The strength of the commitment pool protocol seems to me to be capable of enrichment from a complementary angle. To support my approach, I wish to cite this passage which revisits a number of elements that I will reuse (even though the complete text is much richer and more complex than the excerpt I choose to serve my point):
"In this sense, a commitment pool resembles a market less and a living organ more, where community credit and community debt breathe against each other with a rhythm. It may resemble 'local money/community currency,' or mutual credit at first glance, but the center of gravity is different: the vouchers are specific repayable commitments with explicit conditions and windows; the pool is 'curated' (what counts is listed), indexed (the evaluation is public and governed), and limited (limits prevent runs and predation); and repayment is a first-class outcome, not an afterthought. The goal is not a universal token or coin - these are responsible promises that can compose and route value without dissolving into abstraction."
The end of the text would allow for differentiating currency (universal tokens or coins) from responsible promises. These responsible promises would possess the power to avoid dissolving into abstraction.
This end of the text could therefore imply that abstraction would lose us. Abstraction in itself is a psychic faculty that can help us. I willingly give the example of the questioning of Ptolemy's geocentric system in favor of Galileo's heliocentric system. The adoption of the latter was quite long and difficult given the upheaval it implied. It was a form of decentralization of power, which is never without consequences...
Abstraction has been studied more specifically or more scientifically by the psychologist Peter Wason, who left a strong mark with his test of the 4 cards A-D-4-7.
The classic Wason selection task:
Four cards are placed on a table, each with a letter on one side and a number on the other. The visible faces are: A, D, 4, 7. The rule to verify is: "If a card has an A on one face, then it has a 4 on the other face." Participants must choose which cards to turn over (and only those) to verify whether the rule is true or false."
The answer is easily found on the internet. The interest of this task for my point lies in the series of results that this test revealed.
The correct answer from an individually tested public is only 4%.
Many studies have been conducted based on this test, but two results seem particularly relevant to the commitment pool protocol.
1) A group of 4-5 people together raises the success rate to around 60%.
2) If the "abstract" cards are changed to a proposition related to an experiential lived reality, and no longer "tokens" of numbers and letters but products concretely used daily, the correct answers become higher than 70%.
The commitment pool protocol therefore combines the two success conditions of this task. That is, the possibility of making abstraction explicit. This protocol, compared to mutual credit or currency which individualizes abstraction, therefore has more capacity to avoid the manipulation of abstraction for personal ends or for purposes of domination through differences in abstraction capacity. This implicitly favors the creation of trust, which reverberates in coherence. It pushes "insider trading" to the margins.
The need for concreteness (Earth) does not exclude the need for abstraction (sky), just as earthly rivers do not exclude celestial rivers (https://substack.com/inbox/post/183052578). The two kinds of rivers are therefore interdependent, just as the psychic and the biological are. The biological metaphor can sometimes tend toward the exclusion of abstraction, but we are not quite ants or mycelium. The mental dimension of the human being allows them to abstract themselves from their direct sensory context... also for the worst. In my opinion, this faculty simply needs to be re-evaluated, limited (regulated), and exchanged within an ethical commitment pool. This is obviously already the case in many areas, but old patterns easily reappear under stress.
It therefore seems to me that this protocol deserves to be developed and deepened to give it a dimension on a larger scale. For this, validation both through direct experiences and through solid conceptual formulation is, in my view, underway.
just like the end of "can we scale trust" The honest conclusion isn’t despair - it’s design work.
this conceptualization can be enriched with different points of view, and I appreciate the various comments that illuminate this work from different angles.
Thanks Aude! I once got to hear Bookchin; a small group in the 1980s in San Francisco. The audience was old folks and a young punk rock crowd (some affiliated with the "bound together" book collective). Bookchin paused at one point and asked everyone to join him in an "Ommmmm" chant--the punks rebelled, one of the oldsters scolded them, chaos ensued. As you said, there were sectarian edges which, in retrospect, needed to happen so that we can start to see the underlying commonalities expressed today in "commitment pools" (CP) and other forms of networking.
All of which makes me wonder: are there good models for how CPs can be formed on the basis of institutions rather than individuals? Keeping the model of 4 modes--curation, valuation, limitation, exchange--but between institutions? Somewhat akin to your description of what Bookchin says here:
"he argued for institutions as living organs: municipal assemblies, federations of councils, public administration that is competent without being statist, and cooperative economies that are not simply markets dressed in homespun. Late in life he rearticulated this as Communalism (an explicit, post-anarchist municipalism) and argued sharply against forms of anarchism that treated personal expression as a substitute for building durable public institutions."
love the story. Very cool. the “Ommmmm” moment feels like a perfect miniature of the era. ... charismatic individuals are sometimes crucial. They can catalyze a room, name a conflict, or force clarity. The trouble is when the whole system depends on charisma to function.
I think commitment pooling is already happening at the institutional level, whether we call it that or not. Most institutions are effectively systems of overlapping pools (budgets, obligations, inventories, roles, IOUs, reputational credit, reciprocity agreements). CPP is just a way to make that substrate explicit and translatable.
TBH I’m not sure there are many “other forms of networking” that don’t involve some version of those four modes. If you have examples in mind, I’d genuinely love to hear them ... because even informal networks usually still curate (who/what counts), value (what matters), limit (capacity/boundaries), and exchange (resources/info/commitments), just implicitly.
Institutions can absolutely make commitments ... I think the key is coherence: that the institution’s commitments remain aligned with (or at least reconcilable with) the commitments of the agents that comprise it. Individuals, groups, co-ops, clinics, councils ... all can issue and pool commitments. And stewardship of a pool is itself a commitment (to curation/valuation/limits/settlement under clear rules).
So what’s the “good model” for CPs in and between institutions? For me it’s confederation as a fractal: commitments nesting and overlapping from individuals → teams > orgs > federations > bioregional networks. The strength isn’t any single entity holding curation, valuation, limitation, and exchange under stress ... it’s the network becoming robust enough that those functions can be distributed, rotated, and backed up across pools. The stronger the confederated mesh, the less any one person (or any one institutional pool) has to carry the whole load when pressure hits.
And the “fractal” point runs all the way down: even a so-called individual person has to maintain coherence across many agentic parts ... conscious intentions and unconscious patterns, nervous system and emotions, body and environment. In that sense a person is already an institution: a living confederation of sub-systems making commitments, setting limits, and settling exchanges internally. If we can’t coordinate within ourselves, it’s hard to coordinate between households, co-ops, and municipalities ... so the same coherence problem (and the same promise-making practice) scales up and down.
And when coherence is low (or actively failing - hello world?) in a person or an institution, they often lean on the surrounding mesh for strength: the overlapping pools around them provide redundancy, rhythm, and repair. In a healthy confederation, you don’t have to be perfectly integrated to participate; the network can hold capacity, slow the pace, absorb shocks, and help restore coherence over time.
And your “Ommmm” moment is such a perfect little parable of coherence under stress. Bookchin reached for a shared ritual to synchronize the room; the punks rejected what felt like imposed unity; an elder tried to enforce order; suddenly the group’s coherence flipped into polarization. In hindsight, it’s not “who was right,” it’s what the moment revealed: coherence can’t be commanded, it has to be earned ...... through shared context, consent, clear boundaries, and enough trust that coordination doesn’t feel like submission (NVC protocols are amazing for this).
That’s the same challenge at every scale: inside a person, inside an institution, and inside a confederation of pools. When coherence is fragile, the surrounding network matters even more ..... not to force everyone into the same chant, but to hold enough redundancy and care that difference doesn’t instantly become rupture.
The strength of the commitment pool protocol seems to me to be capable of enrichment from a complementary angle. To support my approach, I wish to cite this passage which revisits a number of elements that I will reuse (even though the complete text is much richer and more complex than the excerpt I choose to serve my point):
"In this sense, a commitment pool resembles a market less and a living organ more, where community credit and community debt breathe against each other with a rhythm. It may resemble 'local money/community currency,' or mutual credit at first glance, but the center of gravity is different: the vouchers are specific repayable commitments with explicit conditions and windows; the pool is 'curated' (what counts is listed), indexed (the evaluation is public and governed), and limited (limits prevent runs and predation); and repayment is a first-class outcome, not an afterthought. The goal is not a universal token or coin - these are responsible promises that can compose and route value without dissolving into abstraction."
The end of the text would allow for differentiating currency (universal tokens or coins) from responsible promises. These responsible promises would possess the power to avoid dissolving into abstraction.
This end of the text could therefore imply that abstraction would lose us. Abstraction in itself is a psychic faculty that can help us. I willingly give the example of the questioning of Ptolemy's geocentric system in favor of Galileo's heliocentric system. The adoption of the latter was quite long and difficult given the upheaval it implied. It was a form of decentralization of power, which is never without consequences...
Abstraction has been studied more specifically or more scientifically by the psychologist Peter Wason, who left a strong mark with his test of the 4 cards A-D-4-7.
The classic Wason selection task:
Four cards are placed on a table, each with a letter on one side and a number on the other. The visible faces are: A, D, 4, 7. The rule to verify is: "If a card has an A on one face, then it has a 4 on the other face." Participants must choose which cards to turn over (and only those) to verify whether the rule is true or false."
The answer is easily found on the internet. The interest of this task for my point lies in the series of results that this test revealed.
The correct answer from an individually tested public is only 4%.
96% of people do not find the correct answer. https://www.psychologyinaction.org/2012-10-07-classic-psychology-experiments-wason-selection-task-part-i/
Many studies have been conducted based on this test, but two results seem particularly relevant to the commitment pool protocol.
1) A group of 4-5 people together raises the success rate to around 60%.
2) If the "abstract" cards are changed to a proposition related to an experiential lived reality, and no longer "tokens" of numbers and letters but products concretely used daily, the correct answers become higher than 70%.
The commitment pool protocol therefore combines the two success conditions of this task. That is, the possibility of making abstraction explicit. This protocol, compared to mutual credit or currency which individualizes abstraction, therefore has more capacity to avoid the manipulation of abstraction for personal ends or for purposes of domination through differences in abstraction capacity. This implicitly favors the creation of trust, which reverberates in coherence. It pushes "insider trading" to the margins.
The need for concreteness (Earth) does not exclude the need for abstraction (sky), just as earthly rivers do not exclude celestial rivers (https://substack.com/inbox/post/183052578). The two kinds of rivers are therefore interdependent, just as the psychic and the biological are. The biological metaphor can sometimes tend toward the exclusion of abstraction, but we are not quite ants or mycelium. The mental dimension of the human being allows them to abstract themselves from their direct sensory context... also for the worst. In my opinion, this faculty simply needs to be re-evaluated, limited (regulated), and exchanged within an ethical commitment pool. This is obviously already the case in many areas, but old patterns easily reappear under stress.
It therefore seems to me that this protocol deserves to be developed and deepened to give it a dimension on a larger scale. For this, validation both through direct experiences and through solid conceptual formulation is, in my view, underway.
just like the end of "can we scale trust" The honest conclusion isn’t despair - it’s design work.
this conceptualization can be enriched with different points of view, and I appreciate the various comments that illuminate this work from different angles.
He did not ask us to be greener consumers; he asked us to become worthy neighbours and builders of free institutions.
Thanks Aude! I once got to hear Bookchin; a small group in the 1980s in San Francisco. The audience was old folks and a young punk rock crowd (some affiliated with the "bound together" book collective). Bookchin paused at one point and asked everyone to join him in an "Ommmmm" chant--the punks rebelled, one of the oldsters scolded them, chaos ensued. As you said, there were sectarian edges which, in retrospect, needed to happen so that we can start to see the underlying commonalities expressed today in "commitment pools" (CP) and other forms of networking.
All of which makes me wonder: are there good models for how CPs can be formed on the basis of institutions rather than individuals? Keeping the model of 4 modes--curation, valuation, limitation, exchange--but between institutions? Somewhat akin to your description of what Bookchin says here:
"he argued for institutions as living organs: municipal assemblies, federations of councils, public administration that is competent without being statist, and cooperative economies that are not simply markets dressed in homespun. Late in life he rearticulated this as Communalism (an explicit, post-anarchist municipalism) and argued sharply against forms of anarchism that treated personal expression as a substitute for building durable public institutions."
love the story. Very cool. the “Ommmmm” moment feels like a perfect miniature of the era. ... charismatic individuals are sometimes crucial. They can catalyze a room, name a conflict, or force clarity. The trouble is when the whole system depends on charisma to function.
I think commitment pooling is already happening at the institutional level, whether we call it that or not. Most institutions are effectively systems of overlapping pools (budgets, obligations, inventories, roles, IOUs, reputational credit, reciprocity agreements). CPP is just a way to make that substrate explicit and translatable.
TBH I’m not sure there are many “other forms of networking” that don’t involve some version of those four modes. If you have examples in mind, I’d genuinely love to hear them ... because even informal networks usually still curate (who/what counts), value (what matters), limit (capacity/boundaries), and exchange (resources/info/commitments), just implicitly.
Institutions can absolutely make commitments ... I think the key is coherence: that the institution’s commitments remain aligned with (or at least reconcilable with) the commitments of the agents that comprise it. Individuals, groups, co-ops, clinics, councils ... all can issue and pool commitments. And stewardship of a pool is itself a commitment (to curation/valuation/limits/settlement under clear rules).
So what’s the “good model” for CPs in and between institutions? For me it’s confederation as a fractal: commitments nesting and overlapping from individuals → teams > orgs > federations > bioregional networks. The strength isn’t any single entity holding curation, valuation, limitation, and exchange under stress ... it’s the network becoming robust enough that those functions can be distributed, rotated, and backed up across pools. The stronger the confederated mesh, the less any one person (or any one institutional pool) has to carry the whole load when pressure hits.
And the “fractal” point runs all the way down: even a so-called individual person has to maintain coherence across many agentic parts ... conscious intentions and unconscious patterns, nervous system and emotions, body and environment. In that sense a person is already an institution: a living confederation of sub-systems making commitments, setting limits, and settling exchanges internally. If we can’t coordinate within ourselves, it’s hard to coordinate between households, co-ops, and municipalities ... so the same coherence problem (and the same promise-making practice) scales up and down.
And when coherence is low (or actively failing - hello world?) in a person or an institution, they often lean on the surrounding mesh for strength: the overlapping pools around them provide redundancy, rhythm, and repair. In a healthy confederation, you don’t have to be perfectly integrated to participate; the network can hold capacity, slow the pace, absorb shocks, and help restore coherence over time.
And your “Ommmm” moment is such a perfect little parable of coherence under stress. Bookchin reached for a shared ritual to synchronize the room; the punks rejected what felt like imposed unity; an elder tried to enforce order; suddenly the group’s coherence flipped into polarization. In hindsight, it’s not “who was right,” it’s what the moment revealed: coherence can’t be commanded, it has to be earned ...... through shared context, consent, clear boundaries, and enough trust that coordination doesn’t feel like submission (NVC protocols are amazing for this).
That’s the same challenge at every scale: inside a person, inside an institution, and inside a confederation of pools. When coherence is fragile, the surrounding network matters even more ..... not to force everyone into the same chant, but to hold enough redundancy and care that difference doesn’t instantly become rupture.