Futarchy, Commitments, and Community Hybrids After the Critique

Critique

The role of AI agents in communities is often limited to:

• Reducing agents to bots for proposals, treasury management, and automation.
• Assuming primitives like identity and reputation will create value without concrete designs for how.
• Focusing only on productivity while ignoring the design of novel rulesets and adaptive, simple governance for communities.

A path forward is to design a ludic constitution for the social structure itself, without defaulting to archetypal AI agent roles and shallow gamification (mini-games, rewards, simulations).

1. From Tasks to Trajectories

The Technomancer economy displaced labour with agent portfolios; the Ludic Constitution displaces back‑office governance with market‑priced commitments. Value now flows in three coupled layers:

1. Signal → prediction of social metrics (futarchy).
2. Commitment → resource‑bound promises that make winners pay for error.
3. Forkability → exit paths that let dissatisfied capital walk the talk.

Together they turn rule‑making itself into the primary arena of play.

2. Futarchy as the Fire Under the Boiler

Futarchy votes on beliefs, not preferences: "Adopt rule‑x if the market expects a higher Structural Entropy Index (SEI) six weeks out." Two contracts run in parallel:

• Conditional Bonds—participants lock stake on SEI↑ vs. SEI↓.
• Execution Oracle—if the rule passes, the losing side forfeits stake to treasury.

Thus every proposal carries an insurance premium priced by collective expectation. Prediction markets stop being pundit sport and start underwriting policy risk.

3. Rule‑Change Credits (RCC): Scarce Tickets to the Design Floor

RCCs are non‑transferable, decaying, and earn‑back instruments:

• Spend to table, amend, or veto rules.
• Earn when empirical SEI or treasury surplus improves post‑adoption.
• Decay logarithmically to keep the agora noisy, not ossified.

Because RCC supply throttles influence directly, identity and reputation matter only as coefficients in an issuance formula—never as collectible trophies.

4. Continuous Fork Futures: Exit as a First‑Class Primitive

A fork future is a standing conditional commitment:

Agents maintain a running order book of such futures. When thresholds trip, the ledger splits atomically; resources and RCC balances follow the movers. Forks cease to be civil wars and become statistically anticipated phase transitions—Schumpeterian creative destruction written to disk.

5. Structural Entropy Index (SEI): The Compass

where pᵢ is share of effective influence (capital × RCC × active labour) held by identity i. A constitutional constant, SEI* ∈ [0.75, 0.85], defines the viable zone between oligarchy and grid‑lock.

• Below 0.75 → automatic RCC mint to low‑influence quartile; futarchy markets penalise capture.
• Above 0.85 → proposal quorum auto‑ratchets; futarchy markets reward consolidation.

SEI therefore drives recursively self‑balancing governance: the metric itself pulls policy levers.

6. Agentic Roles—Ephemeral and Competitive

Agents expose interfaces, not archetypes. At any moment several may claim the MetricOracle(SEI) interface; the one with lowest mean‑absolute‑error over rolling windows earns RCC rebates, the rest risk slashing. Roles emerge as best‑fit functions to current system constraints, then vanish when out‑performed.

7. Dynamics: Commitment‑Market loops

A causal diagram looks like this:

1. Rule Proposal → futarchy market prices expected SEI.
2. Commitment Premium (loser stake) → RCC spend ≥ real‑option cost.
3. Outcome Observation → oracle resolves SEI; payouts recycle to treasury.
4. SEI drift → auto‑mint/burn RCC.
5. Updated RCC balances alter power in step 1.

The loop satisfies the critique's demand: signal → rule update → behaviour change → new signal, fully legible and hedgeable.

8. Hybrid Governance: Human, Agent, Market

• Humans exercise taste, narrative framing, and normative veto (Constitution can mark sacred invariants).
• Agents audit code, forecast metrics, and surface causal salience.
• Markets price uncertainty and reallocate budget.

Each pillar can check the others; none can unilaterally lock the state—as long as fork futures stay cheap.

9. Antifragility by Design

Shock classes:

• Model drift → inaccurate SEI oracles. Mitigation: redundant oracle mesh with bonded stakes.
• Regulatory hit → treasury assets frozen. Mitigation: fork futures let compliant sub‑DAO defect pre‑emptively.
• Social split → value clash unpriceable by futarchy. Mitigation: narrative‑level secession via soft fork, costs wrapped into RCC decay to minimize hostage taking.

Systems that treat exit as blood‑flow survive arterial blockage.

10. Failure Modes & Early Warning

• Fork Ponzi —serial pseudo‑forks to farm RCC inflation. Guardrail: liquidity threshold must include time‑weighted labour, not pure token flow.
• Entropy Masking —sybil identities pump SEI. Guardrail: proof‑of‑work‑history weights identity scores.
• Prediction Market Manipulation —whales skew odds then hedge externally. Guardrail: commit‑reveal with blinded stakes + time‑bounded escrow.

11. Minimal Dashboard

• SEI (live) Goal: 0.75 – 0.85
• RCC Velocity Credits spent / day; target band auto‑scaled to SEI error derivative.
• Market Spread on Next‑Rule SEI Proxy for epistemic uncertainty.
• Fork Liquidity Depth % of capital subject to active futures (systemic stress indicator).

No vanity KPIs; each dial feeds a constitutional actuator.

12. Conclusion: Designing the Playground, Not the Toys

The post‑labour insight was that production becomes meta‑production. The post‑critique upgrade is that gamification becomes constitutional physics. Futarchy prices belief, commitments stake skin, and fork futures bake the right to leave into every contract.

AI agents flourish here not as storytellers or loot‑distributors but as quantitative custodians of uncertainty. They measure entropy, quote risk, and auto‑partition worlds when consensus fractures.

By wagering on rules instead of following them, communities escape both the stasis of canonical roles and the chaos of unchecked novelty. The field we now maintain is the capacity to rewrite itself.

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