Leaps in human technological and social progression seem to coincide with one main factor: Our ability to change the nature of our coordination structures. At a societal level, we move from hunter-gatherer to tribe, to village, to town, city, empires and nation-states. At a more personal level, we move from having to meet all of our own needs i.e. produce our own food, clothing and anything else we need to the modern-day division of labour. At an economic and political level, we move from a feudal society with no individual rights (the strongest rules) into a world (largely) with fully-fledged property rights. The organisation structures that people coalesce around shift overtime to meet the demands of the time.
Let's quickly lay this out:
8 century BC, organisations in India, called shreni, were the first firms that could independently enter into contracts or own property.
960 AD, China's Song dynasty saw the advent of gunpowder, printing presses, the first paper money, and the first partnerships and joint-stock companies to resemble our own modern capital structures.
1500 AD, government-backed firms, like the Dutch East India Company and British East India Company, began building global trading empires, floating stocks and bonds on new exchanges as their goods floated around the world.
1830s, US railroad companies became the first truly modern management organisations, with ranks of salaried middle managers.
By 1870, as those early superhighways lowered the cost of moving goods and information, a new type of company, founder-led trusts, emerged.
1920s, those founder-led firms were replaced by professionally managed corporations, owned by retail investors and run by influential executives.
Management became a career. And by the 1960s, those managers were running a rapidly expanding universe of sprawling conglomerates.
Silicon Valley startups based on compelling founders and pitch decks and the promise of future returns have been the go-to model for many since the 2000’s.
Fast forward to today (2022 at the time of writing), and the next step in organisation development (or coordination game as I like to call it) has arrived: the DAO.
The technological context: DAOs are possible because of a few convergent technologies namely: blockchain, high-speed internet, cheap yet powerful PCs and overall low barrier to entry.
The current societal context: We have had a pandemic which has led to more money printers going brrr, and in turn, we have the great resignation, an expected yet expedited remote work transition and non-transitory, real, I feel it in my plums, inflation.
So we have technological and societal convergence. Now people have a new way of coordinating with others in a decentralised trustless manner pseudonymously.
DAOs probably represent the death knell of the Napoleonic organisational structures that have come to dominate the planet. For the first time in human history, people can communicate and coordinate horizontally i.e. peer to peer. All other examples of large-scale human coordination have required vertical communication i.e. top-down and hierarchical.
This last paragraph is at the heart of why DAO’s why, now.
DAOs are currently only in the bloodstream of the Crypto community, and most focus on playing around with magic internet money. But DAOs are getting more audacious, take ConstitutionDAO for example. Ultimately it failed in its stated goal of buying an original copy of the constitution. But how long will it be until a DAO tries to buy an Island or a football club? Not long.
DAOs allow people to distribute their time and effort across a range of organisations. Compare that to a tradOrg where the expectation is you commit to one organisation.
DAOs are geographically ambivalent. A contributor can live anywhere and still do the thing. When you work for a tradOrg, you are committed to a location or forced to rack up air miles as part of the gig.
You can play different roles in different DAOs. With DAO A, you could be a copywriter. With DAO B, you could be a smart contract engineer. With DAO C, you could be a community manager. You could select the work you care about in a project or community you find compelling.
The sky is the limit for the individual contributor in a DAO, let alone the DAO itself.
The DAO will be armed with passionate, committed and willing workers who have chosen the work they want vs being told what they can or can't do because they didn't go to the right University or failed to meet an obligatory tick box criteria
But that's okay, let the conservative, centralised, permissioned corporates have their tick box criteria, red-brick universities, interview processes and scalability issues. I’ll take the future of human coordination all day every day, even if it's super clunky at the moment, and make no mistakes, it's super clunky, but it's coming together nicely.
- Edg3