Sang Ha Park

If we do accept that DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) are superior form of governance and community creation, what will the future look like? What would it mean to “refer” or “introduce” someone to a community that you have a stake in? What would it mean to “genuinely” like something when your passion is tied to money? Or have we always been like that? Or is that where we should be headed?

Chris Dixon recently wrote in his tweet that new inventions are initially tinkered with knowledges from older domains (Check out the cool word that I just learned: skeuomorphic). In other words, we initially plug older way of thinking into newer form of technology.

3/ In the skeuomorphic era, the design thinking is largely adapted from older domains. For example, the early web was mostly digital adaptations of pre-internet activities like letter writing and mail-order shopping. Websites back then were mostly read only.

— cdixon.eth (@cdixon) September 20, 2021

After reading his tweet, I couldn’t stop but to think what the future of DAOs would hold. Some of the immediate questions that came to my mind are what I wrote down above. If we take only the essence of DAO, which is creating a group of disparate individuals or entities, as granted, what would be some of its crazier, daring implications?

This essay is mostly going to be a series of questions about their implications, because honestly I don’t have much clue. I hope these questions can help you stretch your imagination and have DAO-fitting thinking faster. If anyone has concrete examples, I would love to learn more!

Here are some guiding principles that I started with

1. Codes (which become the governing laws of any DAO) don’t define the maximum. We often think this as a constraint, but we should rather think it as a liberator that define the boundaries. Basically inside those boundaries, we are free to explore anything. (Here, I find weird resemblance to the wormhole explanation from Interstellar. Wormholes don’t defy the laws of physics, they just handle it from a higher dimension. Codes are laws of physics, and we can be the creators of wormhole equivalent on DAOs 😼). Codes don’t define our maximum, but our bare minimum.
   
2. (Current forms of) DAOs merge ownership, economic incentive, and participation to a varying degree.
   

Ok, with that in mind, let’s talk about ownership.

What would happen if you are the part-owner (regardless of how big or small) of every community you belong to (here let’s assume traditional sense of online communities like Subreddits, again could be skeuomorphic, but let’s continue)? Will you be more responsible in using or managing your community? Will you write or promote more quality contents? Or will someone troll even more just for the sake of trolling, despite it may jeopardizing their ownership (akin to burning your stake)? Will communities be more accepting of differences or radically different opinions or taste inside its communities? Or will those different people “fork” and create another community? Would then communities be more or less homogeneous?

Since we are talking about new communities, let’s talk about conflicts among different communities as well. If there are similar communities, for instance, they both like Lord of the Rings, how would these communities evolve in as DAOs? Will we see something similar to what SushiSwap initially did to Uniswap where they tried to leech off from Uniswap’s existing liquidity? Would this kind of leveraging your competitors’ community or power be a common theme among competing DAOs? Will there be even “wars” among these DAOs to protect their interest?

To me, all of these scenarios are quite likely as more community members become emotionally, financially, and socially attached to their communities. We’re already quite familiar with it. Just think about your neighboring something something maximalists. (Actually “wars” among online communities is already common in Korea though they rarely last more than few days. Warring communities would basically go to other communities and constantly spam them with new, meaningless contents, akin to DDOS attack but harmless). On top of this, we can add another level of twist called anonymity that Balaji Srinavasan likes to support 🙂 Things will become even more interesting and confusing when you don’t know who is attacking you!

And finally, let’s jump to reason. Just because we become stakeholders of a community, does that mean we become more rational or actually even more irrational? Say for instance, let’s say there’s a DAO for COVID anti-vaxx groups and let’s assume that they have their own tokens that fluctuate in value depending on how well anti-vaxxers are proved to be true. Would they ever give up their belief or would they even more steadfastly stick to their belief and actively filter out the truth? What about Trump supporters’ DAO? Would they be ever able to accept that 2020 election wasn’t a scam and that he lost in a democratically fair and just process? Are we not just supercharging the “re-fragmentation” that Paul Graham talked about years ago? (I will have a separate post that talks about re-fragmentation in general)

By making our communities explicitly and systematically be tied to financial returns and incentives, are we freeing ourselves from them or are we actually creating a bigger specter of capitalism over us?

Obviously, the future would lie somewhere in between. David Bowie’s extremely prescient interview about Internet is a good starting point for us to prepare for what’s coming. He describes approaching days of Internet as “we’re on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying”. I can’t help but to think exactly the same about DAOs as well.