@balajis.eth

THE RESTORATION OF FRIEND SPEECH ($2048 PRIZE) Farcaster began as a community of friends — specifically Dan Romero’s friends-of-friends — and it thus implicitly had the social norm of friend speech. It was really Friendcaster. However, it couldn’t maintain that norm at scale, in part because it lacked an army of human moderators to enforce its pre-existing terms of service. And thus Farcaster was on track to fail. But with the ~95% support we’ve received in our recent decentralized digital democratic election, we now have a mandate for the restoration of Farcaster. With scalable AI moderation, we can finally create the first digital Singapore, where an in-person level of civility facilitates a high-trust community, and thus a high-value digital economy. And we couldn’t be more excited about what’s next. So: let’s discuss our recent election, the motivation for the restoration, and the economic importance of civility. At the end we’ll close with a new kind of Farcaster Prize: $2048 in content prizes, for creating vertical videos on Norbert Elias’ book on why civility was actually essential for large-scale cooperation rather than a mere nice-to-have. 1. THE ELECTION First, some numbers on our first decentralized democratic election. As you can see from fc.dylanbrodeur.org and verify onchain, we received 26,000+ onchain votes for our new social smart contract, representing ~95% of all accounts that voted, and including many of the original Farcaster users, including both previous CEOs (@dwr and @rish), but also Linda Xie, Jesse Pollak, Alok Vasudev, and many others. The silent supermajority is silent no longer; there’s now overwhelming, cryptographically provable support by named accounts for the restoration of friend speech to Farcaster. Importantly, prior to the election on October 17, we moderated out only 271 abusive accounts, or about 1% of the 26,000+ onchain votes. Of those 271 accounts, we received 85 appeals and have accepted ~67% of them. The remaining ~200 unapologetically abusive accounts repeatedly violated the pre-existing Farcaster terms of service, by doing things like issuing memecoins to celebrate the murder of an innocent father, wishing death on specific people, promoting every kind of racial, class, gender, national and religious hatred, harassing named others with random obscenities, and running an endless array of spammers and bots. Many of these abusive accounts were already widely blocked or muted. However, despite being less than 1% of the Farcaster electorate, the abusers formed a loud, mean, unrepresentative minority who intimidated friendly accounts into silence. The answer to such a thing is democracy: our ~95% of pro-social netizens now provably outnumbers that abusive ~1%. In addition to the ~1% that we moderated out, there’s also another ~4% who chose to opt out of the new Farcaster. While of course on one level we’d like everyone to want our newly abuse-and-harassment-free Farcaster reference client, on another level we’re glad to see this because (a) it proves there was a true democratic choice as a sufficient number actually did choose to opt out and (b) it helps advance Farcaster client decentralization. Fundamentally, the core difference of opinion is over whether anyone actually has a “right” to run up to strangers online and endlessly scream curses at their digital faces, and moreover whether others must not just endure but *fund* such abuse indefinitely. Such behavior had unfortunately become too common on Farcaster, which is why we held the plebiscite, but we just don’t agree that this claimed right to free screams exists within the reference client. It's good that those people who think differently chose other clients and opted out; that's the magic of Farcaster. For everyone else, for the ~95% of accounts that opted in, let’s give a bit more history on why we’re committed to restoring the original Farcaster norms of friend speech, and then scaling that norm to digital Singapore with AI. 2. THE RESTORATION What was the original purpose of Farcaster? It was meant to be a techno-optimistic exit from the anarcho-tyranny of pre-2022 social media, and a return to a community of friends. I know this because I discussed decentralized social networks in detail both online and in-person with Dan for many years before Farcaster was born, and was also one of Farcaster’s very first users and investors. In other words, I know what Farcaster was meant to be…as opposed to what much of Farcaster unfortunately became, namely an original community of friends that was increasingly surrounded by a non-community of airdrop farmers, automated fakes, and even aggressive foes. It’s worth understanding how this degeneration happened, so that we don’t repeat it. Fundamentally, the norms of early Farcaster were like the unwritten norms of small town America. Everyone knew each other and got along. Those positive-sum friends then created wealth; that wealth attracted a flood of zero-sum farmers and negative-sum foes, which then in turn drove many of the friends into silence. The lesson is that the norms of small town America, almost tautologically, don’t scale beyond a small town. What does scale to millions is Singapore. Singapore achieves something extremely similar to small town America, namely a high-trust society with spotless streets and minimal crime, where anyone can walk any time of day or night without fear. Amazingly, it combines that with the merits of big city America, namely international capitalism, openness to experience, and the inclusion of people from different races and religions. Singapore achieved this by first establishing social order, by creating a society where spitting on the ground, public obscenity, drug abuse, and the like were simply prohibited. It became a shining island of civility amidst a sea of anarchy and tyranny in its neighborhood. On a pound-for-pound basis, Singapore then became both the strongest state and the strongest market in Asia, making the country admirable to both center-left administrators and center-right entrepreneurs in the Anglophone world, and a model for Asia’s most important leaders over five decades, from Deng Xiaoping to Narendra Modi. Indeed, if you try putting a valuation on Singapore itself, estimated as either (a) the number of people times the net worth per person, or (b) the number of square feet times the average price per square foot, you get a number around $5-10 trillion. It is thus itself one of the most important startups in the world, the original startup city. And because it greatly influenced the development of both modern China and India, the #1 and #3 economies in the world, it’s also one of the most influential startups in world history. Again, all that began by establishing civility. The Singaporean norms against public swearing and spitting meant that its citizens could trust each other to behave themselves on small things, which meant they could potentially trust each other on big things, which is how they began to cooperate at scale, and how Singapore started to win business from the global market. Civility towards strangers of different races, classes, and religions was one of the core values that underpinned Singapore’s valuations. That’s why the vision of Network School Farcaster is to first create a digital Singapore, with in-person norms of civility similar to Lee Kuan Yew’s city state. We’ll then print out that friendly community at meetups, popups, and permanents around the world, like Farcon and Network School. And once that works, we’ll turn Farcaster into a platform for civilized people who want to find, found, or fund their own startup societies or network states. Along the way, we’ll add many features to Farcaster as it currently stands, but always with an eye towards incentivizing positive-sum behavior. All right! Election recap over. Details of the next $2048 Farcaster prize are in the reply below; we're asking you to create a video around Norbert Elias' pioneering work on Medieval Europe, to explain why inter-personal civility is a prerequisite for large-scale cooperation.

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