Positive Sum Worlds: Remaking Public Goods
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Highlights
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In both instances, political bodies were raised to the status of institutions by establishing new venues for storytelling—venues in which people could begin to identify themselves as part of a collective whole, that is, a public.
- There’s even a popular meme that "crypto allows communities to encode values into money." But in practice, little space has been made for different values to be discussed or enacted. Which is why, in the absence of ways to enact our shared values, we default to the lowest common denominator: profit.
- Likewise, discussion of values is as important, if not more so, than the act of voting itself. A value system is fostered through storytelling and negotiation in forums of public discourse.
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Public goods enacted by Web 3 communities should strive to produce exactly the opposite effect. Greater scale should mean greater good as valued by an increasingly wider set of people: the creation of positive externalities.
- one way to manifest positive externalities is to consider the success of others as your own.
- Public goods are enacted by social institutions that reproduce patterns of behavior in the public interest.