This is article 2 of 4 for the BanklessDAO Writers Cohort. This is the first of three cohort articles in which I’ll try to work out some thoughts on how to analyze DAOs in prep for an article I’ve been wanting to write for most of this year.

Although DAOs have been around for six years, they are still pretty hard to define. Certainly the term ‘decentralized autonomous organization’ does very little to describe what they are, what they do, or how they do it. And even those of us who work and play in DAOs for hours each day have a really hard time describing just what it is we are doing and how we are doing it.

Is decentralization a reference to the technology, the people, the workstreams, the org structure, or the ownership distribution? Is the decentralized organization autonomous because it historically has not been part of a regulatory or statutory regime, because people may come and go as they please, or because these entities enable maximum agency so that people can contribute as they see fit? Are DAOs a tightly run, smart-contract enabled, on-chain voting organization of the future or are they a loose collective of nomads with a multisig and a worthless governance token? The answer to these questions is that it depends on the DAO. So it’s no wonder when I tell people I work for DAOs they look at me as if I must have muttered and sputtered, screamed and moaned, spoke in tongues with alien speech patterns, or offended their mother. Badly.

After spending thousands of hours working in DAOs, the one thing I know for sure is that we need better methodology to examine the organizations we are creating. We need to excavate the soft earth of our recent adventures to understand the building blocks of DAOs, the social legos the coordinators and contributors work with to move people and capital towards a common mission. We need to consider the Archaeology of a DAO.

What Is Archaeology?

As a discipline, most of us are familiar with archaeology as shown to us through old photos and videos of people clad in white, excavating ancient sites, cleaning shards of pottery with a soft-bristle brush. Archaeology is the study of human cultural history through the analysis of discovered artifacts, habitats, fossils, ecological remnants, and landscape manipulation. It matters not whether these materials are 100,000 years old or 20; the field of archaeology is concerned with human history even if that history is this morning’s coffee grounds.

For many, archaeology is the less well-known cousin of anthropology. Unlike archaeology’s more physical-centric approach, anthropology seeks to understand the entirety of the human condition by studying its biological, social, and cultural evolution. And while both anthropology and archaeology are tools we can use to analyze DAOs, there is another type of archaeology that we can employ to aid us in our quest, the Archaeology of Knowledge.

What Is the Archaeology of Knowledge?

The Archaeology of Knowledge is the title of a book by French philosopher Michel Foucault. To a certain subset of intellectuals, Foucault is like a Buterin – a singular mind exploring the ideas of his time through a preferred tool set. Foucault did the bulk of his writing from 1960-1980, exploring themes of otherness and alterity, and is perhaps best known for books on sexuality and punishment. By many measures, he was the most famous philosopher of his time. And that’s great, but who cares?

Well, we should. Foucault developed a method of inquiry he called the Archaeology of Knowledge. In its most basic sense, this particular type of archaeology is concerned with the excavation of layers of social discourse to get at the truth of a thing. For Foucault, this truth was often revealed by exploring the unseen space in power dynamics between people, groups, organizations, and governments. To uncover the relational basis between these players, Foucault would dive deep into the semiotics and lore of an organization – its institutional knowledge – to discover how culture and power were subconsciously distributed throughout an organization, thereby defining the limits of its own possibilities.

So that sounds really complicated, but the TL;DR is the important shit happens beneath the surface, but once you know how to find it, it’s always there to be seen – or rather it can’t be unseen. Which of course brings us back to DAOs.

The Archaeology of a DAO

When I first wrote of my experience in DAOs, I had all these ‘C’ words swirling in my head, writing that DAOs “operate at the confluence of contribution and collaboration, coordination and consensus, cohesion and community, all fueled by capital through a tokenized incentive structure.”

In these cohort articles, I want to apply a broad archaeological approach – in both the traditional and Foucaultian sense – to try and understand what DAOs are. These C’s of contribution, collaboration, coordination, consensus, cohesion, community, culture, and capital make up the social legos on which DAOs are built, and one thesis I’m playing with is that you can understand what a DAO is by excavating and examining its constituent parts in both a literal and subtextual manner.

As with the DeFi primitives to which the social lego concept derives its name, the many C’s are composable, that is, interchangeable, but the way in which these legos are set and stacked determines the kind of DAO that will be built and maintained. Because the social legos are composable, the social tech stack of a DAO is fluid, and with the right inputs and volumes, these social legos can not only be moved around, but amplified or toned down based upon where they fit in the social stack. If we can learn how these legos fit together and how to properly tune them, we should be able to build DAOs that can change the world.

We Can Change the World

And that for me is really what I’m trying to figure out – how to build DAOs that will thrive at scale in the wilds of the world. DAOs are laboratories for new ways of reimagining social relations and therefore human relations, but we have to be certain that we understand what we’re building in order to create the kind of change that will help to lead to the next major evolution of human development.

I’m certain that DAOs can create structures that align humans in ways that will absolutely change the world, but it’s up to us right now to make sure that we are focused on building systems that won’t just change the world, but will change the world for the better.

Hiro Kennelly is a writer, editor, and coordinator at BanklessDAO and the Editor-in-Chief at Good Morning News. He is also helping to build a grants-focused organization at DAOpunks.