 And then, okay, now we're recording. Okay, so this is the second in the 2019 round of the data together reading group and the topic is civics. I have some like nice mood lighting today. We're gonna do a round of interest because there's so many lovely new faces. And I'll just say names in the order I see them on my screen. And if you could just say your preferred name, maybe where you're from, or how you come to this meeting briefly. And if there's any other briefing you want to share about why you're interested, please do but no obligation. So I'll just say a couple in order just to kind of not have us wait too long. So I see Rico, Matt, then Eric. Hey, everybody. My name is Rico Garza. I am based in Brooklyn New York. And I'm part of the query team with Brendan. And I've been coming to these meetings and one from another for a little more than a year, you're in half a month. That's me. Am I next? So I'm Matt, I'm in Toronto. I've been with edgy for two and a half years and with that together since we started. And I am professionally a teacher of history and philosophy of science, among other things. And it's lovely to be here. Everyone, my name is Eric Nost. I teach in research at the University of Guelph, which is about an hour west of Toronto. And I've been involved with edgy for the past couple of years now in various different working groups. So the next people I see are Kelsey, Rob and Kevin. Hi, I'm Kelsey. I'm with edgy, which is the environmental data and governance initiative. I work with edgy and I help organize this as data together. I'm in San Francisco and I help write some of the software code for stuff in edgy. I'm Kevin. I'm from San Diego. I'm edgy's community coordinator. I found edgy through one of the first data rescue events back in 2017. And just been here helping out ever since then. And then next I see Jake, Anna and B5 and Liz. Hi, everyone. I'm Jake. I hail from Seattle. I happened to bump into Kelsey recently at a decentralized web meetup. And she just offhandedly mentioned this reading group, so caught my interest, asked more and here I am. I already watched the recording last time and I really was intrigued by a lot of what was going on here. So hopefully I can go back and catch up on some of those older readings. Seems like good stuff. So professionally, I'm a software engineer, although I'm kind of taking an extended hiatus trying to consider what to do next. So nice to meet you all. Hey, folks. I'm Anna. I am an independent researcher at Protocol Labs and I am focused on the social impact of network effects and on information economics in the 21st century. Before Protocol Labs, I spent five years working at Stack Overflow here because Michelle Hertzfeld told me that I should really check this group out and I think she was super right. And I'm very glad to be here. B5, I think, and Liz, I think. Oh, maybe they're frozen. Okay. I'll jump in with our dual window and I'll hand it off to Curtis first and then me. Okay. I'm Curtis. I'm a colleague of Dawn's at the University of Toronto Faculty of Information. I like work physically adjacent to some edgy stuff, at least at the TRU at the U of T. And I've just been looking over Dawn's shoulder at some of the readings you all have been doing for months and months and months. But today, Dawn finally sent me a text and was like, yo, do these readings. And then physically came to my location and did the call in the room that I was in. So I'm very glad to be here. It's exciting. Nice to meet you all. I'm the Dawn in that story. I am a PhD student at the Faculty of Information and have been involved, though less recently with edgy and data together for way, way back. Curtis is underselling the fact that he has a lot of relevant background and reading in this sort of area and broadly in philosophy and political philosophy and civics. So I feel like it's a valuable source of insight on the topic that we have today. Okay. So other group window is back. I'll say the final people I see in order. So Michelle, Daniel and MP5 and Liz for interest. I'm up. My name is Michelle Hertzfeld. Nice to see some familiar faces and some new folks. Hello. I work at Protocol Labs. I'm a product manager there and I have a background in user experience design and all sorts of crazy things. And I'm here because of Protocol Labs, I suppose, and our interest in decentralized data stewardship. What does it look like on the distributed web to make data work well for people? Yeah, next step. Daniel, I think Oh, you're muted, Daniel. You can unmute in the corner, the bottom corner. Okay. Hi. Thank you. So my name is Daniel, DC, Washington, DC area. And I was looking at open source stuff. And just came across you guys and wanted to check it out and learn more. So that's why I'm here. Welcome to Daniel. Liz, do you want to start? Sure. Hi, I'm Liz Barry. I'm here in Brooklyn with Brendan. And the two of us organize the New York City Data Rescue from January 27. And I don't even count myself as a as someone around at the very beginning of edgy. But for the initiatives that I do count myself as co founder, I think I'm on the fourth for involving thousands of people in a participatory environmental movement. And I'm very interested in collaboration, and especially this topic. Thanks for preparing it. And how do you follow that intro? So my name is Brendan. I work in query and edgy. I do lots of fun stuff around the stuff we're trying to work on things around this query. This is a continuing source of inspiration. So super fun to get into it. Yeah, fun. Awesome. So Matt and I did not coordinate so well. We did. We had great hopes. And you'll see in the notes that we prepared just a little bit of guidance on the readings. So there are four readings for today. Two that we sort of actually said these are the main readings and two optional kind of areas to read into. And I then went in and added some of the themes and I actually thought I might hand it to Matt if that is okay to do a little bit of framing about why this topic and and kind of the core reading. So of the two readings, one is the Hanahan, I don't know how to say the last name very well, actually, on civic virtue, which was us trying to like trace a lot of these different ideas and different arguments and perspectives on civic. And then also one that was a reading kind of from the decentralized space. So Paul Fraze's Information Civics article. I'll hand it to Matt maybe to actually provide a thicker background and kind of get us started. And please, yeah, open up the hack and do like that shared pad if you haven't already. And that's where we put some of the key four or five themes that we were hoping to chat about today, but then also have a discussion with whatever struck you all. Okay, so as usual on my so-called collaborations with Don, Don's done like a solid 80% like moving up towards 90, 95 somewhere. But I guess I feel like I understand why we're doing these readings, which is that we, you know, we started very early on together talking about a civic layer for the web. And I don't think we ever really knew what we meant. There's one reason why, you know, some of the language got watered down in our later statements. But I think the motivation for that phrase comes from the sense that the web can be a place where where collective the interest of the collective can easily become lost in a kind of, you know, surging of vicious that is vice-ridden behavior. And and so just thinking about like what, how we implement some kind of collective responsibility or care has obviously been important to us to that together. And that's why together is in the word, is in the name. So this week is maybe an opportunity to just try to think a little bit harder about what we could need when we talk about civics. And it turns out it's not at all obvious what exactly we mean, like what the extent is of civic behavior and not, unsurprisingly, people disagree vehemently on the content of civic behavior. So we have these readings, one of which is like more fundamentally philosophical. And not only that is very opinionated, right? It's a case for a certain kind of reasoning about citizenship, which is civic republicanism. And the other is more about technology I wonder if we will spend most of our time maybe trying to talk about fundamentals as much as possible because we talk and think about technology all the time. So I mean, I don't know exactly how it'll go, but that's kind of how I imagine it. I is not 100% obvious to me where to start. I think there are just tons of interesting things to think about here. Most of them revolve around the tension between an individual and a collective. And we have most of us, and I think this is especially like highlighted in people who move into X circles, become used to thinking about about the state and legal frameworks in terms of individual rights and freedoms. And responsibilities. And the great, the kind of intellectually fantastic thing about civic republicanism is that it focuses prime fundamentally on the health of the collective first. And that perspective lets us like just step back and think for a second how much do we want to put individuals in the center of our thinking? And what do we gain and lose by doing that? And so, you know, regardless of whether any of us become civic republicans, I think reading a civic republican allows us to think more clearly about why we value, for instance, individual freedom as a virtue, as a political virtue, as opposed to say equality. So, yeah. I really am interested, you know, as a dawn put civic virtue up at the top of the themes. And I do feel like that's kind of the fundamental question that we're interested in figuring out. Like what does it mean to be virtuous? What does it mean to like to do the right thing in a political context? And how do we set up a political structure or infrastructure in a way that makes it easier to be virtuous? So, I don't know that I want to like go on and on about it because you know, I do that sometimes. I'm going to try to and I already did my like one little historical thing. We could talk about the Greeks and the Romans, but then I'd be bullshitting. So, I'm going to try to so I don't I don't know that there's a bunch of stuff written in the text there about civic virtue. Do other people have thoughts before I keep spouting? Dawn, I see you. I was just going to say. You're shadowed by the way, Dawn. If you could raise your hand a little bit high so that you know. Okay. I will strive to get the outline like next time. Maybe if we could start if just by surfacing other parts that people were interested in as well or kind of what struck them most, Matt, I think you're reframing of what I put in that theme section is way better. Those are just kind of me trying to pull forward what felt like the most kind of essential elements of the text to kind of start from, but I think that posing them as questions is more conversational. So, yeah, I mean, maybe before we engage in that question. What else were, how do people feel about the readings? How did people maybe feel in particular about that one, the Hanahan reading and what aspects of it spoke to them, especially in the context of why we all work here or keep showing up on these calls together. I see Eric and Kelsey. Yeah, I mean, I one of the things that I really liked about the Hanahan chapter is not so much the question of the content of civic virtue, actually, but the question of virtuous citizens and how virtuous citizens are made, these different incentives, identification, civic education, religion, so on and so forth. And it just struck me as a, there's potentially a lot of really interesting questions there around how do you make civic virtuous citizens for, on platforms and what is the role of the web generally in creating virtuous citizens. So, so yeah, both in platforms but then more broadly. So I thought those are really interesting questions that came out of that reading. I totally agree. That sounds so cool. And Kelsey. I've been being a lot about civic virtue in circumstances that surround it. So, like, you can have a large political voice if you have a lot of free time or if you have a lot of money, but it's a lot harder if you don't have those things to have, like, even to participate in free activism type of opportunities. And so I've been thinking a lot about the intersection of that with the ability to create a system that allows people to be virtuous. And it goes, like, all the way back to questions of do we live in a society that is abundant or like, abundance versus scarcity, right? But I thought it was touched on really interestingly in both Hanahan and Frizzi. And in Hanahan it was the section where it got closest to what I thought was the part where I was talking about how instead of it being a thing you are morally obligated to do to participate civically, it was more something that you would do similar to maintaining a friendship or having a parent-child relationship where it is its own value to participate and it is a part of your own self-actualization versus, like, back of my head I'd been thinking so is there a system where somebody gets paid to be civically responsible? Because that's kind of where we're at with the capitalist model versus Frizzi kind of touched on this in a different way through the Bitcoin example of, like, well, people with the most Bitcoin get the most votes so that's a pretty direct mapping of financial power to political power. And is that your hand up? Or? I was just stretching, unfortunately. Go ahead, Don. I mean, so I put those four themes there, which kind of is the parts that struck me. But I wanted to say that I felt like very uneven reading the article, the Hanahan one, and actually Frizzi won for very different reasons. And I kind of felt like I actually just really appreciated that there was an attempt to kind of bring together or anticipate critiques from a few different positions. And so actually, like, whether or not I totally agree with all of the arguments that were put forward in terms of, like, a model of civic virtue and maybe, like, how to inculcate it, I really felt like I had a, I was a better situated in that, like, a set of literature that has talked a lot about civics that maybe doesn't always feel present when we talk about things civically that are very technological. So I wonder a little bit about that gap where I was kind of in the back of my mind trying to think about how it relates to, you know, a digitally mediated life. Kind of building a little bit on those last two things that I think that that when in the, in the civic tech world, I don't know if this attitude comes a little bit from you know, the models that we have for technological, technologically mediated social engagement where everything's about, like, how do you entice people to participate in some kind of a framework. And of course, you know, like, we have that problem with our, with Query or DadTogether or whatever, right? What that means though is that we don't have a, like a focus on, like, the origins of civic responsibility, like where does the obligation come from to be civically responsible and also where does the motivation come from. So Kelsey was kind of talking about that a little bit, like that there are these, you know, you can, on the one hand, feel like there's a commandment to you that you have a, you know, that you must do something, or you can think that I become more myself by doing this. And those those two ways of seeing your, your actions, like they blend in real life, but they're pretty different sources, I suppose. Go ahead, SDS. Yeah, I feel like I should just respond to this point verbally because my typing skills are bad on this keyboard. Um, like, directly to pull on that, like, I there's this even notion of, like, in maybe, like, a civic text, like, we've inherited certain concepts of, like, civic or an understanding of an individual's relationship to government, um, that actually they trace, like, as being, there being these alternative conceptions of it, right? And one of them is actually, like, who do you owe your civic obligation to? And I think, um, the point is, like, clearly made, I, I thought this was quotable, page 164. Uh, is that it's an obligation owed between citizens rather than to a central authority. And, like, I don't, I don't know, I mean, like, I felt like that's, again, that's an argument that I'm making, but, um, it, it kind of helped unseat which I think are the things that I don't consider or, like, I forget what I've naturalized as assumptions about, like, civic in the civic tech. Go, go ahead, B5 Liz and Jake, I see you too. Oh, we just want to, like, naturalize the assumptions, like, yes, that's a phrase I'm sticking with that was all, unless you want to say that. Um, well, I want to hear more about what you mean, like, what, uh, I, I, partly because you're in and out, but, uh, what was that about naturalization? And then Jake is on deck. I hopefully our connection is stable. Uh, naturalized assumptions, I think that's a really key phrase, like, I think one of the interesting things, I think it's worth servicing here that, you know, I'm really glad that we picked something that was outside of our common wheelhouse, right, like getting a little way for this reading set, uh, from, like, our, our, our classic center in, like, let's read more Ostrom and to, like, move into this space of, like, kind of giving us some work to, to unseat our naturalized assumptions, such a great phrase, uh, to think through. Um, and, yeah, definitely doing a lot of that, definitely feeling a little bit, like, there's a little bit of discomfort with this reading, there's a little bit, like, okay, this is new, and how do I feel about this, how am I going to talk about this in this context with this group, which I really enjoyed. Um, uh, yeah. So, but I also, I just do, I usually say I found the writing really bad in that article, but I'm really hard to, like, follow and, like, stay with. I'm just, I gotta say that and then, now I'm done. You don't have anything with... I mean, that's philosophy, man. Can all use a writing lesson. But, Jake, you have stuff to say? Sure, yeah, just following up on the point about, um, how there's this tension between having duty to the state as it's set up versus, um, your greater community. I thought that was a really interesting area, and one of the points that brings up that I deeply appreciated was that sometimes there's a need for civil disobedience. Um, I wasn't quite sure it was going to go in that direction, but, um, the fact that it made that explicit, I really appreciated that. Um, you know, there were also aspects of this that I wasn't entirely comfortable with. This wasn't something I would normally go and read myself. Um, I found myself going through and I was constantly wondering if it was going to fill my need for getting into a bit more intersectional analysis. It felt like that was lacking sometimes, but, um, you know, at least it did get into things like a feminist viewpoint, um, to some degree, you know. It seems to me like it's sort of absolutely pre-intersectional in a certain way, right? Like it's not, or um, because it's, you know, from coming from, uh, you know, a tradition of analytic political philosophy, it is fundamentally trying to reason from something like First Principles and where the individuals are kind of abstracted, as is also the case in liberalism, you know, where like, um, what kind of person you are doesn't enter into the conversation. It's just about persons abstractly, right? And so, like, the mention of the feminist critiques was like, you know, it is definitely like a footnote. It's like a really long footnote in the middle text that says, and feminists think also that we should be careful of militarism and the public-private distinction. Um, but it's not, you know, something that more fully grounds the possibility of experience in, of politics and lived experience somehow. Um, Don, were you responding? No, I mean, I just felt I really feel that point and, um, that's part of the like, I mean, I actually found that very, like, intent. Like, I spent so much time reading the whole, like, feminism footnote, which was also, like, mentioned at the beginning, but then, like, actually treated at the end. And, like, just, it felt like there was this, like, almost, like, looking through the looking, like, I was like, what side of the mirror am I looking through here at the moment? Like, it felt like a, almost like an inverted way that I would kind of, my natural inclination to start to treat these topics, but was, like, very like, it gave me a lot to think about because of that. Like, the whole discussion of, like, well, this is not incompatible with a politics of the personalist political. And I had just been reading, like, some Silvia Federici, like, wages for housework, like, finishing off this essay collection. So I felt like I was, like, I had just read these two things, which are, like, very different, like, angles of approach. But, like, weirdly, we're not seeing, like, things that were, like, totally different from each other. Anyway. Is there someone else, or should I go? I mean, I was thinking a lot about that. I guess what we'll now call the footnote. Also, I think maybe because I just re-read The Moral Equivalent of War by William James. People know that piece from 1906 or 1910. So it's pretty interesting. It's this, like, kind of in the American pacifist canon. It's often cited as a really important work. And what it fundamentally argues is that war itself is bad. But everything else about war is great. It brings people together. It cultivates what he calls the masculine virtues. And so what we need to do is replicate as far as possible the experience of war. And that, like, that idea is, like, the, like, intellectual kernel at the heart of the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s during the Great Depression. Which I think a lot of us have lots of reasons to be grateful for. Like, anybody who's ever gone to a national park is really happy that the CCC existed. And, you know, also I grew up as an American thinking of the Civilian Conservation Corps as, like, a model for, you know, what a government can do to help people out. What people can do to turn their efforts to the collective good. And or but or also it is troubling to think about the way in which those, those kinds of endeavors are rooted in military life. Because it seems to me the problems with the military go beyond just, like, you know, that it's main job is to kill people. Which is, you know, like, kind of fundamental issue that even if you're, like, from a military family, you recognize that that's a bummer. But, you know, they're also about, like, the cultivation of loyalty as a virtue above criticism. As always struck me as a real problem for a democracy. You know, and in so far as, like, the kind of the inclination towards republicanism has expressed itself so often in, like, in these kinds of patriotic endeavors that organize themselves around a kind of exaltation of the state. I feel like if we want to bring virtue back into our conversations, we have to do it in some way that gets us away from that. You know? That I guess I also think about that Pete Seager song, what you learned school today. You know, I learned our our leaders are the strongest men, we elect them again and again. You know, the way that all the institutions of civic virtue, of the cultivation of civic virtue, also have the danger of becoming, you know, organs of the state and instruments of both oppression and propaganda. Anyway, I see I think Don's shadow and maybe someone actually, okay, wait, slight aside and then the point I was going to make, it was Pete Seager's 100th birthday recently. And I watched a video at hot docs called seeing red, which was about history of American communists on his 100th birthday and he is extensively featured in that documentary. So if you want some like rabble rousing Pete Seager, check it out. Okay, that aside, I actually thought that what you set us up for that was a really great segue back to the question before we started that Robin B5 or like Viving on in the slack. And I wonder if we could do that, the activity they proposed because it is exactly like kind of a pickup of what you said and kind of leaves us into this question of like the role of virtue or the relationship of like individual and collective and sort of the maybe like the role that the state plays in this and is that okay? Can I do the activity? So the activity was just to have a round Robin and people don't have to necessarily chime in, they can chime in and chat or put their hand up of like how do people react like a gut reaction to the quote that the author made which was any commitment to civic virtue and the common good may be seen as subordinating individual to society or private life to public life in a way that is incompatible with modern concerns and individual fulfillment. The requirement may be to civic virtue may be seen as anachronistic, oppressive, moralistic, unrealistic, may seem a throwback to small weekly institutionalized ancient democracies where there's no separate state to carry out collective decisions. In some interpretations at least the historical notion of civic virtue oppressed citizens by requiring uniform standards of behavior and that's kind of like a coalition of a lot of the potential critiques that Hanahan anticipates. So thoughts when people read that or just heard that or when you even think about the term civic virtue where do you land on it? I guess I'll just go since I'm the person who proposed so I'll talk about that was I just thought that was interesting because reading that that just leapt out at me as this sort of like I had this very strong like what even reaction because it made me think a little bit about when I was growing up I saw myself as very centrist and not leftist or liberal at all and it's actually been a long time since I've seen myself that way I guess I realize I've gone very very far left and liberal but reading this paragraph made me think about for sure way the ways and reasons in which I might have seen myself that way as a younger version of me because those ideas that she's saying are like possibly anachronistic or like seem ridiculous are all the ones that I was raised with and I feel like I almost take for granted in my life and the idea that there's a certain duty that is absolutely required of me to be the fuck here if I'm not going to do it is sort of like ingrained in me so it felt very like weird in my face to read that like question to such an extent and it made me think back to like oh these are the ways and reasons in which I subconsciously not without reflection thought of myself as I couldn't possibly think of myself as very leftist or liberal when I was younger and so that was the thing that just like jumped out at me there. Other people's thoughts and maybe also people who haven't spoken yet as much I want to make sure we make space for that or also if you know didn't spend that much time with the readings even just like an initial feeling around this notion of like virtue being brought close to a discussion of civics what's conjured up in your mind around the term go Kelsey I know already spoken but it makes me sad because it seems like the common sense view to me as currently practiced and I ended up like keeping a lot of quotes from that section because it felt really honest and it felt like the kind of disengage like it specifically says when people feel disenfranchised they don't typically fight they typically disengage and it feels very much like what we're seeing on our national stage and it's it's really hard because everyone who's here I think probably is more than usually engaged and once you've tried being engaged you see how simple it is and how like how anybody could do it but it's not an obvious thing and it doesn't seem like the thing that people ordinarily do I'm really caught up in wanting to understand what is meant by civic virtue I first heard and read that like is that synonymous with participation if not then what are the critical qualities secondarily as this conversation has progressed I've found myself thinking a number of times about dynamics which help cement groups together and create in-groups and out-groups and the just questions of when people further invest in an existing group or an existing system or when they decide to leave and take their efforts elsewhere and I was wondering about how it might be possible to cement certain or cement groups of people without the conflict of war like that was mentioned earlier additionally I am just I guess kind of struck by the question of like if we're worried about participation who is whose needs are not being met and is there sufficient signal to show that needs aren't being met in aesthetic population I'm hesitant to speak because my thoughts keep coming back to the Nair's piece which most people can read about no one is illegal one one of the many arguments in that piece was that the one of the principal outcomes of political action is the creation of a different sense of self on the part of the actor so what you get out of a protest is not necessarily policy change but the creation of people who understand themselves as part of the political infrastructure and so like I had two reactions to that at the same time the one which was like so grateful to hear it and to just like please let that be true because so little of what I've done seems ever to have any concrete effects and on the other hand like skepticism that that result should be taken really seriously because there's so many things that have to change at say the policy level and if we continue to fail to move those dials then there's so many disasters waiting for us on the other side so why am I, I guess I'm saying that in response to you because sometimes I think we look for metrics that may not actually measure very well what we're really doing which is hopefully changing people Liz, I saw your hand and I don't have a direct response to Matt and Anna just now so if we want to keep that thread going that's great I just wanted to say that these, the little of the reading that I did definitely caught me by surprise because I'm not used to thinking of moral terms I've I'm not sure I've dumped that out of my mental model but I really value self-discipline and then I value the dreams we hold together in terms of can we dream together and then coordinate our work together to build a future we want to exist in and I guess that is my limited, that's my limited personal philosophy and I came up, I came up short when challenged with these concepts of virtue or what a responsibility is to a collective because I was a little bit shocked to realize I feel very little responsibility to a collective other than the collective who I'm dreaming with So one of the things this quote and the other part about the potential for apathy to kind of take hold these things really sort of stuck with me I feel although I care a lot about certain issues that affect everyone or at least big portions of society or even minorities or other people who may not have enough influence over the direction things go I often find myself wondering whether I am devoting my energies in the right way in the most productive way and this notion of uniform standards of behavior potentially being entwined with civic virtue I mean it does leave a little wiggle room, there are some interpretations at least, but it feels there may be value in a diversity of approaches people take to engaging in civic virtue, but at the same time I think for any given person for any given agenda they may have it can also be a bit complicated and a bit of a discovery process working out how they can be most effective at it and I think that's something I'm still trying to work through myself I mean the my original thought which was going to build on Anna's maybe is less relevant now, but I mean I think Honohan really did try to spend some space thinking about like what are non militaristic ways of constructing I guess a set of obligations together and that kind of involved education and what incentive structures of participation so I mean like flagging but kind of I would say probably not treating in depth some of these questions I mean and that weirdness around civic religion and ambivalence there, okay I'll leave that aside but I also think that like I mean I probably already knew I had an ambivalence or a concern about like a lack of fealty to a nation state despite like you know struggling with like what it means to be in Canada and like you know a settler in Canada but I felt like this wasn't constrained and I don't know whether it succeeded but I think Honohan also have tried not to only think about it with that frame and some of the like questions about contemporary forms of like republicanism that I'm used to are kind of like scaled down to a city size and so I was thinking about to Liz's question of like like what common do I feel a sense of responsibility to I do see these interleaving layers of like folks I have common cause with that I spend time with because we have alignment on issues or we're working together toward a thing but I do think that there is something about adjacency or being neighbors or occupying the same space and that that is like that there is a location to how I feel responsibility and I I mean I want to just fight that I think Honohan tried to speak to that and I think a little more of like I don't know I'm sorry I feel like I've referenced him a lot I think David Harvey speaks to this and Curtis recommended this article where they referenced Dave Harvey talking about spaces of hope and kind of I don't know to me there's something about about I see ways that obligations and responsibilities get built that are not just those of common cause I don't know so I was like I actually had somewhat opposite reaction Don maybe opposite strong word but maybe skeptical in the sense that there was something so I actually really appreciated when Honohan was maybe a bit more abstract in the way that they described the commonalities between people so like for instance being abstract about just leaving space for kind of a self definition of what the collective is and what the collective interest is rather than adjacency or you know boundedness in a particular nation state or whatever and they you know Honohan does mention that like yeah obviously people who live in the same country or you know they don't necessarily like their common interest not necessarily you know it's arbitrary in many cases there's just one example where they work through like this question of incentives and interests in civic virtue and they make the case that okay yeah really rich people you know they are going to value clean air and clean water too because they live next to like the factory or whatever I forget which page that is but there's an example there that just had me really wondering whether actually like I think we know this from environmental justice right but clearly adjacency is like does not constitute you know a common fate or collective interest because people are able some people are able to opt out of that more than others so I'm not I don't think we would actually disagree but you know maybe misrepresenting what you said but I had a kind of different view there so I keep thinking about how one of the arguments against civic republicanism or the kind of philosophical tradition of civic republicanism is that it worked just fine in the Greek or kind of Renaissance Italian city states because for two reasons one first of all we radically restricted initiative citizenship so that basically mostly the wealthy were the people who counted as citizens and second these places are really small so what that meant was that the political responsibility which you know might mean showing up at the assembly to make decisions like in a kind of quasi-legislative fashion or might mean standing shoulder shoulder in the kind of in one of these military formations where if somebody was out of formation the whole military structure collapsed that those because of the scale which is like a finite human scale it was relatively easy to cultivate in people the sense of mutual responsibility and mutual support you know but we live most of us now not all of us most of us cities which are themselves already gigantic and then in these nation states which are enormous are just immense you know I mean I've been spending time in India on occasion that place is ridiculous it takes a month to hold an election it's so unfathomably huge that the kind of engaged the capacity to organize systems that allow us to engage is small the payoff of engagement is relatively small and as a result we become disengaged people and so and the bummer of that is like manifold first of all we have dictators and second we are not the people we want to be we're not the people who like rise up immediately and claim the task that we think ought to be solved and so that argument that civic responsibility is anachronistic is also often I think kind of nostalgic you know it's not really anti-Republican it's like sorry man we're just like smaller than our ancestors were we're smaller people because we don't inhabit the kind of place that would allow us to grow to human size we're just hobbits we have a stack so Rob and if somebody had a response to that to give me I can try and build off it then maybe Rob we can swap um yeah because I think Matt you're speaking lots of like the notion of scale in this question of like just like dealing with being I think we you know a lot of writing that's emerged some things that I've been reading that have emerged sort of or that have been written sort of like in a post 2010 framing all really sort of are trying to grapple with this like notion of like how do we deal with this notion of scale and I think this I think there's a huge contention we have to really contest with our desire for otherness or for an other in this in a lot of these contexts where we like I think one of the effects of war that we often sort of see is this like very sort of concrete sense of other which allows us to participate in larger groups because it's sort of I think it has an effect of creating a uniform series of desires it reduces the number of things that you're worried about and also simplifies and it simplifies your world right it simplifies your world to have a large other and allows you to participate in a larger group because you naturally glaze over a lot of things that we're contending with here we're talking about civic virtue like we're inherently dealing with a like a set of moral properties a set of obligations versus incentives that are sort of like intrinsically I think a property of people with enough time on their hands to ask these questions in the first place and I think that sort of like means that like we and I think the internet is worth bringing up here because we've sort of talked a little bit about adjacency and now we have this sort of freedom to associate based on interests and we can form groups at whatever scope or scale that we feel comfortable at in some ways and then in others we're sort of forced depending on sort of the constitutional rules of whatever system you're never participating in but yeah it's kind of going everywhere but I think it's really I think there's really a lot of questions that really intersect we have this notion of an us them dichotomy and we have a notion of us them in sort of orders of magnitude and I think it's really worth and I think a lot of our points of historical reference almost always have to contest with that fact that like everything was defined as sort of a max scope and that we now are dealing in when you bring up like just how far the dish can run away with the spoon in terms of economics in terms of group size it's just I think it's actually like a different problem set and I think that's what makes a lot of our sort of points of reference really difficult to contest with because we don't we don't have the same frame of reference that we did even 20 years ago I think but it's very personal I don't think what I had to say is relevant anymore I just maybe want to do a time check so we aim to end at 7 I'd say we should give ourselves 10 minutes to talk about writing or potential writing opportunities so we have 15 more minutes which is enough time to talk about more things but I want to make sure we cover the most interesting things to folks and I think we it feels like we've moved through a lot of the Hanahan texts but are there parts there that people want to talk about do we want to move to relating it a little more closely to the phrasey article I see a thumbs up is that a thought as well Eric let me put you on the spot all good you're at my face for reference I'm trying to read the thing that Curtis just just sent and I'm like that requires focus oh no there's something else I'll be here too but yeah we can move to the phrasey article if you all like no it's all good Curtis so good or we could yeah okay I couldn't tell if I could unmute or not can we talk about it a little bit do you want to share it oh what am I on now yeah oh well I was just going back to thinking about some of the stuff that we talked about at the beginning and about incentives and motivations and stuff like that but then there also seems to be and on a hands account like they seem to be separable from motivation motivations and incentives seem to be separable from like opportunities and affordances to participate which are more collectively kind of managed theaters but I just I don't know that's what I thought about that I mean I feel like this kind of gets back to that core question around like this idea of like I mean it doesn't I'm attempting something yeah a relation between like how how can we think about these things as separable from like a set of relations or being in a community or attached to an institution and participation in that that's kind of what struck me about what you were saying is like by trying to like slice up how these different pieces are treated maybe like the whole which is like a performance of being like virtuous in a community and we can think about what the non-moral equivalents of participating in a community are would be like that kind of this loss I feel like on a hand really gets started with like this assertion that like individuals living in any political community like are interdependent in fact and like in any kind of interdependent community relationship there like are matters of concern they list a bunch of stuff and then like then there's this like then the virtuous attitude is the one that like can engage with those matters of common concern meeting these like specific qualities but not I don't I think on a hand is careful to like say that like that's not gonna necessarily entail what said but like how how discussion about that can occur or should occur but I should probably read it a few more times no I think that's on page 160 like that's this idea of like specifying like a minimal set of I don't remember what they're called a minimal set of obligations but not a maximal so it's like okay you just have to be aware do some sort of self-restraint and like engage deliberately oh and then I really like the use of the word solidarity is like my favorite word the act of solidarity which is like trying to say there are ways that were obliged to each other but they're not like specified about like being a good person in like a moral sense I thought that the mention of affordances specifically was a really excellent transition to talking about for Z I'm just pronouncing that the way I think it is and specifically I'm curious to hear what jumped out to other people in terms of we've talked before in this group about you know how do we design low as low level as possible for our best to be for being our best selves and then the epigraph on the Honohan was Madison talking about how despite your best attempts at legislation you still need a civic virtue which doesn't mean we can't still try to have really well set up structures and then like I'm curious what you all saw I thought that the table comparing the rights of a thick server thin client architecture was like a really really cool way of just immediately going oh yeah that's not fair that's not a participatory system oh jake yeah just briefly to follow on that I really liked that aspect of the frizzy article to how it breaks down different kinds of participants and systems and the ways that they may intentionally or not have different roles in the system one of the cases of unintended consequence that they get into specifically is with the bitcoin protocol and how miners ended up having much more power than perhaps was originally intended so I just thought that was pretty fascinating I mean on the one hand this first article seemed to be focusing a lot on citizens as an abstract concept and ways in which we are the same but when we get down to protocol design it's very important to be able to kind of suss out the differences and analyze how participants may actually differ in the system what kinds of epiphenomenon you can have from that you know Rob, your turn finally I think this is a really good point I think where I get stuck with his article is that he seemed to want to do that by focusing on the technicalities and on sort of what the protocols do and don't enable and those are the rights as it were but he really conveniently actually sort of sidesteps what I think is a problem there by bringing up bitcoin but then failing to analyze bitcoin the same way he analyzes client server architecture so I was at a talk a couple months back Center for Journalistic Accountability talk about blockchain stuff and I was talking with somebody afterwards and the point that had come up in the conversation was the way that bitcoin tries to take the tack in all its languages and in its technical design largely the same thing that Frazee is advocating which is like grand unification of all these things so there's only one kind of actor but the practical reality of bitcoin is that there's not in that once you have a certain divergence of power that creates real meaningful qualitative differences even if they aren't necessarily technically reflected in the protocol they sort of emerge they're more of an emergent phenomenon out of the way the protocol is designed right like the minors aren't sort of technically different than other people is like large minors aren't technically different than other people participating on the blockchain except where they wind up being completely technically different because of their outsizedness and to fail to account for that aspect of it which is non-technical where non-technical in the way Frazee sort of approached it I think is a real like an easy hope to fall into or thing to trip over Liz had her hand right or is that you Dawn Liz if anyone else have their hand go first okay it was me I really appreciate Rob's comments something I kind of want to sit with a little bit more I don't think this is like I think this is a related point but I was really struck by kind of like the set of civic metaphors that were used to describe technical artifacts and how actually maybe this transition say even into the Nair article or some of these like let's trouble a notion of a rights-based citizen approach because it was sort of predicated on like this a reading of civic as as there's like tied to like a constitutionalism and rights and like it felt like I think there's a lot of work done and doing an analysis in that way that's actually reading into the technical set of phenomenon like a specific set of like like something is being read into it that might not be there like I don't know I was really grappling with with the analysis around like yeah most of it. So actually I had read it before and rereading it like I was I don't know I think I need to read it like three more times because I don't really know how to feel about it. Go ahead Les. I'm Brendan. All right quick first Matt had a reference to like stoicism and using that as a metric for evaluation of virtue on and I there's a really great piece I think was in the Atlantic but no it was New York Times talking about how like the the peregons of Silicon Valley are now considering themselves use stoicism as their like metric for their own virtue and it was a bit of a takedown piece talking about how like this this stoicism sort of this modality of thought has really permeated everybody who runs Silicon Valley and how that is really a ruler that is guiding if these are the people in the seat of driving our technologies and then technologies are having these follow-on effects in our democracies like we need to really talk about the stoicism thing we need to really talk about how that affects and I think that that's really interesting and I think it's really important to surface this question of like who are we who's making these decisions and like what rulers are we using I'll be you guys I gotta read that takedown piece I just wanted to say out loud something I put in the comments of like I I'm personally looking for some guidelines to relational health because we know that we have relationships to the land in fact we have relationships with technology as well like we're not it's very hard to draw the skin encapsulated boundary that is where the rights based framework has been so effective so I personally hear you know movements now calling for like relational uprisings and I'm wondering if we've got all these articles talking about what civic virtues are if those if the civic body isn't exactly the right body that we are now reaching for maybe is there another set of characteristics or values we might find I'm just going to say that we should start to transition to thinking about the blog writing bit so I want to maybe just make space we got like this whole like side chat about stoicism maybe we should have a summer reading group just about it will sign on it's been a while but I think you maybe had a tentative response and I don't know if this thread feels finished but it feels suggestive to me of like a set of you know kind of like an unease we maybe felt going in around what work civic is doing and when we're using a language of civic are we doing what we think we're doing when we say it and does it resonate with how we want to approach these questions I have responses I think that I don't know if they're really good closing but they both seem significant to me one is to Rob about this these the kind of reality of Bitcoin and it just strikes me that there's a real analogy to like the gold standard you know part of what the gold standards about is is an attempt to like find something that's outside of our merely constructed contingent reality and like and ground value there you know and Bitcoin is like trying to step outside of all the crap you know the hierarchies of banking and the nation state and all that shit and like just find something that's purely technical but it turns out they're just trapped still also in some social relationships they can't excise the social from their value you know and like that's kind of a useful lesson because they've made a really big effort and and they weren't not only weren't successful like also they're maybe kind of a scam but you know fundamentally a pyramid scheme but the and then what you were saying shit was I I wanted to say something like it still feels to me like the social is really important you know and you know maybe you're kind of right and that the reason I can't figure out what like or dawn and me both say can't figure out what is this the polity to which I owe allegiance or whatever is a sign that we're just thinking the wrong way and we're just like it's like you know everybody trying to figure out like how does the ether work how does it like spring back and then stretch again you know and it turns out well maybe there's no ether but like I feel like the idea that there is something to which you are responsible and which is also responsible back to you you know something bigger than yourself to which you can contribute and on which you can in some way depend I'm still like I still want to have something like that and you know for me it's never going to be God or the church or probably the state but I would like it to somehow be you know a polity of which I am you know something like a citizen maybe more in like Nair sense in which are like enacting these mutual relationships I don't know I feel like the sense in which that is like wrapping up is that I think you know the for me the take-home lesson from some of this stuff is that we really do not have and may have to be content with never having a sharply defined sense of what the nature of our civic responsibility in virtue are so so don do you feel like that's time to switch on that note let's like do a rough like deceleration we like just start catching the exit ramp we're now we're now talking about writing something very pragmatic we're going to go really an abrupt left it doesn't have to be a left-hand turn but that was what I was imagining okay sure I I hope that's okay with people maybe just to say that we have you know many future topics and I actually think we and I should give credit to I think Kelsey and Kevin for orchestrating this maybe a good next topic to flow from here which is like post capitalist or capitalist alternatives and so maybe it's like in this weird entangled way that we don't know how to talk about the civic right now how do we think about what could come after the thing we're in that doesn't feel so great that we're struggling a lot with so that's coming up and then I'll maybe hand off to Kelsey to pick up the thread of writing and just maybe thinking about so you know one of the main ways that we're engaging right now is like we're going and reading stuff by different people and then we're talking about it together but have also talked about writing something that comes out of it we're a little bit close to time so I wonder I'll just say maybe we'll extend five ten minutes max past the hour and of course if people have to leave we totally understand and appreciate you joining us today and so I'll hand it to Kelsey Hi I mentioned this in Slack and on email but I know there are people on this call who might not have gotten those and maybe don't have access to that link I just now sent in chat because it's a Google Doc anyway as this data together group kind of for the folks that haven't spent much time here this group is a little bit loose in that we mostly meet to do these reading groups and then we have quarterly coordination meetings and an annual in person meeting so I would say the majority of our time together we spend doing this but in our other ones we sometimes talk about goals and one of those was to start having more of an outcome from from these discussions and one of the ways that that could look and that we talked about is taking these conversations and seeing if we could turn them into blog posts and start having sort of an output and a public presence of data together Kelsey frozen and Samet oh no did I freeze yeah we lost you for a second but you look like you're back okay where did you lose me actually at a natural pause I think you kind of finished the thought and then you might have started one but none of us caught what you started and I think we've lost Kelsey again I think if I am correct we should look at the doc the Google doc that you share which what is a summary or kind of like a an attempt at writing something out of the last call yeah there's two essential questions one of them is well it's three I guess one of them is do we want to do this type of thing two is do we like this style of doing it and three is more pragmatic do people who are quoted in this one feel good about it and want to post it I don't know how many times I get to thumbs up this thing but just like yes please can we do it how can I help make this a thing I'm really into it I think it's really really helpful and I'm very thankful Kevin and Kelsey for putting the time into doing this I think it's a huge huge I'm really into it that's a thousand just to flag that folks might not be able to see it if they're not logged into Google and I had one thought and this is a 100% a green assault because I wasn't present and I think that well maybe just first to say that that kind of synthesis work is really cool and I think really helpful to like collectively reflect on after the fact yeah like just my appreciation that that's really awesome to see and my second thought is like thinking about who the odd like who the audience is for it because I see this as being really um like yeah I just wonder it feels like really big and great but I wonder if there's like almost seem like stages or if there's like more of like a style of summary where you provide the fuller document below or or a way that we want to kind of figure out how to relate it back to some of the central questions about what we were hoping to know through reading this year for data together and like just thinking about structure I think looking at it that um one way to think about these is that that as I kind of hoping for a long tail um you know that these are things that people might come back to once they get interested and not like something that's going to go viral on its own or something but maybe another paragraph that has like background and maybe like where the first the first mention of Ostrom's name is linked out somewhere or something like that and so like a background paragraph in a summary paragraph it's already some the thing is that it looks to me like was already so much work to do that to try to do that every month might be we might find ourselves lagging but I think that that would maybe make it more approachable to people outside of this group of 12 just to pick up oh go ahead Liz I wrote in the email thank you for like the editing and clarifying of the overall transcript that looks great and um just for this one in particular you know there is an Ostrom Institute at the University of Indiana like they run fellowship programs I mean that might be a place like we could connect with them on this and see if they might also promote it that's all I was just going to say if you could say more B5 about debate in a PR like what does that mean about where it lives where is the PR putting it to PR being pull request but also interested in Kelsey's question in the chat hmm yes let's do that first and then because I think the PR debate is pedantic pull request debate I'm going to say some typical things but like what if what we're doing is actually modeling a set of issues that we recommend other people discuss in their networks like a decentralized bunch of seminar sections and we kind of invite groups to pass their best insights up so maybe when we want to promote that this is happening it's not just like oh read about our conversation or necessarily come into this conversation because we have a lot of shared context in particular among this group we've actually been organizing for years we build technology together it's pretty we have some pretty close relationships what if we are actually saying like we would like to hear from other groups because we feel like these issues are probably coming up around dinner tables and at meetups what do you think that was a dramatic zoom was that the camera I think we got kicked and yeah funny zoom now Grace is doing a weird adjustment thank you thank you Curtis are we responding to Liz's point still yes I thought it was fantastic I think that's a really great way to approach it I would want to actually make that explicit somewhere like in the first post in terms of why we're posting this and what we hope can be accomplished by it the fact that it could be a model for other groups and that we would like to hear from them so yeah I think that's a great way to approach it and then maybe should we talk about the PR now really quick and then we can all go or do we want to just go I was going to say I think we should move on if that's enough Kelsey kind of feedback substantively to the things you want and then just the question of where we see this being published I think in chat though I lost all of it and so I hope someone else based the login look at you Kevin thank you um the suggested edgy maybe edgy's blog it could be a post there but also is there a way we want to think about featuring it for data together I think that was the question Matt had or Matt indicated in the chat and I would just vote that we pick up on blogging about our discussions the link that Kelsey just posted in chat as a method as a point to sort of drive that discussion just so we don't drive it too far unless anyone has any burning thoughts yeah I know that sounds great I think that's all we need to stay on this call for despite wanting to stay on it with you all for as long as possible Kelsey you're hosting the next one right is there anything you want to say or the reading or stuff you need to wrap us up on um I had a lot of fun uh Don provided a lot of context and I'm excited but you don't have to know anything for me great let's let's say goodbye then it was so great to see everyone thank you for and new faces for being on this call and hope to see you all on future ones thanks everybody take care bye bye Omar