Welcome to the Decentralization Research Center report, a monthly briefing on events and research relevant to decentralization, DAOs and governance.

This Month’s Updates

Key Notes

With the current dominance of just a few key players defining the AI race, calls for democratized and decentralized versions of AI continue to grow. In this context, we feature Shared Code: Democratizing AI Companies, a guide from Nathan Schneider, Divya Siddarth, and Joal Stein that offers AI companies a set of viable and achievable options for democratizing the governance structures of their organizations. The Public AI Network has also release their own paper calling for public AI, and these, along with the call from Mozilla last month, represent a new wave of efforts to achieve more equitable AI ownership and governance.

In a thought-provoking piece, Sunset and Renew, Jaron Lanier, Allison Stanger, and Audrey Tang argue that Section 230 requires an overhaul: “To truly uphold First Amendment freedoms, we must hold accountable the algorithms that drive harmful virality while protecting human expression.”

And, as predicted in our paper, AI and Democracy’s Digital Identity Crisis, governments at odds with US interests deployed AI-enabled impersonation and disinformation campaigns in the US election.

The Full Rundown

Other stories and research we’ve been tracking for you:

• As citizens’ assemblies gain prominence as a form of decentralizing power and allowing bottom-up decisions to gain legislative traction, Democracy Next presents their Assembling an Assembly Guide.

• The Ethereum Foundation has released its annual report for 2024, highlighting the teams, grants and institutions that make up its ecosystem and looking at how these help enable the core goals of “long term thinking, subtraction, and stewardship of values.”

• Democracy 2.0: “The opportunities afforded by AI to make governance better are unprecedented in human history.” A paper by Eric Schmidt.

• Examining how decentralized tech can preserve election integrity, Kinsman contends that we’re soon reaching the point where discerning what’s real is going to be virtually impossible, particularly in the context of politics.

• Vlad Zamfir argues that we’re squandering the potential of decentralized technology while prioritizing financial opportunism and insiderism. By understanding blockchains in terms of time, not money, he believes we can change that dynamic.

• As diminished state capacity leads to civic disengagement as governments fail to meet public expectations, Jennifer Pahlka advocates for understanding bureaucratic constraints and using AI to build government capacity for more effective governance.

• Mona Hamdy, Johnnie Moore, and E. Glen Weyl advocate for an inclusive, participatory framework that fosters collaboration between technology and society, offering an alternative to the dominant techno-ideologies of Libertarianism and Technocracy.

• Centered on the collective creation of new vocal datasets, governance frameworks and polyphonic AI models, The Call positions the process of data collection and AI model-training as artmaking.

• “Vetocracy,” polarization, and how “observing that AI could be used for good is like observing that bulldozers could be used to help build affordable public housing. It is possible, of course, but is it likely?” A paper by Lawrence Lessig.

• Project Liberty provides a brief overview and multiple avenues for exploration on the topic of interoperability, a sometimes forgotten yet fundamental part of the internet’s ability to decentralize, or centralize, power

If you’re working on related research or would like to get involved in our work, please reach out to us via [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you!

Connor Spelliscy
Executive Director
Decentralization Research Center