tl;dr: DAOs-decentralized autonomous organizations-which are built and run on blockchains are nascent today. One day, they will be the dominant form of employment.
I was reading A Prehistory of DAOs which was first published on Mirror (covered here) and thinking about how long (relatively) I’ve been watching this space. Nearly 5 years.
I served as an advisor to DAOstack, which builds the tools necessary for DAOs to operate at scale.
These days, there aren’t too many DAOs working at large scale-that will come- and many of them use a cobbled together set of DAO-infrastructure such as Discord, Telegram, Twitter, and Snapshot.
But it’s not so much HOW the various DAOs are working from a technical and operational level so much as WHAT it means that the “future of work” (a term that is bandied about frequently) will be in DAOs, rather than corporations.
As Mike Maples pointed out in Crypto Commons
In 1800, almost every business was a sole proprietorship. Then the railroad and the steam engine created a massive change event. The opportunity to span the country with a transcontinental railroad turned out to be a catalyst for large corporations that would bring enormous abundance to the world through mass production and mass distribution.
All organizations are going to be networks, not hierarchies…even OKRs.
In order to have a functioning network, however, will take more than tech…blockchains, tools, and specialty solutions like DAOstack. It’s going to take a conscious effort at something else: culture.
as Ruth Catlow, co-founder of Furtherfield and DECAL decentralized arts lab, notes, “We need to be building cultures before structures”
https://gnosisguild.mirror.xyz/t4F5rItMw4-mlpLZf5JQhElbDfQ2JRVKAzEpanyxW1Q
Culture building is notoriously difficult and requires a mixture of deliberate and hands-off approach. I’m not an expert at culture building, but it’s interesting to see how different DAOs are taking the approach to ‘hard-code’ the mission directly into the DAO.
For example,
one could imagine a DAO whose treasury self-destructs, like terra0’s NFT, when global temperatures rise over 2 degrees Celsius, accompanied by a sparkly, unassuming mascot avatar.”
https://gnosisguild.mirror.xyz/t4F5rItMw4-mlpLZf5JQhElbDfQ2JRVKAzEpanyxW1Q
A self-destructing NFT sends a clear message.
So does alignment.
Another feature that DAOs can deploy is the opportunity to become co-aligned partners with other DAOs, something that is akin to an existing corporation taking an ownership stake in another corporation.
I suspect that we’ll have “NATO/EU-like” DAO alliances form where the common bond an overlapping mission.
Other environmental DAOs, for example, could take a take in terra0, hitching their fortunes to that of the NFT in a meaningful way.
“Tokens, teams, and missions are not confined to the quasi-institutional boundaries of a single DAO but can and, in order to meaningfully decentralize the control network, should be represented by token ownership in multiple DAOs.”
Eventually, we end up with DAOretsus (see here), overlapping networks of DAOs that align on some missions (but not all) expanding the influence as well as the opportunity for mutual gain in vast networks that move in flows.
