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On this episode of Frontiers of Coordination Peth welcomes artist, philosopher and researcher Travis Wyche. After a couple of years in the Web3 space he considers himself a more culturally focused contributor rather than a technical person even when he spends part of his time doing a variety of research on UXs and developing UI design. The fact is that the interweaving of his skills and interests led to Pluriverse, a transmedia lorecrafting experiment in collective imagineering.

Screaming at punk shows was his first approach to the Moloch meme. Later in life when he entered Web3 he would connect it to Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl, an event that in a way funneled him down a rabbit hole of connecting these cultural influences with the technical game theory of coordination. That is what attracted him to the space in the first place: “I'm not really a Degen; I didn't get drawn into crypto through DeFi or anything like that, through the tokens really at all, but more of the high level philosophy, politics, the various kinds of connections to things in my own background as an artist, as a musician, as a community organizer, as an anarchist, as an aging punk. All those kinds of cultural affinities are what brought me in”.

It's from that perspective that he appreciates the meaning of the Moloch meme, known as the god of coordination failure while also associated with child sacrifice among other things. For him,it’s an image that serves as a “memetic filter” for people to understand the potency that image creates for a “community first” kind of orientation. 

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Will Ruddick is an econo-optimist; in his words. A physicist that got into economics. Experiences such as being in the Peace Corps helped shape his vision around using technology for mutual credit on community groups coming together to produce mutual aid for each other. So he founded Grassroots Economics, a non-profit foundation developing economic empowerment to help communities realize and share their abundance. In this episode he shares with Peth his motivations and experiences with the project.

The proposal is to have communities form a type of agreement on their means of exchange, goods and services that are redeemable from vouchers that can be used in or out of the community. Through blockchain, these vouchers have an expiration built in and the contract holds the legal instruments for it. This type of exchange is actually similar with traditional systems, which in Kenya have not only a rich history but 42 different names to refer to.

For Ruddick this is a basic use case of blockchain that allows creating endogenous instruments in an association. However, in his opinion, for it to succeed there needs to be liability. “When I read the Bitcoin whitepaper and they talk about community currencies this is what I think they're talking about and historically if you look at a lot of the community currency research and all these examples over the years, the ones that were very successful had clear liability; it was clear who was backing this vouchers with what services”. 

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Brandon Norgaard is a researcher, writer and founder of the Enlightened Worldview, a project described in short as a quest to promote peace through societal understanding and inner awareness. In this episode he shares with Peth about the perks of building an organization that will help people improve self-awareness and mindfulness. 

Norgaard explains the project seeks to “promote a new enlightenment”, implementing the premises given in Hanzi Freinacht books The Listening Society and Nordic Ideology and based on Game B as well as “Bildung”, a concept that refers to how individuals and groups of people learn and thrive through education and personal development to cultivate skills, habits and values that contribute to society. 

This would be made possible through software development to encourage people to come together, have leadership structures and coordinate local face-to-face events and networks structured to strengthen communities, improve their quality of life and add value. “There's a way to do it that is entertaining to people while they are also getting sense making and awareness capabilities and meeting spirituality by being a part of these communities and these circles”, he says.

“What gives me hope  is looking at local Game Change, local developments of community circles, a deeper integration across aspects of public life and social experiments in that regard and using technology to benefit people's lives”. Timestamp for video: 32:42 - 33:55

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Hanzi Feinacht books:

Jim Rutt remembers his days as a businessman, CEO of Network Solutions and CTO of Thomson-Reuters. When he retired in 2001 he went back to his original love: science. He then started working with the Santa Fe Institute as a researcher -where he met Jordan Hall- and eventually became the chairman. It was 2012 when he and some friends started the social movement and philosophical set of ideas known today as Game B. 

In this episode Rutt and Peth dive deep into the movement that aims to create the social operating system for the future, from the early attempts as the Emancipation Party to the current state and possible scenarios.

Rutt recognizes the damage caused by Game A's exponential growth approach of the world while he also acknowledges the process of “bottom-up” culturalization that has to take place first for Game B to succeed. “The Game B turn is to do two things. One is to develop a way of living in the world that fully honors our natural world and actually helps it regenerate from some of the harm that's been done in the late stages of Game A, and does it in a way that is organized around increasing human well-being and puts human well-being central”.

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Chair & Bacon are back with a new episode! This time they take us into ETHDenver, with Chair telling us about his experience at the largest blockchain festival in the world.

The event, where he got to meet a lot of octos from MetaGame was a, was a good way to get both hyped about MetaFest2, the only MetaCartel event happening this year, from august 11th to 25th at Fort Punta Christo in Croatia. 

Wait… WTF is MetaFest? A festival including everything you’d expect of a festival + everything you’d expect of a conference + an optional week-long trip. “I have no doubt that it would be a fun time, a very good bonding experience for a lot of friends that don’t get to see each other in person or very rarely”, Chair said. With the vast list of speakers and the epic adventures down the coast of Croatia, we think so too ;)

From texturePunx, Keyp onboarding platform, Sillicon Valley Bank going bankrupt, to the “spookiness” of Aavegotchi closing the $GHST bonding curve the exact day of DAI’s depeg, in this episode Chair and Bacon also talked about news and projects that have caught their attention these days as well as future guests for the show. 

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Patrick Rawson discovered Ethereum in January of 2017 and it seemed to him like a game changer. By 2019 he quit his job in advertising and became a full-time DAOist and regen. He is a co-founder of Curve Labs & Kolektivo. In this episode he talks about his view on the evolution of crypto space and what he has learned so far.

From his perspective, which weighs the institutional framework, the crypto technology has to interface with the real world to build effective finance. “What we need is a new constellation of institutional actors operating from the bottom-up, with more of a community gaze than this top-down flow of money”, he says.

Ecotechnics was the term he once used to define what is now widely known as regenerative finance, a term with which he was trying to answer a question: “Money is a technology that is used to solve this trifecta problem of store value and medium of exchange and so forth; so understanding that, how can we create a bottom-up form of money which has a different set of outcomes? I use this term ecotechnics because I think those outcomes need to be particularly mindful of the closed ecological system that is the Earth".

He brings to the table the use of what he calls process assets, as a form of tokenization that could have enormous real-world benefits by taking different processes and turning them into abstractions of these to guarantee they happen. This is also without the need to subscribe to any particular agenda and thus decentralizing authority from institutions. “I find this all very very exciting from an institutional perspective as it's taking a historically monopolizable form of authority and giving it to regular people to do what they will with it”.

As for the future, his hope is that the distinction between Web3/Crypto and the real world dissolves. “There's sort of this underlying assumption that every time we say crypto we're referring to some virtual domain, some metaverse on the horizon that doesn't affect the real world and I would like to see that that distinction close over time. Where when we refer to crypto or refer to Web3, we are simultaneously referring to more than a predominantly virtual domain, that we are referring to entire communities”.

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DAOs and the Global Economic Order

After writing the latest MetaGame Newsletter Metagame & Metadornism, pt.1, peth sat down to talk with Hanzi Freinacht, political philosopher, historian and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’ and ‘Nordic Ideology’ to dive deep into foundations, views and mindset of Metamodernism.

“Metamodernism comes from the heart of postmodern thinking, it thrives on that critique, on seeing the cracks in the modern project, but it wants to find a direction of development which is going deeper into who we are as human beings and develop our relationships and our worldviews”, says Freinacht.

In his words, the metamodern project is to again believe in growth and development, going beyond critique and beyond just increasing GDP, producing more science papers, inventing new gadgets and medicines. Rather, Freinacht explains, “it's about increasing the sense of meaning and the quality of relationships and the scaffolds for our own personal and psychological development”.

Sustainability, alienation, inequality and lack of meaning are some of the fundamental problems of modernism that the metamodern mindset addresses as a result of a “proto-synthesis” for the kinds of life we would want. “Metamodernism tries to fulfill all of the promises of postmodern critique, all of those values, all of those injustices, but it does so by building a program for the future for what you can do”, he explains.

This Metamodern mindset is self transforming and a result of the interaction of four dimensions: cognitive complexity, symbolic code, subjective states and depth. These layers move between two extremes: “The metamodernist mindset re-enchants the world but does so at the same time explaining everything that can be explained with the best possible explanatory models; and that sense of creating meaning in a secular or rational world is in a sense the core of the metamodernist quest”.

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Hanzi Freinacht Twitter

Hanzi Freinacht Metamoderna 

Jordan Peterson’s 12 rules for life 

Hanzi Freinacht’s 12 Commandments: For Extraordinary People To Master Ordinary Life

Frances Fukoyama The End of History and the Last Man 

The Listening Society

Nordic Ideology

In this episode Peth has a talk with one of his favorite people in the space to chat about the challenges and the future of DAOs and governance.

Dekan Brown is a developer and a Daoist. He’s one of the founders of DAOHaus, Raid Guild and Metacartel. His work has been focused in governance and community type experiments. This time he shares the lessons and perspectives he’s gained over the last three years working in the crypto space.

"We are basically trying to reinvent the system and get people to think about things differently," he states. In his opinion there’s the idea of digital organizations but the idea of decentralization, resiliency, robustness and anti-capture has been forgotten.

Reflecting on past experiences he shares that avoiding what he calls “operational overhead”, minimizing governance and having a high-level purpose are some of the areas for improvement in DAOs.

“What we should be going for is millions of different kinds of sovereign nations where every person is a citizen of maybe hundreds of thousands of other nations and, as an individual, you have the sovereignty to move wherever you want, to use your money however you want and to form in this groups and understand where the publics goods for this groups are and how are you funding them”.

Some of the topics:

·  DAO narrative pushed in the wrong direction

·  DAO Citizenship

·  Digital corporations vs DAOs

·  Token holders vs community

·  Treasury less DAOs

·  DAO governance

·  Burocratic ingroups and “operational overhead”

·  Setting a purpose and guiding principles

·  Minimizing governance

·  Seasonal leadership changes

·  Periods of reflection and goal setting

·  Voting periods and grace periods

·  Retroactive reviews

·  MolochDAO framework

·  DAO purism vs pragmatism

·  The future of DAOs

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Dekan Brown twitter

DAOHaus twitter

DAOHaus website

Moloch DAO twitter

Raid Guild twitter

Raid Guild website

MetaCartel twitter

MetaCartel website

Just days before starting her 6 week workshop, DAO consultant and co-founder of PricelessDAO Grace Rachmany, talked to Peth about her journey on team management and her perspectives on the ReFi space, decentralized organizations, independence, autonomy & much more..

As someone who has specialized in team management, leadership & governance, she raises a question: How to bring out the best in people and communities?

The structure of a DAO, adequate voting systems and the ability to track your reputation as well as hardware production are some of the proposals she highlights in order to create a self-sufficient system that does not operate by the same rules as the default.

“If it’s just a general movement then you’re missing something. If DAOs can offer us some structure where we could recognize one another, be united under some sort of federated protocol that allows us to communicate, then the question would be ``what do you want to communicate?”

For more nuggets of wisdom, listen to the full episode.

If you’re interested in learning more about what money really is, the rules of the game, how the existing economic system has become so unsustainable, commons practices, alternative economic models for a sustainable future and how cryptocurrencies & DAOs can be utilized for such ends, register for the workshop.

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From sunny Croatia to sunny Miami, Peth talks to Aaron Soskin and Stefen Delev from Govern friends with vibes of epic proportions, working on, an open platform that helps DAO contributors to track and record their own work, while enabling communities to value & reward such contributions.

The idea, as they explain, is to make sure that DAO contributors are as autonomous as possible and that the work that they do is owned by them with reputation verified & an option to fork their & other contributions into their own project, if the ideas diverge or contributions grow too much.

“We found that for DAOs to stay autonomous and as decentralized as possible, there needed to be a better way to coordinate work” – explains Soskin. As a response, they developed a protocol not only for tracking contributions but for assigning value.

Besides tracking & rewarding contributions, the whole point is for the contributors to be as autonomous as possible. There will even be measures put in place so organizations can cyclically go from diverging to converging & diverging to converging on a cyclical basis, allowing people to experiment on their own, together evaluate experiments & merge ideas back into strategic goals of the organization - or pursue separate paths if needed.

“This idea –says Delev– of having ownership of your contributions and having a contribution layer that interacts with reputation tools, identity tools or payment tools, etcetera; and combining all this within DAOs opens the doors of governance as based on contribution rather than based on the tokens you buy or the airdrop you got”.

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