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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 access to protected
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In today's world, capital is not scarce; ambitious visions for the public's benefit are.
Sam Hart • Positive Sum Worlds: Remaking Public Goods
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
Public goods are enacted by social institutions that reproduce patterns of behavior in the public interest.
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
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Without a specific idea of the good to build towards, the financial interests of large tokenholders have become over-represented in protocol governance. In our view, this constitutes a centralization risk.
Sam Hart • Positive Sum Worlds: Remaking Public Goods
Greater scale should mean greater good as valued by an increasingly wider set of people: the creation of positive externalities.
Sam Hart • Positive Sum Worlds: Remaking Public Goods
Visions of truly global DAOs representing billions of people are a fantasy. But if we apply our principle of "positive externalities" to include future citizens of the places we live, protocol-built public goods starts to look more like community-driven industrial policy.
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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