# Community or Decentralised Colonialism?

What does community do? Don’t ask anyone on crypto Twitter. Although they never say it, many of those who participate in DAOs view their community as little more financial stakeholders.

What are some alternative notions of community? Ask someone on the cozyweb, and you’ll hear reverberations from crypto Twitter. But the most amplified responses would focus on notions of support. Communities can provide advice and facilitate knowledge-exchange. They might even offer support in ways that approximate the functions of the lost welfare state which has been dismantled under neoliberal governance.

Unlike the notion of *community-as-stakeholder* (under which financial support appears in the ghostly form of an I-Owe-You that can be traded on the global market for other commodities that simulate material support), in the *community-as-support system*, the members share in some common goal. And unlike the older modern institutions, where birth determined one’s religion, class, nationality, gender, etc. and thus membership to that community, the digital communities that shape life today are determined through voluntarism – like choosing shopping items from the aisle shelf.

These notions of community have little in common with [example of a more holistic notion of community]. Can this type of community appear on-demand?

Digital communities can spring up overnight – and vanish just as quickly. (Is this what was meant by *temporary autonomous zone* in the ‘90s’ heyday of the early Internet?) Members come together for a common cause ie. *let’s buy the Declaration of Independence or the Dune storyboard*. These communities are manufactured to provide patronage to a project. Members pool their resources and open their wallets in the hope that their investment will pay dividends.

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At this point let us turn our attention to the history of advertising in the media industry.

The concept of *data colonialism*, while originally articulated in the era of big data and platform capitalism, is explicitly positioned to provide a broad framework capable of transcending the relations of media production at the time it was first described in [@couldry2019].

A final word of caution to would-be stakeholders in DAOs: in the words of Somnath Bhatt’s slogan appearing on tote bags and printed tees, "colonialism was a start up.” We might update that for the Web 3 era: *colonialism takes a community*. Regardless of whether one belongs to the empire or the colony, the colonial relationship depends on violence – and Web 3 communities are sadomasochists.