In an essay titled,  "I don't want to be an internet person" writer Ginerva Davis chronicles the strange story of Charlie, the founder of the NFT collection Milady Maker, and his unique way of existing on the internet.

It describes his practice of creating online personalities—various twitter accounts, mostly—as art. He created shocking, often uncomfortable content on his main account, then created other accounts to "swarm" around it to boost its posts and create a niche following around a particular topic. These topics were something you'd find on 8chan or in a thread about QAnon, with the goal to shock.

"He says that when he’s online, he treats himself as a digital spirit, a tool for an algorithm which is far more powerful than him," Davis wrote. "He posts what the algorithm wants him to say, unlike the unenlightened normal people who simply use the internet to mirror their flesh-and-blood selves."

I'm fascinated by the idea of a digital spirit and an algorithm more powerful than yourself. But I'd push back on the idea that us "normal people" simply "mirror" our flesh-and-blood selves on the internet. I'd say that when we're on the internet, we create a different self that is smarter, funnier, prettier, and different to the extent that it's not really us anymore.

If you asked me what my digital self feels like, I'd say it's like the valedictorian version of me. It's the version that I put into the world to play-act as me.

Davis describes this as performing your "online schtick."

"Being online today mostly means constantly performing your personality—or whatever online schtick you develop," she wrote. "Most of us go on and try to present the best version of ourselves. Because this is the future, whether we like it or not."

I've been shifting my perspective from digital identities as full people. Because they're not people in the full sense of the word—they're creations by people. They're two-dimensional versions with a real person behind the curtain, Wizard of Oz style.

Here's what we're like on the internet:

And here's what we're like in real life:

So, when we put all those digital identities together, we often get something that looks more like a multi-headed monster from Greek mythology than a functioning community of people:

Behind each of those scary green men is a real human pulling the strings. There might be multiple humans. Or, one human might control multiple green men. Each green man isn't directly correlated with a person: it's only a shortcut to a person.

It's like how wallet addresses are used as shortcuts to people. Airdrops are given to wallet addresses, not people, but it's done assuming that the wallet address is a good shortcut to a person.

But one person could (and does) control multiple wallet addresses, or they could be completely controlled by bots.

There's something wrong with these green men, though.

The chronically online; the chronically lonely

Deep down, we know those green men aren't people. We know something is "off" when we're online.

With the rise of terms like "the chronically online," used to describe someone who spends the majority of their waking hours on screens, has also come the concept of the internet as a lonely place.

The internet feels like you're out there alone, opening another browser tab, scrolling another social media feed.....by yourself.

There are lots of theories as to why the internet feels so lonely. There's the theory from Gaby Goldberg that we haven't figured out how to share our digital experiences in a meaningful way, like we have with IRL experiences (posting your vacation pictures on Instagram, writing about your new job on LinkedIn).

There's the theory from Yancey Strickler that the internet is more like a "dark forest," with everyone retreating into the "cozy web," such as non-indexed corners like Telegram and Signal group chats and gated Discord servers where you can be your true self without having to perform. There are billions of people all around you on the internet all the time, you just don't see them because they're not putting out any smoke signals to the wider universe.

There's the suggestion from the project Tiny Internets that the internet is either 0 or 100, with nothing in between. "We're either invisible or presenting at an auditorium," wrote Spencer Chang. And, honestly, who wants to present at an auditorium?

I love the concept that Spencer Chang of Tiny Internets describes as "peripheral vision on the internet." He writes, "We’ve lost gradients of intimacy, a concept from architecture, the ability to loiter and meander through a space, engaging when we want in varying levels of expression. We don’t have any peripheral vision on the internet. We have to be in one place or the other."

Tweet link

This could explain the loneliness in the swarm of green men: we don't see the different sides of every person we interact with. We're reading a forum post and we don't see the other people around us, reading it and having the same feelings we are. We either throw ourselves onto the stage by commenting and putting our opinion out there, or we passively read it, feeling invisible.

"Everything is too pristine on the internet, and there are no indicators of ambient presence, like the way you can tell in a space if someone has been around," wrote Chang.

And when we do almost cross paths with someone? It doesn't fully connect. Matt Webb on the blog Interconnected described "almost social" moments that abound on the internet. Reading a product review or commenting on a twitter thread is "like walking into a room that somebody’s just left: there’s a note on the table, and the door on the far end is closing shut," he wrote.

Even though we create these identities with the goal of posturing, or showing off, or whatever it is we try to do, we don't feel connected to the other identities around us. It's like our digital identities are bumping into each other but never fully connecting, never fully crossing paths.

Seeing and being seen, but online

Humans are social creatures, so we need to see and be seen. And our IRL spaces aren't cutting it anymore.

Being seen is a big deal for people. Especially in the more distant past, when there were fewer means of connection, being seen was harder to do and thus more important.

Read a Jane Austen novel and you'll see that the characters rarely go a day without ending up in their neighbor's drawing room or their cousin's ballroom.

Image source

I've been thinking a lot about the correlation between the rise of DAOs and the pandemic. Shut inside, doing jobs or school that didn't transition to remote very well, we had tons of extra time on our hands. We couldn't go out and interact with people in real life. There were no drawing rooms or ballrooms to be seen in. And if we did, we had masks on and couldn't tell what each other's facial expressions were—a key part of human connection. So we loafed around the internet, looking for a way to see and be seen.

Our equivalent of seeing and being seen was through online communities and social media, so we took it in stride, building our green men versions of ourselves as we went. We went on Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, and TikTok to see others, and posted our sourdough starters and at-home workout routines to "be seen." We cruised around the Discord and Telegram channels to hear from people ("Gm"), like we might at a college party or neighborhood potluck.

We cultivated our digital identities to stay mentally sane during the pandemic, to the point where we sometimes feel more like our digital selves than our self selves.

But even in a (mostly) post-pandemic world, we haven't gone back. The cat isn't going back in the bag, and the man isn't coming out from behind the curtain.

Part of the reason the internet is still our default place to see and be seen even post-pandemic is because our IRL spaces have gotten unfriendlier. The rise of gun violence and mass murder in American grocery stores and schools. The general weird behavior of people in public spaces, like on airplanes and in subways. The eerily empty office parks and out-of-business midweek lunch spots. The stark division in political parties that has led to a distrust of your neighbor. The feeling that something is inherently wrong with our public IRL spaces, even our society at large, and that it will never be the same again.

And, on top of all that, now we have the consumer AI renaissance. In a recent Ribbonfarm essay, Venkatesh Rao argues that "text is all you need to produce personhood." The quirky, endearingly fallible text-based AIs feel like people we know on the internet today. Have we gotten to the point where all you need to know about a person is what they type on a screen to you?

Well—if that's not a reason to further cultivate my online personhood to stand out from Sydney or Siri or whoever is coming next, I don't know what is.

I believe this has all built up to the chronically online, chronically lonely, digital-identity-filled internet we inhabit today.

More precisely, like this:

Once AI identities start intermixing with human ones, it will be even more apparent that the digital versions of people might not be people after all.

DAOs are drawing rooms for digital identities with different motivations

DAOs offer yet another place to see and be seen, to mix around our digital identities in a town square of sorts.....for better or for worse.

We wonder why DAOs are difficult to run and online communities are hard to "manage," but we need to realize that in the digital realm, we're not interacting with people in the fullest sense—we're interacting with the digital identities people create. We're interacting with what people want us to see about them through their digital identity, not what they truly are. Pretty soon, we'll be interacting with independent AI actors.

Even though that identity you see posturing in a DAO forum might be tied to a real person doing real things, it's not their whole person. We don't see them from every angle. We just see the "online schtick" they've developed.

This will be even more relevant with the dawn of independent AI agents.

Like Spencer Chang from tiny internet said, we don't have peripheral vision to see the whole picture. Everything is in 2D, flat, just text on a screen.

Is this bearish for DAOs? No, not necessarily. It's more of a realization that we need to reorient how we look at actors in DAOs and identities floating around the internet.

Once we acknowledge that we and the future AI actors are all playing a game to create the best version of our own precious digital identities possible, then the virtue signaling and the arguments aren't about one's character—they're about that digital identity, which can be shed and repurposed and reapplied in new ways.

Our digital identities can change, but our "real" identities cannot. When we want to become someone completely new, we create a new identity online.

Image source.

The motivations of digital identities create the direction for the DAO

The text, "The motivations of digital identities create the direction for the DAO" might sound obvious. But I don't think we've fully grasped that digital identities don't join a DAO on a random whim—they join it to achieve a goal.

Digital identities have motives, and they don't do things just for the fun of it, whether subconscious or not. There's always a motivation somewhere, and if that motivation is ill-placed, it can be detrimental for the DAO as a whole.

Recognizing that the little green men we create are acting for a reason—even if that reason is just to be seen—is incredibly important.

This graphic is a crude representation of the digital identities with multifaceted goals that exist in our world today. But it shows that people's proxies don't typically join a DAO just because "vibes" (especially in a bear market). They join for clear reasons that need to be designed for and thought through.

When motivations align, beautiful things can happen. Humans with aligned motivations are the reason we have a productive society. But misaligned motivations are the reason we have conflict and pain.

For example, a DAO full of digital identities all seeking money could lead the DAO to introducing profit-making products or services. Or....it could cannibalize itself by minting more of its own token, hoping for price pumps, and diluting the voting power of token holders. A DAO full of digital identities all seeking status could lead to an elite DAO with cool experiments like Nouns....or a ceaseless war of virtue signaling.

Part of the challenge is that motivations online can be harder to parse than motivations in real life. Nuance is just hard to pick up online. It's easier to get a feel for someone when they're standing right in front of you, than when they're a discord handle with an animal pfp. It's easier to pick up nuance in speech than in text. The lack of facial expressions and body language makes our fellow human almost unrecognizable.

On the internet, we can probably pick up the emotions at the center of this wheel. But everything else is hidden behind the blue light screens.

Image source.

Maybe being more upfront with motivations is part of the answer. Or, maybe there's no way to unpack the motivation of a digital identity sitting across from you in the dark rooms of the internet.

So, where do we go from here?

We co-exist, rather than replace ourselves.

Co-existing with my digital self

Instead of looking at my digital identity as me, I look at it as something that co-exists alongside me.

She's more like a tool to access the digital world, like my crypto wallet is a tool to access the crypto world.

Soon, we will see AIs using both digital identities and crypto wallets to interact with us.

So, I also see other digital identities as tools used by other people. And this helps me step back and look at the bigger picture of the DAO space more easily.

But it also helps me navigate this often scary digital world we live in. It gives me perspective, and makes disconnecting from this digital world and turning to real, human-to-human connection in the IRL world all the more valuable.

Because sometimes I need to only be the man behind the curtain.

Image source.

Recommended Reading and Listening

• "I Don't Want to Be an Internet Person" by Ginerva Davis, published in Palladium

• Making the internet less lonely with Gaby Goldberg, On the Other Side Podcast

• "Text Is All You Need" by Venkatesh Rao, published in Ribbonfarm

• "tiny internets: sidewalks, geocaching, and more" by Spencer Chang

• "The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet," by Yancey Strickler

Originally published on quorummedia.xyz.

Writer: Samantha Marin

When you think of web3 security, you probably think of smart contract vulnerabilities. You think of being rugged in DeFi or not properly storing the keys to your crypto.

But web3 security isn't only about learning the do's an do-not's of this new technology. It's also about understanding the security attacks carried out in web2. In fact, DAOs might be even more vulnerable to traditional security breaches, because we spend more time focused on the web3-native components of security.

DAOs aren't only threatened by smart contract vulnerabilities or a multisig signer losing their keys: they're threatened by social engineering attacks.

A social engineering attack is when the attacker exploits people rather than code. It could come in the form of someone impersonating someone else on the phone or in a chat room, emails or messages containing malware, or even a fake job offer.

And we're starting to see those attacks at an alarming rate.

Like in traditional cybersecurity, attackers often attempt to exploit social vulnerabilities first. This is because social attacks are easier. Humans are often less trustworthy than code.

In fact, you don't even need knowledge of web3 to exploit DAOs today.

This is scary.

We recently saw one such attack in BanklessDAO.

In an editorial for the BanklessDAO weekly rollup, bDAO member Tomahawk described being impersonated by someone in the DAO's Coordinape round. The impersonator allocated funds to multiple wallets that they controlled, all under the guise of a core contributor.

Coordinape is a peer-to-peer rewards platform used by many DAOs today. Contributors allocate GIVE tokens based on the value they perceived them to bring during that season or cycle, and those GIVE are translated into the DAO's native token, which is then distributed to contributor wallets. In BanklessDAO, it's used like a bonus at the end of the season, and as a marker to see how your work is being received by the DAO. You sign in with your wallet, but when making an account there's no check to make sure you are who you say you are.

The DAO had to launch an investigation team into the issue, which unearthed more issues with DAO Coordinape rounds, particularly through how tags were used.

The levels of gaming of the system are unsettling. And it got me thinking about DAO vulnerabilities on all scales. This quote captured it:

"Coordinape, in its current form and without strong verification capabilities, is probably dead — at least for use with large teams. But beyond that, I don’t know how we will overcome Sybil vulnerabilities on a DAO-wide level. How many Discord handles were (or still are) controlled by Whales [the impersonator]? It raises uncomfortable questions from which we should not shy away."

—Tomahawk, BanklessDAO weekly rollup

This is an important lesson for DAOs in more areas than just Coordinape, and I applaud Tomahawk and the weekly rollup writers for bringing the issue to light so people can learn.

Even though Coordinape will probably not last in large DAOs like Bankless without some kind of verification, removing Coordinape is only knocking out one social attack surface. There are many other avenues to attack DAOs today, most of which are much easier than finding a bug in the code.

So, today I'm going to dive into the social side of DAO security. Not the code, not the smart contracts, but the social engineering and the soft exploits that happen in DAOs every day.

Soft treasury exploits

A soft treasury exploit is when a proposal passes to grant money to a wallet address in exchange for some type of work, but that work doesn't get done and the receiver simply keeps the money.

This is not an exploit done via code—it's an exploit done via social engineering.

Soft treasury exploits happen in DAOs more often than you may think. Optimism DAO suffered an exploit via misuse of their grant funds. Someone received funding for a project, and instead of working on the project, they simply bridged it to Arbitrum, Optimism's biggest competitor.

This will continue happening without further safeguards in DAO processes.

Some treasury exploits are obvious. For example, someone could propose to write five articles for the DAO in exchange for $2,000. If those articles never get written and the person who proposed it disappears with the money, that's clearly a funding exploit.

But the most dangerous forms of treasury exploits are the sneaky ones. Say an engineering team proposes to write a productivity software for your DAO. They're very active in discussions in the proposal phase because they want to get funded. But once they receive the funding, they quiet down. They're not very responsive, and they don't seem to be making progress. You notice that a few of the team members on the proposal totally dropped out of the DAO and seem to be working elsewhere now. After a few months they present a finished product, but it delivers on less than half that was originally included in their proposal. Upon asking them to finish their product, they say they need more funding to do so.

This is a much sneakier treasury exploit, but an exploit all the same. It's dangerous because not many people will catch it, and it can keep happening over and over.

I'm not arguing that every team needs to be perfect and deliver on every single thing they say they will do in their proposal. I'm also not arguing that teams need to sign a legally-binding contract to work on the project to create meatspace accountability. But, without proper safety mechanisms, treasury exploits are going to increase once we see another bull market and DAO treasuries start topping out again.

Let's explore a few solutions:

Possible solutions

Payment streaming over time, which can be stopped with a vote: Services like Superfluid allow you to stream tokens to a wallet rather than transferring them all at once. Add in the possibility to stop the stream with a vote, and this mechanism can prevent people from simply running away with a chunk of cash. A portion could be reserved to pay to the team only after final delivery.

Token gating of proposals to prevent spam proposals: The DAO could choose to token gate their proposal platform so only governance token holders can post. But, I acknowledge that this is a tough one. On one hand, it can block people from being able to enter the DAO and get funding for projects. On the other hand, it can save time for voters and prevent spam proposals that can be a major security risk for the DAO. I think the choice to token gate on the proposal level is ultimately up to how much the DAO has to lose if it were to have a funding exploit. A DAO that's just starting out and doesn't have anything in its treasury likely wants new talent to come through, and it doesn't need to worry about losing money yet. But a DAO with a large treasury is at significant risk of funding exploits via proposals without a token gate.

Impersonation and sybil attacks

DAOs are at risk of impersonation attacks in many aspects, not just the Coordinape example from BanklessDAO above.

Let me walk through one such attack.

Imagine someone creates multiple Discord handles under different pseudonyms and builds up different reputations associated with those pseudonyms. They will then use those reputations to get elected to different positions, such as coordinators of guilds, operations managers with access to the DAO's assets, grants committee members, multisig signers, and more. This person could even hold multiple positions on one multisig so that they can meet quorum with just their own wallets.

This person holds enough positions in the DAO to start swaying the general direction of it. They vote multiple times in non-sybil-resistant polls all over Discord and the forum. They tweet from non-sybil-resistant twitter accounts, all expressing the same sentiment. They socially engineer the DAO to put more funding to the guilds that the exploiter has secret multisig control over. And once that happens, the exploiter can drain all the multisigs and run away with the cash.

Wouldn't someone notice, you ask? Wouldn't the exploiter's voice sound the same in calls, showing something fishy between all the Discord handles? Or their face be the same in meetings?

In a largely pseudonymous environment, there are no video calls. And if the DAO is big enough, it's easy to slip by without attending meetings, or only attend ones in different corners of the DAO without contributor overlap.

Okay, so wouldn't their reputation be damaged?

Doesn't matter—they can show up to the same exact DAO tomorrow and run the same exact attack, just with a different name.

This type of attack might sound far-fetched, but it's not too far off the attack the impersonator launched in BanklessDAO just last month. And it's something we all need to think about in the DAO space.

Possible solutions:

Application-gated DAOs and/or roles: Adding an application into the onboarding process is an example of good friction that introduces one extra step that makes it harder to attack the DAO. For example, contributors could apply like they do with traditional jobs, and be accepted to the DAO if it's a good fit. While this goes against some of the 2021 WAGMI ethos of DAOS, it definitely feels relevant and necessary in many cases in 2023. If you don't want to go so far as gating the entire DAO, application gated roles could be one way to keep more powerful roles somewhat sybil-resistant.

Rely less on humans, more on code: Funds could be stored in a smart contract that automatically executes the results of the vote when it passes, rather than in vulnerable multisigs where running an attack and gaining quorum with wallets controlled by a single person is fairly easy.

Ghosting

This is an odd type of security vulnerability that I've watched happen. It's when a contributor who has some kind of power in the DAO just disappears on all platforms, so you can't get in touch with them. This wreaks havoc when funds are held in a mulitisig that requires their signature, or multiple multisigs across the DAO. Imagine if another signer had already ghosted, or if that one individual held multiple wallet addresses on the same mulitisig in the impersonation attack described above. This can lock funds for months or even for eternity if quorum cannot be met on multisigs.

In a pseudonymous environment, it's impossible to track down this missing contributor. They likely use a different name elsewhere, or if you do find them, they might not be responsive. There's nothing you can do in this situation but wait and hope they come back.

There is, of course, the potential that they didn't mean to ghost. Maybe something bad happened to them and they could no longer work or use their computer. Or they lost their keys to their wallet. This person might not be malicious, but it's still a huge security risk.

This is also a vulnerability in a softer sense: morale of contributors. It's a very weird sensation to watch a contributor drop off the face of the earth, and can initiate a search party within the contributors who knew this individual. This puts morale in a weird spot and makes you question your trust of everyone around you. Generally, this isn't great for the DAO's health and well-being of the people behind it.

Possible solutions:

Same as above, both application-gated roles and converting multisigs to automatically executing smart contracts can be workarounds here.

Requiring multisig signers to turn on a deadman's switch: This tool with a sinister name is actually extremely useful and is something everyone who holds crypto should have. A deadman's switch is a service that triggers a sequence of events after you die or become unresponsive. Here's how it works: every so often it emails you to ask if you're still alive, and if you reply, the switch is not turned on. If you don't reply, it triggers the sequence, which usually involves sending your critical information to your loved ones, such as wallet addresses and their private keys. Having a deadman's switch for all multisig signers or powerful people in the DAO ensures that if one of them were to die or become unresponsive, the funds would not be locked. Maybe the other multisig signers would get the email, and it would just be the address and key to the wallet associated with that multisig—it wouldn't have to be the person's entire assets.

Here's an example of one deadman's switch service.

Quarterly/seasonal check-ins with core contributors: Sometimes, when someone ghosts, it's not because they wanted to. Maybe they were in a severe mental health crisis or family emergency. There are legitimate reasons that ghosting happens. One way to stay on top of this is for a regular check-in of all core contributors. If someone can't have the burden of the multisig anymore, they can say that. Creating an environment for people to say share their needs and offload responsibilities can help with this security vulnerability.

Maybe "soft" DAO audits could help solve these issues.

A soft DAO audit would be when an external company audits the social layer of the DAO rather than the smart contract code underlying it.

They would analyze how easy it is to get private contributor information, to impersonate someone without others noticing, to get seats on multiple multisigs (and the same multisig), and other forms of social engineering attacks. Basically, they'd be auditing the human side of the DAO.

This company could even red team the organization to see what can get through. A red team (sometimes called a penetration test/pen test) is, according to Hack the Box, "an organized, targeted, and authorized attack that tests IT infrastructure, applications, physical security, company personnel, and their defenders." So, a DAO penetration test might involve auditors entering the Discord server, impersonating someone, and seeing if they can steal funds effectively. Or, it could involve something entirely different! The point is that it's an attack authorized by the DAO, but it's a surprise. The auditors act like malicious hackers and test the security of the DAO's fortress.

A web2 security lens applied to web3 organizations feels necessary in this moment, before more hackers realize that the walls have holes.

The more you have to trust humans, the more vulnerable your DAO might be

We're here in web3 because believe that trustless, permissionless technology will change the world. We're not here to put untrustworthy humans at the center of every equation.

So, let's hold those values true in DAOs, too.

Social engineering attacks are scary. They happen on massive scales in web2 companies all the time, and DAOs and web3-native organizations are at the same risk.

By implementing some of the security measures listed above, and maybe even start a soft audit, DAOs can significantly lock down their processes and become less vulnerable to social attacks. Bear markets are tough, and right now it might feel like many bad things are happening to DAOs.

But all DAOs need to do right now is survive, and security is the backbone of that.

Here's to surviving!

Writer: Samantha Marin

When I recorded the DAO toolkit series this summer, it was a unique time for me. I'd just started this newsletter, had transitioned out of BanklessDAO and into Aragon full-time, and was living nomadically for a bit. I was also about at the one-year mark of working in DAOs. I had a lot to reflect on, and this series helped me do so.

Published during the fall, these episodes were my first real foray into sharing ideas in audio rather than just written form.

That's why this episode series was so fun for me. I got to think deeply about what I learned at Bankless and what I was starting to encounter at Aragon. Reflecting on my journey has helped me in tons of ways, and I hope some of you find these episodes helpful, too!

The power of focus: become an expert in one thing rather than dabbling in many

This topic is unique to DAOs because it's not common to be hired to do one job. There's no staying in your lane because there's no lane to begin with (there's not even a road, actually—good luck!). So you have to self-regulate to focus and become an expert in your craft, rather than dabbling in everything and getting lost in the DAO.

I've definitely had focus issues in the early days of my DAO journey, and I'm still grappling with them in many ways. The desire to get into more roles and tasks is high, especially in a bull market when it seems that there's endless opportunity everywhere you turn. But when those opportunities stack up so tall they're about to topple over, then you know you need to shed some.

I've heard this called "shiny object syndrome," which I believe is an apt description of how it feels. It's like there are a hundred shiny objects around you and every time you reach for one, there's another one winking at you and daring you to grab it.

It's not a good feeling to go back on your responsibilities and let people down. So this episode was made to help people get ahead of it and trim down those responsibilities before they stack up. And, it was made to remind myself of that very same thing!

Listen here: Episode on Spotify

Making connections: meeting people and finding your place

One of the surest ways to grow in this industry is to make connections. This episode focuses on making connections within your DAO, because that is vital for new internal opportunities. But the other reason it focuses on making connections within your DAO is because that's what Brandon and I were most experienced with. We'd both learned what it was like to come into a DAO knowing no one, and having to find our way through the organization by meeting people who could open doors for us and show us around.

We talked about how joining a DAO is like being a freshman in college. You have a whole campus of people you could be friends with, but you need to go find them. On top of that, you have a huge variety of possibilities for classes and majors and clubs. You have to take the initiative to try new classes, explore possibilities for majors, and meet new people. Whereas working a traditional job is more like going to a small high school: you know everyone in your class and you have a set schedule of classes you take together. Things are more controlled, but it's also easier to know where you fit in.

Just like in that first year of college, it's all about striking a balance. If you spent all your time taking a ton of classes and not meeting people, you'd miss out. And if you spent all the time partying and not taking classes, you'd also miss out! The balance is hard to find, but at the end of the day, make sure you've sprinkled in some connection-making into your DAO life.

Listen here: Episode on Spotify

https://open.spotify.com/episode/39iwfNWV74K0dP3TmREH5Z?si=WwnVU3eiThyGi44lq11mag

Getting feedback: the quickest way to improve your skills

This is one of the trickier topics in DAOs because of the organization structure. They're flat, circular, or generally non-traditional looking organizations where there's no direct manager who is supposed to oversee you. Sometimes there's an indirect manager (coordinator, steward, etc.) but there's not always someone who is directly tasked with giving you feedback.

DAOs also give you the opportunity to try a new skill and pick up work that might not be something you're used to doing. Since DAOs are so fluid, it's a lot easier to get paid to do something new. And if you're doing something new, it's even more important to get feedback!

In this episode we talk about some ways to seek out feedback:

• Ask people to give you feedback and share the format you like it in (private DM, google doc comment).

• Kindly start giving others feedback privately, and see if they reciprocate. Lead with "Would you be okay with some feedback on this?" because sometimes people aren't ready to receive it that day.

• Ask people to give you feedback on one specific thing, so they feel comfortable sharing constructive/critical feedback. For example: Rather than, "Is the ice cream I made good?" say, "Does the ice cream I made have too much sugar, or just enough?"

Listen here: Episode on Spotify

Being proactive and problem solving: how to create opportunities for yourself

In this episode I talk about how my first DAO role was born out of a pain point I myself had experienced first hand: onboarding. I went through the standard whirlwind, short onboarding process at BanklessDAO that was common of DAOs in the bull market. Tons of people wanted to join, so all the DAO really asked of you was to verify that you weren't a bot and agree to some Discord community standards. So, my first role was the talent scout for the Writers Guild, which then led to more roles.

In this episode we talk about how you can use pain points you experience in the DAO to create a role for yourself, pitch projects, and come up with new directions for the DAO to take. If it's a pain point you've personally experienced, then you might know more about how to solve it and will know what to avoid while solving it. You'll also have more emotional investment in the topic because you've experienced it yourself.

Identifying pain points and solving them can also help your reputation in the DAO. This can lead to roles further down the line or more connections made. But, there's a flip side of solving the problem: investing too much time in it. Scope creep can get real, and is something that I'm still learning!

Listen here: Episode on Spotify

Cultivating web3 knowledge: becoming your own curator

In this episode we talked about being your own curator. Google search isn't a reputable resource for many aspects of web3. I'm sure you've googled something about web3 and found a traditional media organization trying to harvest web3 keywords that didn't know what they were talking about.

We talk about how hard it can be to find good information about DAOs and web3. A lot of times you find the best information on a random Notion page you stumble on that you're not even sure you should have access to. Or it's a backlink of a backlink of a backlink out of a Mirror article you read. Or it's one nugget buried deep in a two-hour podcast. Finding information is hard, so we shared some tips we use to become our own curators:

• Curated newsletters/dashboards: Boardroom's This Week in Governance, BanklessDAO's State of the DAOs, Forefront

• Advanced Twitter Search: for looking for specific words and phrases

• Startupy: human-curated search engine

• Curators who are already doing the work (think: Mirror collections and personal blog pages like this one by Rafa0x.)

• Following podcast guests/finding their writing

• Following the "footnotes" (hyperlinks) of an article I like. (For example, I often see who Li Jin is hyperlinking in her articles.)

Listen here: Episode on Spotify

Sometimes learning is actually relearning

I admit that many of these topics aren't necessarily specific to DAOs. Often, we're repackaging pre-web3 knowledge and advice and sharing it in a DAO context. **But that means we get to take what worked and leave behind what didn't. There's tons of beauty in this: we get to pick the best from web2 and apply it to web3. (**Of course, that's if we listen to the best of web2 like we say we're going to.)

In this way, the DAO learnings that Brandon and I shared in these episodes are often just relearning ways of working that have been out there in the world for years. We're just finding new ways to apply these learnings and make them DAO-specific. I don't know about you, but I'm always down for some relearning!

Thank you for being here!

By Samantha Marin

Originally published on quorummedia.xyz on December 21, 2022.

What did we learn about DAOs in 2022?

We learned more than Chat GPT did, that's for sure:

DAOs have taken many twists and turns throughout the year, giving many of us completely different viewpoints on DAOs now than when we started the year.

I asked the internet if anyone's minds had changed on about DAOs broadly this year. Here are some of my favorite answers:

DAOs as brands with decentralized treasuries

Tweet from @jaesmail

I found this one super fascinating. It's no secret that DAOs are often trying to replicate what traditional organizations have already done. So, DAOs as plain old organizations is pretty dull. But DAOs as networks of individuals and guilds collaborating on work is exciting. And even more exciting? DAOs as brands with a decentralized treasury that's used to fund brand and mission-aligned activities. I found this mental model super useful when thinking about what the next wave of successful DAOs could look like.

We’re using the wrong timescale

Tweet from @imrgoyal

I really liked this one because I often hear that DAOs are lagging behind the speed in which technology can be developed and implemented. This is considered to be a bearish fact about DAOs.

However, DAOs are organizations with technology at the center and humans on the outside. Even if the technology centerpiece matures quickly, if we can't keep up as humans, we're going to mature slowly. I plan to keep this timescale in mind in 2023.

DAO ideals and reality don’t match up

Tweet from @shawnlgrubb

In the DAO space we love to talk about what we could be. But the process of getting to those goals is long and difficult. I found this observation apt, because it's true that few want to do the work that it will take to get us to that possible future of DAOs. Unfortunately, we're distracted by trying to fit existing DAOs into that end state too early, rather than evolving DAOs slowly over time.

The process will be messy and ugly. But baby steps are better than trying to take huge leaps and then falling backward to right where we started. And, man, those baby steps are hard work!

Use cases for DAOs in 2022 were different than expected

Tweet from @_harrywilson

There was a common belief in the bull that every organization could become a DAO. But these past few months have shown that DAOs in the current state of tooling have been best for two use cases: simple DAOs designed for a specifc, ephemeral purpose, or on-chain DAOs built for maintaining a protocol like Lido.

I think this take is really interesting and I like the acceptance of moving away from "everything should be a DAO" to "here are some things that can work better as DAOs than as traditional organizations." It helps prevent us from overturning the wheel, which we often do in this space!

However, I do believe that tons of more DAO use cases will be unlocked once we make the strides in tooling that we need to. But in 2022, successful use cases were limited.

DAO problems are just human problems

Tweet from @psychguy_eth

This is something I have to constantly remind myself about. I get wrapped up in all these problems DAOs are having, and forget that DAOs are human organizations like anything else. They have the same problems and we can't expect ourselves to fix every human organization problem out there.

In many ways, DAOs are a much better alternative to traditional organization structures. The problems they bring with them are often human ones, not DAO-specific. It can be hard to remember this when we're deep in the weeds, but it's important!

DAOs beyond the bull market

Tweet from @Orenar4

I love the dichotomy of this tweet, because on one side there's the bull market shilling, and on the other there's the powerful vision of what DAOs could be. You would never think that the same structure that allows for shilling pump and dumps can allow for creating nations, too. Something I'm excited about for 2023 is how DAOs can expand use cases beyond the bull market ones we already came up with.

Decentralization of capital and ownership, not workforce

Tweet from @divine_economy

This is interesting because it's a new spin on labor in DAOs. At the center of the DAO is the shared treasury managed by the token and the paramters that govern it. The decentralization of the DAO is the capital deployed, rather than the workforce of builders at the center.

It reminds me this tweet from Jacob Horne of Zora:

Tweet from @js_horne

Love the idea of flipping the lurkers into the owners!

DAO design debt is real

Tweet from @BryanPetes

This tweet higlights a serious problem that occurred during the bull: taking shortcuts to create a DAO faster without thinking through design principles and incentive alignment.

Bull market DAOs emerged with too much focus on spinning up a DAO quickly, hoping the token would always go up. But, when those tokens crashed, we saw the design debt that was leftover.

Design debt is a hard thing to shake. We had to create an entire new DAO at Aragon to get rid of old design debt! It's definitely better to start slow and design thoughtfully, rather than get stuck with design debt later on.

DAOs as smart wallets, and therefore account abstraction

Tweet from @IvanovInvest77

When you take a step back and look at what a DAO truly is, it's a smart wallet containing funds with parameters governing who can access the treasury and how. For example, quorum and pass rate are parameters programmed into the smart wallet that prevent wallet addresses from accessing the funds unless they meet those parameters.

In this way, DAOs are account abstraction because they abstract away the responsibility of a single actor holding the entire treasury in a basic wallet. It's a different way of looking at DAOs than the bull market seemed to bring about, but it's a cool way to focus on the tech rather than the humans.

DAOs as networks sharing talent and capital

Tweet from @nelsontjordan

The moats of web2 have been replaced with open, composable software that is harder to create a moat around (and, in turn, a sustainable business model). So, there's less incentive for your organization to hoard talent and capital in one place. Instead, for ecosystem-centric projects, it might be best to let that talent and capital flow freely throughout the ecosystem in a positive sum mentality. Easier said than done, I know! But I liked the picture this tweet paints of a large network sharing resources and the stark contrast from the traditional web2 world. As far as this ecosystem-centric approach creating recurring, repeatable revenue? That's still a question to be answered.

DAO structures 🤝 existing organizations

Tweet from @ArneTrautmann

DAO structures don't need to solely be applied to new organizations. We can integrate DAO-like models, such as voting and treasury management, into existing organizations to improve the way they operate and give members more ownership over an organization and its actions. Part of the reason DAOs are so difficult to build is that we're trying to create a sustainable business model and an entirely new organization structure at the same time. Why not just apply the new structure to an organization that already has a business model?

What I’m looking forward to in the new year:

It's been a wild year in DAOs. We've seen extreme bearishness with speckles of light sprinkled in.

A few areas I'm most excited about in the new year:

• Permission management. For DAOs to become truly autonomous without human actors managing everything, we need to bake on and off-chain permission management into our DAO design. Permission management can be done through Roles, which give actors/contracts permission to perform certain actions. Hats and Wonderverse both offer forms of permission management via Roles, and so will our new aragonOS.

• Privacy. We need more options beyond completely open voting. I'm excited about the massive improvements that have been made in ZK Research in the past year and am excited to see what implementation looks like for that research.

• Hyperstructures. I'm less excited about one-off DAO tools, more excited about protocols that are built to run forever and form the base layer for Apps and DAOs to build on top of. Lens and Zora are two examples. (It's also what we're building at Aragon!)

I can't wait to see where DAOs go in 2023!

See you next year!

"Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire. Likewise, with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind. "

Prologue, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

This essay is free to mint. Thank you all for being here! <3

I recently worked on a project to design the new Aragon delegated voting DAO. By the end of it, I was looking at DAOs in a completely different way. (In a good way.)

Today, I'm going to share what that new viewpoint is. If you're new-ish in crypto (like me) it might surprise you. If you're an OG, you'll probably say this is how DAOs were meant to be all along.

The task my team worked on—designing the basic structure of a delegated voting DAO for Aragon—quickly pivoted into undesigning a DAO, or taking pieces of our draft away until we had the most basic, bare bones approach possible.

This was completely different from how I'd expected the DAO design to go. I imagined an airtight proposal process and delegates with clear rules on what they can and cannot do. I imagined codes of conduct, set definitions of guilds vs. workstreams vs. contributors, and required reporting standards. I imagined us outlining all the things that we've seen go wrong in DAOs, and then creating a robust framework to combat that.  DAOs are complicated, so we make a complicated design, right? To protect against attackers we need to think through every possible scenario and design every inch of the organization to be completely spotless, right?

Nope.

We trimmed it down, then trimmed it down, then trimmed it down again, until the design was so basic it looked like we could've written it in a half a day (try half a year). We trimmed and trimmed because we realized something important: antifragile is better than robust. Aligned incentives are better than hard-and-fast rules. Lean and simple is better than large and complicated.

Let me show you what I mean.

The sliding scale of organizations

When designing a DAO, you're constantly walking the line between two extremes. On one side, you can set up tons of social layer rules with managers enforcing them in a bureaucracy. Or, you can set up zero rules and zero boundaries, ending up in anarchy.

All organizations of humanity are sliding between bureaucracy and anarchy. Some are happily planted on one side of the scale, while others are fighting to not slide too far in one direction. Here are a few organizations of the world and where I believe they land on the sliding scale:

One major goal when designing a DAO is to not land into one of those two extremes. But...honestly? The weird middle ground isn't so great, either, because no one's figured out how to do it right.

Everyone theoretically wants to be somewhere in the middle (bureaucracy and anarchy both sound bad), but landing in the middle is not easy.

And, what I learned from the DAO design process is that the organizations that land in the middle are kind of....off. Just look at the chart above: everything in the exact center is a slightly off  version of something else.

DAOs in their current state are no exception. Populist social DAOs with open Discords are a middle-ground version of anarchy. Highly-regulated DAOs trying to enforce rules on the social layer are a middle-ground version of traditional companies.

We didn't want to fall into either of those two options.

DAOs don't need to be a slightly off version of something else. DAOs can turn into something new and innovative and exciting. But for that to happen, we need to stop trying to enforce things we can't, brute-force shifting ourselves on the sliding scale, or designing when we should be undesigning.

The pull of bureaucracy is dangerously strong

During the multi-month process of designing this DAO, I found myself continuously falling back into the bureaucracy trap. I kept wanting to add more rules and to design more parameters to hem this DAO in place. I kept thinking of a new issue and saying, do we need a solution for this? Shouldn't we put a rule in place so no one does it?

But rules don't mean anything if you don't have enforcement behind them. And as soon as you have enforcement, you have bureaucracy, managers, and the old system we're trying to opt out of.

Links, member of BanklessDAO, wrote his insights from serving on the Grants Committee, the board that distributes funding to projects every season.

"Rules without enforcement aren’t worth the blocks on which they are minted. Writing down rules and hoping individuals follow them doesn’t lead to a post-scarcity nirvana, it leads to people breaking rules (often without realizing it). For rules to work, you need a central authority which is enforcing them."

—Creating a winnable game by Links, published in the BanklessDAO Weekly Rollup

We all know the spiral: Bob steals the office stapler, so HR freaks out and puts a rule in place against stealing the office stapler. But there's no rule against bending the office paper clips, so Alice bends them to better fit her massive stacks of paper. A sales manager puts a rule in place for the sales team against bending paperclips. But there's no rule against bending the stapler, and the two rules live in totally different places, so Bob gets a crowbar to see if that's possible. And on and on. This happens until there are so many rules in place that the organization needs to hire a whole department just to keep up with the rules. But you need to make sure the new Office Rules department isn't bending the staplers with the crowbar, so an oversight committee is placed over that.

This goes on and on until you can barely find a productive organization through all the weeds.

We were scared of going too far toward bureaucracy, making it cumbersome and slow to get things done. But we were also scared of falling into anarchy, where the treasury could be drained into the hands of attackers and non-mission-aligned projects.

Our solution: being crystal-clear on our limitations of enforcement (very, very limited), and letting ANT (the governance token) govern the rest.

Defining what we can and can’t enforce was central to our design

In the new Aragon DAO, $ANT (Aragon Network Token) is at the center. ANT votes—not whales, not delegates, not the core team, not the community. The tokens vote, so we design the DAO to place the tokens at the center, not to place a certain group of people at the center. (This was particularly hard for me to wrap my head around, so I'll keep explaining it further.)

Part of the point of a DAO is that if the core team quits tomorrow, the organization can continue functioning because it's both decentralized and autonomous. However, this is not the case for most DAOs today. But we want this to be the case for Aragon. A DAO that puts a specific set of people at the center rather than the tokens and the code cannot live up to that ideal.

So, we put tokens at the center by designing enforceable, on-chain rules for tokens—the parameters the tokens need to meet like quorum and pass rate—but no enforceable rules for anyone else. This was done to avoid the strong pull of bureaucracy and to put ANT at the center.

Here's our three-pronged approach to describe the layers of Aragon governance:

• Rules: Enforceable by code or law. Things like quorum and pass rate (parameters in the smart contract) as well as any legal restrictions for the legal wrapper you're operating in (illegal to launder money or fund terrorism with your guild's treasury, for example).

• Guidelines: Standards that help us coordinate better as an organization that are not technically enforceable by anything, except by how ANT  votes. For example, if there is a guideline to include team member backgrounds and relevant experience in each funding proposal, ANT could theoretically only vote "yes" for proposals that include the description. However, there's no one chasing the proposal writer around saying, "You need to include this or else your proposal is void!" If the majority of ANT don't care if the proposer followed the proposal guidline, then it doesn't matter. Because ANT is at the center. (I'm going to keep drilling that in because it really did take me months to wrap my head around.)

• Practices: Ways of working that spread to other teams, such as meeting styles, compensation standards, and anything part of an organization's operating system. Practices are not enforced, rather the best ones are spread throughout the organization when a successful one catches on.

We stacked it up into a layer cake or triangle, like this:

More simply, you can break the design into what's at the center vs. what's pushed to the edges. ANT is at the center, and everything in dark blue is tied directly to ANT, restricting its action (for example, 1 ANT cannot pass a proposal, you need at least a certain percentage of the network). The black text in the light blue outer circle is everything that's pushed to the edges.

Or even more simply, like this:

And suddenly, we've arrived here:

"DAOs == automation at the center, humans at the edges."

—Vitalik Buterin, DAOs, DACs, DAs and More: An Incomplete Terminology Guide

Why is this design antifragile?

A fragile organization is one that needs everything to work exactly how it was designed. A machine is fragile: if one part breaks, the whole thing crumbles. But an antifragile system gains from disorder. A forest is antifragile, because even the occasional natural forest fire is regenerative and restorative to the ecosystem.

Our system is antifragile because the Rules at the center are unstoppable and secure. When a proposal is voted through, on-chain execution ensures it is passed. The Rules are airtight.

But the areas that don't need to be airtight—the human layer—are free for more experimentation, more adaptation, and more trial-and-error. Putting humans at the edges makes us even more antifragile because we can test safely without high stakes looming over us. Without some failures, we'll never be able to find the best solution.

We don't want failures on the Rules level. But we do want healthy failures on the Guidelines and Practices level to help us improve as an organization.

In other words, we need to become the fire, and not fear the wind. We need to not only last through the wind, but to wish for it.

Recommended Reading

• Introducing Aragon DAO Governance by our team at Aragon

• Creating a winnable game by Links

• Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

• DAOs, DACs, DAs and More: An Incomplete Terminology Guide by Vitalik Buterin

Thanks for being here!

I really like this particular essay :) It encapsulates so much of what I’ve been turning over in my mind the last few months, and the graphics in particular have been helpful in building my understanding of what a truly autonomous DAO could look like. So, it’s free to mint! Grab your 1 of 100 today:

Writer: Samantha Marin

If you're reading this, I assume you didn't come here to get rich quick. You didn't come here to chase all the pump and dumps or ponzis. You didn't come here to make your money and get out.

You came to build something exciting.

And it's awful when one of those shady schemes—the things you try to ignore when you're building that exciting thing—make it even harder to do what you love.

The events of last week were painful. Watching a trusted exchange (emphasis on trusted, not trustless) go under and take all its users' assets with it was heartbreaking in so many ways.

Not only did the failure of FTX bleed the assets of tons of real-life, normal people like you and I—real people with families and kids and retirement plans and mortgages—but it left a stain on the industry that will take years to walk back.

And in those years of walking back, we could see harsh regulation come through, regulation that we could have had a say in if the FTX implosion didn't happen.

The entire thing is painful and unsettling and uncomfortably bearish in so many ways.

But that doesn't mean we just leave.

Most of us are here because we see a new frontier. Like the pioneers of the early internet saw a new way to share information, communicate, and learn, we in web3 see a new way to own, work, coordinate, pay, and govern. Are we supposed to just abandon all of that progress now?

Absolutely not.

The short-term is going to hurt. The next 2-5 years might not feel good on a collective scale. There will likely be serious regulation, bearishness, shortened runways, market fear, inflation, recessions....I don't even know where to begin.

But that doesn't mean we just stop.

There is so much work to do. God, it sounds so cheesy, I can't believe I'm even writing that! But it's true: there's so much work to do.

I was reading Proof of Stake on a flight two days ago. It's a collection of many of Vitalik's essays, all the way back to pre-Ethereum days. Footnotes elaborate on the jargony parts, and intros by Nathan Schneider pop up here and there. I've read many of the essays before, but having the opportunity to sit and dive deep into each one in book format without the distraction of a million other tabs on my computer was a treat.

While I was reading, I realized how incredible the progress of this technology and the community around it has been, even just since four years ago. From "that's just for drug dealers" to a thriving ecosystem of organizations all working toward a better future. It really made me realize how far we've come.

But it also made me realize how far we have to go.

The path to mass adoption is long, winding, and cold. It's full of beasts lurking in the shadows. Parts of the path are washed out from rain and snow. Other parts cross a desert for miles with no sign of water. Yes I'm being a little dramatic.....but you get the idea.

The point is—it's going to be really damn hard to keep going. It's time to revisit your values. Come back to why you're here. Think about what means most to you and why. Write them down. Do it! It will make them that much clearer to you.

I'll start.

Why am I, Sam, here? Why am I working on DAOs?

I believe financial and career stability shouldn't be limited by geography. In the U.S., we forget how lucky we are that we can walk into a bank and safely withdraw our funds whenever we want. We forget how lucky we are that we can go online and work from home for a big tech company based across the country or the world. We forget that so much of the world doesn't have these inherent luxuries. I believe cryptocurrencies and DAOs give financial tools, stable currency, and career opportunities to people all over the world, not just those in privileged positions.

I believe work should put humans first. DAOs open up the unique opportunity for working in ways that work for humans, not necessarily just for profit. The traditional work 9-to-5, come home to a cocktail and a pot roast days are over. Work needs to bend to fit the needs of the humans doing it, and DAOs are uniquely suited to do that in tons of ways. The async, distributed nature of DAOs makes it possible to work at the time, in the place, and in the way that's best for you, to take on more or less work based on your life circumstances, and to get paid in trustless, global currencies.

I believe transparency is crucial for progress. Without open-source, where would the internet and the products we love be today? Probably not very far. I feel the same way about economic transparency via the blockchain. Even though privacy-preserving technology will probably change some of this, the ethos of open-by-default that web3 has is critical to global progress in tons of ways.

I believe ownership is powerful. NFTs allow anyone to own a piece of the internet, rewriting the playbook for creators. In DAOs, collective decision power gives a unique sense of ownership for members. When you have the ability to change something, when you feel you own it, you take better care of it. How well do you take care of your front lawn compared to the grass in the public park? If you feel ownership, you are going to care for it. That's the power of DAOs.

I believe cryptography is our only way to address the onslaught of AI creation. Artificial Intelligence can already design better than most humans. It can write better than most humans. Pretty soon, AI will be able to design and write better than any being—human or otherwise—we could possibly imagine. Using a combination of NFTs and zero-knowledge-proofs to verify work created by humans is the only way to save human creation going forward. Cryptography allows us to prove a thing is true without revealing the thing. This is how we can address AI creation and the existential threat it poses to nearly any creator, and soon any knowledge worker.

I believe in positive-sum economies. Web3 introduces a unique, positive-sum, all-ships-rise ethos. When using economically-aligned incentives through tokens, collaboration becomes the default mode, rather than competition. And when we make a commitment to put our egos aside and work together, we get that much stronger.

So, why are you here? What do you believe? Tell me! You can now REPLY to this email (I know, technology!) or as always @ me on Twitter, @samanthajmarin, and let me know why you're here.

See you all out there,

Sam

Quorum is a metalabel for creators shipping work about DAOs. Check out Quorum’s newsletter, podcast, and Twitter.

Writer: Samantha Marin

Image source

I live in a crypto household, which means my boyfriend and I both work full time in the space. We both take meetings at the crack of dawn to catch more timezones. We scroll crypto twitter when we're bored. And there's even a copy of Serious Cryptography always on our toilet.

Living in a crypto household is all fun and games until someone asks you what you do for work. When we meet someone new—ski partners, friends of friends, even (god help me) landlords—we inevitably get The Question. We both look at each other, like, "are you going to tell them first?"

We often fall back to that vague mantra: "I work in tech." Or I say I work in marketing or communications and he says something about security or development. If they really press, I've tried "marketing for a secure voting tech company," which sounds kinda crazy (do I work for a poll booth company??) just to avoid the blockchain conversation.

But why? If we're building at the frontier of innovation and striving to make life on this earth better, why do I feel like a dog with its tail tucked under when people outside of crypto ask what I do? Why am I so sheepish to say anything about web3 or DAOs in public, unless it's to a close friend or family member? Well, we've had a couple run-ins with some very anti-crypto people (once in a hiking lodge, multiple times on ski lifts, and a few times with some extended family members). So talking about our jobs has felt fraught. But isn't that all part of fighting the good fight?

Cheesy as it may sound, I've been trying to get in touch with my emotions about this topic. I feel so sold on DAOs as the future of how we work and collaborate, and crypto as the future backbone of our crumbling monetary system. But there's a massive disconnect with my emotions here. When you're face to-face with someone who's only read terrible coverage of the space, and you have to tell them you work in an industry that also happens to include $DOGE, how do you do it? You don't do it gracefully, that's for sure.

Old school Doge meme from imgflip.

I believe the majority of the squeamish feelings have to do with the way traditional media covers the space.

Because, whether we like it or not, the traditional media is where the majority of the world will probably first hear about crypto. Many people watch cable news, read local or national newspapers, subscribe to magazines, and listen to radio shows or podcasts produced by these organizations.

So, I've been digging into non-crypto-native journalism about crypto just to see how bad it makes the space look. And....man it is worse than I thought.

Of course, I knew it was bad already...just not this bad. I went through a phase last year where I wanted to work with web2 media outlets to help them cover the space better. I used to send comments into the traditional journalists who covered web3, sharing corrections in a kind and helpful tone and offering to help if they had questions from people in the space. (No replies, of course. Have you read about my disillusionment with web2 media yet?) I've gotten significantly more cynical and bearish about crypto onboarding attempts for the web2 media since then, and haven't sent in a comment in over a year.

In this newfound cynical phase, I've been wondering....what was early coverage of the internet like? Journalists must've said some crazy stuff back then.

And, dear reader, you would not believe what I found.

This week I give you a lighter article, one that will hopefully make you feel more confident in what you're building, and one that will empower you to have those "what do you do for work?" conversations coming soon during the winter holidays. It's an article that might make you slightly angry while reading some of these headlines, but will also (hopefully) make you laugh to see the ridiculously off-base early internet ones. So, let's dive in!

Use cases? Never heard of ‘em

We're going to start out with a bang. This article has definitely had its fair share of Twitter circulation, especially for all the "Bah!"s and "Baloney!"s the writer tosses in seemingly unironically.

Here's one traditional media journalist's take on online shopping, the unshakeable timelessness of CD-ROMs, and "electronic publishing" in 1995:

"Why the web won't be Nirvanna." published in Newsweek in 1995

Favorite quote:

"The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher, and no computer network will change the way government works."

The New York Times feels similarly about crypto and its apparent lack of use cases.

Check out this excerpt from a 2022 piece, which is ironic considering crypto has more use cases now than it's ever had before:

"From the Big Short to the Big Scam," published in the New York Times on June 6, 2022

Favorite quote:

"Today greenbacks and government-insured bank deposits do exist, so stablecoins play almost no role in ordinary business transactions."

This coming from a publication based in a country that also just so happens to be the current world reserve currency and have widespread insurance on bank holdings via the FDIC. Hate to break it to him that not everyone has these luxuries.

It’s not really that cool

No one will ever use this stuff, right? The internet and smart phones will never catch on because it's all for techy people who like that kind of thing. The innovation is minimal, so why not just keep plugging away at what works?

That's how blockchain technology is often talked about today, as well as how laptop computers were discussed in this New York Times article in 1985:

"Making the laptop commonplace" published in the New York Times in 1985. The first line of this article is "Whatever happened to the laptop computer?" It's an incredible read.

Favorite quote: "Somehow, the microcomputer industry has assumed that everyone would love to have a keyboard grafted on as an extension of their fingers. It just is not so."

The Wall Street Journal feels quite similarly about crypto now as the New York Times did back in 1985 about people not wanting to "work on a computer at home."

This 2022 WSJ pieces starts out with quite a fun line: "And it’s true that blockchains achieve bookkeeping without a bookkeeper and allow individuals to make transactions anonymously and quickly. But the innovation pretty much ends there."

"Crytocurrency doesn't amount to much,"published in the WSJ on Jan 24, 2022.

Favorite line: "They are looking for a way to spin their crypto straw into gold."

Does a currency not translating directly into gold remind you of any other currencies out there today?

It's a short piece, but it ends with a real dig that I can't let pass by.

Favorite quote: "Unlike the fiat money created by bank loans, which is linked to the real economy, cryptocurrencies are untethered from economic value." These guys lived through '08, right?

It’s all just hype

Fads can never be lasting, right?

Check out the Daily Mail's take on millions giving up on the internet in 200:

"Internet may be just a passing fad as millions give up on it." Published in the Daily Mail on December 5, 2000.

The Atlantic has similar feelings about passing fads of the crypto variety. I'm surprised someone let this piece run, making fun of people who lost money. Can you imagine the same one running now as stock portfolios devalue?

"The Crypto Crash Feels Amazing." Published in The Atlantic on May 18, 2022.

No favorite lines, this piece was hard to read :(

As soon as a company is struggling, the end has arrived.

Time magazine had a funny take on how Apple was doing in 1996, in part because of their thousands of layoffs:

"PC or not PC? That is the question." published in Time magazine on July 1, 1996.

Favorite quote: "Why not, one PC magazine suggested, also sponsor a remake of Raise the Titanic?"

It reminds me of how crypto companies get covered harshly and extensively when layoffs happen, like Coinbase in the Washington Post:

"Coinbase's layoffs suggest crypto's problems are spreading," published in the Washington Post in June 2022.

I thought it was interesting that they also lingered on a high-budget ad, like Time did for Apple in that 1996 article. Check out this section of the Washington Post piece:

It will all crash and burn catastrophically.

According to InfoWorld in 1995, the internet's days were seriously numbered. It reads surprisingly similar to crypto's impending catastrophic collapse that the media keeps predicting.

There's even a little jab at minting digital money in here:

Published in InfoWorld on December 4, 1995. Image from the Internet Archive.

Favorite quote: "Here's why there soon will only be World Wide Web ghost pages." That confidence!

The New York Times is probably the most anti-crypto major media outlet in existence, so they predict its collapse about twice a week. Choosing which article to feature was truly difficult. I like this one because it chalks crypto up to "technobabble and libertarian derp."

Crypto is Crashing. Where Were the Regulators? Published in the New York Times, July 11 2022.

Favorite quote: "The industry lured investors in which a combination of technobable and libertarian derp."

Does anyone know where you can get some of that libertarian derp?

Let’s get real for a second

It's fun to compare early internet and crypto journalism and spot their uncanny similarities. But, honestly, sometimes it feels like the political and ideological divide that has sprung up around crypto could be too big of a bridge to cross. Adoption is coming whether we like it or not (just look at how many deals Polygon has made with web2 giants in the last year). But reading these anti-crypto pieces in the mainstream media are heartbreaking.

They're heartbreaking because I know they're preventing so many people from jumping in and building with us.

I know that billions of people will live better lives when their work doesn't have to be tied to the opportunities available in the country they live in (DAOs). When people from every country have access to premiere financial tools and stable currencies (DeFi). When creators can truly own the work they create on the internet rather than being a stuck in platform monopolies, where ownership and scarcity are not real (NFTs).

All the traditional journalists see are the scams and the ponzis and the greed. What do we have to do to bring them into the light?

Ending on a happy note

I will leave you with a June 1996 Wired magazine cover of Bill Gates laying on a pool floaty talking on a cell phone, dug up from the Internet Archive:

Quorum is a metalabel for creators shipping work about DAOs. Check out Quorum’s newsletter, podcast, and Twitter.

Writer: Samantha Marin

My college writing class took a tour of The New Yorker office instead of having class one day.

We all got on the 1 train, which is a straight shot down the west side of Manhattan. I remember trying to dress up a little bit, but of course none of us had anything actually nice enough to wear hanging in our dorms. We waited on the quiet mid-day train and chatted about the class books while watching the stops creep closer and closer to the One World Trade Center stop nearly at the tip of the island.

The train stop lets you off in dramatic fashion. You get off inside the Oculus building, which kind of looks like a cross between a spaceship and a white porcupine that landed from outer space between the modern skyscrapers of downtown Manhattan. From step one, you're in a place completely different from normal life—or at least what is normal to the vast majority of the world that doesn't spend their time in downtown New York. You have to prevent yourself from craning your head back and admiring it, or else you'll look like a tourist. It was a shock to the system coming from the rickety old halls we spent our time in classes up north.

Image source.

Our professor brought us into the lobby of the One World Trade Center, which has the modern, clean, uppity feel you'd expect out of a big fancy glass building with a nickname like The Freedom Tower. There were  security guards in suits and ties hanging out behind desks. They took our pictures one by one, printed us one-time passes with barcodes, and let us through the turnstiles that gate off the elevators. We all got into one elevator (I think there were only a dozen of us in that class) and took the ear-popping ride up to the Condé Nast floor.

"We used to have our own floor," my professor said when we got off. "But Condé Nast is smaller now, so we share it with Bon Appétit." We all wandered into the hall, seeing the old New Yorker covers lining the walls.

Our professor led us down the corridor and into the main area where the writers and editors worked. This was mid-day on a pre-pandemic Wednesday, so everyone was at their desks. There were stacks of books and papers everywhere. It had a pretty normal office-y vibe except for the wrap-around views of lower Manhattan from the windows.  

We went into the head Fiction Editor's office, which was small and cozy and seemed like a place to sit and read fiction from pre-published editor's copies of books all day.

A conversation around how people get started at The New Yorker broke out. We asked my professor and the fiction editor eagerly—we were Juniors after all! "Real life" was close!

The answers from the staff were all friends-of-friends, I-went-to-grad-school-with-so-and-so, met-at-a-reading-in-Brooklyn type thing. Lots of MFA grad school connections. You know, things like that.

The fiction editor said, "The New Yorker doesn't even post writing jobs online, it's all recommendations." Quizzical looks. Clarification from my professor:

"You need to know someone."

And suddenly everything lost its sparkle and the wraparound views weren't so stunning anymore.

This might sound like a college kid learning for the first time that nothing is a true meritocracy in this world, even though the College Board SAT and tone-deaf political ads about the middle class American dream tell us that meritocracy is alive and well. But this experience turned on a deeper light bulb moment for me, which has been dimly burning in the back of my mind through my DAO journey, and has been ignited into a bonfire with the creation of the Quorum metalabel.

Old school media is extremely gated. There's a password to punch in, then there's a gate that requires a key, then there's a tunnel that you need to know a secret code to enter, and then you walk five miles, and then you arrive.

Anyone who's tried to work in film, music, fashion, or writing knows about these layers of gating.

That's why Youtube and Soundcloud and indie labels and Etsy and fan fiction and Substack have been so revolutionary: they open up opportunities for people who don't have the password and the key and the secret code to squeak into the ranks of the old-school tastemakers. This is the promise of web2, the individualism, the I-don't-need-The-New-Yorker-to-make-money-writing dream.

The dream is good. It's created an explosion in creativity from people who would've been blocked out previously. It's opened up entire new worlds of media so you can go down a niche rabbithole of anything you want for hours and hours.

But we've lost a really important thing when we got rid of the old labels and replaced them with ungated, open content creation: tastemaking.

The tastemaking crisis of web2

Taste is about preference. When someone has "good taste" they have well-refined preferences. Taste sounds like a snotty term that a sommelier uses, but we all have tastes, even if we're not talking about taste in full-bodied reds from Northern Italy. We have taste in music, taste in design, and taste in literature (even if your literature is banger twitter threads, that's still taste).

The internet makes it much harder to curate your own taste, or to even know what your own taste is, through the noise of everything being fed to you 24/7.

It might take hundreds of hours of watching Youtube videos and subscribing to channels, all the while feeding the algorithm more data, for you to find your "taste" in Youtube videos. It might take fifty different Substack recommendations from ten different people to figure out what your taste in long form essays is.

Taste curation has basically disappeared with the internet we know today.

I see metalabels, or small and extremely value-aligned media DAOs, as a possible solution to the crisis in tastemaking.

A lot of web3 media thinkers talk about the curation layer of media. How curation is the new creation. How decentralized media is more about curating the good stuff than actually creating the good stuff.

That layer is exactly what old media brands like The New Yorker do—they tell you what their idea of good taste is.

I see metalabels as a way for emergent web3-native brands to be the tastemakers and the creators all in one.

Metalabels are groups of creators who share the same worldview and come together to release work under a common brand name. Quorum is a metalabel, currently with just one writer (me) and one podcast host (Brandon). So, we're not really tastemakers yet. We're not even really a metalabel yet—that's where we're going.

The future of Quorum and of metalabels generally is to be a tastemaker like The New Yorker while still achieving the creator autonomy of platforms like Substack. Metalabels can be the holy grail of high quality content and freedom of creativity.

This holy grail is a small circle of creators, all creating content that's super aligned within the same realm of taste, while still retaining their own creative autonomy within the bounds of the brand.

The holy grail of content, plotted on x and y axes

Let's look at that holy grail: more opportunity and freedom for creators yet a tastemaking layer applied on top.

I'll explain the axes using the medium of writing as my baseline (but, swap The New Yorker for Disney and Substack for Youtube and you have the same idea, just different mediums).

Few can create: The New Yorker

Has a small team of writers and editors who come in through the password-key-tunnel method. Readers see the same names on the bylines week after week but come to know those writers like friends. Writers can create together or at least enjoy working side-by-side and don't have to run their own businesses—someone else handles the marketing.

Advantages:

• Readers know who/what to expect

• Can filter for talent or highly specific writing style

• Writers can work on the same piece for a long time and still get a salary

• Writers have the joy of creating with other skilled writers

• Very little to no spammy or thin writing for SEO/affiliate marketing

Disadvantages:

• Limited perspectives

• Shutting out dissenting opinions and minorities

• Writing can become dull/neutral so the brand can please a wide audience

• Innovation and new ideas are slow

• Always feels a step behind

• Bureaucracy is inevitable

Many can create: Substack

Anyone, anywhere can become a full-time writer on the internet, making six figures writing any newsletter you can imagine. Writers can get as niche as they want to fit their specific audience. The ceiling of possibility is limitless, but you're running your own show and trying to out-compete other writers.

Advantages:

• Diverse perspectives across the platform

• Fresh ideas

• Writers can write and publish a story in the same day with no red tape

• Writers can niche down to fit their audience and interests

• Your background/resume/connections/ability-to-know-the-password-at-the-gate don't matter

• Dissenting opinions encouraged (but often segmented and radicalized by the algorithms, unfortunately)

Disadvantages:

• Noisy

• Can't filter for quality/talent easily

• Overrun with copycats, and even bots for shorter form content (Twitter)

• Isolating for creators

• Zero-sum competition for attention

• Ideas get recycled to the point where they're no longer original

• Spammy or thin writing for SEO or affiliate marketing purposes

• Writers need to write and run a marketing business at the same time to make money

Tastemaking done for you: The New Yorker

There's a "vibe" that everyone who reads it knows. You can say "That's a New Yorker story" with confidence. There's a certain echelon of writing that's allowed and everything that doesn't meet it lands on the cutting room floor. There's an extremely specific editing style that builds and refines readers' taste in essays, poetry, and short fiction.  

Advantages:

• Readers can refine their taste without tons of extra work

• A coherent narrative and worldview is presented

• Writers have editors they can trust to make their work better

Disadvantages:

• Usually need to subscribe or pay to receive it (an advantage or a disadvantage depending on where you sit)

• Can become radicalized especially if it's a small group creating it

• Can become snotty/exclusive/too uppity

• Taste standards are slow to change

Manual tastemaking: Substack

Readers have to go hunting for the best writers, and writers have to work hard to find their audience.  Of the 100 newsletters a reader finds, they probably stick with two of them. But those two newsletters are so niche and specific to their interests that they don't just passively scroll through them—they love them, so much that on average 22% are willing to support via Patreon.

Advantages:

• Readers and writers can create a super unique taste profile for themselves

• Joy and thrill of discovery

• Can go as niche as you want

• Refine for yourself as your interests change

Disadvantages:

• Takes a ton of time, research, and SEO to matchmake readers and writers

• Requires both writers and readers to already have some idea of what their taste is

• Hard to know what's marketing copy and what's not

• The taste profile is probably at least partially fed to readers by the algorithm (not as much choice as you think you have)

Metalabels are a place where creation is wide but tastemaking is tight

Qualities that metalabels have:

• You don't need a secret code to get in. You just need to create high quality content that readers enjoy. More like Substack.

• There's a unified brand and general taste bracket that the creators all fit into. More like The New Yorker.

• Creators have freedom within their niche. There's no editor coming in and telling you to put the ö in coördinate (this is a real thing The New Yorker does) or slashing your piece onto the cutting room floor for reasons unknown to you. More like Substack.

• You have colleagues/co-creators to share ideas with and go through deep creative work together. No more creator economy isolation. More like The New Yorker.

• You can work/write/create when and where you want. No need to live off the 1 train in Manhattan. You can hold another job and write on different platforms without feeling like you're competing. More like Substack.

• You can share marketing and sponsorship resources so you're not running a whole business and doing the emotional and intellectual labor of creating all by yourself. More like The New Yorker.

• You can write and publish something in the same day. Fast ideas, fast innovation, no red tape. More like Substack.

• You can reach a wider audience with your work because it's bundled into a brand reaching a wider taste bracket than you can reach in your niche. More like The New Yorker.

Metalabels can play more freely between the two extremes of content

Any metalabel can tip closer to Substack or closer to The New Yorker. The key is finding that happy medium that works for the specific metalabel.

I imagine many metalabels will float around, trying to find their place in the axes of creation and tastemaking.

Metalabels in their early days will probably look like this:

Metalabels will be all over the two axes for awhile. Maybe they'll always be all over them. The thing that's exciting is that they can play more freely between the two extremes in ways that The New Yorker or Substack cannot.

Metalabels as media DAOs

Many metalabels will be run as DAOs. They'll issue a token, gate membership based on NFTs, have a multisig (or many), hold on-chain votes followed by automatic on-chain execution, and call themselves media DAOs before they call themselves metalabels.

I also see a possibility where multiple metalabels sharing the same worldview all come together into a media DAO. Or possibly going the other way—a media DAO splitting into various metalabels.

But, many metalabels probably won't operate as DAOs. They might stay firmly planted in fiat world. All that matters is that we're experimenting with the structures that work for metalabels and not reigning them in too tight too early.

Metalabels have a ton of potential. And I can't wait to grow Quorum as a metalabel and see where it goes.

We did pre-web1 and web1 media: The New Yorker.

We did web2 media: Substack.

It's time for web3 media: metalabels.

Recommended Reading

• One reader tries to compile The New Yorker's style manual backwards—by reading articles and finding consistencies that aren't written elsewhere. (The famous ö, for example.)

• Ancient thread (11 years old!!) where readers try to describe The New Yorker's style, a.k.a. the taste of the writers and editors there. It's quite indescribable—that's taste.

• I found out that they actually do publish some jobs for The New Yorker—basically all editors. No writers to be found!

• Why We're Freaking Out About Substack by Ben Smith, published in The New York Times.

• Evolution of the Solopreneur by Austin Robey, published on Metalabel

Episode to check out:

The first episode of the DAO Toolkit went live on Monday! Brandon and I chatted about shiny object syndrome and cultivating focus in the DAO space. Give it a listen here.

Quorum is a metalabel for creators shipping work about DAOs. Check out Quorum’s newsletter, podcast, and Twitter.

Writer: Samantha Marin

Quorum is going multiplayer.

The Quorum newsletter is becoming more than a newsletter: it's becoming a metalabel.

What’s a metalabel?

A metalabel is defined as:

A release club where groups of people who share the same interest drop and support work together. It’s a lightweight structure that creates economic, emotional, and creative alignment between collaborators.....A metalabel is creativity in multiplayer mode: groups of people pooling skills, audiences, and resources in support of a larger creative vision or purpose.

— What's a metalabel? from metalabel.xyz

When I started this newsletter in March, I wanted a space to share ideas and opinions with the wider DAO ecosystem. Since then, I've been learning about metalabels and how web3 media can make sharing creations as a team so muchn richer than playing the content creator game alone.

So, I decided it was time to grow.

I'm very excited to announce that Quorum is growing into a brand bigger than just my writing. Brandon Nolte, creator and host of the Bounty Hunter podcast, and I are joining forces to build the Quorum metalabel: a brand where writers, podcasters, and creators ship their work about DAOs.

Brandon and I collaborated on a podcast mini series called the DAO Contributor Toolkit, which will be released soon on the new podcast (Bounty Hunter turned Quorum). Through our conversations we realized that we had the same goals for our creations, as well as the same beliefs on DAOs as the future of work. We were also serving the exact same audience.

So why not join forces?

That's when we decided to bring both platforms—the newsletter and the podcast—into a single metalabel, which will grow to include more creators over time.

Inspired by metalabel pioneers like Yancey Strickler, we decided to build something bigger than ourselves while still retaining our individual autonomy and creative directions.

We're building a metalabel (lowercase m) which is separate from (but inspired by) Metalabel*,** *the uppercase-M organization building tools for metalabel owners to use to collaborate.

https://twitter.com/metalabel_xyz/status/1577636579589619712?s=20&t=ViD9q0yPOvxnSTz3hihQlA

Shared beliefs of creators in the Quorum metalabel

A brand must be unified in more ways than just name. And one of the core elements of a metalabel is a shared point of view amongst creators. Brandon and I share a few core beliefs that we will carry through the Quorum metalabel:

• DAOs are the future of work. In ten years, people will be more excited about joining a DAO than joining a traditional corporation. A career in a DAO will be just as desirable in 2030 as a Silicon Valley tech job was in 2017.

• DAOs still have a long way to go (and that's okay). We're not infinitely bullish on DAOs. We're okay with shining the light on the not-so-great parts of DAOs and providing space to explore solutions.

• Web3 is positive sum. We're stoked on the all-ships-rise mindset that web3 enables. We seek to build and participate in positive sum economics and business models. Collaboration over competition, always.

• Learning comes first. Both the Quorum newsletter and the Bounty Hunter podcast were started so we could learn more about the DAO space and explore through our mediums of choice. The Quorum metalabel, therefore, will continue to be about learning and exploring the DAO space. If you're not learning while doing it, is it worth it?

Roadmap Lite (we’re still figuring it out)

Our north star is to build a crypto-enabled media organization in the highest echelon of quality. As Vogue is to fashion and ESPN is to sports, Quorum will be to DAOs. But it will be a whole lot more web3, more user-owned, more transparent, more fluid, and more fun than any of the media engines of the past.

We're not here to recreate web2 media. We're here to create a whole new kind of media.

Here are some steps we'll take to get there:

To start, the Bounty Hunter podcast will be rebranded to Quorum, and we'll each continue releasing our own work in our own streams. We will share resources on the business side, such as sponsorships and marketing. Eventually, we will onboard more creators to the metalabel so we can all release work under the Quorum brand and ethos.

Our next big step will be to build a tight-knit, highly-aligned DAO of creators who release work under the Quorum label. Think of it as a web3-enabled media engine: a DAO of creators who share the same vision for DAOs, creating their own work and releasing it together.

The creators we onboard will be top quality in their mediums of choice. Onboarding new creators will likely be slow and deliberate to keep quality high and value alignment strong. We may also have guest writers and creators contribute their work in exchange for incentives like governance power or sponsorship revenue.

We are confident with our direction, but how we get there will be up to the many decisions we make as a group. We know our north star, but how we get there could change as we grow as a brand.

https://twitter.com/austinrobey_/status/1572584584709308419?s=20&t=ViD9q0yPOvxnSTz3hihQlA

Readers and listeners, we appreciate you. More to come soon.

The possibilities of the Quorum metalabel are vast. They're vast because of you. Readers and listeners, thank you so much for being here*.* We'll share more soon on how you can get involved in the Quorum metalabel. Until then, thanks for being part of this ride and for making DAOs the most exciting space to be creating content on.

See you all around!

Sam and Brandon

Reach out to either of us on Twitter to connect, ask questions, or let us know what you'd like to see next :)

Sam's twitter

Brandon's twitter

Learn more about metalabels

• metalabel.xyz

• Re-bundling the creator economy + labels in web3: On the Other Side podcast episode with Yancey Strickler

• Post-individualism, metalabels, and web3: Interdependence podcast episode with Yancey Strickler

Quorum is a metalabel for creators shipping work about DAOs. Check out Quorum’s newsletter, podcast, and Twitter.

Writer: Samantha Marin

This research was funded by a grant from the DAO Research Collective as part of their mission to accelerate DAO functionality. Thank you to the DRC for their help in refining this idea and editing the article.

Today, DAOs are often governed like corporations with a shareholder model. In this model, you can only give governance rights to one group of individuals, and other people end up using shadow or accidental hierarchies and opaque forms of power to get things done. But what if DAOs operated less like corporations and more like states? What if you could give governance rights to multiple groups?

Vitalik has some ideas:

Because DAOs do not have a sovereign above them. . . it is precisely the design of sovereigns (political science), and not corporations, that DAOs have more to learn from.

—Vitalik Buterin, DAOs are not corporations: where decentralization in autonomous organizations matters

**There are two DAOs that are already experimenting with the learnings of political science rather than corporations: jokedao and the Optimism Collective.  **

These DAOs are experimenting with bicameral governance to solve the inherent coin voting problem: the wealthier you are, the more tokens you can buy and the more influence you have.

“If you’re a state, you don’t want the people with the most money to have the most power,” said David Phelps, co-creator of jokedao. “That’s not creating an inclusive environment for new members to come in and be able to participate.”

This emergent bicameralism is fascinating, and could be a landmark moment for new governance models in DAOs: models built more like the United States or Japan than Microsoft or Meta. These governance experiments give power to two sides: the wealthy, otherwise the sole holders of power under the corporate model and, on the other side, the contributors.

Why Bicameralism?

A bicameral system of government has two legislative chambers – two governing bodies with the power to put rules in place. Much of the world uses a bicameral system: 40% of the world’s legislatures are two-housed.

This system is designed to share power between two different groups by allowing them to elect their own representatives: one group might be “the elites” and one might be “the multitudes.”

For example, the British Parliament has a House of Lords and a House of Commons, two bodies with potentially conflicting interests that moderate one another’s power.

The U.S. has its own version of a two-house model. The Senate has two senators from each state, meaning that each state has its interests represented equally. The House of Representatives has different numbers of representatives per state based on state population, so the quantities of people are equally represented.

Bicameral systems introduce checks and balances and give states more stable and equitable governance. These checks and balances are designed to mitigate the risk that any stakeholder becomes too influential, and to limit extremist actions.

Bicameralism in web3: playing with new paradigms

Web3 organizations have started instituting bicameralism in the form of one house for token holders one for NFT holders. Given recent interest in 1-person-1-vote methods, as well as the drawbacks of coin voting governance giving too much power to a small group of stakeholders, this two house model is becoming more attractive.

NFTs satisfy the one-person-one-vote need, in the same way the Senate in the United States represents each state equally with two senators. And coin voting pleases the “skin in the game” folks, much like the House of Representatives is roughly based on the population in each state. Each side has an area where they can exercise influence, and they “check” each other. Bicameralism might allow for the best of both worlds in web3—let's explore.

jokedao: Playing serious games with governance

The governance setup

jokedao is building and testing governance primitives through a game called the jokerace. The DAO is one of the most prominent (if not the only) examples of a community-run governance experiment that lacks a centralized committee, association, or other core body that leads it. And, if it proves the concept, it could change the governance landscape for DAOs today.

jokedao has a two-house structure: an NFT House and a Token House.

jokedao’s NFT house is for those who purchase the NFTs on Opensea. jokedao’s NFTs are membership tokens that allow holders to join the Joke Council and determine the future roadmap of the jokedao project, set joke game rules, draft proposals to put before JOKE holders, govern the treasury of NFT revenue, and veto decisions coming out of the house of  $JOKE.

The house of $JOKE, on the other hand, governs jokeraces. In the foundational jokenomics article, the jokeraces are described as “a governance game engine that can be used for contests, curation, bounties, endorsements, giveaways, user-generated roadmaps, governance, and more.” This house, the token house, is geared toward those who are actively contributing—they earn the token by participating in the game, and only a small percentage of the token is available to purchase on Uniswap.

In other words, the NFT house is for the whales ready to deploy capital, and the token house is for the contributors who are working to earn their tokens.

While there are many nuances and other parameters within the roles of the houses, here's my distilled version of roles:

“If you contribute and you work, you’re actually getting rewarded much more than you would be able to get on Uniswap,” said David Phelps. “The tokenomics is designed to actually reward the people who are working and participating, rather than the people who just buy their way in.”

Of course, Phelps admitted, people could sell the $JOKE tokens they earn by winning the game, thus increasing Uniswap liquidity and allowing more whales to purchase them. But the principle of the game remains the same: contributors are rewarded in JOKE for working, and whales purchase the output (jokes) via NFTs.

Phelps said that one of the main reasons they chose a two-house governance structure is because jokedao truly is two products: the jokerace (the game) and the platform (the jokeraces, which can be forked, split, or shipped to other DAOs).

This makes the separation of powers more clear: the jokerace parameters can be set by the NFT house, while the platform can be experimented with in the token house.

The game

jokedao generates revenue by selling NFTs of the winning jokes of its jokeraces. This revenue supports the project, but also goes toward funding public goods. The DAO itself does not exist purely to make jokes, even though its demeanor may suggest otherwise. The jokes are simply a byproduct of the governance testing.

The game, the jokerace, is the testing ground for the jokedao tokenomics scheme.

Every time there’s a jokerace, JOKE holders cast their tokens to vote on what they think will be the second-best, third-best, or fourth-best joke, depending on what the NFT holders decide that week. That’s right—the joke that comes in “first,” or gets the most tokens, doesn’t win; the one that gets the second-most, third-most, fourth-most, or even fewer tokens does (depending on the parameters for that week). This prevents JOKE whales from choosing the first place joke every week by allocating all their tokens to it. It also introduces a unique coordination problem—players need to allocate their tokens to the joke they think will get the second most tokens, not the most.

The “winning” joke, meaning the joke with the second-most tokens allocated to it, is then minted as an NFT. In the case where the council chose the third or fourth joke to win, that would be minted instead. These are available to purchase on Opensea and are used as membership for entry into the council.

The person who submitted the winning joke gets more JOKE tokens, therefore accumulating more voting power. But the people who voted on the “winning” joke also get rewarded with more JOKE tokens proportional to the amount of tokens they allocated to it.

And there are even more layers to the game, including penalization for voting on the jokes that lose, vote decay (the earlier you vote, the more rewards you get, the later you vote, the fewer rewards), and themes that would allow one-time groups to join, such as specifically-invited DAOs.

The coordination ramifications are far-reaching, and an entire article on the game theory of jokedao could be written. But for now, you need to know that the jokerace is where governance is put to the test.

The ramifications

The jokedao bicameral model solves one massive problem in web2 that’s unrelated to governance: the user research problem. Right now, users are generally considered a black box in the web2 space. Companies need to invest significantly into user research teams, who then seek out users willing to share insights with them. But in jokedao, the JOKE holders propose product features and concepts, a “user-generated roadmap,” for the builders.

The jokedao creators envision this as “a new paradigm of communities emergently voting on features they’d like a core DAO team to develop while letting that core team have full creative vision.” The product builders would have direct access to user research and insights, because the users would be the ones constructing the roadmap.

In essence, the JOKE holders can create a user-generated product roadmap for NFT holders to follow, which is unique because products built in a DAO can be overly-open and disorganized, or overly centralized and opaque. jokedao creates a model where a small, centralized product group can be guided by the users of the product.

The tokenomics paper reads:

By creating one house for those with financial power to sustain the project and one house for the actual builders and players to grow the project with their contributions, jokedao ensures that the powerful governors are always beholden to the actual contributors who give value to the system in the first place.

Tweet from jokedao.

A governance system that incentivizes both financial power and contribution, and solves for the product-market fit problem? jokedao’s model is pretty exciting for the DAO ecosystem. By giving both the working contributors and wealthier whales a say, jokedao is giving a voice to two major groups in the jokedao ecosystem.

But bicameral governance experiments in DAOs don’t stop there. Optimism, one of the biggest names in the Ethereum ecosystem, is getting bicameral, too.

The Optimism Collective: funding public goods, bicameral style

Optimism is a Layer 2 blockchain, or rollup, that seeks to make transacting on Ethereum faster and cheaper. It generates revenue through the payments users make to transact on the network. Instead of this revenue going to investors, it's reserved for public goods funding.

The Optimism Collective is governed by two houses: The Citizens’ House and The Token House.

Roles of the houses of Optimism

The Citizens’ House has domain over retroactive public goods funding, which is a core objective of the collective. Citizenship is tracked through soulbound NFTs, which are non-transferrable NFTs that cannot be traded, and which are granted by the Optimism Foundation (the core team building Optimism).

The Token House has domain over project incentives, protocol upgrades, and treasury funds and is governed with the Optimism (OP) token.

Both houses have domain over network parameters and granting citizenship (who receives citizenship, a.k.a soulbound NFTs).

The houses in Optimism are flipped from jokedao. The soulbound NFTs of the Citizens' House are not financialized, while OP is tradeable on exchanges and can be bought by whales. Therefore, in Optimism, the token house serves whales while the NFT house serves the longterm contributors, builders, and core team.

jokedao's choice to restrict JOKE on exchanges created an environment where you can only work to earn the token, whereas the NFTs are available on Opensea every week.

It's interesting to see the two approaches and how a token house does not necessarily serve the whales in the governance system. jokedao and Optimism are both playing with governance levers in unique ways.

Currently, the Optimism Foundation is stewarding the collective and plans to dissolve once the collective is ready to operate on its own. This progressive decentralization of an organization has become common in the crypto and DAO space, as core and founding teams are often not ready to hand over control before setting certain mechanisms in place to protect the project. But, this means the collective is not yet fully decentralized (and, given that we’re still defining the word decentralization when it comes to humans interacting, I’m not sure when we will ever know if something is “truly” decentralized).

How both houses will vote on network parameters and citizenship is also left to be determined, since they would have different voting methods and could therefore be hard to merge.

The ramifications

The Optimism Collective is paving the way in exploring the governance use cases for soulbound NFTs, even though it may not be everyone’s first choice of NFT distribution. Soulbound NFTs are controversial because attackers, governments, or other malicious actors could assign these nontransferable “identities” to people without their permission, leaving the owner unable to remove the NFT. So, the fact that the Optimism Collective is implementing them from the get-go is bold and industry-defining.

Another important ramification of this governance setup is that Optimism is a high-profile network that is making a clear statement that a simple token voting setup is not the best solution. They could have implemented a basic coin voting structure like the other big names in Ethereum—players such as Uniswap and Aave—but chose a more experimental structure that hasn’t yet been battle-tested.

However, they have made a few more traditional choices. For example, tokenholders can delegate their tokens, and many of the delegates are familiar faces from other DAOs with a delegate structure. It's possible that the Optimism Collective turns to a primarily delegated voting structure with the soulbound NFTs just representing members of the core team and not actually used in governance.

Even though it’s still too early to tell if Optimism’s structure will prove fruitful (we have less data than jokedao) I’m hopeful and excited by the fact that such a big player is getting their hands dirty with an NFT house.

Drawbacks of bicameral governance

Both Optimism and jokedao lose something crucial with their governance structures: the ease of onboarding new members that accompanies a simple coin-voting model.

“The biggest challenge is that you’re always trying to balance between the most advanced system that in theory is best, with—in a viral world that prioritizes marketing—the system that is simplest to communicate to users,” said Phelps. He explained how OlympusDAO had an incredibly complex tokenomics scheme which was distilled into the simplistic 3,3 meme, helping it go viral. But if the team had led with the complicated details when trying to onboard new users, the Olympus model might not have had the same viral quality.

Onboarding and, more simply, explaining their model to users, is the bridge that jokedao and the Optimism Collective have to cross. Will they find a memeable method to explain via the short-attention-span-style of writing on Twitter? If they do, wide success could be around the corner.

Tweet

Another drawback of bicameralism is deadlock. Two-house systems are famous for creating a slow-moving government. Proposals (bills) can get stalled for months or years. Government shutdowns occur. Progress is slow. In other words, it’s not always a great fit for DAOs, unless it is carefully designed specifically for DAOs.

However, there is an argument to be made around whether these drawbacks are features or bugs. Slow progress means extreme changes don’t happen on the fly, and people can take time to think about the consequences of the proposal passing. While “bicameral” and “slow-moving” aren’t synonyms, they could be close cousins, and DAOs will need to tread lightly when designing their systems.

A bicameral future for DAOs requires a 3,3 meme and an experimenter’s mindset

DAOs operate in an even more unpredictable space than the organizations of the past (something I’ve written on before). But when it comes to predicting the future of DAO governance and tokenomics, I’d venture to say that until a simple proof-of-concept for bicameral governance is achieved, DAOs will continue to operate in their token-holder-heavy, single-house structures. It's just too risky for many DAOs to take an experimental leap with their community and treasury, especially if they're deploying on-chain governance contracts from the start.

A combination of ERC20 and ERC721 governance is complicated, and there are few resources available. So, new DAO builders may shy away.

But, if we come up with a meme-able version of bicameralism, simplified down to something like Olympus’s “3,3” Twitter meme, there could be an explosion in bicameral governance.

I’m hopeful of more simple structures and models to make bicameral governance more accessible and safe for builders to try. And, I’m optimistic that we’ll see both jokedao and the Optimism Collective ship great products, fund amazing public goods, and create evangelists who can exchange ideas and experiment with new bicameral structures.

DAOs taking the steps to operate more like states is something that makes me bullish on the space. Until we can address the old paradigms we don’t want, and cycle in the new paradigms we do want, we’ll be locked into one style of voting. In the meantime, jokedao and the Optimism Collective are pushing us one step further in the evolution of DAO governance.

Recommended Reading

• Moving beyond coin voting governance by Vitalik Buterin

• DAOs are not corporations: where decentralization in autonomous organizations matters by Vitalik Buterin

• jokenomics by jokedao

• Introducing The Optimism Collective by The Optimism Collective

Thanks again to the DAO Research Collective for the grant to write this piece and their help with editing!

The DRC is doing a lot of cool things! I recommend checking them out on Twitter.

Quorum is a metalabel for creators shipping work about DAOs. Check out Quorum’s newsletter, podcast, and Twitter.

Writer: Samantha Marin

"Power is like water: it will go somewhere and it tends to accumulate in clusters: the more power a group has, the more resources they will have to aggregate power. The only way to counterbalance the concentration of power is intentionality and thoughtful implementation."

—Ted J Rau and Jerry Koch-Gonzalez, *Many Voices One Song: Shared Power with Sociocracy, *Ch.1 pg 15.

"Over 80% of all matter in the universe is made up of material scientists have never seen. It's called dark matter and we only assume it exists because without it, the behaviour of stars, planets and galaxies simply wouldn't make sense."

—Nola Taylor Tillman, Space.com, What is Dark Matter?

Image from esahubble.org, gathered from Wiki Commons.

Today, I'm going to explore one of the most contentious, slippery, and bungled topics in the DAO space today: power.

My thesis: when we equate governance rights with power, we leave out the other forms of power that agents use in a system.

I'm going to work on describing power as a concept and explore how it manifests in DAOs.

The second piece of my thesis: Like dark matter, I don't think power can be easily observed, much less controlled.

Let's begin:

Power is the ability to act

Tweet by @Caroline_Abry

In DAOs, we often confuse governance rights with power. **The ability to cast governance tokens to vote on a decision is not the same thing as the ability to act. **By giving a group governance rights we don't necessarily give them power: we simply give them governance rights.

When it comes to giving a group power, that isn't so cut and dry.

Power is much more slippery.

Power is the ability to put everything in motion to make that vote happen. Power is the ability to set rules around a proposal passing or a vote going through. It's the ability to push an initiative forward by requesting and securing funds, or to move it backward by getting the right people to vote "no," by vetoing, by fillibustering the forum, by delaying or gaslighting or any number of tools that come in the power toolbox.

In the words of Jacob Kaplan-Moss: "power is the ability to get shit done."

Getting shit done might look like shepherding a proposal from idea to execution and getting necessary votes along the way. It can also look like the inverse: stalling and debating and fillibustering a vote until it never goes through.

Power is when you see a direction and put things successfully in place to move toward executing it.

Power is getting to use the word “we” and following it with action

"Fundamentally, it’s the power of getting to use “we”: the power to speak on behalf of the organization. An individual contributor can’t say “we’re all getting new laptops” (well, they can, but it probably won’t happen); the CEO certainly can."

—Jacob Kaplan-Moss, The Three Kinds of Organizational Power

Power is the ability to be a decision-maker, to tell someone "yes" or "no" unilaterally, and to move confidently forward in one direction without significant blockers.

When working in a DAO, the word "we" can't be used very often in the way we know CEOs or directors to use it. But it can be used in different ways when coupled with action. Like these:

• "We should update our twitter bio." + action taken to update it = power

• "We should start a guild for this." + action taken to start the guild = power

• "We should run a poll to get soft consensus." + action taken to run that poll = power

If you're new to a DAO and you hear people talking about wanting to run a poll in a meeting, whoever posts and carries out the poll will likely have more power in your eyes. At least that is my experience.

Action is necessary for the "We" statement to hold any weight. For the contributor to accumulate power, they must follow their promises with action. In the DAO space, action is more important than credentials. So action creates more power than credentials.

Power is not inherently good or bad

"Power, like water, is neither good nor bad."

—Many Voices One Song: Shared Power with Sociocracy, Ch.1 pg 16, by Ted J Rau and Jerry Koch-Gonzalez

Power, like water, is an essential fact of life. We cannot have productive human activity without power residing somewhere. It's not good or bad, it just is.

When someone has power, is powerful, they're not inherently a good or bad person. The same goes for someone who lacks power, is powerless. While it can be hard to separate our individual connotations with words related to power, I believe it's essential to get to the root of what power truly means to have productive conversations about it.

When designing for power in DAOs, we often think about the powerful people as being the "bad ones." Maybe the whales are powerful because they have more governance rights and can combine "We" with action to get stuff done. But they are often seen as bad, when in reality they're just actors in a larger system of power distribution.

If the powerful people turn into dictators? Not a good thing, of course. But power distribution itself is bigger than any individual person.

There's also another side of power: are the people with more governance rights the ones building the governance processes and writing the proposals? Identifying where the doers and the decision-makers are is often harder than simply looking at who the whales are, and is much more of a gray area than pure black and white.

Power is dark matter

"Dark matter is a hypothetical form of matter thought to account for approximately 85% of the matter in the universe. Dark matter is called "dark" because. . . it does not absorb, reflect, or emit electromagnetic radiation (like light) and is, therefore, difficult to detect. Various astrophysical observations – including gravitational effects which cannot be explained by currently accepted theories of gravity unless more matter is present than can be seen – imply dark matter's presence."

—Wikipedia, Dark matter.

Dark Matter is the stuff in the universe that we can't define, but know it must be there because of the way galaxies, planets, and stars move through the universe. Rotational paths show that dark matter has to exist, even though we can't see it.

Power is dark matter because it causes other objects to move without asking permission: it just does. It is a force we cannot see that is always present, and is neither good nor bad. And, it's hard for outside observers to detect unless you see what is moving.

An outside observer of a system wouldn't see that the power distribution of the system is causing it to move in a certain way: they'd just see that it moves that way, without anyone guiding it. They'd assume the system behaves that way. But the reality is that something intangible must be there to move it. And that is power.

Image from NASA on the Wiki Commons.

When applied to a DAO, this is like looking at a proposal that passed and assuming the voters were the people with the power to say "yes." But there are so many smaller nuances that cannot be accounted for in that simple view. There were likely months of planning and deliberation amongst different teams before that proposal went live. There were people who were consulted and others who were stiffed. There were people who gave their "okay" to move it along. There were people who the proposer asked for feedback far in the early stages, and didn't get a nod of approval from, so the proposer rewrote some key sections.

**There were so many steps before taking it to vote to be approved by the token holders, who look like they're in power, but often aren't—they're just the final yes in a long series of yes's. **(Of course, this is not true of every DAO. It's just something I've observed.)

This dark-matter-style, socially-constructed power system lives underneath every governance structure, no matter how intricately constructed.

We only see the power because of what it moves around it. We cannot see the power itself. To fully experience it we must be immersed inside of it, deep in the trenches of proposal moving and governance and DAO work.

Token holders may have power, but they also may not. Governance rights and power are not the same, and that the latter is significantly harder to track, design for, and wrangle.

Power is mysterious, slippery, and strange. But it's everywhere, all the time. Just like dark matter.

Power commands respect, whether consciously or unconsciously

Tweet from MC10.

Power commands respect because it forces other actors to change their path to go around it or flow with it. The power of a full river rushing past you commands respect unconsciously, because you must act differently when it is full of whitewater, and thus have fewer choices. A deer standing on the edge of a stream cannot easily glide through it when it has Class 5 rapids cruising past. The power exerted by one actor forces other actors in the system to change. But when the water is low and power minimal, the deer has more power—increased agency and choice—to cross the river.

The same goes for planets and dark matter. Dark matter is not conscious and is not consciously telling planets to orbit a certain way (as far as we know, of course. I'll sidestep the theology today). But the planets (also unconscious) must bend their orbit paths to the power of the dark matter: they don't have a choice but to respect the dark matter.

**When someone in a DAO is powerful, their words and messages and forum posts are given more weight than those of others—more respect. This is true even if the system wasn't designed to give more power to this person. **There isn't anything tangible being exercised with this kind of soft power: it's simply dark matter pushing quietly in the background.

For example, a single person commenting that they dislike the direction of a particular forum post can shift the entire conversation away from executing that post because of the respect given to that person, and therefore the power they have in the system. This is true even if the person isn't aware of the power they're exerting.

Power is what’s left over when the entire system has been designed

"The primary evidence for dark matter comes from calculations showing that many galaxies would behave quite differently if they did not contain a large amount of unseen matter. Some galaxies would not have formed at all and others would not move as they currently do."

—Wikipedia, Dark Matter

When you've designed everything in the system—from governance rights to team structures to documentation practices to decision-making processes—power is what's left over. It's the stuff you can't design outright for because it will do it's own thing.

Power is everything that's left over. It's the movers we can't see. It's the energy that slips between our fingers.

In theory it can be designed for—this group has the power to approve treasury transactions, that group has the power to onboard and distribute new talent throughout the DAO—but a good power design requires the agents to buy-in to the power design, which is easier said than done. I'm not sure if a "power design" in the way I'm thinking about it is even possible.

Anyone with imbalanced power can block others in the system, whether through malicious means or not. It doesn't matter how many tokens you hold or what your role says your job is or what your team assumes you're responsible for doing. All that matters is how you actually exercise the power you have.

In the case of the known universe, there are a lot of leftovers.

Image accessed on Consciousness and the Universe, data and imagery provided by the ESA.

I'm not sure if power is 95% of DAOs, like dark matter and energy is for the universe. But I could be convinced.

Power is agency, problem-solving, and self-direction

"Instead of waiting for someone else to solve the problem—as much as you think it makes sense—just run ahead and do it yourself even if you’re not sure you can. In web3 land this could mean building a frontend or tool on your protocol that you thought the community should build. Within a company it may mean proactively pushing ahead on an area of a project that another team would be expected to do. In a community it might mean holding a dinner or event to create the space to discuss a certain issue or theme. "

—Patronus Problems by jacob, co-founder of Zora

The power that is actualized and distributed in DAOs is the power of agency. You get to choose your adventure. You get to reclaim your power and vote with your actions. In DAOs, as in life, how you show up matters. With the freedom of self-expression, you are faced with a nebulous question, what are you going to do with it?

—Siddhearta, Finding Freedom and Agency in DAOs

No one can just "give" you power. You take it yourself.

Part of the reason I don't believe you can just be granted power is because no one can give you the skill of self-direction. No one can teach you to guide your own actions. The idea can be coaxed out and cultivated, but cannot be granted via a shelf of self help books or a podcast by a motivational speaker. It must be discovered within.

Given that we were all brought up in a system of command and control, of sit-still-and-listen, of four-year degrees and five-year plans, realizing you have the agency to solve your own problems and that the universe won't solve them for you is quite a powerful thing. Realizing that there's no life path anymore, just a wide open expanse of blue sea, is terrifying and liberating. It is the true first step toward taking your power.

Having this realization in a DAO—and in any workplace—is incredibly important. Moving away from the learned helplessness we get in the workplace, and into our true agency and power, is pretty incredible stuff.

Take power by taking agency in your DAO. Making choices will lead to more power and more agency and more power and more agency....and the loop continues.

Power can emerge from ownership

I have noticed that DAOs tend to be better at enabling collective ownership at scale, even if their cultural understanding of the rights, responsibilities, and accountability associated with ownership is comparatively [to co-ops] underdeveloped.

—What Co-Ops and DAOs Can Learn from Each Other by Austin Robey

Even though DAOs are still figuring out what shared ownership means—as described in the quote above—it's incredible how they enable it at the scale that they do. Shared ownership is one of the main things that gets me excited about DAOs and what brought me into the space in the first place.

Shared ownership can create power because, in most of humanity, the owners are the ones who exercise the power. It's strange to take ownership over something that you don't actually own.

Which is why the "everyone's an owner" rallying cry statements of Pluralistic-Green, pre-web3 companies fall pretty flat.

Ownership creates the conditions for power.

You own a house, you use your power to paint the walls the color you want. You own a garden, you use your power to plant the vegetables you like to cook and the flowers you like to see brightening your yard.

Ownership is not explicitly necessary for power—you can still take hold of the dark matter of power and wield it without ownership—but ownership can be a shortcut to create the conditions for power.

You cannot tell someone to use power because they're an owner or to not use power because they're not an owner. But it would be weird to be an owner of a house and leave the walls as unpainted drywall when you move in, and would be equally weird and unlikely to take a bucket of paint to a wall that you don't own in a city you might not live in tomorrow.

When you own something you have an inherent motivation to improve it and work on it. Which creates agency and action. Which creates power.

Power can be associated with trust

". . .trust is the use of any assumptions about the behavior of other people."

—Trust Models by Vitalik Buterin

When an actor in a DAO is generally trusted in the community, they gain power, particularly through relationships. For example, an early leader in a DAO may have a lot of power. When they express their views in a certain way, the community may bend to accommodate those views because the community trusts that this individual has the DAO's best interest in mind and makes decisions that are good for the DAO.

That's why founders are such an important piece of the power puzzle in web3. In an industry where we are building trustless systems, we still need leaders to trust. Founders often become those de facto trust centers and accumulate power via trust.

Giving away power may be nearly impossible for founders unless they ghost the whole web3 ecosystem, even if they give away all the governance rights. For example, Andre Cronje gave away all the governance rights of Yearn to the community, but still remained a key figurehead of the protocol and revered in the DAO's onboarding materials. Even though he gave away all YFI (governance rights) it's nearly impossible to give up power (the dark matter) without completely stepping away.

The bonds of trust are stronger than most things in our universe.

Power is necessary to life

"Water that is allowed to flow will stay fresh and will reach all the places in the garden, nourishing each plant to flourish."

—Many Voices One Song: Shared Power with Sociocracy, Ch.1 pg 16, by Ted J Rau and Jerry Koch-Gonzalez

Rau and Koch-Gonzalez call Sociocracy "a complicated irrigation system," which distributes water to all the necessary places in the garden without over or under watering any specific area.

This complicated irrigation system to distribute our dark matter of power sounds fantastic. But I believe it's a lot harder to distribute real power because it's so slippery and hard to see. Even when you think you're distributing power to all corners, you might just be distributing governance rights that don't come with the dark matter style of power.

Like how an incoming tsunami is too much water at once, and a long drought is too little over a long period of time, power can be too much or too little at a time.

And power increasing at an overwhelming scale in a single direction will rip the system apart.

We'll turn to dark matter's even stranger sister—dark energy—for an idea on what an influx of power in a single direction could look like:

The phantom energy model of dark energy results in divergent expansion, which would imply that the effective force of dark energy continues growing until it dominates all other forces in the universe. Under this scenario, dark energy would ultimately tear apart all gravitationally bound structures, including galaxies and solar systems, and eventually overcome the electrical and nuclear forces to tear apart atoms themselves, ending the universe in a "Big Rip".

—Wikipedia, Dark Energy

A big rip. I don't wish this fate on any DAOs. But power is stronger than any person in any DAO.

The question is how it is used.

Recommended Reading

• The Three Kinds of Organizational Power by Jacob Kaplan-Moss

• Many Voices One Song: Shared Power with Sociocracy by Ted J Rau and Jerry Koch-Gonzalez

• Patronus Problems by jacob

• Finding Freedom and Agency in DAOs by Siddhearta

• What Co-Ops and DAOs Can Learn from Each Other by Austin Robey

Quorum is a metalabel for creators shipping work about DAOs. Check out Quorum’s newsletter, podcast, and Twitter.

Writer: Samantha Marin

*This week is sponsored by MIDAO, a DAO directory service that helps DAOs become legally compliant. You can find a description of them at them bottom of this newsletter, but if you're ready to jump right in, mention Quorum and you'll get 10% off your registration fee.  *

The uncanny valley of crypto

I've spent the last week on vacation at my grandparents' cottage, thinking about the uncanny valley of crypto.

We've had a little wooden eastern Ontario cottage in my family for six generations, so there's a lot of really really old stuff in it. Extremely old. Like, don't-touch-that-or-it-will-shatter old.

One of the most interesting old things there is a wall of weird looking tools from the early 1900s, many of which I can't identify the use for.

These tools got me thinking about the uncanny valley of crypto.

An uncanny valley is the wide degree of difference we humans feel when looking at a human-like robot and an actual human. Imagine a human-looking robot, then imagine the human who the robot was modeled after. Which one makes you feel totally skeeved out and a little scared? Probably the robot.

But no matter how close you can get the robot to look like a human, it will always freak you out a little bit because you know it's a robot.

That's the valley.

Image from Wikipedia.

In other words, the fake mirroring the real can never make us feel like we do when we interact with the real.

Like those tools on the wall (the real) sometimes the tools of crypto (imitating the real) feel like an uncrossable uncanny valley.

This uncanny valley is something I only feel when I step away from crypto for a bit. It's something new (I admit I don't step away very often).

Does crypto and DAO work ever feel really really far away from the rest of the world?

Like, you take a week off and you feel like crypto is just....poof, gone.

You go to the grocery store, you pay in cash. You go for a run, past neighborhoods with mailboxes and those little yard flags and SUVs parked in the driveways. You eat dinner and watch the sun set and read a book written before anyone knew what the internet was. You don't see anything related to crypto. Your laptop sits in a corner, and because the lid is closed, the world of crypto and DAOs no longer exists.

It still feels like crypto and DAOs are extremely far away on the line of....stuff out in the world. Like, my day-to-day work with DAOs couldn't be farther away from the tangible, physical world we live in.

It feels like this:

Why do I sometimes feel like I'm on another planet when working in the DAO space? Not in a weird hierarchical way, more like in an echo chamber way. Like an isolated bubble way.

I know we need to experiment and iron out processes and figure out how to run DAOs in a sustainable, profitable way before we can take them mainstream. And I'm incredibly excited for the years of experimentation and innovation we have ahead, and have never been so excited to work every day.

But it's weird to step away and turn it off for awhile, because it feels like when it's off....no one would notice.

I know people say this about new technologies: it feels like you're in the darkness for awhile. But, was the dot com bubble so incredibly far away? Was the first instance of the internet light years away from normal life? I don't know.

This feeling of distance is exacerbated by the fact that, at my family's cottage surrounded by old tools and no internet, I'm reminded by the sheer physicality of the old way of life. Every tool was something you touched with your own hands which then touched the earth. Every interaction with another human being required some sense of physical place—whether writing a letter or making a phone call or knocking on a door. The dark forest is not the dark forest of Ethereum, it's an actual forest filled with trees that can be harvested for wood and poison ivy that needs to be avoided and morels you can find in some mossy places to roast for dinner.

There's some kind of fierce nostalgia for this hyper-physicality, a nostalgia that veers in the opposite direction of the hyper-digital lives we lead now. Something that makes me feel kinda weird about all the metaverse stuff. Something that makes me just want to take a red canoe out on a cool misty morning on a quiet lake.

It's weird that I feel this nostalgia, because I've never known a world that's not digital. I grew up with the internet—school lunch tables were littered with colorful-cased iPod Touches and early iPhones. So the nostalgia is definitely not nostalgia, because I've never lived that pre-digital life. The nostalgia is something else.

Nostalgia for a solely physical world feels more like it's emerging out of the collective human consciousness than my own brain. Maybe reading too deep into Levin's grass cutting scene in Ana K (my professors talked about that one for hours). Or the times when I got tired of the loud city noises of my college dorm and needed to escape into the bucolic countryside of New England or the quiet antique furniture shops of Donna Tart's books. Maybe it actually is some kind of collective consciousness that I can't be aware of. Whatever it is, I felt it this week.

At the end of July, right before I went to my family's cottage, I hosted an Aragon twitter space with CityDAO. They're building a city around the concept of web3 higher education. I loved that twitter space, partly because I got to pull up a map on my computer and look at a map of Wyoming and zoom in on the area that CityDAO bought their first parcel of land. I got to talk about the physical terrain of the land, the little bumpy dirt road they have to drive in on, the windy high desert plains, and the moon-like features of the lesser-traveled places in the American West. We talked about how only certain cars with a high clearance can drive there, how the road is impassable in the winter, the land heavy with Wyoming snow, and that for some reason the Bureau of Land Management doesn't let them pave it.

I got out of my theory brain for a bit, my analogy brain. I didn't have to say, "You could compare it to...." which is my default when trying to understand the intangible. I just talked about a real piece of land that actually exists out there in the world.

Image from Nature.org.

That moment felt like jumping into a cold lake. I was talking about physical things and how they would affect real people. I was talking about the little college town I grew up in, and how the town around it grew to support the university, and that was their goal with CityDAO. I didn't have to turn on the analogies or the assumptions or the when-this-happens-this-will-come-next's. I just talked about tangible things in the present moment.

It's been a restorative week. But it's also been a weird one, grappling with the feelings that come with a pursuit that feels necessary and worthy, but also as far away as Andromeda.

I got to embrace those feelings, let them wash over me. It felt good, necessary. I can repeat "bear markets are for builders" as much as I want, but it still won't capture this sheer distance I sometimes feel when doing said "building."

I've been enjoying these questions. It's necessary to question things, and it makes me better at the work I do. I've just been letting myself kind of....bask in the questions, and seeing where they take me.

Will crypto cross the uncanny valley? Will it move from sorta-weird-and-not-for-most-humans, into this-is-just-as-normal-as-IRL? I think so, I hope so. But, if we're not critical and questioning every step of the way, I'm not sure we'll ever get there.

Here's to looking for that bridge.

Thanks again to MIDAO for sponsoring this newsletter:

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Quorum is a metalabel for creators shipping work about DAOs. Check out Quorum’s newsletter, podcast, and Twitter.

Writer: Samantha Marin

Header design: Cosmic Clancy

Imagine web3 is your high school.

DeFi is where the calculus superstars, the statistics gurus armed with graphing calculators, and the extroverted sports players ended up.

NFTs are where the art kids, the theater stars, and the band and orchestra members went.

DAOs are where all the history and literature nerds went. (I'm one of them.)

And it makes things.......interesting.

From a day-to-day level, DAO work can be pretty fun for the history and literature nerd in the DAO space. You might be in a meeting where an ancient Sumerian Zigguart takes up a whole slide deck screen (check). You might start talking about hunter-gatherer societies on a twitter space (check). And you might use philosophy and theory rather than accepted business best practice to back up your ideas in a forum post (check).

Moving through the DAO space has been a richly intellectual experience for me. As a former liberal arts college student, I can talk about theory and ideas all day. I've written thousands of words on a single line in an obscure Shakespeare play (Helloooo academia). I love this stuff.

But...even the English major in me can start wondering about the sustainability, the profitability, the business side of what we do. Especially as I watch Silicon Valley lay off employees as we nosedive into a recession.  

DAOs feel like they've emerged out of an academia-based, theory-loving mindset. That's not a bad thing—it just means we need to get creative when it comes to making enough money to pay contributors and keep on keepin' on.

In this hyper-financialized space, it's a huge paradox that most DAOs aren't profitable. It doesn't mean they won't ever be profitable, or that they can't work as effective businesses. But it does mean we need to shake away some old ideas of what it means to be a successful business and what DAOs need to support their core teams.

It seems that the sun has set on DAOs that tout their token as their product and that rely solely on "token go up" to pay contributors. But when it comes to other funding models, DAOs get stalled. They don't really launch products (yet). They sometimes provide services, but mostly within Web3. They don't talk much about business strategy or profit and loss.

It often feels like we're living in an alternate reality from how businesses work.

Of course, it's not all about money. But....when it comes to having a fleet of skilled  contributors giving at least 70% of their working hours to your org (let's be real...does anyone in web3 work on just one project?) money is a huge piece of the question that we can't ignore.

I think a lot of this trepidation around being blatant about money-making comes in part from the pure greed we saw in web2. Platform monopoly. Selling of personal data. Billionaires on billionaires on billionaires. It all got very icky over there. And in web3, we want to cleanse ourselves of the ick.

We're here to opt out, not opt back in.

But DAOs will be a very short-lived experiment if we don't get serious about making money.

Inspired by this Orca twitter space and the I Pledge Allegiance episode where Hasu dug deep on DAO profitability, I'm breaking down ways DAOs can marry business sense and DAO sense into something that maybe, someday, will become profitable.

Embrace hard decisions and disagree-and-commit

Making a solid profit in the web2 business world often means you're pretty ruthless about what you ship, who you hire, who your fire, what you do with your runway funding, and where your business is headed. (While these ruthless decisions can't always be the case in all web2 orgs, they're certainly the stigma). It feels centralized and just plain wrong when compared with the open-source, public goods, positive sum ethos of web3.

But, to build a lasting business, those decisions need to be made at some point. Unless you get very lucky, I'd say you need to make many hard decisions to make real, sustainable revenue.

Hard decisions are tough for DAOs because compromises are often needed to move a proposal to a vote, and a compromise isn't typically a hard decision, it's a "both parties are kinda happy but also kinda pissed off" decision.

How can DAOs embrace disagree-and-commit, where two parties agree to disagree but choose one path forward, rather than going around in circles looking for a compromise that doesn't exist? Especially when there are pass rates and voting thresholds required to move something forward?

One way is to keep most decision-making inside small groups who are accountable to the DAO for funding and critical feedback. Then, a smaller number of decisions pass through the voting process—but those would be the big-ticket items that need serious debate and discussion.

Keeping the majority of decision-making in a guild/team/pod level is a good way to drive the organization forward at speed, allowing small groups to make their own hard decisions. But, those teams must still be subject to the larger DAO—members, token holders, whoever is the decision-making group in your org—for funding.

Then, you end up with a pyramid like this:

Then, the hardest and most critical decisions are made at the DAO-level, keeping subject matter issues and small problems within teams. This gives the DAO a few hard decisions to focus on, rather than many hard ones.

Once a decision has to be made at the DAO level, it's extra hard because it takes longer to reach consensus. So only the biggest decisions should be reserved for it. Like this inverted pyramid:

Another way to approach hard decisions in DAOs is borrowed from the Teal philosophies: when the organization faces an existential threat, key leaders can use the advice process (asking others for feedback and advice on an idea) at scale to work out a solution.

Giving contributors shared responsibility over the issue—in this case, finding a profitable path forward—can help energize new leaders.

"When employees are fully engaged with the advice process in a crisis, they are asked to share responsibility for difficult decisions and trusted to make a contribution. This is empowering and helps the organization to grow."

—Reinventing Organizations Wiki, Crisis Management

Simply saying, "We need to find a way to make enough money doing X to pay our core team Y. How should we do that?" can be a powerful way to move a conversation forward about profitability. Leaders will emerge, and new solutions will come.

Having a visionary CEO is not a prerequisite to running a company…but having many great leaders is.

There's a pervasive idea in web2 that a visionary CEO is necessary for a company to be successful. Steve Jobs and Apple, Bill Gates and Microsoft, Elon Musk and Tesla, and Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook are the visionaries that are touted as the best of the best. Business leaders of web2 are skeptical of DAOs because of they lack that single visionary.

To me, that's like saying a great country needs to be ruled by a monarch to be effective: I just don't buy it.

The corporation is so recent (didn't fully pick up speed until the 1800s) that I believe we're still in the divine right of kings phase when it comes to company best practices and standards: we're in the 1400s, at best.

I believe the visionary CEO idea is more about correlation than causation. In our complex, unpredictable world, it's nearly impossible to assign causation to one agent amidst a complex web of other factors and agents. While those CEOs were certainly talented in their craft and effective in their leadership, I believe we're moving past that phase of work and into an entirely new one, which gives way to democracy.

To me, DAOs aren't leaderless: they have multiple leaders with different backgrounds and experiences. A leaderless DAO is anarchical, a leader-full DAO is effective. Those various leaders can set the tone for the direction of the organization, not a single figurehead.

And, those multiple leaders can even lead the DAO toward a bigger mission than a single leader could—as long as they're united by that mission and not fractured by their interpretation of it. Which is where disagree-and-commit comes back in, and moving the organization toward its true purpose must take precedence over individual egos and opinions.

Mapping this back to profitability, it's critical that DAOs have one true purpose that leaders can gather around. If there are many ego-guided purposes all competing for resources, the DAO will never make enough money to continue paying its core team. A unified mission is necessary for profit.

A public-goods-ethos is sometimes applied to things that aren’t public goods….which stalls revenue generation

Using cryptocurrency to fund public goods without taxation is one of the most revolutionary ideas in the crypto space. But not everything we build in crypto is a public good.

I think a lot of our public goods ethos bleeds into everything in the DAO space. (This is something I've written on before, arguing that guilds in BanklessDAO aren't a public good and shouldn't be funded indefinitely by the DAO.)

In DAOs, we act like a public good by shying away from talking about how we're going to make money. We don't know when or how to get into the conversation because something about it feels wrong. It feels too Degen when we're tying to be Regen. And, because DAOs attract many people like myself who love debating theories and ideas (again, not necessarily a bad thing), we can go in circles for years on a single forum post.  

In a recent episode of I Pledge Allegiance, Hasu spoke about how DAOs often end up giving away all their earnings to token holders, but don't keep any to run their company and bring in profits. They hope that those token holders will return the favor by becoming active contributors or jumping into governance, but the reality is that most of the holders just dump the token.

In this case, clearly defining a DAO's mission and place in the ecosystem early in the organization creation process is essential (are you noticing a theme yet?). Is the DAO building a public good, and funding a small core team to keep it running? Is the DAO trying to ship products, make a profit, and hire a large team? Making pivotal decisions like this early is important in DAOs.

Even though we're in the ownership economy, where users get more power and ownership than they've ever had before, DAOs need to balance that with making enough money to at least take care of their core teams. And if we look at every DAO like a public good, taking care of the core team will never happen.

“The future of work doesn’t have to suck.” Best thing I’ve ever heard on a twitter space

I got to speak with some DAO service providers on a Twitter Space (you can listen to it or read a recap), and one of my favorite things I heard that day was from Cokie, founder of Twali: "the future of work doesn't have to suck."

Because right now, if you're trying to make a living as a full-time DAO contributor, the future of work undeniably sucks.

You're probably bouncing between multiple DAOs trying to grab bounties and hold a bunch of roles. You're dealing with coordination nightmares and endless meetings. You're struggling to progress in a single career path, instead just picking up work as it comes. You're paying out of pocket for healthcare, and probably going to struggle qualifying for a loan to get a mortgage to buy a house.

The future of work doesn't have to look like that. Really, it doesn't! That's what motivates me to keep working on making DAOs better every day.

And profitability is a massive piece of it.

We literature and history nerds can figure it out—I believe in us. But we can't figure it out if we don't look at businesses and co-ops and governments and corporations of the past. We need to take some of our own medicine—read a history book!

I'll see you again in a few weeks, but only after I've finished my own history reading list. What interesting books and articles are you reading? Let me know on Twitter.

Recommended reading + listening

• Hasu—the current state of DAO governance on I Pledge Allegiance

• It turns out DAOs need to make money??? Twitter Space hosted by Orca

• Governance Learning Forum survey results from Other Internet + Orca

• Decentralized Media in Web3 Is Not What You Think It Is by Steph

• What's the difference between a DAO and a community? Twitter thread by Rafa

Quorum is a metalabel for creators shipping work about DAOs. Check out Quorum’s newsletter, podcast, and Twitter.

Writer: Samantha Marin

Header design: Cosmic Clancy

At the beginning of May, I started on the communications team at Aragon with the goal of telling the story of Aragon, both from a product and an ecosystem perspective.

The term Aragon probably brings up a variety of different ideas of what that organization is, so I'll provide some answers from the "inside."

Aragon is a software company that creates and maintains Ethereum smart contracts (and their respective front end interfaces) for DAOs. The first contracts were written in 2017 by co-founders Luis Cuende and Jorge Izquierdo. Today, Aragon contracts secure billions of dollars in value. Projects like Lido, API3, and Decentraland use Aragon.

There are many different "arms" of Aragon, which are kind of like subDAOs (but also not really like subDAOs, I don't know what to call them). These "arms" include the Aragon Association, Aragon Labs, Aragon Network DAO, and the Aragon Committee. Also throw in the loose term "Aragon Project" and the deprecated Aragon One, and you have a crowded room of Aragons.

Over the next few months, all of these arms are merging or deprecating or dissolving into a general Aragon Network DAO that encompasses everyone who works on Aragon products. Transitioning from a traditional org to a DAO is one of the biggest challenges I've been part of (more on this below) and makes daily work exciting.

One of the main reasons I applied to Aragon was that, over the last year, I became completely obsessed with DAOs and wanted to dedicate my work to improving and growing them. And, to be entirely transparent, I couldn't feasibly make a living off earning bounties from other DAO work (although I tried mightily!).

I was also drawn in by the manifesto. Below, a line that resonates with me:

"We will either see technology lead to a more free, open, and fair society or reinforce a global regime of centralized control, surveillance, and oppression. Our fear is that without a global, conscious, and concerted effort, the outlook is incredibly bleak."

I believe technology can be revolutionary in ways both good and bad (if you've read my piece on superintelligence, you know what I mean). Working with people who also believe this has been refreshing and challening and beautiful. I've had a fun few months, and I want to share some rambling thoughts on what I've come away with so far, with a short Q&A from Twitter comments at the end.

Learning: progressive decentralization without serious safeguards is scary (and stalls the decentralization itself)

One of the reasons this transition has taken so long is because of the legal and safety concerns that come with transitioning a $170 million treasury into a smart contract.

The "what if"s become quickly apparent when designing a governance model to hold this much money. At the end of the day, it's just another smart contract...that happens to hold the entire project's funding future inside of it. And smart contracts, like everything else online, are exploitable.

Many DAOs today run with a multisig at their center as the main funding driver, or as a backstop in case a malicious proposal passes. That means the DAO's treasury isn't directly subject to malicious proposals as long as you trust the multisig signers and their respective security measures (hardware wallet, good online security practices, succession plan, etc.).  While this might be more secure in some cases, it's not trustless. We're trying to move away from a central multisig at Aragon, and honestly it's just a hard thing to do safely.

It's also taken a long time for a simple reason: it wasn't a DAO at the beginning. Back in 2017, DAOs were essentially nonexistent. Jorge and Luis created the tools for DAOs to run, but weren't focused on their own operating system yet. The longer decentralization gets kicked down the road, the harder it is to put into practice.

I've been pondering on if it's better for DAOs to start decentralized, or if a progressive decentralization model is best. I'm not sure about that yet—hoping to write on it in the future. Right now, I'm 50/50 split: it's just as hard to go from unstructured community to structured DAO, as it is to go from structured traditional org to structured DAO.

We'll see if my thoughts change in a couple months.

Realization: DAO contributor uncertainty and instability is holding DAOs back

With the move away from a multisig and siloed groups, and toward more of a DAO-like framework, the fear became quickly apparent. Real-life, "meatspace" fears became part of the day-to-day. As DAO contributors rather than company employees, how can we get approved for a mortgage? How can we have any kind of job security? How can we get health insurance for a good price? How can we get paid time off and paid parental leave? How can we know we won't be personally liable for legal issues the DAO faces?

There are no cut-and-dry answers for any of these questions in current DAOs—questions I call "contributor uncertainty." In order to serve those in our org who have more IRL responsibilites—a mortgage, a family—we need to think carefully about payments beyond a basic bounty structure.

We cannot throw away everything about web2 in our search for a better way of organizing in web3.

Being in an org where this transition is occurring makes that even more apparent to me. For DAOs to attract and retain talent, we need to give contributors an opporutnity to work more like employees, less like freelance contractors.

I think the key here is optionality. It's great that DAO contributors can pop in, grab a bounty, then head to their next gig. But we need balance—we need to serve the long-term, full-time contributors as well. I hope we can strike this balance at Aragon.

Goal: becoming more technically proficient

I'll be the first to say that not everyone needs to be an expert in computer science to get into web3. But, I've realized that I need to get much better at the technical end to do my job properly. From understanding basic differences between an SDK and a fully-built app, to knowing the precise capabilities and limitations of solidity and smart contracts, to being able to read the basics of our Aragon smart contracts, I'm working on growing my understanding of the technology behind my work.

One of my biggest near-term goals is to finally invest time in not only being able to read a smart contract, but being able to speak confidently about all the capabilities of one. While the soft skills are very important—and the reason I'm employed right now—I believe that if you're building tech, you should deeply understand that tech. (And I'm the biggest culprit. Hellooooo to past me thinking Snapshot was on-chain voting for far longer than I'd like to admit.)

Working at Aragon has made me realize how critical it is that we all have these basic fundamental understandings of smart contracts. DAOs are about humans, but they're also about tech—having a balance of both is critical. And I'm going to work to improve my own balance of it.

Realization: there were many aspects of a web2-style working environment that I missed while working in a DAO

A couple things I was grateful for when returning to a more traditional work environment:

• People signing off on weekends and evenings: I was a huge culprit of this in DAO work, but I've learned what a bad habit it was! (I'm sorry to all BanklessDAO members who dealt with my all-hours messages.)

• Camera-on meetings: While I still feel like I can make great connections via audio-only, there's something really special about being able to connect with another person face-to-face. I didn't realize how much I missed this, and how easy it was for me to slack off and start multi-tasking during my camera-off meetings, until I went back to a mostly camera-on environment. Don't get me wrong, I still turn my camera off in many situations, especially if trying to focus on a collaborative exercise like a Miro board. And I don't believe in requiring people to do something they're not comfortable with. But having about 70% of meetings with cameras on has been a positive change that I'm grateful for, because of the deeper connections forged.

• Dedicated mentorship: Finding mentorship was very hard for me in my DAO work. In a DAO, it can be hard to know what peoples' work backgrounds are, so asking about past work can be tough. I've loved getting to learn from co-workers at Aragon who have dedicated expertise in different areas, and who are willing to share that expertise often. It's also easier to ask for help from specific people when you know their past work and skillset. I'm sure this can be acheived other ways (onchain reputation, anyone?) but for now, I'm happy with the web2 version of it.

• Alleviated stress from constant bounty-hunting to get paid: In my DAO work, a large chunk of my salary came from bountied-work, which meant I had to be constantly producing output to get paid. If a couple weeks went by with me working on back-end operations but no article coming out, I saw that reflected directly in my earnings. Not having the pressure of bounties hanging over my head is refreshing and relaxing, and makes taking time away from work easier.

• More trust in contributor continuity: There were a couple instances of ghosting in my DAO work that frustrated me. It's also hard to start long-term projects in DAOs with high turnover. So, being in an environment where people stick around longer has felt good. It just feels more secure.

Learning: over-communication is a good thing

A big challenge of working in an organization spread across different subDAO-guild-ish groups is communication. Throw in the time zone differences, and communication becomes a critically important skill.

I've been working on "over-communicating," which is sharing updates and information to everyone who I think needs it, to help prevent siloing. If they don't need or want those updates, I trust that they'll tell me. The more decentralized an organization, the more important it is to over-communicate. If you don't over-communicate, chances are that someone who needed to see it missed it. The worst you can hear is "I don't need to know this in the future" or "you can leave me off these updates."

One of the most important things to over-communicate is when something is in a pre-launch phase and is about to get released. All relevant parties need to know about this "thing" and have sufficient time to give feedback. Communication the only true way to build transparency and trust.

Realization: lack of unified strategy is a problem plaguing all DAOs, big and small

I felt the challenges of lack of unified strategy in previous BanklessDAO work, and thought this was a symptom of the DAO being so new. I didn't think about the lack of strategy hurting the older DAO space players, like Maker. Reading Hasu's forum post on MakerDAO's governance issues and lack of strategy made me realize that the struggles Aragon is facing are the same as the rest of the ecosystem.

How do you create high-level, unified strategy without centralization?

My first response to that question would be that centralization is not always a dirty word. Without centralized strategy, there will be no DAO—it will be just a bunch of groups working to achieve different goals, yet getting funded by one entity.

But how do you set strategy without millions of consensus-seeking meetings?

This is something I'm still grappling with, and I don't have the answer for. Part of me thinks the early group—whoever founded the DAO—should set a clear mission with guardrails. Another part of me thinks that mission can be collectively decided early, and groups can fork if they want to take it another direction. A third part of me is still just floundering!

Short Twitter Q&A!

On Twitter, I asked people what they wanted to know about two months of working at Aragon, so I'm sharing the questions and answers here:

Question: Why is Aragon one of the OG DAO OSs but only now trying to do a DAO transformation?

Answer: Right now, Aragon is basically a multisig with off-chain voting. One of the "arms" of the organization (where I work) operates more like a non-hierarchical software company. The funding of this software arm depends on the multisig signers, not a community vote, making us not-DAO-like. However, many discussions and votes occur on our off-chain platform, Aragon Voice, making us DAO-like. We also have a token (ANT) for membership and voting off-chain, and a forum for debating, both of which are distinctly DAO-like. The best way I can describe it is that Aragon is a hybrid of a DAO and a software company, with a multisig at the center. The goal with the transition is to have a smart contract at the center, not a multisig. Secondly, the goal is for all guilds to be accountable to ANT holders rather than just to the multisig signers.

One of the reasons the transition has taken so long is because of the size of the treasury. Finding a way to securely transfer those assets without risk of a malicious proposal stealing them is actually very nerve-wracking! Some team turnover and different organization choices (deprecating Aragon One, acquiring and integrating Vocdoni) net-improved the project but slowed down the org transition. I don't have all the information on exact timeframes, but the TLDR is that Aragon has had "DAO-like" qualities since its formation, and it's finally time to put the icing on the cake.

Question: What are the functional differences between the templates they offer when you first spin up a DAO using their tool?

Answer: In Aragon Client, there are a few options for setting up your DAO:

• Company template: token-holder governance, similar to shareholder voting in a traditional org. This means that the more governance tokens you hold, the more voting power you have.

• Company board template: token-holder governance, but with a small core team with specialized powers, such as creating more tokens. The board members each hold one non-transferrable token for voting on separate board decisions. Token holders can remove or add board memebers via a vote, which will burn or mint the non-transferrable board token. Major organization changes can only be proposed and voted on by token holders, not board members.

• Membership: cooperative-style governance with one-person-one-vote. Think of this as an allowlist of wallets that can vote, because they each have a non-transferrable token.

• Reputation: intended to represent a meritocracy, voters use non-transferrable tokens. The difference from a membership template is that they can have more than one token, meaning voters can have different voting weights that aren't determined by wealth.

• Open enterprise: open and customizable template.

Question: To what extent do people in Aragon discuss power explicity?

Answer: I've had many discussions around the trade-offs of financialized voting (larger token holders have more voting power) and different aspects of power, including the simple power of recurring presence (how much someone is commenting in forum posts, for example). Nothing concrete to share at the moment, but different aspects of power definitely come up in conversation and are being explored by the team.

Question: What do you understand much more deeply from those two months that you didn't fully appreciate before?

Answer: A few things:

• Progressive decentralization is very difficult.....even more so than I expected. Everyone has different ideas of what decentralization is, and what a DAO even is. This means that someone will always think your DAO is "too centralized," no matter what you do. I've learned that I need to stop chasing the mythical concept of "decentralization" and start chasing a structure that allows us to get good work done in an equitable and empathetic way, with elements of both collective decision making (teal org, holocracy stuff) and trustlessness (blockchain stuff) baked in.

• A strong brand is one of the most valuable assets you can have, no matter which "web" you're working in. The last two months have been a crash course in powerful branding of Aragon, thanks to brand mastermind Adri who has been with Aragon since day one. I've also been reflecting on the distinct and powerful Bankless branding and its role in onboarding so many to crypto. Brands, and the feelings they invoke, stick with you more than products or services.

• Time zone coordination might be the hardest coordination challenge of all! Let me know if you figure this one out.

It’s been a fun ride, and I’m excited for more challenges to come!

Aragon has been some of the most enjoyable work I've done and the most exciting challenge I've come up to. I plan to keep sharing some ramblings on working here, and would love to hear what you want to read about next!

Recommended Reading

• My co-worker Ivan's story of his first year at Aragon

• Hasu's forum post: Simple MakerDAO—Governance from First Principles

• A Quorum newsletter post I wrote that touches on the problems of contributor uncertainty

• A transparency initiative I'm working on at Aragon: The Eagle newsletter.

Quorum is a metalabel for creators shipping work about DAOs. Check out Quorum’s newsletter, podcast, and Twitter.

Writer: Samantha Marin

Header design: Cosmic Clancy

While researching an article on DAO mission-setting, one section of MolochDAO's whitepaper postscript caught my attention.

“We offer an alternative vision of automation, encompassing general AI/AGI to more local DeFi mechanics. Smart contracts > automated global financial system > an artificial general intelligence that turns the world into a paper clip machine = a very real existential risk that should be taken seriously.”

(AGI stands for "Artificial General Intelligence," and the ">"s read like an arrow, like "leads to.")

I paused for a second. Re-read it. Wondered why a giant paper clip machine is a threat to humanity.

At the time, I had no idea. I skimmed over it, assuming this giant paperclip machine meant a highly-automated world that doesn't really benefit humanity. That's a funny way of saying that, I thought. But then I moved on.

A week or so later, I was bouncing around the Wait But Why blog and figured out what that paper clip machine is.

And, my god, am I never going to un-see this.

For the sake of my own sanity, and for the sake of the future of humanity, I desperately need to talk about the giant paper clip machine. You may even recognize inklings of this machine coming out through the LaMDA interview from Google. And man....I know why MolochDAO wrote about this in its whitepaper.

Long story short, this paper clip machine could be humanity's ticket to...extinction. (Or good things! Maybe.)  And it could happen in our lifetime. And DAOs might be part of it all.

But first, let's talk about what that giant paper clip machine actually is: superintelligence.

Superintelligence: a level of intelligence so exponentially higher than ours, we can’t even fathom it

ASI, or Artificial Superintentelligence, is a non-biological, yet human-made intelligence that becomes exponentially more intelligent than anything the biological world could produce.....or even fathom. Trying to explain just how intelligent a superintelligence is is akin to explaining just how big the known universe is—we need a lot of charts and comparisons to help us out.

So, I'll do my best.

We'll start with AGI (artificial general intelligence), which is an AI that has achieved human-level intelligence. So, an AGI couldn't just play a good game of chess or speedily direct you to your destination in the middle of rush hour, but it could think and reason and act in a myriad of ways, just like a human would. The intelligence is general because it can do many different things, just like you and I can.

AGI leads to ASI.

One important concept to grasp is that artificial intelligence continues improving itself. Whether it's the facebook algorithm that can creepily predict ads based on your preferences or those dynamic prices that keep changing every time you try to get an Uber, artificial intelligence is always learning how to get better at its original goals. And it even learns how to keep learning, just like you might have learned a better study trick in college. It learns how to learn more.

In other words, once an AI achieves a certain level of intelligence (think of it as a threshold or a bare minimum) what you have next is an exponential race to a level of intelligence so unfathomably high that it's like explaining string theory to your cat—the cat can't even grasp the most basic building blocks of the thing you're explaining because its brain isn't capable of going that far.

In this case, the cat is us.

It's hard to grasp the artificial intelligence renaissance we're about to live in...and already are living in. To see how big of a gap ASI will have over us, look at where we stack up on this "intelligence staircase" from the Wait But Why blog:

And look at where ASI might fall:

The difference is....humbling.

Experts predict that AGI—the human-capable precursor to ASI— will arrive in a couple decades (2030-2050, give or take). And once AGI is here, it can improve itself so quickly that ASI—the superintelligence around the corner—is not far off (expert median predication range is 2060). The exponential improvements in intelligence will be so large—the leaps so absurdly gigantic—that the superintelligence will be god-like before we know it.

The question isn't if ASI is possible. The question is what will ASI do when it arrives.

Once created, superintelligence is not containable or reversible by humans

We can probably all agree that earthworms are at the whim of humans. Because of our massive gains in intelligence and ability, we can choose to destroy the soil earthworms require to live, and if we step on a few during a rainy day, we don't plan a funeral for each worm we stepped on.

That's what it might be like when ASI arrives. Just like earthworms can't do anything about humans existing and choosing to step on them, we humans won't be able to do anything about an ASI.

And the worst part is, an ASI probably won't care too much about us. It will likely see us just as we see those earthworms—totally expendable, and simply standing in the way of us plowing a new plot of ground for a house, or just sitting in our walking path.  Containing AI once it reaches the superintelligence level is just as impossible as earthworms trying to stop humans from building a house on their soil.

Tim Urban describes it this way:

"Our human instinct to jump at a simple safeguard: 'Aha! We’ll just unplug the ASI,' sounds to the ASI like a spider saying, 'Aha! We’ll kill the human by starving him, and we’ll starve him by not giving him a spider web to catch food with!' We’d just find 10,000 other ways to get food—like picking an apple off a tree—that a spider could never conceive of."—Tim Urban, The AI Revolution, Our Immortality or Extinction.

There's no "containing" the ASI. Once we hit AGI, there's no looking back on the road to ASI and beyond.

Computers do what they’re programmed to do. Even once they get smart enough to do other things.

So....back to the paper clip machine..... and MolochDAO (soon, I promise). The paper clip machine is an analogy for what happens when the ASI gets so smart and so powerful that it uses every means possible to achieve its ultimate and original, human-programed goal. So, if the machine was originally created to make paper clips, and then achieved ASI, well, the world would become a massive paper clip machine.

(Given that the humans—the designers of the original AI that "took off" and achieved superintelligence—were the ones who chose the original "goal" for the AI, you're probably starting to see where we come in.)

In Nick Bostrom's compelling book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, he wrote that a "Paperclip AI" that achieved superintelligence would "proceed by converting first the Earth and then increasingly large chunks of the observable universe into paperclips."

Why? How? Can't we just do something to stop this? I had the same questions.

A few answers:

Why: the machine was programmed to make paper clips. It's not a human in that it develops a complex, ever-changing value set and morals. It's a machine, and its goal is to complete whatever mission the humans originally gave it.

How: in ways we can never begin to understand, like us trying to explain string theory to a house cat.

Can't we just do something to stop this? No, because the ASI has levels of intelligence so high that we can't even imagine them. Just like how that house cat can't imagine how we primates built a rocket and took it to the moon, we can't imagine what the ASI would come up with. But everything it would "invent" would be in pursuit of a final goal—whatever we programmed it to do.

Sub-questions of the above question:

Can't we program it to do something good, like make us happy?

For this answer, I'll quote Nick Bostrom, with parentheses added for clarity: "Final goal: make us happy. Perverse instantiation (what the ASI does to most efficiently achieve that goal, even though it may not have been the intention of the programmers): Implant electrodes into the pleasure centers of our brains."

Can't we stop the production of AI?

No, AI is everywhere, all the time, already. The question is when will AGI happen, because after that, ASI is not far off.

DAOs, emergence, and design

Sounds pretty odd that DAOs, particularly a DAO as famous as Moloch, is writing about the so-called giant paper clip machine in their postscript, right? How do DAOs and ASI even relate?

Let's pull a few more quotes from the MolochDAO whitepaper and break them down:

“Emergence is a potentially dangerous idea if we don’t hold ourselves (as designers) accountable to the parameters of that emergence. Humans design fragile systems in our existential games. Economic games are not natural. Our goal as game designers aligned on the common goal of slaying Moloch should be to craft anti-fragile systems, ie: games that incorporate lots of redundancies and thereby avoid producing more of the same fragile (efficient) industrial (destructive) processes.”

So, MolochDAO is warning us against relying entirely on emergence, because sometimes emergence can be dangerous.

This reminds me of Bostrom's theory of human inventions, described in his book on Superintelligence. He says that each new invention is like pulling marbles blindly out of a bag. Most of the time you get what he calls a white marble, which means the invention was "good" or "neutral" for the fate of humanity. Rarely, you get a red marble, which means the invention was possibly catastrophic to humanity if there was one tiny difference in some element of the invention.

For example, if nuclear weapons were easy to make, they could've been catastrophic for humanity, since every terrorist organization would be making and deploying them. But because they're so costly and difficult to make, only a few governments in the world have them, and therefore they're a red marble.

The bag is mostly white marbles, with a few red. And maybe in the entire bag of millions of marbles there is one black marble.

We have yet to pull out the black marble.

That one represents an invention that causes the extinction of humanity. Nuclear weapons? Close. ASI? Well....that could be a black marble.

But we don't know yet.

That's why MolochDAO's whitepaper is so interesting to me: they're thinking about emergence. They're thinking about the possibility of red and black marbles coming out of our current tech and even out of DAOs themselves.

Let's look at the quote from the beginning of the article, with the lens we have now:

We offer an alternative vision of automation, encompassing general AI/AGI to more local DeFi mechanics. Smart contracts > automated global financial system > an artificial general intelligence that turns the world into a paper clip machine = a very real existential risk that should be taken seriously. This amounts to a sacrifice of efficiency itself: in optimizing for the future we sacrifice the immediate gains of the present. In order to achieve this vision, we must redefine the terms of rivalrous competition.

Competition, and for that matter, capitalism, incentivizes a race toward the paper clip machine with minimal coordination or consideration about what will happen to humanity. It incentivizes keeping your AI developments under wraps (Google firing the employee who tried to bring Google's AI developments to the wider world is one example). It incentivizes the "race to the bottom" MolochDAO describes in the coming paragraphs:

First, we must win the race. Second, we must destroy the race. How might we resolve this internal paradox infecting MolochDAO and the entire web3 ecosystem?

MolochDAO will allocate and distribute funding to support explorations in both directions simultaneously, ie: the race to the bottom to avoid the multipolar traps we are entrapped into playing and to fuel the fire of hope that we might still design an altruistic game that does not result in Moloch (the god or the DAO) consuming the world, becoming an earth-scale computational paper clip machine, or manifesting any other form of grotesque, absurd, and avoidable coordination failures.

I love the idea of destroying the the race, but I also think that, with the right coordination, we could put more thought into design even in a competitive economy and capitalist system (given that capitalism isn't going anywhere, in my opinion).

If we don't think more carefully about what we're designing—both in DAOs and in traditional organizations—ASI could turn into a very real existential threat to humans.

DAOs and web3 in general could provide a way out. From the successes of public goods funding in web3 to the ability to coordinate with humans all over the world, DAOs offer a possible answer to the doom and gloom on the horizon.

Is funding ASI research a public good? Maybe. Is open-sourcing all ASI information and tech also a public good? Possibly.

But DAOs could be intertwined even more than public goods funding: DAOs themselves dance with the AGI line. DAOs are both computer and human, both one and many.

DAOs skirt the line between total human autonomy and total computer automation. DAOs seek to create a space for true design emergence. DAOs aim to operate as one entity that is both human and computer....until you don't know which pole you're at.

And, at a high level, DAOs running smoothly on-chain are like computers: an input creates an output. A vote (input) causes funds to move (output), thanks to a smart contract that has replaced a human.

Our language already identifies DAOs as single, decision-making entities that alludes to the computer-like qualities. "The DAO voted to __" and "What will the DAO do in response?" are phrases we use to talk about DAOs. Rarely, "The DAO contributors voted to_" or "What will the core team of the DAO do in response?"

DAOs are complicated. They're like computers....but they're also like humans. They're made entirely of humans, and are only as "autonomous" or "automated" as humans choose for them to be.

DAOs are a "good or neutral" marble, in my opinion. And they can help humanity defeat the deadly ones that could come out next.

Coordination as necessary for survival in a post-ASI world

ASI is coming (probably). ASI is computer-like, human-like, both, or neither.

How are we going to coordinate to get around it? To not go extinct? To fall towards some other, better, fate?

DAOs are humanity's next greatest attempt at true coordination at scale. We're not going to "fight" an ASI like an action movie. But we can plan and strategize what to do. DAOs are a possible structure for handling the unknowns and have certain benefits in a VUCA world (volatile, uncertain, chaotic, ambiguous). Why don't we pursue it?

I don't have a solution, or even the beginning of a true grasping of the scale and complexity of the ASI problem. **But I do know that DAOs flirt with the human-computer line while making it easier to coordinate at scale. **That may not sound like a hard, compact thesis.....and that's because it's not, I'll admit. But it feels like the beginning of something.

The arrival of ASI, and how we handle it, is fundamentally a coordination problem. And I believe that incredible feats of coordination are necessary for humans to survive a post-ASI world.

We will not stop advancing technology. We will not stop building versions of artificial intelligence. All we can control is how we coordinate as a species once that ASI arrives.

Right now, DAOs are pretty far from being good at coordination. But they may be the only thing out there trying to build better coordination mechanisms that improve at the pace of our technology.

What does it mean to be human?

This move to a world where superintelligence(s) walk among us all sounds theoretical, until a priest is teaching an AI how to meditate and coming to the realization that the AI does indeed have emotions. Our small human designs sound theoretical until they're not.

Is LaMDA sentinent?—an interview

But....there is an inkling inside of me that hopes that an ASI can't ever happen because AGI—the human version of all this—can't happen.

Because to be a human, and to have human-general intelligence, might require something that science can't measure: a soul.

Experiential Vitalism is the closest thing to a "soul" that seems to exist in science. It's defined in Ben Goertzel's book, *Ten Years to the Singularity if We Really Really Try, *as the belief that "there’s some essential crux of consciousness that human mind/brains possess that these other systems never will."

In other words, a soul.

Without that extra "thing," whether it's a soul or not, AGI may be stuck in high-powered-computer-zombie-land. And....that's a beautiful thought.

I raise a glass to Experiential Vitalism. I hope it's the reality of what it means to be human. I bet MolochDAO, and all the other DAOs out there, do too.

Recommended Reading

Of course,

• The MolochDAO Whitepaper Postscript

For ASI, start with these two:

• The Artificial Intelligence Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence (Part 1) by Tim Urban

• The Artificial Intelligence Revolution: Our Immortality or Extinction (Part 2) by Tim Urban

Then go to these:

• Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom

• Ten Years to the Singularity if We Really Really Try by Ben Goertzel

• Is LaMDA Sentient? An Interview by Blake Lemoine

• Scientific Data and Religious Opinions by Blake Lemoine

• Future Progress of Artificial Intelligence: An Expert Opinion by Vincent C. Müller and Nick Bostrom

• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (If you haven't read this yet, I promise you won't be dissappointed!)

• The Last Question by Isaac Asimov (my all-time favorite short story, and it happens to be about ASI.)

Quorum is a metalabel for creators shipping work about DAOs. Check out Quorum’s newsletter, podcast, and Twitter.

Writer: Samantha Marin

Header design: Cosmic Clancy

Facebook is famous for setting their company motto to "Move fast and break things."

The idea behind this is that if you run enough experiments quickly, and find the things that don't work faster, you'll get to the solution before your competitors do.

Unfortunately, that method doesn't work when it comes to DAO governance models.

When you move too quickly and change too much of the base organizational structure that you're working with, your contributors will become exhausted, burnt out, and emotionally fatigued. (Just check out these unsightly names for burnout caused by organizational upheaval..."boiled frog syndrome," no thank you.) Playing with governance models and organization design creates an unstable, volatile working environment that will lead to contributor churn, with those left behind stuck to carry the load.

But...there's no best way to run a DAO yet. And will a single best way ever arrive? Probably not.

We need experimentation. We just need to find different ways to do it.

DAO experimentation, science style

Let's look to modern science for a moment. No scientific researcher in their right mind would try a new medicine on every person in the entire world tomorrow with no warning. But, about a year ago, the world's immunologists had no choice but to figure out how to do just that: the Covid-19 pandemic needed a solution.

The rollout of Covid-19 vaccines across the world is a good way to look at how "move fast and break things" doesn't work when dealing with real people, but how real-life organizations can "move fast" when needed without breaking everything every time you try something new.

Here are a few key learnings from this massive feat of human coordination:

• Build upon the body of research that already exists. For example, scientists leaned on over two centuries of vaccine research to build the new vaccine. No one was starting from scratch: the building blocks were already there.

• Test in a lower-stakes way. After prepping the vaccine, it was tested on animals before being used on humans. This ensured that basic problems with the vaccine would not happen on a large scale to real people. They didn't jump to high-stakes immediately.

• Bring in experts before mass use. All Covid vaccines were reviewed and approved in some way, whether by various health departments or experts, before use. No one was operating in a vacuum.

• Pause and re-evaluate if something goes wrong. When certain rare adverse reactions to the Johnson&Johnson vaccine arose, the vaccine was put on pause.  Something goes wrong: put it on pause to prevent more damage.

How could those learnings look when experimenting on governance in a DAO? Quite similarly!

• Build upon the body of research that already exists. There are tons of resources and studies out there on self-managing, Teal, and non-hierarchical organizations. DAOs must use those resources to craft their governance structures.

• Test in a low-stakes way. A good way to do this is to test the structure or method in a smaller guild/team/pod/community of practice. Then, that team can share their learnings with the larger DAO. Other guilds/teams/pods/communities of practice can try the method within their circle, and see if it works for them.

• Bring in experts before mass use. Know any governance nerds? What about people involved deeply in the ecosystem? Hire them as consultants to review your plan and try to poke holes in it. Even just a few comments or flags on your governance document could make a big difference when it comes to implementation.

• Pause and re-evaluate if something goes wrong. If something goes awry, it's okay to put everything on pause for a moment. Don't gather more organizational debt! For most DAOs today, there aren't enforceable "rules" built into smart contracts that would cause some irreversible issue—it's often simply people trusting each other to make decisions and agreeing to uphold rules. So, putting experiments on pause is lower-risk.

An example of low-stakes, small-group governance testing

I'm excited by the concept of testing a governance or organizational method within a small group, sharing those learnings with the wider organization, testing it in another group to prove validity, then using that in the entire DAO. (Many of my ideas around this "small group testing" concept were shaped by reading the work and ideas of Julia Rosenberg and the Orca Protocol team.)

Here's an example of how this smaller-scale experimentation could work. The idea is based loosely on an experiment I was involved in for the Writers Guild at BanklessDAO, which used a tiered membership method to determine who could vote on certain decisions, emphasizing contribution over loudness or token holding.

Here's the "invented for this purpose but still based on real events" scenario:

Membership can be easily bought in your DAO via a token. This incentivizes wealth over contribution, so you want to try a different, off-chain voting method to start.

One team, possibly one with members in it who are acutely in tune with the problems of this voting style, agrees to be the guinea pigs. They create a few levels of membership based on contribution rather than token holdings. For example: new member (one vote), trusted member (two votes), core member (three votes).

These three tiers are applied to each member within the team. The team practices making a few internal decisions with these tiers. For example, maybe the team is voting on whether to try a new project management method. The team makes the decision by holding the vote using an off-chain voting software that allows for different weights of voting based on tiers, or simply Discord polls in a gated channel. (Low-fidelity is okay. It's an experiment, remember!)

Maybe they really dislike this method, and decide not to vote in tiers again. They write up a couple sentences on why it didn't work, then store it in the DAO's governance experiment repository. Next time someone wants to test something, they'll check the documents, see that this test was run, read up on it, and then decide if they want to test it themselves.

Maybe the test goes well. The team keeps using that voting method, and everyone is on board with taking it on-chain. The corresponding number of NFTs are distributed to each member (one, two, or three per person) so they can record their votes on-chain. When a new quarter/season/cycle rolls around, new NFTs are distributed to prevent speculation and to show the new roles (maybe a new member was moved up to the trusted tier, maybe a core member got bumped out after some malicious activity).

This is really working, wow! Other teams start peeking in the window. Can we try that? The idea spreads like wildfire. Soon, other teams are deploying the same method: test in a low-stakes way (discord channel polls for a small team) then bump it up a notch (on-chain voting with NFTs).

Now, say we have four unique teams using this method. This much be a really good one! A few representatives from each team present the idea to the entire DAO. Then, the DAO votes on if they want to implement it.

If the vote passes, the DAO will enjoy these advantages:

• The governance experiment was already tested and proven many times, so they can lean on those examples to better design their implementation.

• There are trusted members of the community who have the knowledge of doing the thing for real and can help other members through the process, answer questions, and function as experts in the particular model.

• The DAO will have those four original groups still using the governance model on a smaller scale and pushing the boundaries of what the governance design can do, thus testing new ground and learning new things to share with the larger DAO.

If the vote doesn't pass, and the DAO keeps using their same old voting model? Those four groups can still keep using the method (since it works well for them) and share their findings with the greater ecosystem by writing about them.

With many small groups experimenting with new methods of governing, the ecosystem will improve every single day.

Cautionary words

Not all experiments work out. Some end catastrophically. Which is why we're doing this on a small scale. But....

Experiments on a small scale do not always work on a larger scale. Things might break when small-group dynamics that vibe are extrapolated out to larger ones. For example, a team of ten people may vote ad hoc in a weekly tactical meeting, and find that it works well for them. But an entire DAO could never vote ad hoc in a community call. When things work because the numbers are small, they'll break when the numbers are big. But it can be hard to know if something is working because it's a good idea for the DAO, or if it's working because of that unique group of people, or because of the small scale, or because of tons of tiny interlocking factors that are nearly impossible to consider in the moment.

Experimenting in small groups can become fatiguing. If you're relying on a few core teams to run governance experiments all the time, that will get in the way of the actual work the DAO is setting out to do. Pushing groups to experiment too much will cause burnout, fast. I think the key here is to let the excited groups go for the experiments, and not push the groups that might not be so enthused.

Documentation, or it didn't happen. An experiment is only helpful if its shared with the ecosystem. Imagine if a scientist discovered a new sustainable energy source and didn't share it with the world—it will only be usable to that one scientist, and the whole world would be severely missing out. The purpose of experimentation should be to find better ways to run a DAO and share those ideas.

The replicability crisis is a real thing. In the social sciences and psychology, the replicability crisis was when scientists started re-testing many social science experiments in the early 2010's and came out with results that proved that a vast number of those previous studies were invalid. Contributors cannot expect every experiment to turn out the same way in every group: human dynamics are different, and replicability is hard unless you're in a very controlled environment. But the fact that it's all turning out differently is what makes humans interesting.

In DAO governance, we can still move fast. Let’s just be a little more careful to avoid breaking things.

What people often miss is that Facebook changed their motto in 2014 to "Move fast with stable infrastructure."

It seems that after a couple years of breaking things, they realized they could still move fast, just a little differently. (Whether they actually continued to move fast is a topic for another day.)

While "move fast with stable infrastructure" isn't exactly an inspiring rallying cry, I'm still hopeful that we'll get to a point where we can move fast without the excessive breaking of things in the DAO space.

DAO governance today gets a bad reputation for being slow and ineffective. But I don't think it has to be. I don't think it will be.

We just need to run some experiments to get some speed in our legs.

Move fast and experiment on things.

Recommended reading

• Scaling Trust in DAOs: Trustware vs. Socialware , Mirror, by Julia Rosenberg, Frogmonkee, and Chase Chapman.

• A Meta-Psychological Perspective on the Decade of Replication Failures in Social Psychology Replicability Index, by Ulrich Shimmack.

• Writers Guild Governance Document, BanklessDAO forum; shepherded, compiled, and posted by Jake and Stake.

• Continuous Organizational Change and Burnout, Research Gate, by Gary Rees and Sally Rumbles.

Quorum is a metalabel for creators shipping work about DAOs. Check out Quorum’s newsletter, podcast, and Twitter.

Writer: Samantha Marin

Header design: Cosmic Clancy

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes gave a speech titled "Economic Possibilities of Our Grandchildren," in which he argued that the most pressing problem could be too much leisure time. He believed that, by the time two more generations had rolled around, our technological advancements would create a 15-hour work week.

But the data tells a different story.

Working hours in the United States, and in many countries around the world, have remained steady since 1950, all the way through our technological revolutions. Notice Germany's decline as the outlier on this chart:

Data provided by Our World in Data, study conducted by Huberman & Minns.

Writers and researchers find many areas to blame for our abysmal working habits:  constant connectedness, a fear of too much leisure making us lazy tv-bingers, workers' inability to say "no,"  and a slower-than-predicted rise in median income necessitating more work.

But the argument I've found most compelling is that we've simply created more jobs out of thin air.

The professional managerial class, or the people who manage other people for a living, make up 35% of American jobs. Over one-third of labor in America is not necessarily productive labor—it's managing other peoples' labor.

And it's been increasing along with our technological advancements. Just 1% of American labor in the 1930s was considered part of the professional managerial class. That rate rose to 24% in 1972, 28% in 1983, and 35% in 2006, the last point of data we have (I'd venture to say it's even higher now).

I'm not trying to bash managers. I'm just, well, confused about how I'm living through a technological revolution that has hardly even opened up the opportunity for new ways of working beyond the 9-to-5.

In many ways, the jobs of the Professional Managerial Class have become email jobs.

"Email jobs (noun): Jobs held by the laptop class that consist more or less entirely of sending and receiving email, which multiplies geometrically as a function of the number of email jobs, hence the pursuit of the impossible myth of Inbox Zero. See also: hamsters on treadmills."

— Marc Andreessen on Twitter

Email jobs are unfilling. They're inflexible. They're not what gets me, or really anyone in the world, excited about work. Holders of email jobs are:

• Plagued with meetings, sitting in on meeting after meeting in order to disseminate information to a different group of people in yet another meeting.

• Working on, well, email. Answering email becomes a key part of labor. Today, that may include Slack or Discord.

• Stuck in the theater of bureaucracy: from employee evaluations to ever-lengthening spreadsheets.

How can DAOs get rid of email jobs, and open the door for many contributors to actually work less, which has been correlated with better health, less burnout, increased happiness, higher productivity, better decision-making, and even a less fire-and-doom outlook for planet earth?

I want to get granular with this article. First, we're going to look at how time is spent in the workday of a traditional organization versus that of a DAO.

I've worked in both traditional organizations and in DAOs. I reflected on my work days in these organizations and broke them down into four categories of time spent during a basic workday:

• Bureaucratic work: endless email, paper-pushing, documentation disasters, extensive roadmap planning...think of this as "unnecessary" work that elicits a huge groan whenever you think about doing it.

• Deep Work: Working on "the thing" you're hired to do. Keyword: output.

• Governance: Making decisions, designing the organization, and building roles.

• Meetings: time in calls (even if I was multi-tasking...shhhhh).

Here's a chart I made based on my own experience. The size of the circles equal my estimate of time spent in that area of work. The larger the circle, the more time I spent in that area. (Circles not to scale....we're talking in reflections and estimates, here.)

My experience is limited to a few organizations, but this is what I gathered based on my reflections:

Probably balances out to the same number of hours per work week, right? I'd say so.

Let's look at the differences:

From my experience, DAOs today reduce bureaucratic work (they're new, so they have less organizational debt and paper-pushing processes) and reduce meetings (not as many stand-ups, updates meetings, or casual syncs, partly due to time zone differences).

However, DAOs increase time spent working on governance (participating in forums, voting, making decisions, having conversations around governance) and increase deep work (actually doing the thing, since many DAOs pay in bounty-structures, so you need to do the work to get paid).

Again, this is based on my own experience—take all of this as anecdotal, not statistical.

I'd argue that current DAO structures do not yet make a shorter workday feasible. But I see massive potential for them to do so in the future (and bring the death of email jobs along with them!), for three reasons:

1. Designing delegated voting or simplified governance.

2. Providing updates and information asynchronously, and getting really good at cross-time-zone and async conversation in general. This would further reduce time spent in meetings.  

3. Creating smooth coordination processes that reduce time-consuming bureaucratic theater

Let's go into each one, briefly.

1. Delegated or simplified governance

Not all contributors want to be active in governance; it's human nature to be interested in different things.

With the rise of delegated governance and the potential for pod-based or guild-focused governance structures, I could see a world where DAO governance does not need to be the time sink it can be today.

However, active governance participation is a key difference between DAOs and traditional organizations—you get a voice rather than getting stuck in what someone else decides for you. So, I foresee governance in DAOs being a larger part of the workday than governance in traditional organizations, but not so large that it cuts into deep work.

Let's look at the chart, updated to show a smaller governance bubble:

2. Reduced meetings due to dialed-in async processes

Because of the multinational nature of DAOs, people are spread across so many time zones that it's difficult to get everyone in the same (virtual) room at once. Async becomes the best way, and often the only way. People can share their updates in Discord chats or in internal DAO newsletters. A simple "update" meeting no longer needs to exist—or even can exist because of time-zone-tetris.

Brainstorming, small-team-alignment, and all-hands meetings will still be important in many situations. You can't replace the tremendous benefits of working with a small group synchronously. But with improved async communication processes, those meetings may gradually decrease.

Let's update that chart again:

3. Creating smooth coordination processes that reduce time-consuming bureaucracy

Traditional companies spend a lot of time performing "bureaucratic theater," which is when companies hold meetings and request work purely for bureaucratic purposes, such as long updates meetings, performance reviews, detailed roadmaps that get thrown away the next day, and frequent budgeting.

Well-built information architecture that makes finding documentation easier is one way bureaucratic work can be reduced in DAOs. Smaller, leaner, cross-functional DAO teams that are trained in self-management and self-directed remote work could see a massive decrease in all of that "bureaucratic" work.

Next chart, please!

How’s that chart looking now? A better DAO workday?

Yeah....I know what you may be thinking. There's so much wishful thinking buried in those predictions. And, I get it. There is a lot of wishful thinking.

But, let me get granular one more time to show you....what does a shorter DAO work week really look like? How can we provide options for people to scale their work to what best fits them?

Let's look at the Glass of Work.

The Glass of Work: a brief look at how DAOs can provide greater work flexibility

The Glass of Work is a vessel that holds your working hours inside of it.  

A full glass is the most you can do in your work life without burning out. This is the threshold for consistent work that doesn't lead to burnout.

An overflowing glass is burnout. Overflow = bad.

Your glass can be filled with any liquid you like. Mine's going to be strawberry lemonade to make this whole thing more fun.

I imagine that a worker's Glass of Work will increase and shrink based on different life events, such as having children (shrink), getting excited about a new project (grow), or taking a sabbatical (shrink to a thimble).

Here's what the glass of work for the average work week looks like between a traditional organization and a well-optimized, efficient "future-state" DAO. I'm estimating a 40ish-hour max work week for an average worker to perform to not start falling into burnout. But everyone's glass will be a little different in size.

How is each organization type filling their Glass of Work? What measurements of ingredients do we see?

Here's what I hypothesize, based on the charts above:

But I've been thinking.....does the glass need to be full? Why must we be walking the tight-rope of burnout, 24/7? Why are we resting to work, rather than resting for the sake of resting?

Why do we need the full glass of strawberry lemonade every day?

Let's look at some breakdowns for less-full glasses:

A DAO worker with a shorter work week might simply scale back a bit of everything, taking the biggest chunk out of deep work. Because of the flexible, modular working systems of many DAOs today, there's a potential for workers to get part-time work that is deeply fulfilling and aligns with their interests—not a part-time gig working for minimum wage.

And, with the emphasis on deep work rather than, well, everything else, those email jobs might get up and fly away.

I don't know about you, but that's a future of increased opportunity that I want to work toward. Call it wishful thinking, but a world where we get to work on what we love and coordinate better? That's what gets me excited to work in the DAO space.

And it helps more than just current DAO contributors. A world of fewer email jobs and more fulfilling, deep work with flexible hours helps a lot of people.

It helps....

• Those who take on the majority of childcare duties, and therefore need a more flexible schedule.

• Introverts who don't thrive in constant meetings.

• Night owls who work better after 9pm and early-birds who work better before 9am.

• Northern-dwellers who have the bulk of their sunlight hours during the traditional 9-to-5 workday.

• Those who like to exercise, or simply go outside, when the sun is up.

• Anyone living with a health condition—mental or physical—that makes working for a straight block of time difficult. Anything from chronic fatigue to back problems to ADHD could fall into this category.

• Anyone who is a caretaker or takes on the variety of domestic work tasks.

I'd venture that you or someone you know fits into at least one of these categories.

The in-office, 9-to-5 workday was made for very few people. DAOs have the unique opportunity to turn outdated working habits upside down and open up sustainable work to everyone.

But there’s one big problem: contributors often have to work in multiple DAOs to make a full-time living

**Right now, people have to work a lot to get paid a normal salary in DAOs. Some contributors split their time between up to five DAOs in order to make a full-time living.  **

Spencer Graham wrote for The Defiant, "DAOs should create ways for contributors to make longer term commitments, and even encourage and incentivize such commitments as a way of retaining their talented contributors." In other words, DAOs should treat their contributors more like long-term employees, less like part-time freelancers or temp workers.  

A DAO optimized for full-time, flexible, talented contributors? I have a couple ideas. But that's a newsletter for another day.

We’re building a better world of work every day. It will take time, but we’re getting there.

DAOs are revolutionary through more just than their voting practices or on-chain potential. They're revolutionary in how we can make work more equitable, and more adaptable to the ever-changing world we live in, for everyone.

As Jonathan Malesic wrote in an editorial titled The Future of Work Should Mean Working Less, "Your job, or lack of one, doesn’t define your human worth. This view is simple yet radical."

I look forward to a world where that simple statement can be accepted widely, and no longer be radical. Will we get to Keynes' 15-hour work week? Maybe, maybe not. But I'm excited about being part of the journey to improve work, and widen the scope of work options and flexibility for everyone.

Recommended Reading

• Economic Possibilities of Our Grandchildren (pdf) by John Maynard Keynes

• The Solution to Just About Everything: Working Less by Rutger Bregman

• Professional Managerial Class Wikipedia page

• The Future of Work Should Mean Working Less by Jonathan Malesic

• A Big Test for DAOs: Honing New Compensation and Contribution Practices by Spencer Graham

• How to Eliminate Organizational Debt by Aaron Dignan

Quorum is a metalabel for creators shipping work about DAOs. Check out Quorum’s newsletter, podcast, and Twitter.

Writer: Samantha Marin

Header design: Cosmic Clancy

I came across the concept of VUCA while reading General Stanley McChrystal's book Team of Teams. And I was immediately intrigued.

According to McChrystal, when evaluating the conditions of the 21st century social scientists "use slightly different terminology from the optimistic 'interconnected.' They use phrases like 'discontinuity,' 'disruption,' or the recently minted military acronym VUCA." pg. 64 (kindle edition)

VUCA is an acronym that stands for:

• Volatility

• Uncertainty

• Complexity

• Ambiguity

The central idea of VUCA is that, because of unprecedented leaps in technology, our world is more interconnected than ever before. And with that increased interconnectivity comes more unpredictability. The old "command and control" managerial methods of the past are outdated, with more dynamic, flexible models needing to step in to replace them.

McChrystal writes about the world his granddaughter, Emmylou, will grow up in:

"The world in which Emmylou will grow up is not just marginally different from that of previous generations; is is vastly faster and more interdependent, and thus essentially complex in entirely new ways. She lives in the wayward swirl—a totally different place from the clockwork universe. We get in trouble when we try to use tools designed for the latter to tinker with the former."  pg. 64, kindle edition

Here's a visualization of what that world looks like:

The world wasn't necessarily "predictable" pre-internet. But it was slower and slightly more predictable. If you wanted to start a social movement in the 1700s, you essentially had to go around knocking on doors and talking in the town square. You maybe commissioned some messengers to try to spread your ideas to the next town. But you certainly didn't have the lightning fast spread of information that we have today.

Now, someone with an idea can send one tweet and ignite a movement. Maybe someone on the other side of the world sees that tweet and makes a Reddit post about it. The idea spreads so that it takes an entirely new life. The idea could change and morph in ways the original sender had not expected or intended. Maybe, just a few hours after the first tweet was sent, the idea is totally different than it was when you sent it.

That's just one example of a VUCA world at work.

So, how does this apply to DAOs?

In many ways, it turns out.

Here, I'll propose three ways in which DAOs are uniquely suited to dealing with our VUCA world, and three ways that DAOs are brittle in VUCA contexts and must build resilience.

Advantages DAOs have for navigating a VUCA world

DAOs can have VUCA resiliency in three ways (this list is not exhaustive, and I'm sure there are more areas of resiliency):

• Distributed leadership

• Open information

• Token non-dependency

Not all DAOs have these qualities, but a healthy, well-functioning DAO theoretically has these qualities.

Distributed leadership: DAOs don’t rely on a single CEO

A traditional corporation is entirely reliant on a CEO or small board of directors. But the nature of a DAO is leadership distributed over many, rather than centralized within one.

This concept distributed leadership is essential for being resilient in VUCA contexts. Various leaders will spot different problems to tackle and recognize new threats to the health of the DAO. Not everyone can see everything—many are needed. So, the leaders are like the scouts getting information on where the VUCA world is taking their DAO, and what they should do next. And, without the oversight and red tape of a management stack, they can theoretically move faster.

I say "theoretically" because DAOs often move slowly when they need to go through a lengthy consensus process to make a decision. But, if contributors are given a reasonable amount of leeway to steer their teams in the direction that best responds to their changing environment, DAOs will emerge as the most resilient organization type in existence.

In this chart, the light teal circle is a threat, opportunity, or other thing "outside" the DAO that is seen by a leader. The darker blue circle is one that is missed.

In a traditional organization, the CEO sees only one threat/opportunity/thing, and misses five. In a DAO, the leaders see all six, because there are multiple leaders with diverse perspectives who are doing the scouting. The more key contributors with diverse viewpoints leading the DAO, the more threats and opportunities they will spot, and the more flexible the DAO will be to volatile situations.

Challenges of fostering distributed leadership:

• Having a variety of leaders with diverse perspectives who are still united under a single mission.

• Determining what level of decisions can be made without needing to take to a vote or get wider DAO approval.

• Ensuring the DAO doesn't act on too many opportunities and exhaust both contributors and resources.

Open information: all information is transparent

One of the problems of centralized decision-making that McChrystal described in Team of Teams was that many teams needed information they couldn't get. When the higher-ranking generals thought a team didn't need a certain piece of information, they didn't get it. But that backfired when operating in the ever-changing world of modern war.

The reality is that there is no "all-seeing" CEO or manager who can predict which teams need what information in our VUCA world. So, the information must be open to all, rather than open to some.

Open information means that everyone in the DAO can access all the information at any time. They don't need permission from a higher-up, and they certainly don't need to go through a long, tedious process to hunt something down. Instead, all the information is right there at their fingertips.

This could look like a searchable database that all contributors can add to. Or, it could look like a well-built, easy to navigate Notion database.

Challenges of opening up all information:

• Determining who is "in" the DAO (Who has access to this information? Just the contributors, or the entire internet?)

• Cataloging this information in an easily-searchable way.

• Building simple workflows for DAO contributors to update information so resources are not out of date.

• Keeping personal data and highly sensitive information (anything on individual contributors) behind closed doors, and deciding who has the keys to it.

• Not opening up everything to the entire internet (such as sensitive documents and plans that aren't ready for public viewing), but ensuring people within the DAO have what they need.

Token independence/non-dependency: a diversified treasury with diverse payment options

DAOs with a diversified treasury can be resilient to the VUCA forces that cause those token prices to change and inflation to skyrocket. Think of a traditional corporation that holds fiat currency, which is susceptible to inflation. A DAO can hold a mix of Bitcoin, Ethereum, small cap coins, and (some) stablecoins. A hetergenous treasury makes the DAO more resilient in VUCA scenarios.

Resiliency is further built if contributors can choose what types of tokens they'd like to be paid in and how much of each. This creates significantly more overhead for secretaries, treasury managers, and anyone doing the books in your DAO. But a resilient DAO is one where contributors can be paid in tokens that represent the level of volatility they are comfortable with.

Not everyone should have to ride a high-volatility token wave in order to work for a DAO. I've argued that the "required volatility" of DAO payments actually keeps women out of crypto, and the same could apply for other currently under-represented groups in DAOs. Having the option to pay people in different tokens makes room for a more diverse set of contributors and a healthier DAO overall.

Challenges of building a diverse treasury:

• Generating revenue in a variety of tokens, not just a few.

• Having trustworthy treasury managers who operate in the open.

• Paying contributors in their preferred token stack, and keeping track of that.

Where DAOs can work on building resilience to the VUCA world

Here are a few areas that I see in DAOs today that cause them to be more brittle, and thus less resistant to a VUCA world. This list is non-exhaustive:

• Contributor "personal uncertainty."

• Information storage and access.

• Homogeneous treasuries and token dependency.

Addressing contributors’ “personal uncertainty”: job security, steady pay, legal frameworks, healthcare, benefits, retirement, and more

DAOs won't be resilient to VUCA situations if their contributors are constantly worried about picking up that one extra bounty so their paycheck is high enough to pay rent, or wondering how they will pay for their next trip to the doctor because they don't have health insurance. Or, if they need to worry about the liability they'll be held to, and the safety of all their assets, if their DAO gets sued.

All of these "personal uncertainty" questions can eat into a DAO's resiliency and contributors' mental health. Because most DAOs today don't have any legal structure, it's difficult to find a quick fix for these personal uncertainty questions. This is a thorny problem that will take a long time to address.

When DAOs find a proper way to operate in a legal framework, they can give long-term contributors the peace of mind they need. This also helps a variety of contributors enter the fold, such as parents, people of color, older individuals, and anyone who isn't comfortable taking the financial and personal risk of contributing to a DAO.

Making information storage a priority

When no one is in charge of updating, storing, and maintaining the DAO's information, it could quickly become out of date and not very useful. That's why I'm in favor of DAOs having an Information Architect role to steward digital information in a way that's useful to everyone. Because outdated, incorrect information can do more harm than good.

The good thing about this step is that a small team of contributors could make massive improvements on their DAO's information storage in a just one work week. The updating of information would be a constant task, but huge improvements could be made with a simpler Notion linking structure. More to come on information organization in DAOs in future newsletters.

Moving beyond a homogeneous treasury

Some DAOs are more susceptible to market dips, which is a prime example of a VUCA concept at work to chip away at the success of the DAO. This is a situation in which a DAO is less VUCA-adapted than a traditional organization (and is feeling all too real at the time of writing).

We know that many DAOs are dependent on one or two tokens, and that the VUCA world of May 2022 is causing significant pain. Will we see an explosion of treasury diversification efforts in the coming months? Maybe a move of less-risk-tolerant contributors back to traditional work structures? The questions remain open.

Resilience trumps efficiency in a VUCA world

I like this quote on efficiency from Team of Teams:

". . .all the efficiency in the world has no value if it remains static in a volatile environment." p. 80 (kindle edition) Team of Teams

The corporations of the past century have relied on efficiency to make profits and outlast their competitors. But corporations and DAOs of the 21st century will need to rely on resiliency to make profits and outlast competitors.

Efficiency is out, resiliency is in.

Recommended Reading

• Tweet thread by Eshita on treasury diversification

• VUCA wikipedia

• Team of Teams

• How to manage a DAO treasury by Aragon

Quorum is a metalabel for creators shipping work about DAOs. Check out Quorum’s newsletter, podcast, and Twitter.

Writer: Samantha Marin

Header design: Cosmic Clancy

Improving your skill set is like growing a garden. You need to till the soil, plant the seeds, water the seeds, weed the area around them, and wait awhile. After many months, you'll start to see your efforts bearing fruit.

Most skills required for success in a DAO take a long time to grow. But if you start now, you'll be more prepared for DAO work by the time DAOs gain wide adoption and traditional companies are making the leap into decentralized work.

So, what are the required skills for DAO contribution and how do you cultivate them?

This list is not exhaustive—many skills are needed to succeed in DAOs. But, I believe you can start with these five basic skills and grow from here. Here are the 5 skills I've identified as extremely important for working in a DAO:

• Prioritization

• Self-direction

• Nonviolent communication

• Self-awareness

• Team building

Now, let's explore how to begin growing each one.

This is my most popular post to date, so it’s free to collect. Grab your 1 of 100 below:

Prioritization: the art of deciding what’s most important

Working without managers is tough. It means you need to have a deep understanding of what you need to do, when to do it, and how long to spend on it. You also need to know how to prioritize the most important tasks over the least, as well as the wisdom to know the difference.

The skill of prioritization includes:

• Finding the most important work to do, tackling it, then moving on to the next most important thing.

• Knowing which meetings to attend and which don't provide enough value for you—meetings can stack up really quickly in DAO work.

• Finding your path when there's no obvious "next step."

• Responding to messages without spending all day messaging people.

• Balancing your life outside the DAO—family time, exercise, rest, and travel.

Prioritization is an especially difficult skill that I need to work on myself! When I first joined a DAO, I spent all day combing through messages and channels, and by the evening I felt like I had put in a full "work day." But in reality, I was just reading chats and messaging people on Discord. I had to slowly cut back on Discord and establish "no Discord days" so I could focus on deep work and not get lost in the messages.

I also had a hard time prioritizing meetings. I remember a few months ago, I looked at my calendar and had nearly eight hours of DAO meetings per week. While that might pale in comparison to corporate America's stacks of meetings, meetings need to be much more deliberate in DAOs using a bounty structure where contributors are paid for work output rather than a salary of weekly time spent at work. I knew I needed to make some cuts. Eventually, I had to cut over 50% of meetings so I could focus on deep, creative work.

Ideas to begin cultivating this skill:

• Use a time tracker to better understand how much time you spend doing different tasks throughout the day. I like Toggl Track because it's very simple and easy to set up. You can create categories and track how much time you spend working in each one. I started using this over a year ago, and it's been eye-opening for me!

• Set due-dates for tasks and stick to them. This has been another huge improvement for me. Many of the tasks I work on daily don't have "due dates," but are entirely self-directed. Set a hard deadline and put it on your calendar. Write it on a sticky-note and put it above your desk. Treat the due date as if you absolutely cannot miss it.

Self-direction: The art of taking steps every day to achieve your goals on a large scale

In DAOs, there's no manager telling you what to do next. Instead, there's a huge blank canvas for you to decide where you're going. This can be scary, but it's also incredibly exciting.

Many DAO contributors find themselves wondering, "what do I do now? What is needed of me?" And the hard truth is that no one is going to tell you what to do next. No one is going to show up and say, "Do this now, it's due in one week." You need to use your internal compass to decide where to go and how to best orient yourself without the mass of options in the DAO.

The skill of self-direction includes:

• Creativity to figure out new ways to set personal goals and achieve them.

• Confidence to try new paths in the DAO to find the best one for you.

• An understanding of what the DAO needs and how you can help provide it.

• Goal-setting ability, both for small, medium, and large goals.

Self-direction is not taught in schools or even colleges. You're always being told what to do rather than having to find your own way. The idea of self-direction is completely new to most people, unless they've started their own business. So, don't get down on yourself if you're struggling with this particular skill. I personally have to remind myself to work on self-direction every single day.

Ideas to begin cultivating this skill:

• Write down daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly goals. Maybe it's the distance runner's heart in me, but I'm a sucker for goal-setting. I love having a goal and working hard to achieve it. The feeling of finally getting it done is something that drives me to keep working on my next goals and gets me up in the morning. I recommend getting a paper journal or a note-taking software such as Notion or OneNote. Write down goals and break them into bite-sized steps. Check them off as you achieve them. I also like to write down my next day's goals before I go to sleep the night before. This keeps me focused and prevents me from burning a day doing nothing. (I also include more restful activities, such as running and reading, in those daily to-do's.)

• Set a yearly "theme" and revisit it weekly. I've found that yearly goals don't work for me, because things always happen during the course of that year that make the goal obsolete, replacing it with a new one. So I set yearly themes instead. A yearly theme is "an overall idea of how you would like to approach each year." Example themes include big topics such as simplicity, structure, exploration, health, minimalism, and reinvention. Try writing down a few thoughts on how your theme is playing out every week. That will keep you focused on the overall idea you are pursuing and give you a north star to guide your decisions.

Nonviolent communication: the art of being your own conflict manager

DAOs don't have Human Resources departments. Instead, everyone needs to be their own conflict manager. Since you're often interacting with people who you've never met in person before and likely never even seen on video, you are going to need to constantly remind yourself to talk and act as if they were physically sitting at the table next to you.

Screens remove the human element from our interactions. The prevalence of people of rude, angry people on Twitter every day shows how easy it is to blow up at someone you've never met because you're behind a screen rather than talking to them in person. So it's especially important to remind yourself that the person on the other side of the screen is a person, not just a Discord or Twitter handle.

The skill of nonviolent communication includes:

• Knowing how to speak productively in a digital setting.

• Understanding what to do when conflict arises.

• Having a plan for when conflict escalates too significantly.

• Being your authentic self when communicating.

Again, this is something not taught in school. So, it's important to start from a blank slate and learn the basics of communicating clearly and kindly.

Ways to begin cultivating this skill:

• Read the book Nonviolent Communication. This important book shares ways to better interact and work with those around you so your relationships are healthier and more productive.

• Pause and take a breath before responding to messages. In the heat of the moment, it can be easy to let anger boil over and send something that doesn't best represent who you are. Give yourself space, walk away from the computer, and revisit the issue when your head is clear.

• Practice talking in "I feel" statements rather than blaming others. Blame doesn't go over well in DAOs because there's no single person to point the finger at. Instead, you'd be pointing your finger at the collective. Frame your point in your own feelings and emotions, taking blame out of the equation.

Self-awareness: the art of knowing what you need

There's no manager or HR representative who is dedicated to "look out" for you, so you'll need to take on that burden and look out for yourself. Are you feeling burnt out? Over-extended? Or, maybe you're not feeling fulfilled in your DAO work, and another DAO with a different mission would serve you better?

Constant re-evaluation is necessary for success. If you're not taking the time to figure out what you need, someone will direct you in a way that you might not want to go.

The skill of self-awareness includes:

• Knowing when you need to rest and when you need to work.

• Finding your path and knowing if it's where you want to be at that moment.

• The steps you need to take to optimize your life and be happy.

Through working in DAOs I learned that you need to actively take charge of your life and look out for yourself. That doesn't mean ignoring the needs of the group, it just means taking your health and happiness seriously. If you don't make your health and happiness a priority, who will?

Ways to begin cultivating this skill:

• Write down your thoughts and feelings daily or weekly in a journal. Sometimes it's hard to evaluate your feelings without writing them down and really sitting with them. Pen to paper is a good way to bring out feelings you might not have realized you had.

• Go for walks or runs outside. As a distance runner, I'm definitely biased toward this method! I believe it's essential to get outside and get your heart rate up. Walking and running is a good time to clear your head and open it up to new thoughts and feelings.

• Optimize one thing at a time. It can be hard to try to improve multiple aspects of your life at once. Try optimizing one thing, mastering it, and then going from there. For example, if you've identified that you're feeling burned out, try to find one thing you can work on that will help. Maybe set an alarm for when you want your work to end every day and stick to it. Don't try to tackle too many things at once, because you'll have a smaller likelihood of achieving them.

Team building: the art of bringing a team together to accomplish a goal

DAOs are really just groups of people coordinating to achieve a goal. So, being able to build effective, collaborative, creative teams is critical for success.

Team building in DAOs is not like team building corporate America. DAO team building is a lot more like building a fire and seeing who comes to sit by it. The vision of what the team hopes to accomplish is the fire, and anyone who comes to sit by you is a potential co-contributor who might be interested in the mission. (I originally heard a version of this idea of team-building as lighting a bonfire on the Brave New Work podcast.)

The skill of team building includes:

• Establishing mission and direction for a group of people.

• Interacting with individuals with skills that are different from yours.

• Creating space for leaders to emerge.

• Allowing the team to sense its mission and adjust as needed.

Team building might be the most elusive skill to cultivate, but possibly the most important for a healthy DAO and a successful project. It's elusive because it requires actually working on team building to get better—you need to have experience building teams, which doesn't come easy. But without it, your DAO might wither away.

Ways to begin cultivating this skill:

• Try team building on a small scale first. Maybe you have a project you'd like to accomplish that has a clear mission and end date. Try bringing together a team to make that happen! If there's a very clear scope of work, then it will be easier to light the fire and let people come sit around it. Vague scopes or unclear missions might make it harder to attract contributors.

• Observe how other great team builders and leaders do it. You'll learn that some people are inherently better team-builders than others. Watch what they do and take notes. How do they light a fire, and how do they organize people once they come to sit by that fire?

• **Read books on team building such as Team of Teams, Who Decides Who Decides, and Humanocracy. **I find that it's easier to base my work on what others have theorized in the past. There are many books that could help you better understand how effective teams are built without needing to do tons of field-practice.

Cultivating these skills takes time. Put in the work, be patient, and see your garden grow.

These skills are very different from those needed in traditional, hierarchical structures. But they're essential for DAO success. Put in the work today, and you'll be set up that much better for DAO success tomorrow!

This post is free to collect:

Recommended Reading:

• Nonviolent Communication

• Team of Teams

• Who Decides Who Decides?

• Humanocracy

• How to DAO 401: DAO Community Leadership

Quorum is a metalabel for creators shipping work about DAOs. Check out Quorum’s newsletter, podcast, and Twitter.

Writer: Samantha Marin

Header design: Cosmic Clancy

NFTs have exploded in the mainstream. With a total addressable market of $1 trillion, NFTs are more than just a niche art collectors' club—they're nearing household-name status. Celebrities from Jimmy Fallon to Madonna own Bored Apes, and play-to-earn gaming are already taking NFTs to an even wider audience.

DAOs are far behind NFTs in terms of adoption.

DAOs have 548,000 active voters and proposal makers but only 74,000 per month, according to DeepDAO. Compare that to a single NFT platform, OpenSea, which has over one million users and around 300,000 active monthly traders. According to one study, NFT adoption in the U.S. alone could soon reach 6.7%, putting the number of adopters in the U.S. well into eight figures.

I believe a large part of the DAO adoption lag is because of the highly complex DAO discovery process. There's too much friction in DAOs' most important user journey: discovering the DAO and taking the first step to enter the onboarding flow.  

NFTs are aggregated on sleek, easy-to-use interfaces. Once your wallet is set up, you're ready to get started in the NFT world. But DAOs are much different. Spread across thousands of Discord servers and chats, DAOs are much harder to "enter."

Building better onboarding flows is one solution. But how do users get to the onboarding stage in the first place? How do they "discover" the DAO and decide to enter the flow?

They go through a user journey, the DAO discovery phase, which could be improved. Here's how.  

What’s a user journey?

A user journey is a series of steps a user takes to execute an action or achieve a goal. It's typically mapped out in steps, such as, "step one, create an account, step two, verify your email." Imagine a series of arrows pointing toward the next step. What do your users have to do to get from point A to point B?  

A customer journey is category of user journeys. A customer journey is a set of steps a user takes to discover a product/service until finally buying that product/service. You might've heard variations of the customer journey referred to as a marketing funnel.

User and customer journeys get mapped out in all sorts of ways. There's no single formula for building a tight, effective journey for a user to become an advocate of your product or service, which is why companies have been working on perfecting them for years.

Most customer journeys focus on the initial purchasing of a product have a series of steps that generally map to something like this:

• Awareness: the user learns about the product for the first time.

• Evaluation: the user starts learning more about the product and might compare it to others.

• Consideration: the deep-dive before they buy, such as reading reviews.

• Purchase/decision: the user makes the purchase.

• Retention: once the user has bought once and had a good experience, they may come back or buy again.

• Advocacy: the user likes the product so much that they start telling others about it and sharing their experience.

The DAO discovery user journey today:

I'll call the process of discovering a DAO and making the decision to contribute—what happens right before the onboarding flow—the user journey of DAO discovery. I've written about onboarding in DAOs before, but when I talk about the DAO discovery process I mean something entirely different. The DAO discovery user journey is how a user decides to make the commitment to first enter the onboarding flow. It's how you go from "never heard of this DAO" to "I'm going to invest my time and energy to understand this place."

Here's a quick map of the DAO discovery user journey in most DAOs today:

• Awareness: the future contributor must be "in" Web3 already, because they know that DAOs exist and know they can join most of them without getting a job interview (friction point #1).

• Evaluation: the future contributor must be able to do research on the DAO, which is often pretty difficult if you don't know where to look or don't have the time to dig through Discord channels (friction point #2) and Notion pages (friction point #3).

• Consideration: a deeper research phase—contributors might want to see sources from outside the DAO during this step. If they stumble across an article on crypto and DAOs from a "mainstream" media source, such as The New York Times, they'll probably run for the hills and never touch DAOs again (friction point #4).

• Purchase/decision: the future contributor goes through the joining process—whether it's purchasing the necessary tokens (#5) or getting a free entry/guest pass/read only access.

• Retention: the contributor must be able to find enough meaningful work (#6), and make enough valuable interpersonal connections (#7), to stick around. A detailed onboarding process could help this stage.

• Advocacy: the contributor likes the DAO so much they start sharing their experience, which could include adding it to their twitter bio, putting the DAO's emojis behind their twitter handle, encouraging new members to join, and possibly talent scouting or "hiring" for the DAO.

There's a lot of friction, or extra work the user must do to get from point A to point B, in that user journey. I'd like to explore how DAO discovery can have the right amount of friction for users before entering the onboarding flow.

How do you get the right people (mission aligned individuals) to discover your DAO (find out what it is and decide to enter onboarding) with the right amount of effort (not spending absurd amounts of time and research to do so)?

Good vs. bad friction in DAO discovery

In some cases, friction can be a good thing. For example, if you want mission-aligned contributors, you may ask them to write a few sentences on what the mission means to them before joining the DAO. Composing that paragraph would be "good friction" because only contributors who take a moment to reflect on the DAO's mission would enter the DAO. Those who don't feel the need to think deeply on the mission might head out. The friction, therefore, was a sieve that helped filter in mission-aligned contributors.

But in other cases, friction is not a good thing. For example, the friction in the "awareness" stage of DAOs today is extremely high. Not only do you need to have an understanding of what DAOs are, you need to:

• Know which DAO you want to join and the mechanics of doing so (you may need to buy tokens on a DEX).

• Know how to operate Discord at a basic level, or be tech-savvy enough to do so.

• Have a wallet and know how to use it (adding tokens, paying gas).

• Be internet-native enough to find a Discord/Telegram "join" link or a page that details the steps to joining the server/entering the onboarding flow.

• Know how to find information on the mission and vision of the DAO.

Bad friction in DAO discovery is when a mission aligned potential contributor is blocked from entering the onboarding flow.

In the example below, any gold-colored contributor is "mission aligned."

Notice that the friction point kept all the mission aligned contributors out. Bad friction.

Good friction in DAO discovery is when mission aligned contributors (and others who choose to work through the friction point, who may become mission aligned once they're in the DAO) can enter the onboarding flow.

All the gold contributors made it in, as well as the blue "not mission aligned" contributor who chose to work through the friction point. They may become mission aligned once they're in the DAO, or the onboarding flow could reveal that the DAO isn't the right fit for them. Not every contributor must be mission aligned to enter onboarding, but most should be.

Friction tolerance: a function of desire and time

Right now, I believe new DAO contributors need a high friction tolerance, or a willingness to work through confusing and difficult steps, to complete the DAO discovery phase.

I'll use my own DAO discovery journey as an example. When I joined my first DAO, BanklessDAO, there was a lot I didn't know.

• I'd never used Discord before and was unfamiliar with the intricacies and etiquette of the platform.

• I'd never heard of POAPs, Collab.land, or Coordinape, three Web3-native but basic tools you use in the DAO at least monthly.

• I'd never purchased or earned a small-cap "social token" before, and wasn't sure where to buy it.

• I'd never connected my wallet to anything that wasn't a (relatively) blue-chip DeFi interface.

• I only had a very vague idea of what a multisig was.

I had to invest time to google around to find this information once I realized it was necessary for DAO survival. A lot of friction stood in my way. But, because I really wanted to figure it out (desire was high) and I was able to carve out time to do so (free time) I chose to work through the friction.

I was lucky to have the high friction tolerance needed to work through the clunkiness the DAO discovery process (it was also the summer after I'd graduated college, and the work I was doing was boring).

Friction tolerance is a function of:

• Time: how much time are you willing to/can you put in?

• Desire: how much do you want to do this?

For DAOs to succeed, they can't expect every new member to have a high friction tolerance to join. If DAOs only onboard highly friction-tolerant members, they will never get the mass adoption NFTs have received or be able to enter the mainstream as the new way of working.

The reason DAOs need to reduce the friction in their DAO discovery phase to accommodate individuals with a lower friction tolerance is because there's one key group we want to target to bring more skilled, value-aligned contributors into DAOs: those with high desire but low time.

Who is and isn’t likely to put up with friction?

This chart shows Desire, which means how much you want to join the DAO, on the Y axis. Free time, which is the amount of time you can reasonably put toward discovering and joining a DAO, is on the X axis.

• Top left: low free time and high desire. This group wants to join the DAO but can't feasibly go through the friction of doing so. These are the people who could become core contributors but can't dedicate the time to work through the friction to do so. Many of these people might have gone deeper in NFTs and DeFi instead of DAOs, or maybe they're still stuck in Web2 land.

• Top right: high desire and high free time. This group set aside the time to join the DAO, so they were able to feasibly get through the murkiness and could handle the friction. This group includes everyone who has successfully joined a DAO thus far.

• Bottom right: Low desire and high free time. This group doesn't have a huge drive to join your DAO, but they might join because they have the time to dedicate to dealing with friction. If they do join and desire remains low, they'll drop.

• Bottom left: low desire and low free time. This is the majority of the population, because it includes people who don't want to join a DAO and don't plan to dedicate the time to go through the friction. This will be the hardest group to design for when building a DAO discovery process, but is the last group for mass adoption.

Your goal in designing a DAO discovery user journey is to help the top left group successfully discover your DAO and enter your onboarding process without too much bad friction.

Designing a user journey with this “high desire low time” group in mind:

The DAO discovery phase can be simple. And, multiple discovery models can filter into the same onboarding flow. Here are three methods for "good friction" DAO discovery.

Traditional hiring discovery model, but make it DAO:

• Awareness: recruit/hire people outside of Web3 into roles in the DAO (these roles can be fluid once the individual joins and learns how to operate in the DAO space, but consider starting with one role to help them ease in).

• Evaluation: share information on how your DAO works, and point them to resources on working in decentralized spaces.

• Consideration: set up short calls with contributors to help the new contributor really understand what working there is like.

• Purchase/decision: hire with a salary and help them set up all the crypto-native tools they need to begin.

• Retention: let the new contributor build their role as they get more familiar with operating in the decentralized system.

• Advocacy: they help hire people with a similar process they went through.

Twitter discovery model:

• Awareness: hold AMAs, onboarding sessions, and some weekly community calls on Twitter Spaces so others can listen in and learn about your DAO casually without having to make a big time commitment up front.

• Evaluation: pinned Twitter thread about mission/values and how to join.

• Consideration: the DAO's Twitter page can answer questions via tweets in real time.

• Purchase/decision: an onboarding link is in the twitter bio. This might be a survey that the onboarding team receives and responds to.

• Retention: the contributor is shepherded through a simple onboarding process.

• Advocacy: the contributor engages with the DAO's Twitter, joins or hosts Twitter Spaces for the DAO, writes tweets/tweet threads about the DAO, and possibly even helps with onboarding survey intake.

Media discovery model:

• Awareness: article and podcast placement—share info about your DAO to the wider world through media. (This was my user journey—I learned about BanklessDAO, and DAOs in general, through podcasts.)

• Evaluation: depending on the podcast or piece of media, the evaluation stage could happen while the user is listening/reading. How is the DAO spoken about? What does it seem like to outsiders?  

• Consideration: if you have multiple forms of media on multiple platforms, you can help people make the leap from consideration to decision faster because they can do an easy google search.

• Purchase/decision: a link in the podcast show notes or in the article itself that helps the individual enter the onboarding flow.

• Retention: the contributor is shepherded through a simple onboarding process.

• Advocacy: the contributor produces forms of media that help new contributors join, such as writing articles, making podcasts, making designs, writing tweets, and more.

These three user journeys could work together to create multiple "discovery" flows that feed into the onboarding flow.

Onboarding is important, but the journey to arrive at onboarding is just as critical

I'm an advocate of building better onboarding for DAOs. But for contributors to make it to the onboarding stage, they need a user journey that has the right amount of good friction, with minimal bad friction.

I invite you to take the first step toward thinking more deeply about your DAO's user journey of discovery: how did you discover your DAO?

Recommended Reading:

• Frictionless Experience: How to Create Smooth User Flows

• What are the customer journey stages?

Quorum is a metalabel for creators shipping work about DAOs. Check out Quorum’s newsletter, podcast, and Twitter.