by Dylan
We need to back up a few paces to be sure we’re right about what is happening with the rise of blockchain technology. DAOs are essentially a use-case for blockchains that make it possible to conduct the vast bulk of business on-chain. There are many benefits to this structure, greatest among these being the availability of highly efficient distributed cognition and the low cost implied by the minimal participation commitment typically required.
Despite suffering setbacks every time we wanted to raise money, for example, the PageDAO still stands ready to essentially deliver its core vision more or less on time. In a traditional startup, this never could have worked out so well, but since we are a DAO and since we have a cryptocurrency, we’ve discovered that our organization is extremely resilient. We also have a very strong idea and a vision many people find very compelling, but perhaps our greatest strength is our ability to work together to produce an outcome in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts by optimizing our behavior to effectively engage in distributed cognition together. The PizzaDAO corroborates this story by being an art project which buys pizza for people–with the right minds and an appropriate network, the sky’s the limit.
Distributed cognition, or network cognition, is the cognitive product of a group of people working on a problem together such that each human mind is able to apply itself in appropriate degree to an appropriate piece of the problem. Ideally, over time, the group as a whole is able to solve said problem, regardless of how complex it might become. One key component of the distributed cognitive apparatus of a typical DAO is the ability to recruit new members with new skill sets into the DAO to resolve particular issues as they come up.
The purpose of this section of the essay goes beyond simply defining distributed cognition to further explain precisely why the PageDAO going broke simply brought us all closer together and made it all the more certain we’d ultimately accomplish our objective, for example—this would have been impossible if we were merely another tech startup. Instead, it is as if being an on-chain DAO grants us superpowers and makes our idea immortal.
We all hold PAGE token positions of considerable size, and none of us has any intention of selling no matter how low the price goes. Yet, as long as the hope for the token remains alive, we all have a vested-yet-indeterminate stake in the success of the network. Judiciously, we’ve apportioned ourselves a very small proportion of the ultimate token issuance, but the initial inflation stage has revealed that the PAGE token is a powerful tool for the shared purposes of the DAO. Having the token improves our relationships with each other because it makes trust an easier ask between members of the group who possess the token.
This trust represents the elimination of the traditional startup’s primary blocker to effective distributed cognition at the organizational level: competition and jealousy within the group. Everyone in a DAO has an entirely transparent record of where things stand, and even if opportunities to participate are missed, the people who stick around on a project of the magnitude of the PageDAO are nonetheless sufficient muscle to move the ball over the goal line, so to speak. Larger DAOs and smaller ones with larger proportions of active members exemplify this principle to an even greater degree, with the largest being perhaps the $ATOM blockchain of the Cosmos Hub (valued around $10B, over 200M $ATOMs in circulation).
Even a declining price of the PAGE token only slightly diminishes the value holders place on it. Evidence of this conjecture is supplied by the 90% value reduction the PAGE token has undergone during the course of its life, plotted against the number of holders (which has remained almost completely positive, but is poorly understood because Discord shows up as one user instead of a network on Etherscan). The project is not generally very well understood by the outside community and has been abused by at least one bad actor, but the founders hold the tokens they’ve been issued for their services and this is the basis of the fluid interaction framework that makes the PageDAO able to execute distributed cognition with unprecedented efficiency, enabling rapid advancements on any number of fronts at the same time for an absurdly small amount of actual capital invested. Remember, the org raised a total of $53,000 last year - the technology we built for that price is probably at least a 10x of that value. We haven’t scaled yet, but seeing this firsthand has made me a firm believer in DAO structure.
Minimal coordination is required to ensure that DAO members do not double-attack the same problem, wasting efforts that could be better applied elsewhere. When coordination is effective, everyone picks a different puzzle piece and the entire collaborative enterprise is assembled. When coordination fails, projects stall. These moments are familiar to anyone who has seen the spinning hourglass icon or watched a loading screen for longer than was desirable – they represent a stopping of activity on the network. DAOs do not frequently grind to a halt because the primary activity of some members is creating projects and the other members become occupied with projects they like; a certain rhythm emerges. Individual projects may remain stalled indefinitely, only to kick back to life when some piece of obscure technology is invented that solves a key issue with open source software.
When distributed cognition works, it is able to orchestrate effortless cooperation across a vast and heterogeneous network to create impact at scale in unthinkably minimal timeframes. If humanity has a hope for solving the climate change dilemma, the first place to look for this solution is on-chain. Regen Networks has already done an unimaginable amount of work in this direction. The technology on display at Regen today is a shining example of the potential of distributed cognition in a new direction, using sensors and chemistry to model carbon sequestration ongoing in different places in real time.
KEEP READING
If you want to read more about Dylan's vision, you can find the full essay in the ReadMe collection on Opensea. Thomas Dylan Daniel is a former philosophy professor turned biotech startup founder turned degen Web3 builder. He is one of the founding members of PageDAO.
"Cybernetics Perfected: How Blockchain Based DAOs Deliver Optimal Distributed Cognition" is an attempt by Dylan to peek into the future a bit and guess what may be coming next. In the Distributed Autonomous Organization, or DAO, we have what could be a newer, more robust social network model.
Everything from incentives that constitute a financial benefit to participants who behave in a particular way to financial penalties for bad behavior on a network is now possible. As DAOs proliferate, the question on everyone's mind is this: what makes DAO participation so enticing for so many people?
In this essay, Dylan elaborates upon ideas first developed in Blockchain Meets Ontology, arguing that the inability of actors to lie about on-chain events speeds up our distributed cognition. In fact, as the technology that powers them becomes faster and faster, DAOs will render new things possible as they perfect the discipline of cybernetics.
Page DAOs'official links
Website
Medium
Discord