This paper was researched and written as part of my undergraduate degree in Media and Cultural Studies at Macalester College. If not for the wonderful support from my professors, mentors and peers this paper would have never seen the light of day. In releasing this work, I hope to add to a rapidly expanding catalogue of incredible writers, thinkers, and other creatives who are beginning to explore the potential of DAOs for restructuring our digital world.

The rise of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) has sparked interest in their potential for creating alternative models of governance and organization. DAOs are decentralized, self-governing entities that operate on blockchain technology, offering new possibilities for data sovereignty, collectivist organizing, and post-capitalist movements. Through my research, I will examine literature that I consider to be canon about issues that have led to the desire to create more decentralized, user-owned organizations operating on a variety of scales (hyper-local and transnational.) My literature review will pull out specific connections between some of these works that are not specifically focused on DAOs, but closely align with some of the missions or critiques that have led to the development of this social formation. Though my research will not be completely void of any technical analysis of the tools that are in operation today, my research is heavily centered around the human aspect of this burgeoning movement and how people are guiding our technological futures. A crucial component of my research here will be balancing these techno-utopian visions of the future with the ways that some of these organizations are operating today. Examining tensions between hyper-capitalist, Ponzi structured organizations that are using some of the exact same technologies and tools to organize as groups like hyper-local NYC mutual aid funds proves to be an interesting lens to examine some of the friction that exists in the development of internet infrastructures and ideologies.  

What deep-rooted technologies – gender, race, class, stereotype, ignorance, bias injustice – are we coding into our legacy, and how do we recognize and transcend harmful binaries?

Do our avatars make us immortal? Do we want to be? If we’re going to live a long, long time, what should we leave behind – and what do we take with us into the forever?** – Sasha Stiles, Technelegy**

I bow to the economic miracle, but what I want to show you are the neighborhood celebrations** – Chris Marker, Sans Soleil, quoted in Nathan Schneider, Everything for Everyone**

The internet is constantly evolving. As such, the desire to reify certain eras of development has become increasingly pertinent. The most common language for interpreting the internet has brought about nomenclature that splits the internet into three major eras - web1, web2, and web3. Web1 is often known as the era of Tim Berners-Lee’s ‘World Wide Web,’ a time where the average internet user would have primarily taken to the internet as a means of consuming information, navigating websites that were created and maintained by tech-savvy individuals and computer scientists. This ‘read only’ era of the internet brought about a revolutionary means of accessing information, but was swiftly brushed to the side as platforms that allowed user generated content began to take hold in the digital landscape. It is in the currently ubiquitous web2 that tech giants like Meta, Google, and Twitter have taken over as the leading facilitators (and surveillants) of global connectivity on an unprecedented scale. Web2 offers users the ability to both consume and create content for an internet audience. However, web2 also ushered in a new form of capitalism, surveillance capitalism, that takes advantage of the abundance of content and usage data in order to generate value for the aforementioned tech giants through behavioral prediction markets (Zuboff.) The emerging era web3 recognizes this fundamental disconnect between who is using the internet and who owns profits from the internet. Web3 is using blockchain technology  to change this. 

This paper places a heavy emphasis on the ever-developing era of web3. More specifically, it looks at one rapidly expanding facet of web3, the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), as a potential means of unlocking new potential in the ways in which digital platforms and communities are structured and governed. The literature review section introduces concepts at the core of my paper, fundamental ideas and technologies of web3 such as the blockchain and the DAO, in order to better orient the reader to the newly blossoming era of the internet. It also outlines key ideological components of internet culture that play a role in shaping how developing technologies are put to use. The final section of my paper will be a comparative analysis of two different DAOs that are working today: Nouns and pactDAO. Ultimately, I aim to offer this research as a primer on the ways in which new forms of digital organizing are taking place with new infrastructures and technologies that have the potential for creating a more open, democratized web. This assertion is not meant to suggest that blockchain technology is the only way that some of these broader digital injustices are being approached. In fact, criticism of the technology is quite expansive and in many cases, well justified. My hope is to present alternative modes of thinking about DAOs and web3 as a whole by introducing important work being done in the ecosystem that strays from narratives of blockchains as hyper-financialized Ponzi schemes.

In order to gain a more complete picture of how power dynamics are shifting on the web, it’s important to set the scene of the internet we inhabit today. Web2 brought about a proliferation of creation on the internet. No longer was having advanced knowledge in computer science a prerequisite to create and represent your identity on the internet. MySpace was booming with user generated profiles and content, where users could adequately express themselves through photos, graphics and music. This era also made way for soon-to-be surveillance capitalists to rise up and begin to capture the value that was generated by millions of internet users. Where users once examined and shared content in largely decentralized, peer-to-peer (p2p) fashion – intermediaries, like Google, began to place themselves in a position to capitalize off of the behavioral surplus. The rampant expansion and accessibility has been an incredible means of democratizing access to information and digital forms of self-expression, however, these surveillance capitalists (Meta, Google, Twitter, and Amazon) hold great power over the flow of information and media on the internet that does not come without consequences (Zuboff). By tracing the contours of the most pressing issues of web2, it becomes clear that web3 holds some of the most promising remedies for these ailments.

Centralized platforms make up the fabric of our digital lives; finding information on Google is easy, and comes almost as a second-nature to many at this point, Facebook and Twitter offer easy means of connecting to a larger network of people around the globe. These platforms have become standardized through their ubiquity across the internet as a whole. This was not always the case, however. The discovery of the behavioral surplus facilitated the rise of the aforementioned tech giants, and this small coalition of corporations slowly began to permeate the infrastructure of the internet, capturing value with every action you took and still take. The behavioral surplus as Zuboff defines in her book Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power is the excess data that is left behind with our everyday interactions with the infrastructure of the internet. When collected as big data, the behavioral surplus can be fed to predictive models to generate capital on secondary markets (Zuboff). As Facebook gained popularity in connecting users from all over the globe, so too did its grip on the flow of data on the web. 

Yochai Benkler outlines this transition technologically in his essay titled “Degrees of Freedom, Dimensions of Power,” where he states “[w]hile the Internet protocol itself remains open, as does the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), other control points counter the dynamics of the early internet.” These technologies: the smartphone, mobile wireless cellular networks as core internet infrastructure, the emergence of cloud computing, and last but not least big data, all contribute to the shift in power dynamics of the internet (Benkler 2016, 20-21). Benkler’s essay focuses primarily on the technological developments that allowed for this shift to happen. Though all the minute technological details remain outside the scope of this paper, it can still be seen that these technological advancements allowed the most heinous surveillance capitalists to interject themselves into more and more of the infrastructure of the internet (Benkler).

Centralization is a major theoretical underpinning for the argument of this paper. As Benkler argues, centralization is not an inherently evil or malicious means of organization. In the context of the development of the internet, however, centralization has had immediate impacts on how the internet operates for the average user. Power has transferred, from what used to be individuals connecting to broader networks in a decentralized capacity, to what we now know as tech-giants, or corporations that leech off of the data that you generate to sell behavioral predictions to advertisers in secondary markets (Zuboff). The cultural reaction to this shift has played out in both economic, political, and technological spheres that ultimately converged to create the first spark that started the web3 fire.

One of the most important movements that led to the development of blockchain technology came from an inherently political conception of the ways that our digital lives are governed. The Cypherpunk movement has its roots in the early 1990s, starting with a small group of computer scientists and electronic engineers in San Francisco who had a particular passion for cryptography in the digital world. Eric Hughes, a founding member of this group, stated in his 1993 text “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto” that “privacy in an open society requires anonymous transaction systems,” (Hughes 1993). These cypherpunks tended to be politically very libertarian, possessing great fantasies of avoiding taxes and the famed ‘Libertarian Exit’. The movement spawned not only politics but also aesthetics that still linger in the web3 ecosystem today, often very potently. 

The most salient remnants of this movement exist in the ubiquity of pseudonymous identities existing across the web3 space. One such example exists in one subject of my case studies near the conclusion of the paper: Nouns. Out of the founders of Nouns, over half use pseudonymous identities to obscure their personal identity in context of the Nouns community. There are plenty of valid reasons to want to obscure one's personal identity on the web. However, when it comes to a project that is ostensibly paying its founders thirty-thousand dollars every 10 days, it may be important to offer a greater sense of transparency to the community, especially given web3’s reputation as a scam-laden environment. Similarly, the notion of an exit fantasy is more present than ever in the web3 ecosystem with venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan’s idea of a ‘Network State’ that lives in the illusion that with enough capital, a community of internet friends can purchase land and operate as a sovereign entity within a developed nation.

In his 2022 book Platform Socialism: How to Reclaim Our Digital Future From Big Tech, author James Muldoon never explicitly mentions Web3 apart from a brief paragraph on distributed ledger technologies – though he has expressed his skepticism on Web3 as a whole in his other work. What he does outline however, is a varying array of concepts, all centered around the central question of the text. How can we reclaim our digital future from big tech? As a political scientist, many of Muldoon’s proposed answers to this question are based on historically prevalent models of democratic organizing. One mechanism called guild socialism offers a potential framework in which to imagine the implementation of Web3 technologies. 

Built from the work of early twentieth-century writers, G.D.H Cole and Otto Neurath, who wrote of theories of democratic associationalism “in which cooperation rather than force is seen as the mechanism that allows people to build organizations and work towards shared goals” – guild socialism proposes that “every important association should have its own democratic structure of governance: from universities and schools to businesses and economic regulatory institutions” (Muldoon 2022, 81). Guild socialism is one facet of Muldoon’s visions for the implementation of platform socialism in our current digital lives. In this world, the average user of the internet will have a much larger voice in how the internet operates.  His ultimate definition of platform socialism is “the organization of the digital economy through the social ownership of digital assets and democratic control over the infrastructure and systems that govern our digital lives” (Muldoon 2022, 3). Not entirely separate from the guild socialism that was written about by Cole and Neurath, platform socialism takes the democratic associationalism and applies it to the internet. In some instances, we can see that this model is already being experimented with in both Web 2 and Web3 contexts, the rising interests in platform co-operatives and DAOs shows that the desire is there to create more equitable internet systems. It is also particularly helpful to imagine alternative instances of historically effective models that may shine light on the problems we face today.

Co-ops have played a major role in the development of how our world came to be. At least, this is what Nathan Schneider argues in his 2018 book Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition that is Shaping the Next Economy*.* Schneider’s writing situates co-operatives in both historical and contemporary contexts. Unlike Muldoon however, Schneider does not shy away from Web3 in his writing. Though more journalistic in nature, Schneider details the profound sense of intrigue he felt when he was first introduced to the Ethereum protocol. In this section of the text, Schneider sees smart contracts and DAOs as a potential futurity for cooperativist organizing. “The cooperatives of the future, too, might be built with smart contracts, inscribing co-ownership and co-governance for vast networks with a freer hand than local laws allow,” (Schneider 111). 

As laid out in the previous sections, our current digital lives are largely governed by tech giants that have a higher concern for their company’s bottom line than they do for the users themselves. Web3 does not inherently fix these deep-rooted issues concerning power on the internet. What it does offer, however, is new technologies and organizational forms which can allow for more creative thinking about how we arrange our digital ecosystems. The next sections of this paper begin to outline some of the technologies, ideologies, and critiques of using and engaging in Web3 ecosystems.

Though it has entered the public consciousness through discussion of cryptocurrency and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in the form of cartoon-ish profile pictures, the idea of a third web actually holds much more importance for our digital futures, especially for those who make a living off of the monetization of intellectual property. Where Web 2.0 offered (and delivered) unfettered access to a whole host of global media content, the parties who owned or created said content were often left in the dust, especially if they were not tied to a major media corporation. It is here that the previous zeitgeist of Web 1.0 begins to revive itself. Web3 infrastructure is built on blockchain technology. A blockchain is a specific type of decentralized database that allows data to be stored across a multitude of locations, as opposed to one centralized server. All data is stored in blocks, with each block connecting to the previous ones, constituting the ‘blockchain.’ Web3 is not limited to these technologies or protocols, however. As Tante describes it:** **

Web3 is a blockchain-based backend and infrastructure layer on top of existing network technologies that aims at restructuring the internet in a radically decentralized and individual way. Services required for individuals to be able to act within that new infrastructure (like identity management, content storage, etc.) are provided by decentralized smart contracts or services built on them. While frontends to use the Web3 Internet still look similar to current ones (browser based apps) they no longer get their content from centralized servers but from blockchain-based content providers giving individuals enforceable ownership of the data and content they create or buy (Tante). 

This working definition of Web3 helps to provide the foundation for how Web3 will be situated throughout the remainder of this paper. As a trustless database, there are two widely applied mechanisms for creating consensus on which chain is the official chain in order to validate transactions and authenticate data. These two processes are proof of stake and proof of work, with the latter being employed on one of the most popular blockchains: bitcoin (Tante). This infrastructure demonstrates a shift from the increasingly imbalanced power structures that are baked into the web today, as was illustrated by the writing of Yochai Benkler in the previous section of this paper (Benkler). It is in the following section of this paper that I will more closely examine both consensus mechanisms, primarily to address popular concern over blockchain technology’s impact on the environment.

Popular narratives around blockchain technology frequently point out the environmental impact of using this technology and sustaining a decentralized network at scale. Though this paper is not focused on litigating every critique of Web3 tech, it would be dishonest academic work to propose that this era of the internet looks like some sort of techno-utopia that comes without costs. Primary critiques of environmental impacts of blockchain technology center around the use of the proof of work consensus mechanism. Looking at this issue through the lens of bitcoin explicitly proves to be sufficient as not only is it the most popular chain, it also utilizes the proof of work consensus mechanism. In order to “mine” the cryptocurrency using this mechanism, an immense amount of computing power is necessary, utilizing extremely high amounts of energy. Due to the nature of the decentralized, often anonymous identities of the node operators who are conducting this work, it is extremely difficult to accurately quantify and gain a complete picture of environmental consequences of such a network. With operators all around the globe, energy sources vary greatly - though bitcoin evangelists often tout an emphasis on using renewable energy sources. In 2017 a group of scholars in Italy examined more closely the environmental impacts of bitcoin in particular, concluding that “[t]he environmental costs of bitcoin’s mining and network maintenance depends on the rate of diffusion into the monetary system, as considering only the energetic costs, the system seems to be less energy consuming than gold mining or the banking system” (Giungato et. Al, 9). It is important to point out in this circumstance that though its popularity has skyrocketed since this paper was authored in 2017, it is still a relatively niche market, and comparing its energy use to that of the global banking system, used by billions of people worldwide, does seem to be a relatively inadequate comparison. 

The second most popular blockchain Ethereum, however, has recently made the switch to proof of stake. Proof of stake chains use significantly less amounts of energy in their consensus mechanism when compared to proof of work chains like Bitcoin. As opposed to guessing a hexadecimal string that verifies transactions and adds them to blocks, proof of stake requires ‘validators’ to stake their coins for a chance to be selected to verify transactions and receive transaction fees as a reward. This method can reduce energy consumption by over 75% (Zhang et. al), though the Ethereum foundation estimates that this model reduces energy output by 99.95% (Beekhuizen). 

It is particularly prescient within the scope of this paper to establish Ethereum as a far more energy efficient blockchain, as it is on this chain in particular that a majority of activity occurs within the context of decentralized autonomous organizations. The reason that Ethereum boasts a majority of DAO activity is attributed to its place as the first blockchain that allowed executable code to be added to the chain, in the form of smart contracts. The next section of this paper will break down more specifically what a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is, whereas the sections that follow will further complicate this idea by analyzing some more theoretical texts that begin to ideate on what DAOs could be.

The decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is rooted in Web3 through an earlier iteration, the decentralized autonomous corporation (DAC). A DAC takes the traditional share-holder model of corporate governance and places it on the blockchain through tokenized shares.  The tokens work in the context of a smart contract, a program built on the blockchain, that can be used for any number of purposes, like configuring a governing structure (Hassan, De Filippi). This technology has been put to use in a wide array of organizations that are operating in Web3. With a predecessor that attempts to emulate corporate governance structures, it is this exact desire to delve into the unknown that brought DAOs into existence. In some instances, groups organizing on the internet were attempting to stray further from notions of organizational archetypes that are commonly employed in corporate structures, which have flourished in a capitalist society. From social clubs, to DAOs governing major protocols that serve as key infrastructure in the functioning of Web3. It can be seen in this litany of functioning objectives, that fall under and rightly claim the title of a decentralized autonomous organization; not only the degree to which these organizations are operating - in terms of technical complexity, but also ideological differences - are particularly salient. This section aims to introduce some nuance into the idea of defining exactly what a decentralized autonomous organization really is, and point out some common characteristics that many of these groups share. 

Attempting to define exactly what a DAO is can be a contentious subject for creatives and academics in the space alike. Part of this contention can be attributed to the relative infancy of the space, with more widespread adoption of the term occurring only in the last decade (Hassan, De Filippi, 2). Another reason for this ongoing debate is the rather amorphous shape that many of these organizations take; some DAOs operate on a hyperlocal scale (pactDAO), while others span geographical divides, operating with members in many different locales (Uniswap, ENS, Nouns, etc). Other factors that really greatly vary from DAO to DAO include: number of members (5 vs. 10,000+), size of treasury (>$1,000 vs. $42 million), and functioning purpose (mutual aid network vs. protocol governance, etc.). In traditional organizational nomenclature these forms would take up names like ‘corporation’, ‘non-profit’, ‘worker co-op’, or ‘community fund’; these names are used to clearly demonstrate some sort of understanding on how any given organization operates. While in many cases, DAOs do tend to fit into one of these categories, it is often the case that the title of ‘decentralized autonomous organization’ tends to take precedence in any public-facing representation that the organization incurs. This, of course, only adds to tensions or debates regarding what truly constitutes a DAO. In a relatively sparse academic landscape surrounding the topic of decentralized autonomous organizations, however, Samer Hassan and Primavera De Filippi, put forward a few common characteristics that can be seen across definitions in academic works. In the context of this article, DAOs generally include: ability for people to coordinate and self-govern themselves online, code deployed on a blockchain with smart contract capabilities (like Ethereum), a smart contract that specifies rules for interactions between people, self-executed independently of the will of the parties, and independent from central control (Hassan, De Filippi, 4). With these key characteristics in mind, the following section of this paper will articulate some of the ways in which DAOs have been theorized to facilitate more prosocial interactions, online and offline.

The introductory sections of this paper establishes the ways in which the ideological advancement of surveillance capitalism has seeped into the infrastructure of the internet. This advancement has created an assumptive imperative that not only does the data you create belong to the platforms which harvest it, but it also insists that these corporations have the right to sell that data on secondary markets in order to influence your real world behaviors (Zuboff). Debates around this topic have been extensively litigated in both popular and academic settings and largely remain outside the scope of this paper. What I aim to introduce here, however, is a specific set of alternatives that has emerged in light of these debates. Data sovereignty and data co-operatives have separately emerged due to the rapid expansion of surveillance capitalism. In his writing, Igor Calzada determines that there is a necessary connection between these topics that has broader implications for the development of so-called ‘smart cities’. Calzada then asserts, rightly so, that  “Data are not oil; they are people,” (Calzada 1). The statement here then reinforces the modes through which surveillance capitalists are able to amass big data, constituted through usage and repeat actions by people. To take his argument one step further, I propose that one potential framework for thinking about and organizing such data co-operatives exists in the realm of decentralized autonomous organizations. Calzada’s writing is not entirely void of the presence of blockchain technology, some such organizations are alluded to in his list of already existing data co-ops, though a majority of these examples present are not utilizing blockchain tech in their work. The intention of such a proposition is to highlight the immense diversity of approaches that are rising up that coalesce around an ideological shift back to a desire for a more decentralized web that is having impacts on the development of new platforms and web infrastructures. Decentralized identity management, and protocol-level social graphs are evidence of this return to an internet that eludes centralized control. 

In essence, thinking about data cooperatives allows us to imagine a world in which the fate of our data is not in the hands of major tech conglomerates. Rather, our data can be managed by democratic organizations that are owned and operated by the very users who are generating said data. This work in many ways signals this broader shift that is outlined in this paper. Consequences of relying on centralized structures governed by billionaires has had fateful consequences, and this is just another instance of users seeking to rebalance power structures on the internet. Some organizations may elect to generate revenue for a platform by offering data to behavioral markets like the ones at the center of Zuboff’s writing. They can choose which data they would like to release, which data will remain hidden, and which data will not even be collected in the first place. A fundamental difference in this approach is that it aligns more closely with Muldoon’s visions of platform socialism. Tech conglomerates and their shareholders will not be the ones that are amassing wealth at the expense of our privacy and captured attention – users can vote or delegate their votes to members of the community who they feel represent their best interests. This change could be implemented through the use of web3 technologies (DAO structures specifically), though popular interest and support in such developments is still hanging in the balance.

The landscape for developing and working in and around DAOs is rapidly changing. In this section, I hope to introduce some more theoretical approaches to the ways in which decentralized autonomous organizations are being imagined. These visions dispel any notion that DAOs have reached a point of completeness in the way they live in our world today. As previously noted, the academic landscape for decentralized autonomous organizations is relatively limited. Critical engagement and theorizing around DAOs often takes place outside the realm of academia. Writers, artists, activists, academics, and community leaders frequently take to other forums to publish thoughts on the evolution of this nascent organizational form. It is critical to note here the methods of dissemination of thought surrounding DAOs because it signals a certain form of divergence from incumbent cultural institutions. This section of the paper will largely consider writing that exists in these alternative publication methods. Some of these platforms of publication include: mirror (particularly noteworthy as it is built on top of web3 infrastructure), substack, medium, independent publishers, and curatorial platforms. 

Kei Kreutler is one such visionary who is imagining better digital worlds – with DAOs at the forefront of organizing cooperative action. Kreutler’s essay “A Prehistory of DAOs” is a robust analysis of this organizational form since its conception. She covers many of the pre-existing organizational models and histories that have been referenced in previous sections of this text, but she adds one new comparison that complicates the cultural lineage of DAOs: gaming guilds. At its most simple layer, gaming guilds that form in MMORPGs are comparable to DAOs as they consist of a group of users that organize in-game to accomplish shared goals (Kreutler). The comparison becomes more complex when you begin to look at the different forms of infrastructure that guilds composed in their operations to develop more intricate systems for the equitable distribution of loot. Kreutler references the work of Joshua Citarella, where he points out that many of these systems developed by gaming guilds resemble a form of market socialism - a label which many guilds would certainly reject (Citarella in Kreutler). Collaborating with different people on the internet necessitates new forms of social interaction and organization. This is embodied in the shift from town hall meetings to discussions on online forums, or the infamous “digital town square” where each user, though geographically divided, operates as a node on a complex social graph. These new changes in organization are brought about by advancements in technological capabilities, and DAOs are just one more instance of this.

Radical Friends: Decentralized Autonomous Organizations and the Arts is a collection of essays edited by Ruth Catlow and Penny Rafferty published by Torque Editions, a leading publisher and curator operating at the intersection of art and crypto. The book highlights diverse perspectives from some of the most active and engaging writers and artists that are theorizing around DAO structures (including the previously cited Kei Kreutler). Radical Friends is also one of the only full-length works regarding the topic that has been released to date. Though I do not seek to offer a full summary of the work encompassed in this book, it is important to note the ways in which it has made the topic much more accessible to those who are not chronically-online, by featuring a glossary of all necessary terms and a timeline that pinpoints key moments in DAO history (collective art movements, technological inventions, and important literature.) On top of this, the book extends a welcoming hand to the DAO-curious.

Hito Steyerl starts her entry to the book Walk the Walk – Beyond Blockchain Orientalism with an inspiring provocation. 

What is a DAO? No one really knows. One reason is that most possible answers lie in the future. Will a blockchain based decentralized autonomous organization follow templates for Ponzi schemes or Paris Commune style popular councils – or neither or both? Are they going to be decentralized, autonomous, or even organizations? Will they be on the blockchain at all, given the fact that this is quite expensive these days? (Steyerl in Cafferty, Catlow, 127)

Steyerl could be considered a cautious optimist when it comes to decentralized autonomous organizations. Her writing highlights the ways in which many actors in the web3 space espouse ideas of a more decentralized, democratic internet, but these words do not always align with actions taken. In drawing a comparison between the DAO and Chinese Daoism, Steyerl begins to tease out the connections between such disparate ideas. Though the DAO does not take any formational inspiration from Daoism, there exists through lines in “[v]ague ideas about following the ‘way’ and somehow vibing with nature.” (Steyerl 127). Another crucial connection that she draws is in the historical context through which both ideas were conceived, rife with thought about money, markets, religion, and philosophy. In the case of DAOs: failing logistics surrounding healthcare, public trust and political (in)stability, climate change, failing financial systems – all of these areas paint a bleak portrait of the global trends. Steyerl suggests that against this background, the emergence of DAOs would of course resonate with many. 

Steyerl’s writing gets at the heart of contentious debate around what a DAO is or should be. “They could actualize as tribes, clans, squads, cliques, mafias, cabals, unions, associations or cartels. DAOs could be modeled as cooperatives, Ponzi schemes, after Rosicrucian lodges or somewhat more realistically, after bullshit job bureaucracies.” (Steyerl 129.) In this sense, her writing is important to carry with us as we examine more closely two DAOs in operation today, and compare their operating motives and methods.

In order to develop a better idea of how these new technologies are being implemented in this new mode of organization, the next two sections of this paper will examine two distinct DAOs: Nouns and pactDAO. The following comparative analysis will help to better situate the ways in which this singular unifying sign (DAO) is used on two very different organizations. To begin my analysis, I will look at the functioning and ethos of one of the most popular DAOs, Nouns. The premise of Nouns is relatively simple. Everyday a new auction is started for a non-fungible token that consists of a pixel-art character wearing a distinct pair of glasses, the ‘noggles’. The proceeds from said auction are transferred to a community-owned treasury, and holders of Nouns tokens are able to put forward propositions to the community that are then voted on (one Noun is equal to one vote). The official Nouns website states that “Nouns are an experimental attempt to improve the formation of on-chain avatar communities,” (Nouns). Nouns positions itself in the wider context of the evolving internet as a “community-owned brand” with the purpose of funding ideas, fostering collaboration, and of course, proliferating the Nouns brand (through the ubiquity of the ‘Noggles’). At the time of writing, the Nouns treasury boasts a whopping forty-six million US dollars (held in the Ethereum blockchain’s native token, Ether). Since the beginning of the year, the lowest price at which an auction was won came in at 23.2 ETH (roughly thirty-eight thousand US dollars). Aside from the glaringly obvious exclusionary nature of the price point at which these Nouns are selling, the DAO requires you to own two Nouns in order to be eligible to submit a proposal to the broader community. 

As a community of the crypto-wealthy, Nouns has become a way to signal your status through the profile picture version of a Gucci belt. With money to throw around, Nouns have used their treasury to fund animated shorts, graphic novels, and even restore a basketball court. One of the major upsides in utilizing blockchain technology as a base infrastructure layer for a community like this is the ability to further examine what a project has done and where funds have gone. Where some Nouns' proposals like to place an emphasis on the ambiguous ‘public goods’ that they are funding, it can still be seen that the organization has internalized a hyper-capitalist notion of endless growth through their ideas of ‘proliferation’. Restoring a basketball court in an underserved Los Angeles community is cool, but doing so as a means to further a brand image means setting the precedent that public goods are good, so long as they help generate awareness for your amorphous brand. In this sense Nouns can be read as a partial futurity for the way that internet communities come together in digital spaces. Bonding over a shared set of symbols that represent a certain ideological position when it comes to the use of blockchain technology. Nouns all over the world have the opportunity to make this pilgrimage to the Los Angeles basketball court and scan a QR code in order to claim their POAP (proof of attendance protocol) token that they can carry in their wallet and assert a Nounish identity to those who take a peek at its contents. 

Nouns started with a group of ten founders. These founders, largely operating on a basis of pseudonymity, control a multi-signature wallet in which they have opted to pay themselves with every tenth Noun for the first five years of the auction cycle. In this instance founders are not being paid through any auction proceeds (as 100% of auction earnings goes directly to the Nouns treasury), but they are paying themselves in a communal base of growing influence over the direction of Nouns as a whole. Certainly these founders could opt to sell any of their collective Nouns on a secondary market and split the profits, but the allure of speculative investment and deeper influence seems to outweigh the prospect of immediate liquidity. 

One strength in the Nouns DAO is its extensive documentation. In these pages you can find information about the history of Nouns (from the first Nouns tweet to the ‘Noggles’ appearance in a Bud Light Superbowl ad), criteria for soliciting funding for a Nouns related project, access to different Nouns subcommunities (Nouns Japan, Brazil, Africa, etc.), and even digital assets to use in building your own Nouns based project. Similarly, access to all propositions is available to the public, where you can see projects proposed and how different Nouns are voting. For these reasons Nouns can be interpreted as a step in the right direction for communities using internet infrastructure. Nouns exists with a high degree of decentralization, pseudo-democratic voting systems, and a certain degree of commitment to ‘public goods’ contingent upon proliferation of the Nouns brand. Keeping these organizational characteristics and operational processes in mind, let’s consider another example of decentralized autonomous organizations operating presently, pactDAO.

In their introductory crowdfunding campaign, pactDAO founders lay out what they’re building, and for who. “Pact is not a social club. We’ll call it a socialist club.” (Pact Collective: NYC Mutual Aid DAO). This explicit political invocation defines where the Pact Collective envisions itself in the wider web3 ecosystem. They are not interested in playing games of financial speculation and brand proliferation like Nouns. Founding members of Pact include activists, writers, artists, and software developers – all working under a shared vision of creating a robust community network to transform New York City. The story of pactDAO starts with its predecessor, the Pact Collective, which arose out of the pandemic in response to collectivized community struggles.  This section will juxtapose the work of the Pact Collective and its evolution to pactDAO with that of Nouns.By holding these two unique organizations up comparatively, it becomes clear the ways in which these organizations, both utilizing the web3 technologies of decentralized autonomous organizations, can operate through entirely different  organizational and ideological means.

Pact’s homepage does not actually use the term ‘decentralized autonomous organization’ – a nod to the usage of decentralized technologies is present, but not even ‘web3’ or the ever popular ‘public goods’ make an appearance. The dearth of crypto-adjacent terminology on the homepage signals a certain intentionality in emphasizing who Pact is for. Pact is not a collective for the crypto-wealthy, sometimes called ‘whales’. Pact is for the people of New York. Though the previously cited crowdfund article does use some of the aforementioned terminology, it is likely best to attribute this to the circumstances in which it was published. This article was a crypto-specific crowdfund, published on the beloved web3 platform Mirror. It would make sense then, that when seeking crypto-funding, the founders would draw from the pre-existing lexicon of crypto-terminology. This article was also released around the time that members of the Pact Collective were beginning to transition into pactDAO, and they were beginning to experiment more with web3 technologies and organizational systems. 

[P]actDAO operations have been categorized into seasons. Seasons are a relatively common framework for DAOs and other web3 projects to utilize. Particularly, seasons are used to establish goals, manage expectations, and demonstrate evolution through the passing of time. This specific naming mechanism tends to come along with projects in the so-called ‘regenerative crypto’ ecosystem. These are projects that insist that crypto can regenerate the world. The validity of such claims are largely outside the scope of this paper, and pactDAO does not explicitly align itself with ‘regenerative crypto’ aside from the partnership with Gitcoin, which is one of the most prominent actors in the space. Using seasons here, however, allows Pact to connect to a more ecologically conscious framework for organizing their community, and similarly adopt such aesthetics.

Pact is currently on its first season which comes after the end of season 0 which they named “Planting Seeds” as a way to further invoke the green aesthetics discussed in the previous paragraph. “Season 0 was for inviting people to the table to set intentions, build trust, and openly discuss local challenges and opportunities together,” (Pact Collective: NYC Mutual Aid DAO). The intention here was to engage with local communities and build support for the DAO as a whole. In doing so, pactDAO also connected with some other web3 organizations that helped them experiment and raise funds. Breadchain Cooperative, Kernel, and Gitcoin are all among the web3 native organizations that allied with pactDAO in order to help them harness the potential of web3 tech. Season One has been all about solidifying organizational structure and putting it down on paper. From this, a robust Notion database has been created that houses all the most important information for pactDAO. Like Nouns, this documentation is easily accessible to anyone who wishes to view it. The bylaws and compensation framework (to be explored further later in this section), a digital public library, recordings of past community workshops, and an events calendar are all available to the public.

Nouns uses token-based voting, which leads to those with the greatest accumulation of capital to holding a larger presence in community direction. [P]actDAO draws from a lineage of co-operatives and non-profits to establish a more robust, and complex voting system that allows for all members to be entitled to one vote. The means by which votes are cast is slightly obscured in the bylaws of the organization. It can be assumed that votes are cast using an off-chain voting system, due to the current state of development in blockchain technology, creating a verifiable record of votes that limits one person to one vote is not widely applied. Members of pactDAO are largely categorized into two distinct groups: comrades and collectivists. Comrades are working members of the DAO, they are responsible for day-to-day operations of the collective as determined by the board. Collectivists, on the other hand, are supporting-members., They can make and vote on proposals and are generally individuals who support the DAO from a greater distance (monthly subscription or NFT purchase.) Other roles in the organization consist of a board of directors and  functionaries (president, vice president, secretary, and a treasurer). Aside from membership definitions, the bylaws also establish procedures for calling meetings, establishing voting procedures, and election terms for more senior members of the DAO serving in roles on the board or as functionaries. 

It’s clear that pactDAO is not employing the ever prevalent ‘move fast and break things’ motto that surrounds Silicon Valley tech companies. At pactDAO, it really isn’t even about the tech. This is one key learning point that the collective honed in on in their Season Zero reflection stating “we were starry-eyed about web3 technology and its potential, and while we still are, we made the mistake of letting this excitement become a core part of our mission… In our well-intentioned effort to educate organizations on these tools, we were coming across more like tech sales people than comrades,” (Season Zero Recap). Unlike Nouns which employs novel use of these technologies to generate buzz and solicit big-ticket entry to the community, pactDAO sees blockchain tech as just another tool in their toolkit for collective liberation. 

Another avenue to examine differences between these organizations is in their relationship to legal structures. [P]actDAO is registered as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, while Nouns exists as an ambiguous extra-legal treasury with no head. In this respect Nouns lends credence to stereotypes about crypto economies posing as a front for less-than ethical (and legal) financial practices. Nouns has no accusations or evidence to support any suspicion of such transgressions, and that is not entirely the point. Operating in these liminal spaces exposes participants to a lack of accountability on the part of the community they are serving. In this way, pactDAO has built in safeguards to help maintain accountability and legitimacy through existing legal structures, highlighting the use of a composable set of infrastructures that create a more flexible organization.

Attempting to write a complete survey of web3 socio-technical development is a Sisyphean task. Demonstrating the ways that the same technologies are being used for opposing ideological means helps to point out the ways in which the direction of technological development is not inevitable. Yet, the internet keeps evolving, and new forms of organization are consistently emerging in light of these developments. The goal of this paper is to highlight one particular nascent form of organization, the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), and situate it against the backdrop of the evolution of the internet, and more specifically crypto technology. In positioning this form of organization as a potentially adversarial form to the dominant ideology of surveillance capitalism that is present in web 2, it becomes possible to imagine a digital future in which cooperation lives at the forefront of our motives. An analysis of one specific blockchain criticism in its environmental impact was also explored, in the context of Bitcoin and Ethereum. Similarly, this paper also addressed two specific DAOs: Nouns and pactDAO and offered a comparative analysis of both organizations’ operating structures in order to demonstrate the ways in which creating more prosocial internet communities does not come automatically with the implementation of this new technology, moreso they must be actively defined and embodied through organizational language, structure, and participation. 

There remains much to be seen for the potential of decentralized autonomous organizations. In examining this technology in such an early stage of development, this paper can serve as a checkpoint to revisit in the coming years, and reconsider the assertions made and whether or not DAOs truly do possess the potential to create more prosocial and participatory online communities.

Beekhuizen, Carl. “Ethereum’s Energy Usage Will Soon Decrease by ~99.95%.” Ethereum Foundation Blog, 18 May 2021, https://blog.ethereum.org/2021/05/18/country-power-no-more.

Benkler, Yochai. “Degrees of Freedom, Dimensions of Power.” Daedalus, vol. 145, no. 1, 2016, pp. 18–32.

Calzada, Igor. “Data Co-Operatives through Data Sovereignty.” Smart Cities, vol. 4, no. 3, Sept. 2021, pp. 1158–72. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.3390/smartcities4030062

Catlow, Ruth and Rafferty, Penny, editors. Radical Friends: Decentralised Autonomous Organisations and the Arts. Torque Editions, 2022..

Craib, Raymond. Adventure Capitalism: A History of Libertarian Exit, From The Era of Decolonization to the Digital Age. PM Press, 2022.

Giungato, Pasquale, et al. "Current trends in sustainability of bitcoins and related blockchain technology." Sustainability 9.12 (2017): 2214.

Hassan, Samer, and Primavera De Filippi. “Decentralized Autonomous Organization.” Internet Policy Review, vol. 10, no. 2, Apr. 2021. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.14763/2021.2.1556.

Hughes, Eric. A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto. https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html. Accessed 21 Mar. 2023.

Muldoon, James. Platform Socialism: How to Reclaim Our Digital Future from Big Tech. Pluto Press, 2022.

Muldoon, James. Web3 Can’t Fix the Internet. https://jacobin.com/2022/01/crypto-blockchain-daos-decentralized-power-capitalism. Accessed 26 Feb. 2023.

Kreutler, Kei. A Prehistory of DAOs. https://gnosisguild.mirror.xyz/t4F5rItMw4-mlpLZf5JQhElbDfQ2JRVKAzEpanyxW1Q. Accessed 19 Mar. 2023.

Pact Collective: NYC Mutual Aid DAO. https://mirror.xyz/pactcollective.eth/crowdfunds/0x15BBCBC2Eae5C70A4473DB7dA6344dA291ce7E5e. Accessed 17 Mar. 2023.

Season Zero Recap. pactDAO.  https://mirror.xyz/pactcollective.eth/TEUhcjrc6QZwRb5n12OmPS0WkBPeoES-AaLGpc1JT80. Accessed 17 Mar. 2023.

Schneider, Nathan. Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy. Nation Books, 2018.

Srinavasan, Balaji. The Network State: How to Start a New Country. 2022. https://thenetworkstate.com/ 

Tante. “The Third Web.” Nodes in a Social Network, 17 Dec. 2021, https://tante.cc/2021/12/17/the-third-web/.

Zhang, Rong, and Wai Kin Victor Chan. "Evaluation of energy consumption in block-chains with proof of work and proof of stake." Journal of Physics: Conference Series. Vol. 1584. No. 1. IOP Publishing, 2020.

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Public Affairs, 2018.

This paper was researched and written as part of my undergraduate degree in Media and Cultural Studies at Macalester College. If not for the wonderful support from my professors, mentors and peers this paper would have never seen the light of day. In releasing this work, I hope to add to a rapidly expanding catalogue of incredible writers, thinkers, and other creatives who are beginning to explore the potential of DAOs for restructuring our digital world.

The rise of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) has sparked interest in their potential for creating alternative models of governance and organization. DAOs are decentralized, self-governing entities that operate on blockchain technology, offering new possibilities for data sovereignty, collectivist organizing, and post-capitalist movements. Through my research, I will examine literature that I consider to be canon about issues that have led to the desire to create more decentralized, user-owned organizations operating on a variety of scales (hyper-local and transnational.) My literature review will pull out specific connections between some of these works that are not specifically focused on DAOs, but closely align with some of the missions or critiques that have led to the development of this social formation. Though my research will not be completely void of any technical analysis of the tools that are in operation today, my research is heavily centered around the human aspect of this burgeoning movement and how people are guiding our technological futures. A crucial component of my research here will be balancing these techno-utopian visions of the future with the ways that some of these organizations are operating today. Examining tensions between hyper-capitalist, Ponzi structured organizations that are using some of the exact same technologies and tools to organize as groups like hyper-local NYC mutual aid funds proves to be an interesting lens to examine some of the friction that exists in the development of internet infrastructures and ideologies.  

What deep-rooted technologies – gender, race, class, stereotype, ignorance, bias injustice – are we coding into our legacy, and how do we recognize and transcend harmful binaries?

Do our avatars make us immortal? Do we want to be? If we’re going to live a long, long time, what should we leave behind – and what do we take with us into the forever?** – Sasha Stiles, Technelegy**

I bow to the economic miracle, but what I want to show you are the neighborhood celebrations** – Chris Marker, Sans Soleil, quoted in Nathan Schneider, Everything for Everyone**

The internet is constantly evolving. As such, the desire to reify certain eras of development has become increasingly pertinent. The most common language for interpreting the internet has brought about nomenclature that splits the internet into three major eras - web1, web2, and web3. Web1 is often known as the era of Tim Berners-Lee’s ‘World Wide Web,’ a time where the average internet user would have primarily taken to the internet as a means of consuming information, navigating websites that were created and maintained by tech-savvy individuals and computer scientists. This ‘read only’ era of the internet brought about a revolutionary means of accessing information, but was swiftly brushed to the side as platforms that allowed user generated content began to take hold in the digital landscape. It is in the currently ubiquitous web2 that tech giants like Meta, Google, and Twitter have taken over as the leading facilitators (and surveillants) of global connectivity on an unprecedented scale. Web2 offers users the ability to both consume and create content for an internet audience. However, web2 also ushered in a new form of capitalism, surveillance capitalism, that takes advantage of the abundance of content and usage data in order to generate value for the aforementioned tech giants through behavioral prediction markets (Zuboff.) The emerging era web3 recognizes this fundamental disconnect between who is using the internet and who owns profits from the internet. Web3 is using blockchain technology  to change this. 

This paper places a heavy emphasis on the ever-developing era of web3. More specifically, it looks at one rapidly expanding facet of web3, the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), as a potential means of unlocking new potential in the ways in which digital platforms and communities are structured and governed. The literature review section introduces concepts at the core of my paper, fundamental ideas and technologies of web3 such as the blockchain and the DAO, in order to better orient the reader to the newly blossoming era of the internet. It also outlines key ideological components of internet culture that play a role in shaping how developing technologies are put to use. The final section of my paper will be a comparative analysis of two different DAOs that are working today: Nouns and pactDAO. Ultimately, I aim to offer this research as a primer on the ways in which new forms of digital organizing are taking place with new infrastructures and technologies that have the potential for creating a more open, democratized web. This assertion is not meant to suggest that blockchain technology is the only way that some of these broader digital injustices are being approached. In fact, criticism of the technology is quite expansive and in many cases, well justified. My hope is to present alternative modes of thinking about DAOs and web3 as a whole by introducing important work being done in the ecosystem that strays from narratives of blockchains as hyper-financialized Ponzi schemes.

In order to gain a more complete picture of how power dynamics are shifting on the web, it’s important to set the scene of the internet we inhabit today. Web2 brought about a proliferation of creation on the internet. No longer was having advanced knowledge in computer science a prerequisite to create and represent your identity on the internet. MySpace was booming with user generated profiles and content, where users could adequately express themselves through photos, graphics and music. This era also made way for soon-to-be surveillance capitalists to rise up and begin to capture the value that was generated by millions of internet users. Where users once examined and shared content in largely decentralized, peer-to-peer (p2p) fashion – intermediaries, like Google, began to place themselves in a position to capitalize off of the behavioral surplus. The rampant expansion and accessibility has been an incredible means of democratizing access to information and digital forms of self-expression, however, these surveillance capitalists (Meta, Google, Twitter, and Amazon) hold great power over the flow of information and media on the internet that does not come without consequences (Zuboff). By tracing the contours of the most pressing issues of web2, it becomes clear that web3 holds some of the most promising remedies for these ailments.

Centralized platforms make up the fabric of our digital lives; finding information on Google is easy, and comes almost as a second-nature to many at this point, Facebook and Twitter offer easy means of connecting to a larger network of people around the globe. These platforms have become standardized through their ubiquity across the internet as a whole. This was not always the case, however. The discovery of the behavioral surplus facilitated the rise of the aforementioned tech giants, and this small coalition of corporations slowly began to permeate the infrastructure of the internet, capturing value with every action you took and still take. The behavioral surplus as Zuboff defines in her book Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power is the excess data that is left behind with our everyday interactions with the infrastructure of the internet. When collected as big data, the behavioral surplus can be fed to predictive models to generate capital on secondary markets (Zuboff). As Facebook gained popularity in connecting users from all over the globe, so too did its grip on the flow of data on the web. 

Yochai Benkler outlines this transition technologically in his essay titled “Degrees of Freedom, Dimensions of Power,” where he states “[w]hile the Internet protocol itself remains open, as does the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), other control points counter the dynamics of the early internet.” These technologies: the smartphone, mobile wireless cellular networks as core internet infrastructure, the emergence of cloud computing, and last but not least big data, all contribute to the shift in power dynamics of the internet (Benkler 2016, 20-21). Benkler’s essay focuses primarily on the technological developments that allowed for this shift to happen. Though all the minute technological details remain outside the scope of this paper, it can still be seen that these technological advancements allowed the most heinous surveillance capitalists to interject themselves into more and more of the infrastructure of the internet (Benkler).

Centralization is a major theoretical underpinning for the argument of this paper. As Benkler argues, centralization is not an inherently evil or malicious means of organization. In the context of the development of the internet, however, centralization has had immediate impacts on how the internet operates for the average user. Power has transferred, from what used to be individuals connecting to broader networks in a decentralized capacity, to what we now know as tech-giants, or corporations that leech off of the data that you generate to sell behavioral predictions to advertisers in secondary markets (Zuboff). The cultural reaction to this shift has played out in both economic, political, and technological spheres that ultimately converged to create the first spark that started the web3 fire.

One of the most important movements that led to the development of blockchain technology came from an inherently political conception of the ways that our digital lives are governed. The Cypherpunk movement has its roots in the early 1990s, starting with a small group of computer scientists and electronic engineers in San Francisco who had a particular passion for cryptography in the digital world. Eric Hughes, a founding member of this group, stated in his 1993 text “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto” that “privacy in an open society requires anonymous transaction systems,” (Hughes 1993). These cypherpunks tended to be politically very libertarian, possessing great fantasies of avoiding taxes and the famed ‘Libertarian Exit’. The movement spawned not only politics but also aesthetics that still linger in the web3 ecosystem today, often very potently. 

The most salient remnants of this movement exist in the ubiquity of pseudonymous identities existing across the web3 space. One such example exists in one subject of my case studies near the conclusion of the paper: Nouns. Out of the founders of Nouns, over half use pseudonymous identities to obscure their personal identity in context of the Nouns community. There are plenty of valid reasons to want to obscure one's personal identity on the web. However, when it comes to a project that is ostensibly paying its founders thirty-thousand dollars every 10 days, it may be important to offer a greater sense of transparency to the community, especially given web3’s reputation as a scam-laden environment. Similarly, the notion of an exit fantasy is more present than ever in the web3 ecosystem with venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan’s idea of a ‘Network State’ that lives in the illusion that with enough capital, a community of internet friends can purchase land and operate as a sovereign entity within a developed nation.

In his 2022 book Platform Socialism: How to Reclaim Our Digital Future From Big Tech, author James Muldoon never explicitly mentions Web3 apart from a brief paragraph on distributed ledger technologies – though he has expressed his skepticism on Web3 as a whole in his other work. What he does outline however, is a varying array of concepts, all centered around the central question of the text. How can we reclaim our digital future from big tech? As a political scientist, many of Muldoon’s proposed answers to this question are based on historically prevalent models of democratic organizing. One mechanism called guild socialism offers a potential framework in which to imagine the implementation of Web3 technologies. 

Built from the work of early twentieth-century writers, G.D.H Cole and Otto Neurath, who wrote of theories of democratic associationalism “in which cooperation rather than force is seen as the mechanism that allows people to build organizations and work towards shared goals” – guild socialism proposes that “every important association should have its own democratic structure of governance: from universities and schools to businesses and economic regulatory institutions” (Muldoon 2022, 81). Guild socialism is one facet of Muldoon’s visions for the implementation of platform socialism in our current digital lives. In this world, the average user of the internet will have a much larger voice in how the internet operates.  His ultimate definition of platform socialism is “the organization of the digital economy through the social ownership of digital assets and democratic control over the infrastructure and systems that govern our digital lives” (Muldoon 2022, 3). Not entirely separate from the guild socialism that was written about by Cole and Neurath, platform socialism takes the democratic associationalism and applies it to the internet. In some instances, we can see that this model is already being experimented with in both Web 2 and Web3 contexts, the rising interests in platform co-operatives and DAOs shows that the desire is there to create more equitable internet systems. It is also particularly helpful to imagine alternative instances of historically effective models that may shine light on the problems we face today.

Co-ops have played a major role in the development of how our world came to be. At least, this is what Nathan Schneider argues in his 2018 book Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition that is Shaping the Next Economy*.* Schneider’s writing situates co-operatives in both historical and contemporary contexts. Unlike Muldoon however, Schneider does not shy away from Web3 in his writing. Though more journalistic in nature, Schneider details the profound sense of intrigue he felt when he was first introduced to the Ethereum protocol. In this section of the text, Schneider sees smart contracts and DAOs as a potential futurity for cooperativist organizing. “The cooperatives of the future, too, might be built with smart contracts, inscribing co-ownership and co-governance for vast networks with a freer hand than local laws allow,” (Schneider 111). 

As laid out in the previous sections, our current digital lives are largely governed by tech giants that have a higher concern for their company’s bottom line than they do for the users themselves. Web3 does not inherently fix these deep-rooted issues concerning power on the internet. What it does offer, however, is new technologies and organizational forms which can allow for more creative thinking about how we arrange our digital ecosystems. The next sections of this paper begin to outline some of the technologies, ideologies, and critiques of using and engaging in Web3 ecosystems.

Though it has entered the public consciousness through discussion of cryptocurrency and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in the form of cartoon-ish profile pictures, the idea of a third web actually holds much more importance for our digital futures, especially for those who make a living off of the monetization of intellectual property. Where Web 2.0 offered (and delivered) unfettered access to a whole host of global media content, the parties who owned or created said content were often left in the dust, especially if they were not tied to a major media corporation. It is here that the previous zeitgeist of Web 1.0 begins to revive itself. Web3 infrastructure is built on blockchain technology. A blockchain is a specific type of decentralized database that allows data to be stored across a multitude of locations, as opposed to one centralized server. All data is stored in blocks, with each block connecting to the previous ones, constituting the ‘blockchain.’ Web3 is not limited to these technologies or protocols, however. As Tante describes it:** **

Web3 is a blockchain-based backend and infrastructure layer on top of existing network technologies that aims at restructuring the internet in a radically decentralized and individual way. Services required for individuals to be able to act within that new infrastructure (like identity management, content storage, etc.) are provided by decentralized smart contracts or services built on them. While frontends to use the Web3 Internet still look similar to current ones (browser based apps) they no longer get their content from centralized servers but from blockchain-based content providers giving individuals enforceable ownership of the data and content they create or buy (Tante). 

This working definition of Web3 helps to provide the foundation for how Web3 will be situated throughout the remainder of this paper. As a trustless database, there are two widely applied mechanisms for creating consensus on which chain is the official chain in order to validate transactions and authenticate data. These two processes are proof of stake and proof of work, with the latter being employed on one of the most popular blockchains: bitcoin (Tante). This infrastructure demonstrates a shift from the increasingly imbalanced power structures that are baked into the web today, as was illustrated by the writing of Yochai Benkler in the previous section of this paper (Benkler). It is in the following section of this paper that I will more closely examine both consensus mechanisms, primarily to address popular concern over blockchain technology’s impact on the environment.

Popular narratives around blockchain technology frequently point out the environmental impact of using this technology and sustaining a decentralized network at scale. Though this paper is not focused on litigating every critique of Web3 tech, it would be dishonest academic work to propose that this era of the internet looks like some sort of techno-utopia that comes without costs. Primary critiques of environmental impacts of blockchain technology center around the use of the proof of work consensus mechanism. Looking at this issue through the lens of bitcoin explicitly proves to be sufficient as not only is it the most popular chain, it also utilizes the proof of work consensus mechanism. In order to “mine” the cryptocurrency using this mechanism, an immense amount of computing power is necessary, utilizing extremely high amounts of energy. Due to the nature of the decentralized, often anonymous identities of the node operators who are conducting this work, it is extremely difficult to accurately quantify and gain a complete picture of environmental consequences of such a network. With operators all around the globe, energy sources vary greatly - though bitcoin evangelists often tout an emphasis on using renewable energy sources. In 2017 a group of scholars in Italy examined more closely the environmental impacts of bitcoin in particular, concluding that “[t]he environmental costs of bitcoin’s mining and network maintenance depends on the rate of diffusion into the monetary system, as considering only the energetic costs, the system seems to be less energy consuming than gold mining or the banking system” (Giungato et. Al, 9). It is important to point out in this circumstance that though its popularity has skyrocketed since this paper was authored in 2017, it is still a relatively niche market, and comparing its energy use to that of the global banking system, used by billions of people worldwide, does seem to be a relatively inadequate comparison. 

The second most popular blockchain Ethereum, however, has recently made the switch to proof of stake. Proof of stake chains use significantly less amounts of energy in their consensus mechanism when compared to proof of work chains like Bitcoin. As opposed to guessing a hexadecimal string that verifies transactions and adds them to blocks, proof of stake requires ‘validators’ to stake their coins for a chance to be selected to verify transactions and receive transaction fees as a reward. This method can reduce energy consumption by over 75% (Zhang et. al), though the Ethereum foundation estimates that this model reduces energy output by 99.95% (Beekhuizen). 

It is particularly prescient within the scope of this paper to establish Ethereum as a far more energy efficient blockchain, as it is on this chain in particular that a majority of activity occurs within the context of decentralized autonomous organizations. The reason that Ethereum boasts a majority of DAO activity is attributed to its place as the first blockchain that allowed executable code to be added to the chain, in the form of smart contracts. The next section of this paper will break down more specifically what a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is, whereas the sections that follow will further complicate this idea by analyzing some more theoretical texts that begin to ideate on what DAOs could be.

The decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is rooted in Web3 through an earlier iteration, the decentralized autonomous corporation (DAC). A DAC takes the traditional share-holder model of corporate governance and places it on the blockchain through tokenized shares.  The tokens work in the context of a smart contract, a program built on the blockchain, that can be used for any number of purposes, like configuring a governing structure (Hassan, De Filippi). This technology has been put to use in a wide array of organizations that are operating in Web3. With a predecessor that attempts to emulate corporate governance structures, it is this exact desire to delve into the unknown that brought DAOs into existence. In some instances, groups organizing on the internet were attempting to stray further from notions of organizational archetypes that are commonly employed in corporate structures, which have flourished in a capitalist society. From social clubs, to DAOs governing major protocols that serve as key infrastructure in the functioning of Web3. It can be seen in this litany of functioning objectives, that fall under and rightly claim the title of a decentralized autonomous organization; not only the degree to which these organizations are operating - in terms of technical complexity, but also ideological differences - are particularly salient. This section aims to introduce some nuance into the idea of defining exactly what a decentralized autonomous organization really is, and point out some common characteristics that many of these groups share. 

Attempting to define exactly what a DAO is can be a contentious subject for creatives and academics in the space alike. Part of this contention can be attributed to the relative infancy of the space, with more widespread adoption of the term occurring only in the last decade (Hassan, De Filippi, 2). Another reason for this ongoing debate is the rather amorphous shape that many of these organizations take; some DAOs operate on a hyperlocal scale (pactDAO), while others span geographical divides, operating with members in many different locales (Uniswap, ENS, Nouns, etc). Other factors that really greatly vary from DAO to DAO include: number of members (5 vs. 10,000+), size of treasury (>$1,000 vs. $42 million), and functioning purpose (mutual aid network vs. protocol governance, etc.). In traditional organizational nomenclature these forms would take up names like ‘corporation’, ‘non-profit’, ‘worker co-op’, or ‘community fund’; these names are used to clearly demonstrate some sort of understanding on how any given organization operates. While in many cases, DAOs do tend to fit into one of these categories, it is often the case that the title of ‘decentralized autonomous organization’ tends to take precedence in any public-facing representation that the organization incurs. This, of course, only adds to tensions or debates regarding what truly constitutes a DAO. In a relatively sparse academic landscape surrounding the topic of decentralized autonomous organizations, however, Samer Hassan and Primavera De Filippi, put forward a few common characteristics that can be seen across definitions in academic works. In the context of this article, DAOs generally include: ability for people to coordinate and self-govern themselves online, code deployed on a blockchain with smart contract capabilities (like Ethereum), a smart contract that specifies rules for interactions between people, self-executed independently of the will of the parties, and independent from central control (Hassan, De Filippi, 4). With these key characteristics in mind, the following section of this paper will articulate some of the ways in which DAOs have been theorized to facilitate more prosocial interactions, online and offline.

The introductory sections of this paper establishes the ways in which the ideological advancement of surveillance capitalism has seeped into the infrastructure of the internet. This advancement has created an assumptive imperative that not only does the data you create belong to the platforms which harvest it, but it also insists that these corporations have the right to sell that data on secondary markets in order to influence your real world behaviors (Zuboff). Debates around this topic have been extensively litigated in both popular and academic settings and largely remain outside the scope of this paper. What I aim to introduce here, however, is a specific set of alternatives that has emerged in light of these debates. Data sovereignty and data co-operatives have separately emerged due to the rapid expansion of surveillance capitalism. In his writing, Igor Calzada determines that there is a necessary connection between these topics that has broader implications for the development of so-called ‘smart cities’. Calzada then asserts, rightly so, that  “Data are not oil; they are people,” (Calzada 1). The statement here then reinforces the modes through which surveillance capitalists are able to amass big data, constituted through usage and repeat actions by people. To take his argument one step further, I propose that one potential framework for thinking about and organizing such data co-operatives exists in the realm of decentralized autonomous organizations. Calzada’s writing is not entirely void of the presence of blockchain technology, some such organizations are alluded to in his list of already existing data co-ops, though a majority of these examples present are not utilizing blockchain tech in their work. The intention of such a proposition is to highlight the immense diversity of approaches that are rising up that coalesce around an ideological shift back to a desire for a more decentralized web that is having impacts on the development of new platforms and web infrastructures. Decentralized identity management, and protocol-level social graphs are evidence of this return to an internet that eludes centralized control. 

In essence, thinking about data cooperatives allows us to imagine a world in which the fate of our data is not in the hands of major tech conglomerates. Rather, our data can be managed by democratic organizations that are owned and operated by the very users who are generating said data. This work in many ways signals this broader shift that is outlined in this paper. Consequences of relying on centralized structures governed by billionaires has had fateful consequences, and this is just another instance of users seeking to rebalance power structures on the internet. Some organizations may elect to generate revenue for a platform by offering data to behavioral markets like the ones at the center of Zuboff’s writing. They can choose which data they would like to release, which data will remain hidden, and which data will not even be collected in the first place. A fundamental difference in this approach is that it aligns more closely with Muldoon’s visions of platform socialism. Tech conglomerates and their shareholders will not be the ones that are amassing wealth at the expense of our privacy and captured attention – users can vote or delegate their votes to members of the community who they feel represent their best interests. This change could be implemented through the use of web3 technologies (DAO structures specifically), though popular interest and support in such developments is still hanging in the balance.

The landscape for developing and working in and around DAOs is rapidly changing. In this section, I hope to introduce some more theoretical approaches to the ways in which decentralized autonomous organizations are being imagined. These visions dispel any notion that DAOs have reached a point of completeness in the way they live in our world today. As previously noted, the academic landscape for decentralized autonomous organizations is relatively limited. Critical engagement and theorizing around DAOs often takes place outside the realm of academia. Writers, artists, activists, academics, and community leaders frequently take to other forums to publish thoughts on the evolution of this nascent organizational form. It is critical to note here the methods of dissemination of thought surrounding DAOs because it signals a certain form of divergence from incumbent cultural institutions. This section of the paper will largely consider writing that exists in these alternative publication methods. Some of these platforms of publication include: mirror (particularly noteworthy as it is built on top of web3 infrastructure), substack, medium, independent publishers, and curatorial platforms. 

Kei Kreutler is one such visionary who is imagining better digital worlds – with DAOs at the forefront of organizing cooperative action. Kreutler’s essay “A Prehistory of DAOs” is a robust analysis of this organizational form since its conception. She covers many of the pre-existing organizational models and histories that have been referenced in previous sections of this text, but she adds one new comparison that complicates the cultural lineage of DAOs: gaming guilds. At its most simple layer, gaming guilds that form in MMORPGs are comparable to DAOs as they consist of a group of users that organize in-game to accomplish shared goals (Kreutler). The comparison becomes more complex when you begin to look at the different forms of infrastructure that guilds composed in their operations to develop more intricate systems for the equitable distribution of loot. Kreutler references the work of Joshua Citarella, where he points out that many of these systems developed by gaming guilds resemble a form of market socialism - a label which many guilds would certainly reject (Citarella in Kreutler). Collaborating with different people on the internet necessitates new forms of social interaction and organization. This is embodied in the shift from town hall meetings to discussions on online forums, or the infamous “digital town square” where each user, though geographically divided, operates as a node on a complex social graph. These new changes in organization are brought about by advancements in technological capabilities, and DAOs are just one more instance of this.

Radical Friends: Decentralized Autonomous Organizations and the Arts is a collection of essays edited by Ruth Catlow and Penny Rafferty published by Torque Editions, a leading publisher and curator operating at the intersection of art and crypto. The book highlights diverse perspectives from some of the most active and engaging writers and artists that are theorizing around DAO structures (including the previously cited Kei Kreutler). Radical Friends is also one of the only full-length works regarding the topic that has been released to date. Though I do not seek to offer a full summary of the work encompassed in this book, it is important to note the ways in which it has made the topic much more accessible to those who are not chronically-online, by featuring a glossary of all necessary terms and a timeline that pinpoints key moments in DAO history (collective art movements, technological inventions, and important literature.) On top of this, the book extends a welcoming hand to the DAO-curious.

Hito Steyerl starts her entry to the book Walk the Walk – Beyond Blockchain Orientalism with an inspiring provocation. 

What is a DAO? No one really knows. One reason is that most possible answers lie in the future. Will a blockchain based decentralized autonomous organization follow templates for Ponzi schemes or Paris Commune style popular councils – or neither or both? Are they going to be decentralized, autonomous, or even organizations? Will they be on the blockchain at all, given the fact that this is quite expensive these days? (Steyerl in Cafferty, Catlow, 127)

Steyerl could be considered a cautious optimist when it comes to decentralized autonomous organizations. Her writing highlights the ways in which many actors in the web3 space espouse ideas of a more decentralized, democratic internet, but these words do not always align with actions taken. In drawing a comparison between the DAO and Chinese Daoism, Steyerl begins to tease out the connections between such disparate ideas. Though the DAO does not take any formational inspiration from Daoism, there exists through lines in “[v]ague ideas about following the ‘way’ and somehow vibing with nature.” (Steyerl 127). Another crucial connection that she draws is in the historical context through which both ideas were conceived, rife with thought about money, markets, religion, and philosophy. In the case of DAOs: failing logistics surrounding healthcare, public trust and political (in)stability, climate change, failing financial systems – all of these areas paint a bleak portrait of the global trends. Steyerl suggests that against this background, the emergence of DAOs would of course resonate with many. 

Steyerl’s writing gets at the heart of contentious debate around what a DAO is or should be. “They could actualize as tribes, clans, squads, cliques, mafias, cabals, unions, associations or cartels. DAOs could be modeled as cooperatives, Ponzi schemes, after Rosicrucian lodges or somewhat more realistically, after bullshit job bureaucracies.” (Steyerl 129.) In this sense, her writing is important to carry with us as we examine more closely two DAOs in operation today, and compare their operating motives and methods.

In order to develop a better idea of how these new technologies are being implemented in this new mode of organization, the next two sections of this paper will examine two distinct DAOs: Nouns and pactDAO. The following comparative analysis will help to better situate the ways in which this singular unifying sign (DAO) is used on two very different organizations. To begin my analysis, I will look at the functioning and ethos of one of the most popular DAOs, Nouns. The premise of Nouns is relatively simple. Everyday a new auction is started for a non-fungible token that consists of a pixel-art character wearing a distinct pair of glasses, the ‘noggles’. The proceeds from said auction are transferred to a community-owned treasury, and holders of Nouns tokens are able to put forward propositions to the community that are then voted on (one Noun is equal to one vote). The official Nouns website states that “Nouns are an experimental attempt to improve the formation of on-chain avatar communities,” (Nouns). Nouns positions itself in the wider context of the evolving internet as a “community-owned brand” with the purpose of funding ideas, fostering collaboration, and of course, proliferating the Nouns brand (through the ubiquity of the ‘Noggles’). At the time of writing, the Nouns treasury boasts a whopping forty-six million US dollars (held in the Ethereum blockchain’s native token, Ether). Since the beginning of the year, the lowest price at which an auction was won came in at 23.2 ETH (roughly thirty-eight thousand US dollars). Aside from the glaringly obvious exclusionary nature of the price point at which these Nouns are selling, the DAO requires you to own two Nouns in order to be eligible to submit a proposal to the broader community. 

As a community of the crypto-wealthy, Nouns has become a way to signal your status through the profile picture version of a Gucci belt. With money to throw around, Nouns have used their treasury to fund animated shorts, graphic novels, and even restore a basketball court. One of the major upsides in utilizing blockchain technology as a base infrastructure layer for a community like this is the ability to further examine what a project has done and where funds have gone. Where some Nouns' proposals like to place an emphasis on the ambiguous ‘public goods’ that they are funding, it can still be seen that the organization has internalized a hyper-capitalist notion of endless growth through their ideas of ‘proliferation’. Restoring a basketball court in an underserved Los Angeles community is cool, but doing so as a means to further a brand image means setting the precedent that public goods are good, so long as they help generate awareness for your amorphous brand. In this sense Nouns can be read as a partial futurity for the way that internet communities come together in digital spaces. Bonding over a shared set of symbols that represent a certain ideological position when it comes to the use of blockchain technology. Nouns all over the world have the opportunity to make this pilgrimage to the Los Angeles basketball court and scan a QR code in order to claim their POAP (proof of attendance protocol) token that they can carry in their wallet and assert a Nounish identity to those who take a peek at its contents. 

Nouns started with a group of ten founders. These founders, largely operating on a basis of pseudonymity, control a multi-signature wallet in which they have opted to pay themselves with every tenth Noun for the first five years of the auction cycle. In this instance founders are not being paid through any auction proceeds (as 100% of auction earnings goes directly to the Nouns treasury), but they are paying themselves in a communal base of growing influence over the direction of Nouns as a whole. Certainly these founders could opt to sell any of their collective Nouns on a secondary market and split the profits, but the allure of speculative investment and deeper influence seems to outweigh the prospect of immediate liquidity. 

One strength in the Nouns DAO is its extensive documentation. In these pages you can find information about the history of Nouns (from the first Nouns tweet to the ‘Noggles’ appearance in a Bud Light Superbowl ad), criteria for soliciting funding for a Nouns related project, access to different Nouns subcommunities (Nouns Japan, Brazil, Africa, etc.), and even digital assets to use in building your own Nouns based project. Similarly, access to all propositions is available to the public, where you can see projects proposed and how different Nouns are voting. For these reasons Nouns can be interpreted as a step in the right direction for communities using internet infrastructure. Nouns exists with a high degree of decentralization, pseudo-democratic voting systems, and a certain degree of commitment to ‘public goods’ contingent upon proliferation of the Nouns brand. Keeping these organizational characteristics and operational processes in mind, let’s consider another example of decentralized autonomous organizations operating presently, pactDAO.

In their introductory crowdfunding campaign, pactDAO founders lay out what they’re building, and for who. “Pact is not a social club. We’ll call it a socialist club.” (Pact Collective: NYC Mutual Aid DAO). This explicit political invocation defines where the Pact Collective envisions itself in the wider web3 ecosystem. They are not interested in playing games of financial speculation and brand proliferation like Nouns. Founding members of Pact include activists, writers, artists, and software developers – all working under a shared vision of creating a robust community network to transform New York City. The story of pactDAO starts with its predecessor, the Pact Collective, which arose out of the pandemic in response to collectivized community struggles.  This section will juxtapose the work of the Pact Collective and its evolution to pactDAO with that of Nouns.By holding these two unique organizations up comparatively, it becomes clear the ways in which these organizations, both utilizing the web3 technologies of decentralized autonomous organizations, can operate through entirely different  organizational and ideological means.

Pact’s homepage does not actually use the term ‘decentralized autonomous organization’ – a nod to the usage of decentralized technologies is present, but not even ‘web3’ or the ever popular ‘public goods’ make an appearance. The dearth of crypto-adjacent terminology on the homepage signals a certain intentionality in emphasizing who Pact is for. Pact is not a collective for the crypto-wealthy, sometimes called ‘whales’. Pact is for the people of New York. Though the previously cited crowdfund article does use some of the aforementioned terminology, it is likely best to attribute this to the circumstances in which it was published. This article was a crypto-specific crowdfund, published on the beloved web3 platform Mirror. It would make sense then, that when seeking crypto-funding, the founders would draw from the pre-existing lexicon of crypto-terminology. This article was also released around the time that members of the Pact Collective were beginning to transition into pactDAO, and they were beginning to experiment more with web3 technologies and organizational systems. 

[P]actDAO operations have been categorized into seasons. Seasons are a relatively common framework for DAOs and other web3 projects to utilize. Particularly, seasons are used to establish goals, manage expectations, and demonstrate evolution through the passing of time. This specific naming mechanism tends to come along with projects in the so-called ‘regenerative crypto’ ecosystem. These are projects that insist that crypto can regenerate the world. The validity of such claims are largely outside the scope of this paper, and pactDAO does not explicitly align itself with ‘regenerative crypto’ aside from the partnership with Gitcoin, which is one of the most prominent actors in the space. Using seasons here, however, allows Pact to connect to a more ecologically conscious framework for organizing their community, and similarly adopt such aesthetics.

Pact is currently on its first season which comes after the end of season 0 which they named “Planting Seeds” as a way to further invoke the green aesthetics discussed in the previous paragraph. “Season 0 was for inviting people to the table to set intentions, build trust, and openly discuss local challenges and opportunities together,” (Pact Collective: NYC Mutual Aid DAO). The intention here was to engage with local communities and build support for the DAO as a whole. In doing so, pactDAO also connected with some other web3 organizations that helped them experiment and raise funds. Breadchain Cooperative, Kernel, and Gitcoin are all among the web3 native organizations that allied with pactDAO in order to help them harness the potential of web3 tech. Season One has been all about solidifying organizational structure and putting it down on paper. From this, a robust Notion database has been created that houses all the most important information for pactDAO. Like Nouns, this documentation is easily accessible to anyone who wishes to view it. The bylaws and compensation framework (to be explored further later in this section), a digital public library, recordings of past community workshops, and an events calendar are all available to the public.

Nouns uses token-based voting, which leads to those with the greatest accumulation of capital to holding a larger presence in community direction. [P]actDAO draws from a lineage of co-operatives and non-profits to establish a more robust, and complex voting system that allows for all members to be entitled to one vote. The means by which votes are cast is slightly obscured in the bylaws of the organization. It can be assumed that votes are cast using an off-chain voting system, due to the current state of development in blockchain technology, creating a verifiable record of votes that limits one person to one vote is not widely applied. Members of pactDAO are largely categorized into two distinct groups: comrades and collectivists. Comrades are working members of the DAO, they are responsible for day-to-day operations of the collective as determined by the board. Collectivists, on the other hand, are supporting-members., They can make and vote on proposals and are generally individuals who support the DAO from a greater distance (monthly subscription or NFT purchase.) Other roles in the organization consist of a board of directors and  functionaries (president, vice president, secretary, and a treasurer). Aside from membership definitions, the bylaws also establish procedures for calling meetings, establishing voting procedures, and election terms for more senior members of the DAO serving in roles on the board or as functionaries. 

It’s clear that pactDAO is not employing the ever prevalent ‘move fast and break things’ motto that surrounds Silicon Valley tech companies. At pactDAO, it really isn’t even about the tech. This is one key learning point that the collective honed in on in their Season Zero reflection stating “we were starry-eyed about web3 technology and its potential, and while we still are, we made the mistake of letting this excitement become a core part of our mission… In our well-intentioned effort to educate organizations on these tools, we were coming across more like tech sales people than comrades,” (Season Zero Recap). Unlike Nouns which employs novel use of these technologies to generate buzz and solicit big-ticket entry to the community, pactDAO sees blockchain tech as just another tool in their toolkit for collective liberation. 

Another avenue to examine differences between these organizations is in their relationship to legal structures. [P]actDAO is registered as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, while Nouns exists as an ambiguous extra-legal treasury with no head. In this respect Nouns lends credence to stereotypes about crypto economies posing as a front for less-than ethical (and legal) financial practices. Nouns has no accusations or evidence to support any suspicion of such transgressions, and that is not entirely the point. Operating in these liminal spaces exposes participants to a lack of accountability on the part of the community they are serving. In this way, pactDAO has built in safeguards to help maintain accountability and legitimacy through existing legal structures, highlighting the use of a composable set of infrastructures that create a more flexible organization.

Attempting to write a complete survey of web3 socio-technical development is a Sisyphean task. Demonstrating the ways that the same technologies are being used for opposing ideological means helps to point out the ways in which the direction of technological development is not inevitable. Yet, the internet keeps evolving, and new forms of organization are consistently emerging in light of these developments. The goal of this paper is to highlight one particular nascent form of organization, the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), and situate it against the backdrop of the evolution of the internet, and more specifically crypto technology. In positioning this form of organization as a potentially adversarial form to the dominant ideology of surveillance capitalism that is present in web 2, it becomes possible to imagine a digital future in which cooperation lives at the forefront of our motives. An analysis of one specific blockchain criticism in its environmental impact was also explored, in the context of Bitcoin and Ethereum. Similarly, this paper also addressed two specific DAOs: Nouns and pactDAO and offered a comparative analysis of both organizations’ operating structures in order to demonstrate the ways in which creating more prosocial internet communities does not come automatically with the implementation of this new technology, moreso they must be actively defined and embodied through organizational language, structure, and participation. 

There remains much to be seen for the potential of decentralized autonomous organizations. In examining this technology in such an early stage of development, this paper can serve as a checkpoint to revisit in the coming years, and reconsider the assertions made and whether or not DAOs truly do possess the potential to create more prosocial and participatory online communities.

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