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@Zayn_R001
Introduction
On July 2021, with the approval of the Wyoming Secretary of State’s office, the American CryptoFed became the first legally recognized decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) in the United States (Pongratz, 2021). This news made the headline of that week, raising widespread attention on DAO, on what it means and why it matters. DAO is an emergent technologybased on the invention and development of blockchain. The first DAO appeared only in 2016 with the name “TheDAO” (DuPont, 2017). Despite its collapse after hackers steal more than $50 million from its users, “TheDAO” has inspired a boom in a variety of new DAOs. To link DAOs with a broader social context, we are currently undergoing a transformation from web2.0 (platform economy) to web3.0 (token economy) in which DAO, with its unique properties, may serve a crucial role. This essay will first give a definition on the concept of DAOs as well as some fundamentally related concepts such as blockchain technology. Subsequently, Under the theme of social movement, I will take DAO as a technological practice to demonstrate how its agency can change the way people communicate and collaborate, and empowers decentralized communities and individuals against centralized power. Finally, explanation on how it can be a tool to accelerate the transformation of our society to the Deleuzian conception of a “control society” will also be given.
Definition of DAO
Before defining DAO, an explanation of the mechanism of blockchain technology must be given since DAOs are fundamentally built upon blockchains. Essentially, blockchains are lists of records, called blocks, that are linked together into a chain using cryptography (Acharjamayum et al., 2016, p. 609), and each block contains the records from previous blocks in an encrypted code. This makes the data on blockchain impossible to be modified once a block is linked to the chain. In other words, Blockchains can only be added, but not altered. Based on blockchain technology, there emerged the institutional technology called “Decentralized Autonomous Organizations” (DAOs). According to Hassan & De Filippi (2021, p. 2), a DAO is a “blockchain-based system that enables people to coordinate and govern themselves by a set of self-executing rules deployed on a public blockchain, and whose governance is decentralized.” In simple words, a DAO is an organization of people who communicate with each other via a “network protocol”. The network protocols are the rules and laws of DAOs, defined using smart contracts written by codes and stored on blockchains.These rules are self-executed by computers, independent from central control and unable to be modified (De Filippi & Wright, 2018, p. 146). As Buterin (2013, p. 23) states, DAO aims to replicate a traditional company or nonprofit by using only cryptographic blockchain technology for enforcement. DAOs are not managed by boards, but are governed solely by community participants with highly participatory processes. Members of DAO participate in the decision-making and maintenance of the DAOs. They are less hierarchical and usually more democratic. “Wages” in DAOs, often in the form of token (cryptocurrencies), are distributed with a community reward mechanism. The more active one member participates in the community, the more token he or she will get. In short, a DAO is a transparent organization built on blockchains, controlled by participants and not influenced by central institutions.
DAOs’ Agency
Most technologies are perceived to be under the control of human since they are the creation of humanity. However, agency, a “power and ability to do something”, is not the monopoly of human, technologies themselves are also able to affect human intention through their own agency (Slake & Wise, 2014, pp. 139-140). From a cultural deterministic perspective, people use the technology of DAO to achieve their intention of decentralized autonomy in several fields. By writing different rules in smart contracts, DAOs can be used for different functions such as a crowd-funding platform, a content-sharing platform, a fully automated company, or an automated decision-making machine (Hassan & De Filippi, 2021, p. 5). Yet this is not an accurate and comprehensive interpretation of DAO. Instead of inactively serving as a tool, DAO has its unique agency to actively promote change and progress. To illustrate, because the rules and laws of DAOs are written in the forms of codes and stored in unmodifiable blockchains self-executed by computational programs, the chances of any participants to commit scam or malfeasance are eliminated by making it fundamentally impossible in a technological way. This diminishes the need for continuous monitoring to detect scams or other insider misuses and thereby increases efficiency (Wright, 2021). Therefore, trust and consensus become easier to be established across members of DAOs since they must obey the rules once enter the community, which makes possible for an organization to be managed in a self-running, self-governing, and self-evolving manner that can achieve the maximum effectiveness and fairness of the organization. In other words, this agency of DAOs provides a new method of organizational supervision and law-making system in which no judges are needed and levels of subjectivity in regulation can be reduced to minimum.
In a broader social context, we are currently in a society dominated by centralized power. With the development and dominance of user-generated content (UGC), companies such as Twitter, YouTube, and WeChat have gained great success. Users create content on those platforms and companies take these contents as products for sale. For no doubt, this kind of economy has been a great achievement. Yet there are problems with the current economic model. To illustrate with the example of WeChat, when we register a WeChat account, we need to provide our real names, phone numbers, and bank accounts to WeChat as to “authenticate” our identities. Yet this causes the private information of users to be controlled by these companies and to be continuously facing the risk of information leakage. A famous example is the Facebook scandal in 2014 that 87 million users’ information was revealed in use of political advertising (Tuttle, 2018). This demonstrates how a centralized organization may be a threat to the privacy of individual users. In a hierarchical structure, centralized power can easily gather our information and contents of our creation for sale, and to accumulate their own wealth. DAOs as a form of technology, have the agencies to empower individuals to protect themselves against the exploitation of centralized institutions. To specify, in a DAO where no central organization exists, no one member can gain the access to the information of all community members. Besides, thanks to the use of cryptography in blockchain, users can be anonymous since IP addresses are encoded using cryptography. DAO participants only need a crypto wallet address to identify themselves. Therefore, even there is an attempt to steal personal information, it is technologically difficult to achieve. Hence the risk of privacy leakage can largely be reduced. In other words, the agency of DAO can empower us to regain control by protecting our privacy from the misuse of personal information and shifting power from centralized companies back to communities and individuals.Similar scenarios can also be found in the arena of business and finance. In a business world dominated by centralized banks, the usage of money is not transparent. To specify, when an individual deposits money to his or her bank account to gain interest, there is no way to know where the money goes and how it has been used. DAOs as a new form of institution can be a perfect solution to this problem by providing full transparency for trades. Every transaction made through DAOs can always be spotted on the blockchain. This builds up the traceability of individual assets. Although the implication has just begun, a lot of research has been conducted focusing on building decentralized exchanges (Lin et al., 2019) that operate on DAOs. The rules of transaction, written in codes and stored on blockchains, can function automatically with full transparency as the records of transactions will be listed on the new block that adds itself to the existing chain. Thus, the agency of blockchain and DAOs make transparent trades possible. Overall, it can be concluded that in multiple fields, the use of DAOs can be regarded as an active agent to decentralize and democratize our society by protecting individuals from centralized institutions.
@Zayn_R001
Introduction
On July 2021, with the approval of the Wyoming Secretary of State’s office, the American CryptoFed became the first legally recognized decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) in the United States (Pongratz, 2021). This news made the headline of that week, raising widespread attention on DAO, on what it means and why it matters. DAO is an emergent technologybased on the invention and development of blockchain. The first DAO appeared only in 2016 with the name “TheDAO” (DuPont, 2017). Despite its collapse after hackers steal more than $50 million from its users, “TheDAO” has inspired a boom in a variety of new DAOs. To link DAOs with a broader social context, we are currently undergoing a transformation from web2.0 (platform economy) to web3.0 (token economy) in which DAO, with its unique properties, may serve a crucial role. This essay will first give a definition on the concept of DAOs as well as some fundamentally related concepts such as blockchain technology. Subsequently, Under the theme of social movement, I will take DAO as a technological practice to demonstrate how its agency can change the way people communicate and collaborate, and empowers decentralized communities and individuals against centralized power. Finally, explanation on how it can be a tool to accelerate the transformation of our society to the Deleuzian conception of a “control society” will also be given.
Definition of DAO
Before defining DAO, an explanation of the mechanism of blockchain technology must be given since DAOs are fundamentally built upon blockchains. Essentially, blockchains are lists of records, called blocks, that are linked together into a chain using cryptography (Acharjamayum et al., 2016, p. 609), and each block contains the records from previous blocks in an encrypted code. This makes the data on blockchain impossible to be modified once a block is linked to the chain. In other words, Blockchains can only be added, but not altered. Based on blockchain technology, there emerged the institutional technology called “Decentralized Autonomous Organizations” (DAOs). According to Hassan & De Filippi (2021, p. 2), a DAO is a “blockchain-based system that enables people to coordinate and govern themselves by a set of self-executing rules deployed on a public blockchain, and whose governance is decentralized.” In simple words, a DAO is an organization of people who communicate with each other via a “network protocol”. The network protocols are the rules and laws of DAOs, defined using smart contracts written by codes and stored on blockchains.These rules are self-executed by computers, independent from central control and unable to be modified (De Filippi & Wright, 2018, p. 146). As Buterin (2013, p. 23) states, DAO aims to replicate a traditional company or nonprofit by using only cryptographic blockchain technology for enforcement. DAOs are not managed by boards, but are governed solely by community participants with highly participatory processes. Members of DAO participate in the decision-making and maintenance of the DAOs. They are less hierarchical and usually more democratic. “Wages” in DAOs, often in the form of token (cryptocurrencies), are distributed with a community reward mechanism. The more active one member participates in the community, the more token he or she will get. In short, a DAO is a transparent organization built on blockchains, controlled by participants and not influenced by central institutions.
DAOs’ Agency
Most technologies are perceived to be under the control of human since they are the creation of humanity. However, agency, a “power and ability to do something”, is not the monopoly of human, technologies themselves are also able to affect human intention through their own agency (Slake & Wise, 2014, pp. 139-140). From a cultural deterministic perspective, people use the technology of DAO to achieve their intention of decentralized autonomy in several fields. By writing different rules in smart contracts, DAOs can be used for different functions such as a crowd-funding platform, a content-sharing platform, a fully automated company, or an automated decision-making machine (Hassan & De Filippi, 2021, p. 5). Yet this is not an accurate and comprehensive interpretation of DAO. Instead of inactively serving as a tool, DAO has its unique agency to actively promote change and progress. To illustrate, because the rules and laws of DAOs are written in the forms of codes and stored in unmodifiable blockchains self-executed by computational programs, the chances of any participants to commit scam or malfeasance are eliminated by making it fundamentally impossible in a technological way. This diminishes the need for continuous monitoring to detect scams or other insider misuses and thereby increases efficiency (Wright, 2021). Therefore, trust and consensus become easier to be established across members of DAOs since they must obey the rules once enter the community, which makes possible for an organization to be managed in a self-running, self-governing, and self-evolving manner that can achieve the maximum effectiveness and fairness of the organization. In other words, this agency of DAOs provides a new method of organizational supervision and law-making system in which no judges are needed and levels of subjectivity in regulation can be reduced to minimum.
In a broader social context, we are currently in a society dominated by centralized power. With the development and dominance of user-generated content (UGC), companies such as Twitter, YouTube, and WeChat have gained great success. Users create content on those platforms and companies take these contents as products for sale. For no doubt, this kind of economy has been a great achievement. Yet there are problems with the current economic model. To illustrate with the example of WeChat, when we register a WeChat account, we need to provide our real names, phone numbers, and bank accounts to WeChat as to “authenticate” our identities. Yet this causes the private information of users to be controlled by these companies and to be continuously facing the risk of information leakage. A famous example is the Facebook scandal in 2014 that 87 million users’ information was revealed in use of political advertising (Tuttle, 2018). This demonstrates how a centralized organization may be a threat to the privacy of individual users. In a hierarchical structure, centralized power can easily gather our information and contents of our creation for sale, and to accumulate their own wealth. DAOs as a form of technology, have the agencies to empower individuals to protect themselves against the exploitation of centralized institutions. To specify, in a DAO where no central organization exists, no one member can gain the access to the information of all community members. Besides, thanks to the use of cryptography in blockchain, users can be anonymous since IP addresses are encoded using cryptography. DAO participants only need a crypto wallet address to identify themselves. Therefore, even there is an attempt to steal personal information, it is technologically difficult to achieve. Hence the risk of privacy leakage can largely be reduced. In other words, the agency of DAO can empower us to regain control by protecting our privacy from the misuse of personal information and shifting power from centralized companies back to communities and individuals.Similar scenarios can also be found in the arena of business and finance. In a business world dominated by centralized banks, the usage of money is not transparent. To specify, when an individual deposits money to his or her bank account to gain interest, there is no way to know where the money goes and how it has been used. DAOs as a new form of institution can be a perfect solution to this problem by providing full transparency for trades. Every transaction made through DAOs can always be spotted on the blockchain. This builds up the traceability of individual assets. Although the implication has just begun, a lot of research has been conducted focusing on building decentralized exchanges (Lin et al., 2019) that operate on DAOs. The rules of transaction, written in codes and stored on blockchains, can function automatically with full transparency as the records of transactions will be listed on the new block that adds itself to the existing chain. Thus, the agency of blockchain and DAOs make transparent trades possible. Overall, it can be concluded that in multiple fields, the use of DAOs can be regarded as an active agent to decentralize and democratize our society by protecting individuals from centralized institutions.
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