Hello everyone! This post contains both an important announcement and a refresher on what Spartacus.app is and how the project proceeds from here.
I’m thrilled to report that Spartacus.app was selected as a recipient of Scott Alexander’s 2024 ACX grant initiative.
The grant will help fund the project's technical development through the MVP stage and beyond. It’s an honor to be selected, and we will capitalize on the opportunity.
Co-recipient of the grant is Tetraspace (https://twitter.com/TetraspaceWest), a software developer based in the UK, who also submitted a proposal to work on assurance contracts. Instead of issuing 2 separate grants for similar projects, a suggestion was made that we join forces, and that’s what we’ve decided to do.
So, what exactly is Spartacus.app again?
The basic overview and use cases can be found on the Website, but in a nutshell, it’s “Kickstarter for Collective Action”.
In a bigger nutshell, it’s an online platform designed to solve coordination problems through collective action campaigns, using assurance contracts and transitory anonymity. The goal is to create actionable and sufficient leverage to affect systemic change or shift incentive equilibriums in a given area of concern, which (the premise goes) can only be achieved through the synchronized behavior of a large enough group of stakeholders.
By making the decision to participate in a campaign contingent on the attainment of effective leverage, using a "critical threshold" trigger for campaign activation, Spartacus mitigates three kinds of risk often responsible for inertia - retaliation, opportunity cost, and uncertainty of outcome - significantly raising the expected value of taking action.
Who are you, again?
I’m Jordan Braunstein, https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordanbraunstein1/
I have a B.S. in Economics and Political Science, where I first became fascinated with game theory, behavioral economics, and social dilemmas.
I started my career in finance but moved to tech at the beginning of the last boom cycle (2012-ish). I’ve been a business development lead for software and hardware startups (mostly in the AR/VR space) for about 12 years. I’ve consulted at several seed-stage companies and was employee #1 and Sales Director for a VR HealthTech startup called Vivid Vision (www.seevividly.com), where we helped deliver innovative vision therapy to thousands of patients with eye disorders like amblyopia and strabismus.
Building Spartacus has been an aspiration of mine for a couple of years. It began as a germ of an idea and then a side project in late 2022, and while progress was made in fits and starts, it floundered due to bandwidth limitations stemming from the demands of my day job. I left that company in November to work on Spartacus full-time, with the attention and dedication it deserves.
Why are you doing this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_trap
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abilene_paradox
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
Simply put, I believe these types of phenomena - coordination failures, bad incentive structures, and power disparities - are at the root of so many sticky problems humanity wants and needs to address. Surprisingly, there’s been a dearth of experimentation in trying to deal with these issues on a fundamental level. Spartacus is an attempt to remedy that with game theory and software.
On a personal note, many years ago, I was involved in political activism (mainly anti-war related during the G.W. Bush administration and, later, Occupy Wall Street). I became disenchanted when I saw how many of my peers were primarily driven by seeking community, moral identity, self-expression, and emotional release. These motives aren’t wrong per se - they’re essential to the human need for social coherence and meaning - but too often, they supersede focus on theories and strategies of actual change. The argument for pragmatism (and the intellectual practices necessary) has difficulty competing with the visceral gratification of moralism and rhetoric. Simplistic ideological dogmas and polarization increasingly constrain our ability to comprehend collective problems, let alone solve them.
Spartacus is also an attempt to give pragmatists who deeply care about making positive change a toolset to augment their efforts.
What Comes Next?
The ACX grant will partially fund the labor hours and technical resources needed to complete a new, more robust MVP, develop several case studies with early users, iterate based on feedback, and build and launch V 1.0.
I’d put the probability of success, as measured by the project achieving self-sustainability, at around 70%. It could become a grant-funded nonprofit or a conventional software company with a standard business model. I’m confident there are several viable monetization strategies, but it’s premature to set a higher confidence level until we can validate if and how the platform delivers tangible value to users.
Future large grant funding is possible if testing yields impressive case studies in the political organizing/non-profit/governance space.
A crowdfunding campaign (partially dogfooding the platform) is possible if the MVP succeeds at gaining traction, the project is sufficiently signal-boosted, and a few early campaigns go viral.
Future angel and VC funding is possible if we can validate a compelling business model for private sector use, a path to revenue, sufficient scale, and profitability.
Can I Get Involved?
Yes!
We’re looking for:
Use case suggestions
Beta testers and early adopters
Technical, design, and policy collaborators
Expertise in data privacy/security
Critiques and Red-Teaming
Additional funding sources and investment
Introductions to any of the above
If you'd like to chat, you can schedule a video call using this link:
https://calendly.com/spartacus_app/30min
Also, feel free to follow project updates on "X", and/or subscribe to this substack.
Stay tuned for more updates!
Best,
Jordan Braunstein
Congratulations!