Evan Van Ness ~ The Future of Work and Organizing Systems Panel

[Music] foreign okay perfect everybody we're we're just about done with the panels for this afternoon we got a couple more remaining on some interesting topics and this is a whole overarching theme of how do we think about what happens when a lot of users are in this ecosystem so we had a topic on how do we get the first million users in and the next million what happens when money and capital 3.0 comes in and uh with that obviously the the nature of what it means of an organization and work should also change so with that in mind I'd like to invite John pauler from opolis Kevin owaki from get coin Derek Reza from purpose Ventures Nathan Schneider from University of Colorado and Natalia from Dallas stack to on to stage and they'll be talking about the future of work and organizing systems and and the panel will be moderated by Evan Van Ness from the week in ethereum please welcome them on stage is this the part where I start with a bit connect reference okay never mind bad joke all right we are the future of work panel uh let's really just uh start with our like very quick 15 second intro go down the line like who are you and what organization organization do you work for I'm Natalia and I work with Dallas Tech so building an operating system for I'm Nathan Schneider I teach in media studies at CU Boulder and uh I work in developing cooperative and other shared ownership business models ownership structures for the online economy oh I'm Derek Razzo I'm with purpose uh and we're building the tools for organizations to Institute alternative ownership and financing structures that support their long-term mission hello my name is Kevin owaki I am a founder of git coin whose mission is to grow and sustain open source software we offer a product that allows you to earn crypto coins in exchange for your work on open source software and I'm John powler I'm the founder of opolis and we're essentially moving a legal and technological framework from corporations centricity to network centricity so that individuals can have more control and ownership over their employment not only functionally but legally so let's just start off with a really broad question that you can answer however you want depending on your organization and we can go whatever order and that's really just like what are the biggest opportunities that you see in front of you for the future of work the the biggest I mean it's pretty big it's big which which one are you going for personally I think we spend a lot of time in the blockchain space talking about the technological components of future of organizing systems I don't think we talk enough about excuse me my voice is totally shot I'm sure you can imagine I've been speaking a little bit this weekend the legal framework of employment is equally as important but we don't talk about it we sort of like act like it's just gonna abstract away and we don't have to worry about like oh the legal stuff you know it'll just be fine um but the truth is the way that we've architected the framework of employment not just from the incorporation level but also legislation regulation and any sort of alphabet soup type of thing that you have to comply with in order to get it right that framework also has to be well architected to create the balance with the technology so um I think that there's a huge opportunity to see a new advent of you know it's kind of like thinking about digital assets or you know cryptocurrencies is a new asset class I think that Dows and the kinds of Co-op Frameworks that I think are going to come out of the conversation are probably the biggest influence in the next 15 to 20 years in my opinion I hope the future of work involves less work um uh the the one thing that strike me I've been on a lot of like panels about the future of work funded by foundations who are uh spewing off the fumes of capital that they own that is producing money that they're not working for um and then they ask about like what is the future of work for all those people who have to actually work for money um and and that's why I'm really interested in the question of ownership and capital ownership um because uh we have the means we have a uh an economy that already enables lots of not not nearly enough a small amount of people to not need to work there were uh Visions in the past that when technology advanced uh uh working hours would decline there's evidence that working hours have actually increased um and so I think we need to have that conversation about what kinds of structures in our society we need to change what kinds of tools we need to be adopting to ensure that we all can much more broadly reap the benefits of that value and and I I have less anxiety about what the future of work is and start talking about the future of life not not only on what structures we're going to use and build but also how we build them and and how we're able to incorporate not only like looking back and all the different attempts that we're we've already made in the past um and and seeing those patterns of human behavior and of the you know the effects of our environments and so on you know and no matter what kind of Technologies we build we're still going to face a lot of similar uh challenges and I hope we look more deeply into that and also in how to make it less imbalanced because we're here questioning these things while like most of the population in the world has no idea of what it is and has no idea of like all the different options that that it involves so I agree um I think that we've gone through a couple title shifts in terms of how corporations are organized and labor is organized and capital is organized to support that uh those corporate missions and I think that the reason there is all these people in this uh massive building talking about ethereum and blockchain and all these technological uh advancements is because we're in the process of seeing a shift from firm-based economic system to network-based economic system and obviously we know what this looks like to some degree uh Airbnb is you know the as the moniker goes it's the largest real estate company that owns real estate or or largest hotel company that owns no hotels we work as the same for Real Estate um these are networked firms but they're structured in the same way that you know in a similar and almost identical way to the East India Company so while the way that we've organized labor has massively changed the way that we've actually uh organized the corporate structures that distribute the value of that labor that actually determine how that is go how the massive resources of that Corporation are distributed and governed has not really changed um and so I think that as we make this shift into the network out Computing The Firm uh there's a whole bunch of massive questions about how do we actually govern those networks how do we own those networks together how do we distribute the value that those networks create and I think the people who are working in networks uh they're not necessarily always doing it because it's a purely Financial play for them I think the the most powerful networks are those that inculcate a sense of purpose so the future of work that I'm looking forward to and trying to build and I think everybody on this panel is also trying to build is purpose-driven networks and we can have a deeper conversation about like how to structure that and what the tools you need and what the capital structures you need are for that but I think that you first have to agree that that's actually where we want to go to before you can answer any of those other technical tactical questions yeah I I would agree that we're in the middle of a a seismic shift in the way labor is organized and uh I like to think of it in the context of epochs of human history so uh basically in the agricultural age a lot of the labor force was deployed on farms to your point in the Industrial Age was built around firms and people moving to cities and one of the theories that I've been noodling on is that we're in the middle of a shift a seismic shift to use your words in uh from an industrial age to an information age and so firms to networks I guess are the organizing principle of the information age and I I hesitate to make say things in Broad Strokes about the future of work because I just have such a narrow Slimmer of visibility on it being a software engineer from the bubble of Boulder Colorado but within the constraints of that bubble I'm seeing remote work being on an uptrend I'm seeing work on open source systems being an uptrend I'm particularly excited about the trends in blockchain of nested capitalism so basically really like the transfer of values within a corporation between teams just like it within a cell there's sort of like an economy of uh of value that that happens within a cell or a multicellular organism I'm excited about uh data as labor which was an idea that Glenn Weil put forward in his liberal uh radical markets book and uh one of the things that I think would be really key for making all this stuff mesh together is ownership self-sovereign ownership of your own employment of end of your own reputation so moving from the LinkedIn model where you are the product and you're being sold to recruiters or advertisers to a more like three box or get coin Kudos type model where your own owning your own reputation your professional resume and can transport that from site to site and manage who can have access to that information I think that all these things are going to change the way that we work within software development and open source but I would not speak so confidently about the broader economy because it's it's just a huge ecosystem and I'm not sure that those things that apply in my older blockchain bubble apply to the rest of the economy so I heard a lot of more or less agreement about dowels and ethereum being a way to reorganize re-architect organizing systems but also a lot of concern about the future so my question is on an individual level what are you and your organizations doing and what experiments are you running to make sure that you avoid dystopia obviously something that we all want to avoid and I think everybody expressed concern about that as well uh I'll take that one I uh so I guess I'll start by saying that I disagree with the premise of the question and uh I'm actually I'm actually bearish on dowels uh I think that we're spending John said this to me the other day uh and I hope you don't mind me repeating it that a lot of dowels I feel like are built for this like Fantastical Blade Runner future that we that we don't live in and they're too complex in their hearts Rogers what's that Buck Rogers Buck Rogers I would say like that when we have a hammer you think everything is a nail no like we see a lot of that happening with that yeah yeah hey cool let's do this and what are we doing and so the trend that I I want to see before before we figure out the dystopia question um I want to figure out what the minimum viable Dao is what's the minimum viable tool that can actually be the rails of an organization and I will stand here and proudly say at this blockchain ethereum conference that get coin is hella centralized and we get a lot of done because we're really centralized and when Dao stack figures out how to give me a dow in a box that I can dialize get coin then I'll do it but um I I just feel like the tech isn't there yet and I'm I'm bearish on Dallas until we find a minimum viable doubt can the attack get there uh sorry this sounds bad and I didn't hear that but can the tech get there yes no this is great I like I like debates the idea of decentralizing Everything Is A Lie it's not gonna happen it doesn't it doesn't conceptually make sense decentralization is something that can happen in part of a system but you've seen it happen over and over think of your favorite decentralized project and then think of the disappointing centralization that occurred in it somewhere down the line that you didn't expect because you were so fixated on the decentralization that you were trying to make occur right decentralization is one aspect of Any of of any system there are going to be points of centralization that arise and and we shouldn't be afraid of that um the the you know this stuff is built into the technology even when you're talking about any protocol is in some sense highly highly highly centralized um uh ethereum is highly centralized in one sense right the metallic Buddha and talks about this about you know it's a you know it's a single Ledger that's an incredible point of centralization and and one thing that's been I think disappointing to me from when I first you know started hanging out with with uh uh people who were building the earliest versions of ethereum in early 2014 is is I thought wow this is going to be the technology for building the new systems of accountable democracy right this is a tool that we can use to really hack out you know voice and and and participation and explore all kinds of new ways of being heard and being efficient and effective in that uh by being so and instead people kind of turn to markets um uh uh people got you know all excited about about kind of uh replicating the pre uh depression stock market right um now I think we're in a moment of opportunity where I see actually patterns forming where people are are starting to develop maybe secretly kind of embarrassed about it a little bit um uh uh models of governance that involve some kind of accountable centralization uh that use these tools to actually develop the new uh the next phases of democracy that you know in some respects aren't so different from the older phases of democracy but I think we can only begin to do that when we get over the idea that um that decentralizing everything is you know a a you know a rational aspiration so what specifically do you want to say sorry what specifically do you want to say yeah well you said you wanted to see like like systems put in place around radical democracy and not markets so I'm like curious about examples around that structures that are able to hear uh uh the voices of participants more uh finally minutely uh attentively than we've been able to do in previous systems you know people uh uh you know we're working in political systems with forms of democracy that are a few hundred years old you know we have the opportunity to build and they create a tremendous efficiencies over authoritarian systems we're in a moment where we can build a accountable Democratic structures to manage these uh tools for instance right now we're relying in a lot of these networks on on you know benevolent dictators for Life guiding communities you know we're going back to authoritarianism uh uh over these markets because we're not building in the structures that can govern these uh these networks appropriately accountably in ways where participants really have voice yeah and I I would just dovetail on what you're saying uh by adding that I think that markets as coordinating mechanisms are a cop-out in most cases I think that there can be situations where markets as a coordinating mechanism make sense but I think that specifically when you start talking about complex ideas like uh that require more project management more coordination more togetherness and governance I just think that history history tells us that a market is not necessarily your best bet when it comes to coordinating that type of activity that being said there's a place for markets in as a coordinating mechanism there's place for decentralization um but I totally agree with what you're saying that uh one of my contentions or one of my concerns about going towards the crypto dystopia maybe uh is that we rely too heavily not not just on markets but on the entire mindset that got us to where we are like a lot of the this idea that we're going to have a transparent Market coordinating all of the economic activity that's going to lead to everybody's uh needs being met it doesn't it doesn't play out that way without really solid governance we know that we've seen it we're in we're in the process of seeing an extremely difficult experiment go down in the U.S uh not to say that it's a fully transparent Market but I I just don't think that I think that we have to be clear about what the goals are uh rather than be fixed on the means I I'd like to hear what the Dow stack representative has to say agree with Nathan in the sense that decentralized decentralization is not everything and we can even see it in our own experiments at alstack so we we create you know we went through an Ico you know we we started creating this operating system we're decentralized organizations um maybe like starting four years ago and as soon as we were done with the iso we're like all right we want to do this a little differently we want our community to take part on the on the development of the prop the project with us and help us decide how to use this funds that we that we got so we started a little Alpha experiment called Genesis Alpha and throughout that process we we had a lot of um different opinions around what would be the importance of centralization and of you know what we call like the soft skills or soft governance in that process and now six months later we we can see you know a huge value in in those skills and in indeed having you know some centralized structures that facilitate um all the the pro like the complexities that are going on in the systems and how by the end of the day we're still humans trying to figure it out and still dealing with a bunch of models in our heads um so I think we we are on that like we totally believe that we need centralization we just believe that right now there's a bunch of centralized processes that can be decentralized including organizations but it also depends on what kind of organization we're talking about and what kind of purpose and processes will exist within it well I mean we don't have that much time left I I feel like I've heard a lot about things that we would like to hear but I'm I'm sort of curious about particularly like in specific ideas that any of our panelists either are planning on running or would like other people to run or are on the you know relatively near-term roadmap what was that last part near-term roadmap yeah from Texas I might be hard to understand yeehaw um for us we think about the evolution of work more than just the future of work we think about how do we get from where we are to where we want to go so as an example part of the Opera stack is actually a trustee that is uh vertically integrated shared services stack and it's highly centralized um it's just more efficient and it's relationship with the consumers is just different um and in the employment World corporations own the employees right there's a lot of legislative and you know compliance based you know onerous requirements of people who want to employ people that you have to go through and our trustee idea and the functionality of it is actually designed to as we decentralize certain processes and and we have the opportunity to kind of peel out certain components um that makes sense to either automate completely or just abstract them away it it actually allows as the bridge or to think about it like the hand on the back of the bike right so we're not trying to go from this highly controlling thing to this like you know Buck Rogers future thing like overnight we think this is a process and it's going to take time so the first thing that we did was we set up a peo which is fully centralized but it's crypto friendly and we're starting with baby steps to get people to use cryptocurrency or die um we've got our friends at maker and wire that we're integrating hi guys um into this process in collaboration to kind of really knit together this full call it the procurement process of employment so we're just taking things a step at a time so we have this like centralized framework and it's really boring and not that sexy but it's functional and it works and the way that we've set up the the structure of it it's not only benevolent it's we're actually actively architecting a legal framework that's not going to be corruptable not just um digital governance but legal DNA that is going to create sustainability for the entire ecosystem of obelisk well we're on the future of work panel but get coin is live now and built off of the substrate of Open Source software which is arguably an ecosystem of entirely decentralized software Engineers that were already building the infrastructure the digital infrastructure of the modern world and so uh this may be a panel about the future of work but uh the presence of work in the blockchain space is that git coin has done almost a million dollars worth of payments for open source software developers that are pushing ethereum 2.0 forward and pushing open source forwards so uh I I think that we're starting to see the glimmers of of the transfer to the information economy and that means remote work open source as a default unbundling of work and those Trends starting to come to fruition and to answer your question Evan our near-term roadmap is just to scale that up great uh maybe I'll start with the president and go to the Future as well uh so you can read more about what we're up to and we've been working with opolis as well in this uncorruptable corporate form at purpose.ag book uh that is kind of where we're documenting the what we think are some of the corporate ownership forms for the future that actually serve these network-based organizations and that serve mission-driven companies um and I think that my the thing I'm excited about for the future is uh network-based companies protocol companies these these types of new organizations uh moving away from the classic Venture Capital model I think that the the implication of the Finance on the governance activities uh and the behavior of these companies is not immediately apparent but it's pernicious and I think it's something that we need to deal with head on so there's some great articles about like token redeemable equity and other ideas that are uh kind of Paving the way for the future and I think that this is one of the key things to get right in the ecosystem is what what type of financing are we taking on uh and what are the implications of those Finance for the for the future I like to start with the past of work um I think it's uh there's a lot to be learned there uh for instance the um uh the the kind of blockchain projects on this panel are have a lot of I think interesting overlap with the history of guilds and I like to mine those histories and and explore lessons that can be applied to to Future models and another that I'm looking at is a a structure uh uh called the Employee Stock ownership plan that was used for has been used for converting companies to employee ownership I think there are a lot of major problems with it but it is uh uh an example of a way that we could think about taking some of the big Behemoth companies that are ruling our world right now and Splinter them off into uh into more accountable structures and so I'm looking right now at how to apply some lessons from that uh history with some overlap with what Derek's involved in and using trust structures and and also tokenization strategies for building democracy into our company so a few years ago I was involved in an effort to where we had a shareholder proposal before Twitter's shareholders to explore uh avenues for for user ownership uh and uh it did better than we thought but we still need the tools in order to do that so that maybe someday through our ownership of the great you know networks around us we don't have to work as much So speaking from myself um I I really I think that it's easy in this space to get in our heads a lot um and I I would really love to see a future of work where we yeah we don't need to be like so much in our heads and using like complicated terms to talk about the stuff um and I I think it's super important you know we're trying to build a technology we hold a massive responsibility in our hands um as I said in the beginning a lot of people still like don't know and don't understand what we're doing uh and it's still it can have a huge impact and many many more lives um so one way that I see that responsibility uh being held accountable is you know just a little part which is experimentation and um yeah that's part of like our roadmap so far it's just knowing that we like we don't know what's going on like it's a lot of complexity and the best we can do is to put our product out there and try to experiment as much as possible with it try to learn as much as possible from people that are using it and stay humble you know um because yeah it's just a lot of them knows a lot of complexity and we're just humans we can't deal with all of this stuff well great we are out of time so let's have a round of applause for our panel [Applause]