Thread · 9 tweets · 11 May 2022

If you want to build up your ability to understand and think about DAOs intelligently (not just 😘 or 🤮), I highly recommend this thread from @robleathern). Adding a few notes on the topic below, but if you read only one read his thread:

Why is there so much interest in governance? We built this whole digital world in a mostly ungoverned way. What happens when you don't have governance is that might makes right and & rich get richer. Governance helps fix imbalances of power.

Establishing a better balance of power isn't something worth doing just for the aesthetics and fun of it. Imbalances of power stifle intelligence and discourage investment and innovation. Even if you're amongst the powerful, smothering the Web kills the goose.

A lot of this excitement is emerging around DAOs with all kinds of cool projects from co-ops to unions to whatever. No matter how much of a {blockchain,web3}-hater you are, I strongly encourage you to go read up what's happening there (read Rob's links!). Good will come of this.

So why don't you see me using any of this fancy DAO stuff in the governance ideas I keep blabbering around? First, the issues that Rob lists at the end of his thread are real. There are interesting, promising, emergent solutions showing up, but it's still early days.

Second, I have a fair amount of scepticism with respect to computer-enforced rules. Getting contracts exactly right is very hard, especially with the kind of corner cases you get at scale. There is a lot of value in leaving room for rational, empathetic agents to step in.

It's worth noting that attachment to strict and defined rules is cultural. Loving rules, red tape, and reams of contracts is a very American pastime (Graeber quipped about "a Germanic country that happens to speak English"). We shouldn't assume it'll travel well.

Third, I feel that between figuring out what good governance is for a given problem and sorting out how to implement it, the hard one is the first so I'm focusing on that first. Put differently, I don't need a smart contract of a bad idea — and I have a lot of bad ideas.

Having said all that, I'm very excited about the many (too many to follow) projects in this space and my hacker soul has been longing to write code. I strongly suspect there'll be some DAO or DAO-informed components in important governance models on the Web in years to come.