Fractal Societies, Building Blocks & The Future of Humanity
Probably the best MetaGame newsletter you've received in >6 months 👀
Hey hey! Originally written to be a presentation at ETHDenver, this post has been stuck in the draft phase for far too long.
Triggered by the discussions around the concept of network states & the future of crypto, this post summarizes all of my thinking around the two & the future of humanity. It’s long, it’s weird & hopefully it’s fun. Enjoy!
In this post:
The point of Web3
Metacrisis
Economies of Impact
Game A > Game B
Resource Based Economy
Autonomous People
What you can do about it
What we are doing about it
🤔 What is Web3 About?
What if Web3 is not about the internet at all?
It started with peer-to-peer money but now it’s making internet as a whole more peer-to-peer. Web3 technologies are allowing back-end interoperability through application logic being on a blockchain & files in decentralized storage.
It means we can stop building monolithic apps & platforms siloed behind centrally controlled APIs with admins who can change anything, and start composing interoperable platforms made up of a bunch of different app & service “legos”.
Web3 gives us the ability to rearchitect platforms from centralized & siloed value extractors into decentralized & interoperable value flows.
Then we can do the same to real world institutions & states. Decentralizing financial systems & organizations then whole societies - digitizing & bringing them fully into the world wide web.
Web3 will have succeeded only once we stop using the word “web3” & these technologies move into the background, a default way of doing things.
😬 Metacrisis
Global economical, ecological & meaning crises combined with technological revolutions threatening to put masses of people out of work, dislocate masses of people from their homes & potentially destroy humanity over the next decades?
Metacrisis is a mess of interrelated crises - if you’re not familiar, read more here.
It’s obvious we can’t rely on nation states & market signals alone to solve our problems. Nation states are corrupt & incompetent while pure markets simply reward those who can extract the most profit - not necessarily solve the most problems.
Economies built around profit maximization is a bad infinite game to be playing on a finite planet. Can we build economies around wellbeing & impact maximization?
We have “triple bottom line” businesses optimizing for wellbeing of the community & the environment vs just profit. Can we have triple bottom line economies? We have purpose-driven organizations - why not purpose-driven economies?
⚖️ Democracy, market & society
Modern societies are composed of 3 systems: democratic bureaucracy, market & the civic sphere. Love them or hate them, they are 3 fundamental forms of governance for coordinating our actions towards functional societies & they aren’t going anywhere.
Currently, there are no self-regulating feedback loops between our economic & bureaucratic expansions or the ecosystems which we depend on - its all running on opaque bureaucracies & market signals.
Lack of transparency & impact data resulted in corruption & value extraction on a massive scale, with wealth being centralized in the hands of those who cut the most corners & externalize the most costs.
Democratic bureaucracy
Lack of transparency, checks & balances
Bloated, corrupt & inefficient
The market
Mindlessly optimized for a single metric - profit
Outcompeting fairness, externalizing costs to societies & the environment
Civic sphere
Has the most data about the impact of the above two systems
No levers to pull, no power in the government & no funding
Each has its own benefits & diseases but they’re all here to stay. So, What if we could just add a shitload of feedback loops & checks & balances by rebuilding them block by block to run transparently over most optimal outcomes for everyone.
DAOs have elements of all 3 so they’re actually a natural convergence & merge 🤷♂️
🌍 Economy of Impact
These days, it could all be publicly available & open to scrutiny. Unaccountable power or draining of resources could be directly criticized & stopped at the click of a button.
The world could run as a network of resources, inputs & outputs held together by layers of validations, verifications & certificates, insured by mechanisms such as staking & slashing or p2p insurance.
Having understanding & visibility into how contributions aggregate & ripple out and how projects affect their networks & communities - allows us to reward value-creation directly, at the source of value-creation rather than the point of monetization.
20th century attempts at moving on from coordinating resources purely on market signal all failed to create game theoretically sound systems & feedback loops - technologies necessary didn’t exist. These days, big corporations are using these kinds of systems for tracking & managing their resources.
Yeah, it just so happens that we have revolutionary new technologies allowing us to reimagine how money is made & how things are valued. To build new kinds of financial systems & incentive structures, new kinds of organizations & economies.
🙃 The Network Slate
Recent development & Balaji’s book have popularized the idea of Network States.
On the surface it seems like an innocuous easy way of helping people grasp the idea, but old concepts have old baggage. To me, state sounds like splitting people into ingroup & outgroup. A fixed state that contains things & you’re either in or you’re out.
In a world that operates as a network, where borders are blurry at best & imaginary for the most part - this is… Silly. An outdated concept.
Best case, it sets us on an equal footing as nation states, a seat at the “nation states table” where we are ridiculed by other nations for years to come.
Big corporations already figured this out - some are bigger & more powerful than states, yet don’t pretend to be states. They are meta entities, operating across borders.
Nonetheless, Network State stuck as a concept, a schelling point. So I’ll spin off of it & ironically but sincerely propose Network Slate to move us past the “state” model rather than competing with it.
😂 Y Slate Tho?
…How about we start with a clean slate?
Slate is a metamorphic rock, often composed of volcanic ash. Its a proverbial phoenix to rise out of the ashes & a clean slate for a new society.
Consider slate as a layer of a building block. Each tool, dapp or an item has its own stack. Made up of layers of technology: front-end to back-end, to operating systems to computer chips made of…………to atoms to….you get the idea.
Did you know “atomos” means “indivisible”? It was thought to be the fundamental building block of matter, before others figured out atoms are made up of a nucleus, protons & electrons - before others figured out these are made up of quarks…
Anyhow!
As we think of Web3 building blocks & composing them info functional platforms, we can extend this metaphor to a world at large.
Every piece of technology we’re using to run daily lives can be considered a building block composed of layers upon layers of slates, each with some data about it, inputs/outputs, costs/benefits etc. Each can be inspected & manipulated in some way.
These slates & building blocks can be composed in infinite different configurations across different dapps, teams, communities, societies, states & the world wide web.
A slate is a single layer of a building block & a building block of its own.
Each of them is autonomous & subject to some kind of laws at the same time.
Each is a whole on its own & part of something bigger at the same time.
Each of these can be a meta-slate to something & a sub-slate to something else.
Each slate block can be a node in a network AND a whole network.
A project may have full autonomy in its own domain, an equal guild inside one network & a subject of a state, all at the same time, subject to different laws & logic.
Slates can make up full stack networked societies, digitized from top to bottom.
🥦 Fractal Societies
Every slate has an address & some data about itself & its usage. Be it a team, a tool, an item or a protocol all floating in an infinite network - they all have some potential inputs & outputs.
Fractal societies scale by connecting stacks of slates into bigger wholes.
Starting at the individual level over households, squads, teams inside organizations, organizations, networks of organizations or homeowner or neighborhood associations, municipalities, nations, networks of nations or networks of impact.
All interconnected in infinite configurations, flowing their inputs & outputs of information & value.
When you really think about it, societies already are fractal in nature - its just a matter of bringing it all online.
❤️ Public Goods
I think a lot of us would be a lot more willing to pay taxes & donate to public goods if we knew exactly how the money is spent, how much impact it does or doesn’t make.
Now imagine world as a network of information & value flows, payment splitters & aggregators, where you can get a detailed view of how the money you donate disperses & transforms into impact.
From taxes & grants, through projects, to teams, down to individuals who can program their paycheck to automatically pay bills & subscriptions, donate to favorite grants & creators, invest in projects & forward to paying-card for spending on food.
All the while, paying some form of taxes whose flow is visible as well.
Of course, of course, the individuals & organizations would be able to protect their sensitive information & spending under zK if they so choose.
👉 Game A > Game B
In case you’re not familiar, Game B is a transcontextual inquiry into a new social operating system for humanity while Game A is what got to the metacrisis & collapse.
Then, we start syphoning money out of the old system by converting tech billionaires to our cause. They would be most likely to support because its a technological solution which they like & are able to validate.
Most of them claim they’re not donating because big non-profits are corrupt or inefficient while small ones are hard to validate, thus hard to donate to lots of them.
Money can start by trickling down through platforms like Gitcoin & Giveth where people can allocate bigger chunks to specific causes. On Gitcoin, people can choose carts of projects from people they trust & on Giveth, grants are grouped by causes they support, eg. “Climate Change”.
Realistically, money is the main coordination mechanism for work because people need money to survive - leaving a lot of people unhappy & working unfulfilling jobs. People want to make an impact but they need money, so a job for Facebook becomes a priority over their ReFi DAO.
🌊 One thing leads to another…
You can see how changing game dynamics can change the game.
If impact could be properly measured & organizations transparent, more people would be donating.
If more people were donating, more people could dedicate their time to impact & quit shitty corporations.
Side effect: shitty corporations would face a talent drain or have to increase salaries, both of which is great. 🤷♂️
Money raised not from VCs but simply people who have a need for it. Neighborhood associations, municipalities, etc.
We could also make it not dependant on donations by making these kinds of projects more investable, but that’s a whole ‘nother topic!
All money raised for new initiatives, 20% flowing to historical contributions?
Economies of Scale & Resource Based Economy
If we are to plow through the challenges ahead, we need to start acting like a crew aboard spaceship Earth - collaborating across organizations, industries & nations.
Other than solving the problems outlined above, there are other benefits & implications to establishing this world wide web of life.
For example:
Unlocking economies of scale
Making fiat currencies obsolete
Previously available only to big corporations & organizations, joining big networks can unlock the “economies of scale” effect for the small. You can already see it at the individual level with platforms like Groupon - now imagine it at the societal level.
In a society of clearly visible inputs & outputs, where resources like food or labor could directly be tokenized & made liquid - you can start imagining non-monetary donations as well as exchange itself facilitated by means other than money.
We already have Kokonut DAO tokenizing coconut trees, we have PΞACHES, we have Kolektivo tokenizing their food forest which will be producing food & carbon credits - can you imagine a world where we use resources instead of fiat? I can!
Altogether, it would allow us to build societies where the focus is directly on solving problems rather than monetization & profit extraction.
🏃 What About Autonomous People?!
With tokens & DAOs, the “barrier of entry” for spawning organizations, coordinating with fellow human beings & starting whole economies has been insanely lowered.
But if you’ve coordinated a DAO, you’ll be painfully aware that most people aren’t autonomous. And this is a niche - think about the real world. Most humans are NPCs. And for no small reason! Our history is a history of giving up autonomy.
As hunters & gatherers, we gave it up to the weather to water our crops, praying to gods for rainfall. We passed it on to factory owners to maximize their profits in exchange for food & onto nation states to solve our problems by paying taxes.
In schools, we are told to sit & listen. At work, wait for commands & obey.
Now we have no autonomy, depend on others for everything & feel powerless, like cogs in a machine that runs on profit. For all intents & purposes, civic society is a shell of what it used to be.
To make it worse, token voting will makes us a slaves to the logic of capital and, you know what the capital wants? Generate more capital!
👇 To recap
Over-optimization of the economy towards wealth extraction & centralization
Global challenges seeming insurmountable, stuck in the nation state world with opaque & incompetent governance
A generation of people hopeless & disempowered. Unfulfilled by the work they do, quiet-quitting, opioid crisis in the US & an overall meaning crisis
Awesome coordination technologies, spread across infinite websites & discord silos, an industry misunderstood & underestimated by general public
Its a matter of putting it all together.
Free market maximalism has defeated state maximalism but 50 years later, the American Dream is dead. America is no longer the land of opportunity it used to be, but we can build a Web of Opportunity.
🤔 What’s next?
We continue educating more people about all of these things, continue creating more building blocks, joining them together, building networks of people & projects.
We stay optimistic, then educate some more & build some more. Then a lot more.
We help more people gain autonomy & make an impact. We connect more people with impactful movement & places like eco-villages that are already pioneering these new ways of living that are more aligned with nature.
We push on, towards decentralized societies where the goal isn’t profit extraction & maximalism but empowerment of more people to make an impact.
We push on, because what else is there to do? 🤷♂️
We, we, we. Not we as MetaFam but we as a society. We as in anybody vibin’ with this.
What you can do about it
Level up & make an impact!
You can’t go straight from being homeless or working a corporate job to stopping global warming, but you can start by upgrading your habits, your inputs & outputs.
Get yourself in order & optimize your life. Learn about Web3, DAOs & ReFi, about Squad Wealth & Microsolidarity, but also about Game B & Metamodernism.
Slowly start changing your own life to be in tune with your values & how you want to live it, find others & find ways to thrive.
Find meaningful communities to be a part of & meaningful projects to work on, everything else will sort itself out 🤷♂️
What we (as in MetaFam) are doing?
With its programmable ledgers, Web3 is what enables fractal societies to function.
Unfortunately, Web3 is full of people uneducated in its true potential. We’re building onboarding flows, aggregating resources, gathering people & curating projects interested in building DAOs or Web3.
MetaGame is not a game, not an educational platform, not a social media platform nor a freelancing platform & certainly not a recruitment platform. Yet it's all of it.
MetaGame is a decentralized society, a platform for helping people level up, find others & build the future they want to live in.
MetaGame is a massive online coordination game.
To put it in the words of the great Buckminster Fuller who came up with the idea of a “World Game” way back in 1961, before the technologies necessary were available:
“Make the world work for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or disadvantage of anyone.”
