[35.0] decentralizing our souls
what happens when personhood becomes a ledger?
Ok somehow I missed this one until six days ago, BUT—
On May 11, Eric Glen Weyl, Puja Ohlhaver, and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a paper titled “Decentralized Society: Finding Web3's Soul.” In it, the three crypto-enthusiast researchers argue that Web3—the catchall marketing term describing an “ecosystem” of blockchain-based technologies, ostensibly a successor to the current era of Big Tech-dominated cyberspace—is limited at present by its emphasis on “transferable, financialized assets.” Instead of “DeSoc,” or a “Decentralized Society,” we’re currently limited to “DeFi,” or Decentralized Finance, they argue.
Within a Web3 matrix, these authors believe, there is, at present, no real way to build “social relationships of trust” on an infrastructural level. Identification in the existing environment involves people’s self-chosen server handles (e.g. @bitcoin_beliver92) and cringe cartoon avatars. Whereas offline, a single body equals a single person, it’s hard to tell within this framework what online identity belongs to whom, and whether a singular IRL person controls several online identities.
Rather than saying “oh, well that’s not good!” and backing away from a dogged quest for blockchain maximalism, the three authors say “oh, well what if we just made things creepier?”
From stage left: soulbound tokens (SBTs).
Weyl, Ohlhaver, and Buterin think of SBTs as a cousin to the NFT, but for personhood and personal achievements. Educational institutions and places of employment would issue them to their pupils and employees. They write:
Imagine a world where most participants have Souls that store SBTs corresponding to a series of affiliations, memberships, and credentials. For example, a person might have a Soul that stores SBTs representing educational credentials, employment history, or hashes of their writings or works of art. In their simplest form, these SBTs can be “self-certified,” similar to how we share information about ourselves in our CVs. But the true power of this mechanism emerges when SBTs held by one Soul can be issued—or attested—by other Souls, who are counterparties to these relationships.
Apart from the struggle to understand how this is all that different from an attempt to turn every social interaction into a more doxx-y YikYak, another issue that arises from this proposal is, ahem, the phrasing. Like, if you’re going to market an entire social vision, you might as well not make the thing sound scary?
Many scholars have discussed how religion is basically marketing. (Here’s a whole book about it!) A lot of it feels like lazy metaphorical connection rather than actual historical analysis, so I’m not all that swayed by it, but suffice to say, calling the core tenet of your belief something fundamentally off-putting likely won’t germinate a mass movement in your favor.
Ohlhaver seems to have gotten the gist a few days after publication and ensuing backlash:
Oop!
Recognizing the frightening nature of the system they’ve devised, the researchers approach lending as a supposedly less-scary entry point.
An ecosystem of SBTs could unlock a censorship-resistant, bottom-up alternative to top-down commercial and “social” credit systems. SBTs that represent education credentials, work history, and rental contracts could serve as a persistent record of credit-relevant history, allowing Souls to stake meaningful reputation to avoid collateral requirements and secure a loan. Loans and credit lines could be represented as non-transferable but revocable SBTs, so they are nested amongst a Soul’s other SBTs—a kind of non-seizable reputational collateral—until they are repaid and subsequently burned, or better yet, replaced with proof of repayment.
Though such a system could entrench redlining as a practice or render minoritized groups particularly vulnerable to surveillance and attack, the authors still think it’s just dandy!
DeSoc does not need to be perfect to pass the test of being acceptably non-dystopian; to be a paradigm worth exploring it merely needs to be better than the available alternatives. Whereas DeSoc has possible dystopian scenarios to guard against, web2 and existing DeFi are falling into patterns that are inevitably dystopian.
In a sassy critique of the SBT SNAFU, Financial Times reporter George Steer highlights how “what Buterin, Weyl and Ohlhaver have done is come up with a complex solution to a problem they created.”
And, tellingly, Weyl told the FT that “we’re heading either for a Peter Thiel-inspired anarcho-capitalist dystopia or a Chinese government-style top-down surveillance system.” So Web3 is the only viable third option, Weyl continued.
Ok so if we’re ranking the dystopias, and there are only three of them, then we’re in the clear :)
Can internet people talk to actual people and not just amongst themselves?
Reading this month’s cover story for WIRED offers some answers. In it, senior writer Gilad Edelman describes his journey into the annals of Web3 culture at ETHDenver, a flagship conference for Ethereum apostles. (Weyl actually has a cameo in Edelman’s article pontificating on Web3’s shortcomings; an uncanny crossover which makes me think he’s the Francis Bacon of the blockchain!)
Catching up with a friend who isn’t involved in crypto after the conference, Edelman writes:
I feel slightly crazed, struggling to explain what I’ve been up to: Web3, cryptoeconomics, BUIDLing a DAO. I’m a bit like Dorothy returned from Oz. Gradually, talk drifts to normal stuff: his family, my job, a trip we’ve been planning. That night, I sleep in Dave’s basement, and on Sunday morning I’m woken early by the patter of his 2-year-old daughter’s feet. The guys at the conference seem to really believe they’re building a better world for her, but in the morning light it’s hard to take seriously the idea that her future depends on precisely calibrating a bunch of incentives in a blockchain membership organization. It all feels like a game that I’ve unplugged from.
Then my phone buzzes. My services are needed before the DAO can officially launch. Without thinking much of it, I plug myself back in.
First, yes a DAO, a Decentralized Autonomous Organization, is called the same thing as the religion/philosophy, which is low-hanging fruit.
Second, beyond hilarious depictions of the weird venue—it was hosted at the Denver Sports Castle, a defunct sporting goods store—and describing its broken plumbing as a metaphor for Ethereum’s infrastructural problems, Edelman’s essay is useful in showing how and why insider ontologies and dialects are so tantalizing.
Deeply entrenched cryptoevangelists like the DeSoc authors often have little incentive to fully unplug from the screen and reconsider the implications of the “pivots” they meekly suggest. Why throw on the breaks in your fast-moving golden vehicle when things are so plush and you’re so popular? Why abolish your moneymaker? Why not consider hitting ctrl + z on your whole endeavor?
One argument is that it’s a slippery slope: Art critic and essayist Jonathan Crary thinks the real middle way between Weyl’s supposed binary of “Thiel-esque dystopia or Chinese surveillance”—which I most certainly will poke holes into down the road—is abolishing the internet altogether for the sake of a common future on earth:
If we’re fortunate, a short-lived digital age will have been overtaken by a hybrid material culture based on both old and new ways of living and subsisting cooperatively. Now, amid intensifying social and environmental breakdown, there is a growing realization that daily life overshadowed on every level by the internet complex has crossed a threshold of irreparability and toxicity. More and more people know or sense this, as they silently experience its damaging consequences.
If you’re reading this, you’re internet people, too. And that’s not good!
Help, I’ve fallen into the trap of discussing a conceit through literary devices and I can’t get up: DeSoc and Soul Bound Tokens are at once a metonym and a warning. We’ve plodded so far into cybernetic hallucinations that something like the Web3 triumvirate’s paper can be published in the first place, and then largely ridiculed on deeply toxic social networks that are either owned by an Augustus Caesar cosplayer or, soon enough, the son of a South African emerald mining scion.
It’s time to turn things off and never turn them on again—to mitigate pixelated psychosis and congregate around some sort of viable future. Hit ‘undo send’ on our digital Genesis. (Then I’d have to start mailing this newsletter? Could be cute!)
Divine Innovation is a somewhat cheeky newsletter on spirituality and technology. Published once every three weeks, it’s written by Adam Willems and edited by Vanessa Rae Haughton. Find the full archive here.