There is a famous line from Plato’s Apology that sums up the central dilemma of human organization. It’s also the title of my favorite college course at UChicago.
Who is a knower of such excellence, that of human being and citizen
Socrates asks us to consider how an individual’s highest calling conflicts with the group. We actually haven’t made a ton of progress on resolving the issue since antiquity.
I’ve been watching crypto struggling with the Human Being and Citizen Problem as governance in decentralized systems because a pressing issue. Much of crypto doesn’t really have philosopher kings, despite startup land’s affection for the willpower driven CEO, because a lot still happens in the commons. Open source and all.
I’ll be curious how we proceed and resolve these issues of individual versus group intensives as DAOs get explored. The corporation with its board and executive structure is being pushed back. But we haven’t figured out how to coordinate yet.
Vitalik has been exploring moving beyond coin voting for decentralized projects in recent posts. The incentives for public goods has generally been economic in the crypto space. We coordinate on commons by being driven by selfish incentives.
Gitcoin is working through shared governance structures beyond itself with a DAO of DAO concept emerging out of Kevin Owoki’s Egregore metaphor. Though I’d personally avoid using occult old Enochian terminology (egregore is a shared manifestation come from the minds of multiple people) as no one wants to accidentally manifest an elder god
Speaking of elder gods, we are all fighting Moloch the god of coordination failure. In popular imagination Moloch is usually defeated by a world historical great man. We love the great man theory of history. One visionary dude leader slays Moloch. Humanity gets coordinated! Hooray! Historians generally agree that great man theory is too simplistic. So however these problems get solved it’s probably not going to be one great savior.