Wanted to share a couple of the resources that the panelists mentioned in the conversation that I found particularly insightful. Highly recommend giving these essays a read!
- Money, Blockchains, and Social Scalability by Nick Szabo (rec by: Leighton Cusack). As Leighton summarizes, smart contracts lower the cost of trust. What is being automated by DAOs is the human trust required for relationships. More trust means more relationships and more coordination to achieve good things together. Interestingly, the specific trade-offs that Szabo cites (resource consumption, time, etc.) ties to the slow bureaucracy protecting the consistency of expectation point raised in the Governance Theory panel.
- Many-Headed Hydras: DAOs in the Art World by Aude Launay, Penny Rafferty, Ruth Catlow (rec by: Scott Moore). Culture should determine technical infrastructure, and not the other way around. Catlow describes a disconnect between the attitudes/life experiences/ vocabularies of critical contemporary arts cultures, and the values reflected in what is actually tokenized/codified/written into smart contracts in DAOs — and some experiments to better align the two.
- A Prehistory of DAOs by Kei Kreutler, Gnosis Guild (rec by: Scott Moore). By learning from their prehistory (platform cooperativism, massively multiplayer online games, etc.), we observe that people and collective vibe are at the heart of any DAO — they don’t go to the edges and cannot be fully abstracted away. DAOs must go beyond technical protocols for governance and realize their goal is to create compelling digital spaces people want to inhabit, recognizing narratives, aesthetics, and common goals are key.
re: the conversation on what is being automated / when it becomes too much: agreed that blockchain creates an abundance of trust, which seems to be a good thing if it allows us to scale beyond Dunbar’s number and exist in many squads connected to a larger network. The phrase “change happens at the speed of trust” comes to mind — if trust is abundant, the world moves faster, stability itself becomes scarce. It seems like consistency of expectation would fray when stability frays… There’s a difference between the trust of open source/transparent code, and the trust of small/intimate mutual aid circles. How do these two types of trust serve different purposes?