In a world that often glorifies competition and the survival of the fittest, it's easy to buy into the myth that we, as humans, are inherently programmed to compete relentlessly.

This is the thought I want to challenge with this article.

Hopefully, by the end of it, we’d be able to imagine a world, based on cooperation and competition, working together in synergy.

SOTF 🤯🤯🤯

My favorite common myth - competition is in our DNA, there is no point in even trying to implement cooperation in our work and life as this is just unnatural, we’re made to compete.

If you look around you first of all you see a lot of cooperation in nature - apes, ants, mushrooms and whatnot. Second of all - we see a lot of cooperation and selflessness amongst humans as well. People are selfless all the time, and we just tend to ignore this. People jump to save total strangers from drowning, provide resources for those who don’t have them etc. We collaborate with no expectation of return all the time.

Only observing humans under capitalism and concluding that it’s in our nature to be greedy is the same as only observing us underwater and concluding it’s in our nature to drawn.

Peter Kropotkin, a Russian anarchist, geographer, and political philosopher, was big on Darwin theory, and he wrote a couple of books giving an alternative view of animal and human survival. Here's what he says:

"As soon as we study animals [...] we at once perceive that though there is an immense amount of warfare and extermination going on amidst various species, and especially amidst various classes of animals, there is, at the same time, as much, or perhaps even more, of mutual support, mutual aid, and mutual defense amidst animals belonging to the same species or, at least, to the same society. Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle."

Sure, in the realm of capitalism, we're often told that it's a dog-eat-dog world, survival of the fittest, and all that. But take a moment to look around, and you'll see a different story unfolding.

Nature itself is a testament to cooperation. The complex systems in nature are based on cooperation - the trees cooperate using the Mycelium, the Syphonophore is made out of colonies cooperating to sustain life, and ants are building tunnels, chambers, etc, all based on cooperation.

Competition is the law of the jungle, but cooperation is the law of civilization.

And while I believe that competition pushes innovation and personal development, I also think we’ve given it way too much attention. Let's shift our focus to cooperation for the next few minutes.

The evolution 🦧

Now that we're all on board with the idea of cooperation, let's delve into how it works. I turned to the "bible" of cooperation, "The Evolution of Cooperation" by Robert Axelrod, a political scientist with some serious street cred. He's advised the UN, the US Defense Department, and others.

In order to understand the prerequisites of a Cooperative society, we need to understand this research, so bear with me.

Axelrod's journey into cooperation started with an experiment in the '80s. He organized a tournament where participants submitted strategies to solve a classic cooperation vs. competition problem - The Prisoners Dilemma.

The Prisoner's Dilemma 🧠

I’m guessing many of you know what the Prisoner's Dilemma is, feel free to skip this section if you do.

It's like the Shakespearean drama of game theory, exploring the conflict between rational self-interest and collective cooperation. Imagine two criminals arrested by the police, both facing a choice: cooperate (stay silent) or defect (confess to the crime).

If both stay silent, they each get a one-year sentence. If both confess, they each get five years. But if one confesses while the other stays silent, the silent one gets a whopping 20-year sentence.

Individually, it seems smart to not cooperate (confess), avoiding the worst-case scenario. But when both choose this path, they both end up with five years. Cooperation (staying silent) would have given them just one year each.

Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (IPD)

Now, let's make it interesting. Imagine playing PD over and over, with no clear endpoint. This changes the game entirely. You remember your opponent's previous move, and retaliation becomes possible.

This is the version Axelrod used in his experiment. Participants submitted strategies to play IPD repeatedly, and Axelrod analyzed the results. What did he find?

Findings 📊

Let’s take a look at the top 15 winning strategies. Among these strategies, 15 out of 15 are marked by their readiness to retaliate when provoked, not always, but at times. Retaliation serves as a defense mechanism to prevent exploitation and encourage fair play. 14 out of 15 of these strategies are inherently nice, meaning they don't initiate aggression and start with cooperation, fostering trust and goodwill. Finally, 13 out of 15 strategies display forgiveness, the ability to return to cooperation after facing a betrayal.

These attributes - retaliation, niceness, and forgiveness - serve as the building blocks of successful cooperation, illustrating that in the complex world of human interaction, a mix of toughness and empathy often prevails.

The Winning Strategy: Tit For Tat ✅

The strategy that triumphed was called "Tit For Tat." It's elegantly simple - start with cooperation and then mimic your opponent's last move. Tit For Tat is nice (starts with cooperation), retaliates (responds in kind), and forgives (returns to cooperation after an attack).

Even more fascinating, Tit For Tat never outperforms its opponents; it's not envious. Yet, it consistently emerged as the best strategy.

Real-Life Lessons 🏙️

What can we learn from this game of cooperation in the world of humans? A lot, actually:

• Niceness builds trust and encourages cooperation. Don’t be mean. 🕊️

• Retaliation is crucial to prevent exploitation. - Don’t let people take advantage of you. 💪🏼

• Forgiveness matters; Mistakes happen - Move on. 😠

• Being envious and solely optimizing for yourself doesn't always yield the best results. Don’t be greedy. 🤑

Theory in Practice 🚨

But why should we care about this game beyond academia? Because it's not just a mathematical puzzle; it's a mirror to our real-world problems.

The Prisoner's Dilemma echoes in politics, decision-making, and even climate action. Many countries hesitate to take significant climate action, fearing economic disadvantages. This reluctance to cooperate harms everyone in the long run. The problem is that governments often lack the attributes of cooperation - they aren't nice, forgiving, or unenvious. All they've mastered is retaliation.

Decentralize everything! 🕸️

In the face of government shortcomings, we're forming new groups to address problems they can't. Local economies, mutual credit systems, eco-activism movements like Extinction Rebellion - these are our responses. ReFi is getting huge, more and more impact DAOs are launched and more and more intentional communities are being born. As of now, Gitcoin has already managed to raise about 20 millions for funding public goods. Amazing work!

However, as we decentralize, we need new ways to coordinate. And here's where the magic happens. And here we get to coordination, if we want to cooperate we need to learn to coordinate. As some say in the blockchain space - It’s all Coordination.

In order to know how to solve the problem, we need to understand it well. And this is when we get back to the books.

The Coordination Limit 🤼

Here's the catch: there's a limit to how many stable social relationships one person can maintain, often referred to as Dunbar's Number (around 150).

Dunbar's number is a concept suggesting that humans can maintain around 150 stable social relationships due to cognitive limitations in our brains. These relationships are organized into layers, with close friends and family at the core and acquaintances forming larger circles. This number represents a limit to our social capacity, beyond which it becomes challenging to maintain meaningful connections. It's a theoretical idea based on our brain's ability to handle social interactions.

To scale our cooperative entities, we need to break this limit.

Breaking the Limit ⛔

So here are my two cents on breaking the limit. For the first time in our history, we do have the technology to build decentralized functional organizations. There are some great people in the DAO space working hard on this. We’ve seen the open source community grow as hell, and succeed by having a few very important features:

• Good Documentation and Communication Protocols: We can’t scale any team without a proper onboarding and documentation protocol. Decentralizing software means also decentralizing operations.

• Collaboration Protocol: Git changed a lot for Software Development. It made a huge difference on the amount of people being capable on working on the same project.

• Good Derivatives Protocol: To have the ability to take a version of a piece of software and build on top of it made a huge difference. Now all maintainers and builders have the ability to build versions of the protocol, better value aligned with their vision, if things go off.

• Serious Leadership: Confusing leadership for hierarchical management is a terrible mistake. We people are naturally organizing in groups and picking our leaders in them. A truly decentralized organization is one that can pick and replace if needed their leaders, instead of not having leaders at all.

• Meritocracy and Reputation - contributors earn influence and decision-making power through the quality of their contributions. This can lead to recognition and leadership opportunities.

Another point I want to make is the importance of personal development in groups. A group can truly be strong and decentralized if they’ve done their own internal work first. Without the ability to communicate in a non-violent way, respect our agreements, and get shit done, we’re useless to the group. This is something I’d love to see more in the DAO space. Putting our focus on personal development and building functioning groups should be our prerequisite to building Decentralized Communities.

Closing Thoughts ✌🏼

I hope I tickled your brain a little bit and made you think about a world based on Synergy between Cooperation and Competition, rather than picking one or another. I hope we can all imagine a better world, built by communities for communities, based on respect, kindness, individual responsibility, and innovation!