Spartacus.app

"Kickstarter" for Collective Action

Bootstrap projects, organize people around a common purpose, and generate leverage to impact institutional and systemic change.

Using Assurance Contracts and conditional anonymity, Spartacus.app can help solve Social Dilemmas, Traps, and Paradoxes, Perverse Incentives, and Preference Falsification.

Start, or join a movement, in safety.

Some causes face strong opposition and require a group effort. Get involved while concealing your identity to avoid intimidation or retaliation.

Gain allies, anonymously.

Spread the word, and recruit others, without risking exposure. No action is taken until the group reaches a designated size.

Take action, collectively.

When a threshold is crossed, the power of numbers replaces the safety of anonymity. Everyones' identity is revealed simultaneously to enable coordination, solidarity and support.

© Spartacus.app All rights reserved.

How Spartacus.app Works

By mitigating risks associated with "first mover" status, reducing the uncertainty and cost of organizing, and maximizing the expected impact of collective action, Spartacus transforms bad equilibria into better ones.

Anyone can create a campaign anonymously. The campaign creator establishes the purpose, writes the description, a plan of action, and sets a "Critical Threshold" - the minimum number of participants at which everyone, anonymous up to that point, is simultaneously deanonymized.It's up to the creator to decide what this number should be.

After the campaign is created, it becomes publicly visible at a static URL. From here, the creator can begin promoting it to a target audience - sharing the link via email, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, or any other method of posting and sharing anonymously.

Anyone can anonymously join the campaign from the public page and share it in the same way. The page is updated in real-time to reflect the number of pledged participants, and how far it is from reaching the Critical Threshold.

When the Critical Threshold is reached, all participants are de-anonymized simultaneously - exchanging the safety of anonymity for the safety of numbers, instantly!

Everyone's identity and chosen contact info is shared via email with the other members of the campaign, along with instructions from the organizer on what to do next.

Now with the power, protection, leverage, and support of a group, the campaign can continue to spread, and accelerate in public.Spartacus has done its job.

The Problem

Trying to make a difference is never easy.A single person is usually powerless to change anything. Often, there's opposition. But the more people coordinate and work together, the higher the chance of success.

In an ideal world, anyone could speak, persuade and organize without fear.

In our world, individuals who try to change things can face intense resistance - even punishment - for speaking up, or taking action.

If the risk and cost are high enough, most people are intimidated into silence, dishonesty, and inaction.When this affects large groups, it causes a phenomenon called Preference Falsification, where many people self-censor their honest opinions and desires.Under these circumstances, a person doesn't know if they're surrounded by potential allies, enemies, or completely alone. Given the consequences of trying to find out, most don't bother.

Willingness to act in the context of a strong group effort is much higher than acting alone. Unfortunately, the "First Mover" is taking the biggest risk in the weakest position. Almost no one wants to do it, but everyone wants to benefit from others doing it. This is a Collective Action Problem.

If everyone who shared a belief or goal could find each other and band together without risking their safety or security, more and more people would be inclined to participate.

Create change together, never alone.

Use Cases

The use cases for Spartacus.app can vary widely and are content agnostic. (some subjects and campaign objectives will be prohibited for legal and public safety reasons.). The common thread is solving of a coordination problem and facilitating the formation of a large enough group to exercise leverage for a change objective that no single individual would be capable of alone.Here are some examples:

Politics / Non-Profit

  • Gathering a critical mass or quorum for government/organizational meetings.

  • Petition outreach to get the attention of congresspeople, senators, and other government stakeholders.

  • Building a list of activists willing to perform an action, protest, boycott or other campaign, collectively.

  • Resolving disputes over large allocations of resources, or competing priorities.

  • Building a preemptive support network to better withstand entryism against the founding ideals of an organization.

  • Vote-trading agreements at scale.

Labor

  • Workers attempting to organize their workplace.

  • musicians coming together to threaten to leave streaming service unless corporate rights holders make concessions.

  • Bootstrapping artist collectives.

  • Discretely probing employees on preference for policy changes.

  • Coming to the defense of a person unfairly targeted for retaliation.

  • Athletes deciding to make decisions as a team instead of free-agents.

  • Generating a critical mass of people with common economic interests to form a collective unit for negotiating leverage with a counterparty.

Commercial / Business

  • Investors or founders creating a group incentive to buy-in to a project where there are first-mover disadvantages or risks; “I’ll invest if XYZ also invests”.

  • Trading coordination - a legal and transparent way to act as a coordinated group to move markets.

  • Agreeing on Industry self-regulation and safety guidelines.

  • Building consensus around a set of standards and practices.

  • Bootstrapping professional consortiums.

  • Halting an incentive structure that leads individual actors to pursue rational interests that threaten the long term viability or sustainability of the whole system.

  • Deciding to replace or keep people in leadership positions in controversial situations.

  • Getting a critical mass of stakeholders to agree to validate new forms of credentialing to disrupt legacy practices.

  • Gathering buy-in for mass resignations or threats of resignations.

  • Collective buying agreements for infrastructure improvements that would be impossible to build incrementally.

  • Achieve volume discounting by aggregating demand.

  • Weighted wait listing for projects that require minimum viable network effects to launch

Bootstrapping / Community Governance

  • Building a big enough group to splitting the cost of big purchases or investments (crowdfunding).

  • Mass simultaneous physical mobilization - collective agreements to move to a new location in order to preserve network effects and economies of scale.

  • Surveying the marketplace of ideas within a community to measure hypothetical support for a proposal and reveal community preferences.

  • Bad Actor / Abuse detection: Anonymous surveying of a community to connect related isolated experiences in order to establish a pattern of behavior.

  • Community Service Activities requiring group opt-in - picking up Trash, public property improvement etc.

  • Creating countervailing force to mobbing, harassment, and bullying online.

  • Party games - fun ways to decide to do group activities.

Get In Touch

This project is currently in closed beta. If you'd like to get involved, sign up to be a beta tester, or have any questions or feedback please contact us.

© Spartacus.app All rights reserved.

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