Real Humans Need to Shape DAOs so They Don’t Become a Rich Kid Club

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Real Humans and the DAO: It’s time for the next dynam­ic to start, if we want DAOs to cre­ate a bet­ter world.

DAOs are chang­ing the old, bro­ken par­a­digms of lega­cy sys­tems, but to make last­ing and resilient changes DAOs need help from non-tech­ni­cal humans.

Leg­endary sys­tems the­o­rist, Donel­la Mead­ows, shared the fol­low­ing wis­dom about the impor­tance of role diver­si­ty

“Insis­tence on a sin­gle cul­ture shuts down learn­ing. Cuts back resilience. Any sys­tem, bio­log­i­cal, eco­nom­ic, or social, that gets so encrust­ed that it can­not self-evolve, a sys­tem that sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly scorns exper­i­men­ta­tion and wipes out the raw mate­r­i­al of inno­va­tion, is doomed over the long term on this high­ly vari­able planet.”

DAOs are in dire need of bold and inno­v­a­tive thinkers, from all indus­tries, in var­i­ous diverse roles, who are dis­sat­is­fied with the sta­tus quo. These are the peo­ple who envi­sion a bet­ter, more inclu­sive world, and under­stand the remark­able poten­tial of Web3. 

DAOs, today, like the ear­ly Inter­net com­pa­nies, are very devel­op­er-heavy. This has enabled DAOs to build remark­able infra­struc­ture and tools, with the poten­tial to change the world. But they won’t reach their poten­tial unless they onboard more diverse and non-tech­ni­cal peo­ple from all walks of life, from all types of past careers, and from all dif­fer­ent skill sets. 

Real humans and DAOs

Con­tribut­ing to a DAO is a great way to leave a legacy. 

A DAO is, in its most sim­ple form, a com­mu­ni­ty of like-mind­ed, good-heart­ed, peo­ple who work on impact­ful projects togeth­er and also have fun. There are won­der­ful humans behind the code. We need to do a bet­ter job of shar­ing their sto­ries because sto­ry­telling is what makes us human. 

We, humans, have used sto­ry­telling for thou­sands of years. Ever since we devel­oped lan­guage, we have used it to spread ideas, pass down virtues and morals, and align on a shared real­i­ty. This has enabled us to prop­er­ly coop­er­ate and col­lab­o­rate with one anoth­er to achieve shared goals. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, as the his­to­ry of human­i­ty has shown, we have had trou­ble coop­er­at­ing. Instead, we embarked on vio­lent cru­sades and caused dev­as­tat­ing harm to those who didn’t believe what we believed. We wreaked hav­oc and stepped on oth­ers so we could get ahead. We cre­at­ed rules that said, if I win, you lose, rather than if I win, you can also win. Instead of sto­ries of abun­dance, we passed down to our chil­dren sto­ries of scarci­ty, com­pe­ti­tion, and war. 

I can make myself quite sad think­ing about the past. I am human, after all. 

But, luck­i­ly, we humans also have the amaz­ing pow­er of hope. And we have the abil­i­ty to write hope­ful, opti­mistic sto­ries about our future, rather than pes­simistic, apoc­a­lyp­tic dooms­day sce­nar­ios that seem to be in our DNA. You know the ones I’m talk­ing about. Just turn on the news, or open cer­tain parts of Twit­ter, and you’re bound to go down some neg­a­tive thought spi­rals in your mind. 

Real Humans and DAOs

Real humans and DAOs: The upside

Screw neg­a­tiv­i­ty 

I’m by no means say­ing that we should ignore humanity’s prob­lems and suf­fer­ing. I’m actu­al­ly advo­cat­ing for the opposite. 

I am propos­ing that we learn from our past destruc­tive habits, from the fears and anx­i­eties that made us do heinous self­ish things. Instead, we can be bet­ter by tran­scend­ing paradigms. 

I will defer to Donel­la Mead­ows again for how we can do this:

“​​There is yet one lever­age point that is even high­er than chang­ing a par­a­digm. That is to keep one­self unat­tached in the are­na of par­a­digms, to stay flex­i­ble, to real­ize that NO par­a­digm is ‘true,’ that every­one, includ­ing the one that sweet­ly shapes your own world­view, is a tremen­dous­ly lim­it­ed under­stand­ing of an immense and amaz­ing uni­verse that is far beyond human com­pre­hen­sion. It is to “get” at a gut lev­el the par­a­digm that there are par­a­digms, and to see that that itself is a par­a­digm, and to regard that whole real­iza­tion as dev­as­tat­ing­ly fun­ny. It is to let go into Not Know­ing, into what the Bud­dhists call enlightenment.”

Transcending paradigms

DAOs are a mir­ror for the real world, exact­ly as Mead­ows describes the real­i­ty of the world: home to a ton of dif­fer­ent par­a­digms. There are a seem­ing­ly infi­nite num­ber of DAOs right now exper­i­ment­ing with new ways of liv­ing and work­ing. It’s won­der­ful that there is so much choice and exper­i­men­ta­tion because it means DAOs are tran­scend­ing paradigms! 

Over time, inevitably, many DAOs will con­sol­i­date and only the most impact­ful will sur­vive. These are the ones that were able to cre­ate the most val­ue. This is no dif­fer­ent from star­tups or small businesses. 

The DAO space right now is still extreme­ly ripe and fer­tile. Peo­ple in DAOs are itch­ing for new humans who can bring fresh ideas and per­spec­tives. This is because they rec­og­nize that with­out fresh thought and new faces, we will repli­cate the same prob­lems of lega­cy systems.

For sure, DAOs, and cryp­to more broad­ly, can feel, today, like a rich boy’s club. Main­stream news loves high­light­ing overnight suc­cess­es, like Bored Ape Yacht Club. Dra­ma and hype sell. It’s in our human DNA. 

But, as any sto­ry­teller or sto­ry fan knows, real life is more like a hero’s jour­ney. It is full of ups and downs, tri­als and tribu­la­tions, lessons learned and wis­dom acquired. Life is a bumpy ride. 

Survival

The real heroes of DAOs are all of the peo­ple who work hard, every day, to pio­neer a new mind­set and paradigm. 

The most suc­cess­ful DAOs, and the ones who will sur­vive the long term, are the DAOs that are already on the hero’s jour­ney. Or, that will soon embark on it. They are the ones whose sto­ries we should be writ­ing – today. Because we have a respon­si­bil­i­ty to spread pos­i­tive mes­sages that will uplift and lev­el-up these DAOs. We need to arm them with a pow­er­ful weapon: non-tech­ni­cal and diverse par­tic­i­pants. Plus, if we don’t write their sto­ries, the main­stream media will, and boy, will they come out butchered! 

Rika recent­ly authored an anthol­o­gy series on the ori­gin of MetaCar­tel, cap­tur­ing the spir­it of the need for sto­ry­telling in the DAO space.

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Disclaimer

All the infor­ma­tion con­tained on our web­site is pub­lished in good faith and for gen­er­al infor­ma­tion pur­pos­es only. Any action the read­er takes upon the infor­ma­tion found on our web­site is strict­ly at their own risk.



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