flâneur

rika goldberg

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on the atlas — 46

highlights — 1277

  • Able people with time on their hands and a need to justify their coming together put their efforts into personal control, and spend their time criticizing the personalities of the other members in the group. Infighting and personal power games rule the day. When a group is involved in a task, people learn to get along with others as they are and to subsume personal dislikes for the sake of the larger goal. There are limits placed on the compulsion to remold every person in our image of what they should be.
    The Tyranny of Stuctureless
  • When a group has no specific task (and consciousness raising is a task), the people in it turn their energies to controlling others in the group. This is not done so much out of a malicious desire to manipulate others (though sometimes it is) as out of a lack of anything better to do with their talents
    The Tyranny of Stuctureless
  • Unstructured groups may be very effective in getting women to talk about their lives; they aren't very good for getting things done
    The Tyranny of Stuctureless
  • Their influence is not based on what they do for the group; therefore they cannot be directly influenced by the group. This does not necessarily make informal structures irresponsible. Those who are concerned with maintaining their influence will usually try to be responsible. The group simply cannot compel such responsibility; it is dependent on the interests of the elite.
    The Tyranny of Stuctureless
  • his has two potentially negative consequences of which we should be aware. The first is that the informal structure of decision-making will be much like a sorority -- one in which people listen to others because they like them and not because they say significant things.
    The Tyranny of Stuctureless
  • Although this dissection of the process of elite formation within small groups has been critical in perspective, it is not made in the belief that these informal structures are inevitably bad -- merely inevitable.
    The Tyranny of Stuctureless
  • One joins such an elite much the same way one pledges a sorority. If perceived as a potential addition, one is "rushed" by the members of the informal structure and eventually either dropped or initiated. If the sorority is not politically aware enough to actively engage in this process itself it can be started by the outsider pretty much the same way one joins any private club. Find a sponsor, i.e., pick some member of the elite who appears to be well respected within it, and actively cultivate that person's friendship. Eventually, she will most likely bring you into the inner circle.
    The Tyranny of Stuctureless
  • Once the informal patterns are formed they act to maintain themselves, and one of the most successful tactics of maintenance is to continuously recruit new people who "fit in."
    The Tyranny of Stuctureless
  • oriety is not a definition of an elitist. The most insidious elites are usually run by people not known to the larger public at all. Intelligent elitists are usually smart enough not to allow themselves to become well known; when they become known, they are watched, and the mask over their power is no longer firmly lodged.
    The Tyranny of Stuctureless
  • Correctly, an elite refers to a small group of people who have power over a larger group of which they are part, usually without direct responsibility to that larger group, and often without their knowledge or consent
    The Tyranny of Stuctureless
  • "Structurelessness" is organizationally impossible.
    The Tyranny of Stuctureless
  • The rules of decision-making must be open and available to everyone, and this can happen only if they are formalized. This is not to say that formalization of a structure of a group will destroy the informal structure.
    The Tyranny of Stuctureless
  • For everyone to have the opportunity to be involved in a given group and to participate in its activities the structure must be explicit, not implicit
    The Tyranny of Stuctureless
  • As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules
    The Tyranny of Stuctureless
  • The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities, or intentions of the people involved
    The Tyranny of Stuctureless
  • We need to understand why "structurelessness" does not work.
    The Tyranny of Stuctureless
  • because their purpose did not really extend beyond this.
    The Tyranny of Stuctureless
  • The looseness and informality of it encouraged participation in discussion, and its often supportive atmosphere elicited personal insight.
    The Tyranny of Stuctureless
  • Design for emergence is permissionless. It empowers people by way of its constitution even though it can never know what people will do with that power. In contrast to user-centered design, design for emergence invites the user into the design process not only as a subject of study, but as a collaborator with agency and control.
    When to Design for Emergence — Kasey Klimes
  • In order to deal properly with the diversity of problems the world throws at you, you need to have a repertoire of responses which are (at least) as nuanced as the problems you face.
    When to Design for Emergence — Kasey Klimes
  • During the years in which the women's liberation movement has been taking shape, a great emphasis has been placed on what are called leaderless, structureless groups as the main -- if not sole -- organizational form of the movement.
    The Tyranny of Stuctureless
  • New Pattern? If needed, roll your own solver, i.e. design your own tokenized network. Of course when doing this, use existing building blocks where possible, from TCRs to arbitration.
    Towards a Practice of Token Engineering | by Trent McConaghy | Ocean Protocol
  • Try An Existing Pattern: Identify if there is an existing solver, i.e. tokenized network design pattern that can solve your problem.
    Towards a Practice of Token Engineering | by Trent McConaghy | Ocean Protocol
  • Formulate the Problem: write down the objectives and constraints for your tokenized ecosystem. This means asking: who are my potential stakeholders, and what do each of them want? What are attack vectors? Then translating those into objectives and constraints that you can measure.
    Towards a Practice of Token Engineering | by Trent McConaghy | Ocean Protocol
  • Formulate the problem: They assume that the algorithm “just works” and they focus on formulating the problem in terms of objectives and constraints (goal) and design space (where can the optimizer explore, which is really just constraints).
    Towards a Practice of Token Engineering | by Trent McConaghy | Ocean Protocol
  • They want to ship optimizer systems that just work. They follow the following steps. Some do it implicitly, though the pros do it systematically:
    Towards a Practice of Token Engineering | by Trent McConaghy | Ocean Protocol
  • Token design is like optimization design: at a high level, you encode intent with a block rewards function aka objective function, and you let it fly
    Towards a Practice of Token Engineering | by Trent McConaghy | Ocean Protocol
  • I’d love to see token ecosystem design become an engineering discipline, side-by-side with electrical engineering, software engineering, civil engineering, aerospace engineering, and so on. This implies that token ecosystem design would also become a field of rigorous analysis, design, and verification. It would have tools that reconcile theory with practice. It would be guided by a sense of responsibility. It would be token engineering.
    Towards a Practice of Token Engineering | by Trent McConaghy | Ocean Protocol
  • And actually since incentives are the heart of tokenized ecosystems, it’s really:
    Towards a Practice of Token Engineering | by Trent McConaghy | Ocean Protocol
  • In my previous article, I described why we need to get incentives right when we build tokenized ecosystems. Here, I ask: how do we design incentives for these tokenized ecosystems?
    Towards a Practice of Token Engineering | by Trent McConaghy | Ocean Protocol
  • Objective function design aka incentive design is hard. But we have to try! To do a good job, we need solid engineering theory, practice, and tools. That is, token engineering.
    Can Blockchains Go Rogue?. AI Whack-A-Mole, Incentive Machines… | by Trent McConaghy | Ocean Protocol
  • The LCA is a hybrid between a limited liability company (LLC) and a corporation.
    Exclusive Report: Solving the Riddle of the DAO with Colorado's Cooperative Laws
  • The most recent and helpful update to the cooperative model, especially for DAOs, is the limited cooperative association (LCA).
    Exclusive Report: Solving the Riddle of the DAO with Colorado's Cooperative Laws
  • Cooperatives differ from other corporate models, because they are formed by members, and for members.
    Exclusive Report: Solving the Riddle of the DAO with Colorado's Cooperative Laws
  • Absent the adoption of a new legal entity structure that serves the novel needs of DAOs, we discuss why we believe, at present, the Limited Cooperative Association (LCA) provides the most ideologically aligned legal framework for DAOs.
    Exclusive Report: Solving the Riddle of the DAO with Colorado's Cooperative Laws
  • Finally, we have to do better in terms of communicating the need for various implementations of decentralized systems to regulators, local representatives, and the broader public, with the goal of fostering credibly-neutral decentralized systems that can stand the test of time.
    Decentralization - DAO Research Collective
  • To reach this next stage of refined, globally-relevant decentralized systems, we as users and community stewards need to remain intellectually honest towards the desired goals of decentralized systems, and we must hold accountable those who infringe on the ethos of the ecosystem. When centralized entities act in bad faith under the guise of decentralization, we have to critique them publicly, and we have to design systems that allow for centralized and decentralized organizations to participate side-by-side in the ecosystem while communicating to users the design trade-offs that both types of …
    Decentralization - DAO Research Collective
  • “Only by making technical systems that offer a variety of mechanisms for checking concentrations of power and by simultaneously building social ideologies constantly on the lookout for failure modes of these mechanisms can we hope to succeed where previous attempts at decentralizing authority have failed.”
    Decentralization - DAO Research Collective
  • he critique that decentralization will beget ineffective governance might be the most truthful critique of the ecosystem right now. As of early 2022, governance of decentralized organizations is largely ineffective across the board — participation is low, and pure coin-voting, as most decentralized organizations have trended towards, has a variety of embedded issues that might create more plutocratic systems than the prior status quo.
    Decentralization - DAO Research Collective
  • But as described in detail throughout this piece, decentralized systems are not just completely horizontally-distributed systems and instead, there are several individual components to consider when judging the level of decentralization of a project. Crucially, the critique that “centralized entities within the system prove centralization of the system” often ignores the idea of data portability. Mudit Gupta, Chief Information Security Officer of Polygon, called data portability “the ability to be decentralized.”
    Decentralization - DAO Research Collective
  • The project immediately became the most interesting story in crypto and skyrocketed to $200M in trading volume within 10 days. Loot became a case study in collaborative value creation, with projects like Loot Character, Loot Mart, and an entire ecosystem of other projects springing up around Loot.
    Decentralization - DAO Research Collective
  • Aaron Brown of Bloomberg Opinion said “The two basic problems with SushiSwap are too many opportunists in its initial creation and failure to align incentives carefully.”
    Decentralization - DAO Research Collective
  • In the midst of 2020’s DeFi Summer, Uniswap distributed 15% of tokens to past users, while reserving most of the remaining tokens for community member distributions. Governance of the Uniswap treasury was transferred to holders of the UNI token, who could decide the future of the protocol in a direct democracy governance process, and the Uniswap protocol is governed and upgraded by UNI token holders in the same process.
    Decentralization - DAO Research Collective
  • Uniswap is arguably the most decentralized application in the crypto world today and the best example of a hyperstructure.
    Decentralization - DAO Research Collective
  • Hop, a bridge for assets between different blockchains, also recently announced their plans for decentralization, which included a standard snapshot of participation in anticipation of a token drop to community members.
    Decentralization - DAO Research Collective
  • Optimism emphasized the idea that funding public goods in the decentralization process is highly important, since without decentralization, public goods projects might not exist or might rely on a centralized entity to fund. Ultimately, while the participation of centralized entities in public goods funding should be applauded and encouraged, relying on only one central entity to fund public goods project leads to a risk vector – if funding for public goods is centralized, funding might only be distributed to projects that appeal to the centralized entity, which is by itself a form of censorsh…
    Decentralization - DAO Research Collective
  • Underwriting systemic correlated risks is difficult and, in complex interconnected systems, can lead to disaster. Decorrelation of systemic risks via the open borders of blockchains can help mitigate these risks and reduce the surface area of attack vectors.
    Decentralization - DAO Research Collective
  • Vitalik Buterin argues that decentralized systems are more resilient to attack and less likely to accidentally fail than their centralized counterparts. Critically, decentralized systems are generally more expensive to attack due to the absence of sensitive central points of failure for attackers to target — an attacker couldn’t just infiltrate the Ethereum Foundation and press a big red “HALT” button (since there is no big red button), and an attacker couldn’t overpower Buterin and force him to shut down the blockchain (since Buterin doesn’t have that type of centralized power, despite being …
    Decentralization - DAO Research Collective
  • In fact, transparent, unopinionated rules to participation are by themselves a flavor of censorship-resistance that blockchain-based applications naturally inherit, since by default, code deployed to public blockchains is open-source
    Decentralization - DAO Research Collective
  • NFTs have been used by individuals to preserve information in the face of authoritarian governments as well – however, these NFTs still required anonymity from the individuals to avoid direct coercion from their government
    Decentralization - DAO Research Collective