Intro

In my previous article describing the experiment I wanted to run with $PUNIA, my personal token, I talked about how the biospheric relationships that traditionally existed in communities for most of human history are all but lost in the hyper-scaled networks of megacities and social media. And the desire for economics to bring that reciprocity back.

Both in the physical and digital, we’re so deeply connected to an unfathomable amount of people in a way that we are not biologically programmed to handle. But these connections exist for a reason - they are useful. We impact each other. We’re crippled by the limited tooling to work with the people that exist in these networks at the margin. 

When I talk about at the margin, what I mean are people that exist within our close friend groups that we interact with reasonably often. Outside of our direct ecosystem.

To add more concreteness to the abstract point, the root question to explore here is: how can I leverage the network that exists outside of my close relationship circle to help me achieve my dreams?

Why

Dunbar’s number denotes the total sum of the relationships one can maintain at the maximum, 150, and that number is clearly unfit for the scale at which societies operate. Every day we interact with complex networks of millions of people in the cities we live in and the social media networks we post and consume on. 

More than ever before do we have these extraneous relationships in our lives [random guy you meet at the bar, someone you sublet to, a Twitter account you follow] and symmetrically these relationships have never been more important. Some dude retweeting your post for finding a job may be seen by your future manager. Requesting product feedback may introduce you to your first VC investor. A like could be by a future lover.

While we each have these networks that exist, the tooling to understand and leverage these networks, actually making social media a more positive thing, is hardly there. Much of the value that is there exists within massively complex black-box AI algorithms that use to optimize us to buy ads.

We can go beyond the feed and could leverage them for us.

How

Complementing a LinkedIn connection with someone I meet at an event, I may also give them some $PUNIA and include them within my network. They may see a survey I post, answer it, and share it in order to earn more $PUNIA. A future iteration of the product would catch their eye and they may introduce me to a VC. The VC may see the overlap in my network and other founder’s already within their portfolio and use it as a reputational reference. The original connection may request my help in thinking through their product design and I can see how much they impacted me by looking at the number of $PUNIA they hold. Happily willing to volunteer my time.

It’s less about being able to ask people for advice that you already know, but more so finding social leverage where you didn’t think you could.

Increasing social media reach is the most salient use case as a 10x increase in reach would have at least a 10x increase in what one can achieve professionally. I do hope other interactions are possible though.

Market structures are uniquely good at aggregating bottoms-up interactions into top-level data in consistently living and evolving systems.

What

As alluded to before, the first iterations of my personal token experiments will be rooted in using $PUNIA to increase my social reach. I’ll consider it a success if I am able to 10x my follower count to 10k.

This is going to be hard to do. I’m not sure how I’ll reward people for liking or retweeting my tweets. It needs to be a relationship where I can push it out to people, and the ones doing don’t need to take any extra action beyond the retweet itself. I also need to think of ways I can provide value back to people. If anything, I will give any $PUNIA holder some of my time!

If anyone has any ideas for implementations here, hit me up.

Who

I’m incredibly grateful to the 27 people that signed up for this experiment and believe in me.

Shoutout: Tanner Karp, tae :), Roger Jin, OverAnalyser, Oliver Tang, Nishanth Babu, niravmurthy, Nic, Mika!, METADREAMER, Mark Redito, Mark, jierlich, jay jog, Ericc572 , Dylan Tran, dekanbro, Crews, Cavalier, BurningFiat / Drew Harding :), BigSky, Betainvestments.eth, alexyao.eth, afromac, adi kotecha, 0xModene, and Danny Hsu!

$PUNIA tokens have been sent to your addresses on Polygon.

You can add it to your Metamask with the information on the Polyscan token page here: https://polygonscan.com/token/0xAfB5Da2763DfB2F0637A415f89E967Dc28E6Aa8a

Do join the $PUNIA holders and personal token enthusiasts discord here: https://discord.gg/Wee5AxsyUm.

If I missed anyone from the initial sign-up or someone that didn’t see the link, please DM me and I would be happy to send over some tokens your way! I got 54k responses of which the vast majority of them were spambots. Lesson learned on open Google forms where airdrops are involved.

Criticisms - Excessive Financialization

In some ways, this may be called financialization in the sense that it makes a manipulatable, digital representation of relationships. But it's worth noting that such digitization already exists in the social graphs we have on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. We have ways by which we already measure such relationships.

The financialization that causes problems in society today is around arbitrary stacks of financialization creating instability and fake value within our economy. The mortgage wasn’t the problem. The problem was traders betting on bets on securitized mortgages. When finance is used to create these novel economic connections between people and institutions, the results can be incredibly positive like creating the first property-owning democracy with an empowered middle class.

This is similar to the creator economy in the sense that those companies continue the trend of bringing power and autonomy back to the individual. It’s an extension of the internet decreasing transaction costs leading to the fragmentation of the firm a la Coase. I don’t quite see it as a monetization schema. 

One day people won’t work for companies, rather companies will work for people.