When we think about the problems of the world
we see global warming, war, appropriation, poverty,
and among numerous other problems,
also the inability to make a living
as an open source developer.
Now this last problem may seem a lot less consequential
compared to the other ones,
but what if I told you that the solution to this problem
and the solutions to the others are one and the same?
And it's because there's a common underlying problem
at the heart of all of these problems.
I'm going to tell you what that problem is in one sentence.
You ready for it? It is ...
the deviation of market value from _true_ value.
Let's think about this in the context of
existing economic systems such as capitalism and communism.
And of these, I want to focus on capitalism
because it is the only nontrivial economic system, really.
Communism is more sort of a political means
to achieve economic ends.
And the other economic systems exist
sort of on a spectrum between these two.
So let's focus on capitalism.
Capitalism has as its basis of value supply and demand.
And consequently, there is a great emphasis
on this idea of ownership.
Now ownership is an idea that made some kind of sense
when you have goods and services
that are constrained in some way,
that are essentially finite in supply.
But when you have things like
works of software, art, and music,
which are essentially infinite in supply,
the idea of ownership and supply and demand
don't make sense anymore.
And yet we employ the institution of property
to constrain supply and introduce the idea of supply
just so that we can induce a market value
in terms of supply and demand
in a capitalist economic system. And it's wrongheaded.
How many of us have written copyright declarations
like these on our work.
It's a lot of work!
Especially when we have version control.
Now in this example,
almost every line is written by a different person,
so who owns the code in this case?
Who owns the copyright here?
Is it some of them, is it all of them,
do they share it in some way?
It doesn't really make sense,
especially when the reason we're employing
copyright and ownership in this case
is to approximate the idea of attribution,
which is what we really care about here.
And that brings us to the nature of the solution,
which is to move away from an economic system
based on ownership and supply and demand,
to an economic system based on attribution, instead.
That is, moving away from who _owns_ what
to who _did_ what and how important was it.
And we can do this by the process of
Dialectical Inheritance Attribution,
which just means that we do it in a collective way
using common collectively agreed upon standards
that are applied transparently to all.
And when we have an economic system
that is based on attribution
as the source of value in this way,
we call it attribution based economics.
Now, once we have that, it gives us fairness,
effective empowerment of expertise,
freedom through incentives rather than through coercion.
And privacy as well.
But I could tell you all of those things
and some may still say, "Why should I care about this?"
There are those who would say
that fairness is not a good goal,
and that might makes right,
and that as Darwin showed us,
the nature of nature is violence.
Now I know that many of us reject this ideology,
and we feel in our bones that it is wrong.
But luckily we don't have to resort to high philosophy
and gut feeling in order to convince ourselves
that an attribution-based system is truly better.
Because in addition to all of
those other properties we talked about,
an attribution-based economic system is also efficient.
And I say this from the perspective of having
an admiration for the efficiency of capitalism.
So understand that that is my perspective
when I say that this system --
an attribution-based economic system --
is significantly more efficient than capitalism.
And it achieves that by virtue of eliminating the waste
that is inherent in adversarial competition,
while still preserving market forces!
In addition to this property
there is also this other property
that I think is truly profound,
and I want to motivate it by this example of a gyroscope.
Now many of us have had the opportunity to play with
a gyroscope at some point in our lives.
If you haven't, I encourage you to go out and get one
and try it out. It also makes a good gift
if you're thinking about giving it
to somebody else this year.
But if you've played with a gyroscope
then you've had the experience, perhaps,
of putting it on your hand and moving it around.
And no matter what you do, it will always maintain its axis.
Even if you try to push it
and try to make it deviate from that axis,
it will fight you. It will resist you,
and keep to that axis no matter what.
And if you've had this experience,
then believe it or not,
you have some insight into the nature of economic systems.
Because if we try to get an economic system to do something
other than what it wants to do,
other than what is its nature,
then it will resist us and it will fight that change.
Now, I don't know about you,
but I'd prefer to avoid fighting these gyroscopic forces.
I'd rather have these forces work with me
rather than against me. Now in a capitalist system,
there is another problem, which is that
not only do you have these gyroscopic forces at work,
but these forces aren't even all working together.
They're working against each other, in many cases.
They represent misaligned interests.
And indeed, these misaligned interests
are the very means by which these forces operate at all.
So in a way, war is not just
an inevitable consequence in this system
but is rather the very nature of such a system.
In an attribution-based system, on the other hand,
by virtue of the source of value
being collective attribution,
we are able to achieve alignment
of all of these interests at every scale,
so that at every scale of society,
from the smallest to the largest scales,
the interests will be aligned,
will be consonant and harmonious.
I think this is a very important, profound quality
that I think is the fundamental problem of economics -
the fundamental goal of economics to solve.
And I believe that an attribution-based economic system
addresses it and solves it.
So without further ado, I want to bring it home
to the prototype that we have in mind
for the Emacs community.
Now we want to start in the Emacs community
because Emacs has a long tradition
of exploring better ways of doing things
and pursuing better alternatives to the status quo.
Now, to give you an overview of the prototype
that we've implemented for open source projects.
The prototype is composed of two broad phases,
that is, the appraisal phase and the accounting phase.
Any project is composed of ideas, capital and labor.
The appraisal phase is involved in assessing the work done
in terms of how much value was created
and who created the value and how important that value is.
The output of this stage is an attributions file.
And the second phase, of accounting, is about, you know,
how do you handle payments that come in
and how do you pay people out.
Now the first part has more of a social component to it
and the second part has more of
a technological component to it that can be automated.
So in order to implement this prototype,
we have two things.
We have founding documents that describe the social aspects,
and an accounting system that automates
some of the technological aspects.
The founding documents, in the noble tradition
of the Gayaneshagowa and the US constitution,
include a constitution which describes
the guiding principles of ABE,
and the two main prongs are forward-looking empowerment
and backward-looking fairness.
This means that we want to empower
those individuals and groups
that are most likely to create value in the future,
while also recognizing and fairly compensating
those who've created value in the past,
to set a good example and incentivize others
to take chances in creating value.
And it describes high level principles of
dialectical inheritance attribution
as proceeding by means of
common, collectively agreed-upon standards
that are applied to all.
And the key thing here is these improvements feed back
to the whole and apply to everyone.
And this is an important quality
to ensuring fairness and accuracy.
There's also a declaration of non-ownership.
We saw already that ownership is an overused institution.
This just codifies that and allows us to shed
the baggage of this idea of ownership
where it doesn't make any sense.
A third document is the financial model
which describes how payments are to be treated,
and a key idea here is that when you pay money
to an open source project, you know,
today you don't really have an incentive to do so,
and it essentially is kind of like a donation.
But in this model, in an attribution-based model,
when you pay money to a project,
you're creating value in a way.
You're contributing value to the project
and that itself is attributable.
And the manner in which we'll treat this
is in terms of the fair market price that, again,
we agree upon collectively.
And any payment that exceeds the fair market price
is going to be treated as investment.
And the goal here for this financial model
is for the system to be self-sustaining,
so I think there are many open problems here
and any finance experts or any other experts
who are interested in contributing here,
your help is needed, certainly.
There's also an attribution model document,
which describes some of the theoretical ideas
that would guide dialectical inheritance attribution,
and there are many interesting ideas here.
One that I'd like to mention is "backpropagation,"
which is the idea that
as we're improving the standards over time
and they're likely to get more accurate and fair over time,
we'd like these more accurate and fair standards
to "backpropagate" and calibrate the value assignments
that were done in the past.
And this means that some people might have been
underpaid in the past
and we would pay them what they were underpaid,
or the balance,
and some people may have been overpaid.
Now in that case we're not going to go and say,
"hey we overpaid you, give us the money back."
Instead the system as a whole is going to bear
the cost of being wrong,
and so it's kind of an insurance policy.
But I think another more interesting quality here is that
the system in practice wouldn't really
absorb any negative impact here
because there is an incentive
for these people who've been overpaid
to reinvest that money.
So I think they would want to invest the money
in other places that the system has valued
as being valuable and showing potential.
The second component of the implementation
is the accounting system. All accounting is public.
All payments into the repo are public
and all payments out of the project are also public.
We can do some things for privacy,
and again, the basis of this system is dialogue.
It's not a fundamentally technologically system.
It's a fundamentally dialogue-based system,
and that, to be honest with you, is everything.
It's all systems that we have in place.
But by embracing that, it means that
we can do whatever we want to do by discussion,
and if there's something
that we cannot achieve in a technological way,
we'll achieve it in a non-technological way.
But anyway, the point is, all accounting is public,
and text files in the repository
form the inputs and outputs of the accounting system
which is implemented as a GitHub action.
So typically a source repository will have
an ABE folder containing these three inputs:
attributions, payments,
and payouts. And we'll see how that works.
This is the drym.org Github organization account.
This is an example of a repository that uses
the GitHub action accounting system.
So there will be a payments folder, a payouts folder,
as well as an attributions file.
The payments: essentially each file
just represents a payment that's made to the repository.
Payouts is the same except it's payments
made by the admins of the repository to contributors.
And the attributions file breaks down
the attribution of the value in the repository
by contributor. And then the billing system runs
on every relevant commit,
which is typically changes to the ABE folder,
generates a set of transactions
that are owed to various people from various payments,
and then creates an issue with the outstanding balances
that need to be paid out to contributors,
and tells you what those balances are.
So for repository or project maintainers,
it automates all these accounting details
and you just have to worry about fulfilling the payments.
An interesting property of the prototype
is that boundary incentives expand the boundary,
and that is that the incentives in the system
are so constructed that those on the periphery
of the attribution-based economic system
have an incentive to join in.
And we'll see how that works.
Well, as I mentioned, we're starting this prototype
in the Emacs community with the
Symex repo. Symex is a structural editing package,
and this prototype will recognize direct contributors
as well as antecedents and related projects
through the process of collective attribution.
We all decide how financial contributions to the Symex repo
are going to be distributed to the direct contributors
as well as to antecedents and related projects.
So the power is yours!
And that's what I meant when I said
that the boundary incentives expand the boundary,
because projects that we agree are owed money
from the Symex repo now would have an incentive to join,
because once they join they would get that money.
And we'll also be implementing this in the
Racket community. Racket is a Scheme dialect,
and Emacs has great support for Racket in Racket Mode
so I encourage you to try it.
And we'll be prototyping it in the Qi repository.
Qi is a language written in Racket which is, you know,
it's for functional programming and things like that.
And once again, we'll recognize direct contributors
as well as antecedents and we all decide
and agree on how those are done.
So how do you adopt this?
You can add the github action to a repo
that you are a maintainer of.
You can financially support an ABE project.
This is important to do
because the system won't get started
without money as an input.
And it also has network effects, as we saw -
the more money you contribute,
the more incentive there is
for other people to join the system.
And contributions are also attributable,
as we said earlier.
Some of them can be treated as investments.
Any help you can provide with funding
would be attributable and very helpful, of course.
And yeah, if you can help us achieve
the goal of self-sufficiency
without relying on capitalist entry points,
that would be very helpful as well.
I'd like to acknowledge the help of many individuals
for this presentation
as well as many of the supporting things
that have gone on behind the scenes for years.
And in particular for now I want to mention
Jair and Ariana who wrote the accounting system
that we saw earlier, and Salim who encouraged me
to take this social approach to the prototype.
And so many more people who have believed and invested
in the cause of "attribution, not ownership!"
I want to leave you with this closing thought.
The electromagnetic attraction between two objects
is 10^42 stronger (!) than the gravitational attraction
between these same objects.
And yet, a stone falls to the Earth
under the influence of gravity, not magnetism.
The reason is that the e/m forces are polarized,
much like our world, and cancel each other out.
Now in this world, we are told
that we should look out for ourselves
because no one is going to look out for us.
That we should take care of our own
because we can't rely on others to care.
An attribution-based economy is nothing like that.
We care about each other,
we take care of each other,
because taking care of one another is valuable,
and an attribution-based economic system
is capable of recognizing that value, in financial terms.
And as a result, we are safe in the embrace of the world.
So, um, yeah. Let's go!