Lead up

I've spent the past three years trying to lay the groundwork to enable universal distributions.

I also believe there are many universal resources which ought to be governed equally by anyone who is willing to attend to them.

In breaking down barriers to the above, my first priority has been to create a system of proving one's uniqueness using one's closest associations (i.e. friends and family--because who else is in a better position to vouch for one's uniqueness?) This has manifested itself as BrightID.

Even if the problem of proving uniqueness is solved, however, another problem remains in open governance systems: collusion.

Collusion as attention swapping

Let's imagine that Acme DAO and Beta DAO allow any unique person to help govern them, so Calvin and Delilah acquire free membership/governance tokens in both. Calvin doesn't care about Acme DAO and Delilah doesn't care about Beta DAO, so they make a swap: now Calvin holds 2 Beta tokens, and Delilah holds 2 Acme tokens, which is counter to the DAOs' goal of distributing governance equally among its members. The root of this problem is that Calvin and Delilah have nothing to lose by being members in both DAOs, so they can easily trade their governance rights to someone who cares.

Plutocracy: legitimizing inequality

Every governance system that deals with personal identities considers buying, stealing or manufacturing identities to game a distribution or voting system to be fraudulent activities.

On the other hand, collusion is often legitimized and perpetuated by the governance system itself. For the purposes of this article, I'll refer to legitimized collusion as "plutocracy," since the forms of governance I want to discuss use money as the primary way to perpetuate control. Money itself isn't the problem, however, and later I hope to show how it can be used to neutralize plutocracy.

Barriers to democracy

Universal distributions at or above the level of a basic income can help to break the cycle of control, because they would remove the possibility of selling votes for survival.

I believe the lack of a universal distribution and the presence of collusion in governance systems strike at the heart of the feeling many of us have that something's wrong with our systems--though I spent most of my life not digging deep enough. When I did begin asking a multitude of "whys," these two unsolved issues presented themselves. It seems to me that when we try to set up "nice things," these are the barriers that inevitably stop us from getting there.

Plutocracy roadmap

Some systems are plutocratic by design--often citing a desire for stakeholders to have skin in the game as a reason for the design. Other systems begin as democracies and become plutocracies.

What makes a democracy susceptible to plutocracy? We talked about the case of the disinterested DAO members. What makes a voter disinterested? According to public choice theory this stems from a person's share of benefits being worth less than the cost to research the voting options.

A key feature in the plutocracy roadmap is disinterest. This can then lead to vote buying or influencing low-information voters.

The break

To quote the "Attention Streams" overview,

When the proportionate effect of a vote on an individual or their individual voting power is small, they may not be motivated to cast a vote.

Getting people to participate in governance is hard when the reward (if any) obtained by a proposal goes to someone else. It’s easier just to free ride on someone else’s attention to the matter. By contrast, people are motivated to try to create change in an economic realm if it has a chance to make themselves money.

The goal of attention streams is to take a familiar strategy for making money in an economic realm-- i.e. finding an idea early that proves to be popular--and make it work in a governance realm. When people discover they can make money this way, their increased participation will lead to increased funding for public goods and better rules for themselves in systems with economic effects.

Fighting disinterest and plutocracy

In an attention stream, participants earn money by creating or being an early follower of a choice that gains support. The choice doesn't have to be the winning choice (among competing choices in a "topic"); it just has to attract follow-on support. This allows participants to rally to fight plutocracy while earning rewards, instead of just donating to a campaign. They can profit even if they lose. The same can't be said for plutocrats, whose concentration of wealth will cause them to pay more in fees than they earn from an attention stream--even if they win.

In addition, large allocations of funds draw attention to a choice, and shrewd participants will immediately start looking to create or fund opposing choices, where the greatest earning potential remains.

Attention streams feature many (perhaps too many) settings for arenas (collections of topics), topics (collections of choices), and choices. Settings allow arena, topic, and choice designers to collect fees from participants for causes such as UBI that can further diminish the power of plutocrats.

Attention stream topics that enact proposals require a choice to maintain its lead long enough for contributors to change their minds. What this means is that if a plutocrat signals that they will make a large future contribution in an attempt to win support, fake supporters can take the contributor fees from the plutocrat and then exit the choice before it has a chance to win. Contributors can contribute to several competing choices (or the same choice several times) using several accounts. This prevents plutocrats from effectively bribing anyone to take down their contribution. Arenas, topics and choices are written in unstoppable code. No one--not even their authors--can be bribed to take them down. In the end, no form of collusion can outperfrom simply adding one's own money. Plutocrats must pay the full price to use the platform (including, for example, fees that go to fund UBI) in full view of everyone else.

Economic attacks and defenses are discussed further in the attention streams documentation.

Experimentation needed

Attention streams feature a framework where "positions" in choices grow over time. An early contributor to a choice can control a large position with a small amount of locked capital. This makes them more capital efficient than an array of bonding curves representing choices. The position framework can be modified by several parameters. These parameters and the framework in general haven't been tested. It could be that bonding curves are a better fit for plutocracy-busting, which is the primary goal of attention streams.

There are several use cases roughly outlined in the attention stream doc. It would be good to build prototypes for these and experiment with their attending parameters.

A team of researchers has built a prototype for the use case of "discovering how to spend funds from an external source" (e.g. from a DAO.) We hope to release it to the public soon.

Why would plutocrats switch to this?

I believe a lot of wealthy people accidentally fell into that position and would give back control if given the opportunity. Others have the hubris to think their wealth means they know what's best for others, but we can defeat them, as I'll explain later in this section. Note that donating to charity is not giving back control, unless the donation increases the decision-making potential of individuals--as would be the case with a donation to a universal dividend. Giving back control is paying others for their attention to their own decisions, not making decisions for them.

Attention streams allow for the democratization of control to happen organically when benevolent wealthy contributors add their contributions to existing choices. They must be comfortable being late contributors and not consistently profiting as early contributors might.

As more systems involved with wealth creation and distribution are governed by attention streams, even hubristic plutocrats will be forced to use them, but they will find themselves in an alien landscape of informed voters that happily take their bribes and then enact opposing proposals. Attempts to grab power will attract scrutiny and large-scale opposition. Platform fees will be paid to universal dividends, further eroding their control.

FAQ

Why use a system that requires money to participate? Wouldn't plutocrats have a lot less power in a system based on one vote per person?

Attention streams are designed to fight collusion. They use money to fight moneyed power. If you use a different system, you'll have to find a different way to deal with collusion.

Isn't this a means test? What if someone doesn't have money but wants to participate?

Anyone can participate with as little money as they have and stands to increase their wealth through participation (even if the proposals they support don't win.) Attention streams are designed to chip away at the wealth of plutocrats, redistributing it as a universal dividend.

Thanks

Sina, et. al for asking questions about attention streams that prompted this article.