Cautious hope: prospects and perils of communitarian governance in a Web3 environment

Abstract

In the context of extreme societal polarization, activists have mobilized to protest injustices and claim their rights, yet such efforts often fall short of goals because demands normally are directed to government or firms that offer superficial responses. Communitarianism, which broadly strives for autonomy from established institutions, promises the development of self-provisioning communities based on cooperative networks and participatory, democratic governance that prioritizes use over exchange value and redistribution over profitable activity for individuals. The emergence of Web3 and blockchain technology has ushered in new affordances such as scaling a communitarian enterprise and exchange of value independent of banks or other institutions. Whereas market-based organizations use Web 3 affordances for accounting purposes for profit, communitarian organizations aim to link accounting with designs to inject capital into a commons to support self-governing communities in community-based peer production (CBPP). To exemplify the broad range of approaches to the multifaceted goals of CBPP, I focus on FairCoop and Sensorica. Despite considerable differences, these organizations nonetheless share problems and generally are illustrative of longstanding challenges to communitarian enterprises – digitalized and non-digitalized alike. Perennial problems such as the fraught capitalist/postcapitalist relation, self-interest, uneven power relations, lack of diversity, and the challenge of responding adequately to societal needs combine with effects of automated governance and associated effects of technocracy that can dissolve founding values to threaten the integrity of a communitarian collective. CBPP as well as its non-digitalized counterparts are important contributions to humanity, but goals and actual practices can diverge. CBPP requires vigilant designs that complement rather than replace human decision making with algorithmic governance and pay attention to reflexivity and positionality, continualre-design to engage unanticipated problems, and distance actually existing projects from discourses that reify patterns such as decentralization with the consequence of missing crucial contextual knowledges.