Web3 has opened conversations about the future of virtual society and personhood. While the space is rampant with speculation, three conversations are worth highlighting. First, how do you govern organizations? Governance-as-a-product will be critical to managing and sustaining community growth. Second, how do you protect and promote public goods online? Crypto has no such thing as a public servant, and eventually, there must be borders erected around the “financialization of reality.” Finally, how do you build trust in a world of pseudonyms? Trust provides the foundation for cooperation, and establishing protocols for trust will be essential to Web3’s success.

"Ethereum is a programmable, turing-complete, global, transparent and immutable substrate for human coordination.” - Kevin Owocki, Eth.Denver

“I’m going. [He does not move.]” - Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

Have you seen it yet?

In the second chapter from Small Pieces, Loosely Joined, David Weinberger introduces the McCollugh Effect, a bit of “visual legerdemain” whereby you stare at certain colored bars and see the effect in your vision for days. It, “gives you the unsettling feeling that looking at the bars has somehow rewired your brain.”

Weinberger’s palpable excitement for Web 1.0 seems contagious and ripe for the same fanaticism applied to Web3. Like 14th century Europeans suffering from Dancing Mania, Web3 evangelists encourage the same exuberance: join in the fun till exhaustion does you in. There’s an uncanny feeling here of being somewhere new (or strange?). For those of us of a certain age who have only heard Jia Tolentino and Ezra Klein wax poetic about the early periods of blogger, there is value here simply in being early to something that feels new. There’s a tension, of course, between fun and exhaustion. When does the performance end?

Last night, I met with a few people at school interested in the space from varying backgrounds- art curator, fintech operator, climate policymaker, writer of essays that quote Samuel Beckett, etc.  Mutually, we all joked (I think?) about the nagging feeling of being the “guy in the corner of parties talking about blockchain.” This is my attempt to explain what drew me into Web3, specifically into researching decentralized autonomous organizations. For those new to the rabbithole, DAO’s are organizations built on the blockchain that control financial assets and range in mission, from social groups to investment clubs to media companies. Here are three ongoing conversations that I think are worth thinking through:

It is not incidental that the examples that commentators often cite are Constitution DAO and Spice Dao. These are conceptually convenient: a single task accomplished by employing a group with a bank account. WAGBAT: We’re all going to buy a thing.

Layering in complexity across varying sizes of capital, members, and other resources only reveals how early the conceptual applications are. A category of “DAO” that includes such a broad range of organizations with diverse problems and needs becomes nearly functionally useless. As Cooper Turley wrote, “A telegram group with 10 members and 1 ETH is a DAO. A DeFi protocol with $1B of assets governed on chain by 10,000+ token holders is a DAO.”

As a form, DAOs raise complex questions of how to coordinate interests and build consensus on issues. Governance of these communities (differing from community management) will play an increasingly magnified role in DAO growth and success. This is governance as a product, whether it’s quadratic voting or liquid democracy. A DAO contains core contributors, staff members, and casual members. The ability to coordinate all of these individuals towards a common mission is a central tension in growth.

DAOs inherently involve the grand messiness of human coordination. For all of the proclamations about the decentralization away from Web3, Twitter remains fundamental for reach and promotion, and  Google’s office suite provides critical infrastructure. Governance-as-a-service requires a host of new tools, products, and norms. There is a first-principles quality to the ongoing work. How do you manage roles in a community? How do you produce reputational and financial compensation and produce responsible delegates? How do organizations debt, and for what purposes?

RECOMMENDED READING:

A Prehistory of DAO’s, Kei Kreutler, Gnosis Guild What Co-Ops and DAO’s Can Learn from Each Othe, Austin Robey, FWB

Not all of this has been done before, but much of it has. This contextualization of this cultural milieu requires a flexibility to recognize what’s essentially uplifting (worker cooperatives, platform cooperativism, etc.) and what’s genuinely new. There’s a strain of conversation happening around public goods that I find intriguing and thoughtful. It underlines the second order effects of blockchain reshaping our social, economic, and cultural institutions.

On one level, proponents of blockchain applications stress the ability to compensate contributors through novel mechanisms built on chain. Imagine if the first users of Instagram were able to be compensated for widespread adoption and growth, the story goes. Tokenomics makes this possible. Early users can get a token that can grow in value as the platform grows.

However, this also indicates the financialization incentives that imbue its emerging layers. It creates incentives to fractionalize, to speculate, to evangelize. It’s the total financialization of reality. There’s a reason that some people believe there are only two use cases for cryptocurrency: speculation and crime. In hindsight, this might just be one. The early internet used public protocols and standards to establish open collaboration. What happens when this is mediated through a private entity rather than a protocol like TCP/IP? There’s a whole post to be written on what Web3 can learn from the open-source community.

Still, Crypto has no concept of a “public servant.”  Current governance structures reward participation with speculative financial and reputational tokens, a model with more in common with Web2’s gig economy than one be comfortable with.

Coordinating people is hard. This is a good thing. Yes, this is the same reason that Oscar Wilde said socialism takes up too many evenings, but human beings building with each other is something that we should be better at. I’ll tread lightly to avoid Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone nostalgia, but if DAO’s allow us to get us better at building things through fair compensation and incentive structures, I’m all for it. These are laboratories for association.

RECOMMENDED READING:

Positive Sum Worlds: Remaking Public Goods by Sam Hart, Toby Shorin, Laura Lotti, Other Internet The Downward Spiral by Dean Kissick, Spike Magazine

Blockchain proponents claim that distributed ledger technology eliminates the need for trust. The argument goes that everything is recorded on the blockchain, and as an entity, this indicates that institutional trust is unnecessary. The problem, of course, is that “everything” must be defined here specifically as bytes of data. Messages on Discord and Twitter are not recorded on chain. Neither are emotions, jealousies, and the human processes that lead us to collective conclusions. In this universe of wallets, will identities be verified or fractionalized?

Anonymity and pseudonymity can be powerful tools for creation and dissent. On a recent episode of On the Other Side, Yancey Strickler told Chase Chapman, “We used to be born into communities and discover our individuality. Now, we are born individuals and have to find our community.” Experimentation in identities online can open new and audacious ways of governance, especially in the context of increasing singularization of identity through Web2 structures like Facebook and Instagram. Still, this poses equity concerns. What does it mean to create spaces that effectively allow for both expression and collaboration? In an online world where defacto assumptions of identity exist, how do we ensure the participation of diverse contributors?

On the flip side, there’s (yet another) whole post to be written on how the structures and classifiers of identity shift our understanding of the world, as in Scott’s Seeing Like a State. Administrative ordering alters our lived human experience to pursue legibility and simplicity. Currently, large technology platforms piece together our singular identity on the web. Google, Facebook, and the like track our history and data exhaust to piece together a profile to sell advertisements. Likewise, massive state projects have already leveraged digital tools to fundamentally construct virtual identity, like India’s Aadhar project and China’s Social Credit system. As with all projects to improve the human condition through social engineering, Web3 encounters the same tensions. Who gets recognized, and what data is required for coordination?

RECOMMENDED READING:

Identity as Information, Mirror Being Your Selves, Aaron Lewis, RibbonFarm

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I want to thank all those who read a draft of this despite all the noise. I’ll be posting a reading list later this week of articles I’ve found helpful in this search and for those who want to fall down the rabbit hole. I have raised more questions than answered any in this post, and for that, I recognize I have a lot of work to do.