Any time a subgroup defines the values for an entire blockchain community, value alignment turns into compliance.
This is the case, for example, when an informal elite ends up defining the ‘objective’ values of its community.
Only decentralised communities can be truly aligned.
The invention of decentralised public ledgers enabled the rise of crypto coins, NFTs and publicly verifiable digital identities. With it, communities emerged around their production, accumulation and distribution: from managing stablecoins to distributing grants. In each case, people from all over the globe coalesced into communities that pivoted around one or more on-chain asset: helping to build infrastructure, create applications or speculate on the market. The resulting blockchain space is exceedingly complex, blockchain communities are internally immensely diverse and the challenges they face ever harder to navigate.
Increasingly, communities face decisions that are value based. ‘How do we interact with legacy state organisations’ and ‘what are “good” projects to fund?’ are two basic examples. In these cases, their diversity can frustrate the ability for collective action as debates grind to a standstill. This begs the question: How do we get members of such internally diverse communities to work toward a common good?
Enter the notion of value alignment.
Vitalik (no surname or introduction needed) discussed community alignment in a recent blog post titled Making Ethereum Alignment Legible. In it, he argued for decomposing alignment ‘into specific properties, which can be represented by specific metrics’ in order to make them more legible. He proposed values such as ‘open source’, ‘open standards’, ‘decentralization and security’ as community values around which members of the Ethereum community could align. Rendering these values legible and measurable, Vitalik hopes, allows for the objective assessment of individual alignment and protects the coherence of a community around (in this case) the Ethereum blockchain.
Earlier, Balaji Srinivasan, former CTO of Coinbase, argued that blockchains enable the rise of a deterritorialized, global, Network State: ‘a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states.’ To make alignment and collective action possible, he introduces the ‘One Commandment’, an ideological center of these communities. It is a ‘moral innovation, where everyone within the society thinks some principle X is good’. Examples he gives are ‘sugar bad’, ‘24/7 internet bad’ and ‘this traditional religion is good’ that can each serve as the ideological center of a distinct blockchain community.
Both Vitalik and Balaji are not only visionary thinkers but also builders that transformed our world. I often agree with the points they put forward. But in this case I am more sceptical.
The key issues is that they assume community values are fixed and objective. Vitalik gives examples of specific values that could be central to Ethereum’s community and expresses the hope that these can be measured somehow in the future. Balaji does something similar with the One Commandment. In practice it is impossible to approach social values as either fixed or objective. Worse, such an approach carries the risk of centralising power around an informal elite that has the power to define ‘objective’ community values.
Let us discuss two reasons why it is impossible to approach social values as either fixed or objective.
Progressive insight. What happens when we realise a value we thought was positive has unintended negative implications or edge cases? It requires updating or changing our values. In reality, this happens all the time: our individual values shift as we get older, live through political events (or start to pay taxes!). Does this mean that a person at time point X - 1 held objectively ‘wrong’ values? Or, worse, how do we know our values at time X will not prove to be objectively wrong at time point X + 1? The issue is that objective values require complete knowledge about a social issue, something that is impossible when it relates to time. We cannot see into the future. As a result, values change across time in unpredictable ways.
Contextual differences. The world is immensely diverse and, with it, values differ from one place to another. There is a famous research project that has surveyed world values since 1983, aptly called the World Values Survey, or WVS. The WVS has consistently shown divergent values across the globe. We can visualise these divergent values along two principal axes that run from traditional to secular-rational values on the one axis and from survival to self-expression values on the other. When we do so, we see, unsurprisingly, that values differ between regions. Interestingly, they also change over time:
The Inglehart-Welzel World Cultural Map – World Values Survey 7 (2023). Source: http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/
We are again faced with an issue of incomplete knowledge. As people live in particular economic, religious, political or family contexts they each acquire distinct values. But there are far too many contexts and each one is far too complex to create any kind of meaningful prediction of how a context will shape the values of an individual. Our lack of knowledge means it is impossible to know how contextual differences influence individual values.
To summarise, we now know that values are not fixed, but change over time and differ between people. In addition, we also established that there is no way to know how they change and differ. The only viable option is to treat social values as subjective in practice: unique to an individual at a specific time and place.
It is the irony of blockchain communities. Distributed public ledgers allow for the creation of a global consensus: an objective truth that spans the globe. But the concrete applications they allow, for example globalised assets and identity verification, give rise to a host of issues around governance and identity that are subjective. It creates a situation where age-old questions are revisited about who we are, how we produce value and how we ought to distribute it, but this time in the truly global communities that blockchains created. It makes these questions immensely hard to solve, but their answers also potentially revolutionary.
This brings us back to the predicament that on-chain communities currently face. How to align members of blockchain communities around a common set of values, if these values are subjective in practice?
Option 1. Asset holders update values and enforce alignment. This can be done through updating community values through select committees, token voting or prediction market type mechanisms. Enforcement, in turn, can be through negative measure (revoking membership in case of breach) or through positive measures (incentive structures, tokenomics). Using this approach, it is possible to create a community around a set of values, update these values and act collectively in their name. The drawback is that members with fewer tokens rarely have sufficient power to adjust community values. In the meantime, they do have an incentive to act aligned. As a result, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to assess the extent that an individual is truly aligned to community values. A reasonable assumption is that many members just act as if, and go with the flow, to ensure you get that airdrop or do not face expulsion.
This approach might seem like a good option as it enables collective action. It is also an approach that many communities use today. But to make very clear: The result has little to do with alignment, and everything to do with compliance. Individual members comply with values set by powerful members in the community. In effect, on-chain centralisation translates to articulating and enforcing community values. The values of an informal elite are taken as the values of the entire community in order to make collective action possible.
Option 2. Another approach is to have every member decide on updating values of their community. We can be brief about this. It ensures true alignment of community members, but in return gives every single member an effective veto. As values are subjective in practice, it will be impossible to articulate or update a community’s values. This approach provides true alignment but destroys the potential for collective action. Nothing will get done.
Option 3. Have a continuous process through which individual members propose changes to community values and other members can collectively adopt them. Allowing members to always propose changes to community values enables us to read silence as alignment. If a member feels communities values do not represent their own, they can propose a change. Community values will be adjusted as a result, or the member will leave. Even though only a small fraction of members will be involved at any one time in adjusting values; past, current and potential future engagement provide proof of alignment. This option seems the only viable one for creating aligned communities.
The key challenge is to ensure that each member of a community has access to this process, at any one time. Only if all members have access can we assume that their silence reflects alignment. Only then do we know for certain that members are truly working collectively toward realising their shared values.
The above has an important implication for how value alignment relates an individual to a community. Instead of approaching alignment as the overlap of individual characteristics to a set of fixed collective criteria; alignment turns into an individual’s engagement in articulating them. The extent that an individual member is aligned to a community’s values is directly related to their ability to change them. Any tendency toward centralisation of a community, which empowers an informal elite to the detriment of other community members, renders alignment more improbable. Non-elite members will find it increasingly difficult to meaningfully adjust community values. Alignment will turn into compliance. Effective voice and value alignment are inseparable.
Both Vitalik and Balaji are defenders of individual freedom, while supporting the rise of blockchain communities. In their attempt to forge a collective from free individuals, they treat community values as fixed and objective: applicable to all and blissfully free from power dynamics. Problem is, as we saw above, fixed and objective values do not exist in practice. More importantly, be aware what treating them as such can do to the freedom of community members. Any centralisation of power in name of defining ‘objective values’ impedes the freedom and continuity of community participation in their articulation. It turns value alignment into compliance – and freedom into serfdom.
Nov 2024, 7Cedars