Two people from the Real World with zero knowledge of crypto or DAO enter a DAO. The first immediate impression is one of utter chaos. They hang around awhile, they listen to random voice channels of groups using vocabulary they can barely understand, they pick up the courage to talk to people. This is where their paths fork. One will run back to the safety, comfort and order of the Real World. The other will be awed by what this nascent ‘thing’ is trying to achieve and will stay in the chaos and try to understand and help with this thing called a DAO.
These people who have stayed and not run away, at present, only make about 2M people from less than 200 existing DAOs. That is 0.03% of the population of the world. There is something that sets these few apart from the rest of the 99.07% and that is the willingness to move forward into the unknown.
The DAO is an experiment to see if decentralization can actually work and be able to build a sustainable entity both from the economic, governance and the monetary angle. This is what the internet was suppose to do before it was sucked into the blackhole that is Facebook, Google, Amazon and the other behemoths who control our data, time and freedom. On the other side of the coin is Big Government all over the world, that mess with our lives by creating debt and debasing our money. The recent pandemic has clearly shown how Big Governments are able tell what we must and must not do. Freedom?
You enter the DAO and the lines that are so prohibitive in the Real World just fall away and disappear. Passports, immigration and borders do not matter. Race, colour, ethnicity, education, gender and age are not KYCed (Know your customer). The DAO is a hive of activity with multiple and sometimes, duplicate projects, proposed and started by groups or individuals. Confusing? You bet. Working through all this will determine if a DAO will either succeed or die. It is the law of natural selection. This trial and error is what makes things strong. Let’s embrace it. This is the anti-fragile that Nassim Taleb talks about. The more we fail and rise again the stronger we become. We have one day of freedom - the day we vote , after which we hand our freedom over to the winner who, then has absolute power. The ongoing experiment of Governance in DAOs is so crucial. We need to do a better job.
DAOs are challenging the status quo. We are so, so young and reckless and wild and beautiful. Out of all this chaos will come an emergent culture the likes of which no one can predict. The butterfly effect is when some tiny insignificant choice made now has huge consequences in the future. Flap your wings DAOs, let’s change the world for the better.