The Invisible Economy: Interdependence
Interdependence creates synergy between people and their community, resulting in a more cooperative, self-sustaining system.
By Beatriz Ramos and Yehudit Mam
Part 10 of 12
Part 9: Creative Collaboration
People are more empathic and cooperative with those who they have bonds with, like family, friends, colleagues, and neighbors. The concept of interdependence describes when people are autonomous with respect to one another but they are interrelated through larger systems like schools, churches, or workplaces. Interdependence creates synergy, resulting in a more cooperative, self-sustaining system. As interdependence between people and the system increases, it reduces the negative impact on third parties and produces more cohesive communities.
The Invisible Economy aims to build trust between people and create interdependence. Online platforms connect and coordinate people but don’t create interdependence as they retain full control of the decision-making. This is efficient but creates an asymmetric relationship between the platforms and their users. For instance, users may spend years adding value to a platform, but centralized organizations can change their terms at any time leaving people with little recourse. On the other hand, decentralized organizations are difficult to manage and can suffer from infighting and paralyzing inefficiencies.
We model our approach to self-governance on Participatory Economics, in which, as Michael Albert explains, “self-management means that people and groups have decision-making influence in proportion to the extent to which they are affected by the decision in question. In issues that affect overwhelmingly just one person, that person should make the decision — albeit in the context of broader guidelines already in place as a result of collective decision-making processes involving a wider range of participants.”
This decision-making process can be automated and scaled through a blockchain DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization.
When we started developing DADA, we could not reach consensus on several issues: no one in the team understood the point of people drawing together, the horizontal scroll we currently have was considered a design sin, and the team was against restricting the reply functionality to just the last drawing. They thought this created friction and that artists should be able to reply to any drawing that they wanted. I had to make elaborate arguments to explain the reasoning behind these decisions but ultimately I had to ask the team to trust me. When artists started conversing visually the team finally understood that these functionalities articulated the logic of the visual conversations, which is what makes DADA unique. Since then, we have made a long list of decisions against logic, best practices, and common sense, but this is also how we have innovated. Hierarchies are efficient because the person at the top makes the final decisions. Now we need to figure out how to do this collectively.
In the Summer of 2017, when we decided to explore using blockchain, we didn’t quite understand the technology. Our investors and advisors felt it was a risky endeavor and were strongly against it. We talked to everyone we could in the blockchain space, and learned as much and as quickly as we could. By October of that year, we were ready to launch what became the first rare art marketplace for digital artists on Ethereum, becoming pioneers in the space.
Communicating this decision to our community and getting them to understand blockchain and participate in its implementation to DADA was extremely challenging. In fact, one of the biggest issues we face is to be able to quickly share complex or highly technical information when we experiment so we can arrive at joint decisions that favor creative risk-taking and innovation.
One recent project that illustrates these challenges is DADAGAN, our model that generates drawings. We decided to explore artificial intelligence by training a machine learning model to create thousands of new drawings with our dataset of over 115,000 drawings.
Nowadays, machines can be trained to make art, which really confuses people, as most people misunderstand and fear artificial intelligence. We wanted to understand the technology, shed light on the possibilities and pitfalls that AI brings to the arts, and help create an ethical framework for future automated projects. We reached out to artist and roboticist Alexander Reben, who got excited about the idea and trained the model. In the spirit of collaboration, Alex put the costs upfront to make it happen, so we made a quick decision and went ahead with the project without making a formal announcement. At the time, we were consumed with the preparations for our art performance at the Tate Modern and we didn’t want to distract people with new information. We were to launch the DADAGAN at the Tate event.
We had no way to involve the community in an efficient collective, deliberative decision-making process that would propel this kind of innovation in a timely manner. We launch these experiments in good faith, in accordance with our terms of use, and we make no money from these projects. We are a very small team with scarce resources. We juggle many projects, prioritizing and making decisions quickly and under much uncertainty.
DADAGAN’s new drawings were intriguing. Some artists were fascinated while others were disturbed. The project sparked many conversations: about what is art, and can a machine create art on its own, about the quality of the drawings, about how artificial intelligence works, and who owns the intellectual rights of the model and its art. In general, the project was very well received, but a couple of artists felt that we had abused our power by not asking their permission to use their work in the dataset.
The visceral rejection people felt towards the idea of artificial intelligence making art only faded away once they saw the DADAGAN’s drawings and they could see the limits of the technology.
Participatory Economics recognizes that when one person or group is responsible for an activity, they organically hold a monopoly of information.
People who are not part of the activity don’t have enough information and can’t challenge the decision. It is important to create transparency in the transmission of information and establish mechanisms for deliberation that involve as many people as possible. We need to address this ethical challenge, so we don’t imitate the abuse people experience in other platforms like Facebook.
On the other hand, Parecon recognizes the importance of not relying on consensus or majority rule. This is key because art and innovation can’t thrive under mechanisms which tend to produce mediocrity, and which kill the boldest and most daring ideas. Also, it is unrealistic to expect thousands of people to grant permissions each time we experiment with new technologies; this would have made it impossible for us to implement blockchain and DADAGAN, which would have been a loss for everyone. It is important to create a culture that includes as many diverse voices as possible while nurturing visionaries and encouraging risk-taking. Our gamified system can help support self-governance by disseminating complex information (about blockchain or artificial intelligence, for instance) incrementally and opportunely so that the community can deliberate on important issues and make informed decisions collectively.
Our live drawing performances have made evident the challenges of self-governance but they also underscore the power of collaboration and social norms. These performances involve intense organizing and preparation with many artists volunteering hours of their time on a daily basis, and coordinating from different countries, with different time zones, using different channels simultaneously for scheduling, chatting, drawing, and communicating in different languages. It can get messy.
However, we have found that when people trust each other and engage freely in a project, driven by intrinsic motivations, they are not only highly invested and committed, but they also have fun throughout the process and find the experience in itself rewarding, and positively challenging. We should note that there has never been any infighting during the intense preparations for these projects or at the high stakes live performances. Even when someone got confused and messed up, everyone was very supportive. There have never been recriminations or power plays. In general, the atmosphere is encouraging and fun.
Economist Elinor Ostrom found that for collective management to succeed, there must be transparency and communication among the participants, and people need to learn to trust each other since trust spurs people to engage in reciprocity and cooperation. Ostrom’s research was central to the understanding of the social dilemma phenomenon, also known as the tragedy of the commons.
A social dilemma is a situation in which people behave selfishly and choose to pursue individual profit and immediate satisfaction rather than behave in the best long-term interest of the group.
For instance, a social dilemma happens when there are freeloaders, which is unfair for the rest of the group or everyone chooses the self-interest alternative, in which case the whole group loses. Examples of social dilemmas are the depletion of natural resources and environmental problems. When two people negotiate the price of a car they are focused on their own immediate interests yet their decision impacts everyone; outdoor air pollution is estimated to cause 4.2 million premature deaths worldwide.
“The tragedy of the commons” is often invoked to justify the privatization of common resources. The concept became popular in 1968, in a paper by ecologist Garrett Hardin who called attention to the damage that innocent actions by individuals can inflict on the environment. But Hardin’s views are controversial. He was an avid proponent of eugenics as a solution to overpopulation and blamed the welfare state for allowing the tragedy of the commons by providing for children as a fundamental human right. He stated that “freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”
Elinor Ostrom realized that Hardin’s theory was not founded by scientific data and decided to study communities around the world, ultimately challenging his views. Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economics for her groundbreaking research demonstrating that ordinary people are capable of creating rules and institutions that allow for the sustainable management of shared resources without any central authority, government regulation, or privatization.
According to game theory — the study of mathematical models of strategic interaction among decision-makers — , there are two approaches to solve the social dilemma. One approach is a top-down structure that regulates the system, through government intervention, privatization, or other measures. The second approach is to increase the degree of connectivity between people, which in turn increases their interdependence. Today, blockchain technology makes this type of organization scalable through the DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization. A DAO is a peer-to-peer network with no central governing body, but with a set of rules encoded and encrypted on a blockchain. ParEcon is a decentralized economic system based on participatory decision-making. Its concepts should work well in a DAO.
In accordance to ParEcon principles, artists will have more weight in regard to decisions involving the experience of artmaking, collectors will have more weight regarding collecting issues, and developers will have more weight when considering database decisions. Since people advance in the system through different stages, different groups of people will have access to different tools, responsibilities, and privileges, making it possible to organize decision-making through cohorts. People on the Habit-Forming stage will be involved in different decisions than those in the Endgame stage.
DADA is a social network that fosters connectivity, which is a prerequisite for interdependence. But it is through community interactions and self-governance that we can achieve interdependence. Instead of relying on the expertise of a few, the system serves as a way to share and distribute information efficiently, incrementally, and consistently, building a well-informed community capable of making complex decisions collectively over time. The DAO makes this decentralized decision making efficient and potentially scalable to millions of people.
Part 11: The Commons
