report

Ruth Catlow

Interviewed by Inte Gloerich on 4 November 2024.

Claiming space for mutualist DAOs amid widespread speculative finance

Ruth Catlow is co-founder and director of Furtherfield and co-lead of the Blockchain Lab at Serpentine Galleries in London. https://www.furtherfield.org/ and https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/blockchain-lab/. She is also an artist, writer, and curator working with emancipatory network cultures, practices, and poetics. She developed CultureStake, a voting system for decentralised cultural decision-making that uses quadratic voting on the blockchain. CultureStake’s playful interface allows everyone to vote on the types of cultural activity they would like to see in their locality. https://culturestake.org/. She co-edited Artists Re:Thinking the Blockchain and Radical Friends: Decentralised Autonomous Organisations and the Arts. Catlow, R., M. Garrett, N. Jones, and S. Skinner (eds). Artists Re:thinking the Blockchain, Liverpool: Torque Editions, 2017; and, Catlow, R., and P. Rafferty (eds). Radical Friends: Decentralised Autonomous Organisations and the Arts. Liverpool: Torque Editions, 2022. Together with Penny Rafferty, she is currently working on Syn, a DAO-based protocol for artist communities that are self-organising cultural frameworks. Ruth has been a central figure shaping and theorising the intersection between the artworld and DAOs. In our conversation, we discuss DAOs against the historical backdrop of experimentation with internet technologies and the contemporary erosion of cultural funding. Ruth stresses the importance of situatedness, harm reduction, and environmental accountability in artworld DAOs. She also shares how playfulness can engage people in political discussions and experimentation.

Centring community and culture in a context of profit-making and financialisation

Inte Gloerich I start these interviews with the question of how to explain what DAOs are to you. Can you tell me about that?

Ruth Catlow DAOs, as we understand them now, are peer-built member organisations run through systems of proposals and voting, automated on the blockchain. This means that they lend themselves to experiments in translocal, cooperative organisational forms. The term was used early on to describe both multi-agent systems in the Internet of Things and the organisation of nonviolent decentralised action in the counter-globalisation social movement. Hassan, Samer, and Primavera de Filippi. ‘Dao (Decentralized Autonomous Organization)_,’ Internet Policy Review, 17 November 2020, https://policyreview.info/open-abstracts/decentralised-autonomous-organisation. However, their development in the blockchain space has been primarily as a form of corporate governance that uses tradable tokens as shares to automate the distribution of dividends to shareholders, producing speculative financial vehicles or new ways to do business in a highly unregulated field. So, there is a potential for building collectively owned cooperative infrastructure, however, a profit-orientation currently strongly dominates.

IG How do you navigate a space that is characterised by such diverging political and economic visions?

RC It has not been easy to gather the financial resources necessary to make proper, real-world experiments to test the social, civic, and cultural benefits of these technologies. The tech industries conflate communities with databases of users. And so rather than building infrastructures that support the thriving of diverse communities and societies, now and long into the future, the risk is that communities will be “treated as a commodity, like pyramid schemes treat their communities as a commodity”. Hamburg, Sarah quoted in Miranda Dixon. ‘Decentralised Community Building in Web3 — “Is it all nonsense” or Could This Change The World?’ Brink, 21 July 2022, https://www.hellobrink.co/post/decentralised-community-building-in-web3----is-it-all-nonsense-or-could-this-change-the-world. This has only gotten worse since the COVID-19 pandemic. And in the arts and culture, both public and private funding is under desperate pressure in so many different places. As per usual, the interests of capital determine the kind of decentralised networks that get built on a planetary scale.

Zooming out, it is interesting to reflect on the difference between, on the one hand, the free and open source software boom of the early 90s and the feeling we had of co-creating a new context for life with the birth of the web, and, on the other hand, current experimentation with blockchain and DAOs. The major difference is that, in the early days of the web, the technology was far less complex. And, importantly, there was a 10-to-15-year period where those techies, artists, and activists with access to internet connection and simple computers, had the freedom to work together to try to understand the social potentials of the technology before commercialisation and financialisation would properly kick in. Some of us therefore had the time to explore where our interests and values intersected, to take a critical approach to building communication infrastructure, and to build platforms that would allow us to collaborate and work together in ways that resisted, questioned, and organised against the logic of capital. In the blockchain space, there was virtually no such moment. Almost immediately — because this is a financial technology — blockchain developers were paid 20 times what an artist would be paid. So, the space for collaboration and experimentation just does not exist in the same way right now.

An effect of this is that the relationship between artists and techies in the blockchain space has been different than it was in the early days of the web. There are some examples See e.g., Koshino, T., and M. Straeubig. ‘On the Early Days of Hic et Nunc,’ Right Click Save, 23 January 2023, https://www.rightclicksave.com/article/on-the-early-days-of-hic-et-nunc. of blockchain developers engaging in deep collaboration with artists, leading to projects such as the early Brazilian crypto-community platform, Hic et Nunc. At Furtherfield we have collaborated with a few, rare artist-developers committed to critical exploration of the potential of blockchains from both artistic and political perspectives. Rhea Myers has informed our investigations with her critical artwork, writing, and mentorship. https://rhea.art/. See also her collected works in Myers, Rhea. Proof of Work: Blockchain Provocations 2011-2021, London: Urbanomic in association with Furtherfield, 2022. Others have brought their artistic practices to collaborations with us on experimental cultural infrastructure projects. Sarah Friend’s work, for instance, has a strong focus on systems of decentralised coordination. She is connected to a high percentage of exploratory art and blockchain experiments because she has been willing to go on a journey of learning and building together with others. This ultimately gives her body of work integrity and depth. https://isthisa.com/.

But the fact that this economy is underpinned by narratives of financial incentives and speculation drives a furious tech acceleration. And, at the same time, of course, the web itself is so much more centralised than it was in the 90s with communication infrastructure owned and controlled by a few huge tech conglomerates. These two developments together limit the social imaginary for decentralised technology. However, thankfully there are still projects resisting a total takeover. The grassroots crypto-art scene has been very well documented by Alex Estorick at Right Click Save, https://www.rightclicksave.com/. who fiercely defends the right of artistic communities to tell the stories about their own experience as practitioners on their own terms and. Other projects like The Sphere DAO have managed to keep spaces for inquiry and experiments with weird economics open. But examples like this are few and far between. Or perhaps I am just not familiar with them. I hope it is the latter!

With the support of Goethe Institute-London, I have collaborated since 2018 with Penny Rafferty on a series of artworld DAO workshops, labs, symposia, and prototypes to activate collaboration across communities, disciplines, and sectors. https://www.daowo.org/ and https://www.goethe.de/ins/gb/en/kul/zut/dao.html/. Since we published Radical Friends in 2022, we have been working towards a cultural and technical protocol called Syn which creates a translocal deliberative decision-making and resource distribution space in which cultural and civic communities can act together in support of emergent art practices. These would encompass hybrid digital, physical, and community-specific art forms. This work is founded in the understanding that arts methods and practices provide the most potent and precise probes for anticipating the impacts of fast eco-social change. It is through these practices that communities develop ways of being, feeling, knowing, and acting together toward the emerging worlds they want. We need to build technologies to serve cultures, not the other way around.

With Syn we are collaborating with the Serpentine Galleries in London to develop a translocal DAO and to test it with various artist-communities in cities across the world. The protocol explores ways in which networked cultural communities could interact to discuss and decide on their priorities — from shared values to joint actions and resource distribution. We want to test different cyclical patterns of engagement that make up these processes, to discover how these might be coordinated with biological, seasonal and planetary rhythms, and to move through moments of socialising, discussing, proposing, and deciding. With Syn, we are trying to create a pattern that will feel comfortable for all involved. This does not mean that there will not be any disagreements, tensions, or conflicts — that is just part of life! — but acknowledges that we are not just disembodied entries in a ledger, whose creativity exists to populate other cells in that ledger.

Toward mutualist DAOs

IG In light of this sketch of historical developments in the culture around emerging technologies, how would you characterise the moment in DAO history that we are in now? And where do you think DAOs are going in the future?

RC The relationship between art-as-commodity and DAO as-financial-vehicle predominates, continuing a long tradition in the arts; this is nothing new, crypto and DAOs have extended the art market and added to its methods of economic accumulation. However, what I have become most interested in recently, is what we might call a ‘mutualist moment’ in DAO culture. ‘OMG — Toward an Open Mutualism,’ Open Mutualism, 17 December 2024, https://www.openmutualism.xyz/OMG—Toward-an-Open-Mutualism. Mutualism is an economic and social model centred around cooperation, mutual aid, and collective support, rather than competition and individualism. It emphasises the importance of people working together to meet each other’s needs.

The work of Kei Kreutler plays a big role in this development, and I highly recommend people explore her contributions to DAO culture in general. E.g., Kreutler, Kei. ‘A Prehistory of DAOs,’ Gnosis Guild, 21 July 2021, https://gnosisguild.mirror.xyz/t4F5rItMw4-mlpLZf5JQhElbDfQ2JRVKAzEpanyxW1Q; and https://www.gnosisguild.org/. Kei is a designer and DAO theorist who worked as chief strategist at Gnosis, building decentralized software infrastructure. There she co-created Gnosis Guild, a small team that developed an open standard and created a series of accessible, modular tools and toolkits for anyone who wants to experiment with DAOs. Kei stresses the importance of understanding the way technologies are framed within certain cultural narratives. To improve the chances of technologies behaving in a certain way in the world, and for them to support certain kinds of relationships, the right stories need to be told around them.

Kei made me aware of current mobilisation around mutualism, and of Sara Horowitz’s book Mutualism: Building the Next Economy from the Ground Up specifically. Horowitz, Sara. Mutualism: Building the Next Economy from the Ground Up, New York: Random House Publishing Group, 2021. The book’s message about mutualism is framed through classical anarchist, unionisation, and solidarity movements — think of workers’ cooperatives for example — and it is especially relevant to DAO-curious people who share these kinds of values. Horowitz formulates mutualism as a system in which labour, community, and the economy are in an interdependent relationship with each other in a way that does not prioritise the economy. This is at odds with the default DAO design strategy that influences and shapes social relations using financial incentives alone. What you end up with if you use this strategy is decision-making that favours financial gain over social relations, thriving and belonging.

Horowitz describes three core principles for mutualist organisations. First, mutualist organisations serve a social purpose that is important to their community. Simply put: community before profit. Second, they have independent and sustainable economic mechanisms. Whatever the community does should produce a revenue that exceeds their expenses. Third, mutualist organisations focus on the long-term. This means that they aim to serve future generations. Fundamentally, mutualism has a practical economy at its heart that shares a lot of perspectives with commons theory and practice, and with indigenous approaches to sustaining biodiversity and thriving life-forms.

For Furtherfield’s current work and for Syn’s DAO experimentation, mutualism emphasises the importance of ‘place’ as a central aspect. Creating something meaningful goes beyond economic mechanisms or financial concerns — it requires engaging directly with the people and context of a specific community. By grounding our efforts in the realities of a particular place, we ensure our work addresses real needs, fosters accountability, and strengthens the living systems we are part of. This focus on place reflects a commitment to mutual benefit, recognising that technology should serve the communities it touches, rather than existing in abstraction from them.

Building place-based responses to the erosion of cultural funding

IG In Radical Friends, you use the term ‘translocal’ a lot. Is the focus on ‘place’ also a translocal one, or is it a geographical place?

RC Important shifts have occurred since Radical Friends was published, and they have caused me to shift gears on this slightly. There are a multitude of wars, genocides, and ecocides taking place at the moment. These take a toll, not just on the people and living beings who are right at their centre, but on us all. I am talking about psychological, political, and economical tolls. Working translocally at the moment is immensely taxing as everyone is exposed to the impacts of multiple, complex harms. The context of massively centralised communication infrastructures owned, controlled and misused by oligarchs only complicates this further.

Initially, Penny and I framed Syn as a translocal DAO. We planned to test it in five different global cities and to learn from the specifics (the commonalities and differences) of each community and their economic context. Unfortunately, the kind of funding necessary to organise something at this scale is just not available at the moment. Instead, now we will do our first organisational experiment in one city. This allows us to dive into exactly what makes something work in a specific context, location, or culture and to think about how it could take shape as a template that can be tested by others in different places.

IG What problem does Syn address? Or, what context does it want to engage with specifically?

RC I will answer this question specifically about London because that is where the first Syn DAO experiment will be located, but similar effects are taking shape elsewhere. In London, we have seen an erosion of the entire artworld ecology. This sounds very dramatic, but is unfortunately true. Public spaces for gathering, exchanging ideas, and exhibiting art — I am talking about the middle and lower levels of the art world, like galleries, and lab spaces — have been squeezed out. This is about both spaces and surplus social energies. The results are palpable on the ground in London, but also in discussion spaces online. So many platforms for exchange and critical discussion around art, media, and technology have disappeared because people have had to focus their energies elsewhere, to sustain themselves economically.

This is the need that Syn is addressing. The need for public spaces that can support and nurture art and creative practices. We want to create a way for people to come together and develop the social and cultural frameworks that they need. We want to create a context for communities to think through what economies they want to draw on so that everyone involved benefits, how they want to work together in new ways, and how a shared framework could boost their creative capacities and resources. The first community we work with will probably consist of about 20 people, so it is quite small. But the concerns are very practical and relevant to bigger communities too. Think for example of organising access to a space for regular meetings, sharing studio materials, or creating connections with other arts organisations. None of this is rocket science, but this support completely fell away in places like London. What we want to find out is if DAOs could support a co-shaped infrastructure for the arts that could make artists less dependent on frameworks that are outside of their control and that could collapse at any moment.

Combining critique and creation

IG It sounds like on the one hand, you see DAOs as a practical tool to build usable infrastructures, but on the other hand, there is also an element of DAOs as a tool for the process of reimagining what the arts could look like.

RC It is probably a bit of both, yes. It is about imaginaries and practically testing and understanding how these tools can work for us. I believe that these tools might actually serve humans and their situated communities, but we have to learn more about why and how people reach decisions with others about the things they value. We have to make it legible to people outside the DAO space in what ways the technology could support these processes. This is what we are aiming for with Syn as well. These are all things that a DAO can do really well: registering and storing results of deliberations and nuanced decision-making processes. At the same time, I am full of reservations about this. This is just a fraction of what DAOs can do, and perhaps as a technological backbone, they are far more complicated than they need to be to do the simple things I just mentioned.

But I like this question a lot. It reminds me of something I heard Joshua Dávila, a.k.a.The Blockchain Socialist, Dávila, Joshua. Blockchain Radicals: How Capitalism Ruined Crypto and How to Fix it, London: Repeater, 2023; and, https://theblockchainsocialist.com/. say at the Regen London gathering last Summer. Rather than toiling to create totalising metaphors about the true purpose of blockchain it is more useful to work in our own communities with the small “units of use and capacity” that we find in blockchain technologies. The dominant metaphor of Bitcoin as a gold standard — as scarce and increasing in value when saved — has served far-right, libertarian, extractivist purposes, by repelling engagement with crypto by those interested in emancipatory goals. Instead, if we want to build infrastructure to last, that is not profit oriented and not part of the state, we need to use blockchain technologies for our own objectives, to create the political economies we want to create or as Josh says “to build the tech that we use to be together.” https://www.regensunite.earth/event/regens-unite-london-2024.

So we are working with a couple of blockchain’s units of use in Syn. Probably the most important of these is recording and archiving the results of collective cultural decision-making about priority setting and resource distribution. Syn uses quadratic voting (QV) for its ability to support nuanced and more informed decisions about what really matters to a community, enabling what Charlotte Frost, Furtherfield’s 2018-23 co-director called an “economy of emotions.” Frost, Charlotte. ‘CultureStake: It’s Your Culture, It’s Your Call,’ in R. Catlow and P. Rafferty, Radical Friends: Decentralised Autonomous Organisations and the Arts, Liverpool: Torque Editions, 2022, pp. 289-290. The data produced by QVs can be used to both reflect what matters most to a decision-making community and, by recording it to the blockchain, preserving tamper-proof records of these decisions in the public domain.

I read a book a couple of years ago that influenced my thinking on technology. It’s called In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations by Jerry Mander. Mander, Jerry. In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations, San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1991. Mander was part of the anti-globalisation movement and he wrote the book in 1991 — so before the web exploded. The book is about the terrible problems associated with the way technology “innovation” happens; about how anti-democratic innovation is because there is no oversight or regulation. Mander focuses on the example of the advent of satellite TV and the impact it has had on indigenous communities in the North of Canada. He eloquently and clearly describes the speed at which thousands of years of culture — whole ways of life in which humans and their entire environment coexisted — are broken down by this sudden appearance. Within three years, so much was lost. Through examples like these, he frames technological innovation as a massive social experiment in which the tech industry will always win and democratic interests are highly likely to lose. I feel like that really captures what happened and is still happening with the web and with blockchain. We are always sold a shiny solution — for example, currently, with AI we are told it will find new cures for rare diseases — but in the process, we forget to look at the devastations these technologies are also causing to the environment and labour justice.

IG I read in an article by you and Penny on The Brooklyn Rail that your work “is still mistaken for an exercise in blockchain boosterism rather than an earnest community claim to tools that can help shape lively infrastructures of translocal belonging.” Catlow, Ruth, and Penny Rafferty. ‘Beyond Innovation: Decentralization, Imagination, and Care,’ The Brooklyn Rail, May 2023, https://brooklynrail.org/2023/05/criticspage/Innovation/. At the same time, you always include thorough critiques of the extractive and colonial effects of the systems and infrastructures around us in your work. It seems to me that you have found a way to balance between critique and creation, which is very difficult to do. Can you tell me a bit about how you go about this?

RC It is difficult! I have a lot of sympathy with those who note that our eco-social worlds are on fire and that DAOs are slow to fulfil their potential as tools for coordination and governance. I see it like this: we have both the right and feel a responsibility to stay curious about DAOs. Despite their limitations, they do still offer a way to experiment — conceptually and technically — with translocal governance. This is still very important as it helps build infrastructures that empower people to act in solidarity with peers across state borders.

Another important aspect of working with contemporary digital technologies has to be a commitment to harm reduction. Recently at Furtherfield, we have been working to answer this question by collaborating with curator and researcher Dani Admiss on a new environmental policy. https://www.daniadmiss.com/. See also her work as part of the Sunlight Liberation Network at https://artscatalyst.org/whats-on/sunlight-liberation-network-tending-waste-cultivating-life/. Dani’s work is on climate justice and environmental accountability in relation to global cultural dynamics between the global North and the majority world. Together, we are looking for ways to deal with the impossible tension between using technology for particular eco-social goals and not wanting to reproduce the ways in which it inconspicuously causes harm at the same time.

Dani has pointed us to the work of sustainability expert Roland Geyer, See e.g., Geyer, Roland, and Trevor Zink. ‘There Is No Such Thing As A Green Product,’ Stanford Social Innovation Review, Spring 2016, https://ssir.org/articles/entry/there_is_no_such_thing_as_a_green_product. who argues that the resource that has the least amount of environmental impact is human labour. Yet, the capitalist economy demands that everything is always produced faster and more efficiently. In the process, more and more human labour gets outsourced to machines and/or to cheap, invisibilised, and racialised labour. We are seeing exactly this with AI at the moment: people justify its use because it seems to be able to do hard cognitive and creative labour at the snap of a finger. What remains hidden from view, is that by outsourcing human labour in the Global North to AI, we are actually outsourcing it to workers in the Global South and to petroleum! AI causes a bunch of carbon emissions that otherwise would not have occurred. Furtherfield’s response to this is to try to work towards using technologies to achieve eco-socially defined goals, and staying alert to the balance of harms we are contributing. Ultimately, we want to remove ourselves from the growth economy that is setting the world on fire. But I would not want to imply that this is either simple or perhaps even achievable.

IG Besides environmentally just practices — which are so important! — what kinds of values are important to you in your DAO work? For instance, you use the word ‘translocal belonging’ sometimes. Can you tell me a bit about that?

RC Translocality refers to the dynamic interplay of belonging, identity, and interaction across multiple, interconnected locales — both physical and digital. It arises from globalisation, migration, and hyperconnectivity, fundamentally reshaping how we perceive the places, people, and cultures we are part of. Translocality acknowledges that individuals simultaneously inhabit layered and overlapping localities, creating a sense of belonging to multiple communities at once. These diverse, place-based affiliations often make conflicting demands, influencing our identities and relationships in complex, and unpredictable ways. The idea of ‘belonging’ is important, See for more on the different meanings of belonging Zeilinger, Martin. Structures of Belonging, Ljubljana: Aksioma — Institute for Contemporary Art, 2023, https://aksioma.org/structures-of-belonging. because it motivates us to think and act beyond our own individual interests. But it is complicated, because while it sounds very friendly, it can also be used to segment, degrade and exclude social groups! This is why so much of our work on Syn has been about the design of protocols and patterns of connection, creating different kinds of rituals, and acknowledging the different limits and restrictions members might experience because of the localities they inhabit. Selasi, Taiye. ‘Don’t Ask Where I’m From, Ask Where I’m a Local,’ TEDGlobal 2014, October 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gT5OpU2PlS4. In some DAOs, belonging is about creating binaries — who is in and who is outside of the community, who has tokens and who does not — and establishing hierarchies between degrees of access. I think about belonging less as an essential value than as a valence to attend to in community settings, and a question that we need to keep addressing and thinking about as we anchor social relations in our technologies.

This reminds me of two prominent token-gated DAOs in the web3 culture space: Nouns DAO and Friends with Benefits (FWB) DAO. Nouns DAO is a fund that generates a new profile picture (PFP) NFT consisting of a pixelated icon every day. https://nouns.wtf/. People then bid for it, but essentially, they are paying in order to become a member of the DAO. Then through proposals and voting, they decide what the common pot of funds should be spent on. Those with more tokens have more power. FWB is a social DAO to realise crypto cultural projects. https://www.fwb.help/. The swift rise in its token price in 2021 arose from its operation as an exclusive members club. The higher the token price, the more desirable membership became, especially for movers and shakers in web3 “culture.” It was the place to be — the place to meet other innovators! In the spring of 2022, the price dropped again.

Often when people say there are no great examples of DAOs, there are others that point to these two DAOs to prove them wrong. These DAOs did succeed in providing a centre of gravity for people to come together to coordinate themselves. However, because they are primarily founded to coordinate around speculative capitalism it seems that what they then produce is a global pizza party or at best an exclusive festival! I am sure that great friendships are made at these events, but it is disappointing that their ambitions do not extend further. When we published Artists Re:Thinking the Blockchain, we wondered if artistic investigations with blockchains as a financial technology would help create more transparency about the relationship between art and money. Maybe, what this whole process has told us is that money is only interested in art’s ability to make more money.

Getting back to your question, and connecting it with what we were talking about before, a value that should be absolutely at the core of any project I am involved in is harm reduction. I mean this both in an ecological and social sense. A concrete way in which this can take shape is for example by supporting practices of maintenance, repair, and remembering. What I mean by remembering is that, for 50+ years, knowledge of the dangers of climate change has been downplayed and ignored. We need to act according to that knowledge and demand that those in control of the systems that both support and poison contemporary life also start to act. We have to be prepared to change the way we behave, to do justice to that existing knowledge and forms of knowledge that have long been suppressed but need to be brought to the fore.

Experimenting with politics in imaginary worlds to bring about real world change

RC One of the ways in which we are approaching these concerns is through Live Action Role Play as a method of community co-creation. When we are organising a LARP, we are trying to create a new space, an intimate setting for exploring together what new worlds that we want might look and feel like. What would it feel like to live with different sets of social relations with each other?

IG I am happy you bring up LARPs because I am interested in the playful element of your work. It seems like the Venn diagram of LARPing and artworld DAOs has a pretty big overlap! Why do you think this is?

RC Well, Penny and I have both been working with LARPing in our own practices, and it is great for exploring future relational scenarios together with others. What we are doing at Furtherfield fits mostly with the Nordic LARP framework, https://nordiclarp.org/wiki/Main_Page. because this allows us to dip into fictional futures, science fiction, and political theatre. Basically, it allows us to experiment with politics and political economy! We bring specialists together who each bring a different perspective to a question or a problem. In this context, a specialist might be an academic who brings expert knowledge on a topic, but they might equally be someone whose life is affected by the topic under consideration. We are bringing these different people together on a level playing field and asking them to engage with the playful, imaginative part of themselves. We all have this part because we were all kids once! Almost everyone played in make-believe worlds at some point, so it is something that does not need a lot of explaining. Decentering intellectual processes can free people up to invent worlds that we do not know yet. Our experience has been that, without fail, people made up sensible, defensible worlds to explore and test together in this LARP form.

For instance, with Furtherfield we have spent the last 5 years organising a series of community-created interspecies justice LARPing events called Treaty of Finsbury Park project as part of the EU Horizon 2020-funded CreaTures collaboration. https://treaty.finsburypark.live/. In this near-future fiction, a treaty of cooperation is to be signed, granting equal rights to all life-forms of the park. Unfolding in 3 acts, it aimed to foster real-world interspecies cooperation and social justice from a more-than-human perspective. Participants included biodiversity scientists, park rangers, rewilding activists, and park users, who were all approached as experts. What was beautiful to see was that, while LARPing, people became much more intimately connected to all the different species and lifeforms in the park. We are now exploring whether by transforming the park into a more interactive ecosystem, players might be more likely to pledge and take both practical and political action in support of more-than-human interests.

IG It sounds like what you were doing was making explicit the community that was already there but that was not recognised yet as a community. I imagine this is an ongoing process: you cannot just point to the community and leave it at that.

RC Yes. To some degree, it is self-defining and quite fluid, but it is also a process of community- and place-based mapping, and strengthening the connections between different entities. For example, we are currently collaborating with Professor Ann Light https://profiles.sussex.ac.uk/p29619-ann-light. on a structured and focused form of community mapping and immersive role-play in Felixstowe, a town on the English East Coast to which Furtherfield has recently relocated. This process is about trying to understand what the priorities, needs, and wishes of the people and other species in this area are. We want to turn this into a continuous process of mapping needs, public co-creation events, LARPing, and then spiraling back to the beginning. By doing this over the next few years, we hope to understand what we can do to support the community to take action in areas that matter to them, based on what they discovered in those imaginary LARP spaces. In a way, it is about understanding the changes that happen in people’s imaginations when they collaborate together.

The hard work of building a place-based cultural democracy

IG It sounds like it also has to do with democratic deliberation processes and the public sphere. Maybe about relearning how to be in a society together.

RC Yeah, I guess so, although my only reservations about that is that it sounds rather grand. As of yet, we have not exactly worked out how it is going to work.

This also relates to CultureStake, which is a project that we started to develop at Furtherfield back in 2018. https://culturestake.org/. CultureStake is a blockchain-based quadratic voting tool — it is actually the basis for the process that we are now developing for Syn — that enables people to distribute given resources based on their own parameters for what is needed or important. It then makes data about this collective decision-making process available back to the community, so it can start to understand their own dynamics and concerns. We wanted to involve all users of Finsbury Park in London in decisions about what culture they would like to see realised in that park. We gave people a vote and a way to share with others what matters to them. Basically, this is about a place-based cultural democracy.

IG Is there a next step on the horizon for CultureStake?

RC I am dying to bring something like CultureStake to Felixstowe! But app development is a resource-hungry process and blockchain app development even more so! For this reason, we are thinking about building an off-blockchain version of CultureStake. In many ways, putting CultureStake on the blockchain was probably a case of technological overspecification for what was needed. We built it on the blockchain to explore whether permanent tamper-proof results would be important to people and learned that the feature people really valued instead was the more subtle way of expressing needs and preferences. We discovered that the people in the community were much more interested in finding ways to vote that were more expressive and emotional, rather than concerned about the trustworthiness of the results of the vote. Of course, priorities will vary according to what is at stake with a vote.

The reason CultureStake had a blockchain underneath it was because of the immutability of data. CultureStake was developed partly as a response to the 51%-49% Brexit referendum vote. Because that 51% was the only thing that counted in the end, we were suddenly framed as a country of racists and immigrant haters. With CultureStake, we tried to deal with that trauma. We tried to create a system that would produce data that could be relied upon, data that no one could mess with, and infrastructure that allowed anyone to see the data, and make up their own minds about what mattered to people and how much it mattered to them. Blockchain was a good solution for that because it can store data immutably and transparently.

IG How did you encourage people to get involved in CultureStake? Was there a lot of explanation of how blockchain works, or did you feel that it was not essential that people knew all the ins and outs, technically speaking?

RC There is a tension between making things accessible, attractive, and inviting on the one hand, and making their mechanisms transparent on the other hand. It is a really difficult tension! I spent a lot of my life arguing against the smooth appearance of systems like Facebook that hide all sorts of surveillance processes, algorithmic influence systems, and frictions under their surfaces. Take for example quadratic voting. I am quite good at maths myself and I quickly understood in my bones the benefits of quadratic voting for collective decision making. But not everyone is made this way. People have different ways of understanding, sensing, and knowing the world. Add that to the complexity of explaining how blockchains work and why they might be useful, and it becomes clear that it is just not realistic to expect every user to grasp every mechanism in every app they use.

So in CultureStake, after making many, many mistakes in user experience design, we put our focus on creating a playful and fun interface so that people could test and feel the underlying mechanisms through their interactions with the app. It was more than just the design of the app, though. During the voting period, we had a team stationed throughout the park that helped people cast their votes — we called them our ‘access angels.’ People absolutely loved it; they loved the way they were asked to cast their vote and what it felt like to vote. There were about 2000 people that took part in the vote in the end!

Building this on the blockchain added an enormous amount of effort. It really was a gargantuan job to make this work, but in the end, I think we did pretty well! We managed to test a new system of cultural decision-making that upended the prevailing one in which privileged people with a lot of power make decisions about culture behind closed doors — the kind of system that makes people feel alienated from their locality. We also learned a lot with Sarah Friend, who was the developer for this project, about the inflexibility of smart contracts. It was very valuable work, but we should not forget that it takes a lot of effort.

Making intentions and endings explicit

IG Seeing as our time is almost up, I have a final question: what should people who are thinking about setting up their first DAO be aware of?

RC Two key contextual forces complicate this at the moment. First, mainstream DAOs have been moving in the direction of speculative financialization, which makes it harder to build momentum for conceiving how they might be useful to cultural cooperatives, though projects like The Sphere https://www.thesphere.as/. help to ensure that the imaginative possibility stays open. And second, access to funding for culture is becoming harder all the time. Maybe the first question anyone should ask themselves is why they are interested in DAOs. Is it because they are interested in experimental governance technologies? In which case, yes, go for it! Breadchain, https://app.breadchain.xyz/. set up by The Blockchain Socialist is an example of this — modelling how to use cryptoeconomics to fund experiments with cooperative ventures in crypto. However, if people are interested because they think DAOs might be a new way to make money as an artist or as a cultural producer? Possibly, but I do not know if that is the case yet. That does not mean that this opportunity will not take shape in the future, but it is not a quick fix.

If people still want to go for it, the great thing is that the tools that make this process easier are here now. Particularly helpful are the Gnosis Zodiac tools, which allow people to start playing with an easy DAO setup. https://www.zodiac.wiki/. It is not complicated to do experiments that lead to important discussions about pooling money and how to make collective decisions. These are very basic things, but they are the start of setting up a DAO. Doing these experiments and having these conversations brings into focus whether a DAO could benefit the individuals and the collective at the same time.

IG Should people also ask themselves at these early stages what would be a cause to end the DAO? When does it not serve its purpose anymore?

RC Yes, definitely! Maybe different projects have different answers to that, but yes, I love a planned ending. I have not been very good at it historically! Some things are better to leave open-ended, but with others, it is good to say “It ends when this point is reached.” It is like good punctuation: very important! It is also important to make sure that people can step out of the DAO as individuals, without dismantling the entire DAO.