We didn’t necessarily come away with a conclusion so much as a better sense of the question. From Josh’s closing remarks: “I honestly wrestle with this. I honestly do not know, and it feels weird, it feels very weird to be a student of the legends who built the open internet and ask, should [AI] be open? It reminds me of a question we ask ourselves as a liberal society—is it possible to be too open as a society? Do open societies ultimately bring about their own downfalls?”
Can We Trust Our Fellow “Digital Citizens”?
This session, led by Metagov contributor Jenny Fan, was a round table discussion around the provocation: can civic responsibilities for online “citizens” exist in an analogous way to how civic duties exist in offline communities? As one participant quoted, “The scarcest resource is legitimacy,” and appropriately, the conversation was framed in the phone number library context of the dearth of legitimate forms of community governance and content moderation for online communities. Though participants were not primarily governance researchers, we ended up with a comprehensive and thought-provoking survey of existing projects in this space.
We broke down the challenges of online “citizenship” around identity, reputation, intrinsic/extrinsic motivation, the issues of delegating trust to other users, and how the correlation between the level of effort affected online community engagement. Participants mentioned references as wide-ranging as existing political science research (liquid democracy, quadratic voting, radical markets), Web 2-adjacent projects (Periscope, Twitter community notes), Web 3-adjacent projects (Klairos, Nouns DAO’s zero knowledge voting, and one participant’s experience IRL at Zuzalu’s pop-up community), and more.