Unchained - How Blockchains Can Help Create Little Democracies Everywhere - Ep.108
Episode Date: February 26, 2019Glen Weyl, a political economist and social technologist, the coauthor of Radical Markets and a principal researcher at Microsoft, and Santiago Siri, the founder of Democracy Earth, discuss how blockc...hains can be used to create borderless democracies that can reach any citizen on earth and can be used not just by nation-states but in all kinds of communities such as the workplace, church or a social network like Facebook. We cover concepts such as quadratic finance and quadratic voting, and look at how forcing voters to have a budget for their votes changes voting behavior. We also dive into what needs to be put in place for blockchain-based voting systems to work, why identity solutions are crucial but also so hard to get right, and how we can prevent token-based governance systems from becoming plutocracies. Plus, we surmise that blockchain-based governance might be the 21st century political experiment and that someday, we may all be citizens of multiple communities. Thank you to our sponsors! CipherTrace: http://ciphertrace.com/unchained Microsoft: https://twitter.com/MSFTBlockchain and https://aka.ms/unchained Episode links: Democracy Earth: https://www.democracy.earth Santiago Siri: https://twitter.com/santisiri Radical Xchange: https://twitter.com/RadxChange Glen Weyl: https://twitter.com/glenweyl Radical Xchange conference in March: radicalxchange.org Radical Markets: https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11222.html Democracy Earth white paper: https://www.dropbox.com/s/sifogl4zimwkkei/Democracy%20Earth%20-%20Social%20Smart%20Contract%20-%20Paper%20v0.2.pdf?dl=0 Democracy Earth cofounder Pia Mancini on early work with digital democracy: https://www.ted.com/talks/pia_mancini_how_to_upgrade_democracy_for_the_internet_era?language=en Santi on how blockchains could revolutionize democracy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UajbQTHnTfM Wired article on Democracy Earth: https://www.wired.com/story/santiago-siri-radical-plan-for-blockchain-voting/ CoinDesk feature on Glen Weyl: https://www.coindesk.com/coindesk-most-influential-blockchain-2018-glen-weyl Vitalik Buterin blog post on Radical Markets: https://vitalik.ca/general/2018/04/20/radical_markets.html Paper by Vitalik, Zoe Hitzig and Glen on quadratic financing: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3243656 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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My guest today is Glenn Weil, a political economist and social technologist, the co-author
of radical markets and a principal researcher at Microsoft, and Santiago, the founder of
Democracy Earth. Welcome, Glenn and Santiago. Great to be with you. A lot of people in the blockchain
space talk about the potential for this technology to be used in governance or to change the way
we govern ourselves. This ranges from everything to how Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are beyond the
control of central banks to how privacy coins in particular could be, could make it harder for
governments to raise taxes. It could also be the way that blockchain technology could be used
to change voting systems or even allow people to choose their own digital jurisdictions that
they choose to participate in. But this technology is so not nascent that it seems like all of this
is a long way off. And yet people like you two are very active in thinking about how this could work.
and also in beginning to try to create the technology that could make all this happen.
So let's start with a very general question.
What problems are you guys trying to solve using blockchain technology?
Well, in my case, what we're trying to figure out...
And this is Santiago for the listeners.
Hello, everyone.
What we are trying to figure out coming from the Democracy Earth Foundation is
what would it take to deploy a democracy over the internet?
anywhere there is a connection to the internet
that is censorship resistant
that is fair
that can reach any member of society
and that can operate in a borderless way
because it's digital
and the promise of blockchain-based networks
is very promising
in the sense that it can deliver
the right infrastructure to build systems
that are far less corruptible
than the current electoral systems
that we find anywhere in the world
and that can scale to help us as a society, as a global society,
to start thinking about governance in a borderless way or in a post-nation state mindset.
Yeah, just to reinforce what Santi was just saying,
I think one of my main motivations in what we're doing
is trying to have a democracy, a democratic society,
without a particular nation state being the place that democracy happens.
Democracy can happen in your workplace.
Democracy can happen in an open-source project.
democracy can happen in your church.
Democracy can happen in all sorts of organizations,
some of which are within a nation state,
some of which are a nation state,
some of which are bigger than a nation state,
and many of which cut across nation states.
Like imagine Facebook wanted to have a democracy
or you wanted a democratically governed social network.
So I think what I'm excited about bringing about in the world,
and I think what Sondi's building the important technology for,
is how do we divorce the concept of democracy,
which is incredibly important from a bridge.
particular nation state or whatever that organizes that democracy.
Interesting. I like that idea, actually. And yet, as you'll see from my questions later,
I have a lot of skepticism, too, about what you guys are trying to do. But I just wanted to
bring it back because, you know, Santiago was using these words, like saying that he wanted to
help prevent elections that are corruptible and stuff like that. So what are some kind of like
everyday issues that people talk about or things that we've seen, frankly, in current affairs
that you feel like would be either preventable or resolvable using this technology?
Well, when you look at traditional elections, there are multiple ways of trying to hijack the
outcome of what's going on. Two very common attacks are particularly the spread of fake news
or gossip or false information about the candidates. So being able to,
one of the challenges of democracy is not just being able to scale the ability to participate,
but also to scale the ability to understand what is being voted.
And that's one of the important aspects where blockchain technology, I think, at the end of the day,
helps to be a much more direct channel to the institutional reality of what's happening among organizations
or within organizations than having these intermediaries like the press or the media
that eventually can generate or inject confusion in society.
The other aspect is related to having a strong consensus on the identities,
on the voters that are participating in a democracy.
When we originally started that democracy earth doing simply open source software for democracy,
in high-stakes elections, we found that the database administrators
or the authorities that had to decide who were registering to vote or not in the
electoral process. If they had a bias of their own, they would delay certain identities from getting
access to the process and accelerate other identities or family members to get access to the process.
So decentralizing the voter registry, building a consensus that is able to grant voter rights
that it works in a decentralized way can be extremely relevant to reduce these type of attacks
that are actually much more common than we think of, especially in developing countries when it comes to democratic elections.
Great. And yeah, I actually wasn't, you know, with all the research I had done before, I wasn't even aware that fake news was something you guys were trying to tackle because that seems a little beyond the purview.
It's not particularly the battle, the main battle that we're picking. I think that the problem with gossip or false information is because of the distance of what happens when you have an institutional event, a transactional event, a transact.
happening and what gets communicated into the media.
The interesting thing about blockchains is that these are networks that provide a public
ledger that allow for society in a permissionless way to audit what's happening in this
ledger.
So the information about institutional events is much more transparent and accessible to everyone.
But, you know, we obviously need better technology to parse and analyze what happens in these networks.
All right. And so since that was kind of a little bit of a detour, why don't you talk a little bit more about what democracy Earth is working on directly right now?
So our main project is an open source project called Sovereign, which is a decentralized application that aims to make easy and accessible the ability to interact with blockchains for the purpose of governance.
we are focusing our organization right now
into being providers of governance as a service.
We work with some large blockchain projects out there
like Blockstack, for example,
where this is a blockchain project
that is rewarding developers with $100,000 every month
in rewards to those who build on top of the platform
and those who decide how to reward these developers
are the token holders of Blockstack.
So this is an example of a blockchain project that has governance where the investors or the token holders directly allocate capital through their voting to the people that are actually contributing work and developing for this network.
This is a simple example of how governance tools are becoming more relevant as we are starting to understand that blockchains at the end of the day are like bureaucracies.
There are power structures.
and power structures require good governance.
And I would argue that good governance is democracy.
It's interesting because I think that in a way that's like taking the function of a corporation,
but just applying it to an open source project where you don't have this traditional hierarchy
where you could have a board of directors or the officers of the corporation deciding like this is how much we're allocating toward this.
And instead it's just the community decides like this is how much we'd like to pay for this.
Yeah, well, I think that in many ways,
gets back, I think, to what Santi just said, which is that, you know, in our society, we kind of have two types of organizations as the canonical ones. One is the nation state, which is like democratic, but it's extremely inflexible. It's like really hard to become an American. It's really like, it's a fixed geography even if you do move there. And on the other hand, we have these like entrepreneurial things. But the problem with these entrepreneurial things is that they're very profit oriented. You end up in practice having to spend 80% of your time.
like actually making your product worse in order to extract money from people.
And, you know, only 20% of your time actually making the product awesome.
And so, like, you know, I mean, well, exactly 2080.
I mean, but a lot of your time you end up spending worrying about monetization and stuff.
And you think about the number of people employed at Google sort of like selling ads
versus actually coding up cool stuff.
And so the question, you know, the cool thing about open source is it maybe has some of the
flexibility that a corporation has.
and it has the, you know, it has the potential for participatory democratic type things.
But, you know, there's a question of how is it funded and there's a question of how is it governed, right, which are open questions, even though it has this cool possibility of being sort of both democratic and flexible.
And I think what both Santi and I are working towards is building technologies and ideas that enable us to have both flexible and democratic organizations that are funded and governed.
in a reasonable way. Yeah, I actually, listening to Santiago talk, I had this question earlier
where I was going to ask him, oh, you know, I noticed you guys were given funding by Y Combinator,
but they're an accelerator and they're trying to make a lot of money. So why would they fund a
nonprofit? But I immediately, when you were talking, I thought, oh, this sounds like something
very useful for all kinds of technology projects. Yeah, we're lucky to be one of the few
actually nonprofit projects funded by YC and were extremely thankful because that allowed
us to come to the US.
You know, my beginning with this exploration of the intersection between the Internet and
democracy dates back to Buenos Aires, where among which some colleagues and friends,
we started a political party.
And our mission was to figure out a way to do a Trojan attack to the Congress by having
candidates that will always vote in Congress according to what people decide online.
So we had to figure out the political side of things of what it takes to build a political
party that can bring this new kind of rhetoric in a context like Latin America, like Argentina,
that it's about using the internet to leapfrog our democracy to the 21st century, and at the
same time figure out the technological aspects. What does it take to build a democracy over the
internet? It has to be open source. It has to work in a decentralized way. You need a strong
consensus on the identities. And because of YC, we were able to come to the US and start thinking
about this in a global way, break the mold of the nation's state.
and understand that the narrative of the 21st century is definitely the internet
no longer just taking over the cultural layer of society,
which already the web won that battle.
But I think that the blockchain revolution, quote-unquote,
is about taking control or the internet going after the institutional layer of reality.
And that's a much more powerful layer.
Yeah, and reading some of the materials to get prepared for this,
I was thinking that actually some of these problems we're seeing with elections
and such may come from the fact that our lives have moved digitally,
but our voting systems have not.
And so we're kind of in this transition period where, you know,
just all that infrastructure hasn't yet caught up.
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a general problem of sort of the formalism that governs our lives,
like nation state and the corporation, whatever, like not really matching the society that
we actually live in.
And I think, yeah, I think many of our problems and not just the like fake news or whatever,
but all sorts of things come from the fact that like we don't have formal institutions that are
sufficiently responsive to the social reality that we're actually living.
The nation state is already in a big crisis, especially since the last election in America,
where a lot of questioning and has been put on the role that Facebook played because of the
suspicion there was a foreign power interfering with the election, the most powerful election
in the world.
the principle of the nation-state is based on non-domestic intervention.
Since the peace of Westphalia in the 17th century,
it's this basic rule that keeps an equilibrium of power
that achieves a certain peace that you don't mess with my domestic affairs
and I won't mess with your domestic affairs.
When you have a foreign influence being suspicious of exploiting this technology
called Facebook that has actually everyone voting every day,
But the problem of Facebook is that it's a fake kind of voting because it's surveys based on the idea of satisfying Facebook's profit needs because it's at the end of the day an advertising company.
It's Facebook surveying people.
But we're voting with every like.
We're actually giving a preference.
Now, these likes only satisfy this advertising-based business model.
And it turns out that whether we want it or not, now it's breaking the very principle of non-domestic intervention.
and Mark Zuckerberg's being called to testify in Congress and explain what's going on.
Now, you know, Facebook has been an influence factor in elections anywhere in the world, in the Arab Spring, in many, many environments.
The fascinating thing in political terms of what's happening right now is that now not even the U.S. is protected from what it has created.
So the nation state is no longer in place.
Wow.
So, Glenn, you kind of came into crypto and a problem.
really different fashion. So why don't you explain what you're working on and how it has come to
evolve together or evolve into working in the crypto space? Well, I mean, I think the way I ended up
in the crypto world was that I was always really interested in what you guys might call decentralization,
what I would call liberalism. It's just the opposition to sort of random historical authorities
running our lives without much legitimacy or reason for being there, et cetera.
And an alternative to that is to try to set up new rules of the game
that provide a lot of the backbone that we get out of these regulatory institutions
or corporations or whatever,
but that embodies it more in something like the rule of law
or some way in which we design our society.
And I wrote a book about that,
but I soon became aware that that was sort of the goal that a lot of people in the crypto community had
was to try to replace a lot of these concentrations of power with sort of new rules of the game
that would sort of take more take care of themselves and allow things to be more decentralized.
But the problem is, while they were interested in those ideas,
the actual rules they had by and large come up with didn't seem to actually yield the outcomes they wanted.
They ended up concentrating a lot of wealth in some people's hands.
concentrating power in other people's hands. It didn't work out the way that they hoped.
And on the other hand, I had come out from a crypto perspective, just from the perspective of like,
well, that's a very old story. Things not working out the way people hoped.
We actually have a whole science and economics called mechanism design that is about trying to
address that issue. And I, you know, through that set of things, came up with some ideas for society,
not particularly ideas for crypto, but ideas for society. But it turned out that it was like
solving a problem that crypto people had had for a while.
And what are some of those solutions that you want to propose or have been proposing?
So some ideas are a new funding mechanism to create organizations that are neither the nation state nor
corporations that unlike corporations are not about profit, they're about the public good,
but unlike the nation state, don't have like fixed boundaries or some particular constituency
that instead that emerges.
And the way that that works.
So like a Dow.
Sort of like a Dow.
But, yeah, but different than Dow's that currently exist, because it would be funded not based on some sort of capitalist profit principle, but instead based on effectively a set of matching grants.
So you can imagine, like the Ethereum Foundation gives out grants, actually many of the cryptocurrencies foundations give out grants.
And you can imagine that those grants could be allocated either, as you were describing earlier, Santee, by like some board or something like that.
or in this case, the way that they actually get allocated is that individuals make contributions to some project, like on Kickstarter, but then the grants come in as matching funds for those individual contributions.
So now, how exactly do you want to structure those matching funds?
Do you want to match one for one?
Do you want to match smaller contributions more, which a lot of people think we should do, right, because it's more democratic?
Do you want to – but if you want to match smaller funds more, like how much more?
like how much more and how does that work, et cetera.
So it turns out from economic theory,
you can sort of derive an optimal design for that.
And that's what Vitalik, Buderen,
this economist philosopher, poet lady Zoe Hitzig,
and I have come up with is a sort of optimal system for doing that.
So that's one example.
Which is what?
So it's that the square of the sum of the square roots contributed
is the amount that the organization receives.
That's a big mouthful.
And you guys call it that quadratic voting?
We call it quadratic finance.
Quadratic finance.
Okay, so how does that work exactly?
So, okay, if under a normal contributory system, the amount that someone would receive would be you add up all the money that's given in by different people.
Under this system, instead, you add up the square roots of the amount that's given, and you square that.
So what that means is that if you give small contributions because the square root is concave, you get more matching funds.
if there are many people contributing, you get more matching funds.
So it has this sort of democratic character that sort of like Bernie Sanders would get like a lot of matching funds.
And like Mitt Romney or someone who funded their whole own campaign would get no matching funds.
So that's the idea.
Like something that's popular and that has lots of small contributions will get lots of matching.
And something that is just like one dude doing it will get no matching.
Yeah, I guess, okay, well, I'm not going to name political figures.
I think the listeners might get mad if I say.
Yeah.
Who would not fare well.
But I really like that idea.
Is anybody in the crypto space working on applying that in some fashion?
Yeah, so actually, this has been by far of all the ideas the most quickly adopted.
There are two implementations that I know of, and I got an indication the other day that there might be some higher profile implementations that are more private.
But there was one for charitable matching by We Trust.
Oh.
Oh, they were advertisers on my show.
Okay.
Yeah, and I've spoken to them before.
Yeah.
They're doing interesting stuff.
And then Gitcoin.
Oh, right, right.
They're an interesting project.
Just completed a campaign, I think yesterday, I think, was the end of the campaign for giving open source software or really blockchain infrastructure within the Ethereum blockchain grants.
And it appears that consensus grants, which is a much bigger version of that, he's going to adopt.
their approach based on the results of them?
Consensus systems?
Consensus grants.
So consensus just announced a set of grants that they're going to be doing.
I think they announced it last week or maybe earlier this week.
Yeah.
Like consensus in Bushwick.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And they're going to give out a set of grants to...
Like, meaning they're going to be the matching?
But that's not confused about.
The first thing they announced was that they were going to give out grants.
And then it looks like they're...
going to, the way they're going to give those out is by making it into this matching fund.
Oh, wow.
Hmm.
I guess we'll have to watch that.
Yeah, because it's somewhat similar to quadratic voting, which is.
It is very related.
It's, it came after quadratic voting, but it's very related, yeah.
Yeah, and I wanted to have you describe, like, I liked that part in your book where you
were talking about how quadratic voting changes, but voting behaviors when compared to more
traditional polling around the, I don't know, how to pronounce it, the Lycurt.
Lickert.
Yeah, yeah.
Liquor.
Yeah.
So can you describe that for the listeners?
Yeah, so quadratic voting is a system that's related to this,
but rather than using money, you're given a budget of credits that you can't,
they're non-fundgable, you can't trade them with someone else.
And you use these to vote, say, on issues or on candidates that you care about.
And because it's a budget, you can express a stronger preference on something that is more
important to you, but it becomes increasingly expensive to do that. So if you get four votes,
that costs you 16 credits, whereas one vote only costs you one credit. So buying the fifth vote is
way more expensive than buying the first vote. And are you literally purchasing the credits?
No, the credits are not fungible for money. You can't sell them or trade them. You're allocated
them by a system. So when you say expensive, what does that mean? In units of these credits. So everyone gets
a budget of credits, but then there are a bunch of different issues or candidates that they can
spend those on. And the more influence you have on any given issue or candidate, the more
expensive in units of those credits it becomes. So it's way cheaper to have a little bit of influence
on many issues than to have a lot of influence on one issue. And when you say more expensive
to have that greater influence, is it simply because then you can't use the credits?
Exactly. Right. So like, for example, imagine there's 10 issues. You could have 10 votes on one
issue or you could have three votes on all 10 issues. So then you would have three times as much
influence if you spread them out more evenly. Oh, okay. Okay. Now I understand. Well, so here's something
that I was curious about when I was reading it. So, well, actually, so let's, but let's go back,
describe the liquor thing. Yeah. Yeah. So the liquor scale, which is something everyone probably is familiar
with is one of these surveys where they say, do you strongly agree? Do you weekly agree? Are you
neutral or are you weakly opposed, et cetera. Now, the problem with those liquor at scales is if you
look at the distribution of reports that people give, most people are on one of the two extremes,
a good chunk of people who are at completely neutral, and almost no one is at anything between.
Now, maybe that's actually what people's preferences are, but it seems kind of weird. The thing
looks like a W, which is not what any statistical distribution I've ever seen looks like,
Whereas if you put people under quadratic voting and you have them vote on issues in a similar way, but they have this budget constraint and it becomes increasingly expensive, the distribution of preferences looks like a bell curve, which is what most distributions look like, not a W.
And so in that sense, it seems to get much more honest responses from people.
Yeah, it essentially forces people into making tradeoffs, whereas like under liquor, then they can sort of scream as loud as they want on everything.
Exactly, with no, yeah, without having to do the trade-offs.
It's a good recipe for this age of polarization.
Exactly, right.
But so this is why I said before that I was a little bit skeptical because when I was
reading about quadratic voting, I sort of, I got like how the budget constraint seemed
really smart.
Yeah.
And yet at the same time, I have seen this time and again.
It's happened to me.
It's happened literally to a friend of mine recently.
We saw it happen with Offrey in the Ethereum space where he was sort of forced
out, I think, because of some people got super riled up, but I don't know if they represented the majority.
But there are many examples kind of in our politics where you see that like there's one very
vocal and passionate small group of people that kind of force an issue, whereas maybe the silent
majority or the majority is probably silent because they're, maybe it's the status quo and they're
sort of like happy with it, right? And so that's why I'm a little bit like, why is it a good idea
to give minorities this greater power because then essentially what we're going to see happen is that
these extremes kind of take control of things.
It's sort of similar to how people always talk about how the primary system in U.S. politics is bad
because then you get the passionate base that don't represent everybody to pick the candidate
and then nobody's happy in the election.
So I kind of don't understand how this could lead to good outcomes.
I think there are two extremes that we can think.
about. So one extreme is one person, one vote, majority rule. And I think that that has the
problem, which is endlessly discussed in the crypto space, especially Vlad Zamfair, for example,
goes on and on about this, of mob rule and like the majority, oppression of the majority,
and people who like really don't know or care anything, just go one way. And then everybody else
goes along, even if they may know and care way more than that. So you don't want to go to that
extreme. But the opposite extreme is allowing a very small, passionate group to just dominate
everybody else, right? So clearly neither of those is the right place to be. So what do we want?
We want something that allows people to express their greater knowledge or preference,
but where it gets pretty costly if they want to dominate everybody else, right? And it's exactly
that happy middle that quadratic voting strikes. So in fact, you can see this if you,
if you just give these liquor things, people go to the extreme. If you give people,
a linear budget where they can just take points and they can put it on whatever they care most about,
you get the same pattern.
Basically, people put all their votes on one issue that they care the most about.
And then you don't get the rule of the majority or the right decision.
You get the domination of the few people who care the most about that particular issue.
Quadratic voting is this compromise in between it, but it's not just a compromise.
You can actually show mathematically reasons why, and I can explain that to you if it's useful,
you get exactly expression in proportion to how important the issue is to you,
rather than either going to the extreme or just completely forgetting about the importance.
So essentially what you're saying is like some of the extreme behaviors that we see online
or just in society get tempered even when you give the minority more power.
So even if they are able to affect change, it's not as extreme as it would have been otherwise
or something like that is that.
Yeah, I mean, look, you can have a situation.
in a room where you like have everyone be quiet and just have everyone raise their hands and take a vote
or you can have a situation where you allow people to scream as loud as they want to scream. And there's like almost no cost to that. Both of those are not very good ways to make a decision.
Right. Instead, you want some orderly process where it becomes costly for you to be louder, but you do have the ability to do that if it's really important to you. That's how good decision-making processes work. And this tries to mimic that with formal mathematics.
Well, one other thing I wanted to ask about was in the way that you framed your answer, you sort of assumed that the people that feel passionately are also the most knowledgeable. But I think like we saw back in the Tea Party days, there were some people who were Tea Party activists who believed that, for instance, ObamaCare was going to institute death panels and they would like scream about this at these town halls. But obviously, that wasn't true. So that's another case in which I sort of wonder, like, does it make sense?
Well, I mean, so on average, what we know from the political science literature is that that's not true, that like actually the people who tend to feel most passionate about things, on average, are more knowledgeable.
That doesn't mean that they'll always agree with you.
But in terms of answering factual questions, having read a lot about the thing, et cetera, on all those measures, the people who are most indifferent on the issue know the least on average.
And the people who are most have the strongest preferences know the most.
So that example that I gave was just an outlier?
Well, I mean, look, I think that there are people who are, quote, knowledgeable, unquote, on both sides and who've read a lot who believe things that may not necessarily be what all statisticians or what all, you know, like descriptors of the thing would do.
But at some level in a democratic society, like, we have to settle disagreements, including disagreements about things that many of us believe are the absolute.
facts of the matter. And I think I could tell you a bunch of facts on issues that you might
care about that, like, you know, most economists would agree with, but certainly are not what the
New York Times is reporting all the time because it doesn't go with the usual left narrative either.
So, I mean, like, you know, and we have to find a way to settle those disputes as citing.
It's only the right that has misinformation. That wasn't what I was saying. I was just saying that
sometimes passion comes from misinformation.
Well, I'm just saying on average in our society, that's not what, like, political
science literature is consistent with and shows.
And in fact, like, you take the example, like a lot of people, for example, it's an objection
to quadratic voting are like, oh, but, you know, Trump had so many passionate supporters.
That's just, like, not true.
Like, it's just as a matter of fact, like, if you look at, like, intensity weighted polling,
which they've done where you have these extreme, you know,
liquor is imperfect, right?
But even with its imperfections,
if you just weight things based on that
and you do just a quantitative, weighted polling,
Trump came in dead last of all the candidates that were running
of the 20 that were in the primaries.
Hillary Clinton came in second to last.
Kaysik came in first,
and Bernie Sanders came in second.
Wait, Kasek came in first?
Yes, because...
Wait, John Kasek?
He would have come in first in that weighted polling.
Yes. And the reason is that for every strong supporter of Trump, you had two strong opponents.
For every 1.5 strong supporters of Hillary Clinton, you had two strong opponents.
Kasek had some relatively small number of strong supporters. Almost no one disliked him.
And he had quite a lot of weak supporters. So once you actually net all these things out and you think
about the fact that passion of that sort is almost always as much negative on the other side as it is positive on your side,
it's just like a lot of the intuitions that people have are just not really right.
Wow. Yeah, no, it would be super fascinating to implement this and see how it changes outcomes.
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CypherTrace is securing the crypto economy. Back to my conversation with Glen Weil and Santiago,
Sari. Santiago, you looked like you wanted to make a comment about that.
Politics would be so much boring if we had these systems in place, right?
That is, well, I don't know. Would it be? I don't know if it would be boring. Maybe it would be
interesting in a less morbid way.
Yeah.
Maybe a little bit less like looking at the corpse on the side of the thing and instead
watching a really beautiful art exhibit.
Yeah.
They say politics is show business for ugly people.
Right, right.
Well, we would hope.
So to keep going on the voting track, I wanted to ask about just in general using blockchain
technology and voting.
This is a very controversial topic.
Like I've been on blockchain and crypto conferences where people who are super gungho for
this technology.
they're dedicating their lives to it, and they will get into these huge arguments.
Some people say, and I've seen it on Twitter as well, they'll talk about how dangerous and irresponsible it is, to use blockchain-based systems for voting.
So for you guys who are kind of working on the technology to try to implement your ideas, what do you feel like it needs to be put in place in order for people to be able to trust these kinds of systems?
So when it comes to, for example, in the case of national elections or state elections,
which are very big processes that involve all of society, ideally,
there's this long argument, long-time argument of e-voting or using electronic machines versus paper ballots when it comes to voting systems.
And I think a lot of these arguments make sense in the sense that we need to create systems
where everyone in society can have the capacity of auditing,
how the election is working and provide the proper mechanisms to reduce the likelihood of corruption
or tampering with the ballot boxes or with the electoral system.
Electronic voting machines, because of that, are severely questioned all around the world.
I think one of the best recommendations that I read on this subject is actually from the Supreme Court of Germany
that argues back in 2010, I think,
that any voting system should at least have two kinds of support to store the votes.
So if you're going to do an electronic voting system,
keep a paper trail so you can have the two supports that are storing the votes to take with each other,
rather than do only electronic or only paper.
When you look at only paper ballot kinds of elections,
especially in developing nations, you see all kinds of coercion and violent attacks,
from people stealing the ballot boxes, burning ballot boxes,
and basically you rely on party authorities to count the votes,
which reduces the scope of people you need to bribe in order to win an election.
And in that respect, machines are actually better,
if we can have systems that can electronically give the guarantees that the votes
being counted the right way, it's probably better.
So in the argument, I think there's this discussion of electronic voting yes or no.
It's a false binary argument.
We need to think of hybrid systems, and we need to think of systems that can really include
everyone in society if we're thinking about elections.
That said, when it comes to governance of blockchains, there's governance of blockchains,
and there's governance by blockchains.
One thing is how we're going to guarantee the mechanisms that allow for the upgradeability of these protocols.
And in that sense, finding the mechanisms that help everyone have a consensus whether we should implement sec with or not.
And then there's governance by blockchains, which is using this technology to face the challenges that society requires,
to bring much better accountability to our democracy and really, you know,
help elections happen not once every two years, but technically we could have democracies
where we could be actually voting or participating in a much more dynamic way than just going
to the poll every two years. So I try to focus more on how these technologies can serve society,
pay a lot of attention to the governance mechanisms of the different blockchain protocols
that are out there. But there's, I think, a huge, tremendous potential to think
on how these technologies can start paving the way towards global governance
and to a new kind of politics that runs on the very same source of information
that we use on a daily basis, which is the Internet.
I mean, I would be one in the skeptical camp of actually literally using blockchains
for important voting anytime very soon.
Some of the things I think are real issues,
and this is something we will probably talk about at some point,
but and that's important with Santi and me is identity.
There are not like blockchain is fundamentally not a system based on human beings.
And voting is fundamentally a system based on human beings.
I couldn't agree more.
Yeah, that was actually the issue.
This is probably the most single fundamental issue, but there's several other issues as well, even beyond that.
So coercion resistance is a huge issue because the truth is in almost any electronic voting system that is remote.
and is not in person without really, really, really thoughtful hardware fixes.
I'm just not sure software is enough.
I don't know how you stop someone from just looking at your phone while you vote.
Like, and that's a major issue.
That's a very, very serious issue.
And that goes well beyond.
And when you say looking, you mean like a hacker?
Physically, no, physically someone being there with your phone watching you press a
button. Like, there may be ways to have hardware that prevents that, but it is not a trivial
hardware problem at all. And there's no way, there's nothing about the blockchain that can fix
that problem. It fundamentally has to be a hardware issue. So. And wait, I mean, what about just
telling people do this in a private place when no one's around? No, no, but the thing is someone can,
who wants to be paid by someone else to vote can easily circumvent that. Whereas like,
if you're in a private booth and that's observable to the election officials, that's very different.
Oh, I see what you're saying. So they know that you are choosing to vote on your own well.
You have to, coercion resistance requires not just that you want to resist coercion,
but that you are unable to prove to someone how you vote. Otherwise, you can be coerced.
And so, like, I'm not saying there's no way to solve that and I go to things all the time about this,
But, like, I think fundamentally it is a hardware problem.
And there may be hardware solutions to that hardware problem.
But they are, like, fundamentally different than the software things that blockchain can facilitate.
So even beyond the identity thing, there's these really hard hardware issues.
So, and I could go on.
But I think there's, like, a number of, like, really difficult challenges of doing this.
And, by the way, some things like that happen for absentee ballots.
But there's, like, huge issues with absentee ballots is like,
well for the same reason. So there's just a lot of challenges involved. And so you glossed over the
identity, but that was actually what, you know, where I was leading with my question. I gloss over it because I think
we should dive into it in greater depth. Well, let's do that now. Let's talk about that now.
Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, well, I mean, my question really about it is just, just generally, I feel like
something I talk about often on the podcast is the problem of oracles, you know, how can you
verify in any situation, not just identity, but how can you verify that real-world data
imported to the blockchain is actually true? So here, you know, obviously identity is kind of the
main thing, but are you guys working on proposals right now to, you know, be sure that these
identities are, can be, are verifiable? One of the most scary papers that I read in recent times
is this paper published in December that uses generative adversarial networks, which is this
new technique of machine learning to create pictures of humans that are very extremely photorealistic,
beats the uncanny valley, and that never existed.
These machine learning algorithms can learn the features that are happening in our faces
and combine these features and generate new faces that look exactly like any random picture of any
human being.
Yeah, I think I saw an article about this, and it was really creepy.
It's actually, there's also masks.
So there are masks that have now been developed that with a 97% human success rate from the distance that you and I are currently at, I couldn't tell was not actually a real human face.
So the very nature of humanity is being challenged by artificial intelligence.
And this is a very, very tricky race that we're fighting against.
In that sense, coming from democracy, we're trying.
try to think about what are plausible lines that we can explore and research to try to figure
how to address this problem. When it comes to blockchains, there are a couple of entities
that you need to care about when it's about governance. One is you probably have to deal with
bots, artificial intelligences that try to hijack the network. Civils and a human identity
that is actually controlling multiple identities. And then the risk of money and bribing that
can corrupt validators in the network.
To address the issue of bots, a line of research that we're looking into is this idea
we call Turing Impossible Proofs, some kind of proof that is able to be validated by another
human being, but an AI is simply not able to process or understand or parse that information.
I always give the example of how I did my daughter's birth certificate three years ago already,
by using video. And it's a video file that has me, my wife, two witnesses, which are my mom and my mother-in-law,
acknowledging the identity of my daughter. And then because it's video content, it is still hard for, you know,
machine learning algorithms require a lot of training for specific purposes. So it's not something that an AI can
easily catch, at least not at the state of computing today. It won't be the case in a couple of years.
but it's a first step towards figuring out a format
that we know that only other humans can really,
you know, are really required to understand and interpret
and not just artificial intelligences.
That's an approach, you know, an initial step towards figuring out
how to prevent bots.
Then the issue of civils is probably working with reputation algorithms
or trust in the network.
The problem with reputation is that reputation is a code name,
for centralization or reputation algorithms mathematically are centralization algorithms.
So a third approach that we're also looking into is cryptographic lotteries, randomization,
which actually, you know, if you go back at the history of democracy, the Greeks, the way
they implemented democracy was through lotteries. They elected public servants using this device
called the Claretotterian, which was an entropy device, a lottery device. And if you got picked by this
device, you had to become a public servant for a year. I think that when it comes to
blockchains, those who get the rights to validate identities, they should get that right
after a cryptographic lottery, so you don't know who to bribe in the network and, you know,
helps keep the system protected against this kind of economic attacks. These are all tentative
lines to research and work on, but I think we definitely need to address this problem because
when Satoshi Nakamoto said one CPU, one vote, that's his quote from the paper, that's
fantastic, but that's talking about power to the machines. If these technologies are going to
serve society, we need to man up to the situation and figure out how we're going to do
one node, one human, or something that really takes into place the social layer of these
networks and not just the technological software layer.
Yeah, and so I very much share Santee's goals.
I have a slightly different approach, which tries to go sort of deeply into actually
sort of the philosophical level of like what is human identity.
And the way I think about that is that what we are is basically a bunch of information
and all the information about who we are is already.
shared with other people. So take the example of my mother's date of birth. My mother's date of birth is also
my mother's date of birth, and it's my grandmother's date of her first child's birth, and it's my sister's
mother's date of birth. And in fact, if you think about almost all the information about you,
it is shared with different people already, just by the nature of social life. And in fact, if you go back
in the history of the development of identity, that is where,
that was the nature of identity verification prior to the emergence of the nation state.
So actually, most people didn't have a surname.
They didn't have a last name.
They sometimes had a first name, but often they would even just be described by their relationship to other people.
So you would be the person who lives in, you know, the child of, et cetera, et cetera.
And in fact, names emerge from that.
The reason that the surname is inherited from your parents comes from that.
and the reason why in many countries there are patronymics or matronymics in some countries
is precisely because of that relational nature of identity.
And I, oh, patronymic, that's like.
John Stepanovich, you know, son of Stefan, you know what I mean, Stephen, right?
And so if once you take that into account, then you actually start saying, oh, what is your
identity, well, the face is really not a good way to think about your identity. It's just
heuristic. The truth is that your face is a reflection of all of the things you've been through
in your life. And all of those things that you've been through in your life are a way more rich
and complex set of data that's far, far harder to fake, especially when you take into account
the fact that there's always for almost all those things, somebody else who knows it.
And you'd have to fake those. You see what I mean? So once you start actually embedding people
fully within their social context,
rather than in the way that the nation state
and centralized institutions have done it
by trying to flatten you down to like
your fingerprint or your face or your iris.
But if you actually think about the full social context
of everything,
that is far harder to reproduce
than is these thinner aspects
that we've relied upon.
Well, so I don't know if I totally agree with that
because honestly, when you were describing those things
or reminded me of those security questions
that you get when you're trying to log
in your bank account and it's like, you know, who is your teacher in first grade or what's
your mom's mental name or whatever. And so I feel like those are things that other people can
find out. And that's why they always say you should lie when you answer the security question.
So that way a hacker can't, you know, gain access to your bank account or whatever. So
how would you use that, like using that theory, how would you apply that in a blockchain-based
identity system? So I think that the problem and the reason why those can be problematic is that
there's a very small number of those things that we usually ask about.
But the reality is like you are billions of bits, not five bits.
Like your mother's date of birth is so overused.
Right.
Your social security number is so overused, right?
Like these are like ridiculously overused quantities.
But the truth is that imagine that your cell phone was in a personal data store that was,
say non-hackable, whatever, you know, really, really private, was tracking every GPS location
that you did it every time. And every time you were together with someone else, a link would be
established between your phones saying we both were here together. Okay, now this is just getting creepy.
No, but it's not in any centralized server. I don't think it's creepy at all. That's in your head anyway,
right? So all that information is in your head or maybe with less fidelity in your head.
I mean, how would you keep it from being hackable?
Well, okay.
So then there's a question of how do we secure that device?
But the point is that, like, there is enough.
Let's not even call it a device.
Let's call it your head.
And imagine your head just has an implant in it,
and it's secureable to something.
Or, you know, like, the point is that the relevant information
that's actually useful that actually shows you uniquely as you,
is all the stuff that has happened in your life.
And that's actually what makes you interesting and unique and different and so forth.
And to the extent possible, we should have digital systems that try to mimic that process
rather than ones that come up with these artificial things that flatten us.
So do you think that there is some way to implement this using in a blockchain system?
Because like what you're describing to me, I don't think it's a blockchain system.
I don't think it should be in a blockchain system.
Well, or not necessarily blockchain, but.
But if we're talking about trying to use blockchain-based systems for voting, then and talking about the problem of identity, is there...
I mean, the problem is I don't really like the blockchain data structure for this type of an application because the blockchain data structure, even though things can be added on top of it, everything is either public or private in the blockchain data structure.
And that's fundamentally wrong for the applications that I'm talking about.
Because everything I was describing was...
But what about like view keys and stuff like that?
Do you...
Well, I mean, yes.
So those can elaborate on it.
it, but I'm saying, like, the basic structure of the blockchain is based on, there's me,
and then there's the global thing. And this is fundamentally based on exactly the opposite of it.
It's like every piece of information is shared by some small community, which is not the whole thing.
To me, that's what decentralization is about, actually, is about the fact that information is
neither global nor completely individual. It's shared within a variety of different local
communities. And so I actually think that it's a different data structure than a blockchain.
It's still a data structure, and it has a lot of the spirit of blockchain in the sense that it
uses mechanisms and uses, you know, data structures to instantiate social relationships,
but it's not a blockchain per se. So essentially your idea for resolving the identity issue
if we're going to ever have blockchain-based voting is to use some other kind of technology.
Yeah. Okay. So I actually want to be.
move on to now also talk about just in general, both of you are working on ideas where you're
essentially melding money and voting. So, you know, democracy or it has its vote token.
We talked about the budget and quadratic voting. So I was thinking about this. And this is sort of a
new concept. And there was something about it that made me a little bit uncomfortable. And
my mind sort of went toward like plutocracy. Like how do you prevent the wealthy from just
ruling. So what are your thoughts on kind of the pitfalls and advantages of melding money and voting?
I definitely agree that if you look at the governance protocols of most blockchains out there,
there are all of them plutocratic, one coin, one vote. And that's probably fine for a lot of
projects where decisions are driven by different motives. But I'm particularly interested
on figuring out what it means to actually deploy democracies over the internet. That's my
my personal mission in what we're doing with democracy earth.
And the reason for attaching an economic value to the act of voting
is simply because of the need to differentiate voting from surveys.
When you participate on social media,
I think actually voting is the main interaction we do with the Internet on a daily basis.
PageRank is really an algorithm counting the votes that each link receive
from other pages on the Internet, likes on Facebook is a way of
voting, retweets on Twitter is a way of voting, app boats on Reddit, hearts on Instagram,
you name it.
We are always giving these networks, this preference and this, you know, signaling what we are
voting for.
Now, none of this voting is capturing any economic value for the voters.
It's capturing all of the economic value for the centralized entities that control these
networks, which 97% of the revenue comes from artwork.
So it's really a mechanism of surveys.
What we care about coming from Democracy Earth is finding a mechanism.
And, you know, I think quadratic voting is one of the most promising ideas by far in the space
to understand how we can stop, you know, being subject of surveys and really empower the end user with voting transactions that are able to trigger
institutional change that are able to trigger a cryptocurrency transaction or unlock,
funds or, but, you know, the difference between a survey and voting is that voting does
have institutional impact. The U.S. election has a cost of $6 billion, around $17 per vote,
if I remember the numbers correctly. It's not a free vote. There is a cost attached to, you know,
doing that process. And so when we look at how to bootstrap a democracy over these networks,
identity, I couldn't agree more, is one of the most important hurdles to overcome
if we want to start having democratic systems of governance and not just plutocratic
within blockchain environments.
Yeah.
So the way I think about it is, so first of all, you should be clear, quadratic voting
does not involve money in a traditional sense.
It involves a budget of votes, which is given equally to everyone.
However, I think that it does involve some ability to transfer votes across different things or to have a budget and not just one vote on everything.
And I think a fundamental problem in our society, and this is partly where we started, is this incredibly sharp distinction that we make between the market and the state.
You know, the market is flexible and adaptable and whatever, but it's undemocratic.
and exploitative. And the state is democratic and equal, but completely rigid and fixed.
And that distinction sucks. It's the reason why we have all the issues that I think that we have.
The right way to think about things is we all have fundamentally equal dignity. But the notion
that we should all have completely equal voice within every organization that we're a member of is
totally crazy. It's like nobody wants that. You know, Hannah Arendt, who is one of my favorite
philosophers, said one of the greatest freedoms in the modern era is the freedom from politics.
A lot of people just don't want to have to deal with all this junk. And like the reason we have
representatives, the reason that we have boards, the reason we have everything is that not
everybody wants to have equal say on everything. So what we need to do is give people equal total
voice, but allow people to choose where they want to exercise that voice, rather than saying
that we're going to flatten everyone down to a homogeneous pancake. That just makes no sense.
And then we're in the marketplace. I can buy whatever food I want. I can buy a car. I'm a
free individual. I can do it ever the hell I want. But then when it comes to politics, I'm exactly
the same as everyone else. Both of those are stupid caricatures. The truth is that we're part
of lots of different communities. And to the extent we're part of those communities, we take on some
notion of equality, but we should have freedom to choose which ones we exercise that in and
where we belong. Yeah, I've talked about this on the show, but are you familiar with the
referendum system in California? Yeah, I grew up in California. Like when I lived there, it was just
like so annoying. Yeah, the most common complaint you hear from people in California is why are
they asking me to vote on all this crap? I know. I would be like, I have no idea. Like,
why are you asking me? You know, and it is a relief to like not have to do that anymore.
So Hunter Arendt says that it is inevitable in life that not everyone can be like involved in and having a say on every political issue.
Instead, we're going to have to have some elites.
But as much as possible, we should have those elites be ones that emerge from people's personal desire to be involved in something,
rather than elites that are, that, you know, come from somebody being in power and someone else being out of power.
And I think that should be our goal is for the people who,
who govern us to emerge from the public rather than from the top down.
And I think that that's true democracy, not one person, one vote.
Borges, the Argentine writer, once said one day will be worthy of not needing governance anymore.
That would be, yeah, I like that.
Well, yeah, I mean, I think that's this emergent property that Glenn was talking about.
So we're kind of running out of time.
So I want to actually bring it back to Ethereum, because Glenn,
And correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that you've said that, Votelic is now your closest collaborator.
That's something you mentioned to me in a pre-interview.
So how so?
Well, I think that Votelik's primary goal is to a large extent very similar to mine, which is that he wants to build governance institutions, ways of organizing society, and experiments with those that work way better than the institutions that we currently have.
And he viewed Ethereum as a platform to enable those experiments, but ultimately those experiments
were what interested him rather than like Ethereum per se.
And so I think he didn't see the vehicle for generating those types of experiments as much
before the book other than just putting something out there.
But now that like the substance of it, he sees a way to get into it.
He's been focused a lot on that recently.
and I've benefited a lot from collaborating with them on those questions.
And so that is, like, are you guys working at, how else are you working on applying quadratic finance?
So we had this paper on quadratic finance.
We, you know, he's giving a speech at this conference that I'm having next month.
Radical exchange.
March 22nd, 24th.
Actually, I guess right after the event that he's doing with you.
So he's calling New York and then to Detroit.
And then he and I, so I've been writing a series of blog posts.
about my sort of political views, and he's been giving me a lot of comments on those.
He's, we're co-authoring another paper, which is sort of a methodology paper about how to come up
with ideas like this.
How did you guys meet anyway, actually?
We didn't cover that.
Oh, it's really funny.
So in October of 2017, he retweeted one of my papers, or he tweeted out one of my papers,
and I got like more Twitter traffic than I've gotten from any, everything combined to that point.
And he, I had never heard of him before.
I was not into blockchain at all.
I looked him up, and he seemed like a bond villain to me.
He was like, you know, 23, 24-year-old kid, Russian, Canadian, living in Switzerland, made all this money on some shadowy business enterprise.
But then I asked him whether he wanted to read a draft of my book, and he wrote back like 30 pages of the best comments I'd ever gotten.
Wow.
And so I realized that there had to be something more going on there than just criminal activity.
And so that was how we started hanging out.
Oh my God, I love that story.
Yeah, no, he's so thoughtful and incredibly smart.
I'm sure I don't need to say this to my listeners.
But so one thing that I was so curious about is Vatolic has actually said that he prefers off-chain governance for managing Ethereum.
So in, and that was a while ago.
So I'm just curious, like in your talks with him, has he expressed interest in testing or implementing some of these ideas in an on-chain way for Ethereum itself or even, you know,
using democracy or its ideas?
I mean, I think once we solve these other problems that we're talking about,
he's very enthusiastic about that.
But I think it has to wait for these other solutions.
And as I mentioned, I'm personally skeptical that there exists a on-chain identity
solution, period.
I think we may need fundamentally different technologies that are possible directly on the
blockchain without contorting it in a thousand ways that make it just like, you know,
Brave uses the blockchain, right?
But that's not most of what's going on.
So, I mean, you could say it's using the blockchain.
But I think you have to use fundamentally different data structures
to supplement blockchains in order to make this possible.
Our very notions of what identity means can be changed,
will change for sure as we become more familiar on how to use these technologies.
Maybe we can start talking about probabilistic identity in the sense that,
you know, you are not full human or full machine,
but some kind of threshold in between
and working around with that.
There are many, many different ways of looking at this.
Ultimately, what blockchins are,
what blockchains are enabling is the ability
to bring trust into computer programs.
I definitely think that Ethereum has had the tremendous ability
to accelerate what is possible to think
in terms of doing smart contracts
and be able to compute trust
in ways that Bitcoin maybe by design decided not to be too incomplete,
decided to strictly stick to the narrative of money and payments and store of value.
And, you know, that's okay.
Thank you, Satoshi for all of that.
But Ethereum took the bold step to allow for much more complex systems to be created
because of what making a world computer, quote-unquote, allows.
And in that sense, it's interesting, you know, now we are a couple of
years into the experiment and we're seeing interesting projects to get traction that are not
just the ETH token or it's not just the ICO narrative of 2017, but actually new technologies
of decentralized finance.
And I'm hoping that we definitely also see decentralized politics.
And in that respect, you know, we are building systems of trust.
Institutions are collections of promises and what the blockchains allow is to guarantee those
promises with cryptographic proof rather than the words of an authority or of a politician.
And for the long term of our societies where especially, you know, I come from Latin America,
my major concern after having dealt with politics in my country is how terrible corruption can be
and what, you know, the impact it has on a culture, on a society is really, really terrible.
And my hope is that technology can help battle a lot of those shortfalls that happen in the way things are today.
You sort of very naturally led into what my last question was, which was like if this vision that you guys are working toward comes to fruition, what will that world look like?
You know, when I was in DevCon this year in Prague, someone told me this joke, half-joke maybe, that the,
The political experiment of the 20th century was communism.
And we can't probably argue that it was a big failure anyway.
It was tried on every continent in every possible combination.
And the dictatorship of the proletariat didn't let anywhere good after a whole century of experimentation with those ideas.
A couple countries still trying.
A couple countries still trying.
But anyway.
But that said, that said, a friend of mine told me,
on the Bitcoin, blockchain like Marxism is going to be successful in the developing world first.
It's going to be tried in the developing world first.
Because when you go to the developing world, you see this need, this demand for trying an alternative to the status quo.
In my country in Argentina, we are facing 40% of final inflation rate.
It's what pushed me to get Bitcoin back in 2011.
In, you know, needless to say, in countries like Venezuela, where the Cs,
Simply trusting the established institutions is not possible.
So you have nothing to lose by embracing these new technologies that can help society work under a much better social contract, which works in digital form and is secured by computational capacity.
And I think this is the narrative of the 21st century.
The 1917 of the 21st century was 2009 when the Bitcoin clock started.
And this is going to unfold, and I hope this is a much better experiment than the experiments of the last century.
So the world I imagine is one that's fundamentally beyond this binary between like corporations that are for profit and governments that are democratic but rigid.
It's a world where it's something I call polypolitonism, where rather than we're a citizen of the United States,
United States, you would be a citizen of hundreds of different communities. And these communities
would own most things. There would be very little private property, but there would be all these
diverse common ownership forms. And what would make you unique as an individual would be the set
of communities that you're a part of and that you gain value from. And most of the things that we
currently buy with money, we would instead participate in communities that would provide them to us
and we would contribute to the democratic governance of all those communities. So it's sort of a
radically democratic but also radically decentralized vision of the world where civil society as we
think about it, things that are neither the private sector nor government and that are democratically
governed and that are responsive and emergent takes up most of our life.
Yeah, we did not get into a topic that I did want to touch on, but we're way over time.
But I will link to something in the show notes so people can read about it.
It's called Common Ownership Self-Assessed Tax, which goes by the economic cost.
And it was very fascinating, but it goes into what Glenn was just talking about where it's sort of like this kind of public-private ownership.
But yeah, but we'll have to say that for another day.
maybe I'll just have you guys back
because this was so fascinating.
But in the meantime, where can people learn more about you?
You can find everything about Democracy Earth
on Democracy.Earth.
That's our website.
And definitely you can find me on crypto-twitter.
I like to hang there a lot.
I'm at Santysiri, and feel free to drop me a line there.
And everyone should check out HTTP Radical X
lowercase exchange.org.
That's this conference that we're having next month
with artists, entrepreneurs,
activists, academics.
In Detroit, Vitalik, Zucco, et cetera, et cetera.
Yeah, the tickets are available for a little while longer.
I hope many people will come.
And you can also follow at Rad Exchange on Twitter
or mine at Glen Weil.
Great. Well, thank you both for coming on Unchained.
Thank you.
Thanks so much for joining us today.
To learn more about Glenn and Santi, check out the show notes inside your podcast player.
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Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, with help from Rainley Gallipali,
fractal recording Jenny Josephson, Daniel Nuss, and Rich Stracolino. Thanks for listening.
