Although I tend to steer away from religious discourse, I still like the article a lot. My personal approach is more utilitarian so I'll continue from that perspective.
Perhaps bringing to light three underlying themes would strengthen the sociopolitical appeal of Commitment Pooling.
1. Distinguish between deadly or 'existential suffering' and 'aspirational suffering'. A person has to be alive and somewhat functional before s/he can have aspirations, make commitments, or withdraw goods or services from the pool (excluding grave marker expenses which we can attribute to the survivors). Popular discussions of suffering and poverty often ignore this important functional boundary. 'Suffering hunger' provide a useful example. We use similar language to describe people who are a) within a week or two of death from lack of any nutrition, b) living on diets that may contribute in the long term to disease or shorter life expectancy, and c) healthy and eating full meals but may be dissatisfied with the variety or taste of what is on offer leading to a personal feeling of 'hunger'. Each of these groups may describe themselves as suffering but the consequences of their suffering with respect to the pool are entirely different. Let's be a bit more nuanced in our evaluation of the concept of suffering while continuing to honor each individual's perception of his/her personal suffering. Communities may have widely different shared values around 'suffering unto death' as compared to 'suffering from failure to accomplish an aspirational goal'.
2. Understand identity boundaries. Me-We-They boundaries vary widely around the globe. What appears as greed, exploitation, corruption, or commons depends on where the sharing community draws these boundaries. We need to include explicit identity boundaries in our attempts to make our values transparent and determine whether they are truly shared.
3. The concepts of greed, hoarding, and exploitation can only have meaning within a context of physical survival, units of identity, and perceptions of control. Early humans evolved as prey animals, not top predators. They controlled neither the availability of food nor natural disasters such as weather, fire, or volcanoes. They did not have fences or lockable doors. Under conditions of natural scarcity, the survival of their gene pool may have depended on their tendency to compete and withhold resources from other humans (greed), collect and protect whatever they hunted or gathered over time (hoarding), and both abstract and extract what they found in their environment so that they could invest in their identity group (exploitation). Our ancestors, those who survived to raise reproductively successful children, were probably those who exhibited characteristics we may not value as much today.
Now let's consider the characteristics of different human ecosystems through time.
- Early Hunter Gathers: Continuous, immediate (day-to-day) external survival threat, minimum viable gene pool (small populations), limited communication (across space or time), rudimentary enforcement techniques (no locks, go guns, no bombs, no machines), strong utility for communitarian behavior within identity boundary, strong utility for 'selfish' behavior beyond identity boundary.
- With rise of agriculture, writing, and cities: much lower external survival threat, large populations, limited communication beyond immediate location although writing increases both space and time), wide variety of identity groups with enforcement techniques available to the elite but not 'the poor', strong utility for communitarian behavior within 'empires' (noblesse oblige), wars among empires, hostility among ethnic or religious groups.
- Industrialization: locus of survival threats from other humans rather than external, gene pool secure (adequate to large population), communication technologies rapidly expanding to global, enforcement techniques expanding from privatization of pastures and forests to atomic annihilation threat.
- Today: survival threats to individuals only from human violence, accident, disease, age, or withholding resources, externalities are no longer threatening. Identify groups only threatened by violence from other groups, withholding or internal disorganization. Population secure except for war or epidemic, communication global, wide variety of identity groups with ambiguous enforcement power.
In other words, to paraphrase Pogo, we have met the enemy, overcome most of it, and the remaining enemy is the leftover psychology from our endangered past. The solution, well aligned with Buddhist philosophy, is to use training and education to overcome our spontaneous responses to perceived threat, to replace violence with compassion, fear of scarcity with productive action, tendency to create narrow identity boundaries with global empathy, and to reclaim ancient social technologies for reciprocity implemented in a modern technical context.
I hope this post isn't too pedantic to wade through. Thanks, Will, for crafting your thoughts so eloquently. Now let's get these words out so that every small town in the world has access to them!
I find the mere act of signing into Substack so that I can leave this message triggers a fear response in me. Instead of just speaking spontaneously to a person within earshot, I have to go through several steps of exchanging secret codes to protect myself against a present but invisible threat. Perhaps this is the everyday experience of people who believe in evil spirits. It certainly describes the psycho-emotional context for prey animals, early humans included, and for people in war zones. For me, born in the US in 1940s, with a lifetime of local peace and security behind me, daily Internet use is compromising my composure. The benefits of worldwide interpersonal contact and access to global knowledge bases are so great they cannot be measured. At the same time, the constant reminder of lurking threat feels like I'm walking across the African savanna, spear in hand with hungry lions hidden behind every bush. We need to redesign the modern digital environment so that it doesn't throw humans back to continuous fear with all the nasty responses that fear elicits in us.
... repeated “prove you are you” ritual can land in the body like danger for me too.
The benefits of the internet are huge, and also the constant background sense of threat can erode ease and spontaneity and care.
And I want you to know (you are very welcome here) and you also do not have to push through Substack friction to be in relationship.
Email is completely welcome too. Same with slower, simpler channels like group emails, or WhatsApp groups.
Also (it is genuinely fine to come and go). I have left plenty of chat groups, then later rejoined others, then stepped back again. Sometimes that is just good nervous system hygiene. Social media can be sticky and draining, and it can be hard to notice we are “in it” until we are already tense.
If it helps, feel free to message me by email anytime (whatever feels easiest and safest for you). And thank you again for showing up (it feels important).
Thank you for wading in so deeply and moving the conversation from poetry into practice.
Your reflections on identity boundaries .... Me–We–They boundaries shape what we call greed, generosity, corruption, or commons. What looks like hoarding from one boundary may look like protection from another. Making those identity boundaries explicit is essential if we want transparency rather than moral abstraction.
... evolutionary framing is powerful. Much of what we call greed, hoarding, and exploitation may have once been survival strategies in ecosystems defined by immediate external threat. The leftover psychology of endangered humans may now be misfiring inside conditions where cooperation at scale is finally possible.
What keeps coming back to me is something simpler and more embodied:
That anyone can find themselves in a situation with other people where the first instinct is to help without negotiation. That a history of helping each other can grow into rich and healthy social soil over generations. That this may actually be our natural, healthy habitat.
To remember it.
To taste it.
To be it.
An abundance of care.
Describing it in every way possible. Imagine it. Draw it. Spread the word. Just so we know what we are looking for.
Home.
Ecos. Oikos. Kaya.
Noticing the traditions that bring us back there. The ones that protect our home, Earth. Spreading this care from person to person, to every bit of soil. Composting hoarded wealth that has become toxic back into what nourishes shared life.
For me, commitment pooling as protocol and cosmolocal.credit as growing infrastructure make that habitat visible and durable again. Not abstract idealism, but practical soil building. Tools that help us move from fear-based reflexes toward trained reciprocity. Home.
And yes, that requires examples, education and training.
Beautiful and life giving. I regard myself as a de-churching 'Christian' in order to disassociate with the the Western corruption (contamination) of the way and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.
The way of being taught and modelled by Jesus resonates and echoes deeply with your writing. He too is understood to have "left the palace" to incarnate within the depths of our suffering, to "love enemies" while at the same time warning against harmful (harm causing) people (who have not yet seen the light). So your operational boundaries are relevant in his worldview too.
Agape, which he represented, can be defined as "other centred, self sacrificing, self giving, unconditional love". That kind of love, expressed in mutuality, within community, yields the kind of abundance that you describe. Not isolating or separating but engaging, inclusive, caring and kind.
Inverting my inherited worldview, to discover the loving origin of our Cosmos through Love's incarnation. Becoming brave enough to call my culture's bluff and walk away from darkness masquerading as light.
Most religions in the world can be divided into two categories: those arising from Indigenous traditions of hunter-gatherer or horticultural economies, where religions are conducive to mutual aid and other forms of value regeneration, and those arising from Empire state civilizations with religions that seem to better fit value extraction. Buddhism is one of those rare exceptions where a religion arises in the context of empire, and yet it is conducive to generative justice.
That gives it a certain set of conceptual tools that many Indigenous practices lack -- you can cite specific sutras, examine the written diagnosis it offers, etc. That allows it go global, becomes applied in many different locations, etc. It is a kind of digital version of the spiritual practices that are conducive to avoiding extractive economies.
On the other hand, I am guessing there are analog dimensions of the Indigenous religions, encoded in song and dance and rooted in local ecological practices, which are not available for global transplanting, and for that very reason have their own unique value when it comes to conceptual tools for generative justice.
What living systems don't carry both portable frameworks and rooted practices?
Even ancient rooted traditions hold transferable principles (reciprocity, restraint, relational accountability) alongside deeply place-based rituals. And even Buddhism, though textually portable, only lives through embodied, local practice.
In that sense, commitment pooling is also both rooted and portable. It names patterns that are already grounded in specific communities (shared labor, seasonal limits, trusted reserves), but it also offers a portable language that allows those commons to recognize each other and cooperate without being centralized.
... keeping those two dimensions in balance (portable insight and rooted participation) so that neither drifts toward abstraction or extraction.
Now we get to the question I was driving at. I think the two dimensions, abstraction and extraction, need to be handled in completely different ways. Abstraction is not the enemy, extraction is. We constantly confuse the two, because the rise in extraction (exploitation, inequality, etc.) often makes use of abstraction as a tool. On top of that, there is a feedback loop: the more extractive, the better it gets at making technologies of abstraction that are designed for extraction. So the key thing about Commitment Pooling is not that it is a technology of abstraction designed for generative justice, as if its the ultimate "techno-fix". It also has to be in a co-evolutionary feedback loop that keeps advancing those capabilities.
My guess is that its the feedback loop part of this in which the opposite of abstraction (concretization, localization) plays a key role. You phrased it as a question of "balance" but I think the challenge is more subtle than that. Its a question of how to advance the digital tools that abstraction can offer, such that anti-extractive localizations co-evolve with it. CP tools for protecting generative exchanges; advancing collective capabilities of value regeneration. SaraFuber (worker-owned uber) might be a localization, but a Sarafu App Maker (so that any idea like SaraFuber could be proposed and implimented by local workers as a collective enterprise) would be the universalized abstraction. Likewise, preventing the problems with foresight (as Uber failed to do when sexual harassment of female riders was reported) would need to be burned into its DNA, not added on later as mere "localization".
Extractive systems have become extremely good at using abstraction for concentration of power and value. But abstraction itself is not the enemy. It is simply a tool. The problem is not abstraction, but abstraction optimized for extraction.
Commitment Pooling is not meant to be a techno-fix. It is not a product. It is not an ideology. It is a protocol. A description of a minimal set of functions that make value exchange explicit: curation, valuation, limitation, and exchange.
In that sense, it is more like TCP/IP than Uber. TCP/IP reduces packet loss and enables flows across networks. Commitment Pooling reduces trust loss and enables flows across value exchange networks. It is simple enough to write down in four words.
What matters is the co-evolutionary loop you describe. Extractive abstraction centralizes. so-called 'generative abstraction' must do the opposite: strengthen local agency while allowing coordination across distance. Ancient Mweria, ROLAs, Sarafu, cosmolocal.credit are implementations that can be analyzed for fitness. Some will evolve better than others.
So I agree. The challenge is not “balance” in a static sense. It is building abstraction (as protocol) that improves its ability to protect generative exchange while localizations continuously shape and constrain it. Anti-extractive features cannot be patched on later. They must be part of the protocol DNA - and that is the entire point of commitment pooling protocol being extremely simple in that regard. It has been wonderful to see it propagate and connect across communities, individuals, businesses, universities, business networks.
Always exciting when we get our descriptions synchronized! I would only add that the struggle to define what CP is (not an ideology, not a product...) is worth reflection. "Protocol" is a good technical analogy, and "mycelia" a good biological analogy, but what about social analogies? Several come to mind. Robert's Rules of Order for example: a general framework for democratic "exchanges" just as you want a general framework for economic exchanges. Of course there are different versions of democratic process: consensus process, quadratic voting, etc. And perhaps CP operates more like a meta-democratic framework in which groups are free to choose from among those many versions.
Unfortunately analogies are only helpful when they simplify, and no one is going to think "meta-democratic" is easier to understand. Another analogy that comes to mind is the first amendment. Free speech, freedom of belief, right to assembly, right to petition. It almost maps on perfectly....
The moment we call Commitment Pooling (CP) an ideology, it narrows. The moment we call it a product, it commodifies. “Protocol” works because it suggests a grammar rather than a doctrine ..... rules for interaction without dictating content.
Robert’s Rules analogy is actually very strong. Robert’s Rules does not tell a group what to believe. It gives them a structure for exchange, sequencing, motion, amendment, and resolution. Consensus process does something similar with different assumptions about power and agreement. In that sense, CP feels less like a specific democratic model and more like a meta-layer that allows different coordination styles to operate within a shared accounting grammar.
I also love the First Amendment analogy. It’s not a policy preference..... it’s an enabling condition. It doesn’t tell you what to say, believe, or assemble around. It protects the space in which those things can occur. That’s close to what unenclosed Commitment pooling networks are trying to do economically: protect and formalize the space in which commitments can be made, tracked, limited, and exchanged without requiring a central authority to define their meaning.
Maybe one way to say it socially is this: CP is a civic infrastructure for economic speech. It doesn’t tell you what promises to make. It provides the grammar, memory, and limits through which promises can circulate.
perhaps “meta-democratic” is not the simplest phrase. But your intuition is important here: CP doesn’t replace governance traditions. It gives them a metabolic substrate. More like .... plumbing?
You don’t argue about plumbing as a belief system. You argue about what flows through it, who controls the valves, and whether it leaks or concentrates 💩.
Good to keep reflecting on this. The purity of protocol, mathematical structures and trust graphs across polycentric systems are simply toy models.
Hahaha! Love how we start out grandiose (nature's secret of the universe! democracy's sacred principles!) only to discover that the best way to keep it real is thinking about good plumbing. Indeed that is why it is so tempting to always use tech metaphors, we assume technology is neutral. "You don't argue about plumbing as a belief system". But that's not actually true. Lead pipes are still poisoning people; half-assed plumbing for poor folks, and good plumbing for rich folks, is still commonplace, still justified by belief systems. Which, as you rightly point out, is why we need to get Sarafu's protocols right, and think through all the implementations as it expands into social (not merely technical) domains.
Although I tend to steer away from religious discourse, I still like the article a lot. My personal approach is more utilitarian so I'll continue from that perspective.
Perhaps bringing to light three underlying themes would strengthen the sociopolitical appeal of Commitment Pooling.
1. Distinguish between deadly or 'existential suffering' and 'aspirational suffering'. A person has to be alive and somewhat functional before s/he can have aspirations, make commitments, or withdraw goods or services from the pool (excluding grave marker expenses which we can attribute to the survivors). Popular discussions of suffering and poverty often ignore this important functional boundary. 'Suffering hunger' provide a useful example. We use similar language to describe people who are a) within a week or two of death from lack of any nutrition, b) living on diets that may contribute in the long term to disease or shorter life expectancy, and c) healthy and eating full meals but may be dissatisfied with the variety or taste of what is on offer leading to a personal feeling of 'hunger'. Each of these groups may describe themselves as suffering but the consequences of their suffering with respect to the pool are entirely different. Let's be a bit more nuanced in our evaluation of the concept of suffering while continuing to honor each individual's perception of his/her personal suffering. Communities may have widely different shared values around 'suffering unto death' as compared to 'suffering from failure to accomplish an aspirational goal'.
2. Understand identity boundaries. Me-We-They boundaries vary widely around the globe. What appears as greed, exploitation, corruption, or commons depends on where the sharing community draws these boundaries. We need to include explicit identity boundaries in our attempts to make our values transparent and determine whether they are truly shared.
3. The concepts of greed, hoarding, and exploitation can only have meaning within a context of physical survival, units of identity, and perceptions of control. Early humans evolved as prey animals, not top predators. They controlled neither the availability of food nor natural disasters such as weather, fire, or volcanoes. They did not have fences or lockable doors. Under conditions of natural scarcity, the survival of their gene pool may have depended on their tendency to compete and withhold resources from other humans (greed), collect and protect whatever they hunted or gathered over time (hoarding), and both abstract and extract what they found in their environment so that they could invest in their identity group (exploitation). Our ancestors, those who survived to raise reproductively successful children, were probably those who exhibited characteristics we may not value as much today.
Now let's consider the characteristics of different human ecosystems through time.
- Early Hunter Gathers: Continuous, immediate (day-to-day) external survival threat, minimum viable gene pool (small populations), limited communication (across space or time), rudimentary enforcement techniques (no locks, go guns, no bombs, no machines), strong utility for communitarian behavior within identity boundary, strong utility for 'selfish' behavior beyond identity boundary.
- With rise of agriculture, writing, and cities: much lower external survival threat, large populations, limited communication beyond immediate location although writing increases both space and time), wide variety of identity groups with enforcement techniques available to the elite but not 'the poor', strong utility for communitarian behavior within 'empires' (noblesse oblige), wars among empires, hostility among ethnic or religious groups.
- Industrialization: locus of survival threats from other humans rather than external, gene pool secure (adequate to large population), communication technologies rapidly expanding to global, enforcement techniques expanding from privatization of pastures and forests to atomic annihilation threat.
- Today: survival threats to individuals only from human violence, accident, disease, age, or withholding resources, externalities are no longer threatening. Identify groups only threatened by violence from other groups, withholding or internal disorganization. Population secure except for war or epidemic, communication global, wide variety of identity groups with ambiguous enforcement power.
In other words, to paraphrase Pogo, we have met the enemy, overcome most of it, and the remaining enemy is the leftover psychology from our endangered past. The solution, well aligned with Buddhist philosophy, is to use training and education to overcome our spontaneous responses to perceived threat, to replace violence with compassion, fear of scarcity with productive action, tendency to create narrow identity boundaries with global empathy, and to reclaim ancient social technologies for reciprocity implemented in a modern technical context.
I hope this post isn't too pedantic to wade through. Thanks, Will, for crafting your thoughts so eloquently. Now let's get these words out so that every small town in the world has access to them!
I find the mere act of signing into Substack so that I can leave this message triggers a fear response in me. Instead of just speaking spontaneously to a person within earshot, I have to go through several steps of exchanging secret codes to protect myself against a present but invisible threat. Perhaps this is the everyday experience of people who believe in evil spirits. It certainly describes the psycho-emotional context for prey animals, early humans included, and for people in war zones. For me, born in the US in 1940s, with a lifetime of local peace and security behind me, daily Internet use is compromising my composure. The benefits of worldwide interpersonal contact and access to global knowledge bases are so great they cannot be measured. At the same time, the constant reminder of lurking threat feels like I'm walking across the African savanna, spear in hand with hungry lions hidden behind every bush. We need to redesign the modern digital environment so that it doesn't throw humans back to continuous fear with all the nasty responses that fear elicits in us.
... repeated “prove you are you” ritual can land in the body like danger for me too.
The benefits of the internet are huge, and also the constant background sense of threat can erode ease and spontaneity and care.
And I want you to know (you are very welcome here) and you also do not have to push through Substack friction to be in relationship.
Email is completely welcome too. Same with slower, simpler channels like group emails, or WhatsApp groups.
Also (it is genuinely fine to come and go). I have left plenty of chat groups, then later rejoined others, then stepped back again. Sometimes that is just good nervous system hygiene. Social media can be sticky and draining, and it can be hard to notice we are “in it” until we are already tense.
If it helps, feel free to message me by email anytime (whatever feels easiest and safest for you). And thank you again for showing up (it feels important).
I don't know which phrase I loved more:
“…(L)eftover psychology of endangered humans may now be misfiring inside conditions where cooperation at scale is finally possible.”
“…Anyone can find themselves in a situation with other people where the first instinct is to help without negotiation….”
“(We need) Tools that help us move from fear-based reflexes toward trained reciprocity.”
Thank you for revealing more completely to me (through language) my semi-formed yearning. This is why and how dialogue:
1) labels new “degrees of freedom" and
2) enables the possibility of coordinating into new forms of connected competence.
🙏🏼💙🌻
Thank you for wading in so deeply and moving the conversation from poetry into practice.
Your reflections on identity boundaries .... Me–We–They boundaries shape what we call greed, generosity, corruption, or commons. What looks like hoarding from one boundary may look like protection from another. Making those identity boundaries explicit is essential if we want transparency rather than moral abstraction.
... evolutionary framing is powerful. Much of what we call greed, hoarding, and exploitation may have once been survival strategies in ecosystems defined by immediate external threat. The leftover psychology of endangered humans may now be misfiring inside conditions where cooperation at scale is finally possible.
What keeps coming back to me is something simpler and more embodied:
That anyone can find themselves in a situation with other people where the first instinct is to help without negotiation. That a history of helping each other can grow into rich and healthy social soil over generations. That this may actually be our natural, healthy habitat.
To remember it.
To taste it.
To be it.
An abundance of care.
Describing it in every way possible. Imagine it. Draw it. Spread the word. Just so we know what we are looking for.
Home.
Ecos. Oikos. Kaya.
Noticing the traditions that bring us back there. The ones that protect our home, Earth. Spreading this care from person to person, to every bit of soil. Composting hoarded wealth that has become toxic back into what nourishes shared life.
For me, commitment pooling as protocol and cosmolocal.credit as growing infrastructure make that habitat visible and durable again. Not abstract idealism, but practical soil building. Tools that help us move from fear-based reflexes toward trained reciprocity. Home.
And yes, that requires examples, education and training.
and not just dating apps: https://willruddick.substack.com/p/this-isnt-a-dating-app
Beautiful and life giving. I regard myself as a de-churching 'Christian' in order to disassociate with the the Western corruption (contamination) of the way and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.
The way of being taught and modelled by Jesus resonates and echoes deeply with your writing. He too is understood to have "left the palace" to incarnate within the depths of our suffering, to "love enemies" while at the same time warning against harmful (harm causing) people (who have not yet seen the light). So your operational boundaries are relevant in his worldview too.
Agape, which he represented, can be defined as "other centred, self sacrificing, self giving, unconditional love". That kind of love, expressed in mutuality, within community, yields the kind of abundance that you describe. Not isolating or separating but engaging, inclusive, caring and kind.
Inverting my inherited worldview, to discover the loving origin of our Cosmos through Love's incarnation. Becoming brave enough to call my culture's bluff and walk away from darkness masquerading as light.
Thank you.
DJM
Most religions in the world can be divided into two categories: those arising from Indigenous traditions of hunter-gatherer or horticultural economies, where religions are conducive to mutual aid and other forms of value regeneration, and those arising from Empire state civilizations with religions that seem to better fit value extraction. Buddhism is one of those rare exceptions where a religion arises in the context of empire, and yet it is conducive to generative justice.
That gives it a certain set of conceptual tools that many Indigenous practices lack -- you can cite specific sutras, examine the written diagnosis it offers, etc. That allows it go global, becomes applied in many different locations, etc. It is a kind of digital version of the spiritual practices that are conducive to avoiding extractive economies.
On the other hand, I am guessing there are analog dimensions of the Indigenous religions, encoded in song and dance and rooted in local ecological practices, which are not available for global transplanting, and for that very reason have their own unique value when it comes to conceptual tools for generative justice.
What living systems don't carry both portable frameworks and rooted practices?
Even ancient rooted traditions hold transferable principles (reciprocity, restraint, relational accountability) alongside deeply place-based rituals. And even Buddhism, though textually portable, only lives through embodied, local practice.
In that sense, commitment pooling is also both rooted and portable. It names patterns that are already grounded in specific communities (shared labor, seasonal limits, trusted reserves), but it also offers a portable language that allows those commons to recognize each other and cooperate without being centralized.
... keeping those two dimensions in balance (portable insight and rooted participation) so that neither drifts toward abstraction or extraction.
Now we get to the question I was driving at. I think the two dimensions, abstraction and extraction, need to be handled in completely different ways. Abstraction is not the enemy, extraction is. We constantly confuse the two, because the rise in extraction (exploitation, inequality, etc.) often makes use of abstraction as a tool. On top of that, there is a feedback loop: the more extractive, the better it gets at making technologies of abstraction that are designed for extraction. So the key thing about Commitment Pooling is not that it is a technology of abstraction designed for generative justice, as if its the ultimate "techno-fix". It also has to be in a co-evolutionary feedback loop that keeps advancing those capabilities.
My guess is that its the feedback loop part of this in which the opposite of abstraction (concretization, localization) plays a key role. You phrased it as a question of "balance" but I think the challenge is more subtle than that. Its a question of how to advance the digital tools that abstraction can offer, such that anti-extractive localizations co-evolve with it. CP tools for protecting generative exchanges; advancing collective capabilities of value regeneration. SaraFuber (worker-owned uber) might be a localization, but a Sarafu App Maker (so that any idea like SaraFuber could be proposed and implimented by local workers as a collective enterprise) would be the universalized abstraction. Likewise, preventing the problems with foresight (as Uber failed to do when sexual harassment of female riders was reported) would need to be burned into its DNA, not added on later as mere "localization".
Extractive systems have become extremely good at using abstraction for concentration of power and value. But abstraction itself is not the enemy. It is simply a tool. The problem is not abstraction, but abstraction optimized for extraction.
Commitment Pooling is not meant to be a techno-fix. It is not a product. It is not an ideology. It is a protocol. A description of a minimal set of functions that make value exchange explicit: curation, valuation, limitation, and exchange.
In that sense, it is more like TCP/IP than Uber. TCP/IP reduces packet loss and enables flows across networks. Commitment Pooling reduces trust loss and enables flows across value exchange networks. It is simple enough to write down in four words.
What matters is the co-evolutionary loop you describe. Extractive abstraction centralizes. so-called 'generative abstraction' must do the opposite: strengthen local agency while allowing coordination across distance. Ancient Mweria, ROLAs, Sarafu, cosmolocal.credit are implementations that can be analyzed for fitness. Some will evolve better than others.
So I agree. The challenge is not “balance” in a static sense. It is building abstraction (as protocol) that improves its ability to protect generative exchange while localizations continuously shape and constrain it. Anti-extractive features cannot be patched on later. They must be part of the protocol DNA - and that is the entire point of commitment pooling protocol being extremely simple in that regard. It has been wonderful to see it propagate and connect across communities, individuals, businesses, universities, business networks.
Always exciting when we get our descriptions synchronized! I would only add that the struggle to define what CP is (not an ideology, not a product...) is worth reflection. "Protocol" is a good technical analogy, and "mycelia" a good biological analogy, but what about social analogies? Several come to mind. Robert's Rules of Order for example: a general framework for democratic "exchanges" just as you want a general framework for economic exchanges. Of course there are different versions of democratic process: consensus process, quadratic voting, etc. And perhaps CP operates more like a meta-democratic framework in which groups are free to choose from among those many versions.
Unfortunately analogies are only helpful when they simplify, and no one is going to think "meta-democratic" is easier to understand. Another analogy that comes to mind is the first amendment. Free speech, freedom of belief, right to assembly, right to petition. It almost maps on perfectly....
The moment we call Commitment Pooling (CP) an ideology, it narrows. The moment we call it a product, it commodifies. “Protocol” works because it suggests a grammar rather than a doctrine ..... rules for interaction without dictating content.
Robert’s Rules analogy is actually very strong. Robert’s Rules does not tell a group what to believe. It gives them a structure for exchange, sequencing, motion, amendment, and resolution. Consensus process does something similar with different assumptions about power and agreement. In that sense, CP feels less like a specific democratic model and more like a meta-layer that allows different coordination styles to operate within a shared accounting grammar.
I also love the First Amendment analogy. It’s not a policy preference..... it’s an enabling condition. It doesn’t tell you what to say, believe, or assemble around. It protects the space in which those things can occur. That’s close to what unenclosed Commitment pooling networks are trying to do economically: protect and formalize the space in which commitments can be made, tracked, limited, and exchanged without requiring a central authority to define their meaning.
Maybe one way to say it socially is this: CP is a civic infrastructure for economic speech. It doesn’t tell you what promises to make. It provides the grammar, memory, and limits through which promises can circulate.
perhaps “meta-democratic” is not the simplest phrase. But your intuition is important here: CP doesn’t replace governance traditions. It gives them a metabolic substrate. More like .... plumbing?
You don’t argue about plumbing as a belief system. You argue about what flows through it, who controls the valves, and whether it leaks or concentrates 💩.
Good to keep reflecting on this. The purity of protocol, mathematical structures and trust graphs across polycentric systems are simply toy models.
Hahaha! Love how we start out grandiose (nature's secret of the universe! democracy's sacred principles!) only to discover that the best way to keep it real is thinking about good plumbing. Indeed that is why it is so tempting to always use tech metaphors, we assume technology is neutral. "You don't argue about plumbing as a belief system". But that's not actually true. Lead pipes are still poisoning people; half-assed plumbing for poor folks, and good plumbing for rich folks, is still commonplace, still justified by belief systems. Which, as you rightly point out, is why we need to get Sarafu's protocols right, and think through all the implementations as it expands into social (not merely technical) domains.