HAUS Party LIVE — Democracy in DAOs 🎉!
Season 4 Episode 7 (3/10/2022)
Join us for 🎉 Haus Party Live 🎉 every Thursday at 2pm EST on the DAOhaus Discord
Synopsis
What does democracy have to do with DAOs? This topic bubbled up during last week’s conversation about Anticapture when a community member asked if “DAOs could be seen as the most advanced instantiation of democracy.” We found this topic so challenging in our internal chats that we decided it must be addressed! Let’s explore democracy as a DAO in a decentralized way and see if some kind of core lesson might emerge!
Democracy and DAOs
How do we define the term Democracy? There’s the standard definition revolving around a “mythology of Democracy” and an ideal that we romantically strive for, which offers us to consider 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. Another key characteristic is found in representative government where our voices can be delegated to others to speak on our behalf, for the sake of efficiency and other reasons. Ideally, this empowers everyone to have a voice. DAOs put power into the hands of the individual, to provide individual autonomy to build towards 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 such as leaving if we don’t agree (ragequitting) and forking. We should be negotiating to build alternatives to pure consensus.
How has Democracy as a concept played out over time? How has it evolved to where we are today? Perhaps DAOs might be considered a political and ideological tool alongside democracy, without being reducible to it. It’s 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 wrote Tools of Conviviality, which we evoke as a rumination upon industrial deconstruction towards a world inhabited by people empowered by tools that guarantee their freedom and rights, a society dedicated to positive collective action. Perhaps we might reevaluate democracy as a tool, one that might be recognized as inflicting its own kind of romantic ontological oppression. 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. First, multi-sig vaults demonstrate 1 person, 1 vote (except for the quorum aspects). Coin voting is usually attached to a multi-sig to incorporate a mix of plutocracy and oligarchy where they may be holding each other in check. Moloch DAOs are an excellent reference with their utilization of weighted governance, which can be plutocratic or based on stake or funds donated to earn governance rights.
Parpolity was an inspiration for early stage Moloch DAOs, where smaller groups make decisions autonomously for a larger group, evoking a shift in the usual conception of participatory politics.
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 entities. We might strive for having smaller decision making nucleii that are somewhat autonomous in making decisions on what impacts 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
Direct action manifests within new tools of DAOs and their trustless momentum. Do we need consensus for all decisions, to ask every single person regardless of how impacted they are by the decision? Local groups making local decisions relieves stress from the larger body, which can always be called in for issues that impact everyone. Distributing decisions through smaller groups allows for a different configuration of our decision flows, but focusing on scale isn’t the whole picture. DAOs allow for a shift in scale, priorities, values, and perspectives.
It might be said that democracy is inherently oppressive and patriarchal. The majority oppresses the minority and is representative of a patriarchal culture. Thus oppression is characterized by prioritizing actions over motions, competition and war, hierarchical power, unchecked growth, domination over others, and the appropriation of resources. DAOs provide hope for an alternative at the structural level, towards a matristic modality. DAOs are more about inclusion, participation, collaboration, mutual understanding and respect as a definitively non-patriarchal approach.
Are we seeing this materialize in the “greater DAO ecosystem”? Representative democracy is still helpful for quicker decisions that gravitates towards the top, but threaten the formation of a technocracy, especially with the highly technical and financial folks in crypto space. These mechanics are at odds with the ideals that DAOs promise through the ruthless imposition of majority interests over weaker sub-groups. How do we build self-sustaining systems where people are incentivized to not destroy each other? Does this depend on a sense of order based on stable domination?
When power shifts we see conflicts emerge. We should advocate for changes to happen deliberately, subtly, carefully, and intentionally. DAOs offer us a recognition for this essential interdependence. Let’s remember the walled gardens and Goodhart’s Forest. Groups dreaming together form tiny bubbles in a pot of boiler water in slow motion and defy the dream of stasis. Would this put us into a state of naive building that makes us more vulnerable to capture? We have to design while within a membrane of stability, to design with an eye toward this downfall.
Holocracy & DAOs
If DAOs become adopted at a wider scale we might imagine that everything will be principled and fair? It’s important to distinguish between the culture and the benefits of the culture’s principles. We might focus on maintaining a critical mass of people that operate this way so that it’s beneficial to the individual to play by the rules. This evokes the mechanics of Game B, as a game where giving freely, being encouraging, and collaborating benefits the self as well as the collective. It’s the mindsets of the people within these systems that brings them about, in structures such as Holocracies and DAOs. There is currently a surge where more people are being introduced to Game B mechanisms. People are more open to adopting these principles since they can be less concerned about being screwed over. The problem isn’t the process, technology or systems, rather it’s the incentives within all of us.
Can DAOs/web3/decentralization serve as a new “one world” theory that is universally acceptable and serves as a ubiquitous social layer for our organizations? The dream is to not replicate a one world structure, as this is precisely the romance of democracy that we must be careful to avoid. Pluroversal design is not one world, but many worlds. Not one narrative, but a chorus of voices. Not a single toolset, but the freedom to develop local applications of these tools. We lack this pluriversal ethos in the world right now, but perhaps DAOs might foster a shift in our perspective.
Scale
One reason why we get monopolistic monocultures are that there are big returns from this type of scale. Why are we always returning to issues of scale? Because there are clear economic returns, ego returns, and power returns to economies of Scale! Big companies are driven to economic incentives for returns to scale. Executives are trained to optimize for returns in ego and power relations. There are many powerful incentives to form mono structures that scale and infinitely grow and a lot of motivation for focusing on scale and growth out of defense. It’s imperative that we find ways to make localized work possible and sustainable.
We can’t be so local that we lose our ability to coordinate to solve problems we all share, but we have to proceed in such a way that the scale doesn’t get captured by people who want to use it for their own gains. There are many incentives for scaling up that stand in opposition to our local values. How do we find ways to make more localized opportunities? How do we ensure that scale isn’t captured by egoic desires?
If we’re thinking about designing things for the 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, yet it has proven to be in opposition to our coordination efforts. DAOs serve as a material instantiation of a critique of romanticized democracy, an action-based architecture that ingrains an alternative theory into our performance. These highly visible political systems formed around the shared resources of a few people facilitate an incredible decision making power. DAOs embody a critical stance to the world. They empower individuals to think and act differently, to rethink political orientation altogether, and this impacts all aspects of our lives.
Collaborative Defiance
Let’s embody a loving contradiction! But what about when conflict arises in our own ranks? How do we handle dispute resolution in DAOs? We are still learning so much and on a community level this takes many forms. The biggest challenge is to avoid state actors or officials if possible, but this is sometimes unavoidable, and perhaps an essential component of scaling to mass adoption. There are lots of tools and strategies out there, but it’s unlikely that a tool will solve the need for direct human collaboration. Tools allow us to not have to trust each other, thereby reducing traditional political 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 direct interface to go away? All of our relations would be purely mechanically mediated and this certainly is far from ideal.
DAOs are deeply political and philosophical structures and it’s important to look at the history of similar social architectures. It’s easy to neglect the historical evolution of previous cooperative structures, for people to feel like they need to start from scratch, but this also leads to recreating previous problems in our dynamics. The entire DAO space needs to share in the responsibility of this work! Yet, folks are struggling with the weight of this learning alongside other topics. How do we collaborate in enforcing limits to bureaucracy? How much structure is needed? Who will rise to the occasion to answer these questions?
Join us this Thursday for the next Haus Party Live where we explore the keystone topic of Scale!
