The awareness of our own reputation acts as a powerful social control that inhibits most of us from acting out our worst impulses. We don’t need a police officer or some outside force to stop us, since there are a whole range of things we would just never do in public. Reputation has a self-policing effect on us. So how do we engage the self-regulating capacity of reputation to curb the worst impulses within cells?

All cells should draft a public constitution that they promise to uphold. We as consumers and workers can then evaluate them based on their constitutions and how well they follow them. The constitutions are very simple. The founders and participants of the cells publicly define the PURPOSE of the project and the IMPACT it will have on creating well-being. Defining the impact will include both the positive outcomes and all the negative externalities that producing that outcome will cause.

The public evaluates cells by their purpose and their stated impacts. How good is the stated purpose in creating shared well-being, and how successful is the cell in delivering it? Can the project produce its positive impact without exceeding the promised limits it has placed on its negative impact? What is the promised impact compared to those of projects with the same purpose? These evaluations define half of a cell’s reputation. The other half is defined by the reputations of the goods and services it produces.

Every action a cell takes can be evaluated against its constitution: how well the particular action serves the purpose and whether its impact is within the stated boundary. By publicly defining its purpose and impact, the constitution creates clear and easily enforceable boundaries for what the project can do in the world. These boundaries regulate the behavior of everybody who works for the project, but also the behavior of those who consume its goods and services.

Every cell creates its own boundaries that it agrees to abide by. Cells are unlikely to list anything antisocial as their purpose, since this would prevent them from attaining subscriptions and workers. If a cell lists world domination as its purpose, it will invite public scrutiny and immediate countermeasures. If the cell lists something innocuous as its purpose but pursues world domination anyway, it will be in violation of its constitution, inviting public scrutiny and countermeasures.

A cell’s reputation has a direct impact on how and for what price it can sell its goods and services in the marketplace. If the stated purpose or the impact it creates is negative, the project is unlikely to receive many customers or subscribers. Without subscribers, it will eventually wither and die. This how pro-social selection works in practice.

The reason people don’t want to subscribe to or work for a cell with a bad reputation is that the project’s reputation will be directly reflected in their own reputations. Being a participant in a cell with a bad reputation taints your own reputation.

The fear of losing subscribers or not attaining them in the first place incentivizes enterprises to focus on efforts that have a genuinely beneficial purpose over anything that is seen as destructive. It also incentivizes projects to serve their community and avoid negative externalities as much as possible. This is a market-based regulation that weeds out bad actors by not letting them get off the ground in the first place.

The purpose of the various reputation categories is to act as feedback loops that steer and modulate the behavior of the cells. cells are the executive arm of our society and the organizations that in practice change physical reality the most. They need to be under public scrutiny and rewarded or penalized depending on how they contribute to the well-being of society.

If a big gap appears between its actual behavior and its constitution, a cell’s reputation will suffer. If it violates its own constitution, not only does its reputation suffer, it can be referred to its chosen regulatory forum. The forum can force the project to return to acting within the constitutional boundaries it has set for itself or force it to adjust its constitution to more accurately reflect its true purpose and impact. If this doesn’t stop the bad behavior, the forum can brand the project a criminal enterprise and even shut it down if necessary. The function of public forums will be discussed in more detail in the last part of the book.

How a cell compensates its participants should also be included in the constitution. Every cell can define its own compensation structure, so long as it is made clear beforehand and is fully transparent to potential subscribers. A defining feature of a cell’s compensation logic is the range between what its highest and lowest paid employees make in an hour. A cell’s compensation logic is public information and customers can choose to shun cells they deem to be using unfair compensation models.

In the default compensation system, additional shares are allocated at the end of the week based on the customer ratings for that week. This means the customer reviews effectively determine the average hourly wage within a project. The workers determine who among them has earned the additional shares that week using an internal assessment. Some workers can have a prenegotiated base salary under which their salary cannot sink.

When customers rate projects and workers rate each other on a weekly basis, the aim is to create a highly responsive compensation system in which good service and hard work are rewarded. The two ratings are correctly structured feedback loops that evaluate the project as a whole from the outside and the workers’ individual contributions to the whole from the inside. The number of additional workshares every worker receives is directly tied to how competent they are and how well they treat their customers and colleagues.

It is probably best that most weekly evaluations repeat the previous week’s results unless something substantial has changed. Evaluations should be tools, not weapons. It is important to remember that small variations in compensations can mean a change of just a few dollars here or there, and they should not be a source of acrimony or conflict. As in subscriptions, predictability is valuable also in evaluations.

Each subscription and workshare entitle their owner to an evaluation of the project. Workshares entitle workers to an internal evaluation, whereas subscribers are entitled to evaluate the goods and services they use. A cell’s purpose and impact can be evaluated by any citizen, but these votes are limited to a total of 100 votes each at all times.

The new organizational structure of the cell has been created to make up for the many problems we see in corporations. The problem with many corporations is that they are bound by law to strictly advance the financial interest of their owners no matter the cost in other terms. Such a single-minded focus on money can cause a lot of damage and costly externalities the rest of society ultimately has to pay for. Environmental damage, exploitative labor contracts and anticompetitive behavior can all be justified by the bottom line. Not only that, when competitors cut corners, a race to the bottom quickly ensues, forcing everybody else to do the same. Financial rewards can justify even the most sociopathic behavior.

As much as cells seek to be an improvement on the way corporations work, it should be noted that cells actually resemble cooperatives more than corporations–so much so that under current legislation cells could even operate within the legal structure of a cooperative. cells could, in fact, be seen as the next generation of co-ops.