HAUS Party LIVE🎉 — Lorecrafting Beyond the DAO MMORPG!
Season 4 Episode 11 (4/7/2022)
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Welcome to our darkest of all the walled gardens, where we will discuss the issues of lorecraft. This topic has caught speed with DAO people. After all, some say that DAOs are just guilds of World of Warcraft with a bank account. We want to discuss this early in the mimetical formation of the concept, and process our repulsion to the term.
We admit that some of us had a strong gut reaction to the article Lands of Warcraft. It’s a subject near and dear to our hearts. The author describes lorecrafting as a “millennial management science” that’s in service to the marketing agenda for an organization. Perhaps we can start with a higher level zoom about what lore could and maybe should be. There’s also some really interesting things about lore within DAOhaus, lots of dots that we could connect.
Let’s start with the obvious. The external branding of DAOhaus is inspired by Bauhaus, a high-modernist international aesthetic style of elementary forms. It’s a cool and clean conceptual style. Internally, the core contributors of DAOhaus are called WarCamp. On the outside we appear cool, clean, and put together, but maybe on the inside we’re a horde of marauding barbarians. Do we consider ourselves to be in the Dark Ages? Or maybe the Crusades, or the Renaissance, like merchant traders of Venice, when it was at the center of the world?
The question of lorecraft is really about DAO identities, which are still very nascent in the space in general. How do the stories we tell ourselves and the stories we tell the world about what we are doing align to create a coherent representation of the real and powerful value that we’re generating? There’s a lot of threads here we might explore. We can think about culture, as a history written by those that have seized power. Is there a legacy to uphold and a privilege to that storytelling? Does the way that we craft this lore have wider implications beyond this community? Something else we could talk about is style in how we tell these stories. Oral traditions are different from written traditions and written documents. How do we formalize and encode lore into our documents? Is this really just a marketing strategy or a business strategy? How might the codification of our values happen more intentionally?
Lore is about mythology. This isn’t just tech, or Web3, or DAOs. This isn’t just about organizational management structures or marketing metrics. Lore is living mythology! Let’s get there slowly.
Someone gave a name to something that’s been around for a long time, a mimetic process for aligning people that were not already pushed together by an external incentivization force. In coming together, they create a mimetic membrane sourced from like code, culture, or philosophy, often done in a way that is most entertaining for the people that share in that commonality. Once this is structured as a management framework, we experience a momentous shift in realizing that the leaders of our organizations are the people who were playing MMORPGs. There’s this push for us to see Web3 as a cultural movement, as a meta lifestyle that is proposed and articulated over forms of expression. When this type of mentality becomes presented as a management structure we are witnessing an intense symptom of a process of threat and seduction. There’s nothing new here, it’s just that people that previously didn’t recognize these patterns are now becoming aware of them.
How do our stories give some scale and some scope to the value that we think that we’re generating? There’s a narrative about DAOs being told by the loudest voice that derails from some of the values and principles that are ingrained within the older communities. Lorecraft can be considered a kind of brand identity for a community. So if your brand is good you get noticed more then you get more community members. But there’s something deeper to it that’s defining our culture in a thematic way.
A brand is an external perception, a perception of something from the outside, and lore might be considered a perception of something from the inside of that entity. With traditional companies, the focus on internal culture often feels like it falls flat, lacking the authenticity and legitimacy. What is changing is not that internal branding or that it is becoming recognized as more valuable. Rather, it’s suddenly possible for these internal narrative to be legitimate and accepted as authentic because it feels emergent and generated by the community rather than by executives trying to impose it on a hierarchy of people underneath them. The shift that Lands of Lorecraft is marking is less about how lore and branding is getting used and more about the shift of how organizations are composed.
Perhaps the important word is not lore, but craft. Lore is the accumulation of inside jokes or memetic values. What is new is crafting that lore into a hyperobject. We are experiencing an intentional collective movement of trying to see the lines between the jokes. The Warcamp-of-DAOhaus joke ended up guiding some of the design assets around the brand. It actually doesn’t have to have internal logic; it’s the emergent, accidental, lateral logic that gets baked-in to these cultural formation.
Over at RaidGuild we have been thinking more about diversity. The RaidGuild lore is inspired by D&D, slaying demons and all that, definitely not for everyone. We understand that we are intentionally excluding people with the mimetic filter in order to strengthen the internal community. There’s something contrived about the process of lorecraft, in trying to make the workplace feel like a group of friends through some kind of artificial cultural incentive mechanism. At DAOhaus — and also RaidGuild — we are interested in understanding how we bake-in authentic friendships into our group organization structure, to incentivize real culture building. Lorecraft can start to feel like a control technique, almost like brainwashing, if it’s coming from a top-down management group like a board of directors deciding on implementing culture as a strategy.
We worry about lore metrics, when people start calling for clear KPIs from our lore. We also remember the explosion of the term storytelling, when every product had a story and their own flavor of fictional characters. We’re going to spelunk a little bit deeper on this issue. Lore is not exclusive to the brand identity of an organization. There’s something much richer, so much older, so much more complex than that.
Lore honors the importance of community. Sometimes we need to get outside of ourselves to gain a fresh perspective.
We’ve been talking about this issue within DAOhaus, related to one of the most canonical lore references in this community, which is Moloch. The Baal contracts (Moloch V3) are riffing off of the foundational Moloch lore. We talk about summoning DAOs and summoning minions, reminiscent of gamer culture. Recently we’ve been discussing the UX writing of our product and how we might be able to change some of the language away from something like summoning, which might be a little exclusionary. With our product, do we want a meme to serve as a vetting method? How could we change the language of these processes, maybe towards something that’s more general, more descriptive in its semantics, or more inclusive to represent the wider audience that we’re trying to access? Does this make it too literal and boring?
Designers are always thinking about accessibility. We recognize that some of the terminology we use is purposefully inaccessible. Maybe it about trying to make a space that’s not as permeable to neoliberalism and at the same time, while also trying to make it so that people who are genuinely interested in the community are able to participate. Lore is the emergent, socially friendly, benevolent process. The craft side is a very intentional process. Lore as war between cultures or rivalries between organizations is just one way of storying; we could story any number of ways.
Lore is more than mere storytelling as a marketing strategy. How does this community intentionally story itself into the world? Can we really say we’re not interested in ROIs? What are the metrics that are meaningful to us? This is the conversation that’s happening internally in DAOhaus right now. Is there some kind of meta-lore, or does that just become a hyper-literal statement about what we are doing? We are explicit about creating DAOhaus as a public good, one that could potentially revolutionize life, but we could phrase this any number of ways without succumbing to cliché. How do we avoid that kind of cultural capture? How do we avoid going through the motions of the millennial marketing science to instigate real impact?
When Moloch DAO was released it leaned really heavy into the meme. Companies like Aragon, for example, were very much into the lore of changing the world. It was all about protecting each other and securing privacy and told the story about how DAOs were going to reshape everything. Then Moloch came out talking about demons and ragequitting, RaidGuild called themselves a band of demon slayers, then MetaCartel followed with a total YOLO attitude. The main point was that we don’t take ourselves too seriously. We’re just building Dapps. The saving the world stuff is very literal.
The space has changed now, but back then the heavy communities were not very common. There were all these things that were very technical and kind of abstract, and then MolochDAO was all about the rage quit. Orgs like Aragon were saying it was all stupid, just a meme and nothing else. Memes can’t get anything done. It’s because of these memetic filters and leaning into a fun culture that we have stayed together, where some of these other teams have been torn apart. Let’s change the world isn’t lore. You’re not defined by what you do. You’re defined by what you don’t do. Memes are a vehicle for principles to retain a strong tether to the community they represent, to be efficient in disseminating and communicating those principles.
Moloch as a demon of chaos and disorder immediately speaks to our subconscious. It’s a metaphor, a rhetorical device, and people are going to remember that image. It’s a competitive advantage to have effective metaphors and lore is a fun way to do that. Ameen Soleimani once said (paraphrasing) that the only thing you have to do is piss off 40% of people. If you piss off more than 40%, you’re fucked. If you piss off way less than 40%, you’re irrelevant.
Are we using lore as a tool or a weapon? Are you trying to guide existing values in a certain direction instead of reacting to a direction that you don’t like? Are we trying to instill some kind of manufactured culture? Perhaps we are seeing the first instance of data-driven lore in the world right now. We are able to access more data than anyone even knows what to do with. How does this affect the lore we are crafting? What might be the downsides of data-driven lore? Lore promises the potential to compress and stylize a way of saying something very important, saying it very quickly, to signal to our peers that we are on the same team.
We believe humans should come before protocols. Our processes should be in service to increasing the vibrancy of our life and we must avoid becoming subservient to our own optimization schemes. Lorecrafting is a potential attack vector of something fundamental to our human experience and we should be keenly aware of opportunities for cultural capture. DAOs offer us an opportunity to automate banality to free up more bandwidth for crafting vibrant culture that is authentic and meaningful. If lore is only ever in service to an organizational need, this might come to overshadow the more profound dimensions of our relationships.
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