Listening to a recent episode of the Solarpunk Presents podcast reminded me the importance of consistently calling out cryptocurrency as a wasteful scam. The podcast hosts fail to do that, and because bad actors will continue to try to push crypto, we must condemn it with equal persistence.
Solarpunks must be skeptical of anyone saying it’s important to buy something, like a Tesla, or buy in, with cryptocurrency. Capitalists want nothing more than to co-opt radical movements, neutralizing them, to sell products.
People shilling crypto will tell you it decentralizes power. So that’s a lie, but solarpunks who believe it may be fooled into investing in this Ponzi scheme that burns more energy than some countries. Crypto will centralize power in billionaires, increasing their wealth and decreasing their accountability. That’s why Space Karen Elon Musk pushes crypto. The freer the market, the faster it devolves to monopoly. Rather than decentralizing anything, crypto would steer us toward a Bladerunner dystopia with its all-powerful Tyrell corporation.
Promoting crypto on a solarpunk podcast would be unforgivable. That’s not quite what happens on S5E1 “Let’s Talk Tech.” The hosts seem to understand crypto has no part in a solarpunk future or its prefigurative present. But they don’t come out and say that, adopting a tone of impartiality. At best, I would call this disingenuous. And it reeks of the both-sides-ism that corporate media used to paralyze climate action discourse for decades.
Crypto is not “appropriate tech,” and discussing it without any clarity is inappropriate.
Update for episode 5.3: In a case of hyper hypocrisy, they caution against accepting superficial solutions—things that appear utopian but really reinforce inequality and accelerate the climate crisis—while doing exactly that by talking up cryptocurrency.
That website is giving me serious wolf in sheep’s clothing vibes. In fact, I think it is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It’s trying to bundle blockchain with various leftist concepts to make the grift less apparent. In this article on the website, under the ‘Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO)’ section, it says:
This immediately triggered alarm bells from what I’d seen about DAOs in Folding Ideas video on NFTs.
TL:DW, DAOs are a scam, or if done with good intent, are easily exploited, and don’t really solve anything.
This tech is so obtuse and reliant on specialized knowledge, that it appears to almost exclusively be created and run by those with ill-intent. It may be possible to use, very briefly, in certain scenarios, as a useful tool. But it really isn’t worth propping up as a good thing/tool, and we should be seeking better alternatives to any form of Crypto.
Its been two years since that video, do you mind breaking down what the DAO critique was again?
Basically, DAO’s aren’t inherently evil, just useless, because they cannot solve any of the problems they purport to solve; you can’t code away human behaviour. Well, useless, and in the right circumstances actively harmful.
A DAO is, in theory, a system of governance where you have a token used for voting, and a set of “smart contracts” which are programs that operate on the blockchain (more or less). The smart contract part doesn’t work, because thousands of years of contract law have proven that there’s no such thing as an unambiguous contract, so a computer can never be allowed to automatically execute the terms of a contract. That will always create issues. The voting token doesn’t work unless you tie them to a real world identity (in which case the whole purpose of the public-ledger aspect is meaningless), because as long as they can be traded away in some form or another you’ve now opened up the possibility that a wealthy person can directly purchase voting power. The public-ledger aspect of blockchain also makes DAOs a terrible idea for purported left-wing uses like union organising, because it’s not actually that hard to tie a crypto wallet back to a real world identity, so now your future employers can all see your union voting history.
Everything that DAOs purport to do, leftist groups have already been doing for forever. It’s just techbros trying to reinvent the wheel we made and sell it back to us.
I would personally think most things like voting be off chain so you can do things like secret ballots more easily, but also just the cost. The use would be use the on-chain contracts to establish the org, governance and the off chain systems to establish an external root of trust. Its was also a growing development to tie the DAO to a matching legal structure so that things like taxes but also state enforcement of contracts. This means you can issue tokens with legal stipulations like (one token per member).
I agree that trying to use this to solve all problems of building an organization is fool hardy. In the same way I don’t think worker and community coops solve everything (but I do support them!)
They don’t solve everything, but the evidence does seem to indicate they are an objectively better way to operate, with virtually no downsides compared to regular corporate structures.
The problem, basically, is that everything you can do with a DAO can be done just as easily without one. Working out the legal particulars of contracts is still a job for lawyers, for example. That job doesn’t get better, easier or cheaper because you now have to pay a lawyer and a programmer. It’s all just added complexity for the sake of added complexity.
I don’t agree, its the same benifit expressed in the idea of policy as code for encoding security policy of IT systems to be turn into reusable and programtically accessible checks.
You could have a team of cyber professionals that know compliance standards and deeper knowledge answering every question and reviewing every deployment or you could add some relevant programming skills to that team and catch known things automatically.
This seems like a pretty big barrier for adoption, not to mention an added layer of bureaucracy. If every single deployment has to be reviewed, you’re creating a new bottleneck and adding a centralizing factor. Catching known things automatically sounds overly optimistic, considering automated testing for other programs still doesn’t catch every bug.
Honestly, I’m really struggling to imagine scenarios that are either only possible with DAO’s, or where they are so massively better than just a normal voting system. If organizations remain small and federated, and if there are no owner/employee dynamics (replaced with coops), its likely that voting fraud would likely be extremely minimized, since everything could just be transparent to begin with.
It just feels like the equivalent of having smart-lights in your home. It’s a little more covenant than getting up and pressing the switch, but now I have an operating system, program, and wifi protocol inserted between me and turning a lightbulb on, introducing many points of potential failure and potential security implications for the most minor of conveniences.
Can you give me some examples of things that have been a big problem for an organization that you’ve been involved with that would definitely be solved by DAOs?
So a project I would like to set up is using a DAO to manage the funding account of and the account of a cloud resource.
So that the a democratic vote can be held on the public record for how it is configured, as opposed to the standard sys admin model of a single owner and manual adding more people to it with powers to delete other admins.
The problem what ever the first system is root of trust, so the basis being an established network like ETH would make it necessary for a much larger consensus to chain that initial config with the members of the DAOs approval.
I think this is more important at larger scales, which while smaller is more agile being able to scale teams and orgs up is just needed for things that benifit from economies of scale.
You want to review things before deployment anyways. At home on low risk systems with no major threats its not a big deal, but for larger more threatened or more critical systems you have to introduce more checks, and reviews, automated or otherwise.
You wouldn’t, for example, a flight control tower to just accept updates from anywhere. Codifying checks, either functional tests, or compliance checks will only ever establish a baseline, catching the common and understood issues.
In trying to understand the upside of the DAO in that use case:
To be honest, I don’t think I’d be able to do it justice. The video link is timestamped at the relevant DAO section, I’d recommend it when you have a spare moment to reacquaint yourself.
I get it! Its a good detailed video tbh, I do vaguely remember have some critics of the technical aspects but the general dismissal of a the grift that was building up at the time was well warrented.
I will give it a shot sometimes to go back over it. DAOs are one the more exciting structures to me for me, potentially covering the gap between small very personal coops and large buerocratic ones, as well the exciting possibility of IT administration accomplished via democratic means vs the wink knod power dynamic that exists today.
The link takes you straight to that chapter in the video, it’s less than 20 minutes
Oh thank you! That helped to know. I remembered it being very thorough and just didn’t want to commit to a full rewatch
What are the alternatives though? Currently much of the scaling of organizations hit the issues of Dunbar’s number results in big (and exclusive) clubs, cat herding, and Kafka problems.
The value points I see are: codifying bueracracies into actionable contracts prevents the current problem where rules and doctrines are written but selectively enforced as a personal choice. I don’t disagree on the need to explictlt account for failures to predict all outcome of a rule though, but I would rather be something fixed upstream then selectively prescribed.
A root of trust built on a transparent system using a mathematical proof as the underpinning to explicitly state and enforce the structure of power.
I don’t disagree on the difficulty part though
Federation of smaller groups? Rojava is a living experiment in that way of organization.
Bottom-up decentralized power does not require management if people are allowed to self-manage. Combined with some form of cybernetics (cybersyn style), an organization could likely scale pretty effectively.
Isn’t all of that just things happening on a computer, though? It still has to translate to meat space, and there, you can still ultimately selectively enforce things. The blockchain won’t stop social clicks from forming.
Unless everyone becomes educated enough to fully understand the implications and inner workings of how all that operates, how would they be able to trust what the blockchain says if it involved controversial things, or things of significant weight? They would either all need to be programmers to understand what the code is doing, or personally know a programmer they trust to verify the code is legit and actually doing what they collectively agreed upon.
I mean in general smaller groups and bottom up organization seem like the moves but I imagine this tool being specifically part of a cybernetic type system like cybersyn was imagined. The guy I mentioned actually introduced me to project cybersyn first and I watched the video not long after wanting more details on the subject.
What I mean on actionable could be the configuration of the IT systems that mediate decisions between memebrs. If a jury system is supposed to be in place then the DAO could orginize the digital apparatus for deliberating votes, apply penalties for failures to appear, hold the configuration for the agree apon forms and inputs, etc etc
All of that today is done by people interpreting regulations and codes and implementing thus enforcing themselves.
That is true of any system, but a system with roots in mathematical certainty, when given enough understanding, lead to the same understanding. That just can’t be said of other systems. The fact that people may rely on experts for complex systems seems inevitable (lawyers for example are that for our current political systems, union reps for the union, the coop evangelist for that system, etc, etc).
The part where you said “people interpreting regulations and codes” is really, really important, and I don’t think you quite understand why. This is where the advocates of DAOs and smart contracts constantly trip up; they think that the interpretation of law is a failure, and not a feature.
This is exactly why we don’t allow police officers to judge guilt and assign sentences. It’s why we have an adversarial court system; because no law can ever perfectly encapsulate all of its own implications. Laws will, inevitably, need to be interpreted at some point in time, because sooner or later you will encounter a scenario that could not possibly have been envisioned when the law was written.
This is why you cannot programmatically enforce regulations and contracts. There must be room for interpretation for any community or society to be able to act in a manner that is truly equitable and just, because - inevitably - most often the least imagined scenarios will involve the most marginalized members of that community.
I mean we don’t disagree on the idea that we need flexibility and the ability to allow for remidiation even in the face of uncertainty.
Its just that I think that where we can be certain we should be. If we can be certain that we want officials that are accountable to the people, we should be.
There is tremendous value in this beyond what is made possible by DAOs. For example many people prefer the set price system set by stores both owners and customers as compared to haggling and bartering for every exchange.
The adversial court system, I personally think, is a great institution but it is very expensive to operate in so the default is too avoid using as much as possible. Its good to have if you need it, and we as a society do need it, but most administrivia doesn’t and shouldn’t be done there.