Interview Transcription: Gareth Farry on Democracy Innovators Podcast
Note: This is an automatic transcription and may contain errors.
Host: Alessandro Oppo Guest: Gareth Farry
Alessandro: Welcome to another episode of Democracy Innovators Podcast. Our guest today is Gareth Farry. We met at a community event and I saw your project that was really interesting. As a first question, I would like to ask something about your project, and maybe then we can learn about your background.
Gareth: Sure. Well, my project actually ties into my background, so I'll start with that. I trained as a lawyer about 20 years ago, maybe a bit more, and was admitted to the bar as a barrister and solicitor in Auckland, New Zealand. In the proceeding 20 years or so, I've always remained interested in law from a social justice point of view. I've worked a lot in social impact in arts and music, always with a social conscience while enjoying music and artistic expressions. So law naturally works with that as well.
In the last 20 years, I've really kind of reverse-engineered what I was taught at law school about the legal system. The legal system is just one aspect of law. When you look broader, there are much bigger modalities and jurisdictions and legacies, histories of law. I became interested in that, and I apply the law now differently. I don't practice and I don't act as a lawyer, just as a man standing on the land applying the law, which is different to a person who appears personally in the legal system. These are different statuses, different jurisdictions. I'm fascinated by what makes up those claims and statuses in law and different jurisdictions - how people in the know have private foundations, private trusts, and operate in different forms of law.
Then there's the convergence of that with blockchain and Web3 technologies. I saw it as a natural fit. I used to run a music label, and we put out physical copies of music - CDs and vinyl - around the world in different places: Europe, North America, Japan, etc. Not huge, not all the way around the world, but different places. When the shift to digital piracy came, we no longer had a business model. When I found out about digital scarcity and provable ownership in the digital realm, I thought that 15 years ago this would have been perfect because we could have proven ownership. It would have come at a time when the digital models hadn't developed so much. Now streaming is entrenched, but if we'd had NFT ownership and provable ownership back then, it could have been like a Bandcamp model but on the blockchain.
So there's a convergence of all that stuff with identity as well. You know, we have these passports that we have to carry around. Our identities are defined for us by governments and other verifiers. I became interested in establishing self-sovereign and lawful status because you need to define your identity to define how you interact and what status you have - economically, privately, socially, whatever.
All these things converge in the project we're calling SOL at the moment, which is the Sovereign (or Self-Actualized) Identity Layer. It assists with blockchain and talks about the status of the holder and provides attestation in law. It also creates spaces for self-actualized identity, for people to determine their own ritualistic way to improve their self-identity. Then you have different aspects of law that you could depend on and use different statuses. You do this with paperwork and international law.
You have to make claims because claims are being put in your name that are difficult, things that are not generated by you. You don't control them, and it's the cause of a lot of economic troubles for people who operate as a person in the legal system and are subject to rules and regulations of global commerce. If you change your status, you're not subject to them anymore - you go to a different jurisdiction.
So my background and my project are a convergence of all that stuff - identity, law, and the whole blockchain aspect of true ownership, peer-to-peer, and freedom technology. That's what fascinates me.
Alessandro: When we met, you had a lot of ideas. You're testing things and that's cool because you get excited about the technology. It's freedom technology, though at the moment it's used like a casino, but freedom is where your heart is.
I really like what you said about reverse-engineering the legal system to understand what has been explained as "the legal system" but can be used in totally different ways. My impression is that law, or if we consider where it came from - the first universities were about law or theology - these were things very useful to power structures to control the land and people. I was really impressed that there may be more lawyers interested in blockchain because of these similarities than maybe other people like philosophers.
Gareth: I think most lawyers are interested in blockchain from a regulatory point of view because there's a lot of work to be done. It's an interesting novel area as far as pairing regulation with blockchain and how things work - questions around DAOs, who bears responsibility, and how the idea of digital ownership transfers into real life when there may be aspects of harm or promises being made. That's one jurisdiction.
I'm not really an expert in that area. I'd have to get another degree to be able to comment with authority on that, so I don't really work in that area. But there's plenty of work for lawyers there. I'm really more of a law researcher, or I apply the law in a broader sense. I am a qualified lawyer, but I don't go around saying it.
Alessandro: I totally understand. What we studied or the degree we have obtained is just a sliver of anything else.
Gareth: It's just a sliver of the real truth, just a special interest looking at the limits. Look at the sciences - health, nutrition, medicine. In sciences, there's no non-physical aspect to it at all. We know that a lot of the forces that generate matter and changes in our world are actually non-physical - the subtle forces of the universe can't be seen. They're in a different realm. This was written in the East thousands of years ago, and we're starting to understand and apply it, but universities will possibly never employ that.
Alessandro: It's very interesting. The universities are some sort of centralized organization, and it can be interesting to see something decentralized. Academia is dictated where you can only speak about certain things, and the peer review system is just entrenched in power dynamics. Like all institutions, everything needs to be decentralized.
The power of the masses and our ability to come up with novel ideas and use AI properly - the human mass crowdsourcing in combination with AI can run any system, any country. It just needs to be given the tools to do it. I think blockchain provides a lot of tools with DAOs or whatever it might be, or even liberal democracy with blockchain features. We've reached a point where we don't need the professional political class, and we don't need the institutions that gatekeep knowledge where novel stuff is kept out.
So about your project, your experiment with the DAO connected with Amnesty International - what are your impressions, thoughts? What happened? What have you done?
Gareth: We're at the stage now of just finishing a white paper, and then we're going to do an MVP for some sort of semi-public launch. We're using 3-4 different countries in the Amnesty region: Taiwan, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, possibly one more. We're going to do a little experiment and crowdsource advocacy or human rights promotion through a DAO and through the MVP.
I'm working with Amnesty International - have been for three years now. I've really enjoyed it. Amnesty has ten million registered members worldwide in their database across 70 different countries, and they've got no coordination mechanism. The organization has reached a point where they've sort of outgrown their historic model of grassroots advocacy but are more of an NGO, so to speak. To move into the digital space and apply some of the core principles of blockchain technology could really enhance human rights and transparency in governance.
We're looking at crowdsourced ideation, reporting of verified journalism, and supporting grassroots activism directly from blockchain with smart contract payments. This sort of thing has happened in projects around the world, especially when it comes to paying UBI to refugees or migrants in humanitarian situations, but it hasn't really been done on the scale that we're thinking of.
We're testing it on two or three different chains because there are a few criteria to satisfy for the organization. We're excited that it could be a really powerful way to bring human rights advocacy into the mainstream - to coordinate and incentivize actions that promote anti-racism or aspects of human rights like freedom of expression, freedom of movement. We'd identify what these things are, and then we can reward, promote, and fund them through a DAO mechanism.
A lot of DAOs are looking for communities. We're a massive community that desperately needs coordination to enhance what we do and deliver value to the ten million people already in our database. It's a no-brainer for me; it's just a matter of getting it done.
Alessandro: Tell me about this experiment with the four different countries. Is it more like a sub-project or experiment, or do you already know which kind of software can be used?
Gareth: We were funded for this first stage of research through Project Catalyst - we got a partnership with Cardano. They were really open, and there's a lot of social impact stuff happening there. I'm partnering with Rosalyn, a friend and colleague based in Paris who's deep in the ecosystem with Cardano and social impact. He runs Web3 Impact and sustainable aid organizations. He's my partner in the project and is looking after the technical side. We talk twice a week and are really drilling down into the tech.
Things evolve really fast. A year ago, everything would have been completely different. But now, cross-chain interoperability and cross-chain tokenization have become much easier. There seems to be a lot more functionality and integration in certain aspects, especially when it comes to governance structure.
Our plan is certainly not complex - it's a simple one or two-page idea: earn a token and burn the token. You earn it by doing advocacy, doing something for skills enhancement, having a say, or reporting on human rights action in the community. We're not sure yet - we're going to talk to the countries and figure out what works best for the supporters. Then you can burn the token by voting on a proposal or perhaps through some sort of on/off ramp system. That's what we're aiming to do around September.
Alessandro: Very interesting. I'm curious which software solution you'll use. As you mentioned, you participate in many social impact projects. When did you have this connection with blockchain where you thought, "Okay, we have to make a DAO"?
Gareth: I briefly touched on it earlier. I was in music, and a couple of friends - one here in New Zealand, one based in the UK - about three or four years ago, maybe 2020, just when COVID was starting... I lost a lot of work because I didn't get vaccinated - I wasn't interested in that. People can do what they want, but for me, that wasn't what I wanted to do. So I lost a lot of contract work and was pivoting at just the right time.
The penny dropped when I found out about the idea with music. There was a young artist in South Auckland, a young Polynesian artist only 17 years old, and Jason Derulo, a number one pop star, took a TikTok clip of him and put it in a song. The song went to number one, and then there was this semi-battle with the artist saying, "Well, it's my song." The young artist ended up getting a share of the royalty points on the record or music publishing. I think it was sorted out, but it made me think: if that had been on the blockchain, as soon as Antonio published his song with an address on the blockchain, even if someone used his music, the blockchain would pay him directly his share. It would be like a secondary sale situation.
And in the future, I believe with the use of AI and intelligent algorithms, if someone tries to use music, even if they do, the blockchain will pay the creator directly their share no matter what. If you want to use it, you set the credit/copyright share system in place, and then it's all done through smart contracts. Anyone can use it, but they have to give a residual share to the owner. Even AI should be doing the same thing with data because it's drawing data points from everywhere. If it's referring to my page, I should be getting a little kickback - that would be the just and respectful system.
When I thought about this for music, I realized I needed to get into blockchain because I was always into freedom and freedom technology and cross-cultural work and different forms of governance and consensus. But the money and technology side was challenging - what are we going to do? But when I found out about this form of money and digital scarcity and trading through distributed ledgers, I saw it as a huge missing piece.
Alessandro: Yeah, it's crazy how many things can be done nowadays. I think smart contracts are still quite new. We've been using them for experiments for many years, but I think we haven't discovered all the possibilities yet, especially now with powerful AI that allows us to program and have interoperability between different chains and systems.
I wanted to ask something about your personal background - maybe starting from when you were a child. Where did you live later? Why and how?
Gareth: I grew up in a little university town called Dunedin in the South Island of New Zealand. My background is mixed - my dad is Lebanese, and my mom is Scottish from the Orkney Islands. If you look at a map of the world, New Zealand and Dunedin are down at the bottom right corner, and the Orkney Islands are at the top left, at the very top of Scotland. That's where my mom is from. Before that, the mix includes Norwegian and English as well.
I've been a carpenter, and I've worked in music and hospitality. I did a law degree and an anthropology degree, then moved to Auckland and worked in music and culture. I worked for the British Arts Council running arts programs for seven years, doing a lot of cool stuff between the UK and New Zealand. During that period, I also worked in Asia with the regional East Asia team, covering seven countries. I met some really great contacts and friends that I have to this day in that region.
I've always worked at the intersection of arts and culture, and more recently technology, with a focus on social impact. My favorite art is stuff that sees something, whether it's visual or music - my favorite artists are the ones who rock the boat and are political and spiritual and say something different.
Alessandro: So you studied anthropology too. That's interesting. I'm currently taking an anthropology class about global health.
Gareth: Is that with Professor Quaranta, a medical anthropologist? Interesting.
Alessandro: Yes, it's about global health from an anthropological perspective over the last fifty years. It's quite interesting because it's also problematizing our relationship with health, and I think it's quite important for our relationship with science.
Gareth: I think many of us now understand that you've got to come back to yourself. You've got to take control because it was crazy, and the people that are supposed to be running the world are obviously problematic or at least not serving our interests. For me, it's about saying enough is enough and looking after myself, my own health, my own mind, and just filtering information and responsibly forging my own path. I don't trust government or those institutions - they're all corrupt by nature now or by design because they've been around so long and are so convoluted with special interests knocking against each other that they have to be corrupted.
Alessandro: I'm thinking about hierarchical systems and how they work. If you are on top, it's because someone voted for you, and you make them happy. That's how hierarchical systems have to be corrupted to work. But I think decentralization and distributed knowledge can change this.
They're talking about collective intelligence now. In the future, hierarchical systems may not be the only way for people to live together - that's what happened historically, but technology could help decentralize power.
Your DAO project includes a desire to improve participant coordination for Amnesty's ten million member support base. It's quite an ambitious project - it would be awesome to see something similar. How did you start this? Did you contact Amnesty? Were they already looking for partnerships?
Gareth: They had a little innovation incubator. I just went and talked to them and said, "I think there's something really powerful happening in blockchain, and with such a broad organization around the world that historically and nowadays does research and advocacy and protects prisoners of conscience, the emphasis is kind of shifting. Surely we could find a way to incentivize and reward people or do something around human rights protection and analysis and education."
For example, if you asked in a room of 100 people who supports human rights, 99% would raise their hand. But if you asked those same people to explain what human rights actually are, 99% wouldn't be able to answer because no one really understands how they apply to our lives or how to use them, or the historical crucial moments that led to each human right - whether it's apartheid falling or the end of the death penalty in many countries.
The people who are doing these actions should be recorded on the blockchain. People should be able to carry around that reputation. There's value in different forms - if there's value in the attention economy or the movement economy, surely there's value in the human rights economy that we can quantify. If I knew you'd been involved in ending the death penalty in Malaysia, I'd have a different perspective on things.
We've got sports stars and celebrities - why are we not recognizing people who work in human rights? So a combination of all that stuff made me think there's got to be something here we should look into. It started from there.
There's a lot to explain to people to help them understand what blockchain is really about - it's about what it can achieve rather than the technical details. We didn't need to know TCP/IP protocols to use email or the internet. With blockchain at the moment, we do need to know bits and pieces because there are huge ecosystems, voting systems, and modules that all need to work together. But as the consumer or individual owning the identity, we don't really need to know about that stuff - we just need a good user experience.
If I own something and I can do something good and it's recorded, leading to some sort of value in the future, then I'm going to support my friend or neighbor who's doing something amazing. I can use Amnesty tools to crowdsource ideation or support or fundraise, or support journalists doing verified reports who can't get coverage. All these different use cases have evolved as we've developed the process and the project itself in our research. It just seems like a no-brainer - so it started with a series of discussions and presentations.
Alessandro: I was thinking about a philosophical question regarding the relationship between law and smart contracts. In our Western liberal democracies, we have the division of powers - executive, legislative, and judicial. But with smart contracts, you write the law and then the law is also executed at the same time. The code is law, and it's executed on the blockchain. It has implications in real life that we may not foresee.
Gareth: It's a very interesting area of research and questioning and real-world application that's coming. We'll find out these issues and have to sort them out, for sure.
Alessandro: In the future, we'll see new technologies, but I also see potential issues. For instance, imagine electronic locks for homes. If I lend someone money with a smart contract that says I have to pay back a certain amount every month, and if I don't, my electronic lock doesn't open anymore with my key.
Gareth: Or you can't get on an airplane, or you can't leave the city, or you might get reduced fuel allowance - like the Chinese social credit system. This is why I keep saying we need our own hardware and infrastructure because if they can take away our identity and stop access to any blockchain or wallet or whatever, then what are we going to do? We need to be aware that this stuff is coming down the pipeline, and we need to do something about it.
Alessandro: Absolutely. There's also discussion about social credit scores and gamification systems that reward people for participating in something. It can be nice in theory, but if it's made in a centralized way - like by a king or president in a hierarchical system - that's problematic. Though this is also what happened with capitalism - we already live in a sort of credit score system.
Gareth: Exactly. The idea of living as a free man or woman is that all the systems we design are for the benefit of the natural environment, for people's health, for exploring consciousness, for elevating the human spirit. If we could put all our resources toward that, then that would mean humanity being free, in my opinion. But we've almost got the opposite - everything makes you poor and unhealthy.
Alessandro: Maybe that's because corporations design these things. In the end, every project that wants to have social impact means people have to cooperate together, and I think this is the most difficult thing in history. People, instead of cooperating, start competing with each other, and at a certain point, they start killing each other. It's about resources and money.
Gareth: I've often thought, what would the world be like if we just took away money and pretended? Maybe some things wouldn't be there, or maybe it would be difficult, but we'd just have to learn to cooperate. The people who didn't cooperate would just be idiots. Or maybe money was free and we had abundance. But some elites seem to think we live on a finite resource planet, so someone who wants 100 TVs or 100 cars wouldn't cooperate.
I think reasonable, mature solutions to these systems kind of converge. We'll get to the point where people have to step up and be mature and responsible and co-steward environments, relationships, and communities on a massive scale. I think the majority of us are doing this already, but it's not reflected in the mainstream system or narrative. I have great hopes for humanity, but we need to get this big centralized rock of corruption out of the way and develop parallel systems.
Alessandro: I'm very negative in the short term and very positive in the long term.
Gareth: It's crazy but the world doesn't make sense, so you know it has to sort itself out sooner or later. You know, we were taught history, but history was called "war." My whole life, I've just seen wars. We were taught that world wars happened in the past - which were really European wars - but this endless war idea never went away.
Alessandro: I was thinking that it's a sort of cultural problem. We are used to competing with each other. The way we are educated, starting from school - we're educated to think about our own grades and not about the situation in the class. There are some experiments related to technology, like the 42 school, where they evaluate people not just on what they did individually but on the whole team. This helps people understand it's not just about us as individuals - we're all in this together in terms of resources.
Gareth: There are lots of books about teal organizations and holacracy and ideas of horizontal ownership and shared resources. I think it is happening, but it's going to take a long time and be unevenly distributed. The future is here; it's just not evenly distributed yet. The culture is there - there are pockets of people doing amazing stuff for sure.
Alessandro: When you talk about time, how long do you think it will take? It's just speculation because we don't know what's going to happen. We're talking about the possibility of having decentralized organizations for Amnesty but also for other entities. I'm thinking about a possible decentralized world where collaboration is better than competition. I don't know if we'll see this world, but I think that everyone is necessary.
Gareth: I think there's probably going to be different types of people in the future. There are lots of people who get their kicks out of capitalism and do really well, and there are lots of people who do well in capitalism and do amazing things for others too. I think we need secular human communities and families and cultures and groups of people who have ownership of their resources and decision-making power about money creation and responsible stewardship of the resources. That will happen in different degrees in different places. I don't think there's going to be a specific date - it's already happening in some places.
It's also about when you decide that you're ready to do it and embody it - the time is now. Everything is already happening, and we are living in an eternal present moment. When you think about it, everything's going to be all right. The visions that we can foresee of the future are already here and happening because they are thoughts that have form and content and energy, so they are already being built right now. The future is already here; we just visit it in the present moment, and it's already being built by consensus.
Time-wise, I'm reminded of a Buddhist koan where a student asks a master, "When am I going to be enlightened?" The master says, "Maybe in two or three lifetimes - you're doing great." The student says, "That long?" and runs away sobbing. Another student comes and asks the same question, and the master says, "Maybe four or five lifetimes." This student says, "Oh, that's so close!" and is enlightened on the spot.
So what is time? What are these things? There's no rush. I just want better for my kids. We went to school and got taught things that were just a sliver of truth - the truth through a lens of materialism and empiricism and Eurocentrism and over-intellectualism. I want my children to understand world cultures and spiritual traditions, to understand different forms of mathematics and numerics, to understand the real knowledge of the East, to be able to use digital tools to earn passive income responsibly and donate. They're at school at the moment, but I tell them, "This is just one thing we can learn - we'll also learn other things." They won't go through 15 years of schooling; we'll be doing other things to explore the plurality of knowledge from different cultures.
During COVID, we had the Western injection model, and that was it. Even in this country, we have 200 cultures living here - it's one of the most diverse cities in the world per capita, in the top five. We had 200 cultures, and none of them were allowed to say anything. A 5,000-year-old Chinese culture wasn't allowed to tell us anything about healing for a viral infection. All that stuff just benefits one central control system at the expense of everybody else - materially, health-wise, spiritually, mentally. We need to get past that.
Alessandro: I totally agree about exploring different cultures because sometimes we just think ours is the best one, but that's because we've read books that say our culture is the best. This has led to colonization and other problematic things.
Earlier you mentioned the word "consensus," which is a very interesting word. Do you have thoughts about different ways of consensus-building in different cultural settings?
Gareth: In New Zealand, it's bicultural with indigenous Māori people, the Tangata Whenua, the people of the land. Consensus-building in Māori communities happens in the marae, the meeting houses for communal discussions, community decision-making, and celebrations. Consensus-building takes days there - it's very well-measured and brings in spiritual aspects and all sorts of things.
On the other side with the Pākehā, the white side, New Zealand consensus is very quick. It can be done in 15 minutes - it's very linear. In Pacific cultures, they have different concepts of time. In the Pacific, they say, "What time are you going to make it?" "I'll make it when the time is right." If I miss the bus, I miss it - I'm not supposed to be there at that time, so you have to show patience.
Consensus-building is very difficult, I think, especially in the digital space. I don't know if you could hard-code it all into smart contract design or protocol design. I think there needs to be some sort of fluid aspect to it - a cultural fluidity for collective consensus-building, not just individual. The Western system is very individualistic: "I decide this, and I decide that, we decide by rotation." Then you've got other forms of consensus-building that are older, and new reflections of that on the blockchain, like quadratic or conviction voting, which try to honor the fact that we're all different and have shifting ideas about consensus and making decisions. It's a tricky topic.
Alessandro: I have a lot of thoughts about consensus. I think that without consensus, you have violence inside a group, because it could be a dictatorship of the majority. Consensus can be associated with power - not in the sense of control, but in the oriental sense of power. For example, today we had a consensus about having this chat, and we are in different spaces and time zones, but we're at the same point in our lives regarding this topic. Maybe five years ago, you didn't have this passion, or I didn't.
Gareth: Totally. When there's a consensus, a meeting of minds, it's a powerful moment in life. Now through digital connection, through Kernel, I've had some good connections with people and good discussions. There seems to be an unwritten consensus about why we're there - no one's doing exploitative or extractive models, no one's just trying to pump coins. We already have a consensus about what people understand.
You were working on a consensus model or tool?
Alessandro: If it was to reach consensus, maybe it was a civic participation platform that I've written a white paper for and developed a small prototype for.
What I was going to mention before is that I like the idea of rough consensus - the idea that we'll never reach perfect consensus. It's never going to be unanimous; there will always be different viewpoints. But as long as we reach a point where legitimate concerns of everybody are answered - even if we say, "Okay, we can't address that now, but in the next version we'll revisit it" - as long as we can give everybody an open floor, that can be a rough consensus to move forward for the benefit of the whole project or mission.
If we try to argue every aspect of human rights, we'll get lost in the weeds. I like the idea of rough consensus - I think it's a workable option that respects all parties' input. If someone has a real grievance, you can't step over it, even if it's just one person out of a hundred. You have to deal with it; otherwise, you break the rules of respect in consensus-building.
Gareth: I think it's also about the fact that if I'm part of a group or community and I disagree, I can accept that other people think a certain way, or I can decide to leave. Sometimes that's hard because it might not be easy to find another group. But if technology makes the process easier - if I don't want the blue color but prefer the yellow one, I can find another community that wants to use the yellow one.
Of course, communities also have to be interconnected in some way. I'm thinking about designing for an interconnected world where everyone is free to explore, to not be in a community where they don't feel good, and at the same time can form another one or join another one. Eventually, there can be mediation between different positions.
It's not really clear to me now, and I think for most people, it's something new. But there's an aspect about the actual day-to-day actions we're talking about - a lot of very small things that involve insignificant amounts of money that are just painful and annoying. If we can remove a lot of that stuff between personal interactions and between us and institutions through automation or AI, we can get a lot done and maybe have more space to elevate our thinking and try to reach consensus.
A lot of what happens with consensus-building and governance is just nitpicky. People stick to their ideas and think their vision of how things should be governed is the best one. But I don't think that will be the case - things have to be really fluid, and people are going to have to let things go and use technology to get rid of some of the bureaucratic crap in our lives. A lot of things don't really make sense in our society - we do them because we think we live in a society, but if we don't question them or try to make small changes, it's going to be harmful. Even our range of what we think is a healthy and happy life is severely restricted within limits that constrain our true potential. I think we can be living intergalactic lives of blessing and co-creation, and at the moment, we're not really getting close to that.
Alessandro: You mean like the attitude of thinking that having a long life is better than having your own life? Or maybe having unlimited material wealth would make you happier?
Gareth: It would make me happy to have unlimited material wealth, but the challenge is how to use it and ensure that you don't get lost in materialism because that's not going to be for your benefit. These ideas about happiness and what we really want for the world - individually and collectively - shape our perception of what we're capable of as humans and the evolution or devolution or whatever path we're on. I'm not restricted in my thinking in that respect.
Alessandro: Some years ago, I was questioning the meaning of life, and I wasn't able to give a reply to myself. So I thought, "Okay, let me exclude some things." I asked, "Is it a beautiful car?" No. "Is it a beautiful home?" No. I was going through all these things to discover what was the meaning of life.
Gareth: I don't think anyone can say what the meaning of life is. Life is to give life to life - to be alive. Then you're halfway there, in my opinion. It's many things we can never fully grasp or understand. That's the beauty of it - we never get an answer because in this form, we're not capable of appreciating or understanding what that answer contains. It just goes on forever.
Alessandro: Going back to the DAO - how is that going? What are some goals that you expect? Is there something you're struggling with?
Gareth: Really, for me, the biggest challenges are implementation and continuing to have people see the vision and get people on board and do the technical work. The next challenge is to finish the technical testing and leave it malleable enough that somehow we can adapt to the future. That's going to be really hard because once you've cemented a DAO structure, you don't really want to change too much about it unless you're copying and pasting information or launching on other chains or hard forking. That's a big challenge, so I have to take advice as I go along.
As for what we want to achieve, we just want to show what is possible with coordination of ideas and people who are aligned around the purpose of promoting human rights and how we can incentivize and reward that so people understand this is a model they can use to benefit societies, communities, or hypothetical situations. We decide what we want to record, how it can be recorded and tokenized on the blockchain, and then reward or resource that impact. The challenge is keeping in mind what we want to achieve: human rights. We're just going to give it a shot.
Alessandro: For other projects, people often say money is an issue because they can't find funding for development. How did you handle that?
Gareth: We've managed to get funding so far. I think it's a combination of thinking through and really understanding the use case and what we have to offer. And with Amnesty, they're really willing to have the conversation and understand the upsides and see the vision. I just think it's a bit of a no-brainer actually. We've applied for a lot of funding, but we've been successful with Project Catalyst at this point. I think once you get people who understand this is worth doing, it also sets a precedent for NGOs and worldwide organizations that they should look at this aspect.
You don't have to transform your whole organization into a DAO or run everything through it - that would be chaos, especially for Amnesty, it's too much. But for supporter coordination, for cause-based or theme-based situations, or initiatives or campaigning advocacy, it's a no-brainer as far as I'm aware. The tricky thing is incentivizing people and ensuring they value their input and get what they want out of the project or the DAO. That requires adaptability and being swift in our approach.
Alessandro: In the DAO, how many people are working on it? You mentioned you were writing the white paper, but how is that going?
Gareth: There are two of us at the moment doing some half-time work - 0.5 each. Rosalyn is networking with his contacts, and we're talking to them. I'm doing the same with the Amnesty stakeholder community, whether that's Amnesty UK or my regional colleagues. We're continuing to talk and try to refine it.
I'm also talking it through with my director here in New Zealand. She's ready to engage and wants to know more and poses tough questions. It's just about having conversations with people. Once people get it and understand that blockchain is more than just Bitcoin or cryptocurrency, that there are other use cases for blockchain and similar technologies, then you can have real conversations. The penny drops after a while, and they really think, "Oh, if I can use it for this, I can use it for anything."
I was visiting my dad the other day - he's in his 80s - sitting near his house, and I said, "In the future, you could tokenize this mechanism. Not quite yet, but if 100 people owned it, they would each automatically get their 1/100th share. There's no debating anything. You could have limited rights to be here, but you could have some rights for a couple of days a year or whatever, and you could just show your 1/100th share, and it's very simple."
We're redoing the book changes now with articles of association and so on, but with blockchain, you could have true ownership of assets or things, and he just said, "Wow, that means you could do this for everything else too!" So eventually the penny drops.
Alessandro: So you're mainly two people coordinating work on the project. Is there any choice to be just two people, or are you looking for others to collaborate with? Maybe someone listening to this episode would want to talk to you.
Gareth: I've tried to talk to anybody who's interested, and I'm happy to help them a little or whatever. When I started out in blockchain, it was quite lonely because a lot of people were doing stuff, and it also suffers from an American-centric model where influence begets more influence. I just gravitate to the ones who want to talk and have interesting discussions.
At the end of the day, that's what it's about for me. I have enough work and things to do on other projects and my own projects. Blockchain interests me, so I'm putting effort into it and enjoying talking to people. I find that with Cardano, it's definitely the best ecosystem I've ever been a part of. People think fast and act fast as well, and I like that because when I go back into the legacy world, things take forever to get done.
It's bizarre here using AI for infrastructure and understanding how to use it correctly and respectfully. I look at people I work with in NGOs and other organizations, and I try to get things progressing, and I'm thinking, "You've got to upskill - you've got to get with the times." Things can move fast, and it's good because we can keep the momentum going. So many projects and ideas get killed or the spirit gets killed because the bureaucracy just crashes everything.
Alessandro: It's great to have human conversation. As you said, lots of people do stuff, but maybe the most important thing is to talk, especially now. My dream is that people can have this kind of conversation, and then maybe there are transcripts that they can analyze and collect, so we can have all the different opinions and views and coordinate our efforts.
Gareth: There was one of your ideas about tapping into other people's feeds and thought processes and having open-sourced tabs on your computer - your workflow and things. It's like a shared analysis, and you get real-time feedback from the community. Like, "Oh, Vitalik is looking at these web pages, and you get real-time feedback from algorithms saying Vitalik is looking at these ones," which seemed to be the next step forward in the evolution of these ideas. It means you're not wasting time - you're able to crowdsource and disseminate information, which is good for everybody. Was that the idea you were talking about?
Alessandro: I was thinking about having saved all the good ideas that people can have in conversation. In traditional systems or the systems being developed now, people can talk about a certain problem - a social or political issue - and then all the people do the same. Then we might not need to vote because we already know all our different points of view.
I can mediate between different people, or eventually say, "Okay, Alex and Gareth are thinking the same way, so they can discuss together," or "Alex and Gareth are not thinking the same way, so they need to discuss that." All of this could reduce polarization. Personally, I've seen a lot of polarization in recent years, whether it's about Ukraine-Russia, Gaza-Israel, or COVID. Sometimes people aren't able to discuss and understand the other person's point of view.
When I think about democracy in the future, I'd like to see a place - a world where people want to listen to others and understand their point of view.
Gareth: I think there are going to be tools that people use to connect with others and share knowledge and find what other people are thinking in a much more rapid way. If they're looking for solutions, they can find them. For example, Alex in Bologna has also been thinking about the same consensus-building thing, and his work is open-source.
We can do that by asking AI certain things, but we don't really have that live feed potential yet. I haven't thought about it properly, but the sharing of ideas and voting and collecting consensus and iterating and voting for it - it's kind of an exponential idea. The knowledge you could get when you have the human consensus of minds working together - when that really kicks into gear, who knows where we're going?
Alessandro: Absolutely. I think there's a lot of richness in having different ideas, and if we're ready to accept other people's points of view and use instruments that help us do that, then we could see a different kind of future and world.
Gareth: I couldn't agree more. I think it's already happening, and it's going to happen whether it becomes ubiquitous - probably not, but does it really matter? Probably not. I think we just need to take control of communities and join together with like minds and use the technology to make it happen, then just leave the legacy system in the dust.
Alessandro: Do you have any sort of method or advice for people building new tools or working in the Web3 space?
Gareth: Nothing off the top of my head, but I would say really question everything - the structures you've been brought up in, the bounds of the education you've been given, and ideas about our history and our potential as a human species. We haven't really been able to touch on it very much.
I think a huge missing piece in the coordination and freedom of expression and freedom of transaction nature of blockchain is a huge step forward. I'd encourage people to think about the core fundamentals of it and what it really means, and how you can perhaps slowly think about applying it to your business or life.
The idea that things can be transparent, that we can build consensus, that we can distribute ownership and distribute the network across nodes so there's no central intermediary or failure point, and things can be done peer-to-peer - ask yourself, what could trump that idea? Show me a claim in the universe that says I can't do a transaction with a medium of financial value with Alex. Show me something that trumps that claim - there's nothing in the world of law or spirituality for me that trumps that claim. I'm free to transact as long as it doesn't harm anyone in the world, and there's no government or entity that can get in the way of that.
If I think they can, I say "prove it," because you can't. In law, you've got to make the claim, stand in your status, express it, and then in the world of commerce and law and voting, you can freely do what you need to do to transact, be part of the world, and live happy lives doing what you want to do.
Alessandro: Thank you, Gareth, for reaching out initially and all the cool stuff you're doing with Kernel - it's really inspiring.
Gareth: Thank you for thinking of me. Look forward to a longer chat. Is there anything else to say, or shall we close the recording?
Alessandro: I could come to Auckland, New Zealand!
Gareth: Category in the bush! The native bush is beautiful. It's later on and dark now, and my kids are asleep, so that's good.
Alessandro: Thank you!
