This July, I spent an amazing five days at DWeb Camp, a gathering at a former Stasi holdout in Germany’s Brandenburger forest, that has been repurposed by the Alte Hölle collective striving towards sustainable and equitable futures.

The event, organised by Archive.org’s Dweb community and the Berlin-based collective Department of Decentralization, brought together around 600 coders, organizers, activists, researchers, tech-enthusiasts and -critics, striving towards a decentralized web. That’s shorthand for a stack of technologies, institutions and infrastructures that are managed, stewarded and governed by the people themselves, towards their communal wellbeing and that of their environment. 

Countering the Californian Dream

From an ideological point of view, decentralization can be understood as a counter-ideology to the libertarian, individualist, tech-bro Californian dream, although there were some variations in how exactly to respond to the centralizing, extractive logic of what our current techno-landscape has become. Some addressed the theme from a perspective of negative freedom: defending individual freedoms of not being dominated, the right to privacy, autonomy and freedom of speech. Others were more focused on the rights and duties concerning the management of collective arrangements such as the commons. Some explored decentralized technologies to strengthen democratic societies and provide civic groups within it with both resources and ‘voice’. Others rather sought to exit the current system: building alternative models with logics beyond market and state, towards regenerative ecosystems and equitable societies. 

As Arikia Millikan wrote in the camp-newspaper, decentralization is not so much a goal in itself. It could even become counter-productive, as decentralization without common standards or nodes of exchange could lead to isolation and fragmentation. There is a difference between technological decentralization, and the decentralization of power, which do not necessarily align.

The main question then is not so much building a decentralized tech architecture, but its democratic governance and custody: who has access to, and who is responsible for the assets inside the systems we build, and who has the power and opportunity to take part in the decision making process?

I mostly stayed within the Sustaining Infrastructure-track that explored the funding, governance and stewardship of decentralized technologies. The track was excellently managed by Liz Barry and her colleagues from https://metagov.org/. In this track, three themes stood out that I found especially engaging and worthy of further exploration.

Designing money, and why distributed systems drift back to the centre

Many of the panels I attended didn’t directly address the development of decentralized technologies itself, but rather ways they could be funded and adapted. In an interesting talk, 

Jean-François Noubel used Monopoly as a parable. In its essence, and somewhat counter-intuitively, this board game seems to represent a highly equitable model of society: everybody starts as equals, and receives a basic income each time they pass Go. Yet, in the end, one player always ends up with all the resources. That, Noubel explained, is the logic in the monetary system: it appears decentralized, but the more money you have, the more you can invest and earn. Money is not just a unit of account, it is a mechanism that produces concentration of wealth and therefore of power by design.

The deeper claim is that similar drifts can also show up in systems that are designed to be distributed at first. SMTP is a distributed protocol, yet Gmail centralised email on top of it. HTTP is open, but Google manages a large part of web traffic. Blockchains are distributed, Binance sits in the middle. Noubel called these forces gravitational: there’s concentration drift (network effects: we all want to be where everyone is) and layer capture: distributed systems carry real complexity, so new intermediaries emerge to make them usable, and those intermediaries become the new centres. This means that decentralization is never a state you reach and keep. It is a condition you have to keep actively defending, by building counterforces into the design.

Much of the funding work at the camp can be read as exactly that, as attempts to engineer counterforces. The platform co-op session with Andreas Arnold and Ela Kagel returned to an old form: one member one vote, and rules about capital staying inside the co-op, with members buying shares to belong rather than to extract. In another strategy, both Platform Coops and  Bread.coop, proposed to turn the centralizing forces of the monetary system towards the advantage of the cooperative and commons movement. Both propose to give out stable-coins in return for fiat currencies. The pooled money can be invested and profits made can be diverted to social projects, while the stable coins can be used for the internal economy of the coop.

Myself, I brought in one of our civic interaction design research projects as a case study in a workshop about the Democratic Tech Fund, organised by Wouter Tebbens, Olivier Schulbaum and Sophie Bloemen. The fund  https://democratictech.fund/, is a new organisation that aims to foster the development and adaptation of democratic technologies for civic organisations. As Olivier Schulbaum pointed out, few civic organisers wake up in the morning thinking ‘i need decentralized technologies’, rather they care about worker’s rights, residents facing eviction, or migrants trying to unionize. ‘Democracy needs code, but code doesn’t create movements.’ Hence, there is a need to develop such tools in close collaboration with these movements, aligning it to their logic and shepherd its adaptation.

Institutions, with or without the state

Ben Cerveny gave a talk that most directly took on the governance and stewardship of decentralized technologies. We are currently living through American software imperialism, Cerveny claimed, and Europe should now develop an alternative. Not by copying the American model, but by developing a different culture of software production. What we need is an alternative to the Silicon Valley model of the startup and venture capital that powered our current tech ecosystem. A European vehicle for development, implementation and stewardship of digital tools. His counter proposal is the Public Product Organisation, a new type of non-profit organisation that acts as such a vehicle for continuous, shared stewardship of public digital products. Rather than putting funding into finite projects that often end-up with a promising prototype, but without a clear path to actual implementation, PPOs are process-based, guiding the development of a common core for particular software packages (e.g. education, health care, groupware for civic organisation, etc)  that local clients can customise towards their local  contexts and needs. 

What is interesting is that this approach sees the state as a possible collaborator. Whereas the American model builds upon the ideology of the free market, Europe should build upon its own roots: that of the social democratic welfare state aiming to sustain the collective wellbeing of its inhabitants. We have a long tradition in which the state provides funding and infrastructures for the public interest, from public broadcasting to funding in the cultural sphere. Now it the opportunity to turn this logic towards the development of software with a European flavour.

Democracy as a skillset, and designing for the formative

The most provocative talk at the camp came from Seth Frey, a computational social scientist from UC Davis. Frey reminded us that democracy is not so much a technological toolset, but rather an ethos, or more precise: a way of being in the world, a set of skills and attitudes that - just like learning - need teaching and training. 

Tools and (cultural) artefacts, he explained, can have two kind of affects. Its actual purpose, or the result of using the tool (its summative outcome), and the way it changes us (its formative outcome). So for instance we can take notes so we can later look up the facts (summative). But note taking can also become part of a thinking process (formative). If we use ai to take notes, we may become more productive from a summative perspective. But we may lose the formative thinking process that goes along with it. 

Similarly, we can replace parts of our democratic process with software and ai. For instance, in one of the other panels, a tool was presented that would allow users to send their avatars to (proverbial) town hall meetings, they would then debate with the avatars of other users to come towards some form of consensus. We save time that could possibly used towards other activities, in the realm of care or culture. But we may well loose the ability to debate, to empathize, to come to common understandings.

In democratic tech, Frey held, we tend to see democracy as a box: people go in, decisions come out. If that is all it is, then replacing the people with bots to save time is a straightforward efficiency. But if democracy is a form of human development, then automating the humans out of it is like automating people out of bathing. But it’s not the AI that needs to become clean. So just like we teach everybody to read, we should also teach everyone to become a democratic citizen. He pointed to the Inner Development Goals and the Council of Europe's competences for democratic culture as existing vocabularies.

That makes sense of course. Yet, I think there is more to it. Technology is not only formative on an individual level, but also towards society. For the invention of the printing press did not just allow for the faster copying and distribution of texts. It also undermined the position of the catholic church, and with its standardization of oral regional languages into  printed national languages contributed to the formation of national identities. 

The question then is, are these formative effects on a societal level, completely unpredictable? Or could we actually design for them? Or design particular affordances into technological systems that allow more entangled form of identities and relationalities as well as democratic forms of governance to emerge? 

Just one panel before Frey’s provocation, Primavera De Filippi had made an interesting attempt in that direction by introducing the ‘network nation’ as a new form of functional governance enabled by decentralized and networked technologies. According to De Filippi, such an approach is not local or global but consists of translocal, interconnected local units. It’s not centralized or decentralized but polycentric, with many centres of decision-making with mutual influence. Not exit-based or voice-based but stake-based, bound by a shared future rather than a shared border. Read affirmatively, this is a way for civil society to constitute its own state of affairs, commons-based rather than state or market, interdependent rather than dependent or independent.

It’s easy to fend off Frey’s call for democratic citizenship education, technological tools for democratic governance or tech designs for democratic systems as oppositional. Frey claims the tools are secondary and the formation is everything, that we should be producing citizens through educational and cultural systems. The network-nations argument says the tools might reshape what a citizen even is. Yet I think they are more complementary to each other than directly in opposition. Both can be true, and the synthesis, if there is one, is to ask whether we can design infrastructures for the emergence of the formative, environments that make people more capable of self-governance rather than machines that govern on their behalf. That is a harder brief than building another voting mechanism, but one worth contemplating further.