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An attendee asks a question of the panel

Event

Recap
Building the New Economy: Data as Capital
A Stanford Digital Assets Week event

Stanford Digital Economy Lab
Fall 2022 Conference

Stanford University
November 17, 2022

Photography by Christine Baker

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Web3 presents new digital means of production and an opportunity to rebalance the relationships between all stakeholders of the economy. As humans continue to develop brilliant new applications of emerging technologies, we need to reimagine the ways our society is organized so that data serves all communities.

The speakers and panelists who participated in “Building the New Economy: Data as Capital,” a special Stanford Digital Economy Lab event as part of Stanford Digital Assets Week, examined the feasibility and implications of human-centered web3, including:

  • — the role of collective citizen organizations in managing the way data is controlled
  • — more resilient and inclusive systems that spread financial and health benefits more widely
  • — the possibilities we unlock when systems are interoperable so that knowledge, trade, and interaction can flow across company and national boundaries.

The agenda featured three panel discussions and a keynote by Stanford Digital Economy Lab fellow Sandy Pentland. Keep scrolling to view videos of the panels and the keynote address.

Keynote

Building the New Economy: What We Need and How to Get There

Sandy Pentland, MIT; Stanford Digital Economy Lab
Sandy Pentland delivers his keynote address at Building the New Economy: Data as Capital.

Sandy Pentland (MIT, Stanford Digital Economy Lab) opened the day by examining the current state of web3 and providing a brief overview of what companies and policymakers must do to help it grow so that the technology benefits everyone in society. Video also includes a welcome by Christie Ko and an introduction by Erik Brynjolfsson. (Keynote begins at 13:55).

Panel Discussion

The Human Perspective: New Types of Engagement

Lucy Bernholz, Digital Civil Society Lab
Delicia Hand, Consumer Reports
Melissa Valentine, Stanford University
Sheila Warren, Crypto Council for Innovation
Sheila Warren, Delicia Hand, and Lucy Bernholz
Sheila Warren, Delicia Hand, and Lucy Bernholz participate in the first panel discussion of the day.

As digital businesses replace traditional physical businesses and civic systems, we must grapple with the implications of the amount of data, and resulting power, held by a small number of actors. As in the past, citizen organizations may be central in helping balance economic and social power (much like trade unions and cooperative banking institutions formed as a response to the forces of industrialization and consumer banking). This panel discussion explored how community organizations can wield data cooperatives, shared data, and distributed tokenized funding mechanisms to form a system based on collective rights and accountability.

Panel Discussion

Resilient Systems: Making Society Work Better

Jennifer King, Stanford University
Brie Linkenhoker, Worldview Studio
Joshua Tan, Metagovernance Project; Digital Civil Society Lab
Brie Linkenhoker, Joshua Tan, and Jennifer King discuss how web3 and other new technologies can make society work better.

New distributed, technology-enabled organizations may offer a path toward more resilient, transparent, inclusive, agile, and proactive systems, and a better future, particularly in places where existing institutions are either weak or underserved. In this panel discussion, we explore how new architectures could provide significant upgrades to — or enable wholly new — systems of currency and finance, taxation, and privacy.

Panel Discussion

Data and AI: A New Ecology

Dazza Greenwood, MIT Media Lab
Jeff Hancock, Stanford Social Media Lab
Sean McDonald, Stanford Digital Civil Society Lab
Sandy Pentland, MIT; Stanford Digital Economy Lab
Jeff Hancock, Dazza Greenwood, Sean McDonald, and Sandy Pentland talk about building a more beneficial data infrastructure.

To support a world with billions of data owners, producers, and consumers, governed by digital data and AI, we need to build infrastructure that enables interoperability across company and national boundaries. This infrastructure will determine the future of finance and money, civic engagement, and factors that contribute to human flourishing. This panel discussion explores the opportunities and challenges of designing ecosystems of trusted data and AI that provide safe, secure, and human-centered services for everyone.

Closing

Closing Remarks

Erik Brynjolfsson, Stanford Digital Economy Lab
Erik Brynjolfsson shares final thoughts of the day.

Stanford Digital Economy Lab Director Erik Brynjolfsson closed the day with a few words about the future of data and decentralization.

Panelists
and moderators

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Event

Recap: Decentralized Society | Digitization, Democracy, and Civil Discourse

by Angela Chen

Stanford Digital Economy Lab Fall 2022 Conference
Stanford University
October 7, 2022

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The one-day event examined the challenges of web2 technologies and explored how web3 technologies could address them

Digitization has changed our economic, social, and political infrastructure irrevocably, centralizing and codifying our knowledge and challenging our institutions and norms. It has also given rise to misinformation, disinformation, polarization, and a succession of other challenges to civil society. With the recent drive toward decentralization, social media, interest and affinity groups, communities, news media, and other institutions and platforms face various challenges and opportunities enabled by AI, web3, and emerging technologies.

On October 7, 2022, the Stanford Digital Economy Lab brought together leaders from industry, civil society, and academia for Decentralized Society: Digitization, Democracy, and Civil Discourse, an event to discuss the promise and peril of decentralized digital architecture for our political and economic systems. 

During the event, speakers addressed a question often debated by academics and civil society alike: “What is it about web2 technology that poses a challenge to democracy, and how can emerging technologies protect it?” Current web2 technology promotes great velocity, virality, and volume of information transfer, exacerbated by anonymity and echo chambers. The strength and reach of social media platforms have turned private companies into de-facto regulators, and consequently, has given them more influence than governments over democratic participation and free speech. 

Decentralized platforms may address some of these challenges and return more control to the hands of users over their data, the information they consume, and how they choose to participate in democratic institutions. However, these platforms require society to address a series of questions:

  • – Who will own the data — individuals, companies, or another party?
  • – If data becomes an asset class, what does it mean for your personal life, society, and the economy?
  • – Who will build the core protocols, and how will they be built?
  • – How do we maintain the benefits of network effects in a decentralized system?
  • – How will people be incentivized to adopt web3?
  • – Who will govern web3 and how can we strike a balance between regulation and innovation?
  • – What can we do now to protect democracy and privacy as the new infrastructure is being built?

The event was the first of two fall gatherings focused on decentralized digital architecture, in which the Lab explores the impact of AI and digital infrastructure on society by examining key questions, such as governance strategies, privacy paradigms, business models, and content moderation systems.

Curious to learn more? Register for Building the New Economy: Data as Capital, which will take place on November 17, 2022, from 10:00 am to 5;00 pm PT at Stanford University. Part of Stanford Digital Assets Week, this special event will examine the feasibility and implications of human-centered web3, including the role of collective citizen organizations in managing the way data is controlled. Participants will also explore resilient and inclusive systems that spread financial and health benefits and the possibilities we unlock when systems are interoperable so that knowledge, trade, and interaction can flow across company and national boundaries.

“When knowledge is codified and digitized, it becomes alienable and potentially centralized. In turn, centralizing essential assets centralizes bargaining power. Concentration of economic power begets concentration of political power.”

Erik Brynjolfsson

Erik Brynjolfsson

Director, Stanford Digital Economy Lab

Information Assets, Technology, and Organization, 1994. Brynjolfsson and Ng, 2022

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