After over a year working together, we had our first in-person consortium meeting of ATARCA! On June 8 2022, 19 members from all the organizations participating in the project got together in Barcelona for three days where we were able to have very productive meetings about different aspects of the project. For many, thsi was the first time we met in person, and we were able to get to know each other better and spend time together.

It was a very good opportunity to have a retrospective session of our first year of the project, to identify the best practices and the results we have achieved until now, plan the next months of the project and analyze what could be improved, taking into account the constructive feedback received by the EC at the end of May during the mid-review.

We had the chance to present the Green Shops pilot in Barcelona and the Streamr use case to all the attendees. Being together was really helpful to discuss key points that can help to make the most of the experiments. We also organized a communication workshop to think about how to reach a broader audience that can be interested in the project and talked about the possibilities of giving continuity to the work that we are doing after the end of the project.

Hopefully we will be able to meet again soon!

STARTING POINTS

Web3, blockchain and decentralised technologies are moving forward at extraordinary speeds. These technologies create avenues for positive changes in our economies, and can be used to challenge existing extractive economic structures.

Let’s begin from our end-goal: what is the economy we strive to build? What does it look like and how does it work? Together, Demos Helsinki and ATARCA are imagining how we can leverage DLTs to build more sustainable and fair economic models and practices.

THE POLICY OBSERVATORY

The 2nd ATARCA Policy Observatory was hosted by Demos Helsinki on June 1st 2022. The goal was to share perspectives and explore the potential of leveraging decentralised technologies to build fairer and more sustainable economies.

To meet this ambitious goal, we gathered together policymakers, researchers, and practitioners from  blockchain, anti-rivalry, commons, economics, and web3 backgrounds to imagine and explore where we could and should go with such technologies.

We began the session with an introduction from Johannes Mikkonen from Demos Helsinki, who spoke about how the anti-rival nature of digital goods creates opportunities for alternative futures of the data economy, beyond the false scarcity and competition that define it today. The strength of anti-rival resources, including digital goods, is that they gain value the more they are used. Mikkonen proposed three directions for a new data economy:

• Regenerative value creation. We need new value creation models and distribution mechanisms that take into account the societal and communal value of economic interaction and data sharing. We need to create non-extractive models and mechanisms to support collaboration, creativity and collective capabilities.
• Emancipatory collaboration and economic interaction. Digital platforms have shown their power in increasing the capabilities of individual actors, and by consequence, contributing to building fairer economies . However we need to guarantee that these new capabilities are enjoyed by everyone and the benefits of them are shared equally.
• Inclusive economic development. It is imperative that we identify and conduct new ways of organising and orchestrating our interactions and collaborations. Decentralisation should not come to mean even more predatory forms of privatisation as has been seen with some Web3 initiatives, but instead contribute to wider emancipation and democratisation.

Following Mikkonen’s introductory speech, three panelists presented on the potential of DLT-based solutions for social good: James Muldoon, Sandra Uwantege Hart, and Julio Linares. First, James Muldoon, Head of Digital Research at Autonomy, talked about the need for the democratisation of digital platforms. Sandra Uwantege-Hart, an advisor on the use of blockchain in emerging markets and development programming, shared her experiences with using blockchain in humanitarian work. Finally, Julio Linares from Circles UBI talked about community currencies and blockchain-based universal basic income. Sandra Uwantege-Hart, an advisor on the use of blockchain in emerging markets and development programming, shared her experiences with using blockchain in humanitarian work.

Additionally, we had the opportunity to have small group discussions allowing us to exchange not only our excitement and ideas, but also our struggles and setbacks in the world of DLTs and technology. As rapidly as we are moving ahead in this space, many central roadblocks remain. Our discussions opened up these tensions.

LEARNINGS AND TAKE-AWAYS

A host of questions emerged from our group discussions:

• How can we rethink money altogether?
• We still depend on real-world ecosystems, so how can we build things in existing structures?
• Since our economies depend on real-world structures, how can we embed technologies within these existing structures?
• We should create new institutions which would facilitate redistribution and exchange. How to do this?
• In building sustainable economies with technology, should we begin or end with policy change?
• How can we keep the powerful and influential people in this space accountable?
• Can anti-rivalry even be codified? And what would this look like (A policy? A practice?)

In order to reach the futures we want to create, we need to, before all else, cultivate conditions to allow for this change to be possible. The following requirements emerged from our discussions. In other words, this is what we need to foster:

• To continue testing and pushing for technologies in ‘unconventional’ environments, it’s one way that technologies will organically develop
• Institutional adoption and long term user adoption of decentralised technologies
• Increased digital literacy wildly in the society
• New legal frameworks
• Political will
• Trust in societal institutions
• A multitude of diverse voices and discussions in the development of DLT solutions
• To talk about our larger values as societies, not only technical values. The conversation is more encompassing than we may think.

These conversations would not have been possible without the honest and inspiring contributions from our panelists. Find out more about Circles UBI and Julio’s work here, The UnBlocked Cash project that Sandra created here, and James Muldoon’s book Platform Socialism here.

WHERE TO FROM HERE?

The 3rd Policy Observatory will be organised in the Fall of 2022 to go deeper with the recommendations for the future of data economy and markets.

The upcoming session will pave the way to compiling a set of policy recommendations to the European Commission to be published in Spring 2023.

We look forward to our next session!

For more information, please get in touch with us.

Johannes Mikkonen, johannes.mikkonen@demoshelsinki.fi

Anna Björk, anna.bjork@demoshelsinki.fi

Atte Ojanen, atte.ojanen@demoshelsinki.fi

Emma de Carvalho, emma.decarvalho@helsinki.fi

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Photo by mauro mora on Unsplash

In June, we released our report on the crypto-economic mechanisms for anti-rival goods, one of the public facing deliverables of our project. In this report, we outline the logic behind the tokens we employ in each of our three use cases.

“Thus, the purpose of this document is to report our current and evolving understanding of the potential of designing anti-rival systems; our focus is particularly in how we can use crypto-economic mechanisms to incentivize the production of anti-rival resources and to facilitate value creation and sharing in anti-rival systems. Ultimately, we aim to reveal potential mechanisms to capture, through cryptographic tokenization, some of the positive externalities of such systems“

Read the deliverable here, and access other project deliverables and relevant resources here:

While the global economy is increasingly centered around data, the data economy and markets remain flawed. We still depend on centuries-old assumptions of scarcity that do not hold for digital goods, which are abundant. The H2020-research project ATARCA suggests that many digital goods are anti-rival by nature: they gain value the more they are shared. Therefore, they fundamentally challenge current economic structures and institutions. Anti-rival goods also pose untapped potential for more sustainable socio-economic structures, such as local cooperatives. However, current economic and political structures and institutions are not prepared to handle anti-rival goods. That’s why we gathered around 30 researchers, policymakers and experts to the first ATARCA Policy Observatory session on 25 November 2021 to discuss these issues. 

Three lighting talks provided inspirational openings on fundamentals of anti-rival goods, practical experimentation with them and how the current European policy landscape facilitates this.

Dr Sonja Amadae, the Co-Principal Investigator of ATARCA discussed the project’s anti-rival use cases and defined their policy implications. Dr Amadae highlighted how the concept of anti-rivalry can enable data sharing for a greater purpose: for example, environmental sustainability in the food supply chain. She introduced ATARCA’s Food Futures Index, a self-curated database that gathers data on food production and its impact on air, water, nutrition, and animal welfare. The FFI supports more informed decision-making on sustainable food consumption by consumers. It also incentivises user contributions to the index through tokens earned for positive impact, which can potentially be turned into environmental certificates, discounts or subsidies on a community level.

Jordan Hall, founder of multiple disruptive technology companies and decentralised governance expert, underlined the transformational nature of anti-rival goods. He argued that anti-rivalry is not an invented concept but something that exists naturally in reality—just like rivalry and non-rivalry. Despite this, society is not entirely ready to accept anti-rivalry yet; this requires a profound shift. He likened this shift to riding a new type of bicycle: we must accept that we will fall but we have to keep trying. The central question is: what does it mean to cultivate anti-rival relationships?

Dr Joachim Schwerin, a Principal Economist in DG GROW, Unit G/3 Digital Transformation of Industry, shed light on the EU Commission policy perspective on the token economy. The decentralisation of data requires a whole new approach to policy and regulation. Emerging Commission policies, such as MiCA (Markets in Crypto Assets), support regulatory sandboxes to foster innovation in distributed ledger technology (DLT) such as blockchain. In a nascent field like this, policymakers must look at local projects, like REC, to further their understanding of the needs that arise. The need for experimentation is also reflected in the emerging understanding of the nature of data, spearheaded by policies such as the GDPR that aim to empower citizens to control their ‘own’ data. To end, Dr Schwerin called for a need to keep the approach radical as ATARCA moves forward in experimenting with digital assets.

Challenges of the data economy

These insights and the following discussion eased the participants into group work on the current challenges of the data economy:

First, many of the identified challenges gravitated around artificial scarcity, in other words trying to apply existing economic logic to data and other abundant anti-rival goods. Anti-rival resources are unlikely to be governed well with systems used for scarce resources. Paywalls in news sites were raised multiple times as examples of digital product features that artificially create rivalry to fit the existing economic paradigm.

Second, the anti-rival goods connectedness to other digital technologies emerged in the discussion as one of the key points. Anti-rival innovations and decentralisation are tied to other emerging initiatives—like ethical and transparent data, trustworthy AI and privacy preservation techniques. Similarly, anti-rivalry is linked to data portability, missing incentives to share data (while also considering privacy and inclusion of marginalised citizens) and technological investment for these purposes, especially within SMEs. Due to these parallels, one has to look at anti-rivality holistically, not merely focusing on blockchain-specific policies like MiCA.

Third, existing cultural norms, expectations and conceptions of data arise as one of the central challenges. Participants noted that data and tokens are a residue or historical record of action, thereby putting the focus on anti-rivality of the underlying action. Decentralised systems function quite differently from the current centralised ones, making decentralised solutions difficult to implement. This mandates a shift in mindsets. Moreover, even in the Blockchain space, the discourse revolves around Bitcoin and ETH mining, overshadowing new protocols and advancements such as Proof of Elapsed Time.

Anti-rival opportunities to solve the challenges

In the group discussion, many participants focused on how the tragedy of the commons could be alleviated—especially in the case of environmental degradation. Anti-rival attestation systems like open CO2 registries or markets could increase transparency through decentralised records based on DLT, thereby helping to tackle climate change while empowering local communities in the process.

Some participants considered DLT-solutions an anti-rival technology per se because of its decentralised nature, while others were more sceptical of the whole concept: data-driven business models are founded on scarcity, and data sharing removes the incentives to provide service at all. To what extent can anti-rival thinking challenge monopolies or escape the existing rival practices?

Implications for policies

According to the workshop participants, one of the possible policy implications of anti-rival technologies could be tax reform. As anti-rival economies and non-payment currencies expand, they challenge the current national taxation systems by legitimising the informal economy. The existing policy regimes cannot keep up with disruptive technologies, so governments need to adopt a vision-driven approach to applying DLT rather than purely reactive regulation. For example, they could first identify existing social problems that blockchain can solve, for example by fostering local data commons and currencies and only then building a political strategy to that end. Governments could also prioritise funding (e.g., through Horizon Europe) that focuses on the ‘evolvability’ of technological systems by the users themselves.

Finally, the discussion illuminated ATARCA’s links to existing EU priorities, such as bolstering data economy and data sharing. Better sharing of industrial data within the single market is already one of the main goals of policies such as the Data Governance Act, yet the incentives for such altruistic sharing are still largely missing. This is where the anti-rival goods and economy can play an important role. This was also echoed by J. Scott Marcus, a Senior Fellow at Bruegel, who in his closing remarks drew parallels between anti-rivalry and concepts of conventional economic theory such as network effects and natural monopolies. Traditional economics can teach us a great deal about anti-rival services, such as how to approach the adoption curve, tendency to monopoly and network effects of platform companies.

The ATARCA Policy Observatory brings stakeholders together to explore anti-rival economics

The disruptive potential of anti-rival economics and tokens need to be explored through extensive stakeholder engagement. The ATARCA Policy Observatory sessions aim to create and share policy understanding of anti-rival economics in the context of data economy and tokens. The process consists of four Observatories that address different dimensions of ATARCA’s core questions:

The session marked the first observatory session of ATARCA, but the work continues. Through the observatories, we will keep exploring opportunities of anti-rival goods to support building fairer and more sustainable socio-economic structures, and identify the required policies and changes for anti-rival governance to foster economic development. The process will result in concrete policy recommendations.

We wish to thank all the participants and look forward to seeing you in future Policy Observatories!

Anna Björk

Johannes Mikkonen

Atte Ojanen

Claire Shaw

Katariina Viljamaa

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Accounting Technologies for Anti-Rival Coordination and Allocation (ATARCA) focuses on technological development and use cases for anti-rival tokenism. It aims to discover new ways to organise the digital markets, which have been failing because we have been busy organising them around the established categories of economic thinking. This is however an insufficient approach to understanding and realising the potential of digital markets since they open up new horizons and logic for human economic interaction and behaviour.

By Claire Shaw, Aalto University

The concept of a digital citizen remains somewhat contested, depending on who offers the definition. In the beginning of discussions on digital citizenship, the emphasis was placed on access to the internet and the skills to use it. As internet access has become more prolific, more recent discourse instead focuses on how digital citizens use the internet. In this view, a digital citizen actively takes part in the online world, building connections in a respectful and responsible way.

With the rise of AI, decentralized platforms, and distributed ledger technologies, the shift into Web 3  requires the next iteration of digital citizenship. Web 3 (also known as Web 3.0) calls for a more transparent and equal internet built on collaboration and trust. A digital citizen in this context, then, holds three characteristics:

(1) has the skills to use the internet,

(2) uses it responsibly and respectfully (e.g., no trolling), and

(3) actively contributes to digital communities while critically reflecting on the benefits and risks of participation.

In this way, a Web 3 Digital Citizen does not necessarily have a political affiliation, but is a citizen of a digital community that can be local or global.

Anti-rivalry, while a somewhat new concept, offers an understanding of data that supports the development of digital citizenship. Anti-rivalry refers to the property of goods that increase in value as more people use it (consider, for example, the concept of Wikipedia). By approaching digital resources and activities from an anti-rival perspective, we can promote structures that incentivize sharing and collaboration, rather than artificial scarcity. This can enable a digital environment centred on co-creation, support, and communication, instead of profit.

In the H2020 research project ATARCA, we are experimenting with anti-rival use cases that combine digital citizenship with real world impact. The Food Futures Index is a digital and self-curated index of the variables impacted by the food supply chain, such as water, nutrition, and animal welfare. Participants are able to reflect on their food choices by viewing these variables and make decisions based on their priorities, for example, sustainability. At the same time, users are encouraged to authorize the collection of their own data through tokenization. The aggregate data allows for a greater understanding of the food choices in their offline communities. The more a participant contributes (and the more participants that contribute), the greater the benefit to the wider community. By taking part in the Food Futures Index, a user becomes a digital citizen through their active participation.

While Web 3 may not yet be fully embraced by all, it is clearly indicative of a growing desire for a bottoms-up approach to the internet. By adopting an anti-rival understanding of data, we can promote the collaborative attitude needed for such a transition.

Photo by note thanun on Unsplash