Let’s see what wiki says about Dao - A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), sometimes called a decentralized autonomous corporation (DAC),[a] is an organization constructed by rules encoded as a computer program that is often transparent, controlled by the organization's members and not influenced by a central government. In general terms, DAOs are member-owned communities without centralized leadership.[1][2] A DAO's financial transaction records and program rules are maintained on a blockchain.[3][4][5] The precise legal status of this type of business organization is unclear.[6]
A decentralized automated organization - this definition appeared early on in the Ethereum blog written by Vitalik. In fact, many of the initial ideas of Ethereum were developed to promote the emergence of more autonomous organizations. Essentially, this organization has three dimensions: it is governed by decentralized computing or code, without government or centralized institutional control. Often, ownership belongs to the community and not to centralized leadership, and financial records are recorded on the blockchain.
However, we find that this definition is somewhat incomplete or, relatively speaking, quite vague. The key aspects of an organization stem from its environment, purpose, people, and their collaborative relationships and economic activities. Thus, a DAO is everyone's vision of how to construct a more unique, new, and better organization based on decentralized theory (the term "automated" is somewhat ambiguous).
Firstly, the DAO was born in a context of global reflection. In the previous era, we lived in a society where centralized states and capital were the primary drivers of resource allocation and collaboration. Corporate entities were deeply intertwined with nations. Companies operated under state protection, and in return, states garnered economic benefits. People formed societies, and through the framework of the state, established deep relationships with individuals. While the original hope of globalization was to drive the world towards a similar social collaboration, it's evident that we've hit a bottleneck. Decentralization is somewhat replacing globalization; we are no longer driven by a centralized entity or interest group, but can redefine a new form of societal organization with greater freedom and openness.
If we were to categorize society into traditional and decentralized, the traditional society would likely experience more intense conflicts between cultures, societies, and economic entities. In contrast, a decentralized society attempts to create a more harmonious foundational collaboration. DAOs, in relation to traditional societies, aren't necessarily dependent or bound; they operate alongside traditional societies. Yet, over time, they may encounter regulatory conflicts from nation-states. Evidently, DAOs are the fundamental units of a decentralized society.
From this perspective, DAOs serve as a remedy for conflicts in the old environment. They address certain contradictions, but some DAOs themselves pose challenges to traditional societal structures. If we were to view DAOs from hundreds of years in the future, they might represent the foundational units of a new human social order. This new order would be hard to capture in a single article, but it's clear that it's a more advanced and systematic arrangement.
Simply put, traditional corporate organizations have a parasitic relationship with the state and society, whereas DAOs foster a symbiotic relationship with their surroundings.
Secondly, regarding purpose, it's evident that DAOs can possess objectives beyond mere economic goals, differing from traditional companies. While economic purposes are critical for many organizations, DAOs can have richer objectives, such as spiritual purposes akin to religious entities, social governance objectives, and humanitarian goals like the Red Cross. Limited by our current imagination and technological advancements, we can still anticipate DAOs having purposes in economics, governance, culture, and spirituality. As underlying technologies evolve, the potential of DAOs in terms of purpose will expand in ways we can't currently imagine.
In simple terms, throughout human history, purposes like religion, statehood, political parties, education, companies, and philanthropic organizations can all be adopted by DAOs. Especially in public affairs, where traditional organizations lack consensus, DAOs are poised for breakthroughs. Examples like Maker DAO, Constitution DAO, and Science demonstrate the diverse goals of DAOs.
Some organizational objectives are beyond our current comprehension. If we expand our imagination, we can foresee that future generations will have non-traditional purpose-driven DAOs. Although we might not guess specifics, we can expect that these non-traditional DAOs will redefine our societal order, elevating it to a new level.
Hence, DAOs can be traditional in their economic, social, cultural, and spiritual purposes, but they might also redefine our understanding of organizational objectives. With competitive evolution, stronger consensus will arise from our deep-rooted relationships with DAOs.
Lastly, regarding the people within DAOs, they will attract, retain, and transform individuals. The concern is the type of people that make up a DAO and the changes they undergo. In the crypto realm, DAOs clearly address significant human contradictions. An example is Satoshi Nakamoto, who designed a decentralized currency to protect individual property rights but also contributed profoundly to the public economic order.
DAOs attract contributors, retain them, and transform them into better contributors. DAOs, to a certain extent decoupled from traditional society and possessing diverse purposes, are also highly competitive. This dynamic redefines our perspectives on individuality and collectiveness. In layman's terms, DAOs may strike a balance between the inherent contradictions of individualism and collectivism. In modern society, our contractual relationship with companies might not define our future world entirely. Still, no matter what, we will continuously engage with various DAOs, discovering our individual identities and contributing to our communities.
Continuing with the collaborative relationships, DAOs will bring about transformative changes from this perspective. Nowadays, many teams are already working hard in this direction. Put simply, through the use of contracts, allocation, accounting, and other technologies, DAOs can effortlessly redefine a new form of collaboration. Once a DAO is open in its objectives, upgraded in talent attributes, and elevated in economic capabilities, a deeper form of collaboration will naturally emerge.
Besides the current emergence of office-like solutions like "Dework", especially in the realms of coding, there are also those focused on economic and organizational accounting. Moreover, there is great potential in the exchange of information between individuals. Traditional, purpose-driven collaborations will likely be richer in depth.
On this note, DAOs break down past spatial constraints, cultural barriers, and information silos. Fascinating developments might emerge in traditionally challenging collaborative fields like art. Historically, art creation is seen as a deeply personal endeavor with difficult collaboration. Yet, we can anticipate that DAOs might foster cross-regional, cross-cultural, and even cross-temporal collective creativity.
Assuming there are barriers between individuals, DAOs might make these barriers appear robust in one context, but thin in another. This type of collaboration is deep, harmonious, filled with uncertainty, yet relatively stable. From this perspective, DAOs resemble political factions or traditional religious organizations.
I personally am very interested in various DAO collaborative models. Apart from the pragmatic economic and public affairs DAOs, I am also keen on those in the realms of scientific research, spiritual exploration, and education, especially in challenging the traditional teacher-student dynamics. In the next twenty years, we may first witness paradigm successes in the economic and public governance fields since these align well with current technology and demographics, exerting significant influence.
In my opinion, the future of deep collaboration may soon be redefined by DAOs. Born in DAO, grown in DAO, succeeding in DAO, declining in DAO.
Indeed, early-stage DAOs require positive economic feedback. This practical feedback is crucial for most DAOs, serving as an essential milestone.
The potential of DAOs to revolutionize economic activities is evident. At the heart of these activities are contracts, and smart contracts automate these economic activities. However, automation is just one dimension. It's not to say that more automation is always better, which is a potential misunderstanding of DAOs. Technologically, DAOs aim to establish long-term organizations that are more secure, built upon a foundation of more secure technology. Economically, DAOs are ideal for larger economic activities like payments and stablecoin scenarios, where they offer a more vibrant solution. From a public affairs standpoint, DAOs are particularly valuable in cross-cultural contexts, addressing public governance issues traditionally out of reach for nation-states and nonprofits, making impactful results achievable.
To put it another way, positive economic feedback is crucial in the early stages of DAOs, though it's not everything. DAOs that lack economic substance often struggle to survive, and those overly focused on economics might lack versatility.
However, economic activities within DAOs might expand their boundaries. We might see the emergence of massive DAO organizations, breaking space-time limitations, leading to unexpected giant economies, surpassing our prior expectations. With further technological advancements, we might witness economies that can last for millennia. Interestingly, economic activities, often perceived as serious, mundane, and rigorous, might transform into something entirely different in the future due to societal needs and technological advancements. Today's "X2Earn" is an intriguing start.
There are indeed reasons to anticipate the emergence of larger, longer, yet more fascinating economic entities. DAOs pragmatically facilitate this, and we might soon experience this alongside many DAO creators.
So, how can we simply describe DAOs? In the context of a new, non-traditional decentralized society, they are a new co-existing organizational unit with a richer and often unexpected purpose that attracts and transforms us into new contributors. They might immerse us in deeper collaborative relationships, and based on decentralized technology, they make larger, more enduring, and expandable economic entities possible.
DAOs are explicable, yet profoundly intricate.
When we interpret this "Dao" (way/path) as the act of practicing, many things begin to look different.
As our group often mentions in meetings, for many practical scenarios, actions often speak louder than words, or as it's colloquially expressed here, "Just do it."