Do you think there are political biases within the general crypto community? I find it sometimes difficult to point out to others in the crypto space that have certain assumptions that I would disagree with without trying to be political since crypto seems to attract a fair amount of people who think economics is outside of politics. Where I think inherently economics is political because incentives tend to accumulate and those with the most resources then get to disproportionately influence the rest of the economy. Politics is what we say we should do with our resources while economics is just the analysis of what we’ve done with them although the line is really blurry.

Definitely. A lot of it is that we bring assumptions from our old political systems when we have this new infrastructure layer where we can build outside of those assumptions and it confuses people. Continuous voting was just not feasible before with pen and paper. We’re in a unique time where we can question some of those basics. I don’t think people have clued into it yet and think blockchain is a new technology they can apply to old processes but it can be used for new processes as well.

I don’t think you can separate politics and economics in the blockchain space because you’re talking about issuing your own money. Who’s going to issue it, who’s in charge of it, and who’s going to upgrade it? I think blockchain really blurs the lines between politics and economics in that way. Whether you do it through an official governance policy or not, it is defining a governance policy.

I think that gives power to blockchain as well because we can question all these assumptions we’ve made for the past hundreds of years of currency as we know it and baking it into the nation-state system. Now it can be up to the ones creating it and there are tons of different options. There’s Proof of Work, Proof of Stake, and I don’t think we’ve even scratched the surface of Proof of Authority.

What we’re trying to build is essentially a library of different options so you can find the one for your context. That’s an important part because it’s going to differ between a ten person community, a thousand person business, and a million person province. You’re going to need different layers of government. We look at it biomimetically. Life is nested with cells, organs, beings, etc. each making their own decisions. We just need to make the cells (communities) be able to interact with each other with a modular library of tools.

You mentioned over Twitter that it would be possible to simulate some kind of socialist economy on cadCAD, how does that look like? Does it work together with Commons Stack?

The Commons Stack is creating a token engineering toolkit which can be used to model, simulate and validate cryptoeconomic systems. Depending on the mechanisms employed in your system design, you could create any kind of system, although we recommend token-engineered solutions to match the circumstances over following ideological lines in the design of an economy. However, the technology will be open source so anyone with the appropriate skills could implement a community economic system according to their group needs.

I can imagine why as a company or organization you would want to say that. It’s good policy to be politically neutral. But, do you think that by encouraging people not to explore ideologically based designs of the economy, it insinuates that you only want to explore designs within the status quo, i.e. economic designs within capitalism?

I would say no. I think socialism makes many improvements on capitalism without a doubt. There are commons advocates out there that think a commons economy should be outside of capitalism or socialism and it should be producing for itself. That’s great if you want to produce everything yourself but we live in a globalized world and I think views that say we should have no capitalism to provide for ourselves is cool but those people have to live without money. I think we need to protect from the extraction out of an economy but we don’t need to build a wall from the modern world. We can win by taking the best from different ideologies, but we need to go way more socialist than today, neoliberal capitalism is brutal.

I think it’s safe to say we could probably simulate many different types of capitalism with The Commons Stack since capitalism is the dominant economic system in the world. Similarly do you think it would be possible to test many different types of socialism, or some other mode of production?

I think that’s what I’m most excited about. It’s tough though because different ideologies mean different things to different people. A lot of the disagreement I’ve seen have come down to semantics. I say capitalist but I think we should define that because when I talk to some socialists, it’s like a dirty word. I think capitalism means using profit incentives to encourage behavior but I’m not sure.

My view is that capitalism is more the focus on wage labor. The mode of production (how you produce goods for your society and economy) is where you have the capitalist who pays people who don’t have capital and they sell their labor on a market to make stuff for capitalists. The capitalist, because of that power structure, is able to extract the value of their labor and gain more of the reward. That’s how I like to define it.

So capital is a stock and labor is a flow (check out Donella Meadows’ Thinking in Systems). Capital accumulates and you can’t accumulate labor. I can only give it by the hour. They’re on a separate differential order. It’s like speed versus distance, if you’re familiar with calculus. What we need to do with labor is put it through an integrator function so you can allow labor to accumulate power. We do this through ownership-labor rather than wage labor. So if you work in the commons, you’re earning money and you’re earning voting power. The more you work, the more say you have along with the capitalists.

Right now, you can see altruist burnout where people want to help with open source projects but they realize they need to make money. Even in our project because they’re not getting paid and people need to get paid to eat and survive. In our current system, capital is upstream of labor because that’s the power structure. If we can have a capitalist give capital that’s fine but they do it one time. Then the laborers are working in the community and they get ownership. So now they’re co-owners and equal. It’s about peer governance and giving laborers more power. Capital makes the project possible so they can have some say but they shouldn’t have all the say. The laborer who puts in an equal amount of labor value should have an equal spot on the table. I think this is an interesting merging of capitalists and labor by putting them in circular flow with each other. You can also have a system of just time-dollars.

One of the problems I see in the space is that there’s plenty of people who want to help out but there’s no capital to pay them. It’s one of the problems with a lot of the DAOs. They’re all trying to figure out how to fund themselves. They want to avoid VCs and try to pool all of their own money. Capital isn’t the problem, it’s the expectation of an extraction of value because of an investment of capital. That’s where we go off the rails.

I’m not sure if we can go in the complete opposite way though. There are plenty of commons projects out there and they’re islands in the rough seas of capitalism. We need to build bridges between these isolated commons so they can cooperate without sacrificing all of their values on the open seas.

If people want to help with the project or keep up with you, where should they look?

People can find us on telegram: t.me/commonsstack, twitter: twitter.com/commonsstack, medium: medium.com/commonsstack, github: https://github.com/commons-stack

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