Governing democracy, the internet, and boardrooms

with @NoahRFeldman, @ahall_research, @rhhackett

Welcome to web3 with a16z. I'm Robert Hackett and today we have a special episode about governance in many forms — from nation states to corporate boards to internet services and beyond.

Our special guests are Noah Feldman, constitutional law scholar at Harvard who also architected the Meta oversight board (among many other things); he is also the author of several books. And our other special guest is Andy Hall, professor of political science at Stanford who is an advisor of a16z crypto research — and who also co-authored several papers and posts about web3 as a laboratory for designing and testing new political systems, including new work we'll link to in the shownotes.

Our hallway style conversation covers technologies and approaches to governance, from constitutions to crypto/ blockchains and DAOs. As such we also discuss content moderation and community standards; best practices for citizens assemblies; courts vs. legislatures; and much more where governance comes up. 

Throughout, we reference the history and evolution of democracy — from Ancient Greece to the present day — as well as examples of governance from big companies like Meta, to startups like Anthropic.

Resources for references in this episode:

• On the U.S. Supreme Court case NetChoice, LLC v. Paxton (Scotusblog)
• On Meta's oversight board (Oversightboard.com)
• On Anthropic's long term benefit trust (Anthropic, September 2023)
• On "Boaty McBoatface" winning a boat-naming poll (Guardian, April 2016)
• On Athenian democracy (World History Encyclopedia, April 2018)
• The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President by Noah Feldman (Random House, October 2017)

A selection of recent posts and papers by Andrew Hall:

• The web3 governance lab: Using DAOs to study political institutions and behavior at scale by Andrew Hall and Eliza Oak (a16z crypto, June 2024)
• DAO research: A roadmap for experimenting with governance by Andrew Hall and Eliza Oak (a16z crypto, June 2024)
• The effects of retroactive rewards on participating in online governance by Andrew Hall and Eliza Oak (a16z crypto, June 2024)
• Lightspeed Democracy: What web3 organizations can learn from the history of governance by Andrew Hall and Porter Smith (a16z crypto, June 2023)
• What Kinds of Incentives Encourage Participation in Democracy? Evidence from a Massive Online Governance Experiment by Andrew Hall and Eliza Oak (working paper, November 2023)
• Bringing decentralized governance to tech platforms with Andrew Hall (a16z crypto Youtube, July 2022)
• The evolution of decentralized governance with Andrew Hall (a16z crypto Youtube, July 2022)
• Toppling the Internet’s Accidental Monarchs: How to Design web3 Platform Governance by Porter Smith and Andrew Hall (a16z crypto, October 2022)
• Paying People to Participate in Governance by Ethan Bueno de Mesquita and Andrew Hall (a16z crypto, November 2022)

As a reminder: none of the following should be taken as tax, business, legal, or investment advice. See a16zcrypto.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.