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###### tags: `Haus Party Live`
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# HAUS Party LIVE! Notes (3/10/2022)

Join us for 🎉 Haus Party Live 🎉 every Thursday at 2pm EST on the [DAOhaus Discord](https://discord.gg/daohaus)

## Guests and Topics

- Felipe, vengist, dekan, vanilladelphia
- Community members from the audience

## Topics

- Democracy and DAOs: What does democracy have to do with DAOs?
- Emerged during last week's conversation about *Anticapture* when a community member asked if "DAOs could be seen as the most advanced instantiation of democracy"
- Been thinking about this throughout the week and decided to use this for this week's topic
- Exciting to approach this as a DAO in a decentralized way without imposing specific ideas
- Explore and see if there is "some kind of core lesson"

## Democracy and DAOs

- How do we define the term "Democracy"?
- Standard definition and a "mythology of Democracy" and a *high ideal that we strive for, almost romantically" -- a government by the people and for the people*
- DAOs are spun up "by the people" and are built up with a community focus to empower everyone to coordinate themselves
- Representative government where our voices can be delegated to others to speak on our behalf for the sake of efficiency or other reasons
- Ideally empowers everyone to have a voice -- DAOs put power into the individual: "Individual autonomy related to collective action"
- What do "majority rules" and "minority rules" mean as Democracy strives toward consensus?
- DAOs empower us to *not all have to agree*, but by design DAOs allow for freedoms (leaving if we don't agree, forking, negotiating to build alternatives to pure consensus)
- Democracy as a concept and how it played out overtime and how it evolved to where we are today
- DAOs as a political tool, democracy as an ideological/political tool
- Very prescient to think of our present moment as full of tension and with oppositional friction that doesn't align with romanticized concepts of democracy
- Ivan Illich: [*Tools of Conviviality*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tools_for_Conviviality)
- Giving people tools that guarantee their freedom and rights and building toward a collective action
- Can democracy be evaluated as being not the best tool anymore, or even "an oppressive tool in its own Romanticism?" -- how do DAOs evaluate this?
- How can DAOs iterate and improve on these designs?

## Blockchain, DAOs, and Governance

- There are a few angles when thinking of blockchain tech and how it relates to governance:
- Multi-sig: 1 person 1 vote (similar, except for the quorum aspects)
- Coin voting: Usually attached to a multi-sig where there is a mix of plutocracy and oligarchy where they *may* be holding each other in check
- Moloch DAOs: Weighted governance, sometimes plutocratic, sometimes based on stake or funds donated to earn governance
- At early stage of Moloch DAOs, an inspiration was *Parpolity* where smaller group makes decisions autonomously from the larger group, but through processes these bubble up to the larger group
- "Participatory Politics"
- [Parpolity](https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Aaron_Swartz_on_the_Parpolity_System)
- What is the difference between philosophers and poets?
- Is there anything stopping non-web3 systems from working just as well as DAOs?
- If DAOs one day span millions of people they'll likely face the same issues (such as corruption) as other entitities
- Strive for having smaller "decision making nucleii" that are somewhat autonomous
- Making decisions on what impact them the most at their local level
- Communication tools allow for hyper local communities all around the world
- **Parpolity** has levels of delegation where these smaller groups can address larger groups

### Direct Action and Hyper Localism

- Manifested within new tools of DAOs and "trustless momentum"
- Smaller groups and consensus:
- *Importance of smaller groups* -- do we need one consensus for all decisions and ask every single person regardless of how impacted they are by the decision?
- Local groups making local decisions -> Relieves stress from larger body. Larger body only needs to come in for things that impact everyone
- Distributing decisions through smaller groups and having smaller groups doing different things in different ways
- Focusing on scale isn't the whole picture:
- DAOs allowing for a shift in scale, *shift in priorities*, values, and perspective
- Democracy is inherently oppressive and patriarchal: majority oppresses the minority and representative of a patriarchical culture (defining actions over motions, competition over war, hierarchical power, prioritizes growth, domination over others, appropriation of resources)
- DAOs provide a "hope for an alternative" at the structural level
- "Matristic" -- DAOs are more about inclusion, participation, collaboration, mutual understanding and respect
- Anti/non Patriarchal approach that is a powerful shift away from domination
- Are we seeing this materialize in the "greater DAO ecosystem"?
- There comes a need for representative democracy when there is a need for quicker decisions, and this gravitates towards the top and a technocracy
- DAOs allow for raising folks up and have them participate more equally
- **Technocracy**:
- Highly technical and financial folks in crypto space
- When we go into the mechanics this is at odds with the ideals that DAOs promise
- Ruthless imposition of interests over a weaker neighbor will always be there, so when building self-sustaining systems where folks are incentivized to *not* destroy each other depends on an order based on stable domination
- When power shifts we see conflicts emerge
- Changes will happen deliberately, subtlely, carefully, and intentionally
- This *interdependence* is something DAOs may offer
- **Walled gardens** and [Goodhart's Forest](https://spengrah.mirror.xyz/3rogxz8MYh5SEIdCCzUXWY7eiKAs63QSgsPh-AfIRyk)
- Each group dreaming together is a tiny bubble in a pot of "boiler water in slow motion" and there is no way to dream of *stasis*
- Would this put us into a state of naive building that makes us more vulnerable to capture?
- While we are watching a "membrane of stability" we have to design while within it and need to design with an eye toward this downfall

### Holocracy & DAOs

- If adopted at a wider scale, everything will be **principled and fair**. Similar to DAOs and DAO adoption
- Important to distinguish between the culture and the benefits of the culture and the principles
- Have a critical mass of people that operate this way so that it's beneficial to the individual to play the rules
- Game B Mechanics -- in a game where giving freely, being encouraging, and collaborating benefits the self as well
- *Mindsets of the people within these systems* is what brings them about (Holocracies, DAOs) and there is a *surge* where more people are introduced to Game B mechanisms
- People more open to adopting since they can be less concerned about being screwed over in certain ways
- Problem isn't the process or technology or systems, it's the incentives within all of us
- Can DAOs/web3/decentralization serve as a "new one world theory" -- universally acceptable, ubiquitous layer
- Dream is to not replicate this structure -- this *is* the structure of romantic democracy that should not be replicated
- **Pluroversal** -- not one world, but many worlds. Not one narrative, but a chorus of voices. Not a single toolset, but the freedom to develop local applicaitons of these tools
- We dramatically lack this in the world right now

## Scale

- One reason why we get monopolistic monocultures are that there are big returns from this type of scale
- Why do we return to scale? Economic returns, ego returns, power returns -- [Economies of Scale](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/economiesofscale.asp)
- Big companies driven to economic incentives for returns to scale
- Ego and power returns to scale for executives
- Many incentives to from 'mono' structures that scale and infinitely grow
- A lot of motivation for focusing on scale and growth is for defense: growing, allying, etc. for defense
- Imperative that we find ways to make localized work possible and sustainable
- We can't be **so local** that we lose ability to coordinate to solve problems *we all share*, but we have to do so in such a way that the "scale doesn't get captured by people who want to use it for their own needs"
- There are *many incentives* for bigger scale and this is in opposition to the local values focus
- How do we find ways to make more localized opportunities?
- How do we ensure that scale isn't captured by folks for their own means?
- If we're thinking about designing things for "community first" is there any value for thinking about DAO system design in a way that "intentionally limits scale"
- What are the mechanisms for smaller, local communities to communicate without eventually becoming the larger monoliths they sought to avoid?
- Democracy is envisioned as a tool for "relationality" and it's so far been oppositional
- DAOs serve as a "material instantiation" of a critique of Romantic democracy and is action based and ingrains a theory into it
- Creates visable political systems from shared assets of a few people to do incredible decision making power
- DAOs embody a critical stance to the world -- empower selves to think and act differently, to rethink political orientation and this impacts all aspects of our lives

## Collaborative Defiance

- Embodying a "loving contradiction"
- Dispute resolution in DAOs?
- How do DAOs handle disputes?
- Lots still being learned, but on a community level this has many forms
- Biggest thing to avoid is to avoid state actors or lawyers if possible, but this is sometimes unavoidable
- LexDAO for arbitration, Kleros for court
- There are lots of tools and strategies, but unlikely that a tool will solve the need for human collaboration
- Tools allow us to not have to trust each other and reduce attack vectors, but at the end of the day some of the conflict must be resolved in human-to-human relations
- Would we want this to go away? All of our relations would be purely mechanically mediated
- Coops and Other Structures
- DAOs are fully and completely political and philosophical structures and it's important to look at history of similar structures
- People not looking at the history of previous structures and are starting from scratch, and if we neglect this we may recreate previous problems
- Entire DAO space needs to do this work
- Folks are struggling with this and other topics: How do we limit bureacracy? How much structure is needed?