Welcome to another issue of Labrys Insights, your newsletter on technology design and policy.

Today, we'll cover:

Our second 2023 in review issue,
How we applied SAT while supporting the Brazilian Central Bank's work designing Pix, and
Our second commitment for 2024.

We're wrapping up our year at Labrys and… boy, have things been moving fast! For the first time ever, we're actually late for a Labrys Insight issue and we do apologize for the change in schedule. Since you didn't have a new issue to read last Saturday morning, we hope y’all used the little extra time to get ahead on your holiday shopping, if you're into that kind of thing. Or to finish reading our landmark article “Systemic Approach to Technology (SAT): The case for society-focused technology”, if you haven't already. In any case, we hope you had a great weekend.

Now, let's get to it.

M. and J.

SAT and TDP

In one of our past newsletters we wrote:

We as a society must regain the focus and the locus of the discussion. We must learn the language of this debate and claim the position of protagonists in this process so we can make sure our long-term interests are truly at the heart of every decision moving forward.

And to do that, society needs methods and tools that are substantially better than the ones available at large today. The conflicts between policymakers and technology innovation are far from trivial, and most are not possible to be solved by cartesian thinking. As we wrote:

We believe that technology design and policy should be all about modeling the systems that will enable us, the tech industry, to better serve society; and that technology should be built from its primitives up in order to solve domain-level problems. By shifting our approach to technology, we can build solutions that are more effective, more sustainable, and more equitable.

This is a fundamentally different approach to technology innovation. Instead of avoiding policymakers’ concerns, embrace and internalize these concerns on the products. Instead of creating regulatory pieces without local knowledge, have the industry participate in the policymaking process.

The consequences of this shift in approach can be enormous. Looking at Pix, the RTP rail created by the Brazilian Central Bank (BCB):

The new approach BCB took, on the other hand, was to build not a product but a platform upon which institutions could build any kind of payment solution without the need to create new integrations. The core concept that enabled this was the idea that all payment solutions, without exception, are all about moving money from one account to another, along with metadata about the payment. Anything, from credit cards to paying government taxes, follows this basic setting. Based on that realization, BCB knew it had to build a settlement chamber (clearing house) and a communication rail that could effectively connect any two members of the rail. After that, it only took designing a messaging protocol between participants that could be indefinitely extended to create the most flexible payment rail of all time.

Pix changed Brazil. In the first 3 years of operation 71 million brazilians that didn’t use eletronic payments started to use Pix. That is a third of Brazil’s population. And this was only possible because the approach to technology and regulation was substantially different.

With that in mind, this year we worked on formalising our Systemic Approach to Technology (SAT) and defining our field of work, Technology Design and Policy (TDP). We believe these publications will help others replicate highly successful projects, such as the Brazilian RTP rail Pix.

And with this comes our second commitment for 2024. We’ll keep producing methods and tools to help society regain the focus and locus of the discussion.

SAT and TDP in 2023