Daemon & Discord:
Anatomy of the DAO

Instructor: Ross McElwain, Jay Springett Date & Time: November 17, 24, Dec 1, 8. 14:00-16:30 ET

DESCRIPTION: This two-credit theoretical and practical Seminar will consider Decentralized Autonomous Organizations from many angles. Beginning with their science fiction-influenced prehistory before focusing on what DAOs are today – both technically and imaginatively – the Seminar will result in speculative group projects to design and present future histories of fictional DAOs.

Adopting Daniel Suarez’s Daemon (2006) and Charles Stross’s Accelerando (2005) as our starting points, we’ll discuss the conceptual framework within which DAOs emerge, emphasizing that contemporary DAOs have been fashioned within only a limited range of all their possible modalities and that DAOs could have taken and could yet take different paths of development. Stretching this notion to a speculative extreme, in the first Sessions, we will consider future histories of hypothetical DAOs from the vantage of the year 2035. The Seminar will then step back through time, examining both the principles and practices underpinning the DAOs of the present and the assumptions made about their past and futures. Presentations by participants in the first half of the Seminar will involve pitching ideas for DAOs to the group. Several of these will be chosen via a quadratic voting process for further amplification in the second half, in which we will proceed to create detailed future archives of the chosen DAOs. These will be presented for critique by experts in the last session.

The Seminar’s second Module will take particular care to interrogate the dreams of decentralization and of autonomy (or perhaps automation) by which theorists of DAOs have sometimes been beguiled. The speculative nature of the group projects will allow the participants to explore these ideas to destruction without consequence.

IMAGE: T. Fong (for Protocol.com), DAO, 2021.

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