In this episode of Governance Futures, hosts Jamilya and Eugene speak with Puja Ohlhaver about her latest paper on community currencies and the PCARE model. She explains how her work builds on earlier frameworks, critiques one-token-one-vote models, and offers new approaches for balancing money, votes, attention, and influence.
Puja Ohlhaver is a lawyer, technologist, and innovator focused on renovating democracy to resist authoritarian drift in the age of AI. As a member of Harvard’s GETTING-Plurality Research Group at the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation, her work bridges law, economics, and computation to build pluralistic governance that empowers communities to rapidly scale cooperation across networks without succumbing to surveillance. Her most recent work explores how community currencies can rebalance attention and influence to amplify collective voices within frontier AI models, while hardening systems against both capture and overreach. Ohlhaver co-authored Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul with Glen Weyl and Vitalik Buterin. Her commentary has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Politico, WIRED, and Time Magazine. The conversation dives into the economic and political theory behind PCARE, its potential role in reconciling financial and non-financial commitments, and how subsidiarity and plurality can foster healthier governance systems. Puja also shares perspectives on the role of AI, digital reputation, and why legitimacy must be rooted in local communities while still enabling global cooperation.
The episode closes with her vision for the future of governance in one word: plurality.
Some of the materials we mention in the episode:
- Ohlhaver, Puja and Nikulin, Mikhail and Berman, Paula, Compressed to 0: The Silent Strings of Proof of Personhood (March 6, 2024). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4749892 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4749892
- Ohlhaver, P. (2024, October 1). Common Knowledge Machines: From Community Notes to Community Posts. Substack. https://pujaohlhaver.substack.com/p/common-knowledge-machines
- Ohlhaver, Puja, Community Currencies: The Price Of Attention And Cost Of Influence In A Networked Age -or-The Price Of Entry And Cost Of Exit In A Networked Age (January 02, 2025). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5136037 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5136037
- Ohlhaver, P. [deep dives w/thefett]. (2024, September 30). Community currencies and PCARE with Puja Ohlhaver [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rpt8PBWgdRw
- Ohlhaver, P. (2024, October 15). Why community currencies are crucial for governance in DeSoc (Ep. 588) [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRnYj_4GQHs

Timestamps
00:00 – Teaser/Preview
01:11 – Introduction and hosts’ reflections on Puja’s paper
04:46 – Puja’s personal, political, and economic motivations for community work
09:09 – AI, crypto, and decentralization beyond state power
11:31 – Community posts, discourse, and polarization online
18:04 – From Soulbound Tokens to community currencies: evolution of ideas
25:52 – Incentive alignment, liquefaction, and empty voting critiques
30:08 – Attention, influence, and the theory of power in networks
34:27 – Pareto’s law and the dangers of one-token-one-vote
40:21 – How PCARE introduces trade-offs between money and voting
44:37 – Why irrevocable stake matters for influence
48:55 – Subsidiarity, plurality, and justice in community currency design
53:05 – Community-based income and social recombination
57:22 – Enforcement, bribery, coercion, and community governance
01:01:10 – AI, neural networks, and identity as a networked self
01:06:30 – Reputation, relational context, and bridging communities
01:12:14 – Global vs. local currencies and legitimacy in communities
01:17:18 – Locality, legitimacy, and reorienting away from anti-social media
01:21:09 – Future experiments: civil society, social media, and music communities
01:25:12 – Where community currencies could start in practice
01:27:52 – Closing reflections before the one-word quiz
01:33:04 – One-word quiz: trust, plurality, and the future of governance
01:34:11 – Outro