Decade-long, but still new and exciting, the realization that we have at our disposal God-level bandwidth for signal co-determination is the source of all below touted evils. We probably both still hope for this technology, the internet, cryptography, to primarily facilitate a whole lot more than commerce and jitteriness. From this viewpoint, I venture to articulate an inkling of governance that makes power distributions rationalizable and accounted for to the widest extent possible. What follows is a case for a new, practicable, and internally coherent governance structure that aims to advance the ethos of decentralization and tickle political imaginaries. In two parts. First, I define things and defend token voting. Then, I prototype and propose a new structure.
Governance and Police
Governance is hard. Much of its historical development revolves around fantastic myths or recurrent thought experiments that storyboard a hypothetical transition between a causa sui state of natural liberty and the apology of contemporary power aggregation. Undoubtedly, there is much use to be drawn from Moloch as well as the contractual tradition in deconstructing the clichés of DAO governance. Articulating yet another social contract however is not of much use in conceptualizing governance proper to an era where byte-solid agreements are deterministically enforceable inside infallible, for the people, by the people machines. As such, the soon™ outlined governance structure was inspired by unicellular organisms. In particular, by the contrast between the popularity of post-scarcity narratives and the fact that we know very little as to how unicellular organisms work. The need-to-become-driven behavior of stem cells or the careless byte of a lacrymaria olor are fascinating yet very much still black boxes. So it’s kind of weird that we can’t seem to be able to discern the inner workings or predict the whatabouts of the simplest of critters but we buy into the narrative that we are so coll as to be able to spawn sentient agents on a whim. Regardless of how you harmonize these facts, what I want you to entertain for now is the thesis that compute-mediated breakthroughs seem to happen through the use of signal-accommodating structures.
Be them encoders, transformers or regenerating tissues, cell networks are ultimately as dumb as a riverbed. What makes them remotely intelligent is their capacity to take a useful form in a particular environment. All intelligent things are affected by their experience. Neurons, be them biological or computational, do their own thing. They receive and produce signal, and by doing so, they uniquely and irreversibly change their world. As neurons in the brain, so shall perhaps humans coordinate in compute-mediated, need solving networks. DAOs as autonomous biological organisms. Why not?
DAO stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organisation. There’s not much of a point in lingering as to what exactly that entails. For now, a literal and open-ended definition should do fine. Better yet, assume a maximalist, purist stance, whatever that may be. With it, and with any significant knowledge of the DAOsphere it should be obvious that there’s no such known viable structure in existence. Anyone holding the prospect of DAOs as a significant potential development for human coordination will agree with this blunt assessment. Lots have already given up on it. Most others embrace and promote counter-intuitive compromises that ultimately render the advertised destination unreachable. As a believer in technology-powered decentralization since before DAOs were a thing, I find this - as if nothing were at stake abandonment - deeply upsetting.
And here’s one of the problems. The contributor that does that which it is in its nature, namely, contributes - without asking for permission - is never recognized or compensated for doing. “Acting as if one is already free” or behaving in a DAO labeled structure as if it is already decentralized, never yields expected results. There’s always, at best, a presumptuous evaluation and at worst, a ring to kiss and boots to lick.
The thing that people get wrong most of the time is that they equate decentralized governance with no leadership and total flat hierarchy. […] In the absence of formal hierarchy what you end up getting is shadow hierarchy and that makes it harder to participate because people don’t know where to go or what panels exist for them to actually be able to participate. So they have to work around kind of unspoken centers of power in order to actually contribute and I think that’s ironically counterproductive to having decentralized governance. I think we need to split apart this idea of leadership and decentralization. They are different topics.
Chris Ahn - Bell Curve Podcast
Subjective experiences aside, in the best of cases, there’s a process. A form to complete, a rubber stamp to get for a forum to post on. The familiar warm embrace of bureaucracy, a competent operator’s default, while providing a reassuring handle on things, ends up excluding a range of types of being and boosts the commonality of endorsed and ultimately predominant value judgments. Page-bending innovation however requires diversity. Commission filtering or more generally any type of process based gate-keeping limits the likelihood of wildflower cross-pollination. There’s simply no cool novel idea coming anytime soon out of the British parliament. Not because those people are unintelligent or incompetent, but because they overwhelmingly are the product of the same formative funnels. Overwhelmingly receptive and excitable by the same signals. Sharing in their desires and restrains, their potentiality overlaps, forms and actualizes a finite range of demeanors; ways of being, saying and doing.
The police is thus first an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the visible and the sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and another as noise. […] Policing is not so much the "disciplining" of bodies as [much as] a rule governing their appearing, a configuration of occupations and the properties of the spaces where these occupations are distributed.
Jacques Rancière, Dis-agreement
As a mater of principle, in any Decentralized Autonomous Organization, a contributor should not need anyone’s approval to contribute and be eligible for compensation for any arbitrary effort. What effort ads value and is rewarded, ought to be determined in an unintermediated fashion by the decentralized network of autonomous agents that form the organization. Prioritizing direct value generation to the detriment of politicking and ‘selling yourself‘ as an intermediary recursive loop will likely unlock unprecedented productivity. This is largely unfeasible today; not because something is truly missing, but because the structuring of human activity defaults to a policing paradigm. An uncomfortable and scary leap away from police driven structures is needed to overcome this limitation. Perhaps then *drinks hopium-aid*, by being attunable to the noisy powers of the crowd, one can point to DAOs as on a path to materializing the idealist’s dream of rendering the value extracting corporate model obsolete.
A Membrane that Moves Forward
A Membrane
All autonomous things and organizations have two things in common: a membrane and the ability to move forward. For the thing, the membrane is what separates, or has the power to separate, the thing, from all that which is not the thing. An organization’s membrane is abstract and sparse as it’s typically formed out of a multitude of things. Cars, buildings, tools, employment contracts etc. But perhaps the most illustrative thing that constitutes a modern corporate membrane is the totality of in-use access badges. They determine who can access and excite an organisation’s movement organelles.
Forward Movement
The moving forward part is quite straightforward. If it’s alive, it moves, “forward”. I for one do not judge as to what any living thing chooses or is drawn towards as its forward. What this forward can possibly be, is, and how it is to be approached, is forged in power machinations identifiable by the word governance. So, forward movement is any change in state or disposition. A merged PR. A new dank meme. All such things count as movement if the externally identifiable enactor is the organisation and the act itself posits the composed body or its perception thereof, in a new light.
What is a DAO
A Decentralized Autonomous Organisation is a social, political and administrative unit that functions such that the initiation and execution of any known action does not systematically depend on the consent or input of any identifiable atomic party.
What is DAO Governance
DAO governance is a cooperative undertaking that serves in sourcing and embodying a common good through the direct participation of its constituent distinct knowers.
In Defense of ‘Coin Voting Governance’
If there’s overwhelming consensus over something among the graduate students of DAO governance is that token voting does not work. This is such a prevalent and consistently held position that vitalik.eth not only wrote about it extensively over the past five years but also reasserted it recently as a mathematically provable certainty.
A token in a protocol with coin voting is a bundle of two rights that are combined into a single asset: (i) some kind of economic interest in the protocol's revenue and (ii) the right to participate in governance. This combination is deliberate: the goal is to align power and responsibility. But in fact, these two rights are very easy to unbundle from each other. […] the borrower has governance power without economic interest, and the lender has economic interest without governance power.
The most important thing that can be done today is moving away from the idea that coin voting is the only legitimate form of governance decentralization. Coin voting is attractive because it feels credibly neutral: anyone can go and get some units of the governance token on Uniswap.
It’s hard to deconstruct any specific, devoid of context claim in vitalik’s writings on the topic in good faith. What I unreservedly take issue with is the maybe implied blanket statement that token voting is simply irredeemable. In my view, such a claim is necessarily the product of a series of generalizations and assumptions. As a disclaimer, I am irreverent and ignorant to the relevancy of any mathematical certitudes (🔊) here.
Anyway, to the best of my knowledge, all critiques of token voting seem to refer to what I would much rather call proposal-based governance, as PBG seems to be its inseparable default. I also differ as to why I think it is so appealing. It most likely has something to do with it being easy to follow. More importantly, a quantifiable common denominator of legitimacy in direction setting makes its processes debugable and diagnosticable. Token voting given, legitimacy can be abstracted and analyzed as the settling of differences in exercised power over time. And that’s likely something only fungible tokens can do. On the offensive, I would caution that a departure from such quantities is of a nature as to likely foster a long term increase in the incidence of obfuscated collusion. I am also generally skeptical as to the conservation of legitimacy capacity of any non-responsive structures. The point being: legitimacy is not static, but context-dependent. Contexts shift. That is, all movement should visibly, continuously and consequentially erode or reaffirm the legitimacy of the police. When this happens transparently in a permissionless, deterministic system, the police is no longer needed.
If that’s not a convincing enough take as to warrant giving token voting another chance, there’s more to it I dare say than the coupling of economic interest and responsibility. They can perhaps also couple recognition and redistribution (🔊). Recognition and redistribution are the two central things on which legitimacy and identity ultimately rest. These are the things that all organizations do and all individuals are sensitive to. Sure, different amounts of petting and feeding might apply, but the point remains, we all yearn belonging and relative prosperity, and distance from water-muddying aporia-inducing philosophers that have been only ruining the vibes for the past 2000+ years.
This coupling and eventual reconciliation of recognition and redistribution in an on-demand, self-adjusting, anti-fragile structure is potentially of nature as to
“enlarge the purview of democracy to encompass not just decision making within a predefined political zone, but more fundamentally democratize the very process of definition and demarcation, the very frames that constitute the political.”
For clarity, even though I am not convinced by the overall case for the dismissal of “coin voting” as fertile ground for rooting experimental governance in; I did not engage on any of the constitutive claims of the overarching case. While I can’t yet see how the known vulnerabilities of token voting significantly disable the framing I am working on, there is a very significant chance they do apply. All I am saying for now is that proposal based governance is a square shape and token governance is a round peg. The two went on sufficient dates as to conclude they are not a match. So it’s quite possible that both are carrying toxic baggage but so far only coin voting has taken any heat for their disappointing performance. I don’t feel comfortable writing it off just yet. The claim is not that it is not fundamentally flawed, but that it simply did not get a fair shake.
If none of this is particularly convincing, I have one last but not least powerful argument to make. It is quite straightforward and goes like: WHAT ABOUT IT? Does it look like its behavior is premeditated by committee-curated neck elongation proposals? I think not!
End of Part I
We have so far stated the goal of coming up with a governance arrangement that makes the basis of power distributions accessible to layman summary and judgement. Toward this end we defined organizations and DAOs, as types of membranes that can move. I insinuated that token voting is likely a keystone in designing signal determined and driven structures. In the second part, I will attempt to prototype a token driven governance mechanism that can potentially address some of the identified deficiencies of DAOs by reconciling recognition and redistribution under the umbrella of Majoritarian Pluralism.