Richard Bartlett about Loomio and how horizontal decision-making is different from society's habits

Welcome on another episode of Democracy Innovator podcast and our guest of today is Richard Bartlett.

So thank you for your time, Richard.

Yeah, it's good to be here.

Happy to talk about this important topic.

And so as I told you, I'm very interested by governance, technology, politics.

And I saw that you co-founded Lumio.

And so as a first question, I'd like to ask you, I don't know, like a short story about Lumio and how it happened that it became a platform.

Yeah.

So I think it's very important to understand the political context that it comes from.

you know, I graduated in 2008 with an engineering degree and I got my first engineering job and then there was a financial crisis and then I immediately lost my job and I was

unemployed.

And that was like my, um, the start of my career immediately got kind of interrupted and

So I was quite lost and confused for some years.

And then in 2011, we had the Occupy Wall Street movement get started in the U.S.

and it spread all over the world and linked up with some of the other pro-democracy movements that were happening like the 15M in Spain and other things going on around the

world.

know, 2011 was this moment of...

effervescence or excitement or like fresh energy around democratic innovation.

Yeah, that transition from like, I'm unemployed and lost to, oh, that's because of systemic reasons.

The economic systems we're living in are not really designed for the wellbeing of all people.

um The people in government are not necessarily competent to create a thriving society or to look after the environment or...

uh Yeah, to make a good environment for people.

m the social movement kind of was an outlet for my feeling of being ripped off my indignation, you know, like, hey, I've just put all this energy into growing up and

getting educated and becoming a useful member of society.

And there's nothing here for me.

And Occupy was really my first introduction to

activism and like taking politics seriously before that hadn't paid very much attention.

But I was just captivated by the

the organizing model, I guess, like I had some experience with open source software and open source hardware, building electronic devices.

m you know, I was one of these kids who was online from a very young age and found most of my friends online.

And I really liked that.

the organizing spirit of the internet, this thing of transparency, of participation, of, you know, in open source culture, you can fork, like you're working on one project and you

don't like how it's going.

So you can just kind of split off and do your own thing and take it with you.

That kind of freedom I found very inspiring.

And then at Occupy, seemed like one of the reasons I was drawn to Occupy, it felt like um it was a face-to-face

in person group that was organizing on digital principles on that, that the, the way that all of these, you know, there was like, I think multiple, like 3000 occupied camps in

different parts of the world, I think.

And that there was no central coordinating organization.

There's no like hierarchy saying, you know, we should have a in San Francisco and one in Wellington in New Zealand, that it was more like a protocol.

And that

anyone who was willing to like subscribe to that protocol could participate.

And it was just like popping up everywhere.

found that extremely inspiring at the global scale, but then at the local scale, things being organized by consensus and you know, in quite a strong contrast to my engineering

career, which was all about expertise and being correct and finding the smartest person in the room to make the decisions at Occupy.

was more.

Yeah, a different attitude towards people, like an attitude that everyone has got an important perspective to contribute.

And when we have a good social process, we can take all of these different perspectives and use them to build consensus.

that consensus can be like the collective intelligence can be superior to any individual.

That was also very compelling to me.

Like I had never really thought about these issues very much, but when I got to participate in it, it was really mind blowing.

know, it was really mind blowing to.

to see a good idea can come from anywhere.

You might be like an eight year old kid and still you might have a suggestion or a proposal for the group that everyone agrees is that, this is brilliant.

This is such a good idea.

We should do that.

You don't have to be qualified or you don't have to have some kind of special status.

So I was extremely inspired by just being exposed to collective decision-making.

And, and, and the weird kind of irony, it's like at the local, at the local level is very strong consensus.

And at the global level is very decentralized, really chaotic.

Um, so it's kind of both of those are like radical ways of organizing and kind of at opposite ends of the spectrum in some, in some sense.

I found both of those things really inspiring and gave me the impression of like, Oh, all of the, all of the aspects, know, the things that I'm scared about for the future around.

uh, economics and justice and environment.

Those are all coordination problems.

They all stem from bad governance.

And I, for the first time, I had some hope that like, it's possible to innovate our governance systems that we can, we can find new ways of organizing together.

We can, use different systems for making decisions and therefore make better decisions.

And the inspiration for Lumio was like,

Maybe we can make a decision-making protocol that that generates high quality decisions and then use that and apply it to itself and get a, you know, like a kind of singularity

or kind of feedback loop of self-improving systems.

I got very inspired by that concept.

And so my friends from Occupy, as the movement was kind of, you know, losing momentum, we just got started with this idea of like, can we make a software?

that kind of replicates something about the Occupy experience.

And we were really thinking in this moment in history, there's a lot of people, there's a lot of demand.

There's a lot of people that want to do assemblies and inclusive collective decision-making.

And all we're going to do is provide a software that makes it easier to do that rather than always doing it a meeting.

It's like text-based, it's like a forum.

And in the discussion forum, you can raise proposals and people can vote.

That's kind of the core idea has always been that way.

And it's hasn't really deviated from that original mission.

And.

That was actually quite easy.

You're like building a tool that supports people that want to organize in that way.

What's hard is not that many people want to organize that way.

That's challenge.

Yeah, I can imagine this.

mean, also nowadays, now there is also AI, building a platform can be something that is doable in a weekend.

Then it's hard to find people that would like to organize in a certain way, maybe because we are not used.

And since from when we start, from when we are a child in school,

we are not used to organize in a horizontal way or to use consensus and can be quite hard.

And so then what happened like, because people are using Lumio, I think.

People are using Lumio, there's still a small team building Lumio, like it still exists.

I'm still on the board.

m Like there is a small, m you know, like for example, a lot of cooperatives are using Lumio.

m A lot of labor unions and political parties and the kinds of organizations, like membership organizations where this principle of one person, one vote is really essential

to how they organize.

ah There's definitely a significant

And there's still a lot of there's a lot of people in that group.

um So we're still serving them.

m But I think from my perspective, as an innovator or a founder and inventor, I was really counting on the social movement from 2011 being the kind of start of a revolution or

something, rather than a temporary moment where people got a little, you know, a little more open to experimentation for a

few months, I thought, I when we started, I thought, this is the ground swell and this is a big change coming.

And um yes, like you say, people in their school or in their family, they didn't get exposed to this way of doing things.

But now there's this new exposure, there's this new way of doing things, and we're going to see this transformation.

And I miscalculated, like I underestimated how much that kind of culture or social expectations or psychology, how strong that

resistance is to change and how strong is the conditioning that people have for, yeah, most people grew up in a family with one or two adults and that they have extra authority

and they kind of call the shots and they're the top of the hierarchy and they go from the family to school, which has the same pattern and then from the school to a job and

sometimes from the job to the state and then all of these different social contexts, there's a hierarchical decision-making authority that people are so well-trained in that

way of doing things that um

asking people to relate to each other horizontally with

without that change of command, without that centralized responsibility and authority, I underestimated how radical that concept is and how...

the cultural side of things is the big bottleneck as far as I'm concerned, rather than the technical side of things.

I thought, because I'm trained as an engineer, I just thought we'll make some really nice technology and em that'll make it easy.

And once it's easier, then it'll be more popular.

And now I don't think it's so simple.

Yeah, it's probably, yeah, I think the problem is cultural.

Like if we wanted to organize in a horizontal way, we probably don't need the technology at all.

Like we could just do it.

ah But then because of society as how it is at the moment.

So I think, I mean, technology could be helpful in some way.

Also because maybe

ah is a sort of training for us and then we understand what to teach to the next generation.

Mm hmm.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Yeah, this is part of the part of the inspiration for me as well as

that I would like, I think if we're going to live in a democracy.

Like there's different depths of democracy and most of us I think at the moment are living in a kind of

reality TV show version of democracy where like, okay, someone gets voted off the island at the end of the week.

um But there's no sense of collective intelligence or deliberation or um that voting in general elections every few years is kind of like a tribe, sport, you know, it's like, do

you like the red team or do you like the green team or the blue team?

It's not really about developing deep understanding of your fellow citizens and building

building agreements and developing empathy and learning the skills of taking other people's perspectives and really considering trade-offs between, this person thinks the

environment is very important and I think the economy is very important and we're gonna have to make decisions that balance those trade-offs.

em For me, part of the inspiration with Lumio is just to give people more experience with deliberation and participatory democracy.

so that they are better equipped when they go to participate in a national level democracy that they've actually got some experience of these dynamics of perspective taking and

participation that most of us just don't get much exposure to otherwise.

Yeah, because as you said, or we are in the school and there is the hierarchy is quite present or we are working and also there in most of workplaces.

I mean, you have the boss that is telling you what to do.

um But this is something like because it's about power.

And you know, there was a professor um

was a seminar, he was a professor of political science and he was like, we don't know how power work.

I mean, there are certain kind of rules that we can aah imagine, but then it's not, we don't know why, I don't know, a lot of people are following just one person.

Yeah, this is, I feel quite confused now.

As I get older, I feel quite confused where when we started doing the, you know, that was more than 10 years ago.

I had that, that clarity of vision that young people have, they, these sort of, it's very clear.

This is what needs to change.

We need to get rid of the hierarchy.

Things will be better if we are more collaborative and more inclusive.

I was very straightforward on that.

And now I'm, now I'm confused.

Like right now I'm, um,

My wife, Nati and I, we've opened this retreat center outside of Barcelona.

And we currently have 20 something people, 23 people in the house.

And they're here for 10 days and they're like doing projects and collaborating.

And it's very clear that Nati and I are the top of the hierarchy.

It's our house.

And...

The group is very harmonious and people are having a great time and it's being very productive and it feels good.

um And I think it's working well partly because of the hierarchy.

And the hierarchy is not us telling people what to do or saying, giving people roles or delegating authority to them or something.

We're not doing any of that.

Like there's a lot of freedom and people are doing whatever they feel excited to do.

But

When it comes to, I don't know, what time should the meals be or some basic house rules or like, everyone knows it's our decision.

decide it's our house.

decide.

that um because everyone in the group trust us delegate like once the delegated to us to make a decision for a temporary time, they're here for 10 days.

So it's not like, it's not like we're controlling their lives, but we're setting some of the constraints on how we're going to interact as a group.

um

the coordination is extremely efficient and people are getting along very well.

And if there was some kind of conflict, it would be up to us to be the kind of justice system that would help create some shared understanding and negotiation and get to some

new agreement.

then, and if you contrast that to if we had 23 people in the house and there was no hierarchy and it was purely driven by consensus, we would literally spend half of the day

in meetings.

uh And we might build like quite an extraordinary degree of bonding.

If we were doing things by consensus, like that's one of the great things about consensus building is that it means that you like any small thing like, how should we keep the

kitchen tidy?

It very quickly draws up people's deepest values.

And that's very interesting if you want to get to know someone to run a consensus process around how should we keep the kitchen tidy, you'll get to know like some of their life

story and the history and what values are most important to them.

um But for coordinating, it's not efficient.

And that's to me now I'm in this dilemma of like, am I now just have I sold out?

know, am I just a little micro fascist?

that likes my little kingdom and I'm the little emperor.

the dictator of the kitchen.

Yeah.

I have to say that I'm also, I also had similar thoughts regarding how people behave and also, yeah, I'm very confused.

I think that in some ways, sometimes we...

generically speak about hierarchy, but then there are very different kind of hierarchies.

like, I think it's very different if there is someone that in some way decide for me, like the time of the lunch, but is there and I can also talk to you or like maybe in a small

town, I can also talk to my major because maybe it's the uncle of my friend.

We are just 500 in the town.

oh while in big towns or like in a big office where there are multiple levels of hierarchy.

I think that is something.

Yeah, I completely agree that the accessibility, the feedback loops so that when you say, or if I get multiple people telling me, hey, lunchtime doesn't work, I'm like, oh, I can

take that into consideration.

And if people were giving me feedback, and I was consistently ignoring them, I would, the group wouldn't work anymore.

You know, like, like my role only works because there's an alignment between how I'm behaving and what people want.

So there is a kind of informal kind of democracy happening there that people could very easily withdraw their consent and say like, you're annoying.

Like, yeah, it's easy for any one person to sort of rebel or say, I don't like what you're doing, which would have a big impact.

that's so like, there's strong feedback loops on me to stay accountable to what people need.

And it's temporary.

think the temporary thing is a huge part of why it works.

If we were living here permanently, I wouldn't want to live under that arrangement where I'm the boss.

I get to say that I mean, that would feel really strange.

Yeah, I would feel yeah, feels very prehistoric maybe.

No, yeah, I can understand.

um

I'm thinking, because this is very interesting, the experience that you had before, like trying to horizontalize uh conversation decisions.

And then with this position of micro power, will say, but in some way you can experience like in an ethnographic way, I will say, ah what happened.

uh in a community that changes continually, if understood correctly.

ah

And in some way also internet has this kind of speed.

mean, you create maybe a Discord group, a Telegram group, there is a small community and then people travel really fast on the internet.

Yeah.

And that, you know, one of the really important roles that I'm playing here is deciding who's in and who's out.

And which for any kind of community, whether that's online or in person, like a discord, ah it just takes one person to ruin the discord.

they're, you know, if they come in on their own agenda, which is not related to the purpose that everyone signed up for, like you really need the power to kick people out and

say,

you're in the wrong group, you don't share our values.

And it's so much easier to do that with a single person who's empowered to do that, that's acting on behalf of the group, rather than doing that by a consensus process again.

And so it's really unlikely that consensus is going to lead to people getting excluded.

Because it's just how groups work, that consensus tends to give a lot of space for all of the doubts.

And people say, oh, wait a minute, maybe we should think twice about this.

Yeah, there'll be a lot more patience and a lot more tolerance.

And so you wind up with a more inclusive group, but with less focus, with less trust, with less enthusiasm and more divergence.

then, well, okay, we were nice and inclusive, but then everyone left the discord because it was not interesting anymore because there's way too much chaos going on or way too much

debate or conflict or something.

So yeah, very, very confused about where to draw the line.

um Like where do you want to use consensus or where do really want to have a strong democratic process and where is it appropriate to have more of a private ownership or

delegated or an expertise driven?

I would love to develop a stronger framework for understanding at which scales should we use which model?

Yeah, I actually don't know.

I think there are a lot of people that are asking themselves this question.

Because I see what you're saying about a community.

Because in some way you have to give freedom to everyone also to express ideas that are maybe different from one.

They could give fresh ideas.

At the same time, you have to keep a sort of uh focus.

And I don't have an answer, unfortunately.

um What I think is that maybe it's like a sort of technocratic dream, I don't know, that maybe technology in some way could also help us to do that.

Let's say, I don't know, I'm in your community and I want to do

I know, a community of, I want to play music, but that is not part of your community.

Instead of, instead of asking you, can we please play music, play music, play music, maybe like, I can find a community that is similar minded to me, but like sometimes is a...

Sometimes it's not hard to find what you are searching for.

And that's why maybe you insist in the wrong place.

I don't know.

Yeah, think a lot of us that get excited about democratic innovation, um the idealism can get in the way of the pragmatism, you that the ideology, like you said, you did some

research into blockchain, I feel like that's a perfect example where you have um a sort of idealistic understanding about how large scale systems should be different than they

currently are.

And then that

mentality affects your decisions about how small scale organizing should work.

um And some of my work with, you know, like the DOWs, for example, in web three, they're very ideological about how things should be organized, and they're not at all practical.

It's because it's like this commitment to a vision about how things should be different, and the inability to distinguish that maybe the way that we want to organize a government

or a currency is quite different from how we want to organize a team.

and that different principles apply at different scales.

Like that's hard to, it's hard to keep track of.

The freedom as well, the freedom of association, like knowing that you can go to different places and get different things and that they would have different modes.

I think that's really essential.

That's funny, man.

this is so, I feel so stereotypical in a way that the older I get, the more normal and the less radical I get that the vision that I have for a really good life looks like, looks

very similar to like, I don't know, the suburbs where you have all of these little private

places with a family in each house and some good collaboration.

There's this sort of like, I have my little mini dictatorship in my house, but I have very good relationships with my neighbors and that your house is more musical and my house is

more political and their house is more into vegetables.

And we're collaborating freely across the fences, but then we can always retreat to our own private place.

What I'm describing is not a radical vision, you know, like that's like kind of a 1950s suburban dream.

Yeah, yeah, I think about this thing about hierarchy and also about the roles because sometimes I thought, okay, a community that wants to do something, I don't know, to park a

car, maybe one is driving, but that doesn't mean that he's the leader because also they are the guy that is out of the car explaining

how to drive.

mean, in some way, he's the boss because he's...

So I think that...

uh Yeah, actually, I'm also very confused.

I think there are some studies about hierarchies and different roles.

I mean, you know, with the example of the micro dictatorship in my house, the way that it works is the good feedback loops.

And this is something that's very hard to scale is good feedback.

I and something that's one part of this one part of the system that I'm actually quite optimistic that technology can make a contribution that so much debate and division

between people emerges from

lack of understanding of the other person's perspective, because we're using the same word to mean two different things, or we're using two different words to mean the same thing,

that we just have these like, these local dialects, which all okay, it's all sounds like English.

But actually, when you say capitalism, and when I say capitalism, we're talking about two completely isolated objects.

m

One of the things that these new large language models do very accurately is to create a universal translation that identifies concepts separate from language, concepts separate

from a specific label.

That's what the math is doing.

It's like identifying, this is okay.

In this cluster, they use this word and in that cluster, they mean that word, but it's all pointing to the same object.

It's the same concept.

that, that gives me quite a lot of optimism that we're...

we are able to use that kind of technology to take very large amounts of feedback from citizens, that citizens could be having a much stronger role in setting the agenda for

what we want our politicians to be talking about at all.

And then when an issue comes to the top of the agenda, that citizens can have a lot of input into their perspectives, their views, what they think is important, and that with

the new LLM technology that we can...

sample a huge amount of information and generate really solid recommendations.

Like, I'm quite optimistic for the way that AI can be a scalable kind of participatory democracy mediator, like a facilitator.

um Like that could be, it's imaginable to me that we could have a new political movement.

Like I say, we need that culture swing, that sort of, uh that wave of um narrative change and values change.

It's quite easy for me to imagine that technology could catalyze that when we say like, Hey, did you know, you know, for example, there's this platform polis, which I think is

one of the more compelling ones for large scale participation.

One could imagine that a political party says, and people have tried this in the past, but I could imagine them trying to build a case that says the reason you're going to vote for

us is because we have this very robust digital participation system, and we're not going to set the agenda you are.

And uh anyone from any place can have their say and shape how we are voting in parliament.

I can see that being a compelling story that gives people some inspiration and some fresh hope for how things can work at the national scale.

And we just have to see if anyone takes that opportunity.

Yeah.

Can you hear me?

Because I saw some messages regarding my microphone.

I absolutely share with you your thoughts about language and also about AI that can mediate.

So I thought like, exactly what you said, that one word has different meanings for me and you, but maybe for the AI, the AI can see both of the meanings.

Also, regarding what you said now, um is it maybe like finding, uh designing, I don't know, a good platform that could do that?

Because I'm thinking...

um

In Italy there was the five star movement that they tried with this platform called Russo, uh not to have a direct democracy, but was in some way to receive feedback from the

citizens, from their their electors.

uh But I mean, back then, there was not AI, I mean, not LLM.

And so I'm thinking if maybe like building a platform that like a really good platform because at the end I'm thinking that um

if a political party in the UK or in Spain or in France or in Italy, I mean, you don't have to beat the platform several times.

You can just beat one and make it very, very, make it perfect.

What's up?

I guess the question with something like the five star movement, do you think, because I'm not very familiar with it, do you think that um was a sort of universal sample of

different political beliefs, or did it wind up being a kind of segment, a segment of the population that, you know, they're all, I don't know, very right wing or very

environmentalist or very social justice oriented or like,

Did it sample broadly or did people cluster around specific opinions?

ah

Good question.

I mean, I think at the beginning, because it will be very interesting to interview some of the people that were there 10 years ago.

At the beginning, there were around 100,000 of people registered to the platform and then they closed the registration.

So it was, I will say, left wings in some way, then what is left?

Different podcast.

And I think, I mean, I remember that they were using it not in a very good way, I would say.

It was not very bottom up.

It was more like, hey, do you like the color of our logo?

You know, that kind of decisions.

Yeah.

That are 13 points.

I'm just thinking about this, like, from a political strategy point of view, would you want to have a genuine, completely horizontal bottom up mass participation that anyone of

any set of beliefs can come in and share their view?

Or would you want to take a segment of society and say, yeah, if you're an environmentalist, come and use this platform and we're going to build strong proposals on

this topic?

Like, I really don't know.

um

which strategy makes the most sense.

And these decisions about who's in and who's out, think are pretty essential that like when you say build the perfect platform, it's like, okay, well, what needs to be in the

perfect platform?

we have to have geolocation, for example, do we have to track citizenship?

Like, how do you define who gets a vote?

Because obviously, if these things have any power, they're going to be subject to adversarial conditions, but people are going to try and break them and they're going to

try and...

Cheat, obviously.

They're not all going to be.

So I'm like, should we try and design it for everyone to basically replace an entire democratic system or should we design it for like party members that at least have a lot

more good faith and a lot more, they're less adversarial with each other.

uh Good question.

don't know, think it's, I mean, these years will be years of experimentation.

So maybe there will be several experiments.

So someone will build a platform just for a specific

segment of people, I don't know.

um

And then the next sort of philosophical question for me is, do you want a mass participation bottom up driven system for generating priorities?

Or do you want to have some interplay between the top down and the bottom up?

for example, where I come from in New Zealand, we have the Labour Party who have a history of what we would call social engineering.

make policies that are unpopular because they think it's the right thing to do.

So they um made it illegal to smoke cigarettes inside.

It was very unpopular.

They made it illegal to hit children.

That was very unpopular.

They made it legal to do prostitution.

Very unpopular.

They make these kind of moves that kind of alienate the population to an extent.

because they are leading on a particular set of values that they believe is important.

And they also have made a calculation that people's attitudes are going to change about smoking cigarettes or about prostitution.

um And that they've got a role to kind of advance the population's maturity or their beliefs.

And they've been quite successful several times of doing this kind of social engineering where now like

Now it would feel absurd to smoke a cigarette inside in a public place.

It's like, are you crazy?

Like, are you an animal?

But when they brought that policy in, it was very unpopular and everyone was outraged and I want to have my freedoms.

You would never get a democratic, or that democratic consensus would take much, much, much, much longer to form.

If that was the only mechanism you had was to allow opinions to bubble up from the bottom, like.

I think there is a role for some kind of top-down leadership and it just wants to be somehow balanced with the bottom-up.

um Maybe a mix of bottom up and top down.

But as we said before, like sometimes um

Once that you dig into social system, you see that sometimes it's more complex.

As we say, who is the boss?

The one that is driving or the one that is giving the indication.

ah And so I think there could be a mix, ah but a lot of theoretical things has to be um considered.

like the difference between, I don't know, uh political decision and a technical decision.

uh And also, yeah, of course, considering skills and considering like certification if a doctor has a degree, whatever.

uh

Yeah, but, um...

I mean, I think that um was Balanjee, the guy about the one that founded an exchange and the network state.

was saying that, and I also shared these things that was saying that now technology allows us to decentralize things, decentralize power.

While before

technology was mainly used to centralize power.

ah

So I think that we should experiment.

Yeah, yeah, I am I feel a little self conscious about how politically confused I am philosophically confused.

Like, you know, if you look at the history of Europe, I mean, look at the history of Italy, right?

Like, um we used to live in in Luca, which is over the hill from Pisa.

And you read the history of Luca and Pisa.

And it's like, there's hundreds of years of like,

murder and bloodshed and war between these two places.

And this decentralized power, these are two independent nation states constantly battling each other.

And then you centralize power and you build the Italian state or you build the European Union.

And that centralization comes at the expense of people's freedom, like it does reduce the diversity, it like forces people to become

to have more conformity to become to lose some of the difference become more same.

um But it also means there's much less violence between Luca and Pisa now because they're part of a bigger thing, you know, like they're part of a bigger centralized system.

And, and this idea of like, now we've got technology that allows us to decentralize.

Do you want to live?

Do you want to live in a Europe that's composed of like 600,000 nation states?

I suspect that could be really, really violent.

You know, like, I m

I'm very grateful for the amount of peace that we have.

And part of that comes from centralizing more and more to a larger and larger populations.

So this is the part of the confusion again, it's like, well, I don't want some global empire where there's a dictator that tells everyone what to do all the time.

But I do like not having to have wars with my neighboring city.

That's quite good.

Of like a global dictator, would not be like probably any conflict between, I don't know, China, so on.

So yeah, I'm thinking like the state is the entity that detains, that has the monopoly of violence.

So of course, if the state is big and strong, it means that in some way

there is less violence in the street, I would say, but then the violence goes into something else.

Yeah.

And this is also thing like, because several times I heard about, and it is true that now we have less violence on the street compared to the past.

At the same time, like every now and then it happened that there is a very big episode of violence.

And I mean, like a World War.

and then how you do the average.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think what I'm saying with all of this though, is just that um the way that I used to think, I used to have a very strong position that we need more decentralization.

That was just obvious to me.

And now I feel more, my position is much more complicated than that.

I've got more apprehension of the trade-offs that we're getting into.

um

and more appreciation for how systems work as well as they do.

And I'm more humble about, God, like if we were going to change something, what would be the unintended consequences?

Yeah, this is a humbling process of trying to do something.

No, but I really like this.

mean, also before the interview, you told me like that now you're maybe thinking less about digital governance and these kind of things.

And maybe it was a process of growth.

don't

So I think a big thing that changed for me, I now have a very strong opinion that there is some correlation between small scale and large scale.

um And that when I was working in technology and working in social movements, I was constantly with people who...

have some claims about how the large scale should be done differently.

And that things should be more inclusive, more transparent, more accountable.

um But that these people were often unable to prove a small scale prototype with their own organization.

And now I feel like if I'm going to make any claims about how the large scale should be done, I need to prove it first at the small scale.

Like if I want to say,

Um, there should be no police, for example, then I should be able to organize a group of 50 people that doesn't have something like a police force.

I should be able to prove that you can, you can develop protocols of safety that work that, that.

Without resorting to that kind of centralized authority.

Um, or if I want to say, yeah, every decision should be transparent and can be interrogated by anyone.

I should be able to prove that in an organization of 50 people before I.

inflict that on a nation of 50 million.

And so now so much of my work is operating, like I said, you know, we've got 23 people in the house at the moment, like, I'm working at a scale of 20 people or 50 people or 500

people sometimes.

trying to learn as best as I can about how do you create a social organism that brings out the best in us and that reflects my values.

And that's the humbling process.

It's like, wow, it turns out it's really hard.

Well, it seems very important that I have to exclude people.

And when I started out, I wanted to be completely inclusive.

know, like I have this lovely naive dream about inclusion, but it turns out at some point you're going to include people who exclude other people.

So you have to decide.

Thank

where your exclusion criteria is going to be.

And so I feel like my philosophy about the large scale has been tempered by the small scale experience.

now I don't have that much time for people talking at the large scale if they haven't got the small scale experience.

Probably it's a needed experience to experience both uh small scale and large scale.

But large scale is hard to do experiments.

uh But I see what you're saying also about the alternative.

Because a lot of times when uh

We could think, okay, without the police or so on, maybe society could work.

But then it's probably, as you said, once that you actually do it and you prove it, and that is power.

Because power is like a potentiality of doing something.

And so if you actually do it, then okay, it means that it's true.

You don't need a dedicated people.

that does that job that speaks about safety and so on.

But yeah, it's experimenting as I said before, like in real life.

And, you know, what I said that we're waiting, think, um like, Lumio came from a specific moment in history with a specific political cultural context.

And I feel we're kind of, to me, it feels like we're waiting for the next political movement, like we're waiting for the next social movement, the next narrative.

um Everything I've been saying for the last half an hour is like, you need to get more humble, you need to get more complex, and you have more nuance in your perspective.

But the next social movement is not going to be complex and nuanced.

It's going to be simple.

the way that you build popular power is with a simple narrative that just says, Hey, look, this is the problem.

This is the solution.

This is what we're doing about it.

Let's go.

Like you need to be able to convey it in 20 seconds to a taxi driver.

And then you get popular support.

So all of this, like, it's good to be doing this like philosophical inquiry and

developing a more nuanced understanding of how social change works.

But at some point it needs to be distilled down to a slogan and a very simple manifesto that says, hey, this is what we stand for and this is what we're doing.

Yeah, and that is also, I'm very confused about that ah because I see that ah with a manifesto, then all the complexity is reduced.

And so people will just follow you as a leader.

m

Yeah, yeah, I mean, I saw this in the Occupy movement that, you know, the slogan, we're the 99%.

um

this idea that 99 % of people are on the same team, but there's like 1 % who are exploiting us and we just need to like rebalance the power against them.

It's very compelling.

Like it feels good.

No, 99%.

Oh my God.

Our team is enormous.

Of course we can win.

It's not true.

It's not actually true.

You know, that you can't divide the world like that.

But it's still motivating somehow.

And I felt like it was a useful.

a useful orientation, like a lens that you put on reality and you say, Oh, yeah, let's, let's imagine it's true that there's 1 % of people that are the problem.

And like, who would those 1 % be and what kind of systems would we have to put in place to like, remove those bottlenecks or make it more equitable or more just like, it's a useful

lens, even though it's like, so, so unsophisticated that it's not at all true.

Like it's still useful.

And I think that's, that's a big part of what communication design, social media, social

Social movement design actually looks there.

Yeah, I actually think that it explains a little bit the composition of society.

uh One percent own 99 percent or 99 percent own just one.

ah Then, of course, when it became as Logan, then the question, uh okay, as 99 percent, how do we organize or

there will be a 1 % of the 99 % that we organize.

We're the 98%.

So probably we just have one, I don't know, 101 %

Yeah, yeah.

That was uh

oh So thank you a lot.

I mean, I had a lot of questions that I haven't asked you, but it's fine.

We just follow the flow.

Yeah, it's really fun to think about it with you.

If you have anything else to add, if you want I have a couple of others.

I think the last thing I'll say before I have to go is...

I have been advocating for complexity and nuance and like, it's not so simple.

But for anyone that, especially anyone younger than me that's listening and is thinking, Hey, I've got this cool idea and it's radical.

it's like, it's simple.

We've just got to use the system.

We've got this blockchain.

We've got this.

I really want to support people that have that energy.

Like I think, I think the simple, enthusiastic, radical proposition is actually like fundamentally necessary.

And I don't want to discourage anyone by saying like, Oh, it's too complicated.

It's never going to work.

No, like you should be doing unrealistic idealistic things.

think that's, I think that's a completely essential ingredient.

And I just want to, yeah, balance out everything else that I've said and say, no, go and be radical.

Burn it all down.

Bring us your proposition.

believing what they are doing.

Yeah, this is essential.

uh

Yeah, thank you a lot.

Yeah, was great to meet you too.