Comment by jonahbenton

Comment by jonahbenton 3 days ago

2 replies

Lot of work happened in the last 5-10 years in the web3 space around tech-enabled participatory governance, with some funding backdrop because it's on top of a crypto platform. ENS is kind of the poster child

https://docs.ens.domains/learn/protocol/

In terms of participation incentive models I like pointing people to slicing pie. The concept is simple enough and can learned from their free materials. Helpful mental model quantifying sweat "equity" where equity can be voting shares, or actual financial shares:

https://slicingpie.com/

In terms of governance policy that is specific to your domain- what are the incentives and measures and countermeasures to ensure good behavior from the different roles of participants particular to therapy- there are certainly codes of conduct in the therapy space but probably this is going to be new work for you.

I have read quite a bit in the anarchy space, including Graeber, and Chomsky's references and pull-outs from the moments during the Spanish Civil War when there was real movement here- regret to say that the prior thinking does not strike me as anywhere near sufficient to serve as models for the current shape of the world. A lot of new work has to get laid down for these to be real things.

Democracy is a fragile mechanism that as we see can collapse quickly under lots of limited resource regimes and when community trust is fractured. High trust does not scale. Low trust is needed to scale and professionalize.

But +1, think now is a good time for worker-controlled services to serve as a growing alternative to platform controlled services (just saw first Amazon therapy ad today, like, are you effing kidding me?)

Good luck.

prrada 2 days ago

Yeah, lol, just saw the amazon thing. I find therapy to be a bit of a spiritual experience and although companies can provide a lot, a more human connection has never been one of them for me. Also, so far every therapist I know has been either heavily squeezed by an insurance intermediary or drowning in task while building their own thing, can't imagine an amazon anything helping them help us.

Yeah, I was excited about the possibilities of something different with Crypto, but it always seems to be more complication than it's worth. That said the true ownership of the name part with ENS is epic. Good stuff, thank you.

  • jonahbenton 7 hours ago

    +1 to all that. My business is a kind of consulting collective, high trust, people who have known each other for decades. High bar for participation. Careful to ensure everyone stays on the right side of the IRS "self-employed" line, while trying to be coordinated and efficient about common expenses and benefits. Cooperative but not a democracy or cooperative per se- having participated in coops including the famous Park Slope Food Coop- think the low-trust semi-informed cooperative democracy is really, really hard to make work when the context ultimately is business and making a living. We have looked very closely at the web3 and especially programmatic stablecoin machinery, there are so many ways having little structures like that would help with risk and cash flow- like, being able to easily self-set up escrow structures with clients who may themselves have cash flow risk. Could definitely do it outside the US, adoption inside probably never get over the hump. Therapy is not so much project based but some common insurance and billing tooling, and then tax reporting, would be beneficial. Anyway, hope you are able to get traction.