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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
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
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
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
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?
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