When DAOs Meet Bureaucracy & Culture
There is a vast volume of writing across the internet on the future of work and how DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organisations) will mean greater pay equity, a constant flow of work, of everyone having a say in the organisation. Decentralization. Human societies have played with these models for thousands of years, even well before Western European Enlightenment. It’s never quite worked out as planned. Can it this time? History is not on the side of decentralization.
That said, there is a place for DAOs, and they will likely play an important role in our digital society. But how significant will that role be? How can they evolve alongside our highly bureaucratized world?
If you’re not entirely sure what a DAO is, there’s a good explanation here. Essentially it bucks the idea of centralized control of work such as we see in modern capitalism. It is the antithesis of bureaucracy. As the internet has grown to touch every aspect of our world, alongside population growth, corporate and government expansion and the division of labour, so has the size and complexity of the bureaucracies we need to manage all that complexity..
Societies and cultures too, have shrunk in this time of modernization. About 12,000 years or so ago, when we shifted slowly from hunter/gatherer societies to agriculture, so centralization and bureaucracy began. Ancient Egyptian society is know to have one of the most complex bureaucracies in human history. At that time, it estimated that between 100,000 to 300,000 societies existed in the world. Today? There are barely around 200.
Proponents of DAOs and the model of decentralization haven’t quite come to understand the meaning of bureaucracy, nor its power and role in the world today. Those promoting the core ideas are, more realistically, and rightfully, disenfranchised with the current state of capitalism, and without perhaps quite realizing it, bureaucracy.
The world today is dominated by the Western European model of capitalism, even autocratic nations like China and Russia and North Korea (to some degree), participate in this system. It became globalization. Unfortunately, this system of capitalism we have today is increasing the economic divide and failing humanity.
Hence we are seeing the growth in ideas such as DAOs, cryptocurrencies, blockchain solutions such as NFTs, Social Tokens and so on. These are all arguments against the current system of capitalism and over-bureaucratization as it is being expressed in the world today. When capitalism works the way it is supposed to, coupled with democracy, it is a good system. Far better than the opposite.
The question then becomes, can ideas like DAOs take hold at a scale enough to disrupt current sociocultural systems and thus, bureaucracy? Maybe. Unlikely at scale though. And if they do, it will take many decades to come about. The rise of agriculture took several thousand years to take root, with many societies accepting, rejecting then accepting agriculture. It was a messy path to modern day farming.
Society is moving much faster today, driven by the rapid rise of communications and transportation technologies. It is affording us great opportunities to extend human life, give voice to those who were rarely heard, and have us questioning how we want to govern ourselves, what it means to the future of our sociocultural systems.
DAOs are but one idea being expressed in a world of rapid change. Digital technologies are having such a rapid and profound impact on our sociocultural systems that our cultures and societies are struggling to adopt and adapt these new tools. DAO’s, like Web3 and the metaverse (which doesn’t exist yet either) are bandied about in very small circles compared to the larger population. The masses are largely unaware and mostly don’t care.
DAOs have yet to truly confront the real world of bureaucracies. Despite well over a decade of privacy concerns and knowing much of the societal dangers of Artificial Intelligence, government bureaucracies are only now starting to make changes. Many of these changes are either bandaid regulations or laws waiting to be passed in parliaments or congresses.
The larger the corporation, the more bureaucratic it will be, driven by policies and procedures. This is even happening in to the Tech Giants. Just this past week, Sundhar Pichai, the CEO of Google admitted that the company has become increasingly bureaucratic and that it is impacting Google’s ability to move fast and innovate.
Bureaucracies are all about hierarchies and centralization. When it comes to innovation, the most common response by large traditional companies, governments and even tech companies, has been to create innovation labs or hubs, invest in creative destruction labs, accelerators and other peripheral activities. This is so the established bureaucracy can study the risks to its own systems before deciding what ideas and technologies they want to adopt. Innovation is kept at arms length on purpose. It is also used as a marketing ploy to say “hey look, we’re big but we’re innovative too!” Like greenwashing, this is innovation washing.
DAOs will, for sometime yet, continue to be quite messy. They will enable collectives to come together and work efficiently and yes, perhaps find more equal treatment. But whoever runs a DAO, may find that it falters fairly easily back to centralization. Humans, so history and our culture tells us, prefer hierarchies and perform better in them. It will be a challenge for DAOs to disrupt at scale. But it is important that they’re encouraged and can flourish.
