Talk:Governance

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Craig Calcaterra (talk) 04:26, 27 March 2023 (CDT)

Libertarianism

Early DAOs, such as the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains were formed in a culture strongly influenced by the political philosophy described by Americans as Libertarianism. The ambition to automate governance in the interests of minimizing corruption is laudable. Further, all governance is overhead. Any energy spent on to governance is taken from the effort to move the group directly to its goal. Early blockchain proponents followed this logic to the point of rejecting the very notion of governance. The very mention of a constitution triggered obvious repugnance amongst its contributors from 2009 until 2019. More recently, however members of the blockchain culture are coming to the recognition that every organization necessarily has a system of governance.

Every DAO either has an explicit system that encodes sophisticated dynamic governance protocols, or it doesn’t. If it rejects an explicit system, then it automatically has an implicit, hidden system of governance. If it’s not sophisticated, then it’s unsophisticated. If it’s not dynamic, then it’s static. Clearly, an explicit, sophisticated, dynamic governance system is generally preferred, but the fourth crucial quality is that is must be good instead of bad. By a good governance system we mean one that is effective in promoting the values of the group.

The primary value for Libertarians is maximizing individual freedom and power. This is an admirable goal for any system, and it is a natural quality of any decentralized system. In fact the amount of individual freedom and power in an organization is a crucial metric for determining how decentralized any organization is. A decentralized organization needs to value personal privacy and protect individual rights and freedoms. Otherwise, by diminishing the power of its members, it diminishes the power of the organization.

However, the weakness of libertarianism as a philosophy is that it raises that goal higher than any other. Clearly a society needs to balance those goals with their opposites: social harmony and personal sacrifice to the community. Libertarianism assumes that freedom and individual power is maximized when governance is minimized. That is not completely true. A system of effective governance can increase individual power and freedom more than a system that leaves individual behavior unrestricted, since collaboration in anarchic circumstances is often less productive. In addition to the organization serving individuals to protect their freedoms, individuals also need to follow the group’s rules and contribute productively to further the group’s goals. For this to happen in an open network with anonymous members and decentralized control, the rules must be explicit and rigidly enforced. Craig Calcaterra (talk) 10:51, 7 March 2023 (CST)