Open Conversations: On Plurality & Harnessing Energy for Social Growth (Glen Weyl)
Funding the Commons Open Conversations · 4:05
Glen Weyl describes plurality as harnessing the latent energy in social diversity, which usually explodes into conflict, for positive growth, much as industry harnessed fossil fuels and nuclear power harnessed the atom. He argues technology should be treated as co-created rather than given, and politics should be able to progress like technology. He says the Funding the Commons community bridges social impact and rigorous incentive design but has not always been in conversation with the wider world outside web3, and that holding the event in Japan at a UN university draws in the public sector. He calls building network states detached from existing institutions self-defeating.
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From Funding the Commons Open Conversations, hosted by Funding the Commons.
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[Music] I'm Glenn W I'm the founder of the radical exchange Foundation the plurality Institute and Microsoft researches uh plural technology collaboratory and I work on imagining and building uh more collaborative Futures using technology and new forms of De [Music] democracy industrial Tech technology was about harnessing the laden energy in fossil fuels to produce you know useful work nuclear power was about doing the same with the laden energy in the atom
and we know that there's Laden energy in Social diversity how do we know that it creates conflict people kill each other uh anything that has that much energy to create destruction could also be harnessed for positive work and that's what plurality is about it's about harnessing the energy that usually explodes into social conflict for positive uh growth development change [Music] Etc we need to overcome this notion that technology is just um given rather than something we co-create together we need
to treat technology more like politics where we have choices and we need to treat politics more like technology where we where it can progress rather than being set set forever in the same rut I think what's great about the funding the commment world is that you've got a set of people who uh on the one hand care a lot about you know social impact and on the other hand uh care a lot about sort of rigorous economic and incentive type things and usually those worlds are very divided from each other and it's great to see them being bridged I think the
limitation is that it hasn't necessarily always been in communication with the broader outside of web 3 conversation and hopefully that's exactly what we're starting to bridge now as well I think the great thing is that Japan is really a hot bed of people in the public sector who do want to engage with these little bit stranger a little bit more edgy web 3 style ways of funding things and so doing it here allows you to really bring in the public sector the NOS the international perspective and doing at the UN University obviously helps with that a
lot and I think that means that uh the lineup is really starting to build those bridges rather than than just have things off in this uh web 3 world I think that the web 3 thing of like we're going to go off and build you know our Network State unrelated to any existing institutions is really uh kind of self-defeating um because what you actually want is to build new Fabrics across things that are already meaningful to people not to sort of have a Castle in the Sky that's detached from everything else and I think you know this lineup and what we're doing here
really gives me a sense that we're starting to reach that level of maturity where people are thinking about what they can do in the world rather than what they can do in a fantasy [Music]