Digital Dual Power

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Discussion

Why Should Dual Power Go Digital?

Marisa Rando:

"While dual power is largely thought of as a tool in the physical organizing space, social movements (and the broader public) have become more reliant on digital tools for coordinating quickly and decentralizing operations. The problem is that being wholly reliant on big tech has serious implications. As most platforms exist today, their default model of governance is centered around its few powerful investing bodies, rather than its users, due to the profit-incentive structure of capitalism. Members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have seen the issues of relying on digital infrastructure owned by Google and have advocated for the use of open source tools.

Countless organizing groups have reported having their dissenting content suddenly censored and/or removed from platforms like Instagram. Outside of activism, the way in which existing Web2 social media data mining companies steal our attention and fill every vulnerable space with advertising has been met with widespread disgust. The need for departure from these abuses of power has never been more clear. We can fight these systems by keeping our data from them, moving to decentralized alternatives, and inviting others to come with us.

Alternative open-source social media platforms like Mastodon provide a great service, but have not gathered the same popularity as the giant tech platforms we know today. While calls for a mass shift away from big tech have been made, it’s been difficult to get away from already established social networks despite all of their flaws. This is not a sign that it’s impossible to shift, but it shows the power of inertia inherent to established institutions. Since you cannot cleanly separate technical from social relations though, this is not just a social problem, but a socio-technological one. The conditions for change need to be set before a mass shift can begin. In this specific context, tools like the Mastodon Twitter Crossposter are the seeds of change that can help us create accessible bridges between the new and the old.

Building digital dual power means building digital democracy - platforms, protocols and toolkits that can be co-designed and co-governed to serve collective needs over individual capital gain. By creating this infrastructure, we can establish freedom from the current digital dictatorship that is designed solely to extract value by selling, surveilling, and data mining. These tools, built under strict demand to return profit, will never be effective agents for anything but extraction. While the majority of tech platforms are run this way, there is a growing movement to change this paradigm in and outside of web3. Teams are using the affordances of blockchains for making built-in democratic political structures for the digital tools we rely on in this day and age."

(https://breadchain.mirror.xyz/boFKBZL9B2OS9lqKJ1a9BZPZgE7RhCpu1RQ0LQPJP1I)


How Do We Create Digital Dual Power?

Breadchain Cooperative:

As it stands, web3 and crypto generally aren’t on course to create positive revolutionary change as there is not nearly enough critical reflection in the space, even among the most well-intentioned enthusiasts. To get to a place where we might actually affect change, we need to build with the goal of improving material conditions for the many. As is the mission of most social movements, we must educate our networks on the historical political and industrial events that got us to where we are today and share our criticisms widely.

The seeds of digital dual power have been emerging for some time. Projects like WikiLeaks and SciHub have used cryptocurrencies to get around financial blockades while Iranian citizens use them to evade American imperialist economic sanctions. Similarly, groups like AssangeDAO are creating democratic structures for organizing capital in support of international activist campaigns to be immune from financial blockade. These examples show the potential for using cryptocurrencies for building counter-power within the dual power framework. Groups like Trust have done research on how web3 tools can help assist labor unions in organizing workers for strikes, which is important for building out labor as a counter-institution to corporations.

The technological affordances of blockchains also make them a promising medium for building counter-institutions. The growing popularity of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) shows the potential of facilitating democratic governance in digital spaces in a way that was not feasible before. However, many DAOs have a long way to go in unlearning hierarchical and capitalistic tendencies (both in funding and structuring) in order to adopt more democratic operating models. We’re less impressed by the self-named DAOs that are more like financial flash mobs which raise funds to make spectacular purchases and more inspired by DAOs like dOrg and 1Hive, who are re-thinking the way we work with democratic models.

An interesting development in the web3 space was an article published by jacob.eth, (co-founder of Zora) illustrating the term “hyperstructures”. What they are identifying-although using different vocabulary than what most leftists are used to- is the new technological affordance of blockchains and smart contracts that can be used to create new resilient public infrastructure which can run for free, forever, and be governed democratically as protocols as opposed to platforms. While like all new paradigms, this is a double edged sword. If done with care, however, these resilient protocols can facilitate digital governance models that are resistant to being subsumed into the existing capitalist framework and act as important infrastructure for facilitating counter-institutions."

(https://breadchain.mirror.xyz/boFKBZL9B2OS9lqKJ1a9BZPZgE7RhCpu1RQ0LQPJP1I)