Good afternoon, beloved -
I'm just back now from a quick few days in Amsterdam and Rotterdam, where I did Lifehouse events at Pakhuis de Zwijger and Independent School for the City respectively. Both were wonderful, in the style I'm gratefully coming to associate with this material: warm and intimate and generous, but intellectually challenging too. The sense I increasingly get is that folks are hungry for the set of ideas I explore in the book, but (quite properly) not inclined to take any of the assertions bound up in it on faith. They want evidence that the various ways of doing and being I'm commending might work for them, they want to ensure that they're not hobbled by the same mistakes so many have made before when operating along these lines, and they want to avoid leaving anything that might help them on the table.
Interestingly (and, I imagine, largely as a result of the things I've written and spoken about in the past), there's almost always someone in the audience that asks why I don't place a greater emphasis on technology in these talks. They want to know how the blockchains or "AI" or digital-fabrication techniques I spent so much time discussing in Radical Technologies do or do not fit into my conception of the Lifehouse. And my answer always starts from the notion that it's not my place to specify any of that — that whatever my own beliefs about any of these technologies, such questions can only legitimately be resolved by each individual, local Lifehouse community, acting on its own discretion and sense of what is necessary. That's kind of the point.
That said, though, of course I have feelings about what technologies we might or might not want want to use in our attempts to develop spaces of mutual care and collective power. And nowhere are those feelings more tangled or vexed than in the case of the coordinating mechanism for purposive group activity known as the decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO.
There are a couple of things about DAOs that I should make explicit right out of the gate, before proceeding to any other discussion of them. They are a mechanism for distributed governance of a shared endeavor based on the execution of so-called "smart contracts," running on an underlying cryptographic protocol, and therefore fold in and naturalize a wide variety of not-at-all-neutral beliefs about property and ownership. They presuppose the continuing functioning and persistent availability of a robust digital computation and communication infrastructure, which may in itself rule them out as a tool suitable in and for turbulent times. And, as even a cursory glance at Wikipedia's list of the more prominent DAOs makes vividly clear, they are generally used to assemble venture capital, or for other purposes far more consonant with anarchocapitalist and right-libertarian conceptions of the world than anything I myself relate to, respect or would want to see advanced.
Why discuss the DAO at all, then? Given all of that baggage — given most especially the failure of any DAO, even one set up for predictably grotesque reasons, to become salient to everyday experience anywhere, among any group of people — isn't it fine at this point to simply consign the idea to the dustbin of history, along with seasteading and all the other manifestly stupid notions that ancaps pleasure themselves with?
My answer is that, for the life of me, I've never quite been able to shake the intuition that there just might be a there there, buried under a whole lot of noxious and distracting cruft though it may be. I don't want my considerable ideological and aesthetic hostility to any- and everything crypto to blind me to what it is that the DAO at its core proposes to be: a lightweight, contingent armature that yokes human and nonhuman participants together in a semi-persistent way, allows those participants to specify the terms of their collaboration, and facilitates their collective ability to do purposive work in the world.
Each one of these elements makes a considerable amount of sense to me in the Lifehouse context. Remember that, as I define it, a Lifehouse is a community-based, democratically-managed space capable of sheltering people against the inclement first-, second- and third-order effects of climatic collapse, in which power is generated, drinking water is purified, supplies are stockpiled, and services are furnished to all who need them. Given this, it's easy to see that a joint entity of some kind — generally a collective, co-op or commune, I imagine — will often have to coordinate the efforts of people who may not be particularly well-known to one another, engage with ownership/control of land and other resources, and accommodate not merely decision-making among the group but the keeping of records documenting their decisions.
This is the point at which some low-level pattern-recognition circuit in the back of my head starts to twitch and vibrate for attention. Because these are all things that on paper the DAO's advocates suggest it can do, and do well. We can think of a DAO as something along the lines of a cryptographic co-op: it's a shared vehicle, owned by its members, whose commitments are governed by votes among the membership, that furnishes them with a lightweight trellis for their joint action in the world. An arbitrarily large group of people equipped with one could, on paper, accomplish things like acquiring abandoned property, interface with whatever state entities or private utilities remain salient, and achieve ends like the recuperation or construction of structures on that property. We know from experience that these are all things that tend to be particularly messy for autonomous groups of people to achieve together, and, over time, particularly corrosive of their bonds of affection for one another. So the ability to consensually articulate something that genuinely helped to structure, mediate and manage the tasks involved would be invaluable.
What are the specific features of a DAO that might commend it to us as a way of instantiating a Lifehouse?
Membership in a DAO is, for starters, voluntary. It does require that people "buy into" it, but I can easily imagine ways for people to acquire the necessary tokens that don't involve the exchange of money. It solves the "Tyranny of Structurelessness" problem, by articulating a consensually agreed-upon and consistently-applied set of operating procedures that guide the work of an autonomous group. In fact, I'd argue that a properly-constituted DAO speaks to every single challenge Freeman identifies by name in her paper (i.e. delegation of authority, fair allocation of tasks, privileges and burdens, diffusion of information and equal access to resources).
Records of decisions made by the group — of who argued for what, and of how resources were actually allocated — are persistent and transparent. (One doesn't have to sport a degree in social psychology to understand how such transparency might well undermine rather than enhance group cohesion; I'm just pointing out that a persistent and universally queryable archive of its commitments is part of what a DAO offers its members.)
Not at all trivially, it would automate a lot of the low-level housekeeping involved with running any organization, of precisely the type that nobody much likes to do, that needs to be kept current as a matter of absolute, mission-critical importance, and that accountability for which is so often lacking.
And finally, much as I imagine would be true of its occupation of any physical structure or space, a Lifehouse DAO would be contingent and modifiable, and persist only so long as was deemed necessary by its members. This speaks to a tension generally experienced by folks with anarchist politics that doesn't really apply to those among you with more conventional commitments, which is our distrust for standing structures of any sort. These tend to be seen as something that imbalances of power can calcify or ossify around, or ways for processes based on abstraction to ultimately supersede decisions made by people with direct knowledge of a situation. (It's largely for these reasons that anarchists have tended not to build anything that might resemble an institution, and to prefer organizing via ad-hoc affinity groups instead.) This is fine so far as it goes, but it's also easy to see that the need for some Lifehouse-like function will not go away — certainly not in the lifetime of anyone now drawing breath on planet Earth, anyway. And you could see how a DAO is something that might satisfy this particularly difficult set of interlocking constraints, allowing a group of autonomous actors to come together to accomplish joint purposive action consistently, over an indefinite period of time, without ever becoming a formally static institution (and, indeed, containing always provisions for its own structured and consensual dissolution).
OK, so much for speculation beyond the evidence — let's get back to what I can affirm without hesitation. My prejudice is to say that all of these ends can still be accomplished, more lastingly and meaningfully, via the time-honored techniques of conversation, negotiation and collective decision, without the mediation of any particularly exotic technical apparatus to speak of. And certainly anything based on a blockchain in any way is the furthest thing imaginable from the "technologies of permanent recourse" I spend so much time talking about in the book. If I confess to you that some small part of me still believes the DAO might be an appropriate container for horizontal, collective action toward shared and difficult goals, on the part of groups of people organized only relatively loosely, it's eminently fair to ask why nothing like this has appeared so far, in the decade or so the technology's been broadly available.
Ever since Radical Technologies came out in 2017, I've taken to asking my various networks, on a roughly annual basis, whether anyone can name a DAO that is (a) active, (b) achieves politically liberatory ends, and (c) secures these ends in ways that could not be accomplished conventionally, without recourse to blockchain protocols, distributed ledgers, or really networked computational technology of any sort.
Every year so far, the answer has been: crickets.
Part of the reason why is clearly that, beyond a single valiant and kind of saddening effort, people with left commitments have tended to shy away from the crypto space, for all the radioactively obvious reasons. ("Don't get any Balaji on you" remains excellent advice for upright living.) Part may have to do with the deeper disaffinity folks drawn to left-libertarian politics tend to have for anything that even remotely resembles finance, or their principled disinclination to truck with property and ownership and so on. But the real reason may simply be that what I have in mind is not possible.
What I'd like to do, to settle the question at least for myself, is to "steelman" the proposition — that is, to try framing the strongest possible argument for the DAO as tool of liberatory praxis, stronger than any its own advocates have so far been able to advance, and see if that holds together. If I could figure out, say, whether one could meaningfully instantiate a community land trust in a specific jurisdiction as a DAO, and see if there were any advantage at all that would be realized by doing so.
My feeling is that "blockchain" and "crypto," and the grifting, shallow, endlessly abrasive qualities of everyone in the public sphere stanning for them, have thoroughly poisoned the space of discourse around these ideas. And justifiably so, right? These people are terrible, what they believe is terrible, and what they themselves say they want to build is beyond atrocious. And all this has been true consistently enough and for long enough that crypto advocacy of any sort has become a reasonably useful heuristic for someone it's safe to ignore. But just maybe there's some value to be retrieved from this set of ideas nevertheless. It's just that, in order to perceive and realize that value, we need to strip away everything that the DAO's own proponents think it is, and understand what any distributed ledger is at its root: just a shared and persistent mechanism for keeping track of relations, any change to which is visible to everyone who has a copy. That, I can imagine finding some productive uses for, so long as the thermodynamics of computation underlying the system can be made ethical.
It strikes me, too, that the specific problem of knowing what to make of the DAO has the general form of a challenge the epistemic environment we now inhabit will confront us with more and more often, which is the proper calibration of one’s bullshit detector. Turned too low, and you risk not merely looking like a credulous rube but validating, naturalizing or even advancing some inimical agenda. (Many such cases, by the way: the opinion pages of the New York Times and the Guardian are rife with just such useful idiots.) Cranked up too high, though, and you run an even greater risk, which is the a priori foreclosure of possibility. And that strikes me as being rather more injurious to the project of remaining fully human in difficult times than merely looking like an oaf before folks who are safely armored in their cynicism.
You know I believe in being utterly promiscuous in being able to derive inspiration, insight, energy and pattern from any source – even accepting the risk of being transformed by some prion-y fragment of awfulness within whatever it is you're taking onboard – if it offers purchase on an otherwise-intractable challenge. It's on this principle that I'm still willing to pursue an inquiry into the DAO in the Lifehouse context: how very foolish I would feel if it offered a way of resolving otherwise-insuperable contradictions in something very much worth doing, and I turned my back on it out of some disgust it only became shrouded in by virtue of its associations.
§ Right now I'm reading Blood Meridian, which is as harrowing and outright astonishing a sustained act of language as any I've ever encountered; listening to the sole track from the new Deafheaven album thus far available, in the hope that it'll eventually click; not watching anything, preferring the "pleasures" of the McCarthy during those hours of the day I'd generally have given myself over to the passive consumption of media; and planning the first few episodes of my new podcast Lifepod (!!), about which I'll have much more to say very shortly.
That's about it for now. As always, I hope that you are well, that you have your feet planted solidly on the good Earth, and that you are taking care of those who need you, taking care of yourself, and letting others take care of you. You have
all my faith,
ag
ldn
This is Dispatch from London No. 136 of Sunday, 2 February 2025, offered to you under the terms of a Peer Production License. You are free to reuse this content, but must acknowledge Adam Greenfield as its author. ◊