 Welcome to a special session of the idea flow series at law.mit.edu, where we talk about, I guess, big ideas on how computational law can be applied to our present and make a better future, I suppose. If we had a slogan, it would be something like that. And the reason that's special today is because, first of all, it's the holidays, and so we're doing it in an irregular time, but that's not what's most special about this episode. The most important thing is our guest, Tony Lai, who truly is one of the founders of the field of computational law and who is one of the co-founders of the MIT Computational Law Report. And before that, the broader research activities that fell under law.mit.edu, joining us from his home institution of Stanford Codex at the Law School, and who's an entrepreneur who's been changing the field of the law to make it more computational and efficient and a just way through his startup legal.io, and who has since kind of graduated from that up to a higher plane of doing international projects and initiatives, all of a theme. And the basic theme is, can we deliberately make the future better? And one of the biggest challenges of our times, of course, is the environment and the crisis that it's posing. He's been very focused on that. And honestly, we haven't checked in much since that's become one of your primary focuses, so I'm particularly interested to hear from you what your activities have been lately in general, but specifically this is going to be a drill down on a major convening that Tony was an organizer of called OpenCOP, and it was sort of a companion event to the recent COP international, like I don't know what it's formally, summit, I guess I'd call it, and on sort of going forward from the Paris Accords. And though there was many tracks that touched upon using tools and capabilities afforded by computational law as part of the solution for that, and Tony has even more ideas. So that's the general anchor for the session today. And so our discussant is someone that's been right in the trenches with Tony at OpenCOP and beyond, our own editor-in-chief, Brian Wilson, who's going to help fill in some of the dots and make some of the connections and keep the conversation flowing on track. So with all that said, I'm actually, although I saw you waving, Tony, I'm going to pass it the baton to Brian, who will do a little bit more set up and then do the introduction to you. And then finally, we're going to be able to allow the ideas to flow. So with that, Brian, you've got the show. Awesome, thank you. That was a wonderful introduction. And I am going to use a kind of set of slides that I put together to kind of introduce this topic because I think it's really interesting and important to look at law and see what we can learn from combining law with other disciplines, how it can grow, how it can evolve, how we can do better. And so this kind of thread of reexamining the role of law in the era of computation is, I think, one that Tony has done a great job at because when you think about it, law is really a technology to deal with changes in communities. So over time, there have been stone instruments like the Code of Hammurabi and stone contracts. There have been precious metal currencies, market monies, grain receipts. And now we're getting to a place where we have digital contracts, NFTs and spatial contracts, programmable kind of instruments that use computation in order to do legal things more efficiently. And I think this is an important thing to point out because the historical development of law, legal processes and legal instruments is really a history of using these new mediums, these new technologies to balance the social contract. And what do I mean by social contract? I mean the relationship between individuals, businesses and governments. So this happened, for example, following the industrialization of the 1900s when we came up with new classes of workers' rights, new types of environmental regulations that accounted for some of the externalities of new technologies, new antitrust, new anti-monopoly regulations, new entity structures, new investment vehicles, new rules for investing. And all of these things were really developed because they were solving some need. And so when we look at today, what is the role of computational law as one of these technologies to sort of rebalance the social contract? And we've published a few pieces on this. We've published John Klopp and Joe's Reflexive Mutual Series LLC article that looks at creating new types of asset classes that account for environmental considerations like ESG, but only sort of programmatically and allow you to deploy new types of entity structures there. We also had some of Tony's colleagues, Michael Schmitz, Catherine Akin and Ruben Junglamp, who put this really great article together about blockchain frameworks for the environment and how we could use data to understand more of what we can do with reporting and how that can be done, not only at the entity level, but also at the level of individual consumers, individual people. And that leads us to now, I think one of the really cool parts of this publication that we're all a part of making right now is that it's not only publishing content, like the great things that all the people that I just mentioned have done, but it's also about convening. So how can we convene people to talk about some of these new issues? And this is where it gets to, Tony's specific types of field building with collective imagining towards new economic models, value, the rights of nature and so on. And all of this got packaged up over the last couple of months and brought us to Tony Lai, who I love and who's a great person. So with that, I wanna hand it over to Tony and yeah, see, tell us a little bit about OpenCOP, tell us a little bit about the Cheridop event and what the goals were in doing those convenings and what the outcomes are and where we're gonna go. Ryan, Dazza, thank you so much for setting me up like this and thank you for all of you being here to hopefully engage in this flow of ideas. This is at heart the way that I feel most alive, it's what intrinsically motivates. And Dazza was the first to bring me into the idea of a jam session around prototyping and taking ideas and turning them into real things in the legal space. So the prototype jam, I feel like is a deep part of my fundamental DNA and the kind of lawyer I want to be. But ultimately, it's the kind of individual or person that I would like to empower more broadly. And that speaks to, I think, one of these notions around access that was I think a key part of the reason we started our legal technology company, it was really called LawGives, had a much more sort of social impact focus. We eventually evolved that into the slightly more, I guess, rubber hits the road focus of legal.io which is now from a business perspective doing much, much better and is still sort of involved in employing different kinds of legal technologies as well as lawyers and legal professionals who understand the legal technology and how that can fit within enterprises at present. And yeah, I still come back to this idea of access which I think is not just about opening the doors but it's about taking the tools and making them available to individuals and organizations to play with kind of like Lego, kind of like getting involved with the act of understanding, participating in and jamming on the creation of rules. The evolving of these different kinds of social contracts that have become increasingly strained as reflected in the sort of widespread distress of institutions of all different kinds. And we've seen social contracts fraying especially during pandemic times when there are various different additional layers of social contracting that are tied somewhat to the biopolitics and the biopolitical power of the state. These are things that Michelle Foucault and others before him sort of famously laid out as like this pattern and pathway for large institutions and states given the fundamental philosophy on which they approach of a institution that has a method of looking at the world from a particular institutional lens and is seeking to order the world through legal and other political means in order to perpetuate itself as an entity. And I think what we have as an opportunity with computational law is the chance to in a sense look in a much more transparent and accountable way at the ways in which these different institutions have traditionally worked could work now and might work going forwards into the future with additional participation and transparency. So I guess that's the idea of access and inclusion is key to this vision that I think we all share of what computational law can enable. Now the other piece of the bridge that we're trying to build is this idea of decentralization as well. So we talk about this bridge to inclusive and decentralized features. And obviously that's related to the extent that when we talk about making something more decentralized in a sense we're talking about making something more maintainable, more createable, more evolvable at the margins without necessarily seeking or requiring permission from the center or from the coordinating political body that may or may not exist in various different ways at the heart of an institutional ecosystem. The traditional approach of social contracts, the economies, the institutions from nation states down to cities and then our companies and organizations has been centralized, it's been sort of hierarchical and there are various different, I'd say more recent academic and practical case studies most notably from the school of Eleanor Ostrom and her husband Victor and the scholars who came after her Eleanor Ostrom being the Nobel Economics Prize winner from 2012, he talked about design principles for governing the commons. And I think these kinds of approaches to understanding ways in which individuals and emergent entities can work with and create their own rules frameworks for a more emerging coordination have been the subject of a lot of academic discussion in the years since certainly she's been working on that work and it's obviously received a lot of exposure after her Nobel Economics Prize in 2012 but this is very much the spirit that has been taken on by that wing of computational law, that wing of applied computational law which is blockchain which is distributed ledger technologies and at Codex where we have been building out various different research programs around computational law and legal informatics we have seen blockchain and distributed ledger technologies as this specific decentralized aspect of computational law and all of the different governance challenges and opportunities that come with trying to create a decentralized system have been very much a part of this specific research group work that we have been doing as part of Codex which has been focusing upon blockchain and especially blockchain law and policy. And actually, could I just say a few more words than you ordinarily would for this broader MIT community about what you're talking about. So we've sort of like said things and certain people like Megan who's actually there's a fellow now know but many people may not be aware, well I think everyone's heard of Codex but what is the specific blockchain research initiative that you co-founded that's part of Codex and how does it relate to computational law? If you could just say a few words about that and we consider it like a sister organization and we're very tightly connected with it intellectually and socially and in some other activities but I really think people here should hear should hear about that. Well, thank you, Daza. The blockchain research group was essentially set up within Codex as a wider center and in the tradition of Stanford was done with a certain kind of entrepreneurial zeal in the sense that folks who were already a part of Codex got together, had some discussions we got a sort of a nod from our executive director Roland who we're very, very lucky, I think similar to Sandy has given us a Codex within our research group a lot of trust and in a sense rope to maybe hang ourselves with maybe to corral some additional ecosystem goodness and in that sense, my past history in helping to set up the communities around startups and entrepreneurs at Stanford one of the things I did after being a technology lawyer for many years and then jumping away from the law firm to Stanford was getting involved with setting up a startup accelerator community in the sense setting up the research group was a had a lineage from doing that in the sense that it was that we didn't really ask too many people whether this is something worth doing we just felt that this was important enough that we gather folks together we started meeting on a pretty regular basis we'd already had various different blockchain projects and early adopters coming to our Codex events future law events from the early 2010s sort of around that time but given the noise that was coming out in late 2017, early 2018 around a lot of the ICO the initial coin offerings and everyone was looking at blockchain as this financial speculative Bitcoin related technology that was seemingly very much about finance and making money and ways of people essentially scamming grandmas I mean, this was a very, very pervasive narrative at the time, the opportunity that we saw within blockchain systems because they were mechanisms for these decentralized assemblages of smart contracts which we've been looking at from the computational contract perspective for many years at Codex as well because they were being assembled in such a way that again, this idea of not needing to ask for permission was in some way very much embedded within the ethos of what was happening this spoke to this idea of a new kind of social contract that Brian touched upon and for us, we started meeting regularly we are with a mandate to essentially research, publish, track and guide and influence policy and narratives to the extent that we could as well as can be and these three things essentially like research get the word out, gather good people together publicly and in private these were things that I had done already as part of this sort of startup community and I knew how to do I knew how to reach out to people I was fortunate in having friends like yourselves who could then reach out to other people we started having these regular gatherings we published and created a journal for blockchain law and policy and we went through we jumped through all the hoops internally within the Stanford sort of institution to get sign off to use the Stanford logo and all of that good stuff but it was really in an effort to try and I guess make this face credible for lawyers and policymakers a lot of lawyers subsequently who came and joined our group were saying that having a journal that was published by Stanford enabled them to go to their managing partners and say, hey, can you allow me to take some of my sort of legal know-how time and spend it towards this because otherwise they would have been sort of are you trying to do something scamming which again was the overarching narrative so we through that we gave cover for a lot of people I think to start getting involved in the space and really that was the main aim was to try and create a welcoming space for people from across the San Francisco system but also more widely and I think that was maybe one of the slightly more subversive elements of being able to operate within that kind of infrastructure is like we could have slightly different entry criteria and we could rely on a slightly different curation mechanic to bring together folks who might not normally be sort of around the table with some of the professors and researchers who we were gathering together obviously a lot of the blockchain community were very much self-taught they didn't go to prestigious institutions they didn't go through the various different gate keeping sort of spaces that would normally accredit you with having a seat at some kind of table in these kinds of arenas but we were in a sense deliberately trying to sort of create a safe space as a world where these kinds of legal technology, narrative design, economic, behavioral experts and journeymen could come together and start jamming. And so you did and so everybody should go to the URL that Megan's just shared and definitely check out their publication which yet again was an inspiration for how to do the MIT computational law report and your editor-in-chief Steve was really helpful just for the record that you're talking about. Huge shout out to Steven Nam. Steven Nam is one of the most generous, kind, intellectually rigorous human beings that I know and so I have a huge amount of respect received. Huge shout out but now so now that we know more about Stanford and about what you're doing and what the topic is meanwhile here in the anchor of MIT so what's the vibe around here? It's an engineering school. That's really what we are. And so we have like our own kind of take and on things and flavor. And so one of the things you'll notice from the previous episodes of Ideaflow for example as I mentioned before we started recording is we usually will look at a particular innovation and then unpack it, understand it, extrapolate from it. And so now I'm looking at climate now and we published something from your group on conceptual areas of how computational law could help to measure and make a verifiable impact on climate change like in our first issue. And I know that you were talking about blockchain and computational law methods at OpenCOP. So I'm gonna start with an example and then ask you to riff. So when I was young we had, there's always existential threats. So we were really worried about nuclear war in the 80s in particular when I was coming up. And so one of the big things we had then was the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. And that was one of the approaches to try to contain the existential risk. And there was a lot of focus at that time in some circles, especially MIT circles and in science and technology on how do we make sure this is really happening? People say stuff in treaties and accords, but what do we do? So one of the, some of the ways to measure an instrument that was seismic detectors at that time. And there's a lot of very advanced concepts of global networks at the right places, checking the right things, reporting in the right ways and all that that could distinguish between a small earthquake or other seismic event in a nuclear, what was probably a different yields even of nuclear tests. And so what would be the seismic method, the seismic detector method and mechanism for verification of nuclear test bands for environment. So as I look through COP26 and the readout of the agreements, such as they were, there was still some stuff there with coming back next year to further get carbon down, carbons measurable. There's new stuff about methane, which is very interesting in terms of how you measure that. There's some things on trees, although it was more proving the negative in a sense that you didn't deforest them, but that's still measurable when I guess I'm thinking satellites and other sensors. There was some stuff on money, like transferring money to developing nations to make sure that they're square and we have equitable efforts. You can measure money transfer. So it just at a high level, just looking way backwards to my times on like the nuclear test band kind of simple metaphor. Where's the opportunities to use computational law in order to achieve the results that are sought in COP. And for extra credit, I guess, when you do COP, open COP 27, I guess that you might do connected with the next one when the countries come back with more specific plans. What sorts of things could be suggested to be built into the language of the accords? That would be the equivalent of incorporating by reference a global network of seismic monitoring tools even if the declarations are not legally binding, could they at least be measurable in a way where and could that be helpful? So that's my question to you now. Two key concepts, Stazza. Firstly, MRV, monitoring, reporting and verification. That's something that I think builds off of this framework for nukes that you were talking about. And obviously in respect of the monitoring piece, we have internet of things. We have satellite data being streamed on a daily basis from companies like planets. You've got the reporting frameworks, which we'll be looking to, there's a whole series of different standards bodies, but there was some coming together around the financial reporting standards. IFRS will be setting up a new center in Frankfurt, I think. And obviously a lot of negotiations around that. I think there's a backup in Montreal as well, but essentially around the reporting piece, that piece plays in particularly into financial reporting and this notion of ESG standards, environmental, social and governance standards, but moving beyond the idea of the greenwashing, which is like there's some marketing, there's a little report that's like sort of a page inside your annual report, moving that into the notion of deep ESG, where you've actually got the data transparently made available in order to demonstrate that reporting. And then the third piece is the verification piece. And verification can take on a whole different tenor when you have a decentralized system that allows for different kinds of actors and stakeholders to be engaged in that verification process. And so this is one of the exciting and new aspects of where computational law intersects with decentralization is to the extent that that computational law framework, whether that's tied in with financial reporting standards or it's tied in with some kind of mandated nation, state or city-based requirements in terms of your carbon neutrality or your nature positivity or any number of standards that might come into play, the reporting and the verification around that can be more decentralized. Again, this is maybe at COP 27 because at the moment we're not quite there yet in terms of what our friends Martin and Marco and Angel at the Open Earth Foundation and Data Driven and Viralab have been working on when it comes to this idea of a nested accounting system. So one of, coming back to Eleanor Ostrom again, one of her big concepts was the idea of polycentric governance. Was the idea that you can have nested systems of governance at various different levels, whether the city, the state, the federation globally, but that these, in order to operate and to design these well, need to be able to interoperate, they need to, and ideally you've got this principle of subsidiarity where the decision is taken closest to the point of relevance and oftentimes that is as local as possible. And so nested accounting systems are part of this new wave of allowing data that is being shared in relation to climate and other kinds of commitments to be interoperable, for those systems of counting for that data to be interoperable and for those ultimately to enable also consumer generated data to also feed in, which is again, this additional layer of verification around all of these commitments that can be possible if we were to roll out these kinds of decentralized computational law systems, which I think are very much the technology that's needed in the under discussion. There's a lot of different funders and financiers both from an impact investment, whether that's sort of pension fund decision makers or philanthropic funders who are spending, who are granting hundreds of millions of dollars towards different projects to get this going and they're saying the tech is not there yet. We need help in getting this tech up there. We've got all of the negotiating parties at the table. We've got all of the different standards bodies getting set up, but we don't have the tech yet. And that's where we as computational lawyers need to be able to step up and help bridge to all of these discussions that are taking place because this is the tech we're talking about. Computational law is this technology that they have been seeking out. And I don't think they necessarily define it in those terms, but whenever I talk about computational law, I mean, it's still a fairly new term, right? People go, ooh, that sounds interesting. Tell me more. And so I think that's this set of idea flows that we need to keep hopefully building upon to enable this infrastructure to be first, people to be aware of it, secondly, get funded and thirdly, get the various different folks to come together and build this out. And I think there's a really interesting tie back to the data rights and to our ability protocol work that you've been doing with my friend, Ben, and the consumer reports folks, because again, once we start looking at how this consumer data can actually feed into, yeah, there we go, can feed into that ecosystem of nested accounting, that allows individuals to be making the choices about the products that they're buying, the services that they are engaging based upon this kind of data on impacts as well. Now, the last thing I'll say is that there's this differentiation between the idea, just within the emissions framework, the idea of level one, level two and level three emissions. And the key thing to know is that level three emissions are 10x what the level one and level two emissions are. Level one and two is basically within the organization and sort of like employees, level three is within your supply chain. And being able to measure the carbon impact of your supply chain is apparently much harder. And very few sort of jurisdictions are willing to like even look at ways that that might become mandatory to sort of report on those level three. Now, California is one of the few jurisdictions which is looking at that. And that is very much the focus of the Stanford Climate Data Policy Initiative that Brian mentioned earlier that my colleagues at Codex are working up on is supporting SB 260, which is a Senate bill that's working its way through the legislative process in California that would require any listed company over a billion dollars in revenue to that does business in California to report the level one, level two and level three emissions. So including their supply chain. And that will be a critical piece then of enabling all kinds of organizations but as well as consumers to be making more informed decisions about the products and services that they're engaging with. Here, here, so Brian's next. I'm just gonna say, I just wanna synthesize what I think I got out of what you said just so we can put a pin in that last topic and then go forward. So what I think you said was some version of heck yeah, we can too do something that's measurable using the new tools of computational law in the new context of verifiable climate action. And I'll just end with this, which is it sounds like something that's missing is almost like dumb, not dumb but it's like way contained inside of the big ideas and the big mega trends and the big concepts which is it sounds like one of the things that could be helpful is an elegant legal hack. And so, because some people are looking for what do I actually do here now where the rubber hits the road? One way to get at those things beyond design and beyond policy is engineering. And so I wonder if you'd be up for maybe over the summer-ish timeline, maybe doing a bit of convening of people that are right on point and then picking one or two contexts, supply chains one where I can bring a lot because I've done a lot of trading partner agreements and a lot of things that verify a lot of aspects of it. There's common clauses, there's common, there's a whole root of change management within those systems to bring in a little bit more telemetry and other sorts of things that trigger and report and whatever. But basically, it's almost like I almost feel like coming up with here's what you would put in your, you know, in the logistics provisions in these sections of your supply chain contracts connecting to these other systems with these, I don't know how detailed you want to get, that's what the hack would be, but maybe some APIs or something about updating a block on a chain or entering something in a blockchain or what have you. But just showing some examples of here's the language you would put, here are the business practices that would be a little different augmenting and here's some of the governance and technology impacts of it. Because it's like that's not solving on that many things for an incremental change, for measurement on systems of contracts and procurement and other legal arrangements that already exist that would need to be reformed slightly in order to implement the outcome of these additional types of climate actions that you're talking about. But people are looking for some guidance and maybe stuff like that could be put out and there's several trade associations that are good but they might not be looking at it this way and sometimes going a little bit out of channel through a university type context or Stanford and MIT-ish people together, you know doing stuff sometimes can be like a way to vector just kind of to get to the point and vector good ideas in and maybe they change everything but we like to maybe we can help catalyze some action that could be slotted into agreements later that could make an outsized impact in the years to come. So I just wanna throw that out there. Maybe it's time to do another legal hack. Heck yeah, yeah. So I've been back here taking some notes of a few threads of ideas that I think lead to a fun question that could actually be kind of the source of some new and exciting material for a possible legal hack. And so there's a little bit of lead up to the question but so bear with me. So at one of the founding events for this publication that imagination and action event back in 2018 Jonathan Askin made a point about the need for weird lawyers or weird lawyering. So basically, you know, creating new concepts, new ideas how that was really the founding of the United States and you know, throughout history that's kind of been the really big hits for law. And Tony, you also said some things earlier that I wanna hit on about governance and gatekeeping that kind of raised a common issue. So Oliver Luckett and Michael Casey have a book called The Social Organism that looks at media dynamics, especially with social media. And one of the things that they point to in their book is this evolution of media and what that does to empower individuals. So from the printing press to the radio to the internet, you know, people have these new opportunities to share messages but also to connect and improve the circulation of ideas among communities. But that also changed gatekeeping because, you know, before the printing press like priests were the only educated people in their towns and they would, you know, kind of spread the message and then news anchors were the only like the people who got to spread the messages and now everybody gets to sort of spread their own message. But the, so in that way, a lot of these things have become more diffused and decentralized but I don't think our governance frameworks have really kept up. I don't think our rulemaking and our community kind of decision making that process is kept pace with the changes in technology. And so the question that I have is, you know, in the same way that the mortgage was created to kind of improve access to ownership after the Great Depression, what are some of the tools or instruments or types of instruments or domains of instruments that you see as enabling some of these new governance frameworks that would help, you know, leverage the potential of computational law and how can we start doing that? So I'll start with a couple of, I think, fairly familiar tools that we've probably all heard of around this campfire which are DAO's and NFTs. DAO's DAO, often called distributed autonomous organizations. We can also think of them as organisms in a sense to the extent that they're not just about organization as much as sensing and evolving as well potentially. And then NFTs are this idea of non-fungible tokens. And so this is moving beyond the idea of the fungible token which in a sense is replaceable one versus the other and this idea of uniqueness. Now, the reason I bring those up specifically in the context of your point about the printing press is that these are also an evolution of media but they're governance media. They're, in a sense, not just about the messages but they're about the meaning. And so this is access to a wider group of people to the ability to define what is meaningful within a particular local solidarity between and local is obviously non-geographic. It can also mean interest base. But the idea that we are creating a vehicle or a mechanism that allows people to step into the creation of new kinds of meaning and new rules for the definition of that new kind of meaning. And so as a specific example, comparing the US dollar or even Bitcoin as a fungible token which in a sense is a universal solvent and can be used to denote value of all kinds or dissolve the value of any particular thing into this solution of US dollars or Bitcoins that we might compare with the idea that your local river and the health of your local river, the cleanliness of your local river is something that you wish to define and measure the value of and have as a commonly accepted value and meaning marker within a group of individuals who are committing to take care of that river. And there may be various different governance mechanics around the ways in which people contribute to and are involved in measuring the quality of that water. And there may be people who are willing to put funds into supporting that kind of value creation to the extent that the value in that sense is about the cleanliness of this particular river. And there may be mechanisms that can be set up that penalize a chemical company upstream for polluting that. And these kinds of mechanisms need not have the explicit sign off of a traditional jurisdiction. These can be community organized like essentially emergent groups of organization that are seeking to define a particular value based upon a particular rule framework that people can be involved in changing as well. And so the idea that these are governance media these are vehicles of meaning that individuals can be involved in playing with. And I think this too is the essential aspect that this is stepping into the play of engagement, of participatory knowing. And there's different kinds of knowing that cognitive scientists have sort of like identified out there's the logical propositional knowledge that you gain through rational deductive reasoning. Then there are sort of perspectival and participatory knowing. I never remember sort of the full list but the key one I'm trying to get down here is that there are ways of knowing things that require participation. And we sort of know it because we've done it. And if you haven't done it and you've only sort of like thought it through in theory there's a very different kind of knowing that you gain and what dows and to some extent NFTs and I'll come onto those separately but they enable I think as there's all of computational law but they're doing so with this particular kind of mechanic they enable people to step in and be playing with and participating in the creation of rules and law in a way that I think democratic systems theoretically like to make available and everybody's notionally able to step in and vote for a representative who will then make your laws but this directness of participation I think means that these are tools like a mortgage that are created to improve access to governance itself, right? Now, I think that this piece is quite fundamental to the gatekeeping function of lawyers and all the dissolution of that gatekeeping function because to the extent that we're talking about computational law more broadly obviously we're opening up the area of rulemaking to engineers and designers and others besides and then I've been talking thus far about in a sense the mechanics and the machinery and the engineering piece I'm also very interested in the I guess this is partly participatory knowledge as well but the in a sense that the consciousness shifting technologies that are involved with for example art and music and poetry and conversation deliberation is not necessarily purely reason-based or logic-based but go a huge way towards constructing and creating our belief systems and the realities that we operate within and again law to some extent in that it is not maybe purely based upon logic in the way that it operates in our current reality I think as part of the ways in which we roll out computational law frameworks I think it's important for us to hold on to these other aspects of meaning-making and the governance of those other aspects of meaning-making as or else risk falling off the deep end of having a entirely structured institutional matrix that we have very little human participation in or the guardrails of empathy and meaning beyond the purely structured and institutional so that's where NFTs come in and I'll leave it there just a little opening but I feel like I've gone on a little bit That's beautiful well the reason we invite you to do as a guest and actually Mad had tipping kudos to Brian for setting you up for this episode was precisely to have you expand on your views and thoughts which this community has not been exposed to and we kind of want to get it on the record and start thinking a little bit more broadly I think largely owing to our institutional home at MIT and perhaps I'll just own some of my own style and focus very structural and definite about things as a start but that's not the that need not be the scope and end of our line of inquiry and so thank you for helping us think more broadly so I want to just if I may Brian I want to throw out an idea I guess I'll sort of put the discussant hat on in a sense or share it with you so what you were speaking toward the end there what I was thinking is it sort of goes back to the the computation part is same same that what's a little different in part is the law part what do we conceive of as law you can take a very narrow view of that it's like statutes and regulations in cases and civil procedure and the terms of a contract or whatever you know something a rule of requirement for which the law will provide a remedy upon enforcement very narrow and could be expressed as a structural view although to a lot of engineers even that's pretty crazy what I just said but still it's relatively narrow but then when you get into these broader social constructs almost and cognitive contexts of meaning making what I was thinking is the first real hack I did at MIT in 1997 was called the virtual statehouse at that point I was also a government lawyer but we were doing some research at MIT and we taught a class and got these grad students to look at what would it look like if we virtualized the statehouse and made it express all of its functions and capabilities and roles online on this brand new thing called the internet and the web was new HTTP and HTML and QuickTime VR allowed anyway so we did what we could with our meager tools that we had and what I got out of it was took the grad students to a governance body that I had played in a lot I was elected to town meeting in Lexington which is basically local governance in a lot of towns in New England you don't even have to be elected they're small enough for if you're if you're a registered voter you can show up like once or twice a year and vote it like an in like Athenian democracy kind of sense on like what the local tax rate will be you know how many firemen or people at least will have the school budget ordinances whatever it's self-governance and what I was thinking when you were speaking was what when we looked at sort of structuring that I kind of kept the students into Robert's rules and what are the ordinances and it was like this narrow path and I've always thought like I kind of did a disservice in the sense that most of when I was a member of town meeting most of what happened was not that it was people getting together talking making meaning and kind of governing through soft power and soft consensus that was very important in terms of how we were going to run the town and what the flavor would be you know what we sort of prioritized what we felt it meant how we'd behave what our expectations were there's a lot communicated when we got these people together in the room none of which I assure you was captured in like that in the little engineered like prototype that we built and but maybe nowadays we can do more through these this next level of tools and methods and mechanisms collapsed into things like decentralized autonomous organizations and in other with the complex voting and communications and I guess we'd have to also I want to bring in the word vibe like so vibes are in a sense the equivalent of rules if you're thinking about like you know institutions have rules and you know the structure of an institution of rules and an extitution a coin that's primavera to the Philippi and myself and Jessica that you know well we've been playing around with and we've started this sort of research program around this concept of extitutions which isn't necessarily the opposite of an institution but is sort of looks at some of these vibes some of these relationships and the actual identity of an individual versus just an individual fulfilling a role which is oftentimes the way an institution looks at it it doesn't really matter who you are as long as you can fulfill the role and you abide by the rules as an institution I see one individual as essentially replaceable by another individual in an extitution or in these gals who you are as an individual your identity matters and the vibes that you can bring the essentially the relationships you're able to form within the context of this organism these are ultimately all important and this is especially the case with a system where people are free to leave and again in an open source context where the entire code base can be replicated and fought the only thing keeping people within that ecosystem are the vibes essentially and that's happened more than once with some of these blockchain ecosystems is that there's been a fork and there's the different set of vibes and like a wholesale group of people move over and so looking at the ways in which these new kinds of social contracts which are essentially based on your intrinsic motivation how much you are able to manage what you call soft power does and I think that's a it is a super interesting term to the extent that rules and law in one sense are like hard power and then you've got sort of soft power which is sort of persuasive and you know more jammy and like you know what are the resonances and risks that we can have off each other as we work through this together in a sense I think yeah again these are all very very new since the word soft power is kind of that's actually is taken in international affairs maybe we call it soft governance because that's one point with what you're talking about and I think that also plays into Larry Lessig's sphetic dot model where you know there are different types of regulation there's law but there's also market places there's also community norms and there's also architectures which is what I think a lot of the sort of technical side of this would fall under because if if you look at you know a safe as a as a tool for governance a safe will you know keep you from stealing money and and so I think in the same way with some of these new types of organizations like NFTs like dows you know that is kind of almost the architecture for you know what this new type of government will look like and and tying it all the way back to to sort of the the bill Mitchell city of bits kind of idea of like what do we reimagine you know some of these spaces as I think that's where you know some of this gets really exciting and my my last plug is that you know I think there's a there's a every I was really happy that you mentioned art and participation because I've been a really big fan of crypto kiddies as kind of a design pattern for law but I think there there's a more recent project with NFTs specifically that a colleague of was seems Sarah friend has come up with this idea of life forms which are a really fun you know take on NFTs where you have to cultivate it and you have to you know actually take care of this and participate with this in FD in order for it to survive but then you have to give it away after 90 days and so I think that's kind of you know demonstrate some of the potential that's available here and you know it just interested in kind of that I know we're at time and I just rambled for a bit so I opened that I opened the thing by interrupting Tony to suggest soft governance rather than soft power but Tony you were rounding the corner to like sort of bring home the point I don't know if you remember the thread but do you want to try to get back to before I interrupted you and then also if just to do double duty bring it home bring this episode home thank you thanks to Sarah for that work I got to meet her for the first time at a NFT residency a couple of weeks ago that brought together artists and NFT and DAO infrastructure developers at a Chateau in France that I would love to have for us to have a computational legal hack at excuse me so I was talking about identity and I was talking about the idea that identity becomes in a sense one of these key fundamental building blocks of some of these new kinds of social contracts that are somewhat based upon vibes and I bring it back to NFTs as well because in some ways they represent from an institutional perspective a new way of seeing that this method of institutional recognition of a particular object whether that's such that could be a tree that could be this sort of an artificial life form it could be a piece of digital art but it allows an institution on the one hand to see something in a particular way based on the data that's flowing through that smart contract on the other hand it's also a way of nurturing and recognizing a level of intimacy between ourselves and the entities or events that we hold meaningful and this idea of intimacy with an event or an entity is this idea of adopting that as part of our identity and I think ultimately these different kinds of tools of governance are ultimately about the governance of our relationships with each other which again comes back to this point around new ways of creating new social contracts and these are this is an entirely new medium of governance you know I thank you Brian for bringing up that that that that aspect and I feel like we're at the beginning of this very very new phase of empowerment around these previously very very distant global hyper objects to coin a Brian Mortonism but it's these things are no longer necessarily out of our grasp we can engage with them on the local and on the like the meaningful level and have a way of actually connecting in and taking action and not feeling disempowered by the institutions and powers that be negotiating away and feeling like each little action that we take is so siloed off and insignificant with these kinds of frameworks we can start connecting those together and everybody can be involved in actually helping to create the rules helping to activate helping to hold to account helping to do this monitoring reporting and verification helping to create these nested accounting systems that we can all be a part of and so that for me is the hope for computational law when it comes to these kinds of global public goods like climate and biodiversity loss and it's incredibly gratifying to have a community like this to be building alongside and co-creating so I'm incredibly thankful to you Daza and Brian and to all of you for being here and yeah look forward to much more we will be having those legal hacks absolutely here here thank you so much for your time today Tony and for everybody for joining us