WalkableDAO

Summary

• Cryptoeconomic games (and gains) can be directed towards enacting desired governance outcomes
• Local or global communities can coordinate to invest in real estate, and then enact policy changes that increase property values and improve neighbourhoods
• Community-owned surveillance tools/networks can be extended to enforcement agencies, to improve outcomes and gain a leverage mechanism to ensure their wishes are being represented.

Welcome to the city of Atlantis

What does it mean to have a walkable city? Is it low rates of petty crime? Cafes where you can have a coffee on the street, observing people pass by? Green solar punk utopian buildings? “Walkable” is cities people want to live in, and enjoy living in.

Here’s to the blueprint for a better city. If George Soros is the memetic antichrist of hospitable cities, then WalkableDAO is the son reincarnated.

Today’s cities in the US and Europe have been plagued by a weird combination of the tragedy of the commons and misguided policy. Good intention does not necessarily lead to good outcomes.

The Thin Veil of Society and Social Fabric

The livability of many Western cities has objectively gotten worse - Quality of Life polls from New York for example, show only 34% of respondents rated an excellent or good QoL, down from 51% in 2017. This change is emblematic of a larger trend in which the results of decades of small, bad decisions compound without intervention.

A simple visit to developed Asia, or even parts of Eastern Europe, tells us development can come without the baggage. The social contract is built upon laws, norms and customs. Some of these sets of rules are cheaper to break, but once customs and norms get eroded, law follows.

The thin veil of society is maintained by universal agreements about the conduct we all abide by. As society starts to tolerate rule-breaking, the fabric of society decays. Hobbes believed that without ceding some sovereignty to the social contract, it would inevitably lead to the natural state of humans (discordance) and a war of all against all. Social contracts are extremely important to the creation of positive-sum games.

Ignoring those social contracts – a compounding of knowledge over the hundreds of years since Leviathan and early experiments with modern governments — leads to bad outcomes. This doesn’t mean they can not be improved, but rather not pushed aside.

The misguided empathy of the welfare state has in some circumstances, mostly apparent in certain US, UK, and Canadian cities, created a system where a certain class of people are functionally above the law (the application of the law is not consistent). This is not the only reason many cities are not highly desirable, but it certainly doesn't help. Furthermore, when public systems start failing citizens, we can expect private solutions to move in. Such is the case in California and Detroit, where private police forces fill the gaps.

Living as a law abiding citizen in such an environment can oftentimes be less than gratifying. Who wouldn’t want to forget their phone in McDonald's (or some hipster cafe) to only return after an hour finding their phone untouched exactly at the same spot?

Some people desire a civil, safe, and thriving community in which to flourish and live peacefully. Should that be a luxury or a basic human condition in the so-called developed world? Or does the misguided term “developed” hint that its development is finished, and thus it can only be eroded?

We, however, envision a different path, striving to upgrade our cities into idealistic, picturesque, and polished neighborhoods where children play freely and safely, and where walkability is paramount.

Charter Cities

Perhaps the answer is starting from scratch. Is creating something new easier than reforming the broken? Charter cities offer an interesting alternative, but need to overcome many challenges of their own. The belief that one can create a robust city-state from scratch requires a great deal of hubris.

The motivation of charter cities probably did originate with urban dysfunction but stems from a deeper sense of aggregating around like-minded people as the town square becomes a global village.

We have grown rather skeptical of this idea. Our concerns about chartered cities could be distilled as follows:

• Homogeneity of constituents
• Pragmatic reality of legal status (cc: Prospera’s legal fights) and the lack of monopoly on violence
• The notion that these cities would be immune to the decay faced by current cities. It seems clear that cities like living organisms ebb and flow through cycles of prosperity and dysfunction.

Despite the best efforts by those creating these cities, it is likely to suffer from a great deal of selection bias and veer away from the diverse nature of an organic city that gives it the life it needs. Furthermore, despite whatever guarantees one might secure from the host country, the nature of reality means that economies ebb and flow.

At certain points, governments change, and so do incentives of what could be a piggy bank for a politician to raid. Sure, one might have a legal claim in the eyes of the UN or whatever adjudicating body it might be, but before recompense, a great deal of damage can be done. This is the pragmatic reality of not fighting the fight directly. These charter cities still lack the monopoly on violence owned by the state.

One question we have always had, is why this is a distinctly better option than enacting change within the systems that exist today? Is the answer that these systems are too calcified? Can we design better urban areas, free economic zones, and lower regulatory burdens within existing countries and states?

Praxis’ recent announcement for Atlas feels like a step in the right direction, where it is somewhere between the two extremes. Building a new city in California, rather than vying for a carve-out with an unclear legal standing. Interestingly, industry towns and trading hubs (i.e. homogeneity of constituents) have a long history of being built in the west and evolving slowly into their own multifaceted beings like Butte, Montana. This serves as a prime example of an industry town, originally established as a mining camp in the mid-19th century. Its growth was directly tied to the rich copper deposits discovered there, leading to a boom that transformed it into a significant urban center. Over time, Butte evolved beyond its initial industrial purpose, developing a unique character.

The Plan

How does one address coordinating such a complex system towards radically different approaches? It begins with capital. Leveraging crypto capital formation to build up financial capital inside of a WalkableDAO.

Next, the DAO members would research and pick a city/neighbourhood/town to invest in. The entity would then select real estate investments to make and begin the transformational process (policy change, community efforts, etc.). This should likely take place in the USA. For the uninitiated, in America, you can vote on the Judicial, Enforcement, and Legislative at various levels of government. This is something George Soros and the NGOs he funds keenly observed many, many years ago. WalkableDAO takes Soros’ blueprint to serve different outcomes.

You can drain massive amounts of public funding for your objectives and get those resources deployed in ways you care about (NGOs). Or you can focus on policy and get activists into positions with policy preferences that you desire. The elections for judges and prosecutors (DAs) were extremely lowly contested in the past. This meant that if you found candidates that represented the ideals you believe in (in their case, weak on crime/drugs), you had an extreme amount of impact with a relatively low cost. No wonder Soros is considered a master of leverage.

The Reverse Soros

Once the real estate assets are secured, the political process can begin, seeking to be proactive in enacting changes that can improve the walkability of the chosen city.

Some examples of this might include policies like the 3/5/7 strikes felony rule. The proposed would see massive reductions in total crime by issuing significantly longer lock-ups for the most prolific criminals based on X number of felony offences. Others may be changes to rules around open-air drug use or involuntary psychiatric detainment and rehabilitation. To put it short, WalkableDAO would lobby for the law & order approach as one piece of walkability.

You could theoretically reduce crime by 85% with a 3 strikes rule, or 70% with a 5 strikes rule.

Other lightweight objectives should be increasing greenery for improvements to mental health, and its association with higher property values. Blue street lights at night have been shown to reduce crime. These lightweight proposals are seemingly less controversial and can have an outsize impact.

At a more microscopic level, beyond the assets the DAO acquires, localized outcomes can be improved in various ways. For instance, offering discounted rents to police officers in residential properties has proven effective at reducing crime in more localized ways. There are numerous accounts of real estate developers who, upon acquiring apartment complexes in high-crime areas, first addressed issues like drug dealing and theft by offering reduced rents to police. This strategy effectively led to neighbourhood-level rerating and a significant drop in crime. This approach warrants further study.

Other possible proposals, nested in technological innovation, could be getting the residents of buildings/neighbourhoods to vote on the deployment of community-owned automated patrols by drones. While that might seem dystopian, it’s not functionally different from having cameras on your house.

But we aim not to make this as simple as being tougher on crime. It involves community efforts around being active in city council meetings and discussions that define what types of projects are approved and what amenities are focused on - patios, resting areas, parks, greenery, mixed use density, variety of jobs. The combined efforts are the key to creating walkable cities.

Decentralized Palantir

The elephant in the room is whether this isn’t a slippery slope to authoritarianism, rather than liberty. Are we replacing authoritarian anarchy with a different form (under a Trojan horse of safer streets)?

Whether for better or worse, the new elite of technobros have broken into politics at the highest levels. Could we, the technobro pleb, start bottom-up at the lowest level (municipal) and bring the operating leverage of technology? Some of this is already happening with people such as Ben Horowitz donating big amounts to help tool up the Las Vegas Police Department.

However, it is important to do this with a system that also prevents us from becoming a totalitarian surveillance state. Enter Decentralized Palantir.

What does Palanatir even do? Who knows, but here is how ours would work.

There is a great deal of surveillance data captured by civilian assets today. As we discussed in our DeSec Article, these assets can be coordinated and turned into a service that provides both operating leverage, and civilian control over how the resources are deployed. These can be enhanced by advancements in robotics/drones to provide improved response times and monitoring.

Take for instance, experimental programs where drones are being used as First Responders, they can provide critical visuals for further context and resource deployment. This can lead to both quicker response times, and higher levels of safety for human officers. These lightweight resources can improve the effectiveness of these units, and possibly free up more resources for other city initiatives.

It is also worth considering how these ideas might go wrong. One can easily conjure ideas of Singaporean-style surveillance and law enforcement, without any of the positive outcomes their government has created. Ideally, decentralization of these tools serves as the bulwark against such outcomes.

The mission would remain safety not at the cost of privacy. The drones and the data could be collectively owned and ZK-encrypted. The safety would lead to positive economic outcomes for the DAO and the population living in the rehabilitated areas.

Scaling

The preceding outline serves as an initial concept rather than a detailed deployment plan. The crucial question is: how can we scale this idea effectively?

While no two cities or circumstances are identical, we can extract valuable lessons that approach universal truths, which can then be reapplied. These insights will essentially form the "blueprint" for those interested in experimenting with gentrify2earn.

Crypto tries to solve coordination problems. We think that there might be a solution to solving the coordination of municipal politics. If there are people out there wanting to enter Private Equity business in which their multiple expansion comes from existing customers leveraging crypto-enhanced products for better outcomes, perhaps taking other approaches might leverage some of crypto’s other powerful characteristics. Coordinating resources towards better representation of those constituents' desires is an ambitious goal that can lead to beneficial outcomes.

We believe this approach could be much more robust than traditional ideas of charter cities. WalkableDAO incentivizes decentralized pockets, possibly sprouting up multiple at the same time. Instead of creating new demand for a new idea/product, you have the possibility to leverage all of the existing latent demand for political change that exists in a given system. Redirection and concentration become extremely powerful tools for the idealist looking to exert change in the world.

If you’re seeking to build in this direction albeit in your own way, we at Zee Prime are willing to listen. Feel free to reach out.