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docs/handbook/in-search-of-commons-that-scale.md
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# In Search of Commons that Scale
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[](https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4375aa20-0390-4450-a02f-4ee3ce49e5e4_1812x700.png)
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The Common Citadel
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> I will attempt here, to disentangle the way I saw Ethereum back when I first stumbled upon it, and how that train of thought drove me to commit.
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But first, I’ll explain what led me down that particular rabbit hole…
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## Mindset
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Like most of my generation, I grew up thinking the world is fucked and that the problem is “_The System_”. A lot of the people placed the blame on the corruption in governance, but yet more blamed "capitalism" - whatever that means.
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I mean, it seemed all great after the (self)defeat of Communism, but it just didn’t seem to work as well for us and the planet, as it did for the past generations.
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The competitiveness of the markets gradually killed _Good Hearted_ and _Well Intentioned_, rewarding the ones maximizing profit; the corporations rose in profits, while the worker wages grew stagnant and benefits deteriorated.
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- Not to mention what all of this “_optimized for one metric_” thing is doing to the planet; a never ending, ever growing extraction of natural resources driven by greed & planned obsolescence.
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As Vinay Gupta beautifully puts it:
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> “We’re in a time when the inability of the markets to sensibly price the externalities is literally destroying the world.”
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At the time, uneducated and barely out of puberty — I thought the answer was to burn it all down and start from scratch.
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[](https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb9ffb8d3-9af3-4dfa-8747-9eb279c9d5d7_500x572.jpeg)
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## Quest
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It became my obsession to figure out why **exactly** the world is the way it is.
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My journey went from unfounded conspiracy theories to established truths, from _Marx_'s critique, to _James C. Scott_ examination of failed systems; from *Hayek's* critique of socialist thinking to more critiques of *austrian economics* thinking. Point is, I was spending ridiculous amounts of time (and I still am) at examining both propositions & critiques of mainstream as well as alternative economic thinking:
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- What makes systems work,
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- What makes them fail,
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- How to do better.
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And although I was leaning closer to the “_free markets_” side of the argument, I was still certain that the conclusion “just pursue self interest” and “markets should be free” — is just not the way to go about…
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[](https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9f57b836-96f7-4efc-93b9-333b7d4300ec_554x671.png)
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One thing that really stuck out for me was this concept of a “Resource-Based Economy”;
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- Inspired by the Great Depression of 1920s, the term was coined by _Jacques Fresco_ — a self-taught economist/sociologist who proceeded to dedicate his life to developing the concept.
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His thinking went something like:
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> “I saw that the factories are all still there, and the people that worked them were also all still there — So what’s the problem?”
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Later popularized by the _Zeitgeist_ documentaries, _Venus Project_ aimed at presenting to the world a viable alternative to the current “money-based” economic systems.
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In theory, it all sounded very nice — except the “_how to actually get there_” part was non-existent. Not to mention the illustrations of his Utopia made me anxious; would anyone actually want to live in a city that looks like this?
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[](https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2f1044a9-7975-4628-b91c-e35ad644af36_672x378.jpeg)
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Maybe, but somehow doubt it…
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So I turned my attention back to reality. There actually already exist places that operate on principles presented by *Jacques* - and they look nothing like what he imagined.
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In modernity, they like to tag themselves “off the grid”, “self-sustainable” or “eco-villages” — but they’re nothing new, really. There are probably countless villages operating on similar principles — without using _modern labels_.
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Point is, small communities have always been able to organize in “resource-based-economies”. There is no tragedy of the commons, because it’s hard to be an asshole in the village — everyone knows you. **It was always the scaling that brought the tragedy and free-riders.**
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## Enter Ethereum
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Then I found Ethereum, and it blew my mind.
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> _“Holy shit, this is the software infrastructure for scaling those above the Dunbar’s number!”_
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[](https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faf3f527c-0a0c-4d28-aca2-04ebf456e56d_498x280.gif)
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My mind was immediately 100% occupied by it.
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The possibilities of this single, decentralized, programmable ledger seemed endless.
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From identity to governance and work/reward distribution systems — anything seemed possible. Uber without the Uber, Airbnb without the Airbnb, companies without bosses, states without the bureaucratic elite..?
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Decentralized autonomous organizations, they called them. Instead of companies _outsourcing_ work to free-lancer — DAOs would simply be _sourcing_ it and distributing the stakes of the organization, to the people building it.
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> All of society could run peer to peer — just like it used to.
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Here's this [in-depth piece by Jeff](https://medium.com/commonsstack/automating-ostrom-for-effective-dao-management-cfe7a7aea138) of Commons Stack, going through "Elinor Ostrom's 8 Principles for Managing A Commons" with the help of a blockchain.
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Of course reality is still far from the ideal we imagined it to be in 2015, but we're slowly getting there.
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## The Fuel
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[](https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffc1c68f6-976e-4d79-9793-a894178d7f3b_800x565.jpeg)
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Tokenized organizations being crowdfunded; in theory results in a perfect alignment of incentives between investors and end-users — merging them into one.
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Make the investors & users into a single type of shareholder, and you should at least be able to get rid of the profit-extraction tension coming from traditional investors. No more planned obsolescence and making things only as good as they need to be to sell.
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## MetaGame.
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It is a commonly owned platform for the community of DAOs and freelancers, to coordinate in building of a better/more equitable future.
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You may think of it as an assembly line for disruptive ideas:
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- Inside the **MetaGame**, projects don’t _outsource_—they simply _source_.
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Except it’s bigger than this “_decentralized factory_” narrative, and definitely bigger than this whole _DeFi_ narrative — it’s about defying the status quo by building a whole new world, a layer atop of the old one.
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What most of us actually hang around the block(chain) for, I believe, is an opportunity at re-imagining, redefining and rebuilding of all the institutions and software infrastructure the humanity needs to thrive.
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- And for that, we need a better sandbox.
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## Spaceship Earth — A Pale Blue Dot
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[](https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fee4a3cfc-7be3-4ca3-a19b-6ef68e824aec_672x372.jpeg)
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