Daniel Kronovet presents 'Chores as Complex Coordination,' introducing 'regenerative labor' as a concept distinct from maintenance or care work, and detailing Chore Wheel, a Slack-based protocol suite (chores, hearts, things) built on Elinor Ostrom's commons-governance principles plus four digital-era additions: no privileged roles, simple inputs, humans-for-sensing/machines-for-bookkeeping, and continuous asynchronous participation. Drawing on his Los Angeles co-living house Sage House as a real-world case study, he argues that separating task definition from task performance (akin to double-entry bookkeeping) allows a fixed, continuously-replenished point economy to turn dish-washing and trash duty into a system of social computation that generates social capital alongside physical upkeep.
Shared by the speakers for the symposium. Email addresses have been removed.
Transcript
YouTube’s automatic captions, unedited, so names and technical terms are often misheard. Each timestamp opens the video at that moment.
0:00 Thanks for having me. Very happy to be here. You know, most people in my life don’t share these interests. So, I just kind of feel like they think I’m this lunatic, but I come here and everyone knows what I’m talking about, which is such a treat. Um, yeah. So, kind of uh, you know, following on Shanghai, this is going to be a very applied talk, right? So, this is going to be very applied, very like, you know, trash and dishes, systems in the real world type of stuff. So, hopefully, you know, that’ll be a nice kind of balance against what we just heard. Um, okay. Let me quickly share my screen.
0:38 Okay, let’s put it up quickly as a slideshow. Okay. All right. So, um, you know, my talk is called chores as complex coordination, regenerative labor, and new institutions. I’ll be talking about the way that we can use uh protocol thinking and digital tools to really think about the way that people um live and work together in shared spaces. I start with this um definition uh regenerative labor and um you know I was kind of thinking about putting together this talk and what I wanted to say and um you know there’s there are a lot of terms people use to talk about chores and and like the work that takes place in the home um care work reproductive labor maintenance and I kind of wanted I wasn’t I wanted a term that that wasn’t quite those things and I ended up you know with this one regenerative labor and then I kind of wanted to operationalize it. And I eventually came up with this definition that um I was actually very happy with. And I was sort of inspired by or riffing off of the Steuart brand book that came out recently um about maintenance, which is kind of going on about the importance and value of sort of the the quiet work of keeping things going. And so with this term, I kind of wanted to say, okay, you know, regenerative labor, of which chores is the sort of archetype.
1:56 Um it maintains physical capital. we’re maintaining you know some sort of physical resource but it also is creating generating social capital. So that’s kind of the the idea that I’m going to develop over the course of this talk that you know regenerative labor doing the dishes it both maintains something physical it’s a necessary task but there’s a sort of second order effect in which it creates something else in this case social capital and that um I’m going to you know we’re going we’re going to say is an exciting thing um you know kind of our historical opening our sort of um you know setting the scene is a merely laterman ukuleles an artist working in the 60s and 70s is um she uh was really interested in something called maintenance art. She wrote the manifesto for maintenance art in 1969 and kind of teased out this distinction uh which you know we’re going to talk about more in the context of this project between development and maintenance. Development is um is novel.
2:52 It is new. It’s what you do when you go to work at your sort of you know challenging prestigious jobs. Um it’s it’s it’s like the high status thing that people want to be doing. Maintenance is the low status thing that people don’t want to be doing. It is the um you know going back to regenerative labor. It is what it takes to keep things sort of going um to maintain a sort of a steady state to maintain a status quo. Um you know Ukillesh in this photo was sort of dumping water over a staircase. This you know because she’s an artist this is now art which I think was her point. She um spent 40 years on the staff as the artist and residence of the New York sanitation department, which um is actually pretty metal when you think about it. So yeah, um UCLA explored this uh as an artist uh decades ago. Um kind of where I’m going to get into this and sort of start to formalize it. You know, I have a degree in math and computer science and I spent a lot of time studying machine learning in the late teens. And um kind of one of my big takeaways was um the idea of the special case and the general case. Um you know the general case, the threebody, the nbody problem um is generally hard to solve. And the special case um you know the twobody problem is one that we can solve. And the reason that we can solve it is because the special case has some kind of structure or constraints or or kind of like a you know handhold that we can use to to to solve a problem that that the general case doesn’t have. And that’s why um special cases are generally more likely to yield results than general cases. And of course the joke is that um you know the greatest honor anyone can ever hope to achieve is for their special case to be later include or for their solution to be a special case of a more general theory in the future which I thought was a funny take. Um in our setting for regenerative labor the special structure is repetition. It is not a endless stream of novel tasks that cannot be foreseen.
4:51 It is a set of tasks that are fixed that repeat again and again and again. And so if we take our domain from labor in general to sort of a a a repeating set of tasks, we now have a special structure that allows us to apply modeling um and systems thinking to the problem. That’s um you know why we’re able to get results here uh without solving labor generally. Um kind of our our influences that you know I use and that I think a lot of us have sort of that kind of our this is this is our team. This is the bench. Uh we have Stafford Beer and Elanor Astramm. Beer was a famous management consultant in the mid-century British uh kind of a one of the early cyberneticists um who did a lot of work around cybernetic management. He very famously worked with Aende in Chile to design a um a digital governance system called Cyersin for regulating the Chilean economy. Um it actually worked pretty well until uh the coup ruined everything and that ended. So sad but um a very interesting piece of history. I would assume many people here are familiar with cyersen. If you’re not worth checking out and you know his line is uh without a model of the system to be regulated you cannot have a regulator.
6:07 His take was that, you know, computers are necessary to help humans manage an increasingly complex world, right? Like computers are not a uh a threat to be avoided. They are a tool to be leveraged, which um obviously I agree with and I think many people here agree with. Also, Austramm needs no introduction, economist who did a lot of work on natural resource management. um you know her her thing is her line is a resource arrangement that works in practice can work in theory. She very famously was doing empirical work when her contemporaries were doing theoretical work. The joke is that you know uh you know the the the tragedy of the commons paper um that kind of argued that coordination is impossible came out 3 years after her research showing that it actually was possible. So that’s kind of like the big joke. She articulated eight principles for institutional design based on her fieldwork which we’re going to talk about in a second and which I think many people have found very inspiring. So Austramm’s principles um design principles for common pool resource management. Austramm went and looked at many many many examples of realworld groups successfully managing shared resources and she articulated eight principles defined boundaries local mechanisms member participation effective monitoring graduated sanctions accessible conflict resolution self-determination and um what we’re going to call what’s that term that people use subsidiarity and kind of you know my for this group you know kind of what I’m going to say is you know is this a protocol you know you know the meme with the the the anime guy with the the the butterfly. That’s kind of what we’re getting at here. Is this a protocol? Um I mean, everyone can draw their own conclusion. I’m going to go ahead and say yes. Yes, it is. Um and when we, you know, so uh when we were designing our uh chores system, we basically took this as a spec, right?
8:00 Astramm developed this uh out of her fieldwork. So for her, this was an empirical finding. In our case, we took this as a spec and implemented a feature or implemented a system according to this as a set of constraints. So for us, this was a protocol spec that we used. Um me and my colleagues Seth and Joe uh added a few more principles for adapting to the sort of digital world. Um and so this is kind of our formulation that um you know, we’ll see how it’s put into practice later on. uh which kind of adapts uh Austramm to the um sort of distributed digital setting and those are you know number one no managers or privileged roles. The idea of parallel play where every participant has the same set of affordances and the protocol is what helps manage their different sort of goals versus having like an admin at the top. This actually came out of a lot of my research into game design. Uh the second is simple and intuitive inputs. The idea is that if you want broad-based participation, you have to make the decisions um very legible um and not overwhelmingly complex, right? A very like you know letting everyone vote on complex proposals they can’t understand is not going to give you um strong signal. The third one, humans for sensing machines for bookkeeping. The idea there also coming out of a lot of my uh machine learning grad work was I did not want the machines to be doing any judgment making. I was skeptical of that. Um I felt like a lot of people were using noisy data to train models. They were not modeling uncertainty and they were overconfident and I didn’t like that at all. And so I think for me I took a very strong stance on all of the judgment uh is is a human input and machines are only doing you know legible deterministic work in the background and part of that was also for reasons of legitimacy. You know I think if you want to deploy these systems uh in like any large setting then you know legitimacy political legitimacy becomes very important. Um and so this was a way to really build legitimacy into the system uh foundationally. And the fourth is continuously available asynchronous processes. The idea there is that you know like this isn’t the 19th century.
10:09 We’re not you know in the in the church having a meeting. Everyone’s on their phone. Everyone has devices. So we can make governance something that is continuously happening and that people can participate in whenever they have a moment. Not you know we had to have a meeting on Sunday and we need a quorum to make decisions. I think that is a relic of a technological environment that no longer exists. And so these were kind of our principles uh for how we would design um digital uh systems again with the meme like is this a protocol? Yes. So that was kind of the theory. Um we went ahead and developed a set of tools. Uh you know the suite is called chore wheel. You know I’ve written about it and shared it with this group in the past so I think a lot of folks have seen this before. Um there are three mechanisms. There’s the chores mechanism. There’s the hearts mechanism which is sort of like a a norms and accountability system. There’s something I call things which is kind of just like a group spending tool. You know, I kind of in in my very um you know amateurish like product design uh sense I tried to like have a little theme with the names and all that. It worked fine. Um these are all uh Slack apps in a shared workspace, right? So the entire you know if you’re a group of people sharing a house, right? This is the co-living setting. um you’re all on a slack and all these apps just live as apps that you know communicate directly in your feed you know and like this was designed 2020 so I know now everyone has like agents in the slack and so this is actually a design you know a couple years before that became kind of the predominant paradigm that I think anticipated some of those directions so I think you know seeing what of this ended up becoming relevant for like a a more agentic world I think is sort of you that’s a thread we can we can follow and and The big idea is that each of these systems, chores, hearts and things is the same underlying uh protocol implemented around a different resource.
12:03 Right? So for chores, the resource is um people’s time and it’s you know in a sense it’s it’s chore points which is a kind of a community currency. For hearts the resource is you know hearts which is kind of like a life bar. You know it’s kind of like a notion of like social reputation or credit but I think done in in a smart way not a bad way. That’s a you know conversation for we can have later. Um things the resource is money but the point is that each one of these resources um there’s something about it that is specific to it but the general principles for designing the system are general and so we can see how those principles were designed to manage different resources kind of right here on one um screen. So I’m going to talk now more about the the nuances of the chore system because I think that’s where a lot of the real deep work was done. The other systems are a bit less nuanced, although I think they do very good work in their own way. I think this is where the action is. And so, you know, chores as as kind of complex coordination, which is the name of this talk. Um, the way that it works, and you know, if you’ve seen this before, we’ll just go over it again. The idea is that, um, there’s no sort of schedule. Um, you know, I was really reacting to the idea of the chore schedule as being an obsolete, again, institutional form, um, which was rigid and inflexible. In this case, you know, the amount of points and there’s basically a sort of steadystate economy going on here with the community currency. Um, people do chores for points and you can kind of go back and you can see, you know, so and so unloaded the dishwasher for two points.
13:29 So and so did the dishwasher for nine points. Someone gifted someone else points for taking to the airport. Like this is these are the interactions. And the way that the kind of mechanism works is that the amount of points entering the system is fixed. It’s 100 points per person per month is available into the system. It’s allocated continuously um across all of the chores that need to be done. Going back to maintenance and you and a and um and a ukulele um and then people do the chores to gain the points, right? So every chore is a bucket of points that is continuing to accumulate. people do the chore to claim the points and then at the end, you know, the total amount of points claimed by everyone is equal to the amount of points that entered into the system at the top. And so the um the amount of points is fixed. The allocation is automatic. Um those things are those are kind of built in. And then people’s choice to do the chore is their choice. They do it whenever they want to. And um the the way that points are allocated among the chores is like a secondary governance process that is sort of part of the suite that um allows people to basically relatively value the different chores cuz you know they’re not every not every chore is the same.
14:42 You want dishes to be done more than you want the trash to be taken out which you want to be done more than the deck is cleaned. And so giving people the ability to collectively prioritize chores and this is actually I know for those of you who come out of the web 3 worlds public goods funding you know was a big thing for years and years this is a public goods funding mechanism um applied to the problem of funding chores that you want to do um and that’s kind of there and I was very proud of this slide because I was able to put continuous and continual correctly on a single sheet which has been you know on my bucket list since I was in college so glad I was able to do Um, this slide I’m actually really excited about. I’m going to be I’m sending there’s an essay that I’m including as an artifact as part of the symposium that goes into this in more depth. I think this particular slide, there’s a lot that we could unpack here um that I’d like to say more of and the the essay goes into it a lot more, but you know, this chore system is is really a means of social computation. Um and and kind of what I mean by that is the system as a whole has sort of like um you know these sort of three like pieces of of of the pipeline. You know you define the chore, take out the trash, do the dishes, you know, garden the plants and like the set of chores people can basically add and remove and edit continuously. So the set of chores is itself in flux. People can update chore definitions. That’s a way to provide feedback to the system. And then within the set of chores they are accumulating value. Um so every day every 3 hours you know there’s a drip of points into the chores and people can then prioritize the chores and it’s it’s a pair-wise process of prioritizing one chore relative to another for reasons that are out of scope for this talk but has a lot of nice properties. Um people can then collectively set the value of the chores. Um and then individually people can then perform the chores which is someone actually you know applies energy uh to reduce entropy in the in the physical space right that’s what’s happening um people do the chores and then um then the group gets evaluates the performance and so that’s kind of the third way that this ends up being um uh like um actuated and um I kind of and performance I want to really take a moment to think about what’s happening here because I think it’s actually quite important When someone performs a chore, they’re kind of implicitly computing over multiple values, right? At that moment in time, you know, time whatever time TC time chore, um, they’re saying, I’m going to do this chore, right? This chore has a certain points value, right?
17:19 Dishes is worth 10 points. That’s objective, right? 10 points is an objective number. However, it is derived from the intersubjective valuation, the priority of what uh dishes should be worth um times the amount of time it’s been since someone did the chore. Right? So, the is itself a sort of hybrid signal combining interubjectivity, a collective decision plus an objective sort of how much time has it been since someone did the chore. So, that’s the value. And then when someone does the chore, they’re sort of interacting that with um their own subjective assessment of their capacity. Do I want to do the chore? Do I have the bandwidth for it? Do I have the energy for it? Do I you know, whatever it is? And the difficulty. So they’re sort of saying, okay, you know, this chore is valued at this thing. I now as sort of as like an independent actor, I’m going to ask myself like, is this a market clearing price for this chore? Right? Is this a fair value for how much I think this chore is going to take me? you know, and you could say that a a more difficult chore like cleaning a bathroom is going to be worth more. And the answer is that it often is empirically for reasons that I think we can understand. Um, and then and like, do I personally want to do the chore? Now, you know, different people have different personalities. Someone might actually want to do the dishes at a lower point, someone else might want to do the dishes at a higher point because of their personality. The point is that when someone chooses to do a chore, they are computing over all of these different signals um at once and then that that that computation then enters into the system as as a piece of data that can now be used um that is now available to all. Right? So this is not only is this organizing people to be contributing chores reducing entropy in a physical space, it is also a a kind of ongoing way to generate um signals and do social computation uh for the group.
19:13 And you know I think that this thing I was proud of was that we think about you know objective, subjective, interubjective, right? Like this chore system is not only integrating multiple signals but it is integrating signals across different epistemologies different ways of knowing are being integrated into one system um throughout this process and I think that you know as I even myself you know was articulating that and like even understanding that articulation of what was happening uh I found very exciting. So that’s something I’m kind of proud of. [snorts] Um, last thing I’ll say, not last thing I’ll say, more things to say, but this slide, um, you know, kind of what I’ve realized, you know, I’ve spoken to a lot of people at chore systems and hiring of domestic cleaners and whatever, and it’s like it’s a it’s, you know, it’s something I spent a lot of time doing. Um, kind of my my proposition is that people want to contribute. Um, like I think they just, you know, they want to contribute, but it has to be very easy and I think it also has to be visible. I think if it’s difficult to contribute or people or there’s there’s no visibility for it, I think people are just going to not be as stoked about it. Um, and I think that’s fine. Um, going back to the social capital thing. And I think that um, this this slide comes out of a blog post I wrote which goes into some other stuff here, but I think I think the key to making participation easy is separating task definition from performance. And I I kind of made this paro chart where I was kind of positioning the sort of digital chore system against two alternatives that I I see in the co-l livingiving world. One is the paper chart which I think many of us are familiar with the chore chart where it’s like here’s a schedule you know Tuesday at 7 it’s my time to do the dishes. I think that system is primitive. And then there’s also a brag sheet which is there’s no structure. It’s just you you know you post in the Slack saying I took out the trash and people give you you know thumbs up emojis. I think both of those systems are um you know more limited in in their own ways. I think that the digital system really gets us off the paro frontier into like an objectively better um like there’s a a better place. And the reason why is because it allows us to separate defining the task, you know, someone has to do the dishes, it’s worth as many points from um performing the task. And you know, I know this group talks a lot about stigm. And I think we look we think of this as a kind of stigmic system in which the the Slack and the Chores app becomes this sort of like um a poster board that people are able to communicate um indirectly and coordinate indirectly allows us to achieve this um high efficiency. And I think that, you know, one one analogy I could make which is like I think a little bit maybe overflattering and so you know don’t take me too seriously uh is to double entry bookkeeping which the Italians developed hundreds of years ago which allowed us to separate a financial transaction um into an input and an output. Again the fact that we could separate a transaction into its two constituent parts and book them separately unlocked a lot of complexity.
22:05 The way that here we’re able to separate defining and performing a task also unlocks a lot of complexity.
22:12 Um, cool. So, case study. Um, I am very concerned and interested in economic value. Um, you know, going back to the theory, like it was very important to me to to to be applied. And so, I um built a co-l livingiving house to try this system out over the pandemic. It was pretty trippy. And, um, I kind of this is kind of the house’s performance. And I I put the slide up just to show that these systems are generating real economic value. Um, you know, this house has been running for 4 years. People like living there. Um, it’s below market. Um, it runs very lean. The expenses are very low to run it because the residents do so much. Um, there’s food included in the rent. There’s a revenue share included as part of living there. Um, there’s 2 hours a month of meetings and we’ve never had a paid manager or a cleaner. And, um, I think that these are, you know, pretty real results. And I think that this is a demonstration that these systems are creating real economic value. Also, people like living there. So, this is, you know, this is this is not just a theory. This is something that is working in practice.
23:16 Um, the last slide and then we’ll save some time for questions. I think it’s worth calling out the limit of structure. Like, no one’s a bigger fan of digital systems than me. That’s actually probably not true in this group, but um, you know, relative to most people I talk to. But I think it’s worth kind of a moment of humility and to talk about the limits of structure. For those of you who have read seeing like a state, which I think is a you know a popular book in this world, um Scott talks about how the formal order, you know, any kind of chore system does fundamentally require uh some kind of informal culture to exist uh which it itself cannot maintain. Um my collaborator Seth has a great line which is you know community creates conflict which creates community. um you know a system by itself uh is is is going to decoher unless there is some sort of you know social sphere that it that it is embedded into um I think that it can also provide structure to that system and I think that it’s you know just like the biological metaphor of you know muscle and skeleton or skeleton and tissue right I think that’s I think that’s pretty familiar I don’t think I think people here can get get that sort of dialectic um but I think it’s worth calling out and kind of kind of where where I want to take that is this idea of giving the residual some leverage, which is kind of like a nonsensical statement, but I’ll explain it. You know, let’s say let’s say that, you know, a a house has an 8 hour monthly meeting where they talk about everything because they have no digital tools, right? So 8 hours a month they’re talking because they have no digital tools. And then you give them digital tools and now instead of 8 hours a month, it’s 2 hours a month. Okay, that’s that’s that’s good. That’s that’s efficiency. Um but but maybe that meeting was helping them develop social skills and so actually you know the two hours you need now means that there’s a loss because people are no longer able to build the same social capital because they’re not in this 8 hour meeting anymore. Well, what if you said, “Okay, we’re gonna have a two-hour meeting and we’re gonna have a two-hour games night.” And so now, you know, we’ll have our two hours of business and we’ll have our two hours of katan where people actually develop skills, you know, people practice um decision-m within formal systems, decision-m under uncertainty, you know, but in a fun way, in a fun, low stakes way. And now, you know, the sort of skill building that was being done implicitly in the six hours of meeting is now being done implicitly by two hours of game night.
25:38 And so your net, you know, still 50% less time. It’s 2 hours of meeting, two hours of game night. And the game night is giving people the skills to then use the digital systems more effectively during the rest of the time. So I think that’s kind of like my like kind of take on that angle because I think it’s worth calling out. But I think yeah, I think that’s I think the idea of giving the residual some leverage is saying how do you take whatever little piece can’t be formalized and figure out a way to to to make the building of that skill have an outsized impact when those people integrate back into the formal system. That’s that’s kind of what I’m doing with this slide. Um this is our last slide. So just to re revisit the term regenerative labor, it’s the repetitive low status work that maintains equilibrium. Um but generally hard to provision without any kind of structure because the incentives are misaligned. Um but when done it is positive sum, maintains physical capital and creates social capital and then if we’re going to be you know kind of complex anarchists here, that social capital then allows us to then take more bold action in the real world outside of the shared space. Right? Right? So it is a net good if people are able to learn to work together because then they can work together um in other settings outside of the shared home and digital systems can help sustain this activity for longer periods and with less effort than without um an equivalent digital system.
27:00 So that is my talk. Um you know if you want to learn more about this project zeroten.world everything um or just you know kind of hit me up QR code takes you I think to the website. I blog a lot about these topics. um community governance system. So that would be the next place to go if you want more of this content. Otherwise, I’m going to stop sharing and we’ll see if we can have some time for questions.
27:23 Yeah, there’s um quite a bit of conversation in the in the chat if you want to like scroll there and maybe speak to a bit of it.
27:29 Let’s see what we got. Um let’s see. A lot of questions. You want to maybe toss one out for me?
27:42 Yeah, if somebody wants to unmute and ask, they can V to the bunch.
27:47 Yeah. Um, let’s see. So, I guess like you know, how are actions like unload dishwashers logged? Does a person manually do it? Um, yeah. So, you you do have to go and claim the chore. And so, you do have to go and say like, I did the chore and then it enters into the system. So, yeah, like I have a pretty strong privacy ethos. And so like people were like, “Oh, put a camera in the kitchen.” I was like, “I really don’t want to put a camera in the kitchen.” Um yeah, but it’s a manual action to log the chore. And then the points um you know, I use the term community currency. They um expire at the end of every month. And so thinking about how do you keep how do you keep points from kind of becoming pathological. Part of it was that they’re um highly socially embedded and ephemeral. And so, you know, every month they expire and you start from zero. And that keeps the system a little bit memoryless. So you can’t have, you know, naive accumulation or things like that that end up throwing the balance off. Um, cyber worked. My um my read when I was reviewing it was that it worked pretty well until the coup, but um maybe there’s a deeper history in which case it there were problems that I glossed over. In which case I did I then I gave I gave beer too much of a glaze.
29:12 Oh, the house is in Los Angeles. Um, in Highland Park.
29:19 Um, no one has kids. It’s a nine people who were single. We had one married couple for a few months, but they moved out. Um um yeah, as far as how bespoke the tool was, um it’s I mean, you know, I’d wanted it to be pretty general, but I’ve learned talking to people over the last few years that, you know, kind of like a like a a 6 to 10 to 12 person house with like a strong sense of stake is is kind of the sweet spot. you know, if if it’s too nebulous, like something I’ve realized is that political change is only really possible during times of crisis. And so finding people who like live in a house where everything’s going pretty well and they’re pretty happy. Getting them to adopt a behavior change is basically impossible. It has to either be they’re having a crisis or someone’s like, “I’m burning out. If we don’t make a change, then I’m moving out.” Then they’re willing to make a change. Otherwise, they’re not really receptive. Um, and I found that, yeah, I think that, um, groups that are too small sometimes have a hard time getting into the rhythm. And something else I found is that I think groups are very quick to add way too many chores. Like, I had a group once that added 50 chores and then they complain that all the chores were worth too little. And I was like, I mean, that’s kind of the what’s going to happen if you have a steady state economy with fixed amount of point, a fixed amount of chores. But that’s an implementation detail that I don’t want to bore this group with. So maybe another time. Yeah, if you have more questions, hit me up.
30:53 Yeah, thanks Daniel. That was that was great. And um yeah, lots going on in the chat still, so we can we can see those questions get answered. And up next, we’ve got Jesse for the next half hour. Laura is yours.
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