One facet of Mirror is that each of these publications are living documents with a history. If there are good ideas, they may be collected, if they are bad, the author(s) only need amend what’s already be said and redeploy those words to another point in some long-term public storage like IPFS or Arweave. Nature abhors a vacuum, but it also has only one dead end in mind: thermodynamic heat death, an event that any reader of this will never experience. To truly tap into what we are capable of producing and consuming, I believe the most important facet of objective reality is realizing that everything should change to accommodate what we know.

One of the things that we know about nature is that evolutionary pressure is exerted on populations, not individuals. We know that there are countless forms of symbiosis, and that we eukaryotes are a direct descendent of endosymbiosis. When a good idea comes along, best to integrate it into one’s thought process. However, good thinkers are transitory and inconsistent, but they will be constantly insightful in aggregate over time. The other point to consider is that atomic units in explicit conformations dictate how matter is recycled. Nature mathematically abhors big bubbles and monolithic structures. To create anything of scale and sophistication, we need to find the least divisible unit and the least costly interchange between any group of them.

Quickly, though, here’s a brief historical synopsis of human organization:

• Homo sapiens emerge around 300,000 years ago. We gather and hunt, start to use tools, and most importantly, we extend our range and explore out of intelligent curiosity in small groups.

• Climate allows for humans to traverse areas like the Bering Strait (then a land bridge) around 10,000-30,000 years ago

• The Neolithic Revolution, where we switched from nomadic hunter-gathererism to more permanent, agricultural civilization (making cities possible), happens around 12,000 years ago.

• Recorded history begins at the end of the Neolithic around 3500 B.C. By this point there has been some form of accounting system (like representative money) for a few thousand years, although currency comes later.

• After processing through several forms of currency, imperialism/oligarchies, and democracies, a period of mercantilism arises in the Renaissance period. By this point we have established nation-states and other, more coherent, forms of government, as well as the first forms of corporations.

• In the 18th and 19th century, industrialism is promoted, and we’ve effectively gotten to the stage that the modern world is still experiencing (our technology is so advanced it has dramatically changed the scale of experiencing the same fundamental system). Corporations become an effective body of industrial output and capital control outside the strict mandates of the state government.

In the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith states:

the most advantageous method in which a landed nation can raise up artificers, manufacturers, and merchants of its own is to grant the most perfect freedom of trade to the artificers, manufacturers, and merchants of all other nations.

From an ecological perspective, this is fundamentally true. The most effective lifeforms arise from the plurality of traits, forms, and functions, and their temporary prominence depends on temporary selective pressure from the environment. Monocultures tend to be dominant until there is a catastrophe; as destructive as there is less diverse capacity for any variant in the population to thrive enough for its population to recover.

Unfortunately, corporate industrialism has political baggage. In nature, there is a balance through competition and necessary adaptation; in society, there is an arbitrary mandate that certain entities must not be outcompeted, and when any entity successfully transcends this natural competition for industrial output, we call it regulatory capture, or cronyism.

The thing about DAOs is that they operate on a naturally free and open competition. For example, Bitcoin remains the most prominent PoW blockchain because it has successfully thrived from the beginning and competed for miners to secure its network. There are variants through hardforking, and they coexist to a smaller degree. If there was a disruption of Bitcoin, another PoW blockchain would take its place. Likewise cryptocurrency has a wide diversity of consensus methods. Ethereum, in particular, is imminently demonstrating adaptation at scale by merging its PoW ecosystem with a PoS consensus architecture. If not Ethereum, there are many PoS alternatives that would be capable of taking over.

The irony of demonstrating this peer-to-peer interchange of resources for self-evident security in aggregate is that it proves that the larger environment can be changed to eschew more monolithic properties (not naturally favorable) to a more nimble and modular form of self-regulation (more naturally favorable). Unfortunately, the traditional environment is obsolete but can afford to expend resources to bend its economic reality. There are many sovereignties that are now offering an olive branch and a quiver of arrows to known DAOs: the olive branch is that DAOs can be recognized as “legitimate” if they are shoehorned into the corporate model, the arrows are potential legal attacks on the basis of liability and arbitrary illegitimacy/criminality.

Nature says that symbiosis is not only acceptable, it is a necessary mechanic by which more complex lifeforms can exist. Plant life would not exist without chloroplasts, and sexual reproduction (and accelerated genetic diversity) would not exist without eukaryotic nuclei. Likewise, more sophisticated DAOs exist like more sophisticated relationships (like mycelial networks) and populations, they are not explicitly defined as corporations. Any “offer” from a state to incorporate an entire DAO is antique poison of an anti-competitive nature. On the other hand, any legitimate recognition by the state of what DAOs resemble will need to articulate the relationships between corporations as appendages of a larger symbiotic system that is strictly outside the bounds of nation-state government. Entire DAOs are not corporations, but appendages like working groups and guilds may be considered as such.

There are some strict definitions of DAOs as they relate to our global corporate economy:

• They exert the competitive pressure of an open, censorship-resistant ecosystem

• They are formed and dissolved through an open, transparent record

• Individual entities are capable of coexisting within and without the DAO

• There is a clear description of the atomic unit and its methods of interchange

DAOs that revolve around smart contracts are the most capable of meeting these parameters. The contracts are explicitly oriented around permissionlessness, they coexist in the same execution layer, they have explicit methods of interaction, they can be forked and parallelized. Natural reality will sustain and propagate the most ambitious of these, and IRL, humans will find better ways to assemble and achieve positive-sum interchange. If there is some regression where a “DAO” meets some of these but contradicts other facets, they will likely be outcompeted or fail outright in retrospect. Here’s a good example of someone describing this:

In conclusion, the most effective ecosystem is both free and competitive. Many times, we are lead to believe that the only way to win is to create some short-term bubble, or “corner the market”. There are plenty of examples of justifying and promoting this in retrospect:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vniKYpk82Ug

However, we can see that it takes more abstraction and more conditionality to justify certain systems that are contradictory to the underlying nature of competition. It’s important to design for greed, but it is also important to emphasize self-evident neutrality and healthy circulation of actors. AI has grown by leaps and bounds because of modular neural networks, not monolithic expert systems. Human collaboration is catalyzed by open-sourced knowledge, not hierarchical, gatekept repositories. Social progress is accomplished through uninfringed assembly, not an n-party system or a simple majority vote. In web3, we should consider what nature has demonstrated to be the most effective path forward, and actually promote it in a genuine way.

P.S. One of my pet projects, the Sagamore Grove, is in the ideation phase for the formation of a confederation of DAOs, consortiums, and other collectives. The defining document will be a charter, and the subgroup that will be responsible for drafting this document are holders of a Bright Blue Planet.

The second working group within S_G is the syndicate, which will be responsible for drafting reproducible IRL “circuits”, some of which I’ve proposed in “a Tale of Five Circuits”

If you, the reader, are interested in this approach, and you have any thoughts pertaining to this subject, any input would be much appreciated.