This material is created by You-Sheng Zhang, Shihtung Lo, Naiting Liu and Jo-Lin Hsieh for the introduction of “Ideathon and Hands on” session 2, Future Ideations Camp Vol.2, Aug 28th, 2023. The banner is Rippling #6 by Yi-Wen Lin.
Why We Need DAOs in the Status Quo
This session tries to articulate why we need DAOs by some examples. Compared with “What we need in order to practice DAOs”, the question here is more substantial and sociological.
The status quo shows us that “Platform Capitalism” is everywhere. In most industry chains, there are middle layers between producers and consumers or content creators and supporters. For example, if you want to sell some items, you need distributors to put products as everywhere as possible till customers see and get them. The situation is quite normal. But now these layers bring troubles much more than benefits.
Leaving aside the problem that middle layers exploit much profits from producers and customers then now being big monsters, they even hold much private information of customers. There are privacy and security issues here.
Through the technology of blockchain and the transfer of NFTs from producers to customers, producers can track the behaviors and tastes of customers without violating their privacy. On the one hand, producers can easily make their own CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems connecting to customers directly. On the other hand, customers can also support producers without barriers. Of course being cautious when doing all these works is still a requirement.
We are talking about NFTs. But where is the position of DAOs? Given that each customer keeps receiving or collecting NFTs from different fields of society one by one, holding tokens would mean they used to be somewhere or spent money in some fields or industries. These tokens are all proof of behaviors, tastes or consumption.
Suppose that there is a common place - like a platform on the internet (a website or app) - gathering them and showing the amounts of their own tokens. Most importantly, all these people can communicate with each other and use tokens they hold to vote for their favorite products, corporations, idols, business cases or even public goods. The group they established and the actions they took now are in line with the principles of DAOs.
An Example: Experiences and Brainstorming
Members of Volume DAO are from many different fields of art. Since Web3 has broken into our lives, we keep thinking about how we can use it to deal with problems we met in the past.
Let’s take You-Sheng Zhang as an example. He has been in the field of performing arts as a critic for almost five years.
Many performing art teams told him that they don’t know who bought their tickets. Audience’s information is all sealed in the platform of ticketing. Teams can know how many tickets they sold in one or various sessions, but the tastes of customers are hidden. As a result, every time they sell tickets is just like the first time because the data cannot be accumulated. It is really a serious damage for these teams and the whole performing art field.
If the audience can get program lists, pamphlets or even tickets as NFTs when they enter into the venues or after watching those performances, can there be something different? After they accumulate specific amounts of NFTs, is it possible for them to use these NFTs to organize themselves to support their favorite performing teams, curated programs and actors/actresses? Can there be an “audience DAO”? What is that like? If those NFTs can be sold at secondary market, therefore the “audience DAO” has its own fund, teams may be helped through its voting result and grant.
Explore Something Interesting
DAOs’ meanings are based on decentralization and extended to democracy by many. In the context of politics, we have “representative democracy”. The representatives are also “middle layers” in terms of the paragraphs mentioned above, and we know there are always scandals about them.
How about putting the similar observation into industries such as catering, film, automobile, culture and media? Are there any other situations facing the same problem? Can NFTs and DAOs or “direct democracy” be the solutions? Of course they are hard to practice, how can we cope with difficulties?