During the last decades of
explosive growth in economic value on the Internet, we observe the trend of
platformization: a shift of economic activity from happening on a wide range of
companies to a few major platforms run by Big Tech corporations. This trend is
highly susceptible to the rise of monopolies and oligarchs, as seen in the
music industry today. In this industry, the top 5 streaming services and top 3
labels form oligarchs. Artist income is diminishing because these powerful
intermediaries take large revenue cuts. Streaming services also have curatorial
power: they decide the inner workings of their black box recommendation
systems. As an alternative for
centralized Internet platforms, this thesis presents a theoretical framework
for building a robot economy in software: autonomous software in which robots
perform monetary transactions on their own. It allows for building infrastructure
for the common good: software systems that (1) handle financial transactions in
a fair way, as (2) decided by democratic engagement, (3) run transparently and
autonomously, (4) are open to any participant (permissionless), (5) are
decentralized and leaderless, (6) support a self-evolving codebase, and finally
(7) can make intelligent decisions on their own using AI. We show a proof-of-concept of this framework,
by implementing features 1,3,4 and 5. We present a fully operational
decentralized music streaming, publishing and discovery mobile app (called
MusicDAO) with peer-to-peer donations to artists. It is built on a fully
distributed, self-scaling network of Android phones. The app was released to
the public, and was installed on 50+ devices. During this public trial, the
decentral financial infrastructure was successful: most music streaming
platforms take a 20-40% cut of music revenue; MusicDAO takes <0.001%.
Discovery and metadata search is operational with low latency. Peer-to-peer
music streaming is operational, but its latency is not yet competitive. Our framework and proof-of-concept are
fruitful steps towards research into infrastructure for the common good:
software systems that are governed by its users instead of by profit-driven
corporations.