NN Ep:7 Meta-Politics: Designing Digital Environments for Civic Power with Audrey & Nathan Schneider

I'm extremely anxious about the word meta because of how it's been used in so many different ways. Like, in tech culture, when I hear meta, generally, I hear an evasion of responsibility. We sent 200,000 text messages, SMS, to random numbers around Taiwan, asking once in a question what to do about information to create a online. When people give us very good ideas, let's label all the advertisements, probably scam, until just on home digitally signs of it. For a decentralized network like a blockchain, you need a centralized protocol, you need and often a foundation that's kind of guiding the development of it. If we show constant adaptability, the ability to self-heal, to care, I think that is a very important foundation or principle. And I call this civic care. And so I've been building a microsite, a research project in Oxford, called Sixpack.care. And so in this website, it shows the six mechanisms by which that the civic care can exercise itself. Today, we are exploring a new question, a fundamental question, which is what kind of digital environments are needed for civil society to govern itself effectively and at scale. And this is what we call meta-politics, which is different from the everyday politics of like, high-wing or left-wing, but have a focus on the meta-architecture that shapes political life. So we all know that technology is neither good nor bad, but it is also not neutral. And so the platform and the protocol that we use today actually define how decisions can be made and also what kind of collective action is or is not possible. And so in this sense, our digital infrastructure is to a large extent governing us. And the question that we want to explore today is whether we can actually design those digital infrastructures in a way that can help us govern ourselves instead. And so we're joined today by two amazing guest speakers who have been exploring this challenge in the front line, one from inside government and one from an academic standpoint, but also from the world of digital commons and cooperative governments. So Audrey Tang served as the first digital minister of Taiwan and pioneer perhaps some of the most interesting experiments in digital democracy from the civic hacking movement, Goff-Zero, to the participatory platform, the Taiwan. Audrey is also the co-author of the book, Fluorality, the Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy, which essentially presents a vision on how technology can be used to strengthen democratic participation rather than undermining it. And then Nathan Schneider is a professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, and also the author of the book, Governable Spaces, democratic design for online life. And Nathan has been exploring the question of implicit feudalism in today's digital platforms and how concentrated power and extractive corporate practices actually fragment online community rather than empowering them. Nathan is also a leading voice in the platform cooperatives movement, where he's exploring how we can actually build digital spaces where community are actually owning and governing those spaces. And so together we will explore how network nations can be regarded as meta-political environment that embed democratic values directly into their own government substrates, hopefully managing to transform digital infrastructure and network technology from those instruments of corporate control into mechanisms that are actually promoting civic engagement and democratic empowerment. Cool, thank you, but for joining us. I'm very happy that you get to meet Adri and Nathan for the first time on this podcast. Hopefully it's going to be a first and long collaboration that emerged. So we're going to jump in immediately. The topic today is Metapolitics, we're going to explore a little bit what it is and then how it applies to network nations. Cool, and I think we would love to bring you Nathan in to kind of like you know set the scene together with us and help us unpack the meaning of meta-politics. You published a very interesting book like about a year ago I think called "Governable Spaces" and I think the idea of "Governable Spaces" really resonates a lot with this concept of meta-politics and especially how it intersects with you know like infrastructures which are confining like the environment in which we are as a society coordinating in the first place. So yeah maybe you can have us understand the concept a little bit better and maybe riff a little bit on your book and the insights from your book. Sir, I'm in first of all thank you for having me and it's such a pleasure to meet Adri. Good to be with you Felix and Primavera. The first of all it also that the other preface is that I'm extremely anxious about the word meta because of how it's been used in so many different ways. Like in in tech culture when I hear meta generally I hear an evasion of responsibility. Oh let's go meta let's you know like the company meta became called meta when it was trying to escape all this accountability for political crisis that it had created and so I think we need to be very anxious when people go meta and try to transcend the real problems that a world is facing. But I do think it is important to allow ourselves to talk about something like meta-politics and we can come to that historically with the recognition for instance that the structures that we take for granted today for our political life like the the nation state and so forth are you know very very recent developments especially as universal forms. The expectation that every piece of land on earth would be the dominion of one country you know is just a relatively recent idea born of a particular European experience related to the Reformation and more as a religion and that sort of thing and then got spread through a series of historical accidents and it's not the only way that we could organize the world and in in governable spaces the book you mentioned I explore the possibilities of of governance in online space and and the more you work out those possibilities and and play with them and see where some experiments and tendencies could lead you start to realize oh this this meta-politics of say the nation state might start to break down pretty quickly it's not kind of lasts it doesn't hold up against the possibilities of self-governing online networks once you start being able to be a citizen of a of a network once you start seeing politics as connected to the fact that hey right now we're talking across all these continents we're building community across all these political territories maybe that community itself is a kind of emerging politics then you start to realize oh boy we're not just talking about oh let's make a minor tweaker reform around online platforms but you start seeing a different kind of politics emerging and I've really become obsessed with that right now and that's it's that kind of thinking that is is driving a lot of my my current work now it's super interesting and yeah so I think like one of the decisive factors in shaping new forms of politics and or in producing the organization to emerge in the first place I of course like the technological infrastructures which in which they are taking place so you are outlining quite interestingly I think also a new book how a different environment is constraining a lot of civic organization and the potential indeed of like self-sovereign communities to emerge and maybe you can have a some pick up it like what is the the problem space a bit at the moment like well how do these environments look like how do they shape our political actions and how could alternatives be formulated well I think that the problems come from a few directions the limitations I should say one one is kind of technical there are certain aspects of the the architecture of the web in particular around the server client relationship which puts a lot of power in where the server happens to be located geographically and that becomes a kind of point of failure especially in relationship to territorial nations and this goes back to the very early online communities with BBSs when people started realizing oh wait you know I have legal liability for all the conversation that's happening on this server sitting in my house and that played out all the way to you know major tech companies located in particular jurisdictions holding huge data centers and realizing oh we have legal liability for the stuff here too and then norms formed around that norms that expect that that didn't expect democracy that didn't expect participatory spaces because you know we were kind of running on the idea that oh we're just you know being hosted by the house party was kind of the the metaphor of a lot of these early communities or even the commune which often had a kind of dominating leader there were a number of these metaphors that that didn't need democracy and didn't need practices of democratic life to be built in and so they weren't built into our online tools and then now we see the kind of all encompassing nature of territorial regulation with you know with the rise of of blockchains and cryptocurrency you know love them or hate them it doesn't really matter it's just a piece of technology but it does it did present the possibility of departing from that old client server relationship and actually having networks designed to be co-governed by multiple participants so there you have a chance to to actually exit some of those old constraints but then territorial regulation stepped in and said no actually we're not going to respect your Dow as like an organization you know you have to double register it as a company with us and and we're going to basically take out all the possibilities of that would enable you to do anything new and you know that's in part for some really good reasons you know how else are you going to get a certain kind of accountability but on the other hand it's constrained the kind of institutional creativity that the technology itself could enable I think the trick is is this technology is sticky in a way and can do things that other you know past regimes can't and even though it's been slow to take hold in a lot of people's everyday lives it is slowly growing in its in its in its stickiness and and we're seeing regulations start to develop new relationships with it and and as this occurs I think it becomes more and more inescapable that we end up with network native forms of organization network native forms of self governance network native forms of of economic life that challenge that that monopoly that than the Westphalian nation state has had for the past few centuries. So I can add that as more follow up to this I'm actually very interested in like do you see that like how do you see the relationship between those different flavor of of government spaces but like online where you have like you know you have like the centralized the centralized digital system which is go existing with the more decentralized system and like what's the relationship with them but perhaps more importantly like the extent to which you see the government space of the nation state or like the the more legacy one actually is it do you see a relationship between for instance like the nation state it is promoting or impinging upon some of those design structures of governance online and disaster do you see how the advent of some of those online governable spaces you know whether it's like the functional sovereign that sort of student of like more power than than the nation state or the decentralized infrastructure is there like a symbiotic is there a non symbiotic is there a competitive relationship between the more like nation state structure and online structures well I think they've they've kind of gotten into a lock right now it you know at least in in the US for instance the context and I know it best where for instance whenever something seems to go wrong in online space like you know children are being abused or or politics is going awry or all sorts of things what happens is is you know the the people who consider themselves the responsible parties in government haul in the CEOs of the biggest tech companies either to pay homage you know as seems to be happening a lot today or to be grilled in Congress and and asked all kinds of embarrassing questions and so forth and and having to perform for 13 hours in front of cameras or something like that in all these cases the implication is you're the boss you figured out you're in charge of this whole thing rather than what you know and I think I think Audrey's work is a really really powerful counter example of this is to say what if we treated the solutions to problems online through a lens of democracy what if we saw democracy and self governance as as as a way to solve these problems rather than reinforcing the autocratic tendencies of the server client relationship and every time we bring those people in and seem to be making them accountable we're actually just reinforcing their power so so I think you know and again Audrey's been such a leader in this um we could have an approach where we say okay in every every time we confront a problem about about platform labor about you know social media speech about infrastructure we said how could we insert democracy into this into this problem and enable people to solve it and all kinds of different ways all at once um that's how we solve a lot of problems in other contexts um but in online space it's it's always this this idea that oh you know we need to haul in the 25 year old who's in charge of this thing and and give him a talking to and and and and reinforce that that assumption that that that dude usually a dude isn't control yeah I think I mean this is a perfect bridge also to you know move to you maybe Audrey I think also interestingly you often speak of democracies and social technology and I feel that kind of echoes to a certain extent some of the insights Nathan just shared about governmental spaces and the design and the design options which are enabling or you know constraining civic society so to me at least and I think Nathan was already gripping on that as well um a priority the project that you're currently pursuing with a lot of other people and movements together uh is a meta political project itself to a certain extent and because it tries to design like a different substrate for others that democracy which enables new ways of you know like deciding together deliberating together acting together so yeah I just wonder like what does this term um a meta politics it takes me to you and how can we maybe also leverage it to you know enhance democracy in the future yeah when I hear meta I think foundational right so what are our foundational substrates for coordination uh turns out these are the protocols that people follow and once people have a better protocol to resolve conflicts people's imagination of conflicts change instead of viewing conflicts as fire on the ground to be put out we start seeing them as fuel our focal creation like before combustion engine after combustion engine people have very different perceptions uh when it comes to fuel um and again fuel or fire we need some sort of substrate to harness that into energy so for example Nathan just talked about the harness caused by online platforms for example last year uh last um march there was a lot of deep fake advertisement suddenly appearing on Facebook on youtube here in Taiwan is usually MVDSCEO jensenform uh trying to give you some crypto or giving you some stock options or investment advice uh to give back to his country or something um but the idea is that we do not need to uh ask like meta or youtube or tiktok CEOs to our legislation uh to uh hold them accounts we actually can ask everyday people because we already had a protocol in this case called alignment assemblies working with the collective intelligence project we sent 200,000 text messages SMS to random numbers around Taiwan asking one simple question what to do about information to create online and people gave us very good ideas and thousands of people volunteered and then we chose randomly 450 people representing the same demographics as i want in rooms of 10 like 45 rooms facilitated by the an AI to figure out what to do uh when deep fake uh harms calm for advertisement platforms and for example when room said uh let's label all the advertisement is probably skim uh until jensenform digitally signs off it very good idea another room says if somebody gets skimmed 5 million dollar because of the investment skim instead of finding Facebook let's make them liable for the full damage if they run in unsigned ad game very good idea and another room says tiktok at the time didn't have a talent office so if they don't comply uh let's not block it because censorship is bad but let's slow down connection to their servers uh until other advertisement business go to their competitor and so all these ideas are aggregated by a language model we read them back people vote more than 85% of people agree in april we check with all the big tech for feasibility they're feasible by may the digital signature act gets passed uh working with trust systems in kind of decentralized notary when people love that idea and then in july the entire law and has skimmed law passed so this year you don't just don't see any deep fake ads anymore uh in Taiwanese social media so there's a very concrete thing saying for each incoming harm whether it's uber like 10 years ago or deep fake ads last year we can go through the same protocol so that we can democratically uh let me do this again so that we can democratically steer the incoming technology instead of just pushing the pedal or pushing the break right and um what do you think are the most relevant design levels we have at the moment so there is a question i guess uh to which extent we can actually uh from a public or civic perspective shape the platforms which are currently dominating you know fields in which uh civics uh you know communities are organizing a lot of this is happening at the moment in uh you know big social media platforms uh these come with uh certain constraints and problems uh you know the algorithms are often skewed um there is manipulation happening deep fakes uh and and polarization partially intended is being incentivized there um so how can we shift and move the playing field to something which is maybe co-constructed by civic society new and alternative ones yeah i think the freedom of movement is really the key here right in the state of Utah uh we as in the project liberty institute uh work with leaders from both parties and the governor uh to pass a law which is already in the fact that says starting next July if you're a Utah citizen and you want to migrate from one social media network to another uh then just like number portability which lets you keep your telephone number when you switch telecoms the old network is then legally uh required to forward all the new likes new followers new reactions new content to your new network and so in this very simple design called digital choices act this is not something that is about nationalizing social media this is not something uh that says social media is bad no this is just saying if something better comes along the old social media network should not make it impossible for Peter to move into the new network just because they have this network effect they have iron grip on like the connection to your friends and families they must keep those up for interoperability and again this is a key decentralized design principle and meta principle if you will which is to enable freedom of choice of movement across all the different solutions because then there will be no incentive for the dominant players today to uh to use Cory Doctor of STEM in Shitify they experience just because they capture the majority of the market amazing um these are very good um leeway to um honest little set of questions uh because basically what we're trying to do with the network nation is precisely to create a better container a better meta political structure and of course the question is how do we design it in a way that actually um endorse and promote the specific values that we want to embed into this um into this vessel so for uh for just like as a reminder so the what we're trying to do with the network nation is that we we're creating a container of course this container can be filled up uh as people wish but the container itself embeds specific values and we want to make sure that you know you can be a left wing and a right wing and you can still create a network nation like the the container cannot prevent what's get inside the container but by shaping specific design structure into that container it will nonetheless probably influence who wants to use it but also if you use it it's going to influence the way in which you can operate within and so one one important point of discussion that we want to have with you but is basically given our meta design principle that we have with network nation uh which is basically of course the value of plurality the value of common ink the value of interdependence and entanglement so all all those all those values that we actually want to bake into the technology then how can we construct this vessel in order to design something that can enable promote civic empowerment and civic participation and so maybe uh odria maybe you can talk to us a little bit about like uh as you see like but from the perspective of plurality because plurality I guess is a similar question of like the meta framework of plurality invites many different things but force those things that are inside to still adhere to the plurality principles so what is your vision in terms of like of course we want to we want to use network nation as a tool to promote better democratic participation of civil society um what do you think should be like the basic meta design principle that needs to be unconditional uh into when we think about the design of our network nation yeah definitely uh i think uh the idea of meta or foundational principles is very important because if we design the protocols right then it has the ability to self-heal to care for the polity itself and if it spares out of control then there's a perfect excuse for some nearby polities maybe nation states to say oh these people cannot take care of themselves and therefore um you know a regular Westphalian entity with a army uh just that end right so um if we show constant adaptability the ability to self-heal to care i think that is a very important foundational principle and and i call this civic care um and so i've been building a microsite a research project in Oxford called sixpack.care um and so in this website it shows the six mechanisms uh by which that the civic care can exercise itself uh like a in a gym right and so everybody can grow six pack of care um and uh these are very briefly um attentiveness uh the ability to turn the ideological device within one polity into this uncommon ground the rarely discover common ground between them this bridging map of attentiveness the idea of uh responsibility of uh credible commitments vehicles so that each agent in doubt polity can make credible commitments that they cannot just override or revoke later um competency the idea of training agents using reinforcement learning on community feedback so like drafting better community notes that bringing people along and how to use constitutional AI to build such agents so that's competency and finally uh responsiveness the ability to do local social coach or evaluation so that people can see whether those mechanisms are really fitting people's needs and if not um if there will be an ongoing eval evaluation of these uh mechanisms based on the local social coach or expectations so that's one loop and then finally the agentech infrastructure that provides like agent id maronimity partial anonymity so that the whistle blowing is easy and cooperation is easy but it also is verified input and finally symbiosis founding uh the agents uh or the protocols to a local care moroscope instead of a paperclip maximizer so that's the main idea of the safe pack of care i would just love to hear a bit more about how how you would imagine how you imagine instantiating some of these ideas and and a couple thoughts about that first of all like for instance when you think about existing decentralized protocols they they embed certain values and not others they embed like the value of property but not and and the the value of care is instantiated in very limited ways like through mining or whatever for instance no instantiation of like care for the people who are involved the protocols unlike for instance the federal reserve never check in on whether the people involved are employed you know the federal reserve has to ask once in a while when making decisions about the money system hey are people having jobs you know and it's interesting that then none of the you know the cryptocurrencies we've seen have ever asked that i i'm also curious about what the the degree to which you you can see these kinds of values being embedded in a kind of decentralized way or a kind of centralized way and i asked this because i think that sometimes we imagine that we can decentralize everything and i've come to think that some things are are gonna be centralized in the same way that like to have a decentralized network you need a centralized at least in our current systems a centralized antitrust authority for a decentralized network like a a blockchain you need a centralized protocol you need and often a foundation that's kind of guiding the development of it so i've come to see these two things as kind of a player as a as as bound together and so i'm curious about how you think about actually implementing some of these some of these principles yeah definitely uh i think uh the first attentiveness pack talks about the idea of bridging systems like polis or the community network system where the relational health between two subcommunities on x.com or nowadays also youtube and facebook um is not measured by a simple vote like whether you can get a majority endorsement from your users now right when you see a community note and vote on it um it measures the unlikeliness of two groups of people or more uh that like almost always don't vote uh the same uh like they're very polarized the left wing and the right wing and in a adversarial uh environment like x.com that is the norm uh but there's like this fringe uh upwing uh the very rare kind of notes that do get support from the left wing and the right wing that don't usually vote uh the same and so these are the upwing and then the idea of community notes now in their experiments um is first to train ais system to draft such notes and reward ais systems when they can increase the bridging potential of each notes to bring those two people um fragments uh together again to achieve internal coherence for a subcommunity and because of this uh ongoing training they can also kind of predict like what kind of ideas will bring these people together in the next um like rumor cycle uh so that they can almost pre-bunk uh such issues and depolarize in advance so that's a very good protocol uh to have and they're trying out on a subset of x.com users now to have that kind of bridge-making potential to be their main sorting algorithm instead of the current algorithm which is kind of engagement through enrichment so that is one very concrete case uh using a local moral scope policy to train for bridge-making and to prioritize relational care as measured by the unlikeliness of the ideological camps to agree and then the potential for the bridging notes for them to cohere i think like out of the six pack i think are some that are potentially uh bakeable into a technological design uh i think some of them might not some of them are like social technologies which i guess cannot really be baked into this structure and it's more like i guess some network nation might choose to adopt some of them and some network nation might choose not to and then it's more like what works and what doesn't work uh hopefully they want that truth to adopt them will be competitively superior and survive better but uh i think like they use they use specific things that really can be uh embedded into the actual i guess sociotechnological design as part of the framework and then i think there are things that we can perhaps promote or suggest uh without necessarily embedding them as part of the the problem is that when you create a vessel unfortunately people will just do whatever they want with the vessel and uh and i think what we're trying to think very hardly is like what is the minimal viable vessel that embed as many of those values as we can but that kind of needs they need to be there for the vessel to work and then kind of like this will nudge whoever sees this as a other powerful vessel uh will somehow automatically be affected by the technological design of this vessel because it just comes with it right and i think like all the thing about entanglement is is also part of that it's kind of like if you manage to structurally entangle then you can create a better vessel uh but also you're come we have to deal now with all the interdependency that you have created through the entanglement and then what are the technology that can help dealing with this interdependency i don't swear i think this six pack become very useful right which is why i frame the decentralization potential as a freedom of movement uh having the freedom of movement doesn't mean that you move around all the time although i did travel to like 25 countries the past year and switching times on every seven days uh that is not a obligation uh right so uh i can at any time decide to stay um like in Taiwan or Oxford uh for more than one week uh so the point here is that once you have the freedom to fork um then you have the potential to decentralize uh the system if you find that the vessel needs a different steering you still have the steering wheel but for most of the time people probably stay in a polycentral fashion some of those central hub points uh but that's not because they don't like decentralization it's precisely because they have the right to move away that these polycentral points of contact can be made unstable and and i i wouldn't discount the the power of of kind of social pressure in in these kinds of systems and say that only the technology provides a hard kind of constraint i mean i think i think how many countries right now have no meaningful democratic mechanisms and yet have presidents right you know and and i think that's a sign of the power of the of the social protocol you know they're perfectly there are monarchies they're perfectly capable of becoming monarchies but they recognize that the kind of mood in the room at the United Nations means it's probably better for them to call themselves a present even in no way their behavior reflects that um and and and even as long as they do it still creates a kind of a kind of pressure on them that that their citizens sometimes can exact to say well if you call yourself a president let's actually you know let let's take this seriously it keeps the seed there and to me that is one of the most powerful you know it is a question that is terrifying and thrilling about this kind of possibility about a different meta politics is what kinds of norms are going to start to take hold and what kinds of and and and and so i i'm so glad that when when Audrey's thinking about this it's not just about what can we encode into the technology it's also what kind of norms do we want to be widespread as you know as as new kinds of protocols are are spreading you know in technological forms and in other kinds of through other kinds of mechanisms exactly and and deadlines being really blurred right once you have a very good norm uh around these ideas and you have programmable cryptography and you have a strong enough language model tune to both worlds uh then you can actually turn some of those ideas into actual code protocol design carrying kind of physics like code power uh that um instantiates those ideas and some of that is being explored by deepgov.org uh which is a funding mechanism using these kind of uh agents politicians uh that are aligned through broad listening and policy technologies to do funding allocation but you can think of it's not just doing funding allocation that's just the first round but also doing like layer two protocols of design what not. If you need also works on the opposite direction which is like and i think the blockchain is a good example of that it's like sometimes by creating a particular technological artifact uh it creates affordance and constraints that farves an actual governance and societal innovation on top because you have to hurt and i think the decentralized nature of the blockchain has actually created an incredible amount of governance innovation uh because you need to figure out distributed governance and you know it goes in the positive and negative direction but the technological design is actually a trigger that force the social technique system to also innovate at the at the social level. One of the important agenda point i guess uh of the network nation is of course we want to make sure that civil society gets actually empowered to act as a political actor and um we often have these questions when we present network nation and so forth where people are like great uh how is the different from a well-working online community right and uh and i think that's that's an important component because of course it's not just uh an online community and so what we're trying to understand is also like from like um like from a design perspective like how can we uh ensure that these these these meta-political structure that we create actually enable political political emergence uh but at the level of recognizing uh the community as a political actor and also being able to act as a political actor through collective action and perhaps um i think a net and you've been working a lot on uh all the question of like uh cooperative and so forth and it's like there is a lot like the cooperative is an interesting vessel which has a lot of push throughout commoning and mutualism similarly to the network nation but it remains mostly driven by economical motives right and so but but yet they have been experimenting a lot with this thing so to which extent will you see um like what is the shift uh between just being like aggregating together because we have a common economical reason to commune uh thus so it's commoning and create a mutualism and entanglement as a political premises well first of all I just want to underscore what you said earlier about the the um what happened with the emergence of blockchains and the kind of breaking of the you know the server-client relationship if really did unleash an explosion of of of governance experimentation that's something that you know got a group of us to come together and form this organization metagov and be like okay let's let's have a space in which we can compare notes on all that's going on here because none of us can keep it all in our head at once and it it's what happened in you know in some jurisdictions where um you know my town here in Boulder, Colorado is having our first citizens assembly right now um but um but in in in places around the world that people were people have gotten to this earlier or with participatory budgeting when when cities open the door to say we want to create a new form of participation now we need tools for it you know really really interesting experiments start happening and I think that's that's one of the things that's so important about metapolitics when you shift the ground and some of the premises of of of organizational life really cool explosions of creativity can occur in this context you know around around cooperves what you know what are the right metaphors for um for for thinking about lessons from from past history I you know I think there are some interesting metaphors from from cooperatives and you know I love them dearly and and that's a big part of of my life than work but actually I think in a lot of respects you know the the the comparison does fall short for exactly the reason you said cooperatives are really really designed around a common business you know a common enterprise um and I think that's a bit too limiting for thinking about politics which which is really about a much more comprehensive view of our of of of of our lives and and what they're for and and what we need to to flourish um cooperatives I think do a lot more of that than other kinds of businesses but they're still businesses in these conversations you know with you the first thing that I started thinking about when when I was reading your work on on on this idea premuvera is religion you know I think that's where you get a lot more similarity I'm Roman Catholic with Jewish ancestors and you know part of a few other world religions in the mix in my in my family history and so forth and in each of these I see a transnational network that has forms of economic value that does like a lot of the stuff that people are aspiring toward with these with with with network nations with network states whatever term you want to use like it just sounds a lot like religion to me a lot of the time and I expend a lot of my life you know setting and writing of a religion and and and I just see these intersections a lot um and and you think of the power that these institutions have held you think about the the the role that they play it at global institutions like the like the United Nations um biology Shrinivasan talks about diplomatic recognition for networks as well religions at to a large degree for develop diplomatic recognition um and um and of course you know there is this guiding idea this kind of metaphysical vision that I think a lot of people interested in technology and so forth like get start getting really nervous about um but you know to some degree or another we're gonna start having to have that conversation because hey you know the nation state is built on that as Benedict Anderson you know famously argued in his idea of imagined communities the nation state is built on a kind of religious idea of a state that transcends anybody's actual direct experience and yet you know you can fly from California to to Maine and everybody believes they're part of this same mythical idea of the United States of America um and so I think there's a lot about religion that we need to take seriously if this stuff is really going to fit within the kind of puzzle piece um or fit with the puzzle piece of of of human beings um and you know the question to me is you know what kind of religion is this gonna be um what kind of belief system and you know shared um you know as as Margaret Levi talks about the shared community of fate um is gonna be involved here I don't think you're gonna get a deep sense of belonging with just with just technical protocols and and and and and digital networks and yeah this is this this makes a lot of sense um what is the what is the religion what is the new religions that is not a religion so um somehow it's also like so what's so wrong with it being a religion yeah i guess it will be too uh he connotates but i think it's extremely relevant because like if we think about nation states they um they acquire the claim that political power because of the territorial sovereignty that they have right like the power come political power comes from territorial control um in the case of corporations the power comes from capital and so all of a sudden they acquire political capital because they have so much capital um because of religion it's interesting like they they do have political power and it comes from i guess kinship and culture and capital and land and well and they acquire capital and land as a result of that uh network nations those uh those those those new political actors what can they drive their political power from so uh primavera and i first met uh over this tribe right that is online that was intentional deteslined by a serious evangelical Christian uh larry war uh who um basically applied a lot of um his trainings as a evangelical person uh and also um shinto and other japanese culture elements uh into designing perro uh not just as a computer language but also as a form of people coming together a a communion of sorts um and his documents for designing perro was called apocalipsis um and uh exegesis uh and synopsis um and i wrote a apocrypha but anyway the point i'm making is that uh if you think about a wider communities around uh open source free software creative commons um later on open governments and nearby adjustments was just called them open movements and exactly as nason said right it started as a a belief in idea like a command kind of uh doctrine if you will uh but then it translated uh to real economic power because it is a new engine uh to not just share the burden of maintenance cost but also make permissionless innovation like literally negative cost like it gets rewarded if you can you know find some bugs boundaries and things like that and therefore we acquire it collectively as the part of open movements not just economic power but also agenda setting power when it comes to politics through movements uh to fight like the out cryptographic wars against export control and things like that and so i think this unifying imagination is really key and it can translate to economic political agenda setting and other powers exactly the way nason described as other oricomized religions do right i think uh another point we're trying to make with network nations and we're trying to you know juxtapose this concept a little bit to the network state is the kind of the theory of change right so how can we empower civil society to become a political actor on the global scale and it's a question of how can you enable communities bottom up you know to connect with like my the communities around the world and start coordinating around shared goals and um i think what sets us a little bit apart from amongst many things i guess but like um amongst these is also the the what sets us apart from network state is the idea of self sovereignty i feel it's like an important principle to enable any different community to act um and operate in a way which is not infringed by external entities but i think a lot of the techno political imaginations we are seeing are they are starting from the hypothesis of the self-suffering individual right like empowering the autonomy and the agency of often you know highly influential you know high um network of individuals to expand their reach into new domains um i think we are interested in a different notion which we working title i guess at the moment but call a self-suffering communities so what does it take in terms of building infrastructure and with this maybe also coming back to the question of like metapolitics and uh pack designs what does it take um to build an infrastructure that enables civic communities to operate in a self-suffering way um and you know um coalesce around these shared goals um and i feel like this this this idea and notion of self-suffering is here really critical because we're living in a world of course we are a lot of different forces specific you know corporate agglomerations of power but also like autocratic forces are encroaching on the space of democratic deliberation and democratic life per se i think so the question of how to protect these spaces of coordination deliberation and you know political organization becomes more more pressing so i wonder if you have some ideas on how we can design these spaces in a way that a allow us to bottom up you know emergence of these political agents but be in a way which is protected against the forces which are trying to you know to limit that space so one thought is that this corresponds to the solidarity pack the fist pack of the six pack of care framework uh in it we argue that just as in the alignment assembly in ty one we sent SMS from the trusted number one one to two hundred thousand random numbers around ty one this is a way to combat uh the kind of co-ocean or trolling or civil attacks and things like that right because you know that is very difficult to capture such a process if you go like literally randomly two to a hundred thousand uh numbers and from the civil society side we're now uh popularizing this idea of meronimetry or selective disclosure it's a way to prove for example that you are a resident of ty one and therefore part of the polity that try to set the rules of facebook entering ty one or uber entering in ty one but in doing so you do not have uh to reveal where you live or you need to prove uh your between sixteen and um forty five because you're deliberating on use policy but then again you don't have to disclose your birthday or your name or things like that without such selected um disclosure verifiable credentials um nowadays it's trivial for one malicious as warm operator to masquerade um as people in that network nation and therefore take over the vibes of whatever community uh there is so a very strong protected deliberator composition based on such uh verifiable credentials but with some way to shield those deliberator from doxing that is to say from getting their personal details revealed i think this is absolutely critical infrastructure which is why we release that decentralized ID wallets from the Taiwanese uh government in open source uh so actually creative come or zero no copyrights so that if you don't trust the government but do trust your local church or temple or uh most um they can fork that wallet and still become interoperable and still issue verifiable credentials in which you can prove that you're of a legal age or you belong to this organized religion without boxing yourself i i think this is it's such an important question to be asking and it's a really dangerous question you know the way things are going right now this conversation is going is headed in really dystopian ways right that are going to enable some of the worst tendencies of our current tech economy um to just have more more power and fewer constraints um and you see this in how for instance um uh as Shrinivasan is building the network state empire through essentially an investment fund and you know all the kind of a accoutrement that go with that like um you know accelerators and camps where people are not taking care of well and all kinds of things you know movies we've seen before um and the result of that is centralized power even when he doesn't really say that explicitly in a lot of contexts we see where it's going with the practice um and and i think back to i've been having conversations lately with a a prominent archaeologist named Gary Feynman who's done a lot of work on looking across ancient civilizations that you know what seem to determine or what's it not determined but what seem to accompany different kinds of governance structures and and you know he of obvious works been really powerful in eye-opening in recent years showing that it's not a one-size-fits-all thing you know hierarchy is not the only way to manage large complex societies but economic forces are really really important and so i think the infrastructure that you know we need to be really attentive to is uh is you know the flows of resources and and control over resources um in in uh in these ancient civilizations if there was if people were dependent on imported resources that a small elite could control that small elite was in control that society that's where you get you know big pyramids with kings inside you know when you have a society that is totally dependent on you know on some external resources and um uh and and so we need to be really aware of how these economic flows are going and figure out how to ensure that we have something um if we want more democratic more participatory outcomes that can really compete with or just undermine you know the the kind of venture capital centralization story that seems to be really taking hold a couple of of of techniques i think that are important one is getting there first that's how protocols often get set you know and i hate to say it because i like you know slow and deliberate processes but that's how protocols form it's really important to to you know to to to set the mold set the pattern in place and um and i think one way is that that we can do that um if we're we're interested in these these kind of more democratic outcomes is start is starting with civil society as you're saying not just as partners but as actually helping them recognize you are forming network nations already you know build on boots it build on the existing infrastructure that build on the things that are already out there help them build the kind of tech the last mile that they need to go from being you know powerful transnational networks um uh uh in in the previous regime to being um the the harbingers of the of the new regime um and and be able to get there build these scale things recognize them rename them you know tell a new kind of story about what these things are that's a way you know to beat the venture capitalist to their own gain you know to get there first i think the second thing is to think about poison pills you know what are the ways that you can that you can make um doing the wrong thing just so painful that nobody's gonna do it you know my favorite poison pill is the the green bay packers um you know football team you know it's that's everybody you know everybody's favorite american football team because it's still in the small town while every other team uh has gone to the biggest cities and and abandoned their roots you know the green bay packers are there because they have an ownership structure it says if this team were to sell all the money would just go to local nonprofits nobody would get rich um so nobody's gonna do it great you know you end up with a really pro-social outcome let's think about ways in which we can and we can just make these systems um uh you know make it painful to uh to to do something other than the right thing um and to make sure we have really strong primitives to for things like you know sold-bound identity you know ensuring that that bypassing people and just focusing on tokens is just not you know it's not done um it's not something you have to do we've got the tools available for for doing it the right way so if you're not doing it the right way there's probably something wrong with you these kinds of mechanisms i think really need to be established and socialized uh to prevent others from swooping into quickly and setting a set really dangerous set of norms just one thought i'll put it briefly because i'm just i'm a hundred percent with everything you just said Nathan um i think one bottleneck though which is very crucial and um which we are also still trying to tackle in our thinking is the question of funding and scale right um because uh the common challenge um against a lot of the things which um we you know all stated in the past minutes um is that you know this is uh nice and theory and it's cool to run an experiment on this in a small community but if we want to roll this out on you know like a civic level around the globe then we need to compete with global platforms and there is just not enough funding within civic society and maybe not even the public sector a hint more of at this point to even you know build infrastructures that can compete on that level so i want uh if that argumentation is flawed in itself already and if there is a different starting point to the question we should consider so is it is the goal always you know to achieve the certain scale that we can compete with these kind of you know mega-lomanic immersive infrastructure which are being built by big tech or it's there maybe a different theory of change that we cannot play here. This is a lesson i learned from cooperatives right is that is that it's actually very weird that startup you know tech startup culture is all about we've got to start from nothing and go to everything um that is a really expensive proposition and you know for better or worse they've figured out the economic models to make that work um but that's like that's a weird and screwed up way of doing things um and what cooperatives do when they and cooperatives have a really really hard time doing that because they don't have access to those mechanisms but what cooperatives are really good at is taking existing economies and actually just making them more efficient you know i mean a case of this that you know people might be familiar with is like mutual funds you know where where you have what where people are realizing oh wait a second if we just took all the investing that people were already doing and put it in something that they co-owned and and they were and they decided they're not going to pay the fees the super exorbitant fees to the to the fund managers and they're just going to kind of do it at cost and reduce cost as much as possible you know they could actually totally transform the financial sector you know you have you have national scaled cooperatives in some industries like for instance hardware in the United States agriculture and a lot of sector a lot of parts of the world where you know you're able to build massive businesses not by starting from scratch but by taking what's already happening and reorganizing it a little bit shifting some you know some layer of the some key layer of the economic activity and and redirecting redirecting it in a different way and suddenly you're able to build a very large business a very large kind of economic system without having to reinvent everything because what you're doing is essentially re orchestrating the fabric of of society that's already there and you're valuing what's already there you know my grandfather ran a national cooperative of hardware stores he did that not by starting from one hardware store and building out to all of them he did that by creating an opportunity that lots of hardware stores and and distributors that were already there that he wanted to support that enabled them to do their business better and I think that's that's the chance figure how can we use what's already up there so my mom actually was a founder of the home makers union at its time started as a kind of environment friendly agricultural idea promotion association but very quickly became a consumer co-op so the same logic that Nathan described works not only on the producer side it also works on the buyer side and home makers already have to buy groceries anyway so this is not about scaling out something it is about scaling across many different communities so that they come up with a protocol that we will only buy like organic farming products or something and then coming up with some way to negotiate with the producers bypassing the existing intermediaries but if you look at what the individual members of this still now Taiwan largest consumer co-op do what they still just go to by cross-base they do exactly the same thing they do before just with a slightly different protocol they enable its replication much easier across smaller communities and so scaling across is much easier than scaling out when you are working from the buyer side we call this fractal scaling as opposed to scaling up because it's kind of like your fractalizing the system and then interconnecting and I think it's interesting because this is actually like what we are trying to do with the network nation is not necessarily like we're trying to convey a concept and a framework but indeed the goal with these conveyances that many people all of a sudden have this new thing in the head and all of a sudden they can see the world and they can actually see that they might already be part of a lot of this network nation is just that they didn't know the concept existed and so they couldn't see them and by giving them this kind of conceptual framework we hope to help people that are already an network nation to realize that they are and then of course take action and not just be an online greenity or not just be like a group of friends but actually recognize that you are a political actor which can also take action and have a political impact do you have a sense of what those next steps are the next step for when you when you realize that you you're part of a thing that could be a network nation what are the what are the things you have to do to make it really a network nation yeah I mean we try to have this recipe and then we realize that there is no step by step I think it's more like there are different things that can be done that can enhance I think the first one the first the first step if there is one step is the naming right naming things into existence and I think the moment in which you start you have a group of people that starts naming themself as a network nation as opposed to as a group or as a collective and really if the if the world network nation means anything it's already changing the flavor like all of student there is a there is a state shift because now we are an network nation now all of student things will start becoming an network nation because we name it like such we recognize ourselves as such an author start recognizing us as this and all of student it has a performative effect the way in which you conceive of a group will also modify how the group interact amongst each other and how author interact with the group so I would say like step number one one one baseline is owning the concept as part of the collective and then I think there is just like many different ways many different axes that can be worked through I think there is the question of mutualization of resources come on in the question of entanglement the question of actually like defining what is the shared societal vision that we want and so forth so there is a lot of possible step that goes in different direction but the more you walk into those directions the more likely to become an network nation you are and I don't think there is like a before and after it is it's a it's a progressive you start as a proton network nation and then you proceed progressively evolve into the network nation but yeah this is part of the work that we also want to do is naming what are those different steps and what are those different like trajectories that can be pushing towards more network nationalness but I think just the recognition I think has extreme good power because because I do think there is so many so many network nation already out there but we just don't know about them because they don't know about themselves and maybe I will just add one thing because I think in our observation there are different entities which qualify as at least proton network nations as primavera said but they're starting from very different places so you have partially very historical structures like you know diaspora's which are network communities across the world which share a lot of features with what we you know like think of when we describe network nations but they're lacking the technical and governance substrate often to coordinate more effectively on an international scale right a lot of diasporas are still in this kind of like process of trying to claim either territory or trying to establish a state which is very much you know within the imaginary of the vestifalian system so and that and you know like it might be and the first move might be towards establishing some sort of like network governance or the other end you have a lot of experiments which have amazing technical governance structures especially with pre-space right like Daos for instance were very sophisticated systems partially but not necessarily like you know like a community of kinship and they and the shared aspiration and imaginary about their own community they're belonging and you know their vision of the future so in this in this sense their culture and and other identity for me for me formatting activities might be much more needed so it's really understanding about it's really about understanding like the starting point from which these different entities are venturing out into this kind of journey and but yeah as primavera said I think part of our work is now to kind of outline these different pathways and super we would be super thrilled about like you know bring also more people into this kind of work and that is one one last important discussion that we want to have with both of you which is something that is oftentimes used as a criticism against like the recipe of a biology towards network states but I think it's something that could potentially also apply as a criticism to network nation and it's the question of you know if if if a network nation is a voluntary optine type of network and of course we all wanted to be a voluntary optine there is obviously a risk that it leads to somehow a very maybe two align set of individual and one of our based line hope for network nation is of course that because we have people from all around the world that that belong to this network nation we might actually ideally increase the the breadth and the scope or the coverage of different potential different opinions and so forth so that we might be able to address some of the global challenges that nation states which are too focused on the territory fail to address or cooperation which are too profite oriented also fail to address the challenge of course is that because it's an optine thing what up and if we end up with like network nation that are just people agreeing with each other and there is absolutely no variety and enough diversity of plurality in order to actually have meaningful conversation that can lead to a better opinion in the end and therefore being able to address global challenges because of the diversity of at least in the deliberation process and so maybe like Audrey I think you you probably have like a strong opinion on that but Nathan as well is like how do we actually design this framework that at the same time on invite as much diversity but at the value and at the opinion level but also that help understand that this diversity is a positive thing because it can enable better operations if we manage to bridge them but then how do we ensure that on the one hand so one risk is that not enough diversity only very value aligned people and therefore quite weak at the at the at the deliberation level are too much diversity but then we cannot bridge amongst them and then nothing up and protects our parallelism because we cannot get to agree on anything yeah well I mean to me democracy needs to be fast fair and fun right there's no trade-off between the three once you start making the trade-off then you got into the kind of situation you just describe in which there's no fun in talking to people who are two different and so you just admit people who are similar which is fast and arguably fair but not at some point not fun at all right because you need diversity in order to have enjoyment and so I think a quick way to turn conflict into procreation and a culture that builds this approaching effect that is to say we actively enjoy crossing longer distances giving large bridging bonuses to people who are so different from us that there's an overflow and there's a wrap around right what we need to really celebrate this kind of crossing large distances as part of the culture otherwise it risk becoming a cult another culture and then it will become like a self limiting idea and so to skill across you need to celebrate long distances and the resolution of long distance differences and conflicts and really take enjoyment in the quick and fair resolution yeah and I think this is it's a really deep challenge and and one thing I one frame that I used to think about it a bit is is this idea of innovation amnesia which is this pattern in which people seem to when something new shows up discard important things that they had fought hard to establish in previous generations so for example we could think about you know the way in which when you switch from sending your mail through the postal service to Gmail you know suddenly you trade a system that doesn't spy on you to a system that does and you know you just accept it because wow it's so fast and and pretty or you switch from taxis to app based rideshare and dispense with you know generations of labor protections that were you know that people fought hard for and and you know I talked before about the you know the Federal Reserve you know like yeah we can have all kinds of critiques but wait a second let's make sure that we still have an economic system that cares whether people are employed and and I think we this is another reason to that I think they're really really crucial dividing line between you know the network state idea which is built on startup disruption and a network nation idea could be the idea of building on what's already there um building on well on on the good things that we have established you know where we have good universal health care programs let's not blow those up and hope that we we can reconstruct them because we in the United States know that that's really hard and and we've been struggling to do that for decades and we can't manage to figure it out and you know for those of you who have it keep it and and figure out how to build other layers on top of that and maybe someday your place it was something better but be careful with the inheritances that we have of from past generations and as we build into the future let's see if we can build on those shoulders um to uh uh for for for the next things and not lose you know the gifts that we've been given um that is I think both like the risk and the real opportunity for for this kind of thinking about a new a new meta politics how do we relate to the past and how do we make sure that we don't forget the good things uh that that we need to hold on to so uh within of our intentional communities which we hope eventually will grow into a network nation um we have this um we have this um I don't know this fault I guess uh which which which we call the plurality paradox um which is essentially this uh this this actually acknowledgement uh from I guess a small degree of empirical experience that um the more aligned people are at the value level then the more we can actually hold diversity at the opinion level and then because if you share the same value it becomes very fun I guess or very interesting to actually discuss different opinion because we know that we're standing on the same ground and it just happens that you know conceptualization of the world has led to us having different opinion and so it's interesting to explore the thinking space to understand why given the same value we have different opinion this verse uh if you are with very different values it might become extremely complex to deliberate or to argue or to debate because the opinion almost don't matter if the value are clashing and so one question that I would love to hear from both of you is like in terms of like these political actors that we are trying to craft with the network nation what is actually uh leading to stronger political capacity uh is it more important to have an accumulation of values in order to hold the diversity of opinion as a positive space of debate or shall we actually try to identify people perhaps that have diverse values but that are united by the same problems or the same uh societal vision and therefore we'll also have to somehow figure out a way to work together even to the value are different um what's your opinion on this? well I stumbled on care ethics and specifically civic care from John Toronto precisely because she treated the ability for a community's relationships we've seen those communities to have a healthiness when it comes to the difference of opinions the ability to resolve them to be attentive and take care of each other and so on as the primary thing to watch out and to design for this is in a position to most other values in virtue ethics which is about individuals uh who must strive to be I don't know courageous or to have great temperaments or to have this um compassionate um like or the ability to show empathy and so on which are all individual level traits uh the problem of these is that if you cultivate for those individual based traits it is almost always to the implicit exclusion of the other traits that these individuals maybe have no taste buds for right because people are neurodiverse for some people some virtues are simply less accessible than other virtues but if you design for civic care then basically you're looking for people who are inhabiting or are vessels of relationships that are healthy and I can cultivate such relationships with people who may hold different taste buds but are also committing to the idea of civic care so it's almost like aligning to a community practice or process instead of like the individual attributes or traits and I find out to be very attractive and also agrees with my experience with many intentional communities. Yeah I think I want to go back to that word entanglement that I used earlier I mean I think that's really important piece of the story and the values I think can only be part of it you know values are kind of hard for humans to hold for too long I think in the certain respect and they bounce all over the place I mean we experience that very deeply right now and in this country where you know the values have diverged so profoundly in so many respects and what holds us together is often just like appearances and just like these weird little like social norms about like how you show up in a space how you drive a car you know just like the ability to live together you know going to really places a worship together you know these these just basic norms are like the tight are the the tendrils holding us together and they look a little more like ritual than values because they're not actually we have different stories that we tell about why we're doing that thing but we're still doing the same thing and you know the political philosopher John Rawls talked about overlapping consensus that holds a society together and I think that consensus can look a lot of different ways which might be a good thing you know some network nations it might be values others it might be you know a thing we do together and we have very different values and that's okay and and you know and sometimes you know for instance you know in my religious community it's the one place in my life a lot of the times it feels like where I'm in context where people have different political beliefs and we're brought together by a shared ritual and a shared story in history and and I think you need though you need to recognize that it's that sick structure of of human life that enables us to hold you know hold our societies together and and and and the entanglement is you know is is that recognition and even when we're very different if we become entangled with each other you know that that is that's a a way of of enabling diversity to flourish right countries that are deeply economically entangled tend not to go to war with each other because it's just too painful I think one of the scariest things that's going on right now in the world is is the disentanglement of of of economic life that can pave a way to you know to to really really dangerous conflict and we have to be aware about like the risk again that we take if we challenge the nation say I mean I live in a in a region that has deep problems with water if we were at all part of the same country we would probably be at war you know Colorado would be at war with New Mexico or whatever because like there's just not enough water to go around and to let us do all of our things and and so we need to be very careful recognize we haven't talked about violence so far but I think that's that's a question that we need to take really really really seriously because it's a part of the human story it's a part of what we're capable of and when we break apart or when we we we reimagine our our political life you know we need to we need to make sure that we're really deeply attentive to that that risk of of kind of of you know the worst parts of our nature coming coming forward in ways that they they are already all around us but you know could could surface even even worse I would like to yeah build a little bit on your reflection also maybe bring this fascinating conversation to an and I think it's like a beautiful picture you're painting this need to kind of flesh out a wee a political community which can you know carry these ideas and ideas that we are discussing here and I think this is also a question we of course asking ourselves for this platform we are trying to build for network nations and maybe which other you know organizers are also asking themselves who want to you know bring about different instantiations of you know like digital democracies of the future and it's the question basically of like how do we build like a compelling narrative which is you know capturing the public imagination and I think like one trap we sometimes probably tend to fall into into these kind of spaces where we are operating in is that we are of course being sometimes slightly theoretical about these topics you know there's a lot of abstraction involved in discussing governance discussing institutional designs and it is discussing you know the intersections of technologies and all of that and to many people citizens around the world this feels a little bit remote sometimes so I wonder how we build a narrative maybe fun applications but also other instantiations you know like plurality like the cooperative movement and so on and which allows us to broaden the platform which allows us to bring in you know groups which we haven't you know enclosed in our echo chamber yet and I wonder if you have some ideas on you know like what this kind of narrative would have to entail how it would have to send this message out and yeah maybe can conclude with that I'll say Ben then leave it to Audrey to wrap us up with something better but I think it's got to start by meaning by bringing responses to people's real challenges you know it cannot be an abstraction you know Marxism spread because the workers were suffering you know and and and and this idea was presented as hey this is a pathway to to the classless society and to and more importantly to like having bread on your table every day and there was a nation state came about not because everyone was suddenly convinced that this was the greatest idea it came about because there were wars that just seemed intractable until we figured out some kind of compromise and this is a compromise people could live with and I think when we look at context like Gaza we're going to look at context like like Sudan you know the crisis of politics in the United States I think we need to make sure to apply these ideas to to those spaces those are all spaces and there are many more where the you know the nation state is rupturing and climate crisis that's where we need to focus is how can these tools be be usable for bringing about solutions that people otherwise aren't seeing in front of them because they can only think in terms of what nation states are capable of yeah and it's important to realize the wins we had as the broader open movement I mean Wikipedia is still top 10 websites there are more and more people using signal proton all of these tools that are precursors right or really enabling factors of those network nation aspirations are already everyday tools that solves everyday problems for everyday people and so the importance I think is not just to invent new things but just to popularize the idea that okay is some other domains for example not many people know that something that's like GPT-4 that does reasoning well like O3 level can run locally on your laptop and actually if you tune in a little bit they doesn't hallucinate as much anymore right so this kind of local edge open source AI is already everyday technology but not many people know about these right so just making popular those ideas that already get embodiment into everyday technologies can make interoperability the norm because the more people using these technologies and protocol the more natural it will feel to them to feel that okay nations maybe united states maybe united but networks that are only interdependent and interoperable and once they got into this interoperable kind of thinking then apply that thinking to the idea of nations or states or nation states become second nature Audrey Nathan thank you so much for this fascinating conversation it was super generative let us maybe know and especially our listeners where we can follow your work I'm sure a lot of them are eager and excited to you know get involved and learn more about it yeah you can find my own work at Nathan Schneider.info or the work of my lab the Media Economies Design Lab at medlab.host or or Metagov's organization I am on the board with PribeVera with his at Medagov.org great and as a I think research advisor or something in Medagov do check out Medagov's work also interoperability between the digital deliberation tools that's another very natural thing to bridge into and you can find me at orgpt.org thank you so much amazing thank you but [BLANK_AUDIO]