David speaks with Jonathan Hillis, founder of Cabin, a place for creators to gather together to work on exciting projects 'IRL'. Prior to founding Cabin, he was Director of Product, Shoppers, and Marketplace at Instacart, where, during the pandemic, he grew their workforce of shoppers fivefold.
They talked about:
🏡 Five principles for stronger communities
🏙️ How cities have centralised and decentralised
❤️ Why smaller neighbourhoods are better
💻 The need for technology in communities
⚖️ The power of decentralisation
🧠 The importance of diverse governance
🌍 Can we make democracy better?
This is just one part of a longer conversation, and it's the second part. You can listen to the earlier episode here:
Part 1: 🎙️ Innovation, Technology, and Human Connection with Jonathan Hillis (Episode 116)
🎙 Listen to your favourite podcast player
🎧 Listen on Spotify:
📹 Watch on Youtube:
📄 Show notes:
[00:00] Introduction
[03:18] Cabin as a network city of modern villages
[06:04] What makes a community thrive
[07:38] Simple truths for creating a happy community
[11:42] What builds a society
[12:58] The connection between our choices and community values
[15:45] Why some small societies struggle when they grow bigger
[17:50] Why smaller neighbourhoods are better
[20:35] Is technology essential for today's communities?
[22:38] Blockchain is about more than just money
[25:09] How technology can change governance
[28:00] The importance of shared principles
[30:34] The challenge of creating new governance systems
[33:24] Are DAOs just complicated Co-ops?
[36:27] The pros and cons of representative democracy
🗣 Mentioned in the show:
Cabin | https://www.cabin.city/
Gall's law | https://www.myddelton.co.uk/blog/24-galls-law
A brief history of decentralised cities and centralised states | https://jon.mirror.xyz/
Dunbar's number | https://www.newscientist.com/definition/dunbars-number/
Kibbutz | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz
Blockchain | https://theknowledge.io/what-is-cryptocurrency/
Decentralised Autonomous Organization (DAO) | https://www.investopedia.com/tech/what-dao/
Liron Shapira | https://theknowledge.io/lironshapira/
Hollow Abstraction | https://x.com/liron/status/1562589538848874498
Peace of Westphalia | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_of_Westphalia
French Revolution | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution
Thomas Hobbes | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hobbes
Jean-Jacques Rousseau | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Jacques_Rousseau
David Graeber | https://davidgraeber.org/
Francis Fukuyama | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Fukuyama
The End of History and the Last Man | https://amzn.to/4eq9wX7
Yamabushi Mountain Monks | https://theknowledge.io/issue34/
The Dawn of Everything | https://amzn.to/4ePxgUj
Çatalhöyük | https://www.catalhoyuk.com/
Uruk | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruk
Haudenosaunee | https://www.haudenosauneeconfederacy.com/who-we-are/
Nebelivka | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebelivka
Garrett Jones | https://theknowledge.io/garettjones/
👤 Connect with Jonathan:
Twitter: https://x.com/JonathanHillis
Website: https://jonhillis.com/
Cabin: https://www.cabin.city/
👨🏾💻 About David Elikwu:
David Elikwu FRSA is a serial entrepreneur, strategist, and writer. David is the founder of The Knowledge, a platform helping people think deeper and work smarter.
🐣 Twitter: @Delikwu / @itstheknowledge
🌐 Website: https://www.davidelikwu.com
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📜 Full transcript:
Jon Hillis: I'm very supportive of essentially all the experiments happening in the network society ecosystem right now, and in the DAO ecosystem right now, because as we've seen, the success rate is very low.
We're in an era right now where people were extremely bullish on DAO's in 2021. And now they're extremely bearish on DAO's. And I've always been kind of in the middle, you know, when everyone else was super bullish, I was pulling people back from the edge. And, and now I'm saying, Hey, actually, there's a lot more out there than people are giving a credit for. And I think that's just based in the actual practiced reality of trying to do these things, which tempers you from the extreme swings and cultural moods about new ideas.
This week I'm sharing the second part of a really fun conversation I had with John Hillis, who's the founder of Cabin, which is a place for builders and creators to gather together working on exciting projects in real life. It's a digital network of physical neighborhoods. It's a really compelling idea.
And before founding Cabin, John was a product director at Instacart where he, during the pandemic, he helped to grow their workforce of shoppers 5x.
And in this part you're going to hear us talking about societies. And we explore the concept of societies and neighborhoods and communities from loads of various aspects. We talk about societies as a form of complex system and how societies evolve. We talk about the values that exist within communities and how we define them, but also how they come to define us. We talk about the history of cities going back to, you know, the dawn of civilization. We talk about the cycles of centralization and decentralization.
We talk about some of the philosophies that drive Cabins and network of neighborhoods and the need or the potential for blockchain to be able to enable both the future of cities at scale and also how blockchain can enable physical communities both now and in the future.
And finally, we talk about liberal democracy and Francis Fukuyama's End of History. And this idea that actually, we might not be done with democracy, or with how we choose to define and determine our societies. Like, there is plenty of room to continue experimenting beyond the current meta, beyond simply what we have now, and having these endless arguments about whether capitalism is better than socialism, or vice versa.
And, you know, there's so much more out there, you know, you'll hear about some really interesting ideas like quadratic voting and things like that and representative democracy and some of the limitations that it has. But overall, this is a really interesting and exciting exploration of the future of what society's communities and neighborhoods can look like.
This was a really fun conversation with John.
You can get the full show notes the transcript and read my newsletter at theknowledge.Io. And you can find John online on twitter @jonathanhillis. You can find him on his website at johnhillis.com and check out cabin at cabin.city. We'll have all the links in the show notes or the YouTube description.
If you love this episode, please do share it with a friend and don't forget to leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts Because it helps us tremendously to find other listeners just like you.
David Elikwu: So tell me what you're building a cabin and also I'm interested to know what the current hypothesis is now and the reasons why that hypothesis has had to evolve over time.
Jon Hillis: Yeah. So cabin is building a network city of modern villages. And so together we are a group of people growing intergenerational neighborhoods, places where we know our neighbors and raise kids together located in walkable pockets of family friendly urbanism, near nature, basically the places where we'd want to grow up. And the goal is to build neighborhoods like this all over the world that are stitched together with a shared culture economy governance structure that basically allows people to practice what we think of as a new old way of living. And, you know, if you think about cities they are the fountains of human creativity, prosperity and progress. There were people come together to build new economies, new ways of life. And historically they've had to be co located. They're essentially economic agglomeration engines, which is a, you know, fancy way of saying that like we were talking about with San Francisco earlier as they build a culture, that culture attracts more people and builds on itself and that's required people in the past to be co located. But as we've talked about, that's not necessarily the case now, you don't have to be in the same place as somebody to have a conversation with them or to make a connection with them much like we're doing now.
And so the idea behind Cabin is that cities don't have to be all in one place. Cities are really about building a high density of culture and that culture can exist in pockets where groups of people are co located and in a high density and are able to live in modern villages, but that those villages can be all over the place and stitch together so that you have a network of places around the world that are connected together and where you can travel between them.
And we believe that this is something that is now possible in a way that wasn't possible previously, and that it is going to allow us over the next 50 years or so to provide our citizens with strong local community with resiliency, with connection, and with a better standard of living that gives them a lifestyle that we think will grow as a parallel to existing society and that can start to grow new types of institutions that can create human flourishing for future generations.
David Elikwu: If you could elucidate a bit more about the importance of, okay, you mentioned, hey, like these, these family style gatherings, these local neighborhoods, they are connected digitally, but you know, they're very present physically.
I am interested to understand, what the importance of that is and how that fits in maybe within some of the context of what we've discussed about these broader philosophies of what life should be like, maybe one additional connecting point here between that idea and something else you mentioned, which is culture is this idea that, okay, even for example, you mentioned the kind of neighborhoods you'd like to grow up in, but different people have different conceptualizations of what that might be. Obviously there is some part of that, that has some cultural roots and I'm interested in, we talked about, Hey, there's an extent to which cultures are naturally sticky. But how do you decide what culture you want? Typically in the past, a lot of that has been defined by war, right? One culture goes and fights another culture and the culture that wins is the one that gets to say, Hey, our culture is better, right? The USSR isn't there anymore. Capitalism won. We get to say democracy won, and we say, hey, this is actually just better. And perhaps as people write about in fan fiction, if the Nazis won, or if some other society won at some point in world history, they might have got to say something different.
So I'm interested to know, yeah, like, how do we define, I know, for example, you had like a 500 year plan, like, how do we define, you know, what should culture be? How do we create something that is both useful in the present but also perhaps lasting and how do we define which elements should be persistent and which elements we want to change over time?
Jon Hillis: Yeah, so I'll start by questioning the premise of your question. I think it's a great question, but I think the lens through which you talked about it had a pretty heavy kind of 20th century modernist lens, a high modernist lens, which is the lens that many people look at the world through which is like, yeah, what, what if the Nazis had won and like, implemented this top down system?
And I think what we saw a lot of over the last 100 years was this sort of, high modernist top down view of the world. Like, let's build a big model of the city and then let's implement that city. And then the culture will like, somehow pop up out of nowhere from you know, our model. And that's not how culture works at all.
So let's go for a second to the root word there. If you think about what a culture is in the context of yogurt or in the context of bacteria, a culture is a small self replicating unit that can grow into a larger thing basically. And that's how I think we think about culture at cabin is that we're not trying to dictate you know, some culture top down. And we're not even really trying to design a culture. What we're trying to do is create the conditions in which a community of people can be a part of the emergence of a culture. What that looks like, you know, to get a little bit more specific and tangible here is what we call our obvious truths. And obvious truths are the set of principles that are derived from observed behaviors in our community. They're not a set of principles we wrote down at the beginning and said, this is what we are. There are things that we watched happen and watched emerge and they grow and evolve slowly over time through collective actions because at the end of the day, culture is not anything really that you write down, it's the actions that people take. And you can try to memetically sort of compress that into language like, I'm about to do for you. But it's really just a description of the behaviors of the community.
So the current set of obvious truths at Cabin, which are essentially the things that we determined we think are both obvious and true. And as a result of that are not just principles that we abstractly want to talk about but things we actually want to incorporate deeply into the way that we live our lives.
There are five of them. They are live near friends. It takes a village. Do the thing. Touch grass and Play infinite games. And so each of these represents an important part of Cabins culture. Live near friends is about turning your friends into neighbors and your neighbors into your friends because we're our best selves when we live near people we admire. It takes a village is a belief that it both takes a village to raise kids and it takes kids to raise a village. And that the only way to build a community, a village, a neighborhood with resilience and longevity is by designing for intergenerational living. Do the thing is about starting small and making real changes in the real world, valuing actions over abstract ideas, practicing duocracy. Touching grass is about getting offline and building resiliency with the natural world. And playing infinite games is about remembering that life is a long term LARP, a live action role play game.
If you take these things these sort of compressed ideas and you add them all together, you get, at least in our case, we believe is kind of a recipe for building a Cabin neighborhood and for building our network city. And we view these as what we would call like a bat signal, which is that there's this kind of like, iterative feedback loop of putting a signal out into the world, attracting the right people who are interested in that signal. And then helping create the conditions, the petri dish, you know, for that culture to grow. And then observing the culture collectively and refining the bat signal so that we can attract more, more, like minded people.
David Elikwu: My follow up question might be me going back to my 20th century modernist perspective, but I'm interested to hear your thoughts. From what I'm hearing it sounds like, okay, these big ideas are more like fundamental axioms as opposed to okay, these are values by which we're going to live and construct a society around. This is why it exists. This is the the reason for a culture existing or kind of like the pillars by which a culture existing rather than this is almost like our faith and religion. You know, these are the principles that we live by in a slightly different sense.
Or would you say those are the same thing?
Jon Hillis: I'm not sure I see a difference between those two things. I think we were talking earlier about spirituality a little bit and, and about the sort of like, real world practice and understanding of that. And I think that to some extent, network societies like Cabin are organizations in which I've certainly had, you know, many of those types of spiritual experiences of connecting deeply with other people.
And I think what we're trying to do here is distill a set of truths that are aligned with the practices that result in those spiritual experiences. And that that's probably not that different from, you know, how societies have always done this.
David Elikwu: So, maybe I'm struggling then to, what's the difference between that and, kind of, what I was alluding to before in the sense that, I mean, going back to your bacteria analogue, right? Connecting that to, let's say, values and principles, simultaneously within your gut microbiome, hey, you might get some bacteria that like sugar. And so that will kind of incentivize the rest of your body as a system to eat a bit more sugar, even if that might not be what every bacteria in the, in the system wants. And so over time you can kind of get pushed towards a slightly different set of values or principles. And there's still this sense in which, okay, you know, the bacteria that you feed, the other ones die. And so that is part of the way in which the culture of your gut microbiome, in that sense evolves, right? It evolves towards the bacteria that continue to live based on what they're fed. And so that's how some of these ideas propagate over time, but then the makeup of that system can also change over time.
Jon Hillis: Yeah, I think that's exactly right. Like what I'm describing is essentially an evolutionary process. And another way to think about culture is gardening. It's essentially pruning and watering and feeding of the plants. And so there is some nudging involved, you know, in the process. But at the end of the day, these are essentially, these are complex systems. They're emergent systems, which means they behave more like natural systems in some important ways. And as a result of that, they follow Gall's law. And Gall's law states that complex systems have to evolve from simple systems. You can't do this top down thing, it actually doesn't work to create complex systems. They have to grow sort of organically and piecemeal over time. What makes it evolutionary is that it is selecting for principles, values, actions that perpetuate the things that work for the community. And so these ideas are the, the set of things that have worked pretty well for us so far would be another way of thinking about them.
David Elikwu: Do you think this kind of thing works at scale? And I know you've written about the kind of history of how we've had cities over time, and it might be useful to recap some of that. But what I'm interested in, in this particular instance, is the idea that at certain points in those cycles, you have some of these smaller groups and smaller societies, but they tend to centralize over time and perhaps after that, maybe they decentralize, but there is this this convergence and during that process, you can lose some of the values that you previously had when you were smaller.
And there are some systems of organizing that kind of work when you're small, but in order to grow well, assuming that the growth is a good thing, but let's say that's a natural process. If that growth does happen, then there are lots of changes that are necessitated along that course as well.
Jon Hillis: Yeah, definitely. So the essay you were alluding to is called A Brief History of Decentralized Cities and Centralized States. And it charts the way that the cycle you just described has happened across the eras of Western civilization. The ancient period in which we saw the emergence of the first cities around irrigation and agriculture, money writing that grew, you know, cooperative irrigation networks that eventually turned into the river valley empires and centralized into literal pyramids.
You have similar story in the classical era with the alphabet and naval trade as these sort of new technologies that drove Greek city states and federations of city states and then ultimately the Roman Empire and the collapse of that. The medieval era in which you have three cop farming and paper and printing that helped drive the creation of market towns and a federated trade leagues and eventually centralization into kingdoms and the Catholic Church and the modern era in which you have the printing press and mechanized labor. Starting out with you know, essentially small scale in democracy and in New England towns that grew into this federated system of the United States and ultimately you know, centralized both in the U.S. and across the world and in the four of nation states.
I've made the case that we are now in the information era in which computers and the Internet and blockchains are starting to allow us to build the types of network villages that I've described, and that we will federate these into network cities. And ultimately I do think that those structures may centralize into network states or at least some subset of them will. But because that's the end of the cycle I don't necessarily see that as the goal. There's something very special about cities both in terms of their ability to create prosperity and in terms of their longevity, it's very hard, actually, for cities to die. It's extremely rare once once they are sort of operating at scale.
And so your question is, and you're totally right. Essentially, as things scale they start to break, especially groups of people, communities, societies, and so how do you solve for that problem? And I think the answer that I've come to hear is that, the solution is to scale out instead of scaling up. And so, what you have typically seen with companies or with countries or big organizations is that they try to scale up. They try to do the same thing that they were doing, but with more and more and more people. And they try to update their processes, change their constitution, whatever, to like account for the increasing scale. And that's what actually drives centralization, is the need to adapt to the bigger scale.
And I think a potential solution here is to build systems that instead of scaling up, scale out, they keep the atomic unit really small. So, Cabin, the neighborhood is our atomic unit, that's the really important thing. And you basically want, you know, your village to be under Dunbar's number, about 150 in order to sort of be in line with the size and scale of what people have historically found to work pretty well for local high trust settings where you, you know, everybody. But what you can do is you can create a whole bunch of these things. And this is not a new idea either. This is actually for instance, I do, I was just talking about the Greek city states. They knew this to be true. Aristotle thought that the ideal Polis was a city of 5,040 people, extremely precise number for some kind of silly mathematical reasons. But the point was, it was small and everybody could get into one space and have a conversation in a coliseum or whatever. Whenever they started passing that number of citizens, they would split off. They would fork. They would send half the population out to go start a new city. And so I don't think there's a an answer to the scale up problem. Other than you know, scale out.
David Elikwu: So why do we need the, the technological part? Because, I mean, what's the difference in a sense between, you know, okay, people already have kibbutzes, right? There's already kibbutzes, there's already Amish communities, there's loads of religious communities actually. Thinking about it now, I was reading recently about the foundations of Utah and the LDS and Mormon movements, and it's been interesting to see how, you know, at some points in U.S. history, they were on the verge of practically becoming their own country, right? Moving out into into Mexico outside of what should have been the U. S. and building their own community there much in the way that you've kind of described. I'm not necessarily equating the two.
But the point being that I am interested to know following the progress of Cabin over time, you know at one point the Linguistically, or at least what you were in the midst of was very much oriented around, okay, this is a blockchain. At one point, people were very much focusing on, oh, this is like a DAO. And I know that you tried to create some distance from that. But there was the sense that hey, this is a technological type thing as much as it is also a physical, it's oriented in the real world, but there are parts of it where you say, Hey, okay, we do need the blockchain. We do need to have this kind of digital passporting or some of these other elements. Is that simply just because people have laptops now and we're kind of in a digital age, or is there some fundamental reasoning or a reason why it's useful? And I asked that partly because I think going back to where we started this conversation talking about, hey, what we just went through during this pandemic period?
I think you saw a lot of what actually Liron would describe as hollow abstractions, right? Lots of situations where people just invoked blockchain. You didn't actually need blockchain to do this thing. What you were describing as a database, right? Okay, you want to have a census, you want to have a place where you put people's names. You can do that on Excel, right? You don't need blockchain necessarily. And lots of other similar examples. Hey, you know, you're just describing a land registry. Okay, fine. Maybe they don't have that in some parts of South America, but you could just have that. And obviously, I am not saying that because I'm taking a particular position one way or the other, but I'm just asking the question because I'm interested to know what your thoughts are on that?
Jon Hillis: This is a question people have always asked about blockchains and I remember asking this question when I was first going deeper down the crypto rabbit hole of why do we actually need any of these things? And I think what I just described, you know, about the history of Western civilization and the emergence of these decentralized cities over time points to the fact that 2 things are true.
The first one is that this is not a new idea. And these are actually things that people have done a bunch of times before. And the second thing that's true is every one of those eras was precipitated by a new set of technologies that enabled people to do it differently. Basically have a new set of tools that could push back against the centralizing forces of the previous cycle. And so that's what, what I think this is about. Why I think that crypto is, is interesting? You know, I was a political science and environmental studies major in college. And I got pretty disenchanted with political philosophy you know, because it felt like the whole thing was kind of stuck in this rut. Which has really existed since you know, some people would date it to the Peace of Westphalia, maybe date it to French Revolution or the emergence of America.
But it's essentially this cycle where, we have these large scale institutions where, you know, we have the left and the right and you could also from a philosophical perspective, you could date that back to Hobbes on one side and Rousseau on the other. And it just all feels so overly trodden and like we've been fighting this same Battle over and over for hundreds of years. And it was a very fresh set of ideas when it first came out and precipitated and led to modern democracy and that's an amazing thing. As we're starting to see now, institutions are they're getting old and brittle. And so, you know, when people think about crypto, a lot of what they think about, a lot of what they talk about is either very financialized, it's defy it's financial ledgers or it's frivolous, it's monkey JPEGs, as you said. Both of those, I think actually are interesting and important for various reasons, but what I find more interesting and more important than either of those things that gets very little airtime and understanding from people because I think it's more fundamental is the idea of social contracts and the idea of you know, essentially capture resistance.
So, you have people like Rousseau and Hobbes talking about the need to solve the core problems of civilization and they basically, Hobbes comes around to, to the understanding that this is why you need Kings and Leviathans. And Rousseau takes a different stance and talks a lot about the ideas that, that lead to modern democracy, but ultimately couches it in the language of sovereign Lords, basically kings as, as well. And that's because that was the world that existed at the time, that they were trying to move beyond, was the world of kings and you know, the transition into the world of democracy.
But they did this within the context of these large groups of millions of people, subformer subjects of kings spread across giant land areas with very limited transportation and communication technologies. And you know, so they had to design systems, essentially the way that they did representative democracies. And I think what I get most excited about is the opportunity to trace that all back and look for new alternative paths. And if you look outside of the Western Canon it's pretty clear that there have been a wild number of diverse human social systems. What David Graber and Monroe call a carnival parade of political forms. We haven't been able to experiment with many of those new types of societies or governance structures over time, because we've been stuck in this kind of one size fits all modern democratic structure, which again is a great thing, but is not the end all be all.
And so what I'm very excited about is the opportunity to run lots of governance experiments and to actually try some of these things out. It was sort of taken for granted when I was in college that you couldn't just go do actual political science you know, you couldn't go run experiments because no one was going to hand you the keys to a country to go try things out. But now with blockchains, we have something very fundamental, which is capture resistant governance structures. Permissionless, trustless, transparent structures that allow any group of people to coordinate resources and make decisions about those resources using immutable rules that those people can decide upon without the need for any intermediary, and that is a fundamentally new thing and it allows us to go back to really small scales and to connect with people from all over the world and to try out to fuck around and find out, to actually go and run thousands of new experiments in governance and see what, what we can do and what we can make and what types of structures might you know, help us build for this next era in the way that other sets of technologies help build the previous eras of society.
David Elikwu: Okay, this makes a lot of sense. I have a lot of thoughts. I'm trying to figure out how to organize them. I think what you say is definitely correct. And ironically, the truth, like you say, is that social contracts are a form of technology, whether they are digital or analog, right? This is technology, this is the way that we organize society. So that's always true. But then there's also this sense that you know, like you touched on, Francis Fukuyama he wrote about, Oh, the end of history, like liberal democracy. This is it. This is exactly the point where human history was leading to, this where we're supposed to be but then simultaneously there's this idea that actually, Hey, we can move beyond that, there might be possible better futures on the other side of that chasm.
And maybe the question here is something along the lines of, what do you think the extent is to which we let principles and social contracting become emergent versus, to what extent is it useful to implement some fundamental constraints and say, hey, this is kind of the box and people talk about different ideas, you could talk about quadratic voting or polycentric systems, things like that, and it might be useful to define what some of those terms are.
But like you say, there's this sense in which political science stopped being a science. We stopped experimenting. We kind of just assumed, hey, we've already arrived at it. You know, America's going around the world and saying, we're bringing democracy to the Middle East, to everywhere, you know, we've already got the answer. This is it. Here, have some. And then it doesn't really work. The Taliban takes back control, you know, all kinds of things happen around the world.
I think I remember writing an essay, it wasn't specifically about this, but I mentioned it kind of implicitly. I was writing about kind of feudal Japan in a sense. And it was interesting that the Yamabushi monks that later became the ninjas in Japan had a form of democracy before the Tokugawa era government did, right. So these random monks living in the mountains that became known as ninja and whatever, like they, they had democracy before the government did. And that was kind of emergent in a sense.
And so, hey, it can be possible that loads of these things that the best possible system for organizing a society is simply emergent, but then simultaneously like we've discussed especially at scale whether that is going up or broad it can be useful to have some centralizing constraints that tie different communities together and say hey, okay fine. You might be different, but you're not going to be too different. We're all kind of going to be connected in such and such a way. We're all going to stand by some form of fundamental principles, there will be some sense in which there are agreed upon building blocks by which societies are governed.
So I was interested to know how you'd respond to that.
Jon Hillis: Yeah, I mean, we're in the very early innings of of all of this. And so, it's hard to say anything definitive. But I do think that as I've talked a lot about, the most important thing is starting small and experimenting. I don't think that, you know, we're anywhere near the point where it makes sense to try to put constraints on the experiments really. Like I think we need to be out there trying all kinds of things. I'm very supportive of essentially all the experiments happening in the network society ecosystem right now. And in the DAO ecosystem right now, because as we've seen, the success rate is very low.
We're in an era right now where people were extremely bullish on DAO's in 2021. And now they're extremely bearish on DAO's. And I've always been kind of in the middle, you know, when everyone else was super bullish, I was pulling people back from the edge. And, and now I'm saying, Hey, actually, there's a lot more out there than people are giving a credit for. And I think that's just based in the actual practiced reality of trying to do these things, which tempers you from the extreme swings and cultural moods about new ideas.
So I think right now, you know, very few of those that first cycle of DAO's have actually survived and thrived. Most of them imploded, which should be expected. We're trying to do something incredibly hard here, creating new systems of governance and new societies. This is no easy task. It's typically taken a very long time for humans to figure out. And I think we are actually speed running that and going a lot faster then you know, previous eras of human civilization were able to go. But there's a whole lot of history to learn from. Like you said, I think that the idea of the end of history is, is crazy. To think that that humans have been trying things for 10,000 years and and now we've suddenly arrived at some end state that can't be improved upon. I mean, it's kind of ridiculous. I think if you went and asked pretty much any regular person anywhere in the world, they would have some ideas about things that could be improved about our current institutions and governance structures. And so to claim that this is the best we can do feels farcical to me.
And like you said, if you just look through history you can find endless examples of small groups of people doing fascinating things. You know, I think a lot of this is, is covered very well in the book Dawn of Everything. You look at civilizations and, and groups of people like the Çatalhöyük and the Uruk and the Haudenosaunee you know, and the Nebelivka. There's so many examples of people doing radically different things as a society than what we do right now. And you know, it's really in some sense more of the same high modernist ideology that we can just like copy paste and stamp out the same governance structure everywhere and that's somehow going to be a good idea.
David Elikwu: Yes, I agree. I think it might also be useful to probably define, and I've asked you to define like what we mean when we say DAOs and then also how that differentiates from maybe other systems like co-ops and things like that.
And I think perhaps somewhere in the gap between what we just discussed and some of what we were discussing before, which is this idea that, okay, on one hand, I completely agree we should probably experiment more and, we're definitely not at the end of history. There's definitely, especially as we become more technologically enabled, there is no way that we have figured out everything that there is to figure out about how to organize systems and societies. Simultaneously, some of what I saw from DAOs in that first wave, you just think, okay, what does this do? Like, how is this useful? And maybe some of this might be bottomed out when you describe what DAOs are exactly, but I remember, you know, there was a constitution DAO, there's a group of people trying to buy the constitution, and you just think, okay, great, but what does this mean and why is this useful? And then you hear about, you know, there's lots of infighting and people manipulating some of the niche rules in order to take control of the DAO. And okay, this person has control and this is happening and that's happening. And it just sounds like, hey, we're just replicating a slightly worse version of what we have already.
And this leads to another point and maybe we'll discuss this a bit further, but i'll just plant the seed now. Which is this idea and I spoke with Garrett Jones about this because he's written a really good book about it, but this idea that people might not want freedom not freedom, but like control. Even what we describe as democracy, which is everyone gets a vote. In most of the most democratic systems, people are not voting directly on the actual things. They are voting for people to make decisions on their behalf. And so, first of all, there's already one or a few layers of abstraction there, because in the UK, you don't even vote directly for the prime minister. You vote for your local MP. And the votes for your local MP add up to votes for the party, and then the party selects who the person standing to be the prime minister is going to be. So we had a crazy situation in the UK for the past, you know, 14 odd years where the prime minister changed five times. I didn't vote for any of those people. No one voted for any of those people that the party just decided, Hey, okay. This person's resigned. Here's the new guy. Nobody gets a vote, you know? Okay, we had some votes during that period, but the point is they could just keep putting people in front of you that no one voted for.
And so, okay, yes, there's a sense in which maybe that doesn't work this system that we have, but simultaneously there is also a very true sensation that, like, do people really care enough about every individual issue? I would wager that they don't. I would wager that people don't want to be on the hook for deciding everything and very often, you know, maybe it's better to have elites that can make decisions for us. I don't want to have to sit down and pour through all the paperwork about every single, you know, Nuclear deal or everything that might happen. Maybe it's better that, that is one person's job. And I can just make some noise on twitter if i'm upset with him or if i'm happy with him. And he it's his job to sit or her job to sit down and think about whether this is right or not and whether we should do something or not. So, yeah, I've thrown a pastiche of ideas at you, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
Jon Hillis: So, first of all, I was actually on the core team for constitution now. So I got a firsthand look at that one and was very involved with
David Elikwu: I'm sorry if I was negative about your
Jon Hillis: No, no, it's fine. It was a fascinating experiment, right? But, but like anything, it was one of many experiments, some of which worked and some of which didn't and all of which we learned from.
I think you also, you know, you just talked a lot about representative democracy and the pros and cons of that. I'm not opposed to representative democracy. You know, I think there's good use cases for representative democracy. But again what I'll return to is, what you're describing is the reality is a very large scale governance systems. If you operate at the scale of a nation state with tens to hundreds of millions of people, maybe even a billion people, you can't have everyone vote on everything, of course, and you need representative systems. And in some way, in some cases, you need multiple levels of abstraction of representative systems, like what you just described, where it's like you're electing somebody who's a part of a party is electing another person, those are not bad systems inherently and the founding fathers of America you know, intentionally created some of these sort of diffused multilayered systems. That's not inherently a bad thing. What is good is that crypto, DAO's basically allows us to just try different things. So, you know, earlier you mentioned quadratic voting. Yeah, that's an interesting example where it allows people to basically assign, portions of their vote to different things in a way that decays with the amount of votes that they're assigning.
And there's lots of interesting reasons why you know, that is a system that tends to arrive at better outcomes. And at Cabin, we use quadratic voting. And I think in practice, we found that we do tend to arrive at better outcomes as a result of using it. You know, there's other forms of representative democracy. There's liquid democracy where you have more control over moving your votes between representatives over time.
My point here, though, is not that like any one of these things is great or is perfect, but just that we haven't really ever had a chance to try all of them out in practice. And that if we reduce the scale of these things. And if we try a bunch of new things at these small scales, we'll be able to figure out what works and what doesn't, you know, better than the options we've had so far.
David Elikwu: Thank you so much for tuning in. Please do stay tuned for more. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe. It really helps the podcast and follow me on Twitter feel free to shoot me any thoughts. See you next time.
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