What the DAO?
Why schools of fish and swarming birds could be the next big leap in human organization.
Here’s a curious idea — the DAO. Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. There are also DOs — Decentralized Organizations. Look! Here’s one that formed just two weeks ago! — oh; look at its aqua color scheme and Triton emblem — it’s called NeptuneDAO! It pools funds (over $25 million has been “injected” into the pool so far) and allows contributors to cast weighted votes on how to disburse the money. It’s got documentation, a discord channel, and weekly meetings.
What the Dao? What even is this thing?
The premise is we need a new form of organization to coordinate action towards solving the global-scale problems we now face (pandemics, climate crises, etc). The DAO is a blockchain-based tool for codifying governance rules and protocols that allow an organization to be dynamic and flexible and do things that existing organizations can’t do. For instance, a DAO might have a specific mission, and once that mission is completed or no longer capable of being completed by the DAO, self-destructs (kind of like a school of fish that disperses all at once). Another capacity of a DAO is to allow an organization to alternate leaders; unlike companies, where the CEO/founder is traditionally in place like a dictator, DAOs could set rules for how leadership passes from one member to another.
Humanity has been organizing itself into a variety of social structures for a long, long time. Families, tribes, cults, religions, kingdoms, plantations, states, countries, and companies are just some examples of organization types. Every now and then, humanity manages to fuse new technology and avant-garde social norms into a new type of organization. Could the DAO be the next such jump in human organization?
DAOs use principles found in nature and fuse them into code with latest generation research done by computer scientists. Ideas that have floated around for seventy years like AI, generative design, fractal scaling, cybernetics - and newer technologies like smart contracts and decentralized ledgers - are all being integrated and built into this new type of technology. There are many startups trying to make the first big DAO platform - a sort of Facebook for DAOs that would let anyone initiate and run their DAO with ease and without great technical expertise.
Yesterday, Wyoming became the first state in the US to codify DAOs as a type of legal entity. I’m not a legal scholar nor a business person, so much of this beyond me. But maybe you can make heads or tails of this! In any case, there’s a lot of exciting movement in this space. Perhaps these DAOs will become functional just in the nick of time to help us transcend the limitations of corporations and effectively (in one generation!) coordinate global actors to address the climate crisis.
Further reading:
The LAO - a DAO supporting the blockchain ecosystem
“Taking the Guesswork out of Climate Action” - Law.MIT.edu
Dazza Greenwood’s blog - CIVICS.com