The Public and Its Problems

tl;dr

Making good decisions is how we participate in a public which transcends any particular political agenda such that we can maintain the meta-political agenda of permissionlessness and censorship resistance.

Making good decisions in increasingly ambiguous domains is both a necessary and sufficient condition for democracy to flourish, where democracy is the name for “a life of free and enriching communion”.

How we make good decisions is what John Dewey’s book The Public and Its Problems is all about.

Re-membering Liberty

Some of our greatest stories remind us that, in order to understand the mysteries of the universe, we require narrative. Though my story does not attempt to encipher its message to quite the same degree as Yun Tianming’s fairy tales, it may one day turn out to be the political soap bubbles powering the use of blockchains as productive political tools.

This story is really an inquiry, and it begins with a man named John Dewey and an old book surprisingly relevant to our time: The Public and Its Problems (1927).

You see, there are many kinds of decentralization. The kind that matters most in terms of the social fictions we agree to uphold is the decentralization of power. As Dewey writes:

“What nonsense it is, then, to talk of liberty as if it were a happy-go-lucky breaking of chains. It is with emancipation that real tasks begin, and liberty is a searching challenge, for it takes away the guardianship of the master and the comfort of the priest. The iconoclasts didn’t free us. They threw us into the water, and now we have to swim.”

Dewey defines liberty as "that secure release and fulfillment of personal potentialities which take place only in rich and manifold association with others: the power to be an individualized self making a distinctive contribution and enjoying in its own way the fruits of association.” That is, the old definitions are much closer to ubuntu than “don’t step on me, bro”.

It is this rich and manifold association of individuated selves that we will be considering in what follows, for it is the crux of the whole matter.

Expert citizens

What Dewey described in 1927, and the story I see forming around “information finance”, shares the same narrative goal: to create a larger framework for the relationship between experts and citizens that is sensitive to the problem of power and that sees citizens not merely as authorizing power, but as genuinely authoritative in decision making.

In the introduction to the modern version of Dewey’s book, Melvin L. Rogers writes:

“The Public and Its Problems seeks to answer two distinct but related questions. First, what is the proper relationship between citizens and experts in the context of modern complexity, which nonetheless retains the self-governing dimension that we associate with democracy? Second, what is the proper method for helping the public emerge from its eclipse in the face of modern complexity so that it can fill the charge of self-governance?”

We need sophisticated actors doing sophisticated things in order to keep our systems efficient and accountable. However, we don’t want those actors to gain power over time due to their sophistication and thereby lose touch with problems experienced by regular people, or erode the ability of regular people to govern themselves effectively.

Dewey says it best:

“The essential need is the improvement of the methods and conditions of debate, discussion, and persuasion. That is the problem of the public. We have asserted that this improvement depends essentially upon freeing and perfecting the processes of inquiry and of dissemination [… Most importantly] expertness is not shown in framing and executing policies, but in discovering and making known the facts upon which the former depend.”

Experts tend to accrue power because the default incentive for sophisticated users is to exert undue influence in making decisions, rather than to provide already-valuable insights which help us decide things together. The issue is that it was unclear–in 1927–how we could practically improve incentive structures surrounding public communication and decision making.

That may be changing. We need to improve the “methods” of debate, discussion, and persuasion. This is precisely what tools like pol.is already do, and do quite well. However, what are the “conditions” of debate, discussion, and persuasion? One could argue that they are primarily economic: a realm tools like pol.is cannot touch. However, blockchains can and do.

If we can enable the expression of preference to include within its ambit a price, then the conditions of debate, discussion and persuasion become directly applicable to their economic outcome, which is precisely how they may be permanently improved. Such direct, economic programmability could enable us, as Dewey hoped, to “perfect the means of communication of meanings so that genuinely shared interest in the consequences of interdependent activities may inform desire and effort and thereby direct action.”

Always in process

That sounds nice, but what does it actually mean to perfect the communication of meanings? In our context, it is nothing other than enabling people to make credible economic commitments in open marketplaces for collective decisions.

This is not a new idea. In fact, Dewey says exactly the same thing:

“By political democracy we mean a mode of government […] that emphasizes the publicity of decision making.”

By this, he does not mean the publicity of individual participants. He means that the methods by which we arrive at decisions should be public, predictable, and open to all.

If we mistakenly focus on who gets publicity, then all we’re doing is changing the name from “king” to “president” to “founder”, or “aristocracy” to “congress” to “delegates”, without changing anything about how power operates. If, however, we make public the process by which decisions are made–and do so in a permissionless environment which makes it possible for anyone to improve that process, or create a different one–then the flow of value from how decisions are made can always be reprogrammed, which has a marked influence on how power accrues and who gets to exercise it under which conditions.

The focus on process, rather than personalities, is critical because it makes clear the link between political and economic power. Dewey is explicit about this:

“The same causes which have led men to utilize concentrated political power to serve private purposes will continue acting to induce men to employ concentrated economic power in behalf of non-public aims. This fact does not imply the problem is insoluble. But it indicates where the problem resides, whatever guise it assumes.”

How do we attend to asymmetric influence and how it concentrates power? We craft verifiable incentives which make it more profitable for everyone when citizens are informing experts, rather than the current default in which it is unfairly profitable for experts to manipulate citizens. As Dewey says:

“To the extent that experts guide political power without taking direction from the public in the form of deliberation, the entire decision-making process loses legitimacy.”

Legitimate power

“Legitimate political power is not merely restrictive—that is, it does not merely constrain freedom—but more significantly, it makes freedom possible by giving citizens control over the forces that govern and enable their lives.”

What sorts of decision markets will give citizens control over the forces that govern and enable their lives? This should be a guiding question for GG as a research collective. It seems obvious that any such solution should be open source, freely available, contestable, and censorship resistant.

Of course, open source tools and methods do not, in themselves, make everyone an expert. However, they do act against the centralization of power through specialization because anyone who cares enough and is willing to follow their interests can always contest the powers that be. This is critical to a functioning democracy in which freedom is not an end in itself, but a means to genuine liberation. Dewey goes on to write that:

“Liberation requires an intimate and critical engagement with the problems that afflict individuals and the ways in which the potential resolution of those problems fits with the liberation of others—an engagement from which the input of individuals and communities cannot be expunged.”

This is, to some extent, why decision markets of various kinds are so interesting. They are structures which merge individual expression with collective interest. When they are implemented on blockchains - a technology which fuses money and speech - that merger of individual expression and collective interest is made economically credible. The actual conditions of any given debate have never been so persuasive.

Dewey’s continues:

“Democracy defines members not simply by virtue of their actual participation in determining social possibilities, but also by the potential participation that remains open to them if need so arises. To the extent that power functions to determine social possibilities, those possibilities cannot be of such a nature that they preclude the future contestability and development of how power functions.”

“The legitimacy of decision making hinges on the extent to which citizens do not feel permanently bound by those decisions in the face of new and different political changes.”

The fact that mechanisms like decision markets can always be deployed without permission means that no-one is bound by the current market and remains free to suggest and implement mechanisms with alternative political consequences, such that how power functions always remains contestable and open to debate.

Re-cognition

“The public consists of all those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for.”

How do we care for those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions? It seems to me that the only possible solution to such a big question lies in programmability, and only in programmability that is open and contestable. That is, Butter can fork the old Gnosis contracts and do CFMs with them. Others can come along and fork Butter’s work to achieve some other end and so on ad infinitum. This amounts to programming money democratically, because we can always deliberate together - by virtue of which marketplaces we use - on which mechanisms results in the most desirable direct and indirect consequences.

Programming money democratically is good for society.

Which naturally raises the question: what do we mean by ‘good’? Melvin L. Rogers writes:

“Dewey regards the good of society as legitimate to the extent that it is self-consciously recognized by the members of the community, his understanding of democracy locates itself in the freely willed actions (whether in support or contestation) of its members.”

The ‘good’ is not a static concept: it is a process of ongoing, self-conscious recognition of how I relate to you, the consequences this has for ‘us’, and the will we can each exert in order to communicate our recognitions creatively. In this sense,

“We come upon the primary problem of the public: to achieve recognition of itself […] The prime difficulty, as we have seen, is that of discovering the means by which a scattered, mobile and manifold public may so recognize itself as to define and express its interests.”

This is one reason why it is so impactful to work on decision marketplaces and information finance generally. Given their permissionless nature, blockchains are home to many divergent political groups. It is neither possible, nor desirable, to identify a “unified politics of blockchains”. Nevertheless, making good decisions and allocating capital appropriately is a problem all users of any blockchain must eventually face and, as a result, decision marketplace may call into being a public that transcends any particular ideology.

Traditional politics contests power via the application of either violence or patience. Permissionless marketplaces for mechanisms which order transactions such that their indirect consequences do not result in the few accruing undue power do not require either protest or occupation. The use of any given mechanism is not determined by rhetoric or personality: it is determined by efficiency and welfare. As Dewey says,

“Democracy, then, entails a kind of openness in which its substantive meaning—that is, what concerns it addresses and what ends it pursues—is always in the process of being determined.

The public refers to a space of unity and difference that functions only if we see it as indeterminate.”

Public solutions

Defining “the public” as those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions is equivalent to saying “the public” emerges from individuals and groups that come together in the service of problem solving. Self-conscious recognition of why we have gathered is the first step towards exercising legitimate power over the decisions which affect us.

This matters because, as new transactions become possible, new publics are called into being as the result of new indirect consequences which affect them, and which they must find some systematic way to care and account for. This is not a phenomenon for which anyone can develop a ‘final solution’.

The very notion of a final solution is–as it should be–odious. What we are concerned with here is process, and the means by which our processes might be locked open such that the way in which power is enacted is always contestable.

Contestability is, in essence, a result of the way said systems either help or hinder us perfect the communication of our meanings. And, seeing as we will always mean new and different things, even perfection is not static. Perfection is a living process, which is found again in every moment our needs are commensurate with our ability to realize their creative solution.

Such solutions depend on our ability to search for, and find, others similarly affected by the indirect consequences of all our transactions. Dewey called this the Great Community:

“Till the Great Society is converted into a Great Community, the Public will remain in eclipse. Communication can alone create a great community. Our Babel is not one of tongues but of the signs and symbols without which shared experience is impossible.”

This is rousing stuff, but we face one more problem, which is that the very word “community” has become overused in our time. It has been stretched so far by insincere advertisements and scammy projects that no-one quite knows what it truly means. However, we can revive Dewey’s old definition to counter this slip into meaninglessness:

“A community thus presents an order of energies transmuted into one of meanings which are appreciated and mutually referred by each to every other on the part of those engaged in combined action. ‘Force’ is not eliminated but is transformed in use and direction by ideas and sentiments made possible by means of symbols.”

Communities transform energy into meanings by virtue of how they use symbols rather than physical force. Understanding exactly how this transmutation works requires that we each:

“Get rid of the habit of thinking of democracy as something institutional and external and acquire the habit of treating it as a way of personal life, so as to realize that democracy is a moral ideal.”

Deliberate art

Dewey concludes:

“Economic agencies produce one result when they are left to work themselves out on the merely physical level, or on that level modified only as the knowledge, skill and technique which the community has accumulated are transmitted to its members unequally and by chance. They have a different outcome in the degree in which knowledge of consequences is equitably distributed, and action is animated by an informed and lively sense of a shared interest.”

How do we create environments which lend themselves to the emergence of a lively sense of shared interest? My submission is that decision markets are perfect candidates. Figuring out how to make better decisions (both in a manner where individuals can profit and communities benefit) is nothing if not a deep and deliberate inquiry into the various consequences of transactions and a search for the others who think along the same lines.

This kind of individually-motivated, community-benefitting story-telling might help us realize the ultimate vision presented in The Public and Its Problems:

“The highest and most difficult kind of inquiry and a subtle, delicate, vivid and responsive art of communication must take possession of the physical machinery of transmission and circulation and breathe life into it. When the machine age has thus perfected its machinery it will be a means of life and not its despotic master. Democracy will come into its own, for democracy is a name for a life of free and enriching communion.”

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I originally posted this analysis on Flashbots’ forum here, making the point that various kinds of research and work on MEV might also fulfill a similar function in terms of cohering a public capable of responding to the indirect consequences of transactions that effect them.

I was initially excited about the overlap between liberty as a “search challenge” and the literal challenge of searching, applied to MEV. It seemed so natural. My thinking evolved over time. Searching a very niche activity, and so hoping for a Great Community to be born from that was perhaps a bridge too far.

So, I proposed that perhaps it was a search for more trustworthy means of communicating that would actually generate the Great Community. The jury is still out on this one. TEEs are also quite niche, and the Venn diagram of those who know a lot about them and a lot about blockchains is still very small. Let’s see what their implementation in AI does for all this…

Nevertheless, I have come back around to thinking that it is a searching challenge which remains core to this whole problem of the public finding itself and become cognizant of its own operations, thereby taking back its power and distributing it amongst all affected members. However, what we are searching for is not (just) the optimal ordering of transactions in any given block, it is “truth” more generally. And I don’t mean “Truth” as some static, absolutely concept. I mean those positions/stories/decisions which arise in time and fit their contexts best, profiting the individuals who have spoken up for them and the communities in which they are applied.