At the Yak Collective, we’re just starting to experiment with DAOs using the Colony platform, so we’ve been reading a lot about the topic in our regular Monday morning blockchain roadmap calls (the idea is to path-find our way to actually working DAOhood to the extent it makes sense for us; we are not a DAO yet, and have no real interest in just claiming the DAO label for cachet-value). Over the weekend I also sampled a bunch of the presentations from ETHDenver.

I’m pretty green around this stuff, but 3 related problems immediately popped out for me, and at present I see no obviously easy and elegant solutions to any of them. I do think they will be solved, but likely in pragmatic ways that will thoroughly disillusion idealists really attached to “trustless” as an ideology.

I’ll throw out my notes in the form of a series of definitions.

The Vapor DAO problem is like a vaporware DAO, existing primarily in theoretical form. Vaporware is software that mainly exists in somebody’s imagination, as a bunch of block diagrams, perhaps a charismatic speech or essay, and at most as a set of wireframe mockups or hollow “demos.” There’s no actual running code. I have zero data to back this up, but I have a strong suspicion 90% of things that call themselves DAOs right now are Vapor DAOs. Forget conforming to any formal technical conditions of autonomy in the mechanism or whatever -- there’s no there there to audit for conformity to definitions.

The equivalent of running code for DAOs is an active and engaged community that’s actually doing stuff, and doing legislative governance around the stuff. A Vapor DAO might have issued a token, and set up some scaffolding for voting and such, but doesn’t actually have any live, load-bearing governance process to speak of. Perhaps a few principals make effectively autocratic decisions because no agency of consequence is actually under the direct control of the DAO itself. This is likely to happen because there is not enough value in play to be worth anyone’s time to get involved in fiddly direct democracy or even token-delegated indirect democracy. Do you really want to spend a couple of hours a week thinking about how to vote your shitcoin tokens in the inconsequential decisions of some shitty DAO? No. Chances are, if you hold any nominal governance power, it’ll just sit in your wallet doing nothing. You might at best pay enough attention to sell the tokens if random events cause it to moon.

The DAOwashing problem is related, and I think is just starting to appear on the scene. Here there IS likely a lot of value in play (maybe big, liquid treasuries, or algorithmic influence peddling around some celebrity like Andrew Yang). But the high stakes and real-world power asymmetries will lead to situations where there is high marketing upside and cred to presenting as a DAO, but high downside to actually operating as one. So there will be a flood of theatrical DAOs set up, full of sound and fury signifying nothing, with the real power and agency consolidated at another locus. Like greenwashing and other off-chain *washing phenomenon, the theatricality is the function. The appearance of significant action unfolding according to some set of principles X, with actual action unfolding elsewhere according to some different set of principles Y. This is not harmless. It will turn the landscape of DAOs into a marketplace of lemons, where the bad DAOs will drive out the good DAOs (there’s some corollary to Gresham’s Law here, since “DAOs” are pretty close to “moneys”).

Finally, Governance Overload. Even if we assume great filter and audit mechanisms emerge to filter out the Vapor DAOs and DAOwashing theaters (there was a pitch about this at ETHDenver, I forget the name, but some sort of klout-for-DAOs thing), just how much governance bandwidth do people think there is here, to go around?

I mean, in most democracies, 40%+ of people can’t even bring themselves to go out and vote in major national elections. Local elections are ghost towns of low turnout unless some dumb flashpoint issue has come up. You really expect to see a world where large fractions of people are showing up to vote, arbitrate, and help govern thousands of random little dApps that have built DAO-based governance into their product architecture?

And remember, except in cases where rare, high-value governance tokens are involved (which will induce its own set of shareholder-activism type problems), this is going to be largely thankless labor, much as it is in the old off-chain world. The kinds of people who show up are a) the ones driven by some higher sense of civid duties, b) tyrannical special-interest minority groups trying to take over the thing at the expense of the majority or c) crackpots who want to show up at town halls to make crackpot speeches about the Earth being flat or ruled by lizards or whatever.

There is zero reason to believe this pattern won’t reproduce itself in Web3 governance.

This is not a theoretical concern. I watched most of the hackathon livestream from ETHDenver, and most of the pitches seemed to be aiming to claim the coveted “Decentralized!” label with a particular design pattern:

• A basic product with some sort of trustless UX reliant on game-theoretic incentives for nominal operations, with some nominal anti-Sybil guarantees

• Reliance on rollups to achieve low costs, creating small transient windows for things to go wrong in (ie, things are not trustless at the atomic levels of resolution, only at rolled-up levels).

• A DAO-like mechanism for arbitration when (not if) things go wrong with the basic process for basic exception handling

• Varying levels of clever or not-so-clever opsec measures to prevent systematic attacks like bot-driven front-running/arbitrage, hostile takeovers, social engineering etc. that cannot hope to be comprehensive, only good enough to make attacks not worth the effort.

This pattern is either disingenuous or naive for all but the most valuable and well-governed of DAOfied ideas. If your product requires a DAO to work at all, to handle non-trivial, non-rare exceptions, you have to do MUCH better than this to get people to devote some of their very limited and precious governance attention bandwidth to it.

To calibrate, in Web2, two-sided marketplaces are among the hardest kinds of startups to do, since you have to spin up both demand and supply (the famous chicken-egg problem). Here you’re talking spinning up a three sided marketplace of demand, supply, and governance. Kinda nice that we go from 2 to 3 dimensions in the hard case, as we go from Web2 to Web3.

I basically don’t think this direction of a vast landscape of tiny local political zones will work. Instead, something like what happened to American politics (the emergence of parties despite founding fathers warnings against parties) or the American labor movement (fragmented landscape of high-skill trade/artisan unions getting rolled up into large, generic low-skill labor groups) is where we’re probably headed. This also means delegation over direct participation.

A third alternative is that instead of everything being done in a legislative mode, something like a judiciary will spin up -- a sector of Web3 devoted to appeals and arbitration. Products that anticipate conflict resolution needs will perhaps have a mechanism to “take the conflict to court” instead of to a DAO. And the judges or arbitrators will get paid in currencies that are worth something, not obscure local currencies.

The maze is fully playable. There are no canonical “solutions” as such, but multiple coherent paths meant to evoke different life circumstances and narratives. Think of the maze as a mirror that can reflect the shape of your life path back at you. On it, you can plot everything from existential despair and status traps to enlightenment journeys and descents into madness.

Besides being playable as a maze, the image is also intended as a sort of mandala for contemplation, and as a canvas to help map out and think through difficult life challenges.

The conceit of the maze is that it represents the Sturm und Drang of life itself, and in particular, the various temporalities one can experience simply by virtue of being alive.

The maze is based on a simpler diagram called the goat-crow-rat diagram, which I made up as a doodle to think with in 2017. Over a series of 3 articles on ribbonfarm (Thingness and Thereness, Been There, Done That, Make Your Own Rules), I developed that diagram further into a visualization of a sort of nerdy pop metaphysics of Life, the Universe, and Everything. The maze is an attempt to turn that metaphysics into an embodied, allegorical world model. Or you can think of it as a blueprint for a mind palace. In the book I’m working on, I’m diving deeper into the temporal aspects of the maze, but there are many other aspects to it.

In the four years since I sketched the first version, the maze has turned into my go-to diagramming aid for thinking about complex and messy situations, headspaces, and life chapters. I like to think of it as a very primitive version of the Total Perspective Vortex, the fictional machine in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that shows you exactly where you stand in relation to the universe.

The three vertices, marked by the crow, rat, and goat icons, represent what we might think of as eigentemporalities: objective, subjective, and eternal-cyclic aspects of time; what the Greeks called chronos, kairos, and aion. To circle the triangle is to move among these three metaphysical time zones. To fall towards the center is to fall towards an atemporal void.

Perhaps your life feels like gradually trying to complete a full circuit of the whole triangle over a lifetime. Perhaps it feels like circling it multiple times on smaller time-scales. Perhaps it feels like mostly staying in the zone around a single edge. Perhaps it feels like you’re circling the void -- or irrecoverably falling into it.

We’ve also incorporated Geoff Manaugh’s idea of Nakatomi Spaces -- as in the setting of the Die Hard movie -- into the design. Does your life feel like you’re walking openly down defined pathways, or does it feel like you’re crawling through ventilation ducts and elevator shafts? Are you skulking and sneaking around like a burglar, or taking the Respectable Citizen path? Fans of Deleuze and Guattari might also want to think of this aspect of the map as an attempt to depict both the smooth and striated spaces of life, and both rhizomatic and arborescent ways of knowing.

Unlike most mazes, this one has arrow markers indicating one-way paths, since it represents the one-way flow of time. If you want to try solving for the various possible paths on paper, you might want to print off a large-format version.

We have no set plans for where to take this. I’ll be working out more of the philosophy of the maze through my book project of course, and future blog posts, but beyond that, the options are wide open. Ideas we have talked about include virtual worlds, a board game based on the map (kinda like an adult, more philosophical version of the classic Game of Life board game), and of course, a maze navigation game.

ethereum://0x3B3ee1931Dc30C1957379FAc9aba94D1C48a5405/106332

Hey looks like I can edit editions after the fact?