The Real Conditions for Digital Solidarity
The Third Space of Anti-establishment (Anti-Algorithms)
This is the 2nd article for the GreenPill.Network global movement, with the Chinese version published on the Matters platform. The GreenPill Network writing project was initiated by Gitcoin founder Kevin Owocki to encourage global local communities to voluntarily write down unique web3 public culture.
After the trend, there is no grass here.
The bear market is a moment of truth. When someone says that minting "NFT" can increase sales, it is a hypothesis. Looking back now, this is just a joke, just like people said that registering the domain ".com" could make a fortune 20 years ago. These people have misunderstood the essential difference between Buzzwords and the technological revolution. Buzzwords can indeed attract attention, and under the amplification of social media platform algorithms, humans are like sheep, domesticated by mechanical sheepdogs. Chasing Buzzwords can indeed bring a rapid market, but this is like the grass in the desert, it comes and goes quickly.
And obviously, this year's grass is growing in the AI field. The underlying research of these two technologies is as difficult as it can be, but the application layer can be very simple. Releasing a smart contract to access OpenSea (NFT trading platform) can be called an NFT project; releasing a service that connects to the API provided by ChatGPT can also be called a developer. The reduction of entry barriers for emerging technologies, which quickly increases the number of early developers, is indeed a key condition for igniting Buzzwords, and media, public sectors, forums, and the public follow.
But don't just focus on the development of hardcore technology, and underestimate the simple creativity of "connecting". The connection has created stackability, and many unexpected application modes have begun to emerge. This is like "The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom", where players thought that the tools available to everyone, were created by Nintendo in 2023. I think this is where Cultural Technology is important. Cultural Technology is the interface active agent of technology, integrating technology into society, and creating more diverse and heterogeneous application possibilities.
Digital Solidarity and Decentralization Tangles
Let's take a look back at the wave caused by the technology tree of "cryptography - distributed ledger - NFT", to see what's left to assemble, among which is DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization). When the marketing narrative of the metaverse combined with the concept of NFT becomes popular, the grand narrative cleverly combines "decentralized will", "storytelling” and "autonomous tools". Many web3 projects claim in their roadmap that after earning wealth, they will move towards decentralized autonomy (daoxit). In the narrative, they weave fantasies of community co-governance and IP co-creation together; in terms of tools, they operate through multi-sig vaults and voting deliberations. However, in reality, some teams in Taiwan, for example, have rug pulled funds and stopped operating (which is not uncommon in recent months), some operators have clashed with the community, and some have lost momentum after entering a decentralized autonomous state. "Decentralized" seems to be a synonym worse than "saying goodbye."
But is there really no possibility for "Digital Solidarity"?
People who walk into "DAO autonomy" from "NFT project" seem to naturally believe that holding "tokens" and voting is the so-called Digital Democracy. However, people almost at the same time found that democracy is a goal that seems to never be achieved. A famous NFT project in Taiwan originally had high popularity, and the community that had online meetings every day looked forward to entering real decentralized autonomy, but when people found that the operators were only willing to provide a small amount of funding as governance initial capital, the polis disbanded. These early pioneers who first tasted digital democracy, as consumers, gradually became believers but seemed to have not made a "promise" yet, to fulfill community autonomy under collective cooperation.
In addition to the emerging web3 projects in Taiwan promoting the spirit of decentralization, the open-source field has been doing so for years and has given birth to many world-renowned projects. However, under the commercial narrative of the metaverse, "decentralization" has become a buzzword again. It is a term that has successfully risen in an era where large commercial platforms monopolize the attention economy. Young people (or venture capitalists) may be inspired and want to achieve commercial success (NFT) while getting spiritual comfort (DAO). Rebellious young people want to break down rules, oppose bureaucracy, establishment, or everything constructed by the secular society of the older generation, which is the same in any era. Whether it is the Cultural Revolution in China, the Hippie Movement in America, or the Wild Lily student movement in Taiwan, these movements contain a revolutionary will no matter how divergent their demands are. However, the classic paper "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" by Jo Freeman, a feminist activist from the 1970s in America, tells us that after removing the rules, flat and non-hierarchical organizations can easily become elite circles due to the inherent limitations of trust chain and information transmission, and thus give rise to representative controversies, power struggles, and movement traumas. The outcome of a movement is often not institutionalization, but the dissipation of social mobilization.
"Decentralization" primarily faces cultural collaboration issues, followed by how DAO tools support its spirit. In facing representative controversy, g0v in Taiwan is a very good example. This is a long-standing (just turned ten) decentralized organization primarily composed of hackers, initially founded with the slogan "hack the government", and subsequently gave birth to many civic technology projects. As g0v expanded, it inevitably faced representative disputes, but in the end, it established the principle of “nobody can represent g0v" under community consensus and emphasized the principle of joint notes for media contact, which is still in use today.
How web3 projects survive, especially teams oriented towards digital art, should reflect on the problems faced by decentralized organizations in different eras, rather than wanting commercial success while maintaining decentralized autonomy. Taiwan does not have a tradition of solidarity economy like Europe or Central and South America. Employees are not consciously also owners, and the community does not have the habit of sharing commercial benefits. This is because the Cooperatives Act is outdated and difficult to use, and it creates a situation of nominal cooperation but actual labor employment. Therefore, "decentralization" has influenced the social and economic level in different forms and appearances at different times, undergoing a wave of changes brought by cooperative corporatization, social movement, and digital tools.
Public Domain and Digital Third Space
Despite the traumas that the decentralization movement brings to its participants, we should still praise such endeavors. In trendy terms, these movements have always been acts of resistance against algorithms, they represent the third space in life. Students have a place to go besides home and school; workers have a place to go besides home and the office. In the past, there were social norms at home and social systems outside, an algorithm evolved from societal culture, with attention and limited time captured in a linear world. Today, we have entertainment algorithms at home (like TikTok) that users can easily get lost in, and profit-oriented high-efficiency algorithms at work. In fact, many people are now actually working alongside AI algorithms. This is a characteristic of a high-efficiency industrial world.
However, a third space is still necessary, and it doesn't necessarily need to be efficient. In fact, it is ineffective, noisy, and often futile. But these are important characteristics of the public sphere that direct us not towards profit, but towards facing communities and constructing culture, resisting algorithms, and even things that algorithms must learn from events that machines cannot create. "Palaces for the People" writes that people need a third space, using "Social Infrastructure" to reverse the coldness and indifference of civil society, like libraries, parks, and fountains. As the public enters digital life, the digital world's DAOs are gradually taking on the benefits of such infrastructure.
In fact, there are precedents for digital spaces serving as social infrastructure, like online-game guilds, forum moderators, etc. These are places that resist algorithms and generate a lot of digital life memories. In this context, Facebook Groups and Facebook News Feed are completely different concepts. The massively multiplayer online game "Eve Online" has seen widely-told stories like Chappy78's birthday party. When veteran player Chappy78 was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, his final birthday wish was to fight an epic space battle. Many gaming guilds and over 2000 players burned resources they had accumulated over time to fulfill Chappy's dream with a space firework show in the digital space. This isn't something an algorithm can do, it can only happen in a third space without too many conflicting interests and social responsibilities.
Just three weeks ago, the American forum Reddit was facing a dilemma between operator profits and community protests over shutting down forums. The operators, in order to profit, decided to start charging for their originally free API service and implemented it after a very short announcement. In response, the community began shutting down their sub-forums. This is the dilemma of decentralized governance and operation. It's not just the web3 world that faces such problems. In another interpretation, web3 can be seen as the internet's third space. Users work in the first space, rest in the second space, and create a culture in the third space.
The Third Space of Web3
An excellent example in the world of Web3 is JPG.Space. JPG is a digital art database created from the ground up through collective intelligence. It started operating in 2021, but unfortunately, it shut down temporarily in June. As a curatorial experiment that lasted over two years, JPG was not constructed by art historians, renowned curators, or artists themselves, but was a curated collection created by crowd stacking and voting. It was not like a typical open-source collaboration platform, such as Wikipedia. Instead, it consciously undertook curatorial and contextual work, involving a large number of subjective factors and manipulative interpretations. It resembles a community-oriented new media art institution, Rhizome, mixed with the surfing spirit of the 2000s. This time, not only creators are involved but also a large number of collectors and amateur critics.
In an interview with the media Right Click Saved, titled "The Power of Community Curation", the leaders of JPG emphasized that NFT is a method of deconstructing the art ecosystem. Community action is based on such infrastructure like NFT, and for JPG, most actions took place on the Discord platform. Discord, a platform loved by the gaming community, gaming circles, and Web3, is relatively closed (you can see the content only after joining), chaotic (non-linear content, prone to multiple channels happening at the same time), and scares away many users who are accustomed to traditional social platforms, yet it is widely welcomed by information surfers. Various Discords often have different live streams, broadcasts, and AMAs (Ask Me Anything) at night (the night in East Asian time zone).
JPG emphasizes the importance of Discord, even with its imperfections, but it is still the "third space" for intense discussions in the web3 community. Wade Wallerstein said: "This is not the tyranny of the masses, but a tool for community mutual support and education." This is consistent with the concept of the "Future Art Ecosystem 3: Art and Decentralized Technology" published by the Serpentine Gallery. The Serpentine Gallery believes that the Web3 community operation model creates a methodology for resistance against institutions. Whether it's the technical bottom or the cultural level, it generates unique creative meanings and cultural values specific to the community, no matter what this community represents.
Returning to the third space, the overseas experience of JPG and my personal experience in Taiwan are consistent. Recently, with the help of FAB DAO (Formosa Art Bank), local group "Huangxi Environmental Education Programme (HEEP)" conducted a series of environmental education actions, proving that social infrastructure and digital solidarity collaboration are possible to unite. Huangxi is a river located in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan. Due to urbanization, the river has gone through stages of natural ecology, landscape, and concretization. The Huangxi team is slowly opening the public participation process through a lot of curation, research, and conversations with local communities and schools. The "Huangxi Environmental Education Programme" had a fun river RPG with primary school students at Mingde Elementary School at the end of June, discussing what the river near their homes looks like. Using the interactive "Tamagotchi at riverside " NFT as a medium, they try to create a process of interaction between students and parents through this symbolic token.
The creators, actors, and planners all come from DAO, and it happens that these participants have different local memories with Huangxi. The cooperation process of these people is concretely and microscopically displayed on platforms related to Discord. In the past, FAB DAO has helped teachers and students of Taipei Municipal Zhong Shan Girls High School to deal with the time and space tokens of campus historical buildings, helped teachers and elderly people at Longtan Elderly Center to create paper-cutting creations, and cooperated with museums and art villages to practice the possibility of chain community interaction. These non-profit projects are attempts to incorporate NFT, symbolizing a certain spirit, into the third space.
Internet Autonomy Region
This month, we discussed the concept of the Network State with Mask Network founder Suji Yan. The Network State is an emerging concept, initiated and written by Balaji, and has now become a social movement in the Web3 world. This theory suggests that when a digital community's technology, culture, and economics mature, an autonomous body without borders or territory is likely to emerge, overlaying traditional sovereign nations. Suji believes that our generation has not yet reached this mature state. At best, we are the generation before the founder’s grandfathers. When the infrastructure of a virgin land is not yet mature, it is a necessary measure to exchange resources from the colonial motherland (real economies and enterprises) (see the full interview: Suji Yan talks about the generation of Network State).
This prompts us to reexamine, is digital solidarity really happening? Whether it's the exceptional state of the third space, or the public domain in a democratic society; in terms of the development of digital culture's basic infrastructure, is the emerging Web3 toolkit an inevitable path? Beginning from protests and war zones, we have seen official cryptocurrency wallets and peace-supporting Ukraine DAO in Ukraine, attracting global supporters' funds for practical help. Similarly, on the subject of Russia, the famous protest group Pussy Riot issued the NFT "Putin’s Ashes" and produced a protest-style MV, and they were wanted by the Russian government because of the issuance of the NFT.
In cross-border issues, NFT is an effective advocacy tool, and DAO is a collection of effective tools for coordinating cooperation and asset management. Urgent situations often bring about creative and effective "connection" methods. Back within a single national boundary, whether local communities can benefit from DAO at this stage to achieve substantial cooperation, such as digital asset management, cooperative division of labor and profit sharing, issue communication and marketing (at this point it must be reiterated, as a Buzzword, the wave of DAO is no longer in place), these are within the scope of culture technology and how to continue to create unique culture for the digital public domain, surpassing the algorithm dominating the first and second spaces, this is a phenomenon worth observing at the moment.
Together with the director of the Taiwan Labor Front Research Department, Hong Jing-shu, freelance translators Liu Wei-Jen and Liao Pei-Xing, we discussed how cooperation should happen in different fields under the theme of The Dynamic of Cooperation at the beginning of the year. We have studied whether the landing of DAO in Taiwan can apply the Cooperative Law. According to the database of laws and regulations of the Republic of China, the Cooperative Law was promulgated in the 1934 and last amended in the 2015. It is no longer applicable in the digital or cultural field. Hong Jing-shu pointed out that the context of cooperatives in the Taiwan is different from the tradition of cooperatives in Europe and America, which can easily be misleading. In fact, there are precedents in Taiwan for initiating cooperatives as legal entities in the field of arts, such as the Co-Art Co-Operative initiated by Huang Sunquan, and the still-operating Scutoid Coopertion, and others like Les Petites Choses Production, a performance art group that has entered substantial cooperation under a non-cooperative legal entity.
Conclusion: Independent and Persevering
From the overseas experiment of JPG, the domestic state of Huangxi digital solidarity, to the Taiwanese cooperatives in form or substance, and finally back to the Network State, we can clearly see that the legal sources and tools of physical society are hardly able to meet the needs of digital communities. The infrastructure is not yet mature, but the third space is still present.
Through the observation of Web3, we have the opportunity to examine the influence of non-legal entities on social culture. We can probably affirm that the infrastructure of the Internet space is inherently decentralized and is naturally conditioned to continue towards a state of multi-centric and diverse heterogeneity.
Perhaps the best cultural tool is one that allows everyone to independently develop culture. As a reality condition for digital solidarity, be independent and persevere.