The Invisible Protocols that Animate the City
A Brief Introduction to the Open Protocol Research Group
by Ven Gist, Exeunt & Macks Wolf
Overview
The goal of the Open Protocol Research Group is to generate a body of research around the functioning of exotic social production processes in the urban environment and the possibility for meaningful interventions into those processes from the p2p and crypto toolkit. Our belief is that structural similarities between non-standard social production entities (see glossary) and the peer production protocols of the web3 ecosystem present a rich avenue for mutual reciprocity. The web3 ecosystem might lend urban non-standard entities strategies and tools for building more permissive resource environments (thus hacking the revenue evil curve) while the same experimental forms might offer the web3 ecosystem insight on how peer production protocols can function in diverse cultural milieus.
Our research will include a survey of non-standard social production forms in our city, a mapping of the material relations that animate those forms, an account of how they have managed to persist and what strategies have been weeded out or honed, and other open ended engagement with relevant communities to explore the nature of these forms. The terminal goal of the project is a public facing report with at least three case studies (one of a web3 native peer production entity and two or more of nonstandard entities in our city) with insights and detailed recommendations for mutual benefit between web-native and urban nonstandard systems.
Glossary of Terms
Formalization The process of becoming broadly legible to or composable with a variety of structural norms beyond one’s own community; as distinguished from Standardization, legibility to or composability with dominant institutional norms.
Open Protocols Informal, open, permissionless knowledge sets or practices with the ability to propagate and persist absent institutional support or recognition.
Standard Entities Entities that are standardized within the dominant resource environment. These include private individuals, shareholders corporations, nonprofits, public institutions, government agencies, NGO’s.
Non-standard Entities Coherent systems of social production that are not (primarily) beholden or oriented to the dominant resource environment or dominant institutional regimes, and may be illegible before them.
Resource Environment The landscape of revenue inputs (as well as other meaningful sources of value) an entity finds themselves embedded within. Can be thought of as an economic landscape colored by political-economic determinants.
DAOs Decentralized Autonomous Organization, a means of coordinating and/or governing without the need for a central controller.
Revenue-Evil Curve The revenue-evil curve of a product is a two-dimensional curve that plots the answer to the following question: How much harm would the product’s creator have to inflict on their potential users and the wider community to earn $N of revenue to pay for building the product?
Social production & Peer production Voluntary, often spontaneous processes of collaborative creation (of material goods, social relationships, knowledge sets, etc). Eschews centralization and rigid hierarchy for fluid and shifting participation. Social production and peer production are interchangeable, though in this study peer production is used for web-native production processes.
Introduction
The city is a factory for productive social relations. Whether the assets produced are material goods, intellectual resources, or the productive social relations themselves, the social production process is going on all the time, with or without the sanction of official bodies.
However, not all forms of productions have equal access to the resources needed to sustain themselves; a major vector of capture in our free society is the allocation of resources based on standards of legibility (e.g., legal and tax legibility, legibility with nonprofit funding apparatuses or commercial systems, etc). This standardization isn’t always ill-intentioned, yet its effect is clear: at its best, it stifles experimentation, and at its worst, it’s used as an instrument of suppression by those systems that benefit from widespread insecurity and complacency.
Nonetheless, the needs of people, often underserved and/or marginalized communities, continue to fall outside of the coverage supplied by standardized institutional forms. (Whether this lack of full coverage is an inherent facet of standardization is an open question; see modern conceptions of the “industrial reserve army”). Throughout the city, perhaps spontaneously, inhabitants self-assemble into a huge variety of social forms to fill these gaps. If the city is a factory, these are social machines facing a dynamic horizon of invention and refinement.
In this dynamic environment of innovation, there seem to be those machines of production that have managed to bypass the pressures of standardization. They’ve sustained themselves in a hostile environment, becoming kinds of informal institutions beyond standardization, gems of autonomy and localist experimentalism that persist without the sanction of the powerful, even checking their dominance over social production.
Revenue Evil & Resource Environments
Vitalik Buterin’s revenue-evil curve has given us an effective means of modeling the shape of standardization pressures on particular social processes. In the United States, the productive processes that are most vulnerable to the stifling forces of standardization may be those experimenting with public goods. (The path of standardization for for-profit entities is straightforward, as the legibility under discussion is largely legibility before a for-profit regime). Over time, these forms necessarily navigate the revenue/evil curve, continuously relocating their position as they seek to sustain themselves and their purpose.
Being that public goods producers generate non-exclusive and non-rivalrous offerings, they face extreme difficulty sustaining themselves in relation to standardized resource environments while also limiting evil. Privatized and gated services can add revenue, but at the expense of added evil, as gating compromises values of open access crucial to public goods. Becoming legible as nonprofit entities depends on its own set of evils: administrative bloat, mission drift, vulnerability to influence and capture by funders.
As the viability of these systems or entities depend upon their resource environments, we should consider questions like the following:
What specific facets of standardized resource environments create hostile conditions for non-standard entities?
What invisible or illegible facets of the urban resource environment have allowed non-standard entities to persist? What strategies of “minimum viable standardization” have allowed entities to skirt revenue-evil curve conundrums?
How might non-standard entities generate and institutionalize amenable resource environments for themselves that might expand or open the overton window of social production forms? How might they exploit hidden or invisible facets of the resource environment to discover new potential paths along the revenue/evil curve?
Bootstrapping Viability
It’s our belief that distributed ledger technologies can bootstrap a more inclusive and pluralistic resource environment for non-standard social production forms, borrowing from legacy experiments in peer production to expand the “overton window” of legible organizational or economic behavior.
There will always be the need for local interpretation of global phenomena, in order for adequacy of service to emerge. While local, public goods oriented social production offers the important edge case, we will examine the cosmolocal relationship across the full stack of goods, public and private, global and local. Our operative “north star” in this research is repeatable positive sum confluence between private and public oriented systems.
It’s our belief that multiscale diversity and difference supports positive-sum confluence between public and private interests, while homogeneity tends to create antagonism between them. Opening the window of legibility, discovering strategies of generating self-bootstrapped, modular resource environments that can tolerate and support a wide plurality of forms of social production will create a wider space of opportunity for robust public goods apparatuses to be supportive of and generative of private freedom - and vice versa.
Pathways to Formal Viability Beyond Standardization
Our interest in non-standard social production entities has two poles:
Standardization
Given the current resource environment, any non-standard entity we find in the wild is likely to be both extremely well adapted (because it has managed to survive with limited resources) and extremely valuable to its participants (because they are willing to hazard the struggle of participating and maintaining the system with minimal support). If these entities have avoided formalization, it is likely because they are unwilling to accept the burdens of “standardization.”
These might include:
- high overhead costs, administrative bloat, mission drift
- vulnerability to capture (funding quid pro quos, fear of alienating potential contributors)
- pressures of centralization (board politics), homogenization, or both
Though many or perhaps most entities with this orientation have accepted minimal standardization as a trade off, their dependency on p2p community support rather than large revenue influxes points in an alternative direction. We think distributed ledger technologies, specifically decentralized means of self-assembly like DAOs, can further develop a path to formalization without making any of the above sacrifices.
The first reason for our interest in surveying non-standard entities in the city is that they offer a powerful use case for the web3 toolkit, namely in the form of formalization without standardization.
Protocols
It’s our suspicion that those non-standard entities that have managed to persist have done so because of their relationship to an often invisible substrate of social cohesion and value - the open protocol.
Open protocol is our shorthand for informal, open, permissionlessly propagated knowledge sets or practices - these can be individual practices like handwashing, or bundles of practices - e.g. health oriented hygiene - that spread in a manner that is ambivalent or sometimes antagonistic to institutional standardization.
Likewise, open protocols inspire organizational or economic behaviors that are ambivalent to standardization. As a quick example: repair culture may inspire an ad hoc community bike repair station. The participants don’t intend to make profit, become professionals, or win formal government sanction - they are encouraged by a sense of satisfaction in spreading values of autonomy and empowerment, and it’s off of that fuel that the station persists, perhaps for months or years.
This relationship (of a social production form to an open protocol) is interesting from the perspective of DLT because it mirrors the decentralized production and self-regulation methods of decentralized web protocols. Early DAOs arose as free associations of value-aligned participants interested in preserving and expanding the integrity, and potentialities, of the protocol. They ran off of the fuel of shared values. In the case of Ethereum, this protocol and its entities - through largely self-organized and horizontal innovation - generated the tools to build its own resource environment.
Here is our second point of interest: many “non-standard entities” are structurally analogous to ecosystem DAOs because of their genesis in and relationship to open social protocols. Its our hypothesis that if these entities experiment with the DAO form, they can take advantage of - and iterate upon, to their own ends - the exotic resource environments that were constructed in the web3 setting to its own wider range of organizational and economic forms. They can formalize their protocol-entity relationships, and transform the very nature of standardized production.
The why of the research project can be summed up as follows:
- wider ranging resource environments can foster less homogenous organizational and economic forms.
- a more plural landscape of social production will afford more opportunities for public and private interests to converge.
These non-standard entities already exist in the wild; it’s our task to survey them and their characteristics, sharing insights cosmolocally, between the global and local layers. If we are right, we will see evidence of structural analogies between these entities and ecosystem DAOs, thus providing a clear path for intervention that could bootstrap an expanded resource environment more tolerant to experimentation and pluralism.