The Realignment: Well...They Weren't Able to Buy the Constitution
Audience response to Kyla Scanlon episode, episodes of the week, and more...
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Welcome Back to The Realignment
Hey everyone, sorry this is going out late.
Quick update from Tuesday’s episode: ConstitutionDAO ended up raising more than $40 million dollars. Unfortunately, they weren’t able to win the auction. Billionaire Citadel CEO Ken Griffin ended up outbidding them, paying $43.2 million dollars.
There was a bit of audience pushback over why we’ve spent (and will continue to spend) time focusing on crypto and Web3 topics, as opposed to topics that are more obviously political. It’s good and fair, and I plan on writing something broader next week. Because next Thursday’s Thanksgiving, the newsletter will come out on Friday.
Audience Response of the Week
As we mentioned last week, we’re doing more to feature the audience's perspectives on the show. This response came in response to our episode with Kyla Scanlon.
Reply to this newsletter or email us at realignmentpod@gmail.com to submit your own feedback/thoughts.
Hi Marshall and Saagar,
I apologize in advance if this runs a little long but I do hope you get to read it. The following sentence in your interview around web3 and crypto is why I felt the need to write you guys:
“It’s not even that the train is getting built as it’s going down the tracks, it’s that there aren’t probably even tracks in the first place, and there definitely isn’t a destination, but there’s a financial incentive to describe there being a set of tracks and a destination, when it’s unclear whether it actually exists.” - Marshall
Kyla makes informative content and gives a good interview of the overarching narratives that bubble to the top of the public dialogue. Unfortunately much of the other noise in the space is either VC funded or marketing campaign driven. This is in large part the reason why many feel the way you do in the quote above. But I would like to give you the nuanced explanation for why this technology comes off as a movement, when compared to previous technologies.
What Marshall describes in the quote above is the new economic model that enables labor to build software collaboratively yet publicly. What’s interesting to me is that this technology is about injecting shared ideologies into open code, allowing people to gravitate to what they want to see in the world, and creating a community around those shared distributed principles. Think of Bitcoin as the first example, which has largely gathered around a maximum supply of 21 million units. The reason this space feels salesman-like to many is because people either don’t intrinsically align with the politics/morals/ethics of what certain code means for society, or because a project truly is being narrative driven with VC inflows and people are participating in the mimesis simply for the sake of advancing their financial score board. This certainly is also happening.
Now, just because you guys aren’t convinced with what crypto is trying to offer, doesn’t mean you aren’t aware of how mobilizing a mechanism for value creation and labor it truly is. Crypto has been the technology with the fastest adoption curve in the history of mankind - more so than the internet - in very large part due to the behavioral incentives. Let me now describe open source idea that has been built and that I believe you will understand the societal significance of, in order to close the loop on your understanding for why software that has a native asset with a scheduled supply issuance (reward for validators) and a growing demand (price inflation) is an important mechanism to improve the state of the our digital world and society.
The problem with the current state of our networks is that we do not own our identity. Our identity can be described as the ability to exchange information with our network, and our network is composed of identities. In the physical world you own your identity, and your network is limited in large part by proximity. In the digital world our identities are limited by where our networks are hosted. Our networks exist within private corporate servers, and thus so too does our identity. “Blockchain” enables us to own our network, as first proven by Bitcoin allowing you to own your financial identity, where transactions need only a public key to send someone information in the form of BTC. The importance of this is very nuanced but is crucial for moving us away from an ad funded internet with no civil liberties run by a world of tech monopolies. When your network is owned at the corporate server level, it gives the corporation the market power to monetize your identity, with minimal capacity for you to opt-out of their platform. This is evidenced by people who complain about a certain social media platform, ironically doing the complaining on that very same platform. This is why many companies have adopted limiting interoperability to preserve control and prevent competition. We need to enable competition. To put another way, people become beholden to a small set of corporate platforms because the people don’t own their digital identities, because they don’t own their networks. Network effects are very real and they have been the core focus of VC efforts. Understanding why, is important. (See attached image)
In “crypto” we now have a technology that places a revokable and recoverable, human readable, digital identity at protocol level of the blockchain. You spin the identity up from the security of the blockchain. It is provably yours, along with your network. This is a primitive that is starting to attract people because they are growing to understand the importance of giving everyone the ability to have a self sovereign digital identity. This enables us to build civil liberties into our digital networks and give us final encryption. Just as our government verifies our identity when registering to vote, they will now be able to provide provable attestations from their identity to our provable self sovereign identities, that we can make public, to allow us to form consensus in the digital space. These provable signaling capabilities will further enable us to come together. The great thing about these technologies is that people begin to trust them as they grow in stored monetary energy. We are in desperate need of migrating to provable digital systems built on consensus that we can verify, and then trust.
There are people building this technology that have a deep understanding of what is needed to allow our networks to eventually migrate to this better model for society. The space is divided between infrastructure builders that are building public utilities to allow government the ability to exist in the digital space, and VC funded projects with more intentions on capturing this space through early allocations and access to policy makers in order to rewrite securities laws in their favor.
I am looking for people with a deep understanding of what societies require in order to scale. Crypto is increasingly integrating itself into our social fabric by way of structural trends like Metcalf’s law, Moore’s law, and asset price inflation (asset being the operative word). I hope this helps you guys see what is being built and where the networks are migrating. There are a number of other tools for society being built at the protocol level but I’ll leave it at this for now.
Feel free to ask me anything, and thanks for providing me with your email!
This Week’s Episodes
Episode 177: Tim Marshall: How the Power of Geography Shapes 21st Century Flashpoints
Episode 176: ConstitutionDAO’s Julian Weisser and Will Papper: We’re Trying to Buy the Constitution
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Wow I like how that guy explains that. It reminds me! And I don't mean to be a repetative bother, but... "Mr. Kosloff. I'm listening to Episode 176 and I find myself flooded with questions. In what way could a DAO be used to interact with the Legislative Branch? Could a DAO replace the House of Representatives? The House of Delegates? Could it be a periphreal model for us to petition our delegate/representative to vote yay or nay for a given bill or a model for us to convene in Constitutional Conventation? How could a DAO be a part of the Legislative process? At the municipal, State, and Federal levels?"
Like a Dao for Campaign finance reform. A Dao for medicare for all.
Is it just me? Or is this maybe a budding mechanism that could facilitate our ability to petition our legislatures one way or the other?
How would we even start something like that? Accessibly?
Maybe in a couple decades?