Making the Non-Human World Legible Through Technology
* Article: Austin Wade Smith. Commons Sense - An Introduction to DAOs as Ecological ↔ Digital Linkages.
URL = https://mirror.xyz/austinwadesmith.eth/J2Ac0fFG1XbEHLch5c_TQy2OxfFjebK6BnJpHJKbgFg
(the human, the natural, the technological, three in one coordination mechanisms)
Description
"We live in an era of a great extinction of certain kinds of webs, and a vast proliferation of other kinds. Despite their apparent divergence, I think understanding the fundamental commonalities in pattern and origin of these different webs is essential in order to invert our current existential crisis into an opportunity for the transformation of planetary social consciousness.
This essay is about how we create and steward visions of our world as commons. It explores technology’s fundamental role to “undual” the relationships between people and the environment, and asks how we bear witness to a world populated with subjects in a manner which might rewire different social technologies to be accountable to a more diverse, populated, and plural world? How do we see ourselves as expressions of the planet, and how do we make these mediated reflections tangible, and actionable?"
Excerpts
Austin Wade Smith:
"Every commons is an integration of knowledge with the bio-physical processes which comprise the living world. Always an overlay, they provide a fruitful means to discuss the interdependence of species, information and governance, because knowledge and our practices of regenerative stewardship are themselves living systems, contiguous with the biological world. From this perspective, what we describe as commons may be another way of saying that a community is at its essence, web-based. Although the term is most readily applied to internet native groups, I’d argue that communities which practice social life in an expanded sense through networks of mutualism, symbiosis and reciprocity are the original web-based communities. MMO guilds, open source developer communities, and these new thorny things called DAOs, are more recent actors in a lineage of web-based communities whose identity is actively formed relationally through networks.
To undual is to reconcile the fact that the social sphere has always been web-based, and thus not exclusively a human affair."
(https://mirror.xyz/austinwadesmith.eth/J2Ac0fFG1XbEHLch5c_TQy2OxfFjebK6BnJpHJKbgFg)
Discussion
DAOs as Commons
Austin Wade Smith:
" the social sphere has always been web-based, and thus not exclusively a human affair. In what follows, I’d like to explore how DAOs, a very recent form of web-based community, can be understood as a continuation of the legacy of the commons, and how the hybrid commons of ecological and information systems they support, may be an essential substrate through which informed climate policy, law, economy, and information technology might emerge.
In complement to the work of Elinor Ostrom, the theorist David Bollier argues that commons are composed of three essential attributes. He describes how shared resources are stewarded through shared governance processes guided by a shared set of intentions or purpose. [10] The definition is strikingly simple, yet effective for describing how groups manage common resources, and the dilemmas they engender, across different kinds of webs. I think we should consider DAOs, whose shared purpose stems from a belief of planetary regeneration, as a necessary continuation of commons. In defining regenerative DAOs [11] through commoning, I seek to extend past competing factions of acronyms, which may not withstand the test of time, towards the unifying practices of regeneration and the technologies which support them.
Understanding DAOs as a continuation rather than a disruption of existing kinship and governance models foregrounds the essential role applied symbiosis and interdependence has played in defining our social, and technical systems over the long arc of our evolution. Additionally it places the emphasis on the interaction between community purpose and the technical systems through which they coordinate, rather than a more familiar form of techno-determinism which tends to overemphasize technology’s role in defining culture.
Some of the DLT’s (distributed ledger technologies) like blockchains, which act as the underlying substrate of web3 native communities like DAOs, can be understood as commons. The practices of purpose driven governance and stewardship are the defining element, not the resources themselves. The arrangements of people, minerals, and technologies which coordinate through DLTs need not be defined by the technology, rather the technologies are scaffolded by our shared purpose and ethics. Perhaps one of the greatest contributions that the blockchain and DAO technology can make to the wellbeing of the planet is to enable the effective scaling and distribution of the commons as an alternate option to market-based or government-based solutions at a scale heretofore never achievable. How might hybrid commons like regenerative DAOs be effective in counteracting the trend towards enclosure and extraction?"
(https://mirror.xyz/austinwadesmith.eth/J2Ac0fFG1XbEHLch5c_TQy2OxfFjebK6BnJpHJKbgFg)
Ecological State Protocols: "Seeing State"
"Ecological state protocols are an enacted cultural record of how we exist, flourish, or perish together in a storied world. They are economic, legal, and machine - readable visions of what it means to be a social species in an era of mass extinction."
Austin Wade Smith:
"The notion of bringing vision and sensitivity where previously there was none is not a metaphor. It is both an exercise in qualitative impression as well as quantitative measure. It is both a science of the abstract and a science of the concrete. Through myriad observations, impressions, pixels, signals, experiences and readings we create durable representations of our place in the world and our relations within. This requires presence and perspectives from up close, as well as at a distance. Embodied perception at an intimate scale as well as earth observation data at a remote scale work in mutually reinforcing loops to weave a dynamic understanding of place and relationships. These shared visions are knowledge commons, inseparable from the corners of the living world from which they emerge, and as commons they must be stewarded and protected like their living referents because they form the basis of where we see ourselves in the world, and from where our values stem.
...
Defining the “state” of a place is a way of formulating the present as an accumulation of events from the past Like the process of bearing witness, ecological state is a testament to the wellbeing of a place, a people, a social fabric. It is a reflection of its extinctions and resurgences, its exposure and patterns of regeneration in a form coherent to prompt action and response. Despite the profound complexity at the heart of ecology and all living systems more broadly, the wellbeing of the planet is not unfathomable. To define and hold the state of the living world, is to make a kind of attestation. Doing so builds an important point of contact within the challenge of legibility. Ecological state is a form of knowing the wellbeing of the living world which is legible and thus actionable within anthropogenic systems like law, economy, policy, information technology, etc. It is an interface through which different worlds can touch, and upon which action can be orchestrated. Rather than a convergent process, the expression of ecological state can be an exploratory process. Let there be a renaissance of interfaces through which the living world exerts pressure on anthropogenic systems.
DAOs could be powerful assemblages of social, ecological, and technical relationships which own and steward the state of a given territory, ecosystem, and bioregion. This is because the protocols, (or perhaps we might call them rituals?), through which communities gather and cohere ecological state requires coordination and governance across diverse domains. This premise is not unfamiliar.
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The methods through which data and experience are structured as information, formalized into situated knowledge, and ultimately made actionable as ecological state should be owned and governed by the inhabitants of a particular territory. Whoever owns or governs these standards controls the point of contact between ecological wellbeing and the different infrastructural and technical regimes which coordinate our lives. This interface becomes a coordination point for all kinds of interactions.
The rituals by which DAOs define and update ecological state are a response to the dilemmas of access and use. These patterns are not unfamiliar to commons rooted in plants, water, and minerals, because ecological states must be owned and governed like the living systems in which they are situated, and to which they refer. Ostrom explicitly states that both informatic and biophysical commons are shared resources prone to social dilemmas. [14] In the case of ecological state protocols, communities govern the means by which they form a coherent understanding of place through diverse and imperfect means. This process of overcoming complex inputs and incentives to create reliable consensus is a variant on a problem sometimes referred to as an oracle problem. DAOs can be a critical means through which communities own and govern oracles of ecological state, in order to orchestrate action, value, policy at a bioregional / territorial level. Making the complex and entangled state of a bioregion legible to political, economic, and informatic systems, without reducing them solely to the logic of any one of those systems, is essential in combating terra nullius. While rituals and protocols to cohere and maintain state may feel like a foreign concept to broader legacies of mutualism and environmental intimacy, the convergence of informatic, social, and ecological processes is in fact the point.
Ecological state protocols are an enacted cultural record of how we exist, flourish, or perish together in a storied world. They are economic, legal, and machine - readable visions of what it means to be a social species in an era of mass extinction.
(https://mirror.xyz/austinwadesmith.eth/J2Ac0fFG1XbEHLch5c_TQy2OxfFjebK6BnJpHJKbgFg)