"Friends are the original DAOs. To be friends is a relation autonomous from corporations or states, a fugitive association"
We remain constantly intrigued by DAOs - decentralised autonomous organisations. Are these powerful software agreements just the ultimate version of “Computer Says No” from the Little Britain sketch? Or do they actually give strength to purposeful communities, helping them build resources and get new things done?
The latter definition - especially for groups of artists - is held by the contributors to a new book, Radical Friends: Decentralised Autonomous Organisations And The Arts (buy here). They helpfully define a DAO as:
… A form of internet-based organisation that enables people to coordinate their work with each other wherever they are in the world. Collectively-owned and member-managed, their built-in treasuries can only be accessed with the approval of the group.
In the most common structure everyone in the organisation contributes to decision-making through a system of proposals and voting. The software of the DAO manages membership, pooling, and distribution of resources, according to the pre-agreed rules of its members, and keeps permanent and transparent records of all decisions made.
The rules of the DAO are encoded into secure, decentralised software called smart contracts which holds the group’s treasury and “tallies votes and carries out the will of the people”. No one can change the rules of the DAO once the contract is live on the blockchain, except by a proposal and vote system, in the case of upgradable smart contracts.
While the people who interact with these automated organisations are subject to the laws of the lands where they reside, the DAO eliminates the need for third-party mediation, such as the involvement of banks or state-mandated company structures.
Clear? The book is replete with examples of artists’ collectives trying, testing and breaking DAOs in their search for a structures that serves their creativity, their need for collaboration, their desire to be recompensed for contributions.
The foreword by Nathan Schneider, the blockchain democrat regularity cited here, pulls the commitments of the DAO quite beautifully into the context of friendship:
Nathan Schneider: Practice Upwards
Friends are the original DAOs. To be friends is a relation autonomous from corporations or states, a fugitive association. There is no Bureau of Friendship that could possibly centralise such organisations as these.
Friendships have an economy, an incentive structure, an internal currency. Through the holy pastime of gossip, curious miners pry for information about what is going on in others’ friendships (whether it is their business or not). Validators circulate assessments of friends’ behaviour across the wider community. There are no servers, only peers.
DAOs propose to enlarge the reach of friendship to the point of replacing corporations and governments, while also threatening to ruin it with immutable records. Imagine if you responded to a gift by handing the giver its precise market value in cash; the gift is no longer a gift. Friendship might stop working properly when you put a price on it.
What is new and different about DAOs, on top of foregoing friendship, is the ability to know, trace, and surgically reallocate a relationship’s value. Through the digital bean-counting, friendship can scale, extending its powers from the edges and corners of the social order to the center. There, the friendship-DAOs inaugurate a new order based on the specialties of friends, like play, reciprocity, and affection.
The name of a storied artist DAO, Friends with Benefits, alludes less to the sexual innuendo of the phrase than the fact that there is an $FWB token and that it has a price. At last you can check the precise status of art-powered gentrification. But members have assured me that the benefits they care about most are not financial; like any friendship, a DAO will not survive long if its heart can only pump transactions.
The idea of casting society in the mould of friendship is an old one. Confucian thought held friendship as an elemental bond that helps hold everything else together; Chinese political theory has long understood even international relations among states as a species of friendship.
Aristotle also considered friendship integral to statecraft. It could even be a substitute for the state; if we were all friends, we would not need the scaffolding of government. Aristotle thereby seems to anticipate the most absurdist libertarian fantasies, which flow freely in crypto-land – government falling like scales from our eyes, once we can at long last properly coordinate.
Modern liberalism has generally subjugated friendship to a merely private sphere, apart from politics. But in recent decades feminist thinkers have reasserted friendship as a political act – as a basis for both resisting oppressive systems and conjuring new communities into being, on the principles of equality and voluntary association. “Friendship,” wrote political theorist Marilyn Friedman in the late 1980s, “has socially disruptive possibilities”.
When a few friends sit together in a circle it is not the same thing as a CEO addressing hundreds of employees as “dear friends”. The lines between small and larger scale ordering are not straight or clear. They are wormholes, dividing levels of abstraction with distinct ways of working.
And yet, almost two centuries after he toured the early United States, Alexis de Tocqueville seems to have been right that the health of democracy at the scale of a country has everything to do with how people organise in small scales, in their everyday lives.
Activist and writer adrienne maree brown insists on drawing the lines that link these levels, and acting accordingly: “Our friendships and relationships are systems. Our communities are systems. Let us practice upwards.” We practice politics when we practice friendship.
The technological achievement of DAOs may prove only as good as our friendships prepare us to make them. The early glimpses of DAO-life so far reveal the engines of friendship at work, extending their energy over pseudonymous token holders and formidable financial treasuries.
The inside jokes among friends expand into the memetics of a DAO, into the space-making for secret codes and initiation rituals and private mythologies, with the intensity of an ancient mystery cult. Smart contract code often protects the right to “ragequit” – to storm off and take your tokens with you, to say we’re not talking anymore, and maybe start your own crew with the same source code.
The clever new voting methods are interesting – quadratic, conviction, delegated, take your pick. But the frequently near-unanimous vote counts suggest that the real politics is happening somewhere else.
This is true. Gossip lurks everywhere off-chain, in the relentless Telegram and Discord chatter, a site of power secured above all by the formidable proof-of-work required to keep up with the conversation. Those who can do so mostly act and vote like friends, together.
Still, the opposition remains between fluid scuttlebutt and immutable blockchains. There is the promise of unencumbered, free-wheeling human relations on one side, and then the dispassionate, unalterable ledgers on the other.
They amount to either a symbiosis or a contradiction; we can only know which by trying. Can friendship survive the ruthless quantification of a DAO? Or, by automating the work of incentive alignment, do DAOs at last make true friendship possible?
For years I have been fantasising about (and failing to conduct) a study of labour in DAOs, one attuned to pre-digital categories like invisible labour, shadow work, and gendered making – in sum, the kinds of work that the reigning order doesn’t count as work.
Particularly during the 2017 ICO [initial coin offering] boom, everything was so obviously smoke and mirrors, as hasty whitepapers made world-historical claims for software that could do virtually nothing, if it even existed yet.
Anecdotally, it was clear enough that behind the claims for how a protocol would change the world were people doing difficult work – often the outliers in a sea of bros. Those “community managers” (if they had a title at all) were doing tons of emotional labour: connecting and orchestrating and summarising, resolving disputes and ordering the food, all in order to protect the illusion of an actual product.
Whales throw tokens at nonexistent software, somehow, but not so much at competent friends. Yet it is friends who seem to be holding up the great mass of activity in DAOs, now at least as much as in 2017, while the quantification and incentive alignment remains a substantially mythological artifice. Could DAOs survive the absence of their underlying friendship?
Another way of getting at the point of that question is to shill this book. The design of DAOs is an art disguised as a science, and perhaps then their true natures will appear to us most fully through art.
Unlike liberal political theorists, artists have not had the luxury of imagining friendship as extraneous, since friends are the precondition and original audiences of their work. The networks of friends around an artist are the first to insist that the art is worth noticing, and to give it value, just as friends in a DAO can make “number go up” with their transaction volume and their hype.
If DAOs end up becoming anything like what their proponents imagine – an operating system for the next generation of human institutions – then the things friends are doing together in DAOs right now will matter immensely.
The norms, habits, and memes bouncing around now will harden before we know it or notice. The very-online abbreviations and conventions formed among friends on 1990s BBS servers are still with us now :-/
Friends are similarly shaping what we expect from these new protocols and patterns – what rights, and what rules, what jokes and what counts as art. “The extent of their friendship,” as Aristotle put it, “is the extent to which justice exists between them.” Will we be good enough friends to make our DAOs just?
Let us practice upwards, please. When none of the rules are set yet, all we have are friends. Little weighs more powerfully on us in this world than what friends ask or demand, what they hold us to and expect. So far, we buy their jpegs, swap our tokens for theirs, and crowdfund each other’s wars.
What next? At this formative moment, the global order to come depends on how, now, we show up to each other as friends.
Buy the full copy of Radical Friends here (or click on cover above)