The Role of Universal Reputation in a Free Society

A Society Without Government?

What if I told you that our society could not only function without any government but would also be a better society overall? I am a firm believer that people do not need a coercive government, with a monopoly on violence, just to coexist together in a peaceful and productive society. In a truly free society, every individual would be a sovereign individual with total control over their own life and property.

Voluntaryism, also known as anarcho-capitalism, is a political philosophy in which there is no government and all interactions are done on a voluntary basis without the use of coercion or force. In a voluntaryist society, property rights are sacred, and violence of any kind is unacceptable except as a means of self-defense. Voluntaryists believe that the government's use of force to collect taxes is morally wrong, especially considering they often use the taxes to fund the murdering, extorting, and kidnapping of innocent people.

Governments are responsible for more death and misery than any other organization type in history, and while a society without government will not be a utopia, it will at least be free and exponentially better than a society with a coercive government. There are also minanarchists and libertarians who are on a similar wavelength as voluntaryists, but they believe that we can still have a very limited small government to do things like enforce property rights.

Unfortunately, while it sounds great on paper, actually having a limited government is quite a challenge. The United States is a perfect example of a government starting out as a very limited small government, but then growing into a massive leviathan of a government with almost unlimited power despite a constitution designed to keep that from happening.

All of this can be distilled down to a very basic concept; one we all learned as children but that some of us seem to have forgotten as adults, and that is don't hurt people and don't take their stuff. This is basic morality, but for some reason, individuals who work for the "government" believe they don't have to follow these basic moral principles because of what's written on some pieces of paper.

They believe they have a right to hurt you and take your stuff because you were born within the imaginary lines that form their "jurisdiction."

The government is simply a gang with fancy titles and uniforms. They extort people within their territory for "protection", but then don't even provide much protection. In fact, instead of protecting citizens, some governments put their own citizens at risk with reckless foreign policies.

Unfortunately, these voluntaryist ideas aren't very popular yet. When most people think of a stateless society, they imagine a Mad Max-style post-apocalyptic wasteland, in which roving bands of marauders rape and pillage anything they come across like hordes of locusts descending on a field of crops. Even people who are a little more practical when imagining a stateless society have legitimate concerns.

After all, without the daddy government watching over us, who will protect us from bad actors? It seems like most people think that without a coercive government, the roads would instantly disintegrate, your cereal would be flavored with rat feces, and buildings built by shady unregulated contractors would collapse the second they are paid for!

Cars will be made to be so unsafe that you have to pray every time you start your engine! Children's toys will be constructed solely out of rusty razor blades! I think that this commonplace idea that we would have complete chaos without a government doesn’t give humanity enough credit.

Humans are smart enough to continue to function without a central government controlling every aspect of their lives. We would not instantly devolve into apes the second the state ceases to exist. Most people don't like chaos and will try to avoid it. Humans also have a strong tendency to act in their own self-interest, and it is in everyone's best interest to have a functioning society where you can walk down the street without getting murdered.

If you have ever seen traffic spontaneously organize itself at a stoplight that has lost power, this is a good metaphor for a society without government or with a very limited government. Once upon a time, there weren't a gazillion governmental agencies regulating everything you can think of, and somehow society still functioned.

Why Reputation Is Essential In A Free Society

Well, how would a society with no government or a very limited government work? Part of the answer is that the power of reputation systems would enable free markets and society to regulate themselves. For example, barring any governmental intervention, you will eventually go out of business if you don't have a good reputation.

If you are hurting or scamming your customers, you might get away with it a few times, but generally, you will eventually stop getting new customers as the word spreads. This was true even before we all had magic rectangles in our pockets that could instantaneously share information across the entire globe. Now the word about bad actors spreads even quicker than it ever has.

Reputation and the trust we base on it is an essential part of any truly free society. The power of reputation doesn't just apply to commerce, it is applicable to all interactions. A stranger could wander into your town and instead of just hoping that he's not a serial killer, rapist, or con artist, he could simply show you a mathematically verifiable blockchain-based reputation score that proves other people have dealt with this man before and had positive interactions.

Alternatively, if let's say, Sally the Sadistic Serial Killer showed up, presumably their reputation would be so bad that they would be ostracized from society and few people would be willing to do any business with them. This alone could accomplish a lot of what the state does, with a fraction of the violence, and none of the corruption. The worst members of society would quickly find themselves living off in the woods, forced to rely on the land to survive because nobody in town would sell them food.

Criminals who still had some hope for rehabilitation could voluntarily turn themselves into a private rehabilitation center where they would be confined. They would have to work for their room and board, providing the profit incentive the rehabilitation center needs to exist. They could get treatment until they were deemed fit to rejoin society, at which point their reputation score would reflect the fact that they had been rehabilitated.

If they decided they didn't want to be confined anymore before they finished the program, they could always check themselves out and go live in the woods with the other outcasts, because their reputation score would still be too low to be able to live in society.

For a good example of how a reputation system can regulate a purely free market, we can look at the world's first dark net marketplace, the Silk Road. It can be said that the founder, Ross Ulbricht helped a lot of people. Wait a minute, how would selling drugs help anybody? Well, he helped people, who were going to buy drugs anyway, do it in as safe a way as possible by providing a neutral and safe venue with a reputation system to conduct transactions in.

Before the Silk Road, if you wanted to buy drugs you often had to do it from strangers or relative strangers. You would have no clue whether they had a history of selling unadulterated products or not, or if they were going to just outright rob you. You could end up getting hurt or even killed just trying to score drugs.

When the Silk Road arrived, all of a sudden customers could instantly know whether a vendor was considered reliable or not based on their reputation. This is a perfect example of a completely unregulated market, outside of state control, that regulated itself to an impressive degree based solely on a reputation system.

Vendors who ripped people off would quickly be ostracized and no one would do business with them. Yes, they could make a new account, but their reputation would be starting at zero again and no one is going to spend a significant amount of money with a zero reputation vendor.

Your reputation is one of your most valuable assets. It has quite a bit of value even though it has no physical form (kind of like Bitcoin!). Unless you live by yourself deep in the woods, you have to interact with other humans at least occasionally, and your reputation can greatly influence those interactions.

Depending on the situation, your reputation might even be your most valuable asset and it can determine what kind of opportunities come your way. Reputation is amorphous and is not easily quantifiable in its entirety, but it has always been greatly influenced by proof of work, even in the earliest days of humanity.

A great warrior in a prehistoric tribe would gain that reputation based on how many enemies he had defeated, a great hunter's reputation would be based on how many kills he brought back to the tribe, and a shaman's reputation might be based on how many people they had healed or given good advice to.

They all make contributions to their community and are rewarded for it with an increase in their reputation. You can see this throughout history, a great writer's reputation will be based on how many quality books they have written, an artist by the quality of their works of art, etc. In the days before technology enabled easy long-distance communication, you had to really be exceptional to gain any reputation beyond your immediate community.

To complicate things further, a good reputation with one group can mean the exact opposite with a different group. For example, having an excellent reputation among criminals for being a good criminal isn't going to get you very far with non-criminals.

Flaws With Web 2.0-Based Reputation Systems

The internet has changed everything, enabling anyone to develop a reputation that transcends borders. But it's still not perfect yet, we have things like fake reviews and bots falsely influencing reputations. Someone can simply buy themselves followers, likes, and views. What if you could distill the essence of one's reputation down to its base and quantify it in a mathematically verifiable way? What if you could instantly know someone's reputation when you are interacting with them online?

Beyond that, imagine if you could know that reputation wasn't bought but instead represented actual contributions based on their commitments to the communities they are a member of. Now that we have the technology to do so, we need a universal reputation system that is fair, transparent, and equally valued and accepted by all groups.

Any reputation systems we build in Web 3.0 have to address the flaws of Web 2.0 reputation systems. For example, let's say you see a post on social media from an account you don't recognize. The post contains some important information, and you need to determine to what degree you can trust that information before you act upon it. What do you do? You can use heuristics and base it off the easily available information of their follower count, whether their account is "verified" or not (such as with Twitter's infamous blue check mark), how old the account is, and what their other recent posts contain.

For example, if you see they posted a claim a few days ago that you know is a complete lie, you can reasonably conclude that you can't trust anything else they say without first verifying it (just because someone has lied in the past doesn't mean they never tell the truth). If the account was created last week, you can reasonably conclude it doesn't have any reputation yet.

These easily available pieces of information can help you determine your reputation to some degree. However, having an aged account with a high follower count doesn't necessarily mean an account has a good reputation or that you should trust it. Those followers could be a bunch of bots for all you know.

If you really wanted to determine their true reputation it would require a deep dive into the account's history and its interactions with other accounts. The point is, it can take a considerable amount of time and effort to determine someone's reputation online. What if you could instead determine it from a single universal reputation score? Wouldn't that help you filter out the noise that is so prevalent on the internet if you only bothered to interact with accounts above a certain score?

Technically there are already "reputation scores" that determine what you see on your feed, but as a user, you have no idea what that score is or how it’s calculated because it is part of the black boxes that are social media companies’ algorithms. An algorithm is determining for you who you should trust and you aren't even given the opportunity to see accounts it thinks you shouldn't trust based on whatever formulas it is using.

People can study the results of the algorithm and make educated guesses as to how and why it rates accounts the way it does, but since you can't actually inspect the code for yourself, and the code is constantly changing, you are forced to trust the social media company.

Elon Musk's X partially addressed this problem by releasing some of its algorithm's code to the public, but this may have been more of an attempt to appear transparent than actually be transparent. Very important aspects of the algorithm, such as the models used to train it, remain closed off to the public.

Also, at the same time X was supposedly becoming more transparent by releasing some of its code, they changed the API so that researchers could no longer access enough data to learn anything new about how the algorithm functions.

Āut Labs to the Rescue

Thankfully many people are sick of having corporations decide what people's reputations should be and whose content they should be viewing. The trajectory of the internet is moving towards open source code, decentralization, and sovereignty over one's own data, which is the ethos behind Web 3.0. Reputation is just as important in the new iteration of the internet as it was on Web 2.0, but the difference is that it will no longer be determined solely by black box algorithms and will instead look more like what Āut Labs is doing with their systems.

Āut Labs is a company I recently discovered that is working on solutions and tools for decentralized identity, reputation, and community governance. I don't know if they want an anarcho-capitalist society like I do or not, but we definitely share many of the same principles. There are multiple types of people and companies that work in the Web 3 and cryptocurrency space. They include grifters and scammers, people who don't want to scam you but are only concerned with making a profit, and then there are the idealists.

This last category includes people and companies like Āut Labs, who truly understand the world-changing potential of Web 3 and crypto. They want to improve people's lives through developing decentralized technologies and systems outside of state control that enable self-sovereignty and are designed for the benefit of everyone. The potential of these freedom technologies is only beginning to be realized, and can very well mean the difference between freedom and tyranny in our not-so-distant future.

Right now, we are basically in a digital arms race, on one side you have governments, big corporations, and various bad actors who either want to steal your data or money, or they want to oppress and control you. On the other side, you have cypherpunks, freedom activists, white hat hackers, and anyone like Āut Labs who are building tools to enable and protect freedom.

The tools that Āut Labs has developed allow anyone to create what is called a "hub." A hub can be any kind of community, such as a DAO, a co-op, or even a network state; as the tools allow for quite a bit of customization. Within each hub, there are different roles for community members, kind of like Discord roles, as well as different commitment levels.

There is the "expander", which allows you to add custom membership modules onto a smart contract, enabling you to put things like roles and member commitments directly onchain. Want to see what a member has contributed to a community? It will be right there on the chain for you to verify in a trustless way.

Reputation and Pseudonymity

One of the most important aspects of the internet is the ability for anyone to interact pseudonymously, using a username. This enables the free exchange of ideas without an individual having to worry about whatever they say resulting in real-world consequences, especially people who live in countries without legal protections for freedom of speech.

Citizens of authoritarian regimes can speak out about their governments without as much fear of being silenced, arrested, or even killed. But the pseudonymity of the internet also brings with it a set of challenges in relation to reputation. How do you trust someone when you know nothing about them other than their username?

Well, each username or "nym" has a reputation based on their past actions on the internet. If the nym has been proven to be correct again and again for example, then the community will have a higher level of trust in anything that nym says because they have a verifiable history of telling the truth. This is one of the obvious reasons why you can't allow duplicate user names on a social media platform, this way when people interact with userXYZ on something like X, they can know that is at least the same account as they have interacted with previously.

However, there are two major problems with username-based trust assumptions. For one, they are platform-specific. Because we have social media platforms such as Facebook and X that are essentially centralized walled gardens, you can only be sure userXYZ is the same userXYZ with a good reputation if you are interacting with them on the same platform.

UserXYZ on X is not necessarily the same person as userXYZ on Facebook. UserXYZ has to confirm with a post on X that the userXYZ account on Facebook also belongs to them. Users of Facebook that don't use X will not know that userXYZ has a stellar reputation on X.

Āut Labs addresses some of these issues with pseudonymous identities on the internet by using a nontransferable NFT, the ĀutID, to represent an individual's identity. You can't sell your identity to someone else without giving them your private keys to the entire wallet. This switches reputation and trust from being platform-based to being wallet-based.

By signing messages with the same wallet that contains your ĀutID, you can easily cryptographically ensure others that you are the same person they have interacted with before.

The ĀutID contains information such as your global reputation and your local reputation scores. The local reputation score is calculated using the ratio between a user's given contributions to their expected contributions based on their commitment level to a specific community. For example, if you commit to writing a weekly newsletter for your community, every time you submit the newsletter, the system will keep track of that and use it to calculate your local reputation score.

The global reputation is simply an aggregate of all your local reputation scores if you are a member of more than one community. This global reputation solves the problem of having multiple reputations across different platforms, by combining all your reputations into one. The reputation score system is an attempt at making reputation less subjective, more verifiable, and universal.

This is also important because, without a programmatic and verifiable/transparent approach to reputation, you are sometimes left with relying on other community member's perceptions of a member's contributions to determine one's reputation within a community.

Subjective Versus Objective Reputations

For an example of how perceptions of one's contributions to a community and their actual contributions can differ greatly, let's take a look at two hypothetical DAO members, Cassandra and John. This DAO doesn't use any tools like the ones Āut Labs are building and instead one's reputation and status in the DAO are entirely subjective. It is based solely on what other community members think. In that kind of DAO environment, recency bias is going to have a huge effect, as are other biases.

Recency bias is when people give more weight to more recent information or events when forming opinions rather than weighing everything equally regardless of when it happened. Cassandra has contributed a lot of work to the DAO over the past two years, much more than John has.

Cassandra isn't as active in the chat as John is, she usually just reads what others are saying and spends her time working on things the DAO needs done. John spends a lot of time in the chat, so everyone knows him quite well, and he has made a few contributions to the DAO's workload over the past few months, whereas before that he only contributed a little here and there.

People often forget Cassandra even exists, and a lot of the work she does is backend code stuff that the non-technical members of the DAO don't really pay attention to. In addition, Cassandra has been very ill for about a month and has no recent contributions, but she also hasn't taken on any commitments in the last month because she knows she won't be able to do her best work right now.

In a more subjective reputation system, John probably would have a better reputation and more status in the DAO than Cassandra, even though he has actually contributed less work overall. He is more present in other DAO members’ minds because he is so active in the chat and everyone knows him, and people know he has done some work recently.

Recency bias will weigh the more recent work by John higher than the massive amounts of older work done by Cassandra. Some members of the DAO weren't even around when Cassandra made a lot of her contributions, but they know John and his work because he's been so active since they joined.

If this hypothetical DAO was using Āut Labs and its reputation score, then DAO members would know that Cassandra has actually contributed more overall to the DAO and she would have a higher reputation score, ensuring she was still recognized for all her past contributions despite her recent illness. This will ensure that Cassandra doesn't feel like the DAO isn't appreciating her and will continue to work hard for the DAO once she recovers.

Being able to distill someone’s contributions over a long period of time into a verifiable score is incredibly useful, and is also a motivator for community members. Humans love keeping score, it’s in our nature. This kind of reputation scoring allows for a gamification of community contributions.

Everyone likes to be recognized for their work and if they know for a fact that they will be, they are more likely to want to contribute. This is why Āut Lab's tools are so powerful for enabling successful communities to grow and thrive, with members all getting the recognition they deserve.

Conclusion: The Future

Wouldn't it be great if your real-life reputation was a meritocratic system that was mathematically based on your actual actions rather than solely based on people's subjective perception of your actions? Well, I suppose it would be great for a lot of people, and not so great for anyone who has managed to gain an undeserved reputation that isn't in line with their actual deeds!

In the network states of the future, this is how reputation will function, as something anyone can verify on a blockchain. It will not be based on a black box algorithm controlled by a centralized entity.

One of the beautiful things about a system like this is that everyone has an equal chance to redeem themselves if they do acquire a bad reputation. If you fuck up and ruin your reputation, you can always get a fresh start as someone with no reputation at all or you can slowly rebuild your reputation through hard work. I believe almost anyone is capable of positive change and their past mistakes shouldn't necessarily destroy their entire future.

Āut Labs continues to build out its set of tools for communities, and those tools might become the basic building blocks we need to opt out of our current flawed system and rebuild a new decentralized meritocratic future in which anyone willing to put in the work can become successful regardless of their background.

We may not be able to have a truly anarcho-capitalist or even a minarchist/libertarian society in meat space right now, but what we can do is use the digital realm to experiment with the kind of reputation and governance systems that will be needed in such a society. We can establish network states mostly outside of government control and learn how to govern ourselves in a way that supports self-sovereignty and rejects coercion. People spend a large portion of their lives online anyway, so at the very least we can live as free as possible while we are online, thanks to the power of decentralization, encryption, and permissionless systems.

Try It For Yourself

For anyone who is curious, I tested out the hub creation process and made my own hub for the Thought Crime Trap House. The process was easy and only took a few minutes. To create a hub that is free, you just have to have enough $POL (formerly known as $MATIC) in your crypto wallet to pay for the transaction fees.

1. Go to launch.hub.sbs and click "Launch New Project". Pick a name for your community, upload any picture to use as the hub's avatar, and type out a short description of what your community is all about.

   
   

   

   
   

   
   

2. Then you have to pick a market that best represents your hub, the options are open-source & infra, deFi & payments, reFi & governance, social/art & gaming, or identity & reputation.

   
   

   

   
   

   
   

3. Create roles for your community members to choose from, roles come in sets of 3 and can be used to create new sub-groups within your hub as it grows.

   
   

   

   
   

   
   

4. Set a minimum commitment level for new members, this is important because it forms the basis of the local and global reputation scores. The commitment level is just the amount of time or work that members promise to devote to the community. You will assign them tasks based on this and whether they complete them or not will determine their reputation.

   
   

   

   
   

   
   

5. Deploy your hub's smart contract by approving a transaction on Polygon. You are now the founder of a new hub!

   
   

   

   
   

   
   

6. Next, you want to verify your hub, return to hub.sbs, and you should see your hub listed with the others. Click Verify.

   

   
   

   
   

   
   

7. Now, you will create your ĀutID so that you can join your hub as its first member, select a role, pick a nickname and an avatar

   

   
   

   
   

8. Next, you will need to approve another transaction that will mint a soulbound (nontransferable) NFT that represents your ĀutID!

   
   

9. Congratulations you now have both a hub and an ĀutID! You can also now join other hubs as well.