Frameworks for Uncoordination
Also: Taylor Swift Hitclips, Beyond JPEGs, and Do Books Sell?
Vitalik recently shared his thoughts again on a key requirement that’s often under-looked in how modern civilization functions: uncoordination. It’s not about figuring how to get the right people to coordinate with each other, but to rather ensure that some groups/people do *not* coordinate with each other.
Some of the examples he cites:
Separation of church and state
Antitrust (corp A and corp B in one industry)
Politics (anti-bribe rules)
Voting (secret ballot)
Political contributions (eg. rules against foreign participation)
Witnesses not being influenced by other parties to a case
Strong versions of free speech (by which eg. organizing mobs to fire people is a violation)
As communication has gotten easier, coordinating against uncoordination has gotten harder:
And a hundred years ago, this worked reasonably well, because *communication was hard*. Non-coordination was the default, and there was already a high technological hurdle to coordinating.
Today, *communication is easy*. It takes only a few minutes for the CEOs of all major corps in some industry, or a CEO and a politician, or the pope and the president, or any one of a number of other possible pairings, to get into a chat group and start organizing a strategy.
…and he finishes his thought that one of the last barriers is morals. But, it doesn’t feel like it’s a reliable foundation as we’ve built more exits for people to find tribes that fit their own morals (for good and bad).
The main disincentive against nefarious collusion is people's morals - both people's moral inclinations to not collude, and people's fear that someone with whom they try to collude will rat them out. This remaining barrier is significant, but it's far lower than what we had 100 years ago. And so leaning as hard on non-collusion / separation / non-communication as we have been before is increasingly untenable. What is the alternative? I don't know yet... I suspect it's messy and it's being figured out in real time.
It remains an interesting question and conundrum. One of the other problems of over-communication is that we’ve lost access to local randomness and local status games. Something like Woodstock won’t ever happen again. Or, the random popularity of Rodriquez in pre-Internet South Africa. The loss of local status games in time/space in less than a generation has also meant that many people feel directionless. To compete in work and to compete in status with the entire world has led many to check out completely. The response is unfortunately a rise in authoritarianism, xenophobia, collapse of efficient supply chains, nationalism, and isolationism.
Currently we mostly rely on our nation states as a check on the balance of over-coordination. We (generally) try to keep things fair and try to punish those who are corrupt.
But, if the only solution in our modern age is: trust in goodness, our morals, and our trust in nation states (and by extension, the prevailing global order), it doesn’t feel like the best solution, because these have always shifted under us. Morals might work in the sense that its impact feels timeless: the belief that *I* am a bad person and/or *I* will be punished in this lifetime or the next is a powerful tool. Is this enough?
In addition, solutions such as: stop certain communication or criminalise certain information also doesn’t feel right because someone (or some institution) will get to decide where that line is. For now, we have a mixed bag of checks and balances that is doing okay, but it’s not as good as it can be. Or rather, can it be better? What should we prepare for?
Thus, the question still remains: how *do* we get better at coordinating against undesirable coordination?
I don’t have an answer, but there are some metaphors I want to share that feels directionally interesting to consider. I know Game Theory is a popular one, but I want to explore others. One of the critiques with game theory is that it’s ultimately games in local time/space.
This is from Vitalik’s earlier article on good and bad coordination:
But in the version of game theory that allows for the possibility of coalitions working together (ie. "colluding"), called cooperative game theory, we can prove that there are large classes of games that do not have any stable outcome (called a "core"). In such games, whatever the current state of affairs is, there is always some coalition that can profitably deviate from it.
Information Theory & Time as a Source of Noise
I’ve always liked the Shannon-Weaver model as a fundamental theory of everything.
As Ken Liu writes: “every act of communication is a miracle of translation”, the model explains the fundamental constraint of coordination. Noise. Noise from understanding, noise from a protocol, noise from subjectivity, noise from the physical world, noise from so many sources.
The improvement in coordination thanks to the reduction of cost to communicate stems from the ability to reduce noise in the now. You’ve shrunk space/time as a source of noise.
When I think of resilient social institutions (from money to religion to governments), one value they provide is that they reduce the cost of noise to communicate with the future. In other words, it makes it easier to plan (and be certain about the future).
I’ve mentioned this before in my article on hardness and the social institutions of crypto:
The Shannon-Weaver model details the cost of noise in communicating. One such noise and source of entropy is time: our desire to communicate with the future. While we might see language as the primary way we communicate, we anchor towards our society’s various laws, norms, markets, and architecture to communicate in ways that flapping our lips at each other, can’t. It’s context turtles all the way down.
The ease to coordinate out-of-band with collusion stems from a belief that a short-term gain (corruption) is more beneficial for a select group of actors because the future is inherently unknowable. In some circumstances, it might feel like a rational choice to take action today in a scrupulous way to benefit oneself and others close to oneself at cost of a more collectively successful future precisely because the future is unknown. Making the future more certain can mean that a moral choice for people becomes easier if they might imagine that their children will reap the benefits from it: I will do good today for benefitting tomorrow (and I’m certain of it).
When you think of contract theory, a primary purpose of it, is to ensure that if people defect from an agreement that they could be punished for it. Thus, contracts are communication tools towards the future.
So, one framework to reason about ensuring that certain coordination doesn’t happen is to merely ensure that some futures are more certain, today. That comes reducing the noise of time. Besides existing institutions such as governments, religions, etc, blockchains feel the closest to being meaningful centers to inscribe certainty about the future.
Complexity Theory, Dissipative Systems, & Entropy
In between the flow of entropy from order to chaos, we get dissipative systems: temporary pockets of organization and complexity. It’s like waving your hand through a fog of smoke and seeing the whirls develop behind it.
If we map coordination to metaphors of entropy, one could say that the amount of uncoordination in a system is a reflection of the communicative entropy in a social institution. If entropy is the uncertainty of a physical system, then communicative entropy represents the amount of uncertainty that out-of-band collusion could be taking place. A country with a strong government that enforces anti-trust, keeps markets fair, and jails corrupt people can be said to have lower communicative entropy.
That being said: higher communicative entropy could also just be indicative of complexity and not elements of uncoordination. For example, a high communicative entropy system could be a functioning and complicated bureaucracy. It’s hard to navigate, but there’s not many elements of uncoordination. Sometimes they can be correlated (bureaucracies can have more elements of back-handed deals, for example), but they aren’t necessarily correlated in principle.
Complexity theory is thus a great source of study that can be helpful here because the problems of uncoordination can ultimately be an intractable problem: one where the model might have to be reality itself in order to get anything done. Designing any coordination system to combat uncoordination could just be another turtle that you are stacking all the way down. By its nature, coordinating against coordination can also become a source of uncoordination. Anti-trust, for example, can become an extension of a tool to remove a fair competitor from the market if abused.
You can’t easily model it. Interactions are diverse and non-linear. Feedback loops can develop. Overall behaviour is not merely an outcome of the sum of the internal parts (emergence). It requires constant energy to maintain itself. Agents are adaptive to changes. Many decisions are made only from local conditions as a bird’s eye-view is impossible or unlikely to be employed as a strategy for interacting.
Lessons from complexity theory thus means that in navigating it means taking less of a bird’s-eye and top-down approach to the problems of coordination and becoming more adaptable and flexible. Redundancy and diversity also becomes more important which is why decentralization is sometimes valuable, even though it can be costly.
It can take the form of things like:
Monitoring, evaluation, and auditing is important.
Ensuring all systems are temporary and enabling more frequent off-ramps to retain dynamism. Things like automatic sunsetting of laws, regular elections, land reform, and jubilees.
Adding more redundancy. Why *do* many countries only have 2 legislative houses (eg upper and lower chambers). Why not 3? Or 5? Why not add a citizen’s assembly that’s randomly selected? What about randomness as a tool in general to add diversity? What if a random 10% of people in a year don’t have to pay taxes?
Weaning off sources of energy that empower uncoordination. eg, remove tax breaks for an industry that’s corrupt.
Physics & Gravity
Gravity is an extension of dissipative systems and complexity. Everything is attracted to everything. The stability of our solar system is only temporary. But, it’s stable for now. And a part of that stability comes from both a push and a pull. Too much coordination (too much gravity) and we’re all collapsing back into a state of a singularity. Too little coordination (no gravity) and everything remains a soup of maximal entropy.
Stable orbits (maximal good coordination) require there to be other celestial bodies that keep everything in check. Earth is kept in its orbit by its neighbours as much as it is also falling into the sun and gently missing it every year.
Physics and gravity are useful metaphors/frameworks because our own systems can mimic nature itself. I’ve once opined on rethinking the theory of the firm through the celestial concept of the Roche Limit. The point where a celestial body will smash into another one can be a good equation to determine whether one firm might want to absorb another.
Economic Roche Limit1 = Radius of the Primary Firm / (2*(Output of Primary Firm/Output of Secondary Firm))^1/3.
The same goes for coordination and uncoordination. Anchors of social gravity can pull people away from over-coordinating in unwanted ways. Morals are one of them. Institutions are another: a well-functioning nation has several branches of government and civil society.
If you want a stable orbit it can come from:
Adding another celestial body nearby (another legitimizing institution)
Decreasing the power of the biggest body/sun (decentralizing)
Increasing/decreasing size of your own body (privatization or nationalization can both bring forth growth, for example)
Moving a body closer or further (increasing communication to the right parts and decreasing communication with the wrong parts)
In conclusion, there’s many metaphors to work from here that isn’t just game theory and to navigate a coordination trap means we should try looking further. It remains an interesting problem and one to pay attention to.
Bonus Content!
An exceptionally unexciting week for me. I watched a Baseball game which was fun, but otherwise more of the same: running, and writing. :)
I must say. It’s been a while since I have had this much time for routine. I’ve been craving it for a good while, but now that’s been here for so long, I’m getting antsy again and want to do something novel. Such is life, always. 😅. Going to enjoy it before things change again. So, doing not much and enjoying it.
Books and Publishing Sales
The publishing industry has been abuzz with a post from
about sales numbers in the publishing industry. Notably, that books don’t really sell. It refers to the anti-trust trial regarding the now-cancelled merger between PRH + S&S.The DOJ’s lawyer collected data on 58,000 titles published in a year and discovered that 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies.
It’s full of interesting stats! Do click through. In a way, this power law distribution isn’t new to me. Always assumed that the media of today is like this. A few very successful books and then a long-tail of the rest. I’m enjoying the discourse.
wrote about it previously in 2022 and again this week.Important to remember that context of the trial:
While I think Griffin does great work collecting these quotes, I would offer a word of caution. PRH’s legal strategy was to present publishing as an imperiled, dying industry beset on all sides by threats like Amazon. PRH allegedly even paid high fees to have agents and other industry professionals testify on their behalf. I’m not saying any of the quotes are lies. I’m saying the quotes and statistics are fitting a specific narrative in the context of a legal battle.
The reality is. Books do sell. A lot. In the US alone, it’s almost a billion a year.
How many books are sold in the United States? The only tracker we have is BookScan, which logs point of sale—i.e., customer purchases at stores, websites, etc.—for most of the market. BookScan counted 767 million print sales in 2023. BookScan claims to cover 85% of print sales, although many in publishing think it’s much less. It does not capture all store sales, any library sales, most festival and reading sales, etc. (Almost every author will tell you their royalty reports show significantly more sales than BookScan captures. Sometimes by orders of magnitude.)
Still, I’ll be very conservative and assume 85% is correct. This means around 900 million print books sold to customers each year. Add in ebooks and the quickly growing audiobook market, and the total number of books sold over 1 billion. Again, this is the conservative estimate.
On the inverse. The median American reads 5 books per year while the average is 14. If 18% of Americans read 20+ books a year, then you have probably a similar power-law distribution on the consumption side.
People are still reading regardless of the impact of other media.
Beyond JPEGs
I’ve been a pretty loud advocate on this newsletter about forms of NFTs that actually uses the blockchain as medium: not just linking out to an inert jpeg.
Miragenesi curated a selection of great artworks that form to this medium (including my recent project, See You There).
Art is everything and everywhere. It’s hard and unnecessary to try to draw a line between what’s art and what’s not.
You perform art by just filtering what the universe offers to you.
If a white square with nothing else but a frame speaks to you, let it be art.
If a picture of an ape with laser eyes triggers deep ancient emotions in you, well… let it be art.
There is another point of debate that I find more interesting: how the medium is used for artistic expression, which is what I will elaborate on in this article, specifically with regard to NFTs.
Vinyls vs CDs
If people prefer a physical format, why are people buying vinyl over CDs?
The clear answer is, is that vinyls are better as display items. People are buying vinyl because it’s *also* a way to “collect” music and display your music. It’s centering the music in a way that means more to the listener.
That aspect of media has never left and many a fan try to extend their connection to it (and others) through ownership. It’s also made me wonder if there are modern ways to rethink media in physical formats that isn’t just returning to its older, physical formats.
Hitclips was a unique way to “carry” your media that also helped fans display their music on-the-go (ht Devon).
Look. If I was Taylor Swift, I’d be redoing hitclips-as-friendship-bracelets and make a bajillion more dollars.
There’s many ways to still rethink digital media into a more physical collectible format.
Choosing To Remember
wrote an interesting article about the act of being more intentional about what one chooses to remember.He quotes one of my favourite books of 2023: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.
"Memory, you realized long ago, is a game that a healthy-brained person can play all the time, and the game of memory is won or lost on one criterion: Do you leave the formation of memories to happenstance, or do you decide to remember?"
He ends the article with a great summary on why this intentionality works.
Deciding to remember is, above all else, about gratitude. An emotion with a similar trick: it's completely up to me. It's as simple as deciding to be grateful. When I'm grateful, I fly a little lower to the ground and look more closely at the view. When I'm grateful, it's easy to remember. A grateful disposition can even help cultivate more awareness in the present. Gratefulness is a reminder that this is the good part--that it's all the good part.
It reminded me of an experiment I did in 2014. I recorded a second of every day and made an entire video of it.
The interesting thing it does to your day-to-day is that you’re always tuned into wanting to capture the most interesting second of that day. For months into 2015, I would still have this gratitude muscle that was attuned to recognizing a meaningful moment of the day even though I wasn’t recording it anymore. This is it, I would say, and that would ground me to my present.
So, yes, sometimes this intentionality is powerful, as cliche as it sounds.
Vandelux - To Love Again (Sofia Kourtesis Remix)
I’m such a sucker for music like this. Ethereal, hopeful, flying music with a strong beat underneath it. Just makes you want to dance with a sunset going down in front of you. Enjoy!
Speaking of sunset. Hope you get to enjoy one this week! Thanks for reading and if you enjoy this newsletter, please share it.
See you next week.
Simon