“How about if the future of work does not get answered straight away with automation, but with cowork, with the creation of commons, with putting up productive energies, and the definition of work towards social and environmental ends.”

IN THIS EPISODE

Stacco Troncoso, Strategic direction steward of the P2P Foundation

Micky Metts, Worker/owner of Agaric

Ela Kagel, Cofounder and managing director of SUPERMARKT

TRANSCRIPT

Laura Flanders:

We’re relying more and more on free online platforms to mediate and inform our lives. But are they really free? As our digital selves are crunched, categorized, and traded, for-profit companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon make out exerting an alarming amount of control over our economy and us in the process. It could get much worse, but there are alternatives. This week on the show, I talk with coders, activists, and tech entrepreneurs who are at the forefront of the platform cooperativism movement. They’ll share their experience with cooperatively owned and operated digital platforms, which distribute rather than concentrate, power and wealth. If we take the cooperative route, they argue tomorrow’s digital economy could shrink inequality rather than exacerbate it and change our lives in the digital world and also on the dance floor. It’s all coming up on the Laura Flanders Show. The place where the people who say it can’t be done, take a back seat to the people who are doing it. Welcome.

Laura Flanders:

Welcome all to the show. Glad to have you. Let’s start with platform cooperativism because I still don’t think people quite understand what we’re talking about. So what is a digital platform and why does it need to be cooperativised?

Micky Metts:

Yes, a digital platform is the type of tool we use every day, as you said, a Facebook is a digital platform, amazon is a digital platform for buying things. We believe in platform cooperativism that people need to own the platforms that we use daily and engage in. We need to be the keepers of our own information and to put forward the goals we want with our platforms. We are now being owned by platforms that we are on and we are so far engaged in them that they own all of our contacts, all of our information. If you were to be shut off of a platform, you would not have any connection with all the people, the thousands of friends that have given you likes and that you know. So for platform cooperativism, people need to build and own the platforms that we use.

Laura Flanders:

So is it as simple, Stacco, as to say maybe once upon a time the marketplace was where we did our business, now it’s some platform online and there’s a problem.

Stacco Troncoso:

Well, they increasingly mediate our daily lives, they mediate our elections, how we relate to each other, and we have no ownership of this. And they’re actually headquartered in the US but they have worldwide reach. So how about we lower the transactional cost of that collaboration and take ownership of the decision making of how they affect us.

Laura Flanders:

Well what’s the cost we’re paying now?

Stacco Troncoso:

The cost we’re paying now is that our digital facsimile of you is creating information for advertisers to exacerbate consumerism, to give data to further set political ends, which may not be in accord to you, the data generator.

Laura Flanders:

So that reminds me of what we’ve heard about recently. We saw some of the leaked memos from Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook corporation, literally bargaining with clients based on the currency they had, which is us.

Ela Kagel:

I mean there’s the saying that goes if it’s free, you are the product. And I think that’s true for all the digital platforms where your data is being sold and your privacy rights are just being used.

Laura Flanders:

And just to put a little bit more of a fine pin on it. How is that different from advertising? Because I always say the for-money media is all about delivering people to advertisers, unlike the independent media, which is about delivering people to each other. So is it really different?

Ela Kagel:

I think it’s entirely different because advertising is a way of sending out a message to the world and you can still decide for yourself whether you want to receive it or not. But what we are talking about here is media corporations owning the infrastructure of our society, not only our data but also looking at Airbnb for instance, owning streets, owning neighborhoods, and transforming the way we live and relate to each other. And I think that’s really, that’s a different story.

Laura Flanders:

So what do we do about this? Stacco, you have this extraordinary DisCO manifesto that you’re releasing and you’re on book tour with it now. It is sort of about disco, but not quite.

Stacco Troncoso:

So what is DisCO? DisCO stands for distributed cooperative organizations. They’re a way for people to get together and work, and create, and distribute value in commons oriented, feminist economics, and peer to peer ways. You don’t get to do this at work very much, to exercise these kind of relationships. And there are also critique of this monster called the decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO. They’re basically corporations or organizations that exist on the block chain that can execute contracts, they can levy penalties, they can employ people. So the computer organizations that wield their own economic power, and because technology is far from neutral and it always follows the ideals of those who are investing in it, we’re quite concerned about the deployment of these decentralized autonomous organizations. So we came up with the DisCO as an alternative, which is comparative on solidarity base.

Stacco Troncoso:

This came out of the lived experience of our comparative called the Guerrilla Media Collective, which started with a project based around translation and combining pro bono work and paid work. So we will do social and environmentally aware translations for someone like Ela for example, but then we would also do client work and the income that would come from our agency work would come back to compensate for the pro bono work. And we did this because volunteering, doing pro bono stuff is cool if you have the privilege to do it. But if you’re a mother and you have five kids and you need to get to the end of the month, maybe you want to look into compensatory mechanisms so you can do valuable work. So this was the guerrilla translation, guerrilla media collective story. But as we became, through our work in the P2P Foundation, aware of this world of the blockchain, et cetera, we said, “Well, we need a feminist reaction to this,” and why we need that is it’s a movement that talks a lot about decentralization, but it doesn’t really talk about decentralizing power and this trifecta of hierarchy, which is capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy.

Stacco Troncoso:

So how can we operate in the marketplace while articulating those values?

Laura Flanders:

Micky, you’ve worked closely with the Ujima Project in Boston where you’re based, that is also trying to address this problem of investing and where it comes from and where it doesn’t go.

Micky Metts:

Yes. Well, one of the problems with investing is the vetting, of course, and finding out all the underlying ties, et cetera. If you’re not really speaking, today’s language of technology, it is very hard to vet what technology you’re going to invest in. And without consulting the community, you can’t really build the technology they need. So right now we’ve ended up with a bunch of corporations that are tightly tied with corrupt governments doing their bidding and feeding the information directly to the government. So without disengaging from that, there really is nowhere for us to go.

Laura Flanders:

So if you’re making software differently-

Micky Metts:

Yes.

Laura Flanders:

How do you do it?

Micky Metts:

We use free software that allows the people that use it to modify it, change it, sell it, do anything they want with it. When you’re using a corporation’s software, like a Facebook or whatever they build their platforms with, you cannot see into that and you cannot see what they’re doing, which is as Shoshana Zuboff is talking about now, surveillance capitalism, which in a nugget leads right down to predictive analysis.

Micky Metts:

And now there is a bill that William Barr has put up to use predictive analysis to take our social media or a doctor’s records, combine them, and search for signs of mental illness. And then to put us-

Laura Flanders:

As defined by somebody.

Micky Metts:

Yes, who we don’t know who yet, and then to place us in observation against our will. How is this possible? And hardly anyone knows it, but these are platforms that are corrupt, that are all filtering info to the governments.

Laura Flanders:

I highly recommend Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism, if you haven’t read it, people. Ela to you, you don’t only work with artists, but you have worked for a long time in the artistic community in Berlin. How does that fit into this discussion? How do artists engage with the same question?

Ela Kagel:

Well, I’ve seen quite a lot of my artistic friends moving away from contemporary art and rather diving into the world of activism, trying to apply artistic strategies to helping bring about social change. So I think that’s something that is happening because also, the artistic world is subject to a colonialization of people who have the money and the power to acquire arts. But that also brought about a really interesting movement of people applying all sorts of strategies.

Laura Flanders:

You work at the very prosaic level though of people’s daily needs as well, and I understand you’ve been working on a project having to do with food delivery systems.

Ela Kagel:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Laura Flanders:

We’ve got lot of automated food delivery now coming from companies like Amazon, or explicitly Amazon in the US. Is that a similar problem in Berlin?

Ela Kagel:

Yeah, I think it’s starting to be a real problem everywhere. So a lot of these food delivery networks are owned by BlackRock, the world’s largest investment company. So no matter are you trying to build locally? In a sense, you need to compete against this company. But what I think is super interesting when Deliveroo decided to pull out of some European markets, there have been a bunch of writers who decided, “Okay, so we are fed up anyways, we’re going to start our own thing. So we will apply a different ethics to what we do. We will create a platform co-op, something that is owned by us, something that allows us democratic control over what we do.” So there’s an interesting movement emerging now in Europe. It’s happening in Spain with Mensakas, it’s happening in Berlin as well.

Ela Kagel:

And it’s really interesting because this is not so much about taking a sole and entrepreneurial decision about, “Okay, I’m starting a co op or a company,” but this has more of a shared effort because clearly if a bunch of people is trying to build a sustainable food delivery network in a local sense, it’s super, it’s almost impossible to compete against the likes of, you know. So this really requires a shared effort of municipalities, of activists, people who know how to build co-ops, it’s super essential. The people who run the business, but also restaurants and potential partners, to really build something that is a real alternative to the food delivery as we know it. And I find it so interesting because these meetings, they feel different. This is not the startup situation, but this is really about creating multi-stakeholder models in cities and helping to bring about a real shared effort because all these organizations will only exist if you all want them to be, otherwise it won’t happen.

Laura Flanders:

They won’t be able to compete with the huge multinational. Well that gets to my next question for you, Stacco, the DisCO Manifesto is a lot about what happens online, but it’s also a lot about what happens offline in communities. And I want to just elaborate a little bit on what Ela just said, that co-ops are typically other privately owned organizations. They’re privately owned companies, they just happen to have a lot of private owners. Is there a possibility that you could have accumulation of wealth in cooperative hands that would still be concentrated, would still potentially be manipulated or abusive or surveilling, or are you trying to change the whole ethic of capitalism around accumulation?

Stacco Troncoso:

Despite the issue of private ownership, you can see that co-ops are like this fenced off area to experiment with other models, because co-ops actually overturn the three technologies of capitalism. So private ownership of the means of production becomes collective ownership. Wage labor? There’s no wage labor, you’re the worker and the owner, and an exclusive orientation to what’s profit is tempered by the cooperative principles. Now on the subject of comparative, as opposed to capital accumulation, as Ela has said, there’s multi-stakeholder models and you have precedents in Quebec and Emilia Romagna where for example, instead of privatizing healthcare, how about we give it to co-ops and we will have four kinds of votes. And one of them, it will be the state or the municipality that are putting up the funds, another vote will go to the doctors, another vote will go to the patients, and another vote will go to the family of the patients.

Stacco Troncoso:

So this is the more decision making side, but you can see that it’s emphasizing people who are part of the economic activity beyond the co-op. Co-ops have existed for 150 years, but they haven’t brought about the desired revolution that they could foreshadow, and part of it is because they do not talk to each other, they don’t know how to mutualize, and they don’t know how to mutualize economically for greater ends. You mentioned the big boys and they are boys, which is Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple, they have a market cap collectively of 3 trillion US dollars, but co-ops worldwide have also market cap of $3 trillion but they’re not talking to each other.

Laura Flanders:

You’re nodding and smiling, Micky.

Micky Metts:

Yeah. The most important thing that I see and hear from people we talk with is what the co-op movement needs most is a secure communications platform that is not owned by the Man or by governments. Because without that, our communications are kidnapped. We are not in real communicate, like the WhatsApp app that is just ubiquitous, that is a direct spy mechanism.

Laura Flanders:

You can say that it’s all the problem of capital orthodoxy and the tendencies of the economy. But isn’t it also our fault, Ela?

Ela Kagel:

I find this a super interesting question, to be honest, but anyway, I think we’ve had a really tiny time window where we actually had a choice. I wonder, if talking about today, if we still have that choice. Coming back to what you just said, you need to have the privilege to have the time to search for an alternative to opt out of these networks. But very often people are not in a position to opt out of Facebook and all these other platforms. WhatsApp, whatever. So that’s the real problem. And it’s not so much about us taking a choice. And I see this rather as a quite dangerous way of framing the situation. I think this is more about building an alternative to what’s there.

Laura Flanders:

Can we build one when Google has, I think, 96% of all the search business at this point? is it too late?

Stacco Troncoso:

I don’t think it’s too late. And if you look at the history of these monsters, they’ve only existed for some 20 odd years, and born out of public money. Here’s the thing, even though they may seem like behemoths, which are impossible to take down, take into account if the revolutionary drive of the 19th and 20th century was let’s take over the factories, let’s take over this massive economies of scale. What about if the means of production are actually in your laptop right now? And what about if we can network those laptops? It is much easier to create the alternatives. With that being said, what is really difficult is to have this network effect because what we need are alternatives, which are easy to use, which are inclusive, where your friends are, and this is where we’re lagging behind because of course we don’t have those massive investments, but the actual technology and to educate people into this technology is much simpler.

Micky Metts:

It’s there.

Stacco Troncoso:

Yeah. And it’s beautiful for people to actually know how to make the technology not just have it handed to you.

Laura Flanders:

How do we move forward to make the change that you’re talking about? It’s not going to be sporadic, you over here and you’re over here and maybe one TV show in a million once every 10 years. How do we do it? Do we embed these discussions in schooling and education? Do we fight for a better public media system? What?

Micky Metts:

Well, it’s difficult because the education system now, Microsoft and Apple got in there very early in the days of early computing and they armed all the schools with Apple’s and Macintosh systems, so now people have grown up with these systems and feel a loyalty to them that is beyond the convenience. So for new adopters, it’s the convenience, for the older generations that have grown up with these tools, it’s nearly impossible to get them out of their hands.

Laura Flanders:

Those are the screens that brought them up basically.

Micky Metts:

Yes. So even when you’re pointing out the inequities and how this tool you’re using is your jailer, people don’t really get it or they have to divide their mind and say, “I need this tool to do my work. I can’t work without it, therefore I must use it.” But I caution us all to while you’re using it, think of how inequitable it is. Think of the things that it’s doing to the system.

Laura Flanders:

But that feels like me feeling guilty when I drink out of a plastic water bottle.

Micky Metts:

It starts like that. But then with these movements and platforms, there are actual places to join and make change.

Laura Flanders:

Ela-

Micky Metts:

And to not be alone.

Laura Flanders:

You have one of those places.

Ela Kagel:

I guess we find ourselves in a place where we are constantly competing with others about likes and about visibility, attention, and so forth. So what if we would really work on strengthening our local communities, our municipalities in order to create a sense of where we are, what our communities are, having more opportunities of actually getting together and helping each other with all these questions. Because one of the big problems of the neoliberal past 10, 50 years, 15 I mean, was the fact that people got isolated in a way. So that’s really, that’s proof to be a side effect. So for me a counter strategy is to radically create those opportunities in places where people can come together. That’s the first thing, because that is missing.

Laura Flanders:

So what do you do in Berlin?

Ela Kagel:

Well, there is Supermarkt but also other spaces because Berlin, this is in recent years turned into a hub of people that want to make the world a better place, which is great.

Ela Kagel:

And since space is still sort of available, there are enough people took advantage of that and got a space, rented it, and opening up that space for community events. So that’s what we also do at Supermarkt. So in doing so, just being there, that’s helped a community to emerge and that wasn’t curated by myself or anything, it was just about being there, opening the doors, running regular events, and then things happen automatically. They just emerge by people being in the same spot. And I really think that’s a healthy way to try to counter the current situation, but of course it’s not just the communities there. They also need backing from local politics and they need solid financing structures, and that finance cannot just come from the classic world of finance, but also that needs a collaborative effort to raise funds from sources that are acceptable and sustainable. I really think these are big tasks we need to tackle and there is no easy solution for that. But at the same time, what I really see, for instance at the Platform Co-op Conference here, I see a lot of people starting initiatives and I see them thriving. So there is hope, but we just need to bring these people together, as Stacco said, we need to build an ecosystem of platform co-ops.

Laura Flanders:

We caught up with one such group at the Platform Cooperative Conference titled Who Owns the World held at the New School in New York in November, 2019. For over 20 years, Smart Co-Op has provided work security for tens of thousands of freelances in over 40 cities in nine European countries. Here’s what they had to say.

Sandrino Graceffa:[in French, translation follows 00:22:00].

Our organization, Smart, has understood that there was an intermediate position, between the classical salaried worker and the individual forms of entrepreneurship, we call it the grey zone of the working world. This grey zone consists of creatives, freelancers, people that work with a lot of discontinuity. We call it the new form of employment. The atypical jobs. The institutions, whichever they are, don’t really take into account this category of workers who still need to be protected. Therefore, our organization intends to bring new solutions to these problems of work and employment.

Tyon Jadoul:

We are pursuing a social model for social transformation. We have a really political dimension to our project that strive to offer the best social protection for the most freelancer as possible.

Sandrino Graceffa:[in French, translation follows 00:23:01].

The core activity of Smart is to provide the administrative, accountability and financial frameworks that allow autonomous workers, freelancers, to charge for their performances. In exchange, Smart gives them a working contract, a salaried working contract. Smart converts the revenue into a salaried working contract and therefore brings the best level of protections for these workers.

Tyon Jadoul:

You can have a real living democracy participation of the members, even with a big structure like us because we are now about 25,000 cooperators or associates in Belgium. How we do that, we invented or created different possibility for a member to participate into the evolution, the decision making of our cooperative. You could do it by participating to small meetings at night, you can do it by giving your opinions online on a blog, by writing something that you might find interesting, by coming to the general assembly each year, you can watch it online, you can vote online, you can express your voice.

Laura Flanders:

Sharing successful models and innovative ideas is essential if we’re ever going to create a more democratic digital world, cooperatives owned and controlled by their workers look set to play an important part in that evolution.

Laura Flanders:

So we often end this program by asking people what they think the story will be that the future tells of this moment. So Stacco, I’m going to ask you, what do you think is the story the future will tell of us now?

Stacco Troncoso:

Just off hand, it may be the moment where people were doing things that were criticized as folly or useless, but really what we’re doing is to build capacity, and we’re building capacity because there’s people that talk of collapse and you always imagine like the Mad Max sexy collapse, but we’re in an ongoing process of collapse. But we’re doing these things that may not make sense, according to the predominant economic logic, but man, they will make sense in the next economic crisis where incidentally, co-ops over all economic crises have actually thrived, kept to their principles, and being more successful. But it’s not just that, there’s also overcoming the alienation that Ela talks about. How about if the future of work does not get answered straight away with automation, but with care work, with the creation of commons, with putting up productive energies, that being that the definition of work towards social and environmental ends.

Stacco Troncoso:

And I think that we’re in this hinge moment where everything may seem hopeless, but a lot of things are crumbling and those solutions which are being posited, your green growth, your neoliberal strategies now to tackle climate, they’re not going to work. And again, process of collapse we raise the ground with alternatives.

Laura Flanders:

All right, I’m going to leave it there. Thank you all. Micky, Stacco, Ela, great conversation. You can find out more about the Platform Cooperativist conference or the Conference on Platform Cooperativism at our website and we’ve been happy to be part of it these last few years.

Ela Kagel:

Thank you.

Micky Metts:

Thank you.

Laura Flanders:

Thanks.

The post Take back the App! A dialogue on Platform Cooperativism, Free Software and DisCOs appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In this post, we analyze Wikipedia — a site that has achieved tremendous success and scale through crowd-sourcing human input to create one of the Internet’s greatest public goods. Wikipedia’s success is particularly impressive considering that the site is owned and operated by a non-profit organization, and that almost all of its content is contributed by unpaid volunteers.

The non-commercial, volunteer-driven nature of Wikipedia may cause developers from the “decentralized web” to question the site’s relevance. However, these differences may be merely cosmetic: IPFS, for example, has no inherent commercial model, and most of the open source projects that underlie the decentralized web are built, at least in part, by volunteers.

We believe that a site that has managed to coordinate so many people to produce such remarkable content is well worth a look as we search for solutions to similar problems in the emerging decentralized web.

To better understand Wikipedia’s success, we first survey some key features of Wikipedia’s battle-tested (to the tune of 120,000 active volunteer editors) coordination mechanisms. Next, we present some valuable high-level lessons that blockchain projects interested in human input might learn from Wikipedia’s approach. Finally, we explore vulnerabilities inherent to Wikipedia’s suite of mechanisms, as well as the defenses it has developed to such attacks.

Wikipedia: key elements

While we cannot hope to cover all of Wikipedia’s functionality in this short post, we start by outlining a number of Wikipedia’s foundational coordination mechanisms as background for our analysis.

User and article Talk Pages

While anyone can edit an article anonymously on Wikipedia, most regular editors choose to register with the organization and gain additional privileges. As such, most editors, and all articles, have a public metadata page known as a talk page, for public conversations about the relevant user or article. Talk pages are root-level collaborative infrastructure: they allow conversations and disputes to happen frequently and publicly.

Since talk pages capture a history of each editor’s interaction — both in terms of encyclopedia content and conversational exchanges with other editors — they also provide the basis for Wikipedia’s reputation system.

Clear and accessible rules

If we think of the collection of mechanisms Wikipedia uses to coordinate its editors as a kind of “social protocol”, the heart of that protocol would surely be its List of Guidelines and List of Policies, developed and enforced by the community itself. According to the Wikipedia page on Policies and Guidelines:

“Wikipedia policies and guidelines are developed by the community… Policies are standards that all users should normally follow, and guidelines are generally meant to be best practices for following those standards in specific contexts. Policies and guidelines should always be applied using reason and common sense.”

For many coming from a blockchain background, such policies and guidelines will likely seem far too informal to be of much use, especially without monetary or legal enforcement. And yet, the practical reality is that these mechanisms have been remarkably effective at coordinating Wikipedia’s tens of thousands of volunteer editors over almost two decades, without having to resort to legal threats or economic incentives for enforcement.

Enforcement: Peer consensus and volunteer authority

Upon hearing that anyone can edit a Wikipedia page, no money is staked, no contracts are signed, and neither paid police nor smart contracts are available to enforce the guidelines, an obvious question is: why are the rules actually followed?

Wikipedia’s primary enforcement strategy is peer-based consensus. Editors know that when peer consensus fails, final authority rests with certain, privileged, volunteer authorities with long-standing reputations at stake.

Peer consensus

As an example, let’s consider three of the site’s most fundamental content policies, often referred to together. “Neutral Point of View” (NPOV), “No Original Research” (NOR), and “Verifiability” (V) evolved to guide editors towards Wikipedia’s mission of an unbiased encyclopedia.

If I modify the Wikipedia page for Mahatma Gandhi, changing his birthdate to the year 1472, or offering an ungrounded opinion about his life or work, there is no economic loss or legal challenge. Instead, because there is a large community of editors who do respect the policies (even though I do not), my edit will almost certainly be swiftly reverted until I can credibly argue that my changes meet Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines (“Neutral Point of View” and “Verifiability”, in this case).

Such discussions typically take place on talk pages, either the editor’s or the article’s, until consensus amongst editors is achieved. If I insist on maintaining my edits without convincing my disputants, I risk violating other policies, such as 3RR (explained below), and attracting the attention of an administrator.

Volunteer authority: Administrators and Bureaucrats

When peer consensus fails, and explicit authority is needed to resolve a dispute, action is taken by an experienced volunteer editor with a long and positive track record: an Administrator.

Administrators have a high degree of control over content, include blocking and unblocking users, editing protected pages, and deleting and undeleting pages. Because there are relatively few of them (~500 active administrators for English Wikipedia), being an administrator is quite an honor. Once nominated, adminship is determined through discussion on the user’s nomination page, not voting, with a volunteer bureaucrat gauging the positivity of comments at the end of the discussion. In practice, those candidates having more than 75% positive comments tend to pass.

Bureaucrats are the highest level of volunteer authority in Wikipedia, and are also typically administrators as well. While administrators have the final say for content decisions, bureaucrats hold the ultimate responsibility for adding and removing all kinds of user privileges, including adminship. Like administrators, bureaucrats are determined through community discussion and consensus. However, they are even rarer: there are currently only 18 for the entire English Wikipedia.

Since there is no hard limit to the number of administrators and bureaucrats, promotion is truly meritocratic.

Evolving governance

Another notable aspect of Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines is that they can change over time. And in principle, changing a Wikipedia policy or guideline page is no different than changing any other page on the site.

The fluidity of the policies and guidelines plays an important role in maintaining editors’ confidence in enforcing the rules. After all, people are much more likely to believe in rules that they helped create.

If we continue to think of the policies and guidelines for Wikipedia as a kind of protocol, we would say that the protocol can be amended over time and that the governance for its evolution takes place in-protocol — that is, as a part of the protocol itself.

Lessons for the decentralized web

Now that we have a little bit of background on Wikipedia’s core mechanisms, we will delve into the ways that Wikipedia’s approach to coordination differs from similar solutions in public blockchain protocols. There are three areas where we believe the decentralized web may have lessons to learn from Wikipedia’s success: cooperative games, reputation, and an iterative approach to “success”.

We also hope that these lessons may apply to our problem of generating trusted seed sets for Osrank.

Blockchain should consider cooperative games

Examining Wikipedia with our blockchain hats on, one thing that jumps out right away is that pretty much all of Wikipedia’s coordination games are cooperative rather than adversarial. For contrast, consider Proof of Work as it is used by the Bitcoin network. Because running mining hardware costs money in the form of electricity and because only one node can get the reward in each block, the game is inherently zero-sum: when I win, I earn a block reward; every other miner loses money. It is the adversarial nature of such games that leaves us unsurprised when concerns like selfish mining start to crop up.

As an even better example, consider Token Curated Registries (TCRs). We won’t spend time describing the mechanics of TCRs here, because we plan to cover the topic in more detail in a later post. But for now, the important thing to know is that TCRs allow people to place bets, with real money, on whether or not a given item will be included in a list. The idea is that, like an efficient market, the result of the betting will converge to produce the correct answer.

One problem with mechanisms like TCRs is that many people have a strong preference against playing any game in which they have a significant chance of losing — even if they can expect their gains to make up for their losses over time. In behavioral psychology, this result is known as loss aversion and has been confirmed in many real-world experiments.

In short, Proof of Work and TCRs are both adversarial mechanisms for resolving conflicts and coming to consensus. To see how Wikipedia resolves similar conflicts using cooperative solutions, let’s dive deeper into what dispute resolution looks like on the site.

Dispute resolution

So how does a dubious change to Mahatma Gandhi’s page actually get reverted? In other words, what is the process by which that work gets done?

When a dispute first arises, Wikipedia instructs the editors to avoid their instinct to revert or overwrite each other’s edits, and to take the conflict to the article’s talk page instead. Some quotes from Wikipedia’s page on Dispute Resolution point to the importance of the Talk pages:

“Talking to other parties is not a mere formality, but an integral part of writing the encyclopedia”

“Sustained discussion between the parties, even if not immediately successful, demonstrates your good faith and shows you are trying to reach a consensus.”

Editors who insist on “edit warring”, or simply reverting another editor’s changes without discussion, risk violating Wikipedia’s 3RR policy, which prohibits editors from reverting 3 changes on a given page in 24 hours. Editors who violate 3RR risk a temporary suspension of their accounts.

If initial efforts by the editors to communicate on the Talk Page fail, Wikipedia offers many additional solutions for cooperative coordination, including:

• Editor Assistance provides one-on-one advice on how to conduct a civil, content-focused discussion from an experienced editor.
• Moderated Discussion offers the facilitation help of an experienced moderator, and is only available after lengthy discussion on the article’s Talk page.
• 3rd Opinion, matches the disputants with a third, neutral opinion, and is only available for disputes involving only people.
• Community Input allows the disputants to get input from a (potentially) large number of content experts.

Binding arbitration from the Arbitration Committee is considered the option of last resort, and is the only option in which the editors are not required to come to a consensus on their own. According to Wikipedia’s index of arbitration cases, this mechanism has been invoked only 513 times since 2004 — a strong vote of confidence for its first-pass dispute resolution mechanisms.

A notable theme of all of these dispute resolution mechanisms is how uniformly cooperative they are. In particular, it is worth observing that in no case can any editor lose something of significant economic value, as they might, for instance, if a TCR was used to resolve the dispute.

What the editor does lose, if their edit does not make it into the encyclopedia, is whatever time and work she put into the edit. This risk likely incentivises editors to make small, frequent contributions rather than large ones and to discuss major changes with other editors before starting work on them.

“Losing” may not even be the right word. As long as the author of the unincluded edit believes in Wikipedia’s process as a whole, she may still view her dispute as another form of contribution to the article. In fact, reputation-wise, evidence of a well-conducted dispute only adds credibility to the user accounts of the disputants.

Reputation without real-world identity can work

Another lesson from Wikipedia relates to what volunteer editors have at stake and how the site’s policies use that stake to ensure their good behavior on the system.

Many blockchain systems require that potential participants stake something of real-world value, typically either a bond or an off-chain record of good “reputation”. For example, in some protocols, proof-of-stake validators risk losing large amount of tokens if they don’t follow the network’s consensus rules. In other networks, governors or trustees might be KYC’d with the threat of legal challenge, or public disapproval, if they misbehave.

Wikipedia appears to have found a way to incentivize participants’ attachment to their pseudonyms without requiring evidence of real-world identity. We believe this is because reputation in Wikipedia’s community is based on a long-running history of small contributions that is difficult and time-consuming to fake, outsource, or automate.

Once an editor has traded anonymity for pseudonymity and created a user account, the first type of reputation that is typically considered is their “edit count”. Edit count is the total number of page changes that the editor has made during his or her history of contributing to Wikipedia. In a sense, edit count is a human version of proof-of-work, because it provides a difficult-to-fake reference for the amount of work the editor has contributed to the site.

If edit count is the simplest quantitative measure of a user’s total reputation on the site, its qualitative analog is the user talk pages. Talk pages provide a complete record of the user’s individual edits, as well as a record of administrative actions that have been taken against the user, and notes and comments by other users. The Wikipedia community also offers many kinds of subjective awards which contribute to editor reputation.

Reputable editors enjoy privileges on Wikipedia that cannot be earned in any other way — in particular, a community-wide “benefit of the doubt”. Wikipedia: The Missing Manual’s page on vandalism and spam provides a good high-level overview, instructing editors who encounter a potentially problematic edit to first visit the author’s talk page. Talk pages with lots of edits over time indicate the author should be assumed to be acting in good faith, and notified before their questionable edit is reverted: “In the rare case that you think there’s a problem with an edit from this kind of editor, chances are you’ve misunderstood something.”

On the other hand, the same source’s recommendations for questionable edits by anonymous editors, or editors with empty talk pages, are quite different: “If you see a questionable edit from this kind of user account, you can be virtually certain it was vandalism.”

Blockchains which adopt similar reputation mechanisms might expect to see two major changes: slower evolution of governance and sticky users. And while no public blockchains that we’re aware of have made significant use of pseudonymous reputation, it’s worth noting that such mechanisms have played a significant role in the increasing adoption of the Dark Web.

Assigning power based on a long history of user edits means that the composition of the governing class necessarily changes slowly and predictably, and is therefore less subject to the “hostile takeovers” that are a fundamental risk for many token-voting-based schemes.

Sticky users are a consequence of the slow accretion of power: experienced users tend to stick to their original pseudonym precisely because it would be time-consuming to recreate a similar level of privilege (both implicit and explicit) under a new identity.

All in all, Wikipedia’s reputation system may represent an excellent compromise between designs offering total anonymity on one hand and identity models built on personally identifying information on the other. In particular, such a system has the benefit of allowing users to accrue reputation over time and resisting Sybil attacks by punishing users if and when they misbehave. At the same time, it also allows users to preserve the privacy of their real-world identities if they wish.

Iteration over finality

Wikipedia’s encyclopedic mission, by its very nature, can never be fully completed. As such, the site’s mechanisms do not attempt to resolve conflicts quickly or ensure the next version of a given page arrives at the ultimate truth, but rather, just nudge the encyclopedia one step closer to its goal. This “iterative attitude” is particularly well-suited to assembling human input. Humans often take a long time to make decisions, change their minds frequently, and are susceptible to persuasion by their peers.

What can Radicle, and other p2p & blockchain projects, learn from Wikipedia in this regard? Up to this point, many protocol designers in blockchain have had a preference for mechanisms that achieve “finality” — that is, resolve to a final state, with no further changes allowed — as quickly as possible. There are often very good reasons for this, particularly in the area of consensus mechanisms and yet, taking inspiration from Wikipedia, we might just as easily consider designs that favor slow incremental changes over fast decisive ones.

For instance, imagine a protocol in which (as with Wikipedia) it is relatively easy for any user to change the system state (e.g. propose a new trusted seed), but such a change might be equally easily reverted by another user, or a group of users with superior reputation.

Or consider a protocol in which any state change is rolled out over a long period of time. In Osrank, for instance, this might mean that trusted seeds would start out as only 10% trusted, then 20% trusted one month later, and so on. While such a design would be quite different from how Wikipedia works today, it would hew to the same spirit of slow, considered change over instant finality.

Attacks and defenses

While the previous section covered a number of ways in which Wikipedia’s mechanisms have found success up to this point, the true test of a decentralized system is how vulnerable it is to attacks and manipulation. In this section, we introduce Wikipedia’s perspective on security. We then examine some of Wikipedia’s vulnerabilities, the attacks that play upon them and the defenses the Wikipedia community has evolved.

How Wikipedia Works: Chapter 12 discusses the fact that nearly all of the security utilized by Wikipedia is “soft security”:

“One of the paradoxes of Wikipedia is that this system seems like it could never work. In a completely open system run by volunteers, why aren’t more limits required? One answer is that Wikipedia uses the principle of soft security in the broadest way. Security is guided by the community, rather than by restricting community actions ahead of time. Everyone active on the site is responsible for security and quality. You, your watchlist, and your alertness to strange actions and odd defects in articles are part of the security system.”

What does “soft security” mean? It means that security is largely reactionary, rather than preventative or broadly restrictive on user actions in advance. With a few exceptions, any anonymous editor can change any page on the site at any time. The dangers of such a policy are obvious, but the advantages are perhaps less so: Wikipedia’s security offers a level of adaptability and flexibility that is not possible with traditional security policies and tools.

Below, we discuss three kinds of attacks that Wikipedia has faced through the years: Bad Edits (vandalism and spam), Sybil Attacks, and Editing for Pay. For each attack we note the strategies and solutions Wikipedia has responded with and offer a rough evaluation of their efficacy.

Bad edits: Vandalism and spam

The fact that anyone with an internet connection can edit almost any page on Wikipedia is one of the site’s greatest strengths, but perhaps may also be its greatest vulnerability. Edits not in service of Wikipedia’s mission fall into two general categories: malicious edits (vandalism) and promotional edits (spam).

While Wikipedia reader/editors are ultimately responsible for the clarity and accuracy of the encylopedia’s content, a number of tools have been developed to combat vandalism and spam. Wikipedia: The Missing Manual gives a high-level overview:

• Bots. Much vandalism follows simple patterns that computer programs can recognize. Wikipedia allows bots to revert vandalism: in the cases where they make a mistake, the mistake is easy to revert.
• Recent changes patrol. The RCP is a semi-organized group of editors who monitor changes to all the articles in Wikipedia, as the changes happen, to spot and revert vandalism immediately. Most RC patrollers use tools to handle the routine steps in vandal fighting.
• Watchlists. Although the primary focus of monitoring is often content (and thus potential content disputes, as described in Chapter 10: Resolving content disputes), watchlists are an excellent way for concerned editors to spot vandalism.

Given the incredible popularity, and perceived respectability, of Wikipedia, it’s safe to say that the community’s defenses against basic vandalism and spam are holding up quite well overall.

Sybil attacks

Sybil attacks, endemic to the blockchain ecosystem, are known as “Sockpuppets” in Wikipedia, and are used to designate multiple handles controlled by the same person. They are usually employed when one person wants to seem like multiple editors, or wants to continue editing after being blocked.

While Sockpuppets are harder to detect in an automated fashion than vandalism and spam, there is a process for opening Sockpuppet investigations and a noticeboard for ongoing investigations. Well-thought-out sockpuppetry attacks are both time-consuming to mount and defend against. While dedicated investigators (known as clerks) are well-suited to the task, it is impossible to know how much successful Sockpuppetry has yet to be discovered.

Hired guns — Editing for pay

Hired guns — editors who make changes to in exchange for pay — are becoming an increasingly serious concern for Wikipedia, at least according to a 2018 Medium post, “Wikipedia’s Top-Secret ‘Hired Guns’ Will Make You Matter (For a Price)”, in which Author Stephen Harrison writes,

“A market of pay-to-play services has emerged, where customers with the right background can drop serious money to hire editors to create pages about them; a serious ethical breach that could get worse with the rise of—wait for it—cryptocurrency payments.”

In the post, Harrison draws on a number of interviews he conducted with entrepreneurs running businesses in this controversial space. According to Harrison, businesses like What About Wiki, operate in secret, utilizing large numbers of sockpuppet accounts and do not disclose the fact that that their edits are being done in exchange for pay.

In the past, Wikipedia has prohibited all such activities and in fact, businesses like What About Wiki violate Wikipedia’s Terms of Use — a legally binding agreement. However that seems to be changing. According to Harrison,

“A 2012 investigation discovered that the public relations firm Wiki-PR was editing the encyclopedia using multiple deceptive sock-puppet accounts for clients like Priceline and Viacom. In the wake of the Wiki-PR incident, the Wikimedia Foundation changed its terms of use in 2014 to require anyone compensated for their contributions to openly disclose their affiliation.”

The upshot is that since 2014, paid editing is now allowed on the site so long as the relationship is disclosed.

And yet, major questions remain. For one thing, at least according to Harrison’s analysis, companies acting in compliance with Wikipedia’s disclosure policy represent just a small fraction of the paid editors working (illegitimately) on the site. For another, he argues that complying with Wikipedia’s policies leads to paid editors making less money, because there’s a lower chance their edits will be accepted and therefore less chance the clients will be willing to foot the bill.

This leads to a final question, which is whether paid edits can ever really be aligned with the deep values that Wikipedia holds. For instance, one of Wikipedia’s main behavior guidelines is a prohibition against editors who have a conflict of interest in working on a given page. It’s hard to imagine a clearler conflict of interest than a paid financial relationship between the editor and the subject of a page.

DAOs

Wikipedia’s success is inspirational in terms of what can be accomplished through decentralized coordination of a large group of people. While we believe that the decentralized web still has many lessons to learn from the success of Wikipedia — and we’ve tried to touch a few in this post — a great deal of work and thinking has already been done around how a large organization like Wikipedia could eventually be coordinated on-chain.

Such organizations are known as Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), and that will be the topic of a future post.

Photo by designwebjae (Pixabay)

The post What the decentralized web can learn from Wikipedia appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The DLT4EU program is an accelerator that will identify and link Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) initiatives with leading public and private sector organisations. The initiative aims to promote the development of projects that use blockchain and other distributed technologies (DLT) to solve social and environmental challenges for public good.

The accelerator program will pilot DLT applications by connecting the expertise of leading innovators, entrepreneurs and developers with real-world, unmet challenges in the public and social sectors to create market-ready social ventures.

The programme will focus on two high impact sectors:

• Circular Economy
• Digital Citizenship

The DLT4EU project is led by a consortium of three organisations specialised in distributed technologies, digital social innovation and environmental sustainability: Ideas for Change, (Barcelona); Metabolic, (Amsterdam); and Digital Catapult, (London).

Find out more at DLT4EU’s website.

• Lead image: network by sjcockell
• Republished from DLT4EU

The post DLT4EU: Call for Applicants opens April 14 appeared first on P2P Foundation.

All the powers of the old-world have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: liberal States and dictators, banks and FANG, regulators and speculators.

Where is the State that hasn’t attempted to muzzle freedom of communication and information, or to expand surveillance of its own citizens? Which major online service hasn’t monetized their users’ data without their knowledge or closed user accounts without possible recourse? Which banker hasn’t publicly opposed the right of everyone to have personal and absolute ownership of one’s assets through cryptocurrencies?

Two things result from this fact:

1- Peer-to-peer is already acknowledged by all world powers to itself be a power.

2- It is high time that peer-to-peer supporters should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies; that they counter oppressive forces with their diverse and energetic initiatives. To this end, peer-to-peer contributors will assemble in Paris from the 8th to the 12th of January 2020 at the Paris P2P Festival, the first event dedicated to all forms of free interplay between peers: technical, political, cultural, social, and economic.

If we indulge in allusion to a much more famous Manifesto, it is because we believe that p2p technology projects (Bitcoin, blockchains and Web3, distributed Web and Solid, self-sovereign identities, decentralized protocols…) need to be put in perspective.

In 2019, people’s protests and social demonstrations have flooded the streets of every continent: Sudan, Chile, Hong Kong, Catalonia, Algeria, Iran, India, and of course, in France, our Gilets Jaunes. In many cases, governments reacted not only through police or military crackdown but also with censorship of electronic communication: the internet shutdown in Iran, the censorship of social networks in Hong Kong, the prohibition of decentralized identity systems in Spain… Unfortunately, it is now well-established that internet censorship effectively protects the police states that use it.

Therefore, it is no surprise that we’re seeing an increase in infringements of freedom of the press and physical attacks against those who spread information. Antoine Champagne, journalist and co-founder of reflets.info, will come to the festival to talk about the current state of the protection of journalists and whistleblowers.

Along with the cypherpunk tradition, we believe that cryptography and decentralization are essential means to protect individual and collective civil liberties. We hope that talks on the history of the cypherpunk movement and on the history of decentralization will spark conversations about this point of view among the festival participants.

Peer-to-peer technology is a concrete way to arm the resistance against oppressive powers by providing the resilient and confidential communication channels needed to coordinate social movements in hostile environments. Multiple initiatives in this domain will be presented, from the research work of the LIRIS-DRIM team (CNRS) on streaming and Web request anonymization, to Berty‘s decentralized messaging protocol, to talks and workshops on libtorrent and ZeroNet, Ethereum’s network protocol, cjdns, ZKP and identity, and homomorphic encryption.

For the general public less comfortable with the nuts and bolts of p2p cryptography, the documentary Nothing to Hide will give evidence of how mass surveillance impacts everyone and why we have come to accept it so easily. The festival will also host a show on mentalism and social engineering and a serious game which aims to help everyone learn about effective cybersecurity practices.

Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are another branch that stems from the cypherpunk movement. Over the last few years, the importance of having a form of money that is independent from political powers and financial institutions became obvious. At first it was ignored, then it prompted only laughs and sarcasm, and finally, open hostility. Now states and mega-corporations try to compete with their own digital and centralized currencies.

Hence the necessity of articulating and educating the public about what makes decentralized currencies so special! We will tackle this challenge in many ways: a talk on Bitcoin by the founders of Cercle du Coin, a screening of the documentary Protocole with its director in attendance, workshops introducing how to use wallets and cryptocurrencies, presentations and workshops on Libre Money (Monnaie Libre), Dash, Ark…

Since the inception of Ethereum, the scope of the blockchain, this decentralized ledger which stores cryptocurrency transactions has exceeded its monetary applications. Blockchain-based Dapps, DeFi and DAOs refer to new ways to perform peer-to-peer interactions and new approaches for managing common resources in more open and less inegalitarian ways. The audience will be introduced to several programmable blockchains such as Ethereum, Holochain, Tezos, or Aeternity.

DAOs, or Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, are a way to introduce self-governed and transparent rules in place of the arbitrary exercise of centralized power in organizations. We will review the most interesting DAO initiatives such as Aragon, DAOstack and MetaCartel, with a panel, talks and two workshops: co-designing a DAO using DAOcanvas and participating in a decentralized jurisdiction with Kleros. Lessons learned with iExec and Paymium will shed light on decentralized marketplaces and exchanges, another form of decentralized and programmable entities.

But blockchains are not the only way to decentralize the internet. The Solid standard, created by Tim Berners-Lee, aims to re-decentralize the Web, which today lies under the control of a small number of global mega-firms such as Google and Facebook. In France, this standard is actively supported and extended by several teams gathered in the Digital Commons Consortium, present at the festival. They will give talks and workshops covering the Virtual Assembly and Startin’Blox.

Blockchains and distributed Web are closely associated with open source and free software, considered a type of digital commons. More generally, the question of the commons, is defined as a shared resource that is co-governed by its user community according to the community’s rules and norms and is an essential aspect of peer-to-peer networks.

The P2P Foundation, which will give one of the opening talks of the festival, claims the autonomy of the commons with respect to both the private and public sectors. An event within the festival, the Public Domain Day, organized by Wikimedia France and Creative Commons France, will invite open conversations about multiple aspects of intellectual property in the age of the commons: open science and open education, free licences and development aid, and the implications of IA and blockchain on art production. We will also screen a documentary telling the tragic story of Aaron Swartz, the freedom activist behind Creative Commons, and Hacking for the Commons, a brand new documentary about the clash between supporters of intellectual property and those who stand for open and free knowledge. Several members of the Coop des Communs will also participate, such as the Digital Commons Consortium and Open Food Network. Finally, a talk by The Commons Stack will show how blockchain, DAOs and commons can be tightly coupled.

The last major theme of the festival will be shared governance and peer collaboration, as these are critical to all the other topics mentioned above, from blockchain upgrades to management of the commons to the ability of people to act as free citizens and economic agents. We will open the festival with the Citizens’ Convention for the Climate, the first experiment of direct democracy embedded in the institutions of the French republic, as a response to the demand for real democracy expressed the Gilets Jaunes, in the context of climate emergency. The association between climate and collective intelligence will also be discussed during a talk and workshops on the Climate Collage. Tools, practices, and ideas for distributed governance and collective sense-making will be discussed and experienced with Jean-François Noubel, Open Source Politics, the Open Opale collective, and a Warm Data Lab by Matthew Schutte.

In short, peers and commoners everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.

In all these movements, they bring to the front, as a leading question in each, the intellectual and physical property question, no matter its degree of development at the time.

Finally, they labour everywhere for a unanimous agreement on initiatives supportive of civil liberties and the construction of the commons.

Peers and commoners disdain the concealment their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the overthrow of the prevalent logic of concentration of power, wealth, and information.

Free Peers of All Countries, Unite!

Lead image: Close view of Hong Kong Lennon Wall by Ceeseven under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Special thanks to Kirstin Maulding.

The post The P2P Festival in Paris: Unite the Peers appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The nightmare for the U.S. financial industry is that a technology company—whether from China or a homegrown juggernaut such as Amazon.com Inc. or Facebook Inc.—replicates the success of Alipay and WeChat in America. The stakes are enormous, potentially carving away billions of dollars in annual revenue from major banks and other firms.

That threat may now be materializing. On June 18, Facebook unveiled a white paper outlining ambitious plans to create a new global cryptocurrency called Libra, to be launched in 2020. Facebook reportedly has high hopes that Libra will become the foundation for a new financial system free of control by Wall Street power brokers and central banks.

But apparently Libra will not be competing with Visa or Mastercard. In fact, the Libra Association lists those two giants among its 28 soon-to-be founding members. Others include Paypal, Stripe, Uber, Lyft and eBay. Facebook has reportedly courted dozens of financial institutions and other tech companies to join the Libra Association, an independent foundation that will contribute capital and help govern the digital currency. Entry barriers are high, with each founding member paying a minimum of $10 million to join. This gives them one vote  (or 1% of the total vote, whichever is larger)  in the Libra Association council. Members are also entitled to a share proportionate to their investment of the dividends earned from interest on the Libra reserve—the money that users will pay to acquire the Libra currency.

Needless to say, all of this has raised some eyebrows, among both financial analysts and crypto-activists. A Zero Hedge commentator calls Libra “Facebook’s Crypto Trojan Rabbit.” An article in The Financial Times’ Alphaville calls it “Blockchain, but Without the Blocks or Chain.” Economist Nouriel Roubini concurs, tweeting:

Another Zero Hedge writer calls Libra “The Dollar’s Killer App,” which threatens “not only the power of central banks but also the government’s money monopoly itself.”

From Frying Pan to Fire?

To the crypto-anarchist community, usurping the power of central banks and governments may sound like a good thing. But handing global power to the corporate-controlled Libra Association could be a greater nightmare. So argues Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, who writes in The Financial Times:

This currency would insert a powerful new corporate layer of monetary control between central banks and individuals. Inevitably, these companies will put their private interests — profits and influence — ahead of public ones. …

The Libra Association’s goals specifically say that [they] will encourage “decentralised forms of governance.” In other words, Libra will disrupt and weaken nation states by enabling people to move out of unstable local currencies and into a currency denominated in dollars and euros and managed by corporations. …

What Libra backers are calling ‘decentralisation’ is in truth a shift of power from developing world central banks toward multinational corporations and the US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank.

Power will shift to the Fed and ECB because the dollar and the euro will squeeze out weaker currencies in developing countries. As seen recently in Greece, the result will be to cause their governments to lose control of their currencies and their economies.

Pros and Cons

Caitlin Long, co-founder of the Wyoming Blockchain Coalition, recently agreed that Libra was a Trojan horse but predicted it would have some beneficial effects. For one, she thought it would impose discipline on the U.S. banking system by leading to populist calls to repeal its corporate subsidies. The Fed is now paying its member banks 2.35% in risk-free interest on their excess reserves, which this year is projected to total $36 billion of corporate welfare to U.S. banks—about half the sum spent on the U.S. food stamp program. If Facebook parks its entire U.S. dollar balance at the Federal Reserve through one of its bank partners, it could earn the same rate. But Long predicted that Facebook would have to pay interest to Libra users to avoid a chorus of critics, who would loudly publicize how much money Facebook and its partners were pocketing from the interest on the money users traded for their Libra currency.

But that was before the Libra white paper came out. It reveals the profits will indeed be divvied among Facebook’s Libra partners rather than shared with users. At one time, we earned interest on our deposits in government-insured banks. With Libra, we will get no interest on our money, which will be entrusted to uninsured crypto exchanges, which are coming under increasing regulatory pressure due to lack of transparency and operational irregularities.

United Kingdom economics professor Alistair Milne points to another problem with the Libra cryptocurrency: Unlike Bitcoin, it will be a “stablecoin,” whose value will be tied to a basket of fiat currencies and short-term government securities. That means it will need the backing of real money to maintain its fixed price. If reserves do not cover withdrawals, who will be responsible for compensating Libra holders? Ideally, Milne writes, reserves would be held with the central bank; but central banks will be reluctant to support a private currency.

Long also predicts that Facebook’s cryptocurrency will be a huge honeypot of data for government officials, since every transaction will be traceable. But other reviewers see this as Libra’s most fatal flaw. Facebook has been called Big Brother, the ultimate government surveillance tool. Conspiracy theorists link it to the CIA and the U.S. Department of Defense. Facebook has already demonstrated that it is an untrustworthy manager of personal data. How then can we trust it with our money?

Why Use a Cryptocurrency at All?

Why has Facebook chosen to use a cryptocurrency rather than following WeChat and AliPay in doing a global payments network in the traditional way? Yan Meng, vice president of the Chinese Software Developer Network, says Facebook’s fragmented user base across the world leaves it with no better choice than to borrow ideas from blockchain and cryptocurrency.

“Facebook just can’t do a global payments network via traditional methods, which require applying for a license and preparing foreign exchange reserves with local banking, one market after another,” Meng said. “The advantage of WeChat and AliPay is they have already gained a significant number of users from just one giant economy that accounts for 20 percent of the world’s population.” They have no need to establish their own digital currencies, which they still regard as too risky.

Meng suspects that Facebook’s long-term ambition is to become a stateless central bank that uses Libra as a base currency. He writes, “With sufficient incentives, nodes of Facebook’s Libra network would represent Facebook to push for utility in various countries for its 2.7 billion users in business, investment, trade and financial services,” which “would help complete a full digital economy empire.”

The question is whether regulators will allow that sort of competition with the central banking system. Immediately after Facebook released its Libra cryptocurrency plan, financial regulators in Europe voiced concerns over the potential danger of Facebook running a “shadow bank.” Maxine Waters, who heads the Financial Services Committee for the U.S. House of Representatives, asked Facebook to halt its development of Libra until hearings could be held. She said:

This is like starting a bank without having to go through any steps to do it. …  We can’t allow Facebook to go to Switzerland and begin to compete with the dollar without having any regulatory regime that’s dealing with them.

A Stateless Private Central Bank or a Publicly Accountable One?

Facebook may be competing with more than the dollar. Jennifer Grygiel, assistant professor of communications at Syracuse University, writes:

[It] seems that the company is not seeking to compete with Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. Rather, Facebook is looking to replace the existing global financial system with an all-new setup, with Libra at its center.

At least at the moment, the Libra is being designed as a form of electronic money linked to many national currencies.That has raised fears that Libra might someday be recognized as a sovereign currency, with Facebook acting as a “shadow bank” that could compete with the central banks of countries around the world.

Long thinks Bitcoin, rather than Libra, will come out the winner in all this; but Bitcoin’s blockchain model is too slow, expensive and energy intensive to replace fiat currency as a medium of exchange on a national scale. As Josh Constine writes on TechCrunch:

[E]xisting cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum weren’t properly engineered to scale to be a medium of exchange. Their unanchored price was susceptible to huge and unpredictable swings, making it tough for merchants to accept as payment. And cryptocurrencies miss out on much of their potential beyond speculation unless there are enough places that will take them instead of dollars. … But with Facebook’s relationship with 7 million advertisers and 90 million small businesses plus its user experience prowess, it was well-poised to tackle this juggernaut of a problem.

For Libra to scale as a national medium of exchange, its governance had to be centralized rather than “distributed.” But Libra’s governing body is not the sort of global controller we want. Jennifer Grygiel writes:

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg . . . is declaring that he wants Facebook to become a virtual nation, populated by users, powered by a self-contained economy, and headed by a CEO–Zuckerberg himself– who is not even accountable to his shareholders. . . .

In many ways the company that Mark Zuckerberg is building is beginning to look more like a Roman Empire, now with its own central bank and currency, than a corporation. The only problem is that this new nation-like platform is a controlled company and is run more like a dictatorship than a sovereign country with democratically elected leaders.

A currency intended for trade on a national—let alone international—scale needs to be not only centralized but democratized, responding to the will of the people and their elected leaders. Rather than bypassing the existing central banking structure as Facebook plans to do, several groups of economists are proposing a more egalitarian solution: nationalizing and democratizing the central bank by opening its deposit window to everyone. As explored in my latest book, “Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age,” these proposals could allow us all to get 2.35% on our deposits, while eliminating bank runs and banking crises, since the central bank cannot run out of funds. Profits from the public medium of exchange need to return to the public rather than enriching an unaccountable, corporate-controlled Facebook Trojan horse.

Reposted from Truthdig. Header image: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. (Mike Deeroski / Flickr)(CC BY 2.0)

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Walking down the high street of a place described as one of the UK’s most ethical towns, the first thing you notice is the absence of national chain stores and fast food outlets. Instead, you find a diverse mix of independent shops selling organic food, clothes, art, antiques and furniture, as well as cafes and restaurants and an abundance of charity shops.

This is Totnes – a small, historic market town in the south-west of England that has garnered a reputation as a thriving hub for art, music, theatre and alternative lifestyles. Noticeboards around the town advertise everything from yoga lessons to Zen meditation, together with posters for various events – including the next Extinction Rebellion non-violent direct action training session.

In many shop windows today, there are stickers which read “Totnes pound accepted here”. Sadly, after 12 years of operation, the Totnes pound will come to an end on June 30, 2019. This highly symbolic initiative inspired other local currencies including the Bristol pound and the Brixton pound, which encourage people to spend locally and keep money in the community.

But the gradual shift to a cashless society and a lack of uptake by local government agencies have ultimately led to the Totnes pound’s demise. Rob Hopkins – co-founder of community-led charity Transition Town Totnes and initiator of the local currency – thinks the Totnes pound has helped to build a sense of community and strengthened the town’s identity, with the £21 note reflecting the local sense of humour.

The impact of austerity

The Totnes pound is just one example of the kind of outside the box thinking that has kept this local community resilient in the face of austerity. Since 2010, the pressure on local authority budgets across England has been intense, with a 50% decline in central funding support. The result has been cuts to public services and less money circulating in local economies.

In Totnes – as elsewhere – there are visible signs of these trends, with the closure of local bank branches and “to let” signs on vacant shops. According to Francis Northrop, former manager of Transition Town Totnes, smaller rural communities like Totnes face difficulties because they lack the economies of scale which make cheap goods and services more accessible in big cities.

Leer más: Retail decline, in maps: England and Wales lose 43m square metres of shop space

Totnes has responded by developing a new ethical economy that puts community values at the core. The closure of the Dairy Crest factory in 2000 convinced many locals that the answer was not to wait for inward investment from big businesses outside of the town. Instead, the focus is on internal investment: harnessing community wealth to address community needs.

But unlike anti-austerity efforts seen in larger cities – such as Preston – a small town like Totnes cannot rely on anchor institutions including local government, universities or hospitals, to redirect their spending into the local economy.

Indeed, one such institution – Dartington College of Art – relocated to Falmouth in 2010 with the loss of an estimated £6m a year in local spending from 900 students and staff. Instead, Totnes has had to show it’s possible for small towns to withstand such losses, by drawing from a toolbox of different methods to build community wealth.

A new ethical economy

The response has grown from more than a decade of community trust building, since the launch of Transition Town Totnes in 2006. Initially set up to promote local resilience in the face of climate change and peak oil, Transition Town Totnes now coordinates an extensive range of local projects, and forms part of a global Transition network, with initiatives from around the world sharing knowledge and ideas.

Some of these projects focus directly on combating the effects of austerity. For example, Caring Town Totnes is a collaboration of around 80 organisations seeking to counter the impact of budget cuts on local health and social services.

Current Transition Town Totnes manager Jenny Gellatly is also working with the Common Cause Foundation to explore how it may be possible to place compassionate values at the heart of the future transformation of the town. During a recent visit for my research, she explained to me how initiatives like these promote caring for neighbours, friends and family, to help ensure that the most vulnerable people in the community get the support they need.

Other projects focus on building up the local economy and making it more self-sufficient. An important breakthrough came with the launch of the Reconomy Center, to support new enterprises and promote local investment. The centre hosts an annual Local Entrepreneur Forum to crowdfund low carbon, ethical and sustainable business projects.

A number of organisations also came together to produce a Local Economic Blueprint, which highlights the economic benefits for small independent businesses in Totnes of sourcing goods and services from other local businesses and suppliers, to ensure more money circulates in the economy.

The next critical step was the launch of the Totnes Community Development Society – a not-for-profit that raises funds and implements local development projects. It’s currently implementing the Atmos Totnes project, to transform the disused Dairy Crest site into a school for food entrepreneurs and a business incubator, with affordable housing.

In the face of severe challenges, Totnes has shown how a community can mobilise to achieve a more ethical and resilient local economy. It will be fascinating to observe how the town changes in the years ahead, and to see what the next initiative will be, to replace the Totnes pound.

Author Brendan Barrett is Specially Appointed Professor, Center for the Study of Co*Design, Osaka University

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Peter Harris: 2018 was the year where the twisted intersection of apps, data exploitation, privacy and corporate tech giants went mainstream.

While the issues had been brewing for a while — such as the revelation of addiction design in most apps, the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Mark Zuckerberg’s subsequent testimony before the U.S. Congress — it seems like 2018 was when questioning the tech giants became the norm. A new term called surveillance capitalism also entered the public lexicon.

A recent report from the ICA (International Co-operative Alliance) summarizes this situation well, describing the larger dynamics at play:

As technology shapes and reshapes how people interact, it shapes and reshapes economic activity, including how people work and trade. In line with this, there is a growing trend of work that is funneled through digital platforms owned by just a few large corporations. These platforms offer flexibility and independence, but they can also be viewed as exploitative — extracting the value of the connections made by the 99% for the 1% of outside investors.

The network effects of scale in a digital economy has led to the dominance of these Big Tech companies, which in turn has made it harder for people to envisage an alternative future to the current model. However, alternative futures do exist and for now, it is the co-operative alternative in the form of platform co-ops in particular that is attracting interest.

A movement to create member-owned, technology-based firms has birthed this new genre of startups — the #platformcoop. While no single definition has been found, we would define such an enterprise with the following characteristics:

• Connection of members via networks (the essence of the Internet itself)
• Collective ownership, decision-making and profit-sharing
• Emphasis on fairness and justice for all stakeholders
• Design and business development aiming towards global scalability

These four essential qualities have been the driving force behind the formation of the music streaming service Resonate. A multi-stakeholder co-operative, Resonate addresses inequities in the streaming market, where the work of musicians is often undervalued, and meaningful connections between artists and fans are almost totally non-existent, due to intentional design on the part of the mainstream services.

This combination of unfair economics and artificial separation between member classes is a key characteristic of the gig economy and many of the large scale platforms that have received frequent criticism for their practices:

Today, more and more people manage their work and resources through digital platforms that offer boundless flexibility and independence. However, they can also be exploitative and monopolistic, owned largely by a small number of Big Tech corporations which enable the precarious gig economy, exacerbate systemic inequalities and facilitate data surveillance and data capture. The dominance of this form of platform capitalism, as well as the network effects created, means it is hard to see anything beyond this prevailing model.

However, this must be challenged because other futures are possible — platform co-operativism is a network of trading businesses that might look and feel like the established Big Tech platforms, but are democratically controlled and collectively owned. They are a route to a fairer, more inclusive outcome, that generates tangible advantages for workers and consumers alike.

The above quote, from a joint report by Co-operatives UK and Nesta, clearly defines both the challenges and hopes of this growing movement to create truly fair, digital-based economies.

We long ago detailed the problem with co-ops and traditional startup investors. At the heart of this new Nesta/Co-ops UK report is a profound question — can people-power finance a new wave of community-owned apps and online services?

Given some recent developments both in the UK and Germany, we’re hopeful that the traditional co-operative sector — which represents over $2 trillion in market turnover — is ready to enter the relatively new #platformcoop sector.

With well established markets, enterprises and memberships in a variety of sectors, the time has never been better for the co-op world to fully embrace the digital realm, helping take a wide range of fresh apps and online services to new heights through their investment and support.

A short history of Resonate’s funding and development

Initiated in early 2015, our first two years saw the formation of the co-op, a modest crowd campaign, development of an Alpha version of our #stream2own app and growth of the first 5000 members*.

In the second phase of Resonate, we received an investment** via the RChain co-op, a blockchain platform based in Seattle, WA. Accomplishments included a complete rebranding and new product design, a near doubling of the membership and two-thirds of a new codebase designed to scale to hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of members.

Now firmly in our third phase, we have launched our new branding and #stream2own player, which has been subsequently open-sourced. We’ve also recently started working with several large distributors and labels which is going to dramatically increase the size of our existing catalog.

While we stand on the threshold of significant growth, one thing is profoundly clear — tech startups stand in need of investment and support ahead of development. We remain optimistic that both the Resonate community and the long-established co-op world are committed to seeing a service such as ours succeed.

We invite you to learn more about Resonate by visiting our homepage, supporting our endeavor by becoming a member, or through the purchase of Supporter Shares.

*In this instance we use the term “member” in a general sense, as not all users are technically co-op members. For example, artists earn their member share only after uploading their first song and listeners when they buy a 5 euro membership.

**One of the primary goals of this investment was to launch a token sale, intended as a long term investment vehicle, which was (unfortunately) hindered by the crash of the crypto market in late 2018.

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Toward what? Most of us probably aren’t sure. But the people involved in a Wellington, New Zealand-based network called Enspiral have done more than just about anyone to figure out — to figure out where we’d want the future of work to be headed if the better angels of our nature were in charge. I’ve had the chance to visit them (and lived to tell the tale for Vice). Now, a trip down to Wellington, although I absolutely recommend it, is a little less necessary. The Enspiralites have created a book, Better Work Together, which chronicles in conversational stories and pictures their attempts to create a kind of community worth working toward.

Enspiral is fairly small, as organizations go — a few hundred active participants, a modest budget. Rather, it’s lean. Most of the Enspiralites’ businesses exist outside the organization, but attached to it, allowing Enspiral itself to take risks, learn lessons, and reinvent itself when necessary. It’s a community of early adopters. They offer themselves as beta-testers for a suite of collaboration software they’ve co-produced, such as Loomio and Cobudget. They relentlessly explore challenging governance frameworks like sociocracy and teal. They even funded the book’s production through a new blockchain-enabled platform called DAOstack (which still crashes my browser when I try to use it). These are not ordinary workers; they’re people with the passion, the patience, in many cases the privilege, and the fault-tolerance to repeatedly try stuff that may or may not work.

In the book, you’ll see why. There is a generosity and pleasure and even a spirituality in how they talk about their efforts that makes it all seem less like, well, work. There are typos, but these pale in comparison to the challenges we collectively face. The upshot is not a final theory or doctrine or destination, but a mode of working toward it, of declining to accept disguised versions of feudalism as good enough. Order it, digitally or physically, here.

Cross-posted at the MEDLab website and on Medium.

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Can we create big, ambitious projects without corporations, governments, and bosses?

Nathalia Scherer wants to try. Her organization, DAOstack, is using Bitcoin-like blockchain technology to make tools for self-organizing. Last year DAOstack raised $30 million in a 60-second token offering, but genuinely participatory governance may be easier to raise money for than to actually achieve.

MEDLab’s radio show and podcast, Looks Like New, asks old questions about new tech.

Each month, host Nathan Schneider speaks with someone who works with technology in ways that challenge conventional narratives and dominant power structures. The name comes from the phrase “a philosophy so old that it looks like new,” repeated throughout the works of Peter Maurin, the French agrarian poet and co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement.

You can hear Looks Like New the fourth Thursday of every month at 6 p.m., or online as a podcast on iTunes and Stitcher.

Originally published on KGNU.org

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Presentation slides are here: https://meet.lucidmeetings.com/a/sJVq…

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