18th Jun 2024 Gemini 1.5 Pro
Primavera De Filippi's interest in blockchain stems from its potential as a platform for experimenting with new governance structures. Unlike established institutions, blockchain offers a space where high stakes coexist with a strong desire for experimentation. This combination makes it ideal for exploring decentralized and participatory governance models.
De Filippi highlights the limitations of traditional institutions, which often prioritize competition over cooperation. She emphasizes her own focus on exploring tools and methodologies that can facilitate a shift towards more cooperative systems, and sees blockchain technology as a key driver in this transition.
"My research is essentially looking at blockchain, mostly because blockchain is kind of this new area in which experimentation is actually possible. There's like very little space left in the world in which we can actually experiment with new governance structure because everything is so entrenched and even existing institutions that want to experiment are afraid because there is too much stake at risk."
De Filippi, along with colleagues, coined the term "extitutional theory" to describe an alternative lens for understanding social dynamics. This framework emphasizes the importance of individual identities and their relationships, rather than solely focusing on institutional structures and rules.
She argues that excessive focus on institutions often leads to over-institutionalization, stifling individual agency and creativity. Extitutional theory, on the other hand, seeks to empower individuals and leverage their relationships to create more effective and fulfilling forms of social organization.
"We start focusing on the extitutional lens, then we do the opposite. We start instrumentalizing the institutional scaffolding because you do need institutional scaffolding to support the extitutional dynamics or to constrain them if they go in the wrong direction. And so the idea is really to kind of like use those to disentangle those institutional dynamics and extitutional dynamics in order to then be able to better understand the interplay between those two and therefore being able to shape understand and shape human dynamics by playing those different strings."
De Filippi proposes the concept of "Impact NFTs" as a way to leverage the economic power of the NFT market for ecological and social good. These NFTs would be linked to real-world data points, such as the health of an ecosystem, and their value would be directly tied to the well-being of those resources.
This model aims to incentivize investors to support ecological health, as the value of their assets would be directly linked to the vitality of the underlying natural resources. This approach seeks to align economic incentives with ecological well-being, creating a more sustainable and symbiotic relationship between financial markets and the environment.
"And so with Impact NFT, the idea is to do exactly that and particularly for the environment, but it can be any kind of impact. And so the idea is that today we have a lot of philanthropists, but not enough. And then we have a lot of economically motivated people. Some of them are also interested in some impact, but they mostly operate for economic returns. And so with Impact NFT, the idea is, can we actually create philanthropy that actually come with a return on investment?"
De Filippi acknowledges the potential pitfalls of speculation within the blockchain space, particularly the tendency to prioritize financial gains over real-world impact. She argues for a nuanced understanding of speculation, differentiating between purely profit-driven activities and those that generate tangible value or serve a broader purpose.
She emphasizes the need to remain conscious of the potential risks of relying too heavily on speculation-driven models. While acknowledging the potential for blockchain to exacerbate these tendencies, she also highlights its capacity to support alternative, more cooperative economic systems.
"I think the danger is when you have this pure speculative bubble that is only and exclusively feed by financial speculation. And it seems like blockchain... puts into hyperdrive the ability to create speculative representations. Because we can now tokenize and tokenize and tokenize and put all these layers and it's programmatic and it's 24/7 and it's software."
De Filippi criticizes the concept of the "network state," arguing that it promotes an unrealistic and ultimately unsustainable form of exit-based governance. She suggests that the current state system, while imperfect, provides a necessary framework for global coordination and addressing shared challenges.
Instead of seeking to secede from existing structures, De Filippi proposes a more layered approach to governance, where blockchain-enabled communities can operate as overlays, augmenting and supporting existing state functions. This approach emphasizes interdependence and cooperation, leveraging the strengths of both digital communities and traditional institutions.
"And so overthrowing the network state is the concept of saying, well, let's actually identify, it's like memetic warfare, let's identify an alternative concept that taps into the same underlying resonance of how do we help communities engage, acquire agency, engage in collective action, engage in the shared management of resources."
Airtable