Web3 community is essentially a community rooted in deep optimism and hope for the future. The increasing popularity and advancement of technology gives us all reason to believe that a world where everyone has the ability to thrive and develop is not just a daydream, but a real possibility. However, when we look at the descriptions of technology in the popular imagination, it is obvious that we often imagine a world that we actually do not want to live in - a place where technology runs rampant at the expense of our values, privacy, and collective freedom. This is a failure of imagination with far-reaching consequences. It is a problem that we can choose to correct by envisioning better outcomes and creating systems that help us achieve those outcomes.
Cyberpunk culture, from dysfunction to aspiration
The "cyberpunk" movement, which is strongly connected to cyberpunk thinking, emerged in the late 1980s and continued to be popular in the early 1990s during the internet era. In this process, it offered a better but still limited possibility - the possibility that technology could help us as individuals fight against increasingly powerful global surveillance states.
Activists like Eric Hughes fought primarily for a world in which powerful cryptography would enable systems to enhance privacy and individual autonomy, allowing us to live freely and undisturbed.
In the 2000s, a broader concept of a future world began to take shape: solarpunk. Although solarpunk initially started as a niche environmental movement focused on renewable energy and sustainable technology, it later evolved into a key part of a global conversation about collectively building an optimistic future - a renewable future that focuses on human development alongside the natural world, rather than in opposition to it.
Fundamentally, while cyberpunk focuses on what we should move away from - dystopian mega-corporations, corrupt governments, and crumbling rebel alliances - solarpunk offers a vision of where we might want to go. It emphasizes the deep integration of technology with the environment, rather than separation, and the joyful preservation, self-sustainability, and social inclusivity, even for those without economic means. It is hard not to be excited about a future where human flourishing and local sustainable development are at the center.
Solarpunk offers a fresh start
However, we may ask ourselves: why are these movements really important? Specifically, why are they important for what we are doing in Web3? In short, the stories we tell ourselves explain our reason for existence and how we behave in this world. As Joan Didion famously said, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live."
But as Adam Curtis and others have pointed out, sometimes the stories we tell ourselves are not actually our own. Often, whether through institutions or algorithms, it is easy to fall into narratives that do not improve our well-being, rather than narratives that we collectively create and empower. We must carefully choose together the narratives we want to see in the world and free ourselves from centuries of collective conspiracy. In the case of solarpunk, the narratives we tell ourselves can bring profound hope and motivation to build the future we want to see, explore the role technology can play in it, and coordinate collectively, not just individually.
Beyond its depiction of a regenerative world, solarpunk can be seen as a focal point for hopeful people, especially for those of us in Web3. Many of us are struggling to figure out how to shed burdens or at least better examine historical power structures, whether they be governments, corporations, or other intangible forces like the economy, which itself is a shared power, narrative structure, and collective illusion. Now, many of us are doing this work independently, without a unified vision or approach.
Some of us may be studying why modern nation-states have quickly become synonymous with political and social coordination compared to traditional indigenous practices. Others may find inspiration from the work of Karl Polanyi, who argues that the pursuit of continuous growth and economic optimization without an emphasis on local or historical context has led to dysfunctional market societies. We may explore the work of Ivan Illich to gain a broader understanding of how educational institutions like universities (and measures like grades) have become representatives of education and lifelong learning.
Solarpunk's forward-looking concern for human flourishing provides fertile ground for exploring all these themes at the intersection of social and institutional power and offers us space to observe where we may be building unnecessary walls between each other.
Other worlds are possible
In the work of Elinor Ostrom, there is a particular alternative model of political and social coordination worth exploring. Ostrom, who won the Nobel Prize in 2009 for her research on common pool resource management, studied irrigation, fisheries, and forest use arrangements in numerous countries including Nepal, Spain, Indonesia, Nigeria, Bolivia, Sweden, and the United States. By applying insights from rational choice theory and development economics to ecological conservation, Ostrom's work demonstrated that "local property can be successfully managed by local commons without any regulation or privatization by central authorities."
While her work is worth reading in its entirety, for a high-level overview of Ostrom, we can summarize her famous eight principles as follows:
- Clearly define boundaries between communities and resources.
- Define rules locally with the participation of stakeholders with direct interests.
- Establish clear procedures for updating rules.
- Establish accountability after rules are established.
- Use graduated social sanctions to resolve conflicts.
- Ensure conflict resolution is informal, accessible, and low-cost.
- If necessary, ensure that your rules are not hindered by higher-level authorities.
- Continue nesting rules in this way until everyone aligns.
While many of these principles may seem obvious to those of us in Web3, it is still rare to see these concepts implemented in a non-hierarchical manner in most parts of Western society even more than a decade later.
Another alternative, this time compared to corporations, can be found in the Rochdale Principles, a set of ideals for the operation of cooperatives established in 19th century England. Cooperatives around the world still actively use these principles today. In summary, they state:
- Establish voluntary and open membership.
- Create participatory processes for decision-making.
- Ensure everyone has a role in the game.
- Allow members autonomy in all arrangements.
- Educate and inform to ensure equality among members.
- Network with other cooperatives.
- Generate positive externalities for the community.
These two examples inspire us to adjust standard models with other well-tested but less adopted tools in how we govern ourselves. If we remain optimistic and work together, perhaps we can avoid the dichotomy presented in cyberpunk media between dystopian mega-states and cyberpunk radicals.
Can we escape the tragedy of the commons?
In short, one challenge faced by common or cooperative-based approaches is that relationships are complex - and as group size increases, they become even more complex. While commons with a few dozen people often function smoothly, conflicts become more likely as we approach Dunbar's number, the theoretical maximum of around 150 intimate relationships that the average person can maintain.
From a network growth perspective, according to Metcalfe's law, a group of two people can only establish one connection, but five people can establish 10 connections, and twelve people can establish over 60. Governance is one thing when communities are small, localized, and nested, but our relationships within modern civilization are vast and sprawling. So what happens when our commons reach a global scale?
The obvious solution is to get everyone involved and simply work together - but without coordination mechanisms to ensure everyone contributes, they often won't. This is aptly called the tragedy of the commons. Although, as Ostrom critically points out, it is avoidable, it remains a significant challenge for all of us today (for reasons of scale, culture, or human nature, it is still hard to say).
The regenerative economic tools being built in Web3, including "dweb" technologies, are hopeful solutions to these global coordination problems. Regenerative economic tools are solarpunk. But fundamentally, no tool is perfect, and we must choose to not only focus on the right problems but also continue iterating potential solutions until we have the best ones. Doing so affects every corner of the world.
But to do this, we need to resist doomsday narratives. While it is important to critique new tools (as Marshall McLuhan said, "We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us"), we must first and foremost remain optimistic and recognize that we must collectively take back control from corrupt institutions, co-design new frameworks and mechanisms to replace them, and harness the power of new cooperative currencies to fund our efforts.
Redefining the commons
Arguably, one of the most critical frameworks to modify is the traditional concept of the commons. In Economics 101, a public good has two immutable characteristics: it is non-excludable (meaning no one can be prevented from using it) and non-rivalrous (meaning one person's enjoyment does not diminish another person's enjoyment). Public goods are typically provided by governments because there is no incentive for businesses to address the "free-rider" problem (why pay for a good that cannot be excluded from use anyway?).
As Laura Lotti, Sam Hart, and Toby Shorin state in "Positive-Sum Worlds: Reframing the Commons," "to create a grand and equitable society, we need a broader vision of the commons than what economics can imagine alone." We must deeply consider what constitutes a public good in Web3 and then think about the tools we might build, as categorization is not always straightforward. For example, open-source code is widely considered a public good. But what about developers? As creators of infrastructure, should they also be seen as (and funded as) public goods? Or perhaps they are ordinary commodities since they are finite?
Thinking critically but optimistically about what constitutes a public good will enable us to address the "free-rider" problem that has plagued the funding of public goods in the past. The clearer we are, the easier it is to decide which projects are worth funding.
Teams like Gitcoin and ENS have already applied a framework that goes beyond the standard criteria:
Axis 1 represents market failure, indicating how difficult it is to extract any economic value from the project (i.e., the higher the market failure axis, the harder it is to monetize it).
Axis 2 represents the value the project provides to the community (donations/funding amounts depend on where the project falls on both axes).
Now let's consider what happens if we not only obtain public goods that create value for a given community but also obtain them for the positive externalities they generate for other communities. Built in this way, we can imagine how clubs or commons can actually function as generators of true public goods.
One example of viewing open-source software as a true global public good (in most cases, and increasingly so, something that anyone should be able to access and use) is Ethereum. While Ethereum may primarily benefit token holders who maintain network security, the generated code is open, permanently available to everyone, and can serve as the basis for other projects. In fact, we have seen time and time again Ethereum-based chains.
Tools for social progress
Here are some specific examples from Web3 projects that can help us achieve the solarpunk future, many of which are sustained by positive externalities generated by other projects, which in turn generate their own positive externalities:
- ENS's digital signatures and online identities help us create sustainable, independent (and interdependent) online entities.
- Optimism's retroactive public goods funding allows for rewarding open-source projects commensurate with the value they have generated in the past.
- Second-order funding established by projects like Gitcoin enables communities to express their support and co-fund public goods in a diverse way, both for altruistic reasons (supporting the public good itself) and for instrumental reasons (supporting products in their own ecosystem, which in turn provide funding for broader open-source software through matching funds).
- Modular governance tools like Gnosis Guild can help fund projects with fractal governance and sustain themselves.
Ethereum is solarpunk, but only if we choose it
Web3 is not just marketing hype and scams, but if we are not careful, it can easily end up that way instead of being a meaningful tool for social change. Technology does not have to be at odds with our environment or our relationships with each other. Especially Ethereum, unconstrained by any jurisdiction, can serve as the foundation for global coordination and building new institutions for a fractured world.
But as we have said many times, this is work that we must actively choose, it will not happen on its own, and in fact, if left to our own devices, we may resist it. Let us use the stories we tell and the regenerative economic systems we build to propel ourselves, generating the positive externalities we seek. Ultimately, it is all about collaboration.