government and enforce the common good via mandate, but to advance technological industrial frontiers in the interest of the common good without compromising the economic liberty of the free market.

In slightly more concrete terms, this vanguard would steer nonprofit initiatives, such as chambers of commerce, self-regulatory organizations and social welfare organizations, to organize stakeholders in emerging technology sectors, to promote standards and practices beneficial to the public good, and to generally act as philanthropic midwives of the actualization of technology’s potential.

As a post-capitalist praxis, this can be referred to by a number of terms, such as ‘free market collectivism’, ‘communitarian capitalism’, or ‘neo-vanguardism’. There remains a good deal of theoretical work to more meaningfully elaborate on the dialectical relationship between capitalism and communism, to ensure that this new praxis properly learns from geopolitical history and the western philosophical tradition. There also remains practical and experimental work to be done, in terms of organizing vanguard nonprofit initiatives at the cutting edge of industry, as well as the rearguard efforts of working with regulators and legislators. 

Despite the vast bulk of work left to do, the chief aim of this short inquiry is to promote critical and solutions-oriented discourse at the level of societal systems, to provide theoretical context for existing initiatives of public goods technology, and to intimate, however vaguely, a step forward in the world-historical process.

This article was originally self-published on t2 on September 19, 2023.

That said, doing so typically involves relying on a protocol, and relying on the determinism of code without the opportunity for manual intervention brings with it a unique and largely novel risk profile for on-chain organizations. With the will of a community represented by a smart contract, how can an on-chain organization institute community-led governance, while also protecting itself against such risk?

One suggestion is to implement a certain kind of high-level committee which can override the community smart contract, but only in well-defined and collectively agreed-upon situations of perceived emergency. Such a "failsafe committee" can be situated within an organization so as to hedge against some of the risks entailed by totally algorithmic governance, thus providing guardrails to promote the adoption of on-chain community governance methods.

Through a combination of smart contracts and internal policy, this failsafe committee can be instituted as a sort of insurance regarding the risks of algorithmic governance.

On-Chain Architecture

Below is a draft "blackprint" for an on-chain organization's implementation of a failsafe committee. For additional technical context, see my prior article about role-bound multisigs, which make use of the SignerGate contract from Hats Protocol, here represented by the yellow Safe logo.

In this arrangement, the community (represented on-chain by a DAO contract) effectively serves as the board of directors, and it elects executives, who effectively serve as the C-suite. The community elects individuals to serve executive roles by way of transferring a tokenized role, or Hat, to those individuals' addresses, thus giving them the authority and responsibility associated with those roles.

These executives can handle operations, such as budget appropriations, as signers on the executive committee multisig (bottom). These same individuals also occupy the failsafe committee multisig (top), seeing as both the executive multisig and the failsafe multisig have the same hats (Hat ID N.1.2) as their signers. This means that if someone receives one of these hats, they become a signer on the executive committee multisig as well as the failsafe committee multisig.

That said, the two multisigs have different positions in the on-chain hierarchy, and thus the two committees have different levels of responsibility and authority.

The executive committee heads up operations, by delegating project management responsibility to subordinate multisigs (not shown in the above diagram). Just as the community can elect the individuals on the executive/failsafe committees, the community can also manually elect people to serve on lower committees. Alternatively, the community can also trust the executives to appoint these lower roles.

The failsafe committee multisig has authority over the community. In the parlance of Hats Protocol, the failsafe committee wears the "top hat" of the hat tree. This means that the failsafe committee can intervene in any structural changes made by the community, and can even cut the community out of the organization, by way of transferring the community's hat to a different address, or by toggling the hat off.

The glaring concern, at least in the minds of decentralization advocates, is the potential for such a failsafe committee to exploit their position to seize control from the community. This can be addressed by way of mutual oversight, as embodied by a combination of capture-resistant protocols and internal policies.

Checks and Balances

While the human potential for self-interested malfeasance is arguably not completely preventable, this potential can certainly be curbed. One way to mitigate this risk, in the case of the failsafe committee, is to systematically limit their powers such that they can only override the community in well-defined scenarios wherein the community is corrupted or the community smart contract is compromised.

In addition to that policy-based limitation of power, which is more of a formal check on the power of the failsafe committee, there can also be instituted a protocol-based system of mutual oversight, which would serve as more of a real check.

The above diagram illustrates an arrangement whereby the community can override the executives in general operational scenarios, in the manner of a board of directors, but the executives (via the failsafe committee multisig) can override the community only in emergency scenarios, as defined by provisions in the organization's operating agreement. This means that the power the executives have over the community, via the failsafe committee multisig, is more tightly constrained than the power the community has over the executives. It also means that the community gets to elect who gets to override it in emergency scenarios, in accordance with the operating agreement.

Boilerplate Provisions

Below are examples of the sorts of provisions an organization may choose to include in their bylaws or other relevant operating agreements. It should here be noted than I am not a lawyer, nor is this legal advice. Rather, the language below is meant to serve in a purely informational capacity, illustrating the basic logic by which an organization's internal policy can constrain the powers of the failsafe committee:

ARTICLE X - THE FAILSAFE AND EXECUTIVE COMMITTEES

SECTION X.1 - Committee Duality

The Failsafe Committee and Executive Committee shall each have their own distinct designated multisig contract address, but both multisig contracts will be occupied by the same set of signers. Appointments, replacements, removals, or any other actions taken to adjust the set of signers on these multisigs will be made by the DAO, according to the process(es) defined in SECTION X.8 (Actions Taken to Adjust Committee Rosters or Parameters) of this Operating Agreement. Such actions can only be taken by the Failsafe Committee in situations described in SECTION X.10 (Grounds for the Failsafe Committee to Override Actions Taken by the DAO) of this Operating Agreement.

SECTION X.2 - Failsafe Committee Purpose

The purpose of the Failsafe Committee is to ensure the operational and legal integrity of the Organization by overriding the DAO in, and only in, situations of perceived danger, illegality, or other forms of emergency as defined in SECTION X.10 (Grounds for the Failsafe Committee to Override Actions Taken by the DAO) of this Operating Agreement

Such actions of override will be taken by the Failsafe Committee through the multisig contract address designated in SECTION X.3 (Designated Failsafe Committee Multisig Contract Address) of this Operating Agreement, and not through any other vehicle.

SECTION X.3 - Designated Failsafe Committee Multisig Contract Address

[Multisig contract address, and optionally its resolved ENS domain/subdomain.]

SECTION X.4 - Failsafe Committee Parameters

The Failsafe Committee multisig shall have 7 signers, with a super majority of 6/7 signatures required to take action.

SECTION X.5 - Executive Committee Purpose

The purpose of the Executive Committee is to serve as the operational leaders of the Organization, subject to oversight by the DAO. The Executive Committee will have power to create and manage subordinate divisions and committees, appropriate funds to such committees, and administer operations in general, according to, and without conflicting with, the provisions in this Operating Agreement.

Such operational actions will be taken by the Executive Committee through the multisig contract address designated in SECTION X.6 (Designated Executive Committee Multisig Contract Address) of this Operating Agreement, and not through any other vehicle.

SECTION X.6 - Designated Executive Committee Multisig Contract Address

[Multisig contract address, and optionally its resolved ENS domain/subdomain.]

SECTION X.7 - Executive Committee Parameters

The Executive Committee multisig shall have 7 signers, with a simple majority of 4/7 signatures required to take action.

SECTION X.8 - Actions Taken to Adjust Committee Rosters or Parameters

The DAO may take actions to adjust the roster of the Executive and Failsafe Committees, or to adjust any associated permissions or parameters, including but not limited to multisig quorum and spending permissions, whenever it sees fit, according to the DAO governance processes detailed in the Operating Agreement

[NOTE: These "governance processes" would be detailed in a separate article of the Operating Agreement, having to do with voting platforms, voting methods, voting quorum, etc.]

[NOTE: The Organization may wish to have term limits, or to institute certain assurances against the DAO arbitrarily removing executives without substantial grounds.]

SECTION X.9 - Grounds for the DAO to Override Actions Taken by the Executive Committee

The DAO may override the actions of the Executive Committee on any grounds, provided that the proposal to do so reaches sufficient quorum and surpasses sufficient majority, as specified in this Operating Agreement [detailed in a different article of this Operating Agreement]. Such override may be further vetoed by the Failsafe Committee only in situations detailed in SECTION X.8 (Grounds for the Failsafe Committee to Override Actions Taken by the DAO) of this Operating Agreement.

SECTION X.10 - Grounds for the Failsafe Committee to Override Actions Taken by the DAO

The Failsafe Committee may only override actions taken by the DAO in situations where the majority of the Failsafe Committee, as detailed in SECTION X.4 (Failsafe Committee Parameters), perceive, in their opinion, significant legal, operational, financial, or other risk which would reasonably be expected to be entailed by the pending action of the DAO.

While this tool has been around for a few years, allowing individual wallet addresses to operate as signers, what is new is the ability to abstract this signer role into a token which can be transferred from one wallet address to another, thus transferring signatory status from one person to another. One tool which enables this is SignerGate, which is currently being developed by the team at Hats Protocol.

When considered in the context of a single, isolated multisig, this new capability may not seem to be much more useful than the default "account-bound" setting. After all, static signers can still propose to add or remove signers to the multisig, so why incur the complexity of interacting with an additional smart contract?

As usual, the answer depends on one's situation. If the multisig is only being used by a few people in a small organization with no membership body or auxiliary departments, then perhaps the simplicity of the default "account-bound" multisig makes it the better choice. If, however, the multisig in question is part of a larger organizational structure, or is subject to oversight from a higher committee or group of shareholders, then the composability of a role-bound multisig starts to take on more importance.

Before exploring said composability, first I will highlight the fundamental innovation of role-bound multisigs.

Account-Bound Multisigs vs. Role-Bound Multisigs

Where normal account-bound multisigs have their signer slots assigned to wallet addresses, role-bound multisigs have their signer slots assigned to tokens, tokens which represent roles and which can be transferred between wallet addresses.

Below is a diagram illustrating the difference between an account-bound multisig and a role-bound multisig, in terms of how each would go about replacing a signer.

In isolation, the difference between these methods may not bring much utility, and in fact the standard account-bound multisig may be more straightforward to operate, all else being equal. That said, the benefits of the role-bound multisig begin to emerge as the organization in question develops a more complex and hierarchical system of permissions and authority.

For example, imagine there is a multisig for a project management team, and they have a certain budget given to them from the organizations primary treasury multisig. Just using account-bound multisigs, the primary treasury team would not be able to actively oversee operations of the project management team, and would not be able to intervene if something goes wrong. Whereas, if the project management multisig were a role-bound multisig, and if the primary treasury multisig had admin over transferring signer hats, then the treasury team would be able to dynamically appoint and reappoint signers on the project management multisig.

Another example, and perhaps the most exciting one, is the prospect of giving a DAO, or some other tokenholder community, admin control over a given role-bound multisig, thus allowing the community to collectively elect who has signer status for their treasury. Operationally speaking, this can be done in a number of ways, such as giving the top hat* of the organization's hat tree to a Moloch DAO contract, or even running a contest on jokerace to nominate and elect hat wearers.

Takeaways

Whether to use a regular account-bound multisig or a role-bound multisig depends on the context in which the multisig will be used. If it will be used in relative isolation, such as for a small core team to co-manage funds, the simplicity of the account-bound multisig makes it a preferable option for less technical users. However, if the multisig in question will be nested in a larger hierarchical system of oversight and management, the role-bound multisig enables a whole field of sophisticated possibilities.

Footnotes & Resources

*The term "Top Hat" refers to the master admin hat in a given hat tree. The top hat can create, modify and transfer "child hats" which represent different roles in an organization, and these child hats can create, modify, and transfer child hats of their own. For more information, see the Hats Protocol documentation listed below.

• Guide for integrating Hats Protocol with a Safe multisig (using the SignerGate contract)

• Hats Protocol web app

• Hats Protocol documentation

• Zodiac wiki (SignerGate is a "Zodiac Module" for multisigs)

Whether one chooses to adopt smart contracts as instruments for their business or organization depends on one's aims and circumstances. This new technology enables transparency, trustlessness, and composability in new and exciting ways, but these values may not be important in every situation, and the complexity of this technology can constitute serious cognitive overhead.

That said, if this technology does appeal to a given business or organization, then the question shifts from whether to use it, to how to use it.

In this newsletter, business and nonprofit applications of this technology will be explored, with an emphasis on consulting. This entry in particular will focus on whether and how consultants should use this technology to engage with clients.

None of the following constitutes legal or financial advice, and is purely for informational purposes.

Engagement-Bound Wallets

If a consultant is planning to engage with clients in some on-chain capacity, whether that is as simple as receiving cryptoassets as payment or as complex as managing a number of smart contracts, they should have clear practices in place regarding security and accounting. Across the industry, such best practices are still being determined through experimental modes of engagement.

One question which serves as a point of departure, in terms of developing such a methodology, is the following: to what extent should consultants use unique wallets and contracts for each engagement? That is, should a consultant create new wallets and deploy new smart contract instances for every engagement they open?

Some examples are relatively clear, such as Smart Invoice contracts, which are intended to be limited to a particular engagement. Other examples, such as whether a consultant should use one wallet to receive payments across a number of engagements or whether they should use a unique wallet for every engagement, is arguably less clear.

One benefit for using a unique wallet for every engagement is that it arguably simplifies accounting to the extreme. That is, if a consultant dedicates a wallet to a given engagement with a client, both the consultant and the client can be confident that the transaction history of that wallet is pertinent to their engagement, in terms of accounting. A downside, however, is that it involves greater cognitive overhead for the consultant, seeing as they'd have to keep track of an arbitrary number of wallets, even if these wallets are retired upon closing an engagement.

Adopting such a technique depends on the preferences of the consultant, namely whether they'd prefer the siloed organization of their engagements, or the operational simplicity of using a single wallet across multiple engagements. This decision may also depend on how compliance and reporting requirements develop, such as whether the IRS eventually requires independent contractors to report on-chain payments in certain ways. If using multiple wallets ends up entailing multiple unnecessary taxable events, then that is another factor to consider.

Engagement-Bound Smart Contracts

Aside from wallets, smart contracts constitute the other main category of on-chain instruments. As far as business and organizational applications go, examples of smart contracts include multi-signature or "multisig" wallets, smart invoices, and smart escrow accounts. Each of these instruments involve users creating unique instances of these tools, to be used in particular engagements or enterprises. Moreover, they all involve the facilitation of funds or assets.

Some of these tools, such as smart invoices and smart escrow accounts, are designed to be used in a particular engagement and retired thereafter. Others, such as multisigs, can be used in such temporary capacities, or in more perennial capacities, such as company treasuries.

That said, many of the same considerations apply here as they do for wallets. If every on-chain instrument involved in a given engagement, wallets and smart contracts alike, is dedicated to that particular engagement, not only is accounting simplified, but external risk is arguably minimized. That is, a wallet which has a history of smart contract interactions, some of which may include the allowance of ongoing permissions, has an equal or greater attack surface than a wallet which is freshly created for a particular engagement.

What To Do?

Should consultants approach on-chain engagements in maximally siloed manners, or does such an approach involve unnecessary complexity? Ultimately such a decision depends on several factors, such as the personal preferences of the consultant and/or client in question, and the reporting requirements they are subject to.

While this newsletter is exploratory in nature, it is nonetheless worthwhile to ask how useful a theoretical practice would be, and how justified its complexity. Do the capabilities enabled by switching to a new methodology warrant the cognitive overhead involved? Many of the new practices this technology will enable, including those covered above, deserve to be explored, but how meaningfully such pure innovation may be applied is a matter we, as an industry, are to determine.