In light of the recent Gitcoin & Shell partnership, I thought this was a good opportunity for a note on Substrates, the concept introduced in vengist.eth and I’s recent booklet, Friends of the Outside: Control, Substrates, and the Afterlife of DAOs.

Biologyonline gives the simple definition of “substrate” as “the surface or material on or from which an organism lives, grows, or obtains its nourishment.” When Ven and I put together the conceptual outline for FotO, our intention was to name a generative element, - a first cause, even - through which DAOs live, grow, and obtain their nourishment.

The notion of first cause is relevant here because we are not only talking about practical structures, but metaphysical beliefs and superstitions that animate different types of social bodies. In the booklet we invoked the bourgeois and colonial cults of Emanationism - the belief in a wellspring of power that stands above the plane of nature, and which classes of beings have more or less proximity to. It’s an archaic, magical, racist and basically absurd belief. It also shaped the majority of our modern institutions.

A lot of the confusion of our time seems to be around a schizophrenia within modern orgs - they feel the masquerade thinning, as the average person develops more and more conviction in the the relational nature of power, but they are literally unable to abandon it. Check the cynical minimalism currently in fashion in platforms. Control logic is pulling back, hollowing out, as the gravity of our civilization flows elsewhere.

These types of orgs are powerless to change because they are structurally married to the metaphysics of hierarchy. Restrictive, permissioned, they operate in an imagined landscape of scarcity where they must conquer and hoard. To understand what DAOs have to offer in the place of legacy orgs, we have to understand the landscapes of abundance they live in, the pluralistic stage upon which their birth is effortless and their death is always generative.

Substrates are kinds of social entities - though their nature is largely resistant to identity - that are defined by spontaneous and shifting network relations. Genre communities and memetic communities are great examples inasmuch as they represent a kind of headless and totally informal cultural cooperativism, edged by the artistic or maker-based conviction in free production, free association, and free sharing of knowledge. To follow Deleuze & Guattari’s usage, they are Social Bodies without Organs (SBwOs) (a good wikipedia definition of BwO: ‘the unregulated potential of a body without organizational structures imposed on its constituent parts, operating freely’). They consist entirely of relational tissue and a common, immanent tendency to flight from organizational capture that shapes those bonds.

As we said in the piece - ‘they have no walls, and they continuously build the ground they stand on.’

DAOs, we argue, are distinct organizational types because they are structurally joined to substrates. The ease of genesis is ideal for temporary, cause-based assemblies; the smart contract infrastructure limits opportunities for administrative collusion that can make orgs self-perpetuate to no end; their available funding techniques unlock methods for sustainably producing open source resources; they maximize and encourage channels for fork and exit. DAOs, in other words, are temporary strategic vehicles for furthering the core project of the substrates - generative pluralism and flight from capture. When we do away with superstitions, and divorce ourselves from the shells of the old Emanationist fictions, we find an easy strategic advantage: the realists behind the open source and financial pluralism movements, and the hackers and gamers that supported them, found the structural features of DAOs.

To keep winning, we need to remind ourselves to stay welded to the substrates, understanding any DAO as a functional contingency that can and should be forked or abandoned at an instant. If we forget to do this, we risk missing out on the strategic advantage that DAOs, in their play, irreverence and organizational minimalism, have to offer.

The Gitcoin + Shell partnership is a great edge case. I believe the partnership with Shell has strategic legitimacy. I also believe that Shell is an organization run by actual psychopaths, and might be one of the most dangerous and knowingly malicious groups in human history. I’m okay with this tension, because I know that pluralism and strategic multivalence, more than moral outrage, is how we will win this game. GitcoinDAO doesn’t have a responsibility to align with every strategy. It does have a responsibility to make available channels of dissent [1] and to welcome forks and alternative use of its protocol (it has, robustly) - and, at some point, to consider dissolution, fracture and reassembly.

I hope that in coming years we run into all manner of strategic disagreements, conflicts and organizational implosions, and I hope we greet them gracefully, gingerly. I hope legacy institutions are downright disturbed by the spooky amicability with which we erect spontaneous calls for consensus, by which we fork or abruptly dissolve our orgs. I hope we look like a chimera, a swarm, grounded on the plane, formless and full of fugitive agency.

08.15.2023

[1] See FotO, Axiom #3 on products versus resources.