2026-07-11 –, Teen Base Camp
What if we've been building the wrong thing? What if the decentralization project is not a project of technological development but one of human development. I will show just how much of successful decentralization depends on people with tremendous training in collaborative and autonomous work.
Decentralization has an easy part—the structures—and a hard part—people who have internalized those structures. All applications of new technology go towards making the easy part easier. In this talk I will take the perspective of behavioral science to argue that we've been building the wrong thing: that the critical lack in a polycentric, free future is not a type of structure, but a type of person. Integrating psychology, sociology, and political science I will show what I mean, and what role it suggests for future effort toward a decentralized future.
We will conclude with a discussion where everyone shares their own experiences of failure and success stepping into decentralized systems with the right preparation.
Dr. Seth Frey is a computational social scientist and cognitive scientist who studies commons governance, collective action, and other complex social phenomena. He specializes in using online communities as model systems for emergent institutional and organizational phenomena. His expertise is in computational approaches to self-governance and the cognitive science of collective behavior.
He is an associate professor in Communication at the University of California Davis, an affiliate of the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University, and a Research Director at Metagov. He was a behavioral economist at Disney Research in Walt Disney Imagineering, and a complex systems scholar at NECSI. Seth holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science and Informatics (complex systems) from Indiana University and a B.A. in Cognitive Science from UC Berkeley.
Seth’s research has appeared in PNAS, Nature Scientific Reports, and Proceedings of the Royal Society. It has been covered in The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, and TEDx. It has been funded by the NSF, NASA, and the Ford Foundation.