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Positive Sum Worlds: Remaking Public Goods
In today's world, capital is not scarce; ambitious visions for the public's benefit are.
Sam Hart • Positive Sum Worlds: Remaking Public Goods
Each of these public goods, both actual and potential, are goods beyond the reductive economic sense. They satisfy values of privacy, the virtue of freely shared work, liberalism, accountability, and democratic participation, incorporating a shared sense of the good for parties well beyond the users of Web 3 today.
Sam Hart • Positive Sum Worlds: Remaking Public Goods
Consider a classic public good: a public park. We might say park visitors are generically "users" of this public space, or that anyone within driving distance is adequately served. But this categorization feels distinctly unsatisfying. "User" does not capture meaningful detail about a population that collectively values free acc
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In today's crypto ecosystems, token-based membership determines key considerations such as resource allocation, on-chain incentives, and off-chain decision-making. While a blockchain's censorship resistance may seem like the solution to a world of gatekeepers, in reality, pay-to-play limits access in other ways. Protocols may be owned by thousands,... See more
Sam Hart • Positive Sum Worlds: Remaking Public Goods
More recently, Vitalik Buterin and others in the cryptocurrency community have taken up the rhetoric of blockchain mechanisms as public goods. To be sure, crypto protocols are among the most compelling novel institutional forms. Their unique capabilities derive from their "public" qualities: unrestricted membership and participation, open APIs, tra... See more
Sam Hart • Positive Sum Worlds: Remaking Public Goods
A social body is united not only by the things it makes use of, but by a multitude of shared traits, including geography, ethnicity, religion, taste, culture, history, and values. This is why, no matter their claim to universality, instantiations of public goods are always local . Locality is created and felt through shared space, time, or experien
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But how many look at the "public goods" funded in the crypto space and see their values reflected? What are the shared values of UNI holders, or Ethereans?
Sam Hart • Positive Sum Worlds: Remaking Public Goods
When we think of the public, we should think expansively. This is not to say that we must consider everyone in the world as a part of our public. As we emphasized in our essay on squads, we also celebrate small, self-selective communities and trust-based groups. But by considering the effects (positive and negative) that we might have on groups at
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We are members of a multitude of publics, and we must bring the perspective of our full selves to the creation of public goods.
Sam Hart • Positive Sum Worlds: Remaking Public Goods
to create a majestic and egalitarian society requires a more expansive vision of public goods than what can be imagined with economics alone.