report

Aude Launay

Interviewed by Inte Gloerich on 14 November 2024

DAOs are like plants, they need constant attention

Aude Launay is a philosopher focused on the ethics and political philosophy of technology, and web3 in particular. Since 2016, they have been researching distributed decision-making through algorithmic processes and blockchain-based democratic systems. They are interested in the power mechanisms underpinning governance structures. They also apply these ideas in their curatorial and DAO work. They were one of the co-founders of the Decentralised Autonomous Kunstverein, an early art DAO, https://dak.international/. and have contributed and engaged with many others over the years. They are currently writing about the political philosophy and intellectual history of DAOs. In our conversation, Aude shared many examples of artworld DAOs, focusing on how they emerged, the issues they attempt to address, and why they did or did not work out. As a researcher of and a practitioner in the DAO scene, they emphasise that setting up and maintaining a DAO is anything but automated. It is hard and continuous work that requires a lot of dedication and conviction. Finally, they warn that DAOs are not deterministic: using a decentralised technology does not mean that the social effects of the technology are decentralising.

Coordinating for a common goal

Inte Gloerich How do you explain what a DAO is and what it can do?

Aude Launay When I started researching DAOs from around 2016 onward, I made a collection of definitions that I came across. I loved how much they revealed about the people who coined them: DAOs are a moving object, and everyone frames them in a slightly different way. When I explain what DAOs are, I try to do it in layman’s terms as I seek to address a general audience and to emphasise the continuity I see on a political and historical level rather than the disruption at a technological level that is usually highlighted, and — too often — fearmongered about.

So, this is not a very funky definition, but a DAO is a structure that facilitates the association and coordination of people driven by a common goal, especially with regard to the funding of that goal. Its particularity is that it can theoretically exist without leadership thanks to some operating mechanisms that are automated via rules encoded on a blockchain. At a minimum, these rules define the way to join the organisation, the way funds are deposited to it, how voting on the allocation of those funds takes place, and how people can leave the organisation. The proposals, the voting procedure, its results, as well as the code itself, are all publicly auditable, meaning that the organisation can be collectively owned and managed by its members. As such, DAOs on public blockchains are a priori uncensorable entities that only a global power outage could threaten. Importantly, “DAO” is an umbrella term for many different types of organisations that we will probably not all cover here as not all are concerned with the needs that are at play in artworld DAOs.

One of their features that particularly interests me is that, contrary to traditional organisations that use retroactive rule enforcement, DAOs use preventative rule enforcement. Consensus on proposals has to be reached through the voting mechanisms that have been chosen by the DAO, and defining these rules is already a first level of autonomy that is present from the very start. The use of blockchains for basic operations, such as voting and transferring funds, facilitates transparency in governance.

The many shapes artworld DAOs can take

IG What potential do you see in the intersection of the artworld and DAOs?

AL DAOs can take the role of different actors in the artworld: they can act as artists, as art collectives, as collectors’ clubs, as exhibition spaces, as institutions — even educational ones, although I have not yet come across an example of the latter. People in the arts and people in the crypto sphere remain quite unaware of the potential of art DAOs, which is understandable as DAOs are still a relatively small subset of the crypto industry, and art DAOs are a very minor subset of this subset. We have to keep in mind that crypto is still in its early days!

An interesting example of an artist DAO is the Jonas Lund Token (JLT) project which was not framed as a DAO from its launch in 2018, but claimed the term later on. Lund, Jonas. Jonas Lund Token (JLT) (cryptocurrency), 2018 -, https://jonaslund.com/works/jonas-lund-token-jlt/. It is an ongoing project by the artist Jonas Lund, whom I met in 2016, and invited for a solo show the following year. On this occasion, we discussed what would later become JLT, and even though it could not be produced in time for our exhibition, I kept following the project as I found it fascinating.

The tokens represent stakes in his artistic practice. There is a supply of 100.000 shares, which are made available in different ways: some could be claimed by a selected board of art professionals — of which I am part — with regard to their interactions with Lund’s work, others can be claimed by people that purchase artworks or collectibles from the project, they can also be bought directly from the project’s shop or earned through social media interactions with the project. The tokens give each shareholder a say in Jonas’ artistic practice, as is the case with governance tokens in DAOs or blockchains. The market value of the token is a reflection of the market value of the artist’s work, so the shareholder’s participation is incentivised towards supporting the artist in a successful career path. It is a form of collective decision-making. Or perhaps it is more accurate to call it collective consultancy since the artist does retain some agency in the framing of the proposals to be voted on, as well as on which proposals he makes in the first place. The line that separates one’s art practice and one’s personal life is fine, and one of the boldest proposals was the one to decide where Jonas should live. As I recall, the options were 1) moving to Amsterdam where he is administratively based; 2) moving to London where his partner is mostly based; 3) continuing to live in Berlin, and 4) buying a house in the countryside in Sweden, where he is from originally. Just as much as with proposals about formal details of artworks, or about whether to accept an exhibition invitation, people actively discussed the options on the shareholder forum. Witnessing and getting involved in artistic and aesthetic choices felt amazing and somewhat uncommon, even for an art curator! In my experience, the artworld feels devoid of conversations that are actually about art itself!

IG It is also a nice way of nuancing the widespread perception that DAOs and smart contracts are all about automation, the idea that you press play and then they do their thing. The JLT example shows that a lot of discussion goes into these processes. DAOs are technical as well as social phenomena, and it is always about finding the right balance between automating certain things and then keeping other things unautomated.

Do you have any other interesting examples?

AL Well, yes, especially regarding the swiftness of action that mimicks the speed of a conversation that DAOs can allow. The collectors’ club called PleasrDAO has a really interesting origin story that many people, including myself, saw unfold in real-time on Twitter in the Spring of 2021. It was such an exhilarating experience, I did not sleep for two days!

The artist pplpleasr — pronounced people pleaser — produced a forty-six-second promotional video for the Uniswap token exchange protocol, with a view to showcasing the symbolism so prevalent in decentralized finance. Fascinated by the recent and insane popularity of NFTs, which she had been following for several years, she thought she would give it a try, but for the benefit of charities. Originally from Taiwan, the artist wished to support the Stand With Asians movement, which fights against the discrimination and violence against people of Asian and Pacific Island descent that was amplified by the COVID-19 crisis. Her unicorn, bringing prosperity to a desolate land, haloed by colourful lines undulating across the landscape and illustrating the mathematical formula on which the protocol is based, appeared on social media on March 25, 2021, at 3:56 p.m. CET. Its auction was announced to be on the Foundation platform the next morning. At 10:20 p.m., Leighton Cusak, co-founder of another decentralized finance protocol, tweeted, “Who wants to create a DAO in a hurry to bid on this NFT?” By 6:29 a.m., someone offered to help set up the DAO. By 6:43 a.m., two people were already publicly joining the project. Then a WhatsApp group formed and these core people rallied other bidders to their cause. At 1:24 a.m. the next day, the DAO, then consisting of twenty-three people, was leading the bidding. At 2:49 a.m., it won, raising $525,000 for the charity in the process.

The now-named PleasrDAO is, to my knowledge, the first DAO to have been formed for the sole purpose of an acquisition, as a sort of special purpose acquisition company. A month later, PleasrDAO bid the equivalent of $5.4 million to acquire Edward Snowden’s first NFT to raise funds for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which the whistleblower, a herald of transparency if there ever was one, chairs. PleasrDAO had about forty members at the time of this acquisition, on April 16, 2021 at 10:10 pm, still on Foundation.

Unlike collectors’ clubs, which are generally closed groups composed of people who all more or less know each other, PleasrDAO was formed as an open group and grew via word of mouth on social networks. While some of its founders knew each other through their online profiles, as is common in web3 companies, it took almost a year for most of PleasrDAO’s members to finally meet in person.

These moments are extremely important to understand the cultural history of DAOs. My own disappointment in the brick-and-mortar artworld led me to study shady transactions in the traditional art market, so what really stood out for me during those first few days of PleasrDAO was the transparency and openness.

In addition to these values that are rather uncommon in the traditional artworld, I am fascinated by the ways NFTs opened up the definition of what art is. The traditional artworld would not initially consider memes or profile picture NFTs — like Bored Apes and Cryptopunks — art, yet within the context of web3, the concept of art has expanded to include these forms of expression. Fundamentally, anything that is labeled ‘art’ by its creator, is considered art in this context. Whether they are recognised by the traditional art market or not, teenage content creators, graphic designers, and digital artists all meet each other in web3 spaces as artists without distinction or critical apparatus. This gave rise to a culture that features both direct appreciation of the quality of the works and a very clear focus on prices. Whether you are a meme tweaker or a recognized artist in the contemporary art scene, anyone who wants to can, for the cost of the transaction, make a digital file into a rare object. There are no waiting lists nor auctions that select artists and buyers based on their fame, pedigree, or education. Anyone can place a bid while at the same time remaining pseudonymous. Rather than the anonymity jealously preserved by auction houses and freeports, the pseudonymity on the NFT market allows one to connect with a community. For me, all of these elements constitute a compelling paradigm shift away from the traditional saying that “art is what the artworld designates as art,” towards “anyone can be an artist as long as someone buys your art.” In a way, the market always already decided what art is, but now at least we are being open and honest about it!

Iteratively discovering what DAOs can and cannot be used for

IG You were involved in the now discontinued Decentralised Autonomous Kunstverein (DAK). Can you tell me a bit about your experience and what you were trying to do with this DAO?

AL I was one of the founding members of the DAK, which started in 2018. I met its originator, the artist Nick Koppenhagen, as we had each published a text in the same magazine, and his bio said that he was interested in applying the DAO framework to the artworld. He had been part of The DAO — the original DAO! I reached out to him and we met in person — we were both living in Berlin at the time. He was already in conversation with two other people, both PhD candidates in film and visual studies at Harvard University — the researcher Wesley Simon and Francisco Alarcon, an artist and civil engineer — and we quickly kicked things off.

It was still early days for DAOs, to my knowledge, we were the first interested in having an art-related DAO. In the process of setting up our DAO, I bought my first cryptocurrencies, not as an investment vehicle, but as a tool to vote in our DAO, which I gather is not a common origin story for people in crypto. This whole process was a sandbox for all of us: we were figuring out what DAOs were and what we wanted to do with them while we were at the same time setting one up. An idea that we settled on was that the DAO would be a way to fund artistic projects in politically challenged territories, taking advantage of the blockchain as a way to bypass national jurisdictions. Or, as Nick recently put it: “We had lofty goals. In hindsight, I would place them in the middle of an uncanny valley between utopian-revolutionary and pragmatic-reformist.” Koppenhagen, Nick. ‘Centralized Undead Organization,’ Google Docs, November 2023, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rpqktBfopMDjeVlmtk7kq7hZwSw-oH5d5eChiP7oThA/edit?tab=t.0.

The first tangible idea we discussed and that strongly sparked my enthusiasm was brought in by Wesley. He suggested that we could support the first Kobanê International Film Festival to take place in 2018 in Rojava, the Kurdish-majority autonomous region of Syria. This stateless enclave which functions through a bottom-up, grassroots democratic system and is led by groups instead of a singular leader, was at the time setting up educational programs around blockchain technologies and cryptocurrencies to develop its decentralised and cooperative economic systems. The region was equally driven towards crypto as it was driving crypto people towards itself. Wesley was connected to the festival’s organisers over there, and had consulted with Amir Taaki, one of the first Bitcoin developers who had also recently spent time in Rojava.

Unfortunately, we did not manage to make it happen. We were struggling to raise money because, in Europe, culture is so dependent on public funding and positioning the new form of funding that DAOs offered in this context was very difficult. People did not understand it yet, and retaining their attention was difficult. I realised then that DAOs are like plants, they need constant attention! If you do not engage with the community every day, it dies. I discovered how hard it was to set up and maintain a DAO. Even when you align on values, it is extremely difficult to keep it alive. And to quote the DAK’s epitaph once again: “The DAK is an example of technological solutionism, a solution in search of a problem. It was founded with excitement for the technical feasibility of an art DAO instead of emerging as a necessary infrastructure around a collective practice to solve a shared problem when it presents itself.” Ibid.

IG You also contributed to the Proof of Work exhibition, See Denny, Simon, Distributed Gallery, Harm van den Dorpel, Sarah Hamerman, Sam Hart, Kei Kreutler, Aude Launay, and Anna-Lisa Scherfose. Proof of Work, Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin, 8 September — 21 December 2018, http://www.launayau.de/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/ProofOfWork.pdf. which was described as a ‘decentralised autonomous exhibition.’ What does this mean?

AL The Proof of Work exhibition was initiated by Simon Denny, who is a well-known artist dedicated to creating a cultural cartography of technologies. He was invited by the Schinkel Pavilion to curate a show in 2018, which he decided to focus on the narratives that surround the blockchain space. He attempted to distribute the decision-making process to a small group of artists and thinkers who would act as nodes in a curatorial network, and would each select two artworks or projects relevant to the current crypto discourse. I was one of the people in the curatorial network and I invited the DAK and the JLT. However, that the process was distributed does not mean that there was no hierarchical structure in place: Simon and his studio manager still vetted the projects, and the Schinkel Pavilion team did as well. There was no collective decision-making process per se. As it often goes with intellectually exciting art projects, there was not enough money nor enough time to make this work to its full potential.

For the DAK, the exhibition was a testbed, and for the exhibition, the DAK was the only project that directly addressed DAOs as an object. To set the stage for openness and decentralised decision-making, we invited the audience to vote on what the logo of the DAK would be, just as The DAO had also done. Personally, it was then that I fully grasped the immensity of the gap between non-crypto and crypto people, and the extent of the necessary work to be done to properly “onboard” people in such an organisation. I think it is then that I first felt that I might feel more comfortable as a witness, an analyst, and a reporter, all in all as a philosopher, than as a proactive member in the DAO. The feeling was overwhelming. So many bright possibilities and yet such a painstaking endeavour to share this vision in all its accuracy. The JLT reception was much more straightforward, probably in part because its presentation relied on tangible artworks “traditionally” hung on the art institution walls!

A few years later, I made another attempt to bridge art curation and DAOs. In 2021-2022, as I was discussing the terms of a research and writing residency with an art centre in France, they suggested I curate an exhibition that would reflect on my theoretical research on DAOs in the cultural field. Due to illness, I have not been able to complete the project, however, what stood out in the working process is that the traditional artworld and the crypto world function on completely different timelines. The art centre asked me to give an outline of the physical form of the show 1,5 years in advance; at that point, we had not even started the collective decision-making process about the ways we would collectively make decisions, let alone on the contents of the show! Making all those decisions was part and parcel of the exhibition itself, it was those processes that I wanted to share with the audience! I guess the most difficult part for me was to be the sole instigator of this project. Had we been a curatorial team from the start, things might have turned out differently. Situating yourself as a withdrawn originator is like walking on a tightrope. You want and need to be there to nudge people into participating, but you also want them to take initiative and ownership, which is why the debate between progressive decentralisation and decentralisation from the outset is still an unresolved one. The notion of progressive decentralization means that originally centralised organisation gradually relinquish decision-making power to the community. For more detailed views on the topic, see Alleyne, M., C. Canon, A. Evans, Y. Feng, N. Schneider, and M. Zepeda. Exit to Community: A Community Primer, Boulder: MEDLab, 2020, https://www.colorado.edu/lab/medlab/sites/default/files/attached-files/exittocommunityprimer-web.pdf.

Yet, ten years ago, I had what I consider — and what was generally considered — a very successful experience of withdrawing myself as a curator. For a show at Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard in Paris, I let the artists I had invited, who, for the most part, did not know each other beforehand, spontaneously and collectively create a unique artwork that would become the exhibition. None of this was planned, it happened organically as the discussion between the artists unfolded and I felt increasingly lucky to witness this very witty and very specific conversation. I felt like the right thing to do was to become a witness and a scribe, to transcribe the experience through my own medium, which is writing. So the exhibition was accompanied not by a traditional press release but by a booklet narrating the whole process that led to the physical experience of the exhibition. This was an exhibition about painting, but so many of the reflections and processes were similar to the ones I experienced in my art DAO attempts. Launay, Aude. {davide balula, jonathan binet, simon collet, blaise parmentier, guillaume pellay, elodie seguin}, Fondation d’Enterprise Ricard, Paris, 11 February — 15 March 2014, http://www.launayau.de/index.php/2014/10/01/davide-balula-jonathan-binet-simon-collet-blaise-parmentier-guillaume-pellay-elodie-seguin/.

In college, I wrote my thesis on relational aesthetics through the prism of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. And somehow, it all makes sense in retrospect: the continuity in my thinking and my interests is pretty clear! I was always interested in decentering the author’s position, and DAOs sparked my interest because of their fascinating distribution of decision-making processes, not because of their funding capacities. And even in that respect, it is the transparency of funding that interests me more than the ease of pooling resources.

So yes, I had gathered an incredible group of amazing people to create this exhibition as a DAO, but in a way, it was not enough. I had previously organised a couple of side events of Ethereum conferences, and what I learnt from these experiences was that to get things done in the blockchain space, you need to move quick: invite people to something that happens on the following day or in the same week. This sort of timeline is clearly incompatible with the slow pace of the traditional artworld. And at the same time, it is just impossible to get people in the blockchain space to focus on something that is more than a year in the future, because everything changes so fast that it just does not make sense to look that far ahead. Although I was met with a lot of enthusiasm on both sides, it just did not work.

Organising a DAO is close to being a community manager

AL One of the things that I would like people from the artworld to get out of this conversation is that it is very difficult to set up and maintain an artworld DAO. I guess it is clear for those who have read this conversation until here! To some extent, a DAO seems to be a dream tool, but it is not just a technological tool. What is often forgotten is that you have to be very good at forming communities, at gathering people around you, and at keeping their attention. In a way, you have to become a community manager. A DAO is much more than an automated system, especially if you want to do something in the cultural sector that takes place in the physical world. There are very few projects that really succeed. The only one that comes to mind right now is The Sphere. But even they had their struggles.

Hackumenta was another project that I followed from the beginning and for which I had high hopes. It stemmed from Trojan DAO, an art DAO born in Athens in 2019, with the ambition of proposing an alternative to the bureaucratic and financial hierarchies of the art world. https://www.trojandao.com/. Conceived as a grant-giving organisation, Trojan DAO set out with the aim to transform the cultural economy through the use of blockchain technology. Its board consists of great people, there are real crypto pioneers in there. Many of them met in the context of The DAO, and wanted to take its frameworks into the artworld.

Hackumenta was a project that James Simbouras, who is the summoner of Trojan DAO, started to work on in 2020. One of the many shapes the project took was that of a decentralised contemporary art fair: a peer-to-peer art market that would offer a genuine experience of local encounters by setting up accommodation and exhibitions in private homes. To this end, a fungible token would have acted as a local currency that could be exchanged for works of art without any gallery or institution being involved. The project was to be financed through the pre-sale of these tokens, at which point its governance would be opened up to the public and the collectors, who would then be able to become active members of the DAO. See for more information e.g., The Sphere. ‘Hackumenta: Emergent Dreams — James Simbouras — We Draw a Magic Circle and Grow at the Speed of Trust,’ YouTube video, 17 November 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYruM7-tADY.

Unfortunately, crypto culture was not prevalent enough in Greece and James only had a very small group of people around to help him develop the project. He participated in many workshops and educational programs in order to get people on board, but in the end, the project fizzled out. This shows that is difficult to mobilise people, even around beautiful ideas!

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Refraction DAO https://www.refractionfestival.com/. was founded three years ago by a collective of 38 artists with the aim of producing big events that bridge visual arts and music from blockchain native artists as well as established digial artists. With over a hundred partners, and after producing many NFT artworks and hosting more than fifty events, the DAO is currently preparing to launch a new token, $IRL, which they write is “designed to amplify collective creativity and shared ownership” “by sharing value across all stakeholders: audiences, artists, and venues.” https://x.com/RefractionDAO/status/1838956811195396297 and https://www.instagram.com/p/C_3OWZLp1Cg/. The discussion is token-gated for the moment, which means that, as a first step, it is only open to a select group of Refraction token holders, before being opened to the wider community later on. This also means that I am waiting to learn more and, as enticing as the promises of this new token sound, they remain pretty vague and general.

Researching DAOs

IG It is great to hear so many examples. You have been researching the DAO scene from within for a long time, and you are even working on a book about it! Can you tell me a bit about the topic of the book? Based on your research for the book, how would you describe the current moment for DAOs, and what do you think the future holds for them?

AL The original working title of the book was Democratic Processes Prototyped by Artists. I had started this research on the distribution of decision making long before learning about DAOs. As I mentioned earlier, it is as a continuation of my Master’s thesis research. In the beginning, I was convinced that artworld DAOs would take off really quickly, so I was working very fast to keep up with everything that was happening around me from 2016 onward. In hindsight, it was a bit early to be able to reflect on what was happening and for things to take shape properly. After a couple of years, only a few examples stood the test of time. I was very interested in the general concept of art DAOs, and I wanted to raise public awareness about it, but with just a few initiatives going on at the time, it seemed to me that this was not sufficiently rich material to pursue my analysis. So by the end of 2019, I started working more on the political origins of this form of organising.

Then, when the NFT hype took off, I was regularly invited to talk about NFTs at events and in the media. Soon, I got labelled as an “NFT expert” in the press, and of course, this only increased the requests — even though NFTs are not my primary topic of interest! Over time, I engaged more and more with the ideas underpinning NFTs, and it led me to reconsider common and unquestioned conceptions of private property through recent developments in contemporary philosophy. I also went on a quest to learn more about the values that underlie web3 in general. I wanted to go beyond the parts that are most often mediatised, such as crypto bro culture and its intersections with survivalism and the life extension and longevity movements. Currently, I am writing about the thinking of the original cypherpunks — a community that was working on, among other things, digital cash from the early 90s onwards. All these different aspects of my research nourish my reflections on DAOs and allow me to apply my philosophical interest to the context of their intellectual history. I am not exactly sure what this book is going to be, but I have an incredible amount of material for it! It feels like a first-person encyclopedic tale of DAO history told in real time.

IG Maybe it can become an auto-ethnographic account of DAO history? That would be cool, I think!

You mentioned private property just now, and I have also heard you speak about co-ownership elsewhere. How do you think DAOs can alter how we understand these notions?

AL Ownership is a core concept in crypto, but many different views on it and many different applications of it constitute crypto. One thing that I learned over time is that when you engage with this scene, you will be overwhelmingly confronted with just one ideology. You have to constantly remind yourself that crypto is a sum of many different ideologies and ideas and that it is very difficult to get a broad and realistic view of all that crypto is or can be. It is important to keep in mind that knowledge is always situated, and the discourse around crypto comes for a very large part from the U.S. Take for instance Chris Dixon’s Read, Write, Own, which is argued from an investor’s standpoint but disconnected from the reality of anyone who is not and probably never will be. Dixon, Chris. Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet, New York: Random House, 2022.

Crypto seems to be a direct descendant of the founding ideas of American independence — partial ownership gives one an incentive in the general project — and is also largely rooted in a rather pessimistic worldview: the tragedy of the commons, the Moloch parable, the trolley problem, and game theory. The views expressed by Garrett Hardin in his 1968 article famously titled ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ summarise the centuries long philosophical tradition that sees private property as a bulwark against the so-called egoistic human nature, and in which all these influential theories are entrenched: “Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest.” Hardin, Garrett. ‘The Tragedy of the Commons.’ Science 162, 1968, p. 1244.

What is fundamental is that in crypto, the technical meaning and the philosophical meaning of ownership conflate. As the saying goes, “not your keys, not your coins”. Or in more explicit terms, crypto is a finance management system in which one can bury an alphanumeric sequence engraved on metal in their garden as a way to preserve their savings. Your money is preserved in an ethereal realm of data but you are solely responsible for it. So it is about the ownership of one’s money, of course, but also ownership of one’s data, of one’s identity, of one’s social graph… Hence crypto exemplifies the many facets of ownership, such as (self-)sovereignty, autonomy, responsibility, and private property.

A common understanding of DAOs is that they are co-owned by their members, but as Philippe Honigman points out, “Another way to think about DAOs is actually to think about entities that are owned by no one. This is more like the A of DAOs, the autonomous part.” Ethereum France. ‘EthCC 2: Philippe Honigman,’ YouTube video, 10 March 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkKtoucLZ3Q. In this regard, we are coming close to the idea supported by the French philosopher Pierre Crétois that private property is fundamentally relational and contractual and that it cannot be seen as an exclusive relationship between the owner and things, but as a way of regulating social relationships to things that are fundamentally inappropriable or co-owned. Hence, there is no absolute private property, but a multiplicity of partial and relative rights that aim to make possible the coordination of social relations, and DAOs can be thought of as examples of Crétois’ thesis that states that regimes of appropriation are modalities of the common, i.e. modalities of the embodiment of social life. Crétois, Pierre. La copossession du monde, Vers la fin de l’ordre propriétaire, Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2023. In a literal sense, co-ownership in DAOs is about people getting shares in a project, pooling their funds, and deciding collectively what to do with those funds. However, this is in a very narrow sense. If you zoom out of these specifics, co-ownership is more of a mental framework than the definition of a financial concept. It is about contributing labour, paying attention, performing care work, and all these sorts of elements that get lost if we think about crypto as an investment vehicle. Autonomy does not exist in a vacuum — one is autonomous from something or someone — and the same goes for ownership.

IG I see that we are at the end of our time. Is there anything that you want to add before we wrap up?

AL From my perspective, DAOs can be seen as a testbeds to prototype new structures within society, some of which have the long-term view to be viable structures outside of society as we know it today. The examples of such viable structures that I can think of are not in the field of art, as art is far from a common use case for DAOs, as we saw. However, land acquisition DAOs, pop up cities, privatised charter states, all these exit strategies have accelerated through DAO structures. Activist DAOs are an extremely interesting use case too. Speaking of activism, we have not touched upon the tooling topic, which is very important. While working in DAOs, people rely on all sorts of tools that are not dedicated DAO tools, whether that is for organising, communicating, raising funds, or taking action in a decentralised manner. Unfortunately, most of these tools are centralised, such as Telegram, Discord, Twitter… and not confidential at all. This is a problem, especially for activist DAOs that have to preserve the privacy of their members. There are effective privacy-enhancing technologies out there, but most are quite new and not widely used yet. We need to support these tools, expand them, and change the culture around them so that people actually start using them, because while I pointed out that DAOs are not necessarily transparent, on some level they can also be too transparent.