Why the "Veil of Ignorance" Should be Our Starting Point for Evolving Web3 Social Ecosystems

On its surface, the suggestion that builders of Web3 platforms, protocols, tokens and tools should start their efforts from behind a "veil of ignorance" doubtless sounds a little, well... strange.

But the term comes from John Rawls, widely considered one of the greatest philosphers of the modern era. Bob Davies, an Oxford scholar writes:

Rawls’ "Veil of Ignorance" is probably one of the most influential philosophical ideas of the 20th century... a way of working out the basic institutions and structures of a just society. According to Rawls, working out what justice requires that we think as if we are building society from the ground up, in a way that everyone who is reasonable can accept. (Emphasis mine.)

I emphasized the bold text in that sentence because that is what we are currently doing in Web3 - here on t2, in the Farcaster ecosystem, on WarpCast, and elsewhere. We are building a new sort of society - replete with economic and social opportunities unheard of in previous times. Make a micropayment to a person half-way around the world instantly and at almost no marginal cost? Find an audience of like-minded people interested in nearly any niche? Integrate human and artificial intelligences to create art and spread ideas?

Truly, this is an amazing time to be alive and early.

And it gives us a unique opportunity to implement Rawls' vision for how to create a society that is fair and equitable for all of its citizens - a vision which can be implemented by groups, but whose principles can be just as easily implemented by a single programmer preparing to deploy a smart contract or a bot - any visionary sitting down to draft their project's white paper.

In short, Rawls' holds that any person or persons who were empowered to create a society - or element thereof - is naturally predisposed to weighting the scales in their own favor, in that of their family, their friends, their religious or ethnic group, their circle of "OGs".

That is the way human social organizations - be they political, military, economic, or academic have always been created and iterated - and it is the reason why the world as we know it - both online and IRL - remains one with vast inequities that drive endemic conflict, and which create (or ignore) vast numbers of hungry, desperate, and dispossesed humans.

Rawls believed that the only way to solve that problem was to create our template for what a "just society" would look like from behind a "Veil of Ignorance."

Suppose you were tasked with creating such a template - but that you did not know how you yourself would be "born into" the society you created.

If you did not know what race, what gender, or what income bracket you would be born into, would you be likely to create the world as we know it? A world where women, by and large, are still deprecated vis-a-vis their male peers in terms of income and opportunity? Where some races are imprisoned at rates far in excess of others? Where 1 percent of the population controls 45% of the world's wealth, while a billion of their fellow humans live in poverty?

If you didn't know whether you'd end up as a Power Badge holder or a member of the "unbadged masses" on Warpcast - whether you'd be granted a large tip allowance, or whether you'd be too poor to hodl the minimum $DEGEN required for any allowance at all. If you didn't know whether you'd be a human labeled as a bot, or a bot labeled as a human?

From behind such a "Veil of Ignorance," Rawls believes that ANY intelligent person (I would say, 'any intelligence') would, out of self-interest, create a system that:

  1. Grants each person equal access to basic liberties, and
  2. While acknowledging that some social and economic inequalities are bound to exist (and may even serve a purpose*) would build a system to ensure equality of opportunity, and afford the greatest benefit to the least advantaged.

* An example of where/when a degree of inequality might serve a greater good is - in some degree - the incentives of wealth or status insofar as we want entrepreneurs, innovators, and leaders to be motivated to work towards improvements that benefit society - that said, it should be noted that many people (such as scientists and amateur athletes) do great work that is not motivated by economic incentives. More on this below...

Professor Davies puts it like this:

If you had to design a good life for yourself, you’d go for the specific things you care about. But behind the Veil you don’t know those specifics; you only know things that generally make people’s lives go well... things like money and other resources; basic rights and freedoms; and finally... the things you need to feel like an equal member of society (i.e. to feel valued/respected)

In Rawls’ view, a central challenge behind the Veil is the lack of probabilities available. If you knew that your society was 90% Catholic, you could set things up so that the rewards associated with being Catholic were much higher. That would be personally rational, since you are very likely to end up in the better off group. The Veil prevents this type of reasoning because it hides the information. In the complete absence of probabilities, Rawls thinks you should play it safe and maximise the minimum you could get... (the maximin principle) Translated into a society, that means that we should ensure that the worst-off people in society do as well as possible. (Again, emphasis mine.)

Regarding how the maximin principle would apply to dealing with levels of useful forms of inequality, a simple example would be a choice of systems for distributing benefits.

Imagine a media ecosystem of 10 people where 100 dollars in benefits was available for distribution. The system will requires at least 2 writers and 10 readers to function well - and assumes that (a) whoever is a writer is also a reader, and (b) it takes the same time to write an article as to read it - so how should the money be distributed?

We could say "equally" (10 dollars per person) but then the writers would then put twice the effort for equal reward, and that would be unfair/unjust - exactly what Rawls hoped to avoid. We would not ourselves wish to be a writer in such a system.

The system most beneficial to the writers would have each reader receive 1 dollar and the writers each receive 45 dollars for their writing - on top of the 1 dollar for their own reading. A slightly-less unbalanced system would have each reader receive 2 dollars and the writers receive and extra 35 dollars. But we would not want to be the reader in those systems.

We could continue iterating the math until we hit upon the model which maximizes the benefit to the readers without being unfair to the writers - which would be one where each reader receives 8 dollars (they do spend their priceless time reading, after all) and where the writers receive an additional 10 dollars for the extra effort they put into writing.

In that system, each of our two writers comes out 4 dollars ahead of a "purely equal" system, and each reader comes out better than they would in any system that was not inherently unfair to the writers.

You might note that equilibrium between valuing time reading and writing is actually attained at 8.5 dollars per reader - but then there would be no economic incentive to write as well as read, and without writers, the ecosystem would fail. It is worth noting that it would also fail without readers - and yet few platforms make an attempt to value the 'work' of reading - t2 being a notable exception!

What is interesting is that the math scales as more people in the ecosystem become writers. Whether there are 2 writers or 9 writers, they can always make more than those who simply readers, but the readers always enjoy their best possible share - and if it gets to the point where ALL people in the ecosystem are reading and writing, the shares actually do become equal - and that is as it should be.

The takeaway for Web3 in general and the Farcaster ecosystem in particular?

Everyone building - or influencing - should be framing their targets from the perspective of ensuring equality of opportunity and maximizing the "minimum outcome."

For example, a system where are 400,000 Warpcast users, but only the "Top 1000" (by any chosen metric) are awarded the majority of $DEGEN tip allowances - and where many users are given no tip allowance simply because they lack the personal capital to acquire 10,000 $DEGEN fails to meet either of Rawls' principles for the design of a "just society." Not everyone has equal opportunity to tip at all (because not everyone can afford 10,000 $DEGEN) and for those who have any tip allowance, the minimum tip amount is not calculated in accordance with the maximin principle. And if those at the bottom don't feel "valued and respected" (hint: we do not) - and find themselves limited in the extent to which they can engage in positive social behaviors such as tipping for good content (hint: we do) they will at worst leave the ecosystem, or at best, fail to evangelize for it.

Thus, as builders and influencers, let's take a moment as we prepare to create or iterate to ask ourselves if the systems we are creating or advocating for are ones in which any person, from anywhere around the world, rich or poor, old or young, of this race/gender/religion or that, will find themselves with equality of opportunity and their "minimum viable start position" maximized - or whether they will find themselves (yet again) in a system stacked against those who arrive a little later, a little poorer, or a little less socially connected, a little less tech-savvy than others in their timelines.

This is just my 9 T.P. and I look forward to hearing YOUR thoughts in the comments here, on my feed in Warpcast* / or my feed on Lens, or (if you're reading this, Banksy) spraypainted on a public edifice where I can see it.

* I also moderate a channel for Web3 Writers on Warpcast and edit a Web3 journal of Arts & Poetry which is currently hosting an open call for minimalist poems and art for Volume Three.

P.S. This post is taking part in the t2 x Kiwi Writing Contest, which was brought to my attention by Mac Budkowski, and it seeks to address one of the contest prompts regarding the potential futures of decentralized social. It has been cross-posted to my Paragraph channel, The Degenaissance Digest, and links to Web2 versions will be added presently.