Imagining Human-Machine Futures: Blockchain-based “Decentralized Autonomous

Organizations”

Kelsie Nabben, Researcher

RMIT University Blockchain Innovation Hub
[Link]@[Link]

Abstract:

Blockchain-based “Decentralized Autonomous Organizations” (DAOs) communities risk

perpetuating the 1990s Californian Ideology of techno-elitism in their imaginary of
“autonomy” via technological determinism, free-market economics, and “engineering”
approach to social and political challenges (Barbrook & Cameron, 1996). Imaginations include
algorithmic governance via Artificial General Intelligence agents running on decentralized
blockchains, hiring labour in DAOs, and bartering payment in cryptocurrency. The role of
humans in this imaginary is limited. This piece explores autonomy in blockchain-based DAOs
to investigate visions of algorithmic assemblages. Do DAOs imagine a different future where
the role of humans is one of symbiosis and augmentation with machines? I draw on cybernetic
interpretations of DAOs as “autopoietic” organisms to imagine a co-constitutive relationship
between people and algorithms in the information age. By understanding the promises and
practices of blockchain technology and decentralized governance, we can better engage with
these emergent objects of social and policy inquiry.

Introduction:

Blockchain technology perpetuates what Barbrook and Cameron called the “Californian
Ideology” of libertarian markets, and individual freedom by providing the infrastructure for
“infinitely scalable” “Decentralized Autonomous Organization” (DAOs) (Barbrook &
Cameron, 1996; Russo, 2020). From its hacker origins in the Californian Ideology, and the
Cypherpunk Mailing List in the 1990s and early 2000s, blockchain communities continue to
experiment with individual autonomy via technological integration that transcends the need for
existing social and power structures. This piece employs ethnographic methods to explore the
question: ‘Do DAOs imagine an autonomous future where the role of humans is one of
symbiosis and augmentation with machines?’. Here, augmentation refers to extending human
capabilities but not displacing them. First, I trace the history and origins of blockchain
technology and the idea of “autonomy” as technological disintermediation of existing political
structures and self-governance. Then, I explore how the Californian ideology is perpetuated in
existing public blockchain communities, specifically DAOs, through the idea of autonomy.
From here, I investigate the possible futures that are created by the infrastructural desires and
imaginaries of the idea of autonomy that are perpetuated through blockchain communities,
including algorithmic governance and decentralized Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). I
then reflect on blockchain imagined future of autonomous self-governance in practice by
observing a DAO called “1Hive”. I draw similarities between 1Hive and the cybernetic concept
of “autopoiesis” and autonomy, to imagine a different future where the role of humans is one
of symbiosis and augmentation with machines. It is integral to investigate the imaginaries
driving blockchain, as a globally relevant and influential institutional technology, as well as
DAOs as a site of experimentation in decentralized governance of digital platforms.

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The Californian Ideology Perpetuated in Blockchain Imaginaries of Autonomy

The Californian Ideology of the 1960s was a political outlook and cultural style that
championed the pursuit of universalist, rational and progressive ideals, including democracy
and self-fulfilment, through technological means (Barbrook & Cameron, 1996). This ideology
was predicated on ideas of individual autonomy through technology that would replace existing
social and political order. The Californian community shared “a nearly universal belief in
technological determinism” and free market entrepreneurialism for autonomous individuals
and their software to replace existing social, political, and legal structures and “radically reduce
the power of the nation state” (Barbrook & Cameron, 1996). The original critique of the
Californian Ideology is that it is in fact a polarizing and repressive vision of the future where
individual self-fulfilment is exclusively accessible to the elite virtual class and the socially
segregated remain subservient labourers who get left behind in this progressivism (Barbrook
& Cameron, 1996). This is epitomised in the Extropian community’s imaginary of great
advances in Artificial and Intelligence and medical science leading to posthuman evolution
where some become upgradable, super intelligent living machines (Eder and McCluskey, n.d.).

Fifty years on from the inception of the Californian Ideology at the 2018 Ethereum blockchain
conference, hippie, “culture hacker”, and personal computer pioneer Stewart Brand told the
enthusiastic crowd of onlooking software developers that the book that changed his life was
“Finite and Infinite Games” by James Carse (Ethereum Foundation, 2018). The book states
that “infinite players look forward, not to a victory…but towards ongoing play”, as analogy to
pushing cultural boundaries and hacking society to pursue political goals and social change
(2013). Preceding the talk, the introducer posed the question: if blockchain is coordination
infrastructure, “what do we aim for in using it?” (Ethereum Foundation, 2018). Scholars
purport that Stewart Brand was a key influence in a pattern of romantic individualism that
appeared as part of the Californian Ideology (Turner, 2006). Following Brand’s advocacy for
the release of the first NASA images of the whole earth, an alliance between hippies,
cyberneticians, nature romantics, technology freaks, psychedelia, and computer culture formed
in the 1960s and 1970s that was a crucial impetus or the rise of digital network culture (der
Welt, 2013).

Despite the optimism and promise of emancipatory technological determinism throughout the
1990s, existing Web digital infrastructure and platformitization has had many negative
consequences for society. Decentralized digital infrastructure promises to change this (Lee,
2021). To date, digitisation and commercialisation of people as everyday consumers has
reproduced and reinforced existing forms of systemic oppression, such as surveillance
capitalism, datafication and monetization of the individual (Zuboff, 2019). Some scholars
argue that platforms need to be designed and optimised for individual autonomy to avoid the
dehumanising effects on society of digital infrastructures and algorithmic exploitation (Hepp,
2020). Indeed, the Californian Ideology imagined “visionary engineers” as inventing “the tools
needed to create a free market within cyberspace, such as encryption, digital money and
verification procedures” (Barbrook & Cameron, 1996). This is exactly what public blockchain
protocols (meaning opensource software code, permissionless to access, and use) are trying to
do (Nabben, 2021). Proponents of public blockchains promise guarantees of autonomy via
decentralized, encrypted digital infrastructure that can’t be exploited (Field, 2018). This piece
explores the promise of public blockchains to deliver “public good” social infrastructure for
individual autonomy. Through an ethnographic investigation of “Decentralized Autonomous
Organizations” (DAOs), I assess decentralized digital infrastructure in practice as a
perpetuation of the Californian Ideology to analyse its imaginaries and realities.

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The next section addresses the imaginaries of blockchain communities by exploring recent
development in blockchain communities pertaining to the idea of autonomy through
decentralized governance.

Blockchain Collective Imaginations

Blockchain technology is deeply embroiled in imaginaries about the current and future state of
information infrastructure and society. Socio-technical imaginaries are visions of scientific and
technological progress that carry with them implicit ideas about public purposes, collective
futures, and the common good (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015). Blockchain experiments embody the
politics and power structures which they want to enable in society (Husain, et. al. 2020).
Bitcoin, the first fully functional, public, decentralized blockchain protocol, was intended to be
peer-to-peer electronic cash (Nakamoto, 2008). Bitcoin is a “techno-economic imaginary” of
both the role of money, and the role of people as “peers” in a networked, “peer-to-peer” society
(Swartz, 2018). Furthermore, the idea that money should be linked to the sovereign control of
a state that is able to infringe upon the liberty of individuals is itself an imaginary that Bitcoin
seeks to challenge by specifying the rules of societal systems in software code on a public
blockchain (Maurer, et. al, 2013). The concept of governance to achieve this revolutionary
autonomy has been an evolutionary concept among blockchain communities. “On-chain”
governance is when governance rules are made explicit in software code, and blockchain nodes
automatically execute code upgrades in the protocol in response to on-chain coin holders voting
processes (Zamfir, 2017). In contrast, “off-chain” governance is when rules are much less
formal, and the non-code-based processes of how ideas are shared, discussed, and evaluated
outside of formal, recorded, transparent decisions are eventually reflected in nodes decisions
upgrade their software to pass on changes to the protocol. The “on-chain” governance of
Bitcoin is a clear example of the Californian ideology, as the community sought to mechanize
the rules of the protocol and minimize human interventions. In practice, the thinking that
community politics can be abstracted away through technological mechanisms has proven
unrealistic in digital infrastructures that are designed, built, and maintained by communities of
software developers, albeit distributed (Hassan & De Filippi, 2017). The next section details
the origins of notions of blockchain conceptions of autonomy, before exploring how these
ideological underpinnings are being expressed in multiple manifestations of decentralized
governance in blockchain communities today.

The Origins of Blockchain “Autonomy”

Blockchain as a decentralized, digital infrastructure promises individual and collective

autonomy. “Autonomy” refers to individual freedom through self-governance, enabled by
digital infrastructure and automation that removes the need for trusted third parties in economic
and social interactions. Public, decentralized blockchain technology offers a distributed record
of history with no central point of control so the rules of the system cannot be interfered with.
The invention of Bitcoin, the first fully functional, public, decentralized blockchain protocol,
is largely attributed to a disparate group of countercultural “hacker-engineers” known as the
“Cypherpunks” (Brekke, 2020). The Cypherpunks operated on a mantra of self-organization
and direct-action in building privacy preserving, cryptographic software tools to counter the
threat of Corporate and State surveillance in the digital age. They believed that “software can't
be destroyed”, and “a widely dispersed system can't be shut down” (Hughes, 1992).

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The desire for autonomy against the threat of corporate and state surveillance is deeply
enmeshed in the culture of the Cypherpunks. The online author of “the temporary autonomous
zone” Hakim Bey, who shared the popular vision of autonomy as self-governance for self-
determination by creating spaces that elude formal structures of control. “The autonomy of the
individual appears to be complemented & enhanced by the movement of the group; while the
effectiveness of the group seems to depend on the freedom of the individual” states Bey in
1991 (Bey, 1991). Furthermore, Timothy C. May, co-founder of The Cypherpunk’s Mailing
List and a key spokesperson of the group was a self-professed libertarian and author or “The
Crypto Anarchist Manifesto”. This manifesto is an inherently political vision of “anonymous
computerized markets” that catalyze “a social and economic revolution” (May, 1992). With
May as a key spokesperson for the Cypherpunks, libertarianism ensues as the dominant
political philosophy seeking to maximise autonomy through political freedom, freedom of
choice, and voluntary association beyond the transparent, opensource, permissionless digital
infrastructure that the Cypherpunks sought to build (Woodcock, 2004). The Cypherpunks
employed software engineering as a form of direct political action, epitomised in the catchcry
“Cypherpunks write code” (Hughes, 1993). The Cypherpunks experimented with numerous
distributed and digital cash technologies, which culminated in the invention of Bitcoin, a tool
for electronic transactions that didn’t rely on a trusted intermediary (Nakamoto, 2008).

The Cypherpunks Mailing List was closely tied to “The Extropian Mailing List”, a group that
advocated for self-transformation through integration with technology. The core principles of
The Extropist Manifesto are perpetual growth and progress in all aspects of human endeavor;
transcending the restrictions of authoritarianism, surveillance, and social control; overcoming
property rights, including IP and money by sharing knowledge, culture, and resources;
intelligence, and smart machines, specifically the attainment of “Friendly Artificial
Intelligence” that exceeds human ability (Moore, 1998; n.a, 2010). Extropians advocate for the
philosophies of technological self-enhancement (known as transhumanism), extropy
(improving the human condition), and the future (Greenberg, 2014). Extropianism has been
critiqued as part of the individualistic Californian Ideology perception of the capabilities of
new technologies for the purposes of personal escapism (Barbrook & Cameron, 1996).
Numerous prominent Cypherpunks subscribed to the Extropian mailing list, including co-
founders Timothy C. May and Eric Hughes, as well as Mark Miller, the Co-founder of
blockchain project “Agoric”. Now, DAOs are being created to further pursue these goals.

Visions of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations

Blockchain-based “Decentralized Autonomous Organizations” (DAOs) are the logical

extension of the Cypherpunk ideal of cyber and physical autonomy. Scholars define a DAO as
“a blockchain-based system that enables people to coordinate and govern themselves mediated
by a set of self-executing rules deployed on a public blockchain, and whose governance is
decentralized (i.e., independent from central control)” (Hassan & De Filippi, 2021). In these
software encoded institutions, “autonomous” refers to individual and collective self-
governance as independence from external force and the control of others, human involvement,
and self-direction through intelligent machines that can make decisions and participate in
labour in the organization.

The phrase “Decentralized Autonomous Organization” was first mentioned in the field of
cybernetics, despite Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of the Ethereum smart contract enabled
blockchain protocol, having claimed to invent it (Dilger, 1997; Buterin, 2016). In the field of
cybernetics, the idea of autonomy and autonomous systems has been a longstanding theme to

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describe self-determination and the emergence of meaning in a system (Varela, 1986). Here,
autonomy is also political. Cybernetics developed in crisis as a reaction to the horrors World
War II and a critique of liberalism and humanism as “a new fable” (Tiqqun, 2020). It advocates
to transcend the human to maintain societal order by treating society as an engineering problem
that can be programmed and re-programmed through “the machine of governance”. Tiqqun
refers to this as “the ideal of a stable society, expressed by objectively controllable social
mechanisms” to protect against accidents in the future (Tiqqun, 2020). This idea of engineering
society through cyber-physical system carries over into blockchain community manifestations
of autonomous digital organizations.

The concept of a “Decentralized Autonomous Corporation” was originally proposed in

blockchain communities by Dan Larimer to describe cryptocurrency as profit-earning shares
in a free market economy (Larimer, 2013). Buterin then adopted the phrase “Decentralized
Autonomous Organization” or “DAO” (2013). Buterin described a Decentralized Organization
as “a set of humans interacting with each other according to a protocol specified in code, and
enforced on the blockchain” that control a treasury, and a Decentralized Autonomous
Organization as “an entity that lives on the internet and exists autonomously, but also heavily
relies on hiring individuals to perform certain tasks the automation itself cannot do” (Buterin,
2014). This interpretation of autonomous systems was partly inspired by futarchy (a
mechanism for organizational governance via prediction markets by Robin Hanson), self-
operating machines long referred to as “automatons”, the novel series Daemon in which a
distributed, persistent computer application begins to influence the physical world after the
death of its creator, and Bitcoin (Buterin, 2014; 2016). This vision of autonomous organizations
is hypothetically fulfilled by artificial general intelligence that runs on decentralized
blockchains.

The Algorithmic Extremes of Autonomous Organizations

Buterin imagines DAOs as “the dream of science fiction”, in that eventually, autonomous
agents (full artificial general intelligence, or AGI) would operate and govern the digital
infrastructure of society in a self-replicating and self-maintaining manner with very little need
for human involvement (Buterin, 2014). In this imaginary of technology-enabled autonomy,
fully autonomous AGI agents promise to liberate people from menial tasks, reserving human
judgement for higher order, specialized tasks. “In an autonomous agent, there is no necessary
specific human involvement at all; that is to say, while some degree of human effort might be
necessary to build the hardware that the agent runs on, there is no need for any humans to
exist that are aware of the agent’s existence” states Buterin (2014). The vision of decentralized
AGI is that AGI algorithms run on blockchain-based marketplaces to automatically coordinate
tasks and earn digital tokens for their work, where they too are autonomous from centralised
forces of control or coercion (Salah and Rehman, 2019). Here, blockchain offers the
decentralized, digital infrastructure that forms the foundation of a fully autonomous network
of AI agents that is resilient against infrastructural or political co-option. DAOs enact
autonomy through disintermediation of the social and economic structures that govern society,
and replace it with trust minimizing, automated systems for “social scalability”, to inculcate
digital infrastructure itself as an autonomous zone which eludes formal structures of control
(Szabo, 2017). These visions need to be contrasted with the practice of designing, encoding,
and organising in a technology-mediated, decentralized manner to better reason about their
consequences in society.

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Deeply instilled tensions remain between the role of algorithms and the role of people in
reinforcing “autonomy” in these systems. The premier example of the tension between
algorithmic prominence, and normative decision-making based on established norms based on
shared values is “The DAO” hack, the first major experiment of a blockchain-based
decentralized, digital investment organisation in the Ethereum community (DuPont, 2018). A
bug in the code allowed millions of dollars to be drained from the smart contract, resulting in
arguments in the community between whether it is right or wrong to change the record of
transactions. This led to a “hard fork” of the Ethereum protocol, and community division about
the “truer” blockchain, leading to Ethereum and “Ethereum Classic”, as well as early Ethereum
CTO Gavin Wood founding his own protocol known as “Polka Dot”. In the aftermath of the
hack and ongoing debates on governance, Buterin stated that “people who think that the
purpose of blockchains is to completely expunge soft mushy human intuitions and feelings in
favor of completely algorithmic governance (emphasis on "completely") are absolutely crazy”
(2017). Today, the Ethereum community seeks a balanced approach to the social and technical
aspects of governance, embracing its “off-chain”, human-oriented processes. For example, the
role of the “Ethereum Foundation” in maintaining an essential coordination role in the
development of the protocol, such as hiring research and development staff and facilitating
regular “Ethereum Improvement Proposal” (EIP) meetings. While this is excellent in crisis, it
can be inefficient and subject to social attacks such as collusion. In contrast, other blockchain
communities such as Polka Dot and Tezos embrace a “purer” technological form of on-chain
governance, where protocol upgrades are determined by token holder votes, and software code
is immutable, meaning it cannot be changed once deployed. While the advantage of this is
transparency, a drawback is the reduction of governance to voting, when it is in fact multiple
layers of social and technical components and processes interacting in the coordination and
control of a system, which can’t be anticipated in advance, and are therefore impossible to
encode into the rules of protocol in advance (Weyer, et. al, 2015).

From these origins, blockchain-enabled organizations have developed and evolved into a
plethora of protocols, applications, and communities which perpetuate and actualise visions of
political autonomous futures through software code. Following the initial (failed) experiment
of “The DAO”, numerous communities are experimenting with blockchain-enabled
decentralized governance to initiate and maintain virtual organizations. The objectives and
functions of these organizations include investing, building ecosystems for “decentralized
finance” economies, and creating cultural artefacts known as “non-fungible tokens” (NFTs).
Other DAOs are for funding and commercialising longevity research, and, in the tradition of
Steward Brand’s advice to Devcon, exploring the intersection between Web3.0 and
psychedelics (VitaDAO, n.d.; PsyDAO, 2021). Well-funded projects are also underway to
develop decentralized AI services, such as “SingularityNet” in pursuit of the science-fiction
DAO dream of a “fully autonomous system” (O’Higgins, 2021). In this way, Ethereum and
other blockchain communities are emerging in numerous manifestations to pursue a vision of
autonomy through the reduction of government (termed “mutualist minarchism”) through the
self-provision of “public goods” to provide better infrastructure than the State and build their
vision of an autonomous society (Ennis, 2021).

Warnings Against the Californian Ideology

The major critique of the Californian Ideology as a sociotechnical imaginary is that it uses
technological advancement as an excuse for exploitation. The neoliberal pursuit of free market
mechanisms and technological self-enhancement is dependent on labour commodification and
the exploitation of others (Barbrook & Cameron, 1996). The fear is that this results in social

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segregation between the haves and have nots. Barbrook and Cameron argue that there is an
inherent contradiction between the ideology of self-sufficiency and resentment for any external
encroachment of one’s own individual autonomy and the goal of “cyborg masters and robot
slaves” (1996). They warn of a potentially repressive vision of the future, wrapped in a bio-
technological “search for the perfection of mind, body and spirit” will inevitably lead to the
emergence of a post-human future of narcissistic self-fulfilment enabled by the exploitation of
others, in which “the technologies of freedom are turning into the machines of dominance”
(1996). This has already been demonstrated in the Web 2.0 modern day-internet era, which
perpetuates asymmetries of power in society, between those that govern digital platforms
through “black box algorithms”, and users, whose personal data is itself extractible (Barbrook
& Cameron, 2015; Hepp, 2020). The hope of Web 3.0 is that decentralized technology will be
distributed, participatory, and different.

Warning Against Blockchain

Yet, blockchains rhetoric of transformative new political structures such as delegated voting
by “liquid democracy”, decentralized artificial intelligence, and “the metaverse” of blurred
division between physical and digital spaces is at risk of overshadowing the construction of a
cyberspace that inclusively distributes its benefits. Some scholars warn that the “non-
hierarchical, decentralized or distributed topologies…are confused with principles such as
democratic decision-making and non-hierarchical social structures” (O’Dwyer, 2015; 2016;
2020). These “techno-utopian ideologies” may cause alternative attempts at platform
cooperative models to fail, like many before them. “Techno-fundamentalism” risks tainting the
potentially positive social outcomes of blockchain technology (Walch, 2015). In the current
state of “experimentation” in “decentralized organizations”, and pre-“autonomy” through AGI
algorithms, the social dynamics of blockchain-based digital communities need to be further
investigated to ascertain their promises and realities.

The politics of this ideology reveals how reference to “experimentation” is somewhat of a sly
turn of phrase in blockchain communities. The term experimentation elicits depictions of safe,
small-scale, and low-cost play. Yet, referring to Carse in “Finite and Infinite Games” and the
provocation of ‘what can be achieved with our newfound tools?’, these are in-fact very serious
games. The stakes are high in some of these multi-million-dollar digital platforms, which can
have hundreds of participants, and are commonly hacked (or “rekt”). “Experimentation”
underplays the fact that the rules of decentralized organization are still being invented. Some
scholars warn against these unchecked visions of decentralized, autonomous futures arguing
that the ideological promises of the uses of decentralized technologies, such as widening
political participation, contradict the reality of these tools in practice which inevitably collapse
into re-centralisation under the forces of commerce as a powerful driver of technological
innovation (Heemsbergen, et. al., 2020). At present, these digital institutional infrastructures
are more at the stage of “decentralized organization” rather than “decentralized autonomous
organization”, given the limits of algorithmic agents as being sentient agents capable of human-
level intelligence. Without assuming that this is inevitable, or desirable, this vision and the
means to its realisation in terms of who designs, builds, and programs these systems needs to
be questioned as it has far-reaching implications about what it means to live in a digital society.
Imaginations, visions, and narratives shape the future. The blockchain narrative of the
superiority of algorithmic governance and the rhetorical power it holds to attract and retain
faithful followers may prove more important than the technological practices of blockchain
itself (Zook & Blankenship, 2018).

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The next section explores a case study of a DAO experimenting with the possibilities of
decentralized organization, algorithmic governance, and automation called “1Hive”, to explore
and test the DAO imaginary of autonomy.

Case study – 1Hive, where “Honey is Money”

“1Hive” is a decentralized autonomous organization with the objective of building and

experimenting with decentralized applications and protocols to generate and maintain a self-
sustaining, decentralized community (1Hive, n.d.). The concept behind 1Hive was heavily
influenced by the Bitcoin and Ethereum protocols as technology with surrounding communities
that recursively maintain and improve them over time because they care about them. 1Hive has
existed in various instantiations since 2017 but has no core team (Duncan, 2017) The 1Hive
“Honey” token was anonymously listed on cryptocurrency exchanges (CoinMarketCap, n.d.).
The objective of the ecosystem is “for the everyday person to earn their wages, and store their
capital, in cryptonetworks” for individual autonomy. “One of the goals was to see it take on a
life of its own” states one early contributor. 1Hive is structured to function automatically, in
accordance with a decentralized social contract (known as a community covenant. A smart
contract issues Honey tokens, anyone can make a proposal to request Honey to build 1Hive
modules, and anyone with Honey tokens can vote to support a proposal using a novel voting
system (known as “conviction voting”). The threshold of support required to pass proposals
changes depending on the supply of Honey and the amount requested, meaning that the system
automatically self-stabilises. This dynamic of allocation funds is reinforced through a dispute
resolution protocol called “Celeste” which the community has designed and built (Sacha,
2021). Accountability for fulfilling proposals once granted is largely socially reinforced
through reputation. Through the “gardens” initiative, anyone can use this model and
infrastructure to run their own DAO.

1Hive is a self-governing organization. Its operations are autonomous from external forces of
governance or coercion. It is also self-functioning, in that the rules of the community, including
arbitration, are enforced via economic incentives in the governance of ecosystem. Through its
core mechanisms and community, there is enough momentum for things to happen without
specific direction. Barriers to participation are low and people can freely participate, contribute
to development, or exit the community. With no company, core team, or management
hierarchy, community working groups called “Swarms” orient around a self-invented currency
called “Honey” to coordinate an ecosystem of activities (1Hive, n.d). The community covenant
specifies the values and norms of the 1Hive community, including the goal of fostering a
“healthy community economy” (1Hive, n.d). These standards of behaviour guide the allocation
of honey towards development and blockchain based incentive mechanism to enforce
behaviour. To make a governance proposal within the ecosystem, Honey tokens must be
“staked”. Voting is conducted using a novel decision-making algorithm that continually signals
preference called “conviction voting”. Economic interests align incentives within the
ecosystem in the “on-chain” governance components. In cases of dispute resolution, staked
tokens are risked in the Celeste decentralized arbitration mechanism or “court” (1Hive, n.d).
The community has effectively allocated Honey to the development, maintenance, and
improvement of shared tools that sustain the community, such as the development of a
decentralized exchange aggregator (“Honeyswap”), a decentralized arbitration mechanism
(known as “Celeste”), and a liquidity market protocol (“Agave”) (1Hive, n.d.). From these
foundations and goals of determining one’s own work and wages, the 1Hive community has
generated a valuable market capitalisation of around $8 million, and $30 million at its market
peak. The combination of social dynamics and blockchain protocol enforcement of votes and

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dispute resolution makes 1Hive a socio-technical system. 1Hive acknowledges its social
dynamics, including the community “Discord” chat and forum (1Hive, n.d.)).

As a blockchain-based DAO, 1Hive reflects some of the dynamics of the Californian Ideology,
including technological determinism, free market economics, and algorithmic governance. Yet,
the community describes itself according to Elinor Ostrom’s “Principles of the Commons”,
seeing itself as producing public goods (Ostrom, 2005; 1Hive, n.d.). Algorithms in the system
are to serve the goal to build, fund, and self-maintain infrastructure. Rather than algorithms
being predominant or subservient in this system, it is a co-constitutive human-machine
ensemble in which humans determine algorithm rules, and human outcomes are thus
determined by algorithms. Early contributor Luke Duncan states that “You hear about DAOs
putting people to work. Most DAOs are about putting machines to work. The infrastructure
coordinates people and labour through incentives and rewards but people generate the
infrastructure and reap the benefit”. 1Hive is geared towards coordinating human labor that
can’t easily be automated. In fact, 1Hive is closer to Dilger’s original cybernetic view of a
“Decentralized Autonomous Organization” (Dilger, 1997), rather than a dystopia of AGI
marketplaces where humans have a minor oversight role and autonomous algorithms
coordinate independently.

Cybernetic Principles of Biological Autonomy and DAOs

In line with the field of cybernetics, Dilger imagined Intelligent Home technology as a
complex, multi-agent system of algorithms that would operate like a living organism. The
formal definition of an autonomous dynamical (or adaptive) system in cybernetics comes from
control theory engineering, to describe systems whose “steady-state” is disturbed by external
inputs (Dimirovski, et. al., 1977). Also in this field, the term “autopoiesis” is used to describe
human-machine systems as “living” organisms, the attributes of which include adaptability,
withstanding perturbations, and reproducing themselves and entirely new systems (Varela, et.
al. 1974). In this conception of complex sociotechnical systems, “autonomy” is a state that
results from autopoietic organization, as the process of an individual’s ongoing operation as a
self-generating organism (Varela, et. al. 1974). Autonomy is achieved through autopoietic
organization of the individual, to participate in a greater whole (Varela, 1979). “Wholeness
relates to autonomy”, in that something that is whole is complete, self-governing, free from
external control or influence, and generated by itself (Glanville, 2015). Dilger’s conception of
an Intelligent Home was a “self-defining and self-maintaining system” capable of
“evolutionary” processes (1997). This type of DAO is comprised of sensors and actuators
(controls), with the capacity to evolve, adapt, and grow like a biological immune system. In
this way, 1Hive embodies these attributes of an autopoietic living system in its objective to
self-generate and its ability to evolve and reproduce decentralized governance mechanisms to
continue to sustain itself as a functional whole, without relying on external entities. Varela
describes that “death” of a living, autopoietic organism would result from disintegration from
being a unified whole and loss of identity (Varela, 1979). In the same way, DAOs like 1Hive
exist because of participants are oriented towards a shared objective, without which it would
die. The life of a decentralized organization is sustained thought the relational interactions
between constituent components, for example in 1Hive, the constitution, issuance of Honey,
proposals, voting, and arbitration that comprise the DAO as a functional whole. 1Hive is
designed for resilience from external capital dependencies. The value of Honey is intrinsic to
its ecosystem and scales up and down over time. “We’ll never run out of capital because we’ve
chosen not to use capital” states Duncan. This inherent homeostasis is dynamically determined

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over time. The ecosystem reproduces and evolves as other DAOs deploy a similar social and
technical framework.

This vision of an autopoietic, cybernetic DAO offers a stark contrast to the dystopian,
mechanistic picture of human minimization through “trustless” transactions, strictly on-chain
governance, and algorithmic automation with humans at the edges. Instead, autonomy is
projected as a whole system or society, that is greater than the sum of its individual parts and
can achieve things as a collective whole that it otherwise could not have (Glanville. 2015).
Here, a system is autonomous and whole when it is self-organising and self-reproducing, rather
than when it is free from human intervention. In this same way, autopoiesis describes systems
that are capable of producing, reproducing and maintaining themselves (Verala, et. al., 1974).
Some blockchain community and DAO participants argue that this may be a more suitable way
to conceive of the mode of operation and being within and through DAOs (Zargham, 2020).
The protocol is at the centre for coordination, with humans at the edges to contribute to, and
benefit from, the system.

This is not to pretend that cybernetics is the “correct” response to how to organise society.
Cybernetics was developed as a reaction to the tragedies of World War II in the hopes of better
ways to “steer” and control social systems (Wiener, 1954). Cybernetic approaches have been
criticized for overemphasizing an engineering approach towards the mathematical
“optimization” of society (Burrell & Fourcade, 2021). Cybernetic approaches also advocate for
the technological extremes of human-machine integration for societal advancement. The
Cybernetic Manifesto predicts a neural-link type “physical integration” of direct connection
between technology and the nervous system for individual immorality (Principia Cybernetia,
1989). This includes “Embodied Artificial Intelligence” (EAI), which is not the Extropian
“abandoning the wetware” of human physicality but draws on the epistemology of autopoiesis
to embrace integration between technology and biological processes of cognition and sensing
(Damiano & Stano, 2021; Varela, et. al., 1991). Still, in this information age paradigm,
cybernetic approaches to digital futures mean making machines able to sense and develop more
like humans, rather than replacing humanness.

Cybernetics has undergone critical self-reflection from within the field with the development
of “second-order cybernetics”. Second-order cybernetics approaches argue that system
designers cannot exist independent of the system itself and the designers’ model of reality
(Mead, 1968). The concept of autopoiesis and autonomy arise out of these developments. From
this basis of self-awareness, a conception of AGI autonomy that is a system which evolves and
makes decisions with no external input is impossible. However, a whole system, in which
individuals and the collective are free of political coercion over decision-making may be
possible. Cybernetic visions of human-machine integration emphasise preservation of the
“creative core” of the human individual, because it is the essential “engine of evolution”
(Principia Cybernetia, 1989). Humans are always in the loop of complex systems engineering,
whether that is establishing initial settings, deciding what objectives to optimise for, or training
algorithms. The understanding of autonomous human-machine systems as coherent wholes
presented in this field offer a potentially more complete vision of what technologically enabled
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations could be.

The cybernetic vision of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations as autopoietic organisms

provides an alternative to some blockchain instantiations of DAOs that appear heavily
informed by the Californian Ideology. Rather than limiting or foregoing humanness, cybernetic
approaches to societal organization embrace co-constituency with machines as a continual

Electronic copy available at: [Link]

process of optimization instead of a perfect end state of decentralized blockchain-AGI
“singularity”. This is perhaps a better integrated sociotechnical imaginary for autonomous
organization in a digital era for blockchain communities to consider.

Analysis

The real forefront of how decentralized governance is evolving through DAOs is in the detail
of autonomy. A clear picture of an autonomy that benefits the people participating in
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations is yet to be articulated in blockchain communities.
Who or what is being made “autonomous” in “Decentralized Autonomous Organizations”, and
whether this is sentient algorithms, or individuals and communities is yet to be clarified in the
participatory visioning of DAO builders. When our imaginaries mature to allow the perceived
participants in these systems to consider “autonomy”, perhaps we will be ready to meet our
self-made systems of superintelligence.

Visions of the future are born out the contexts they are created in and carry with them implicit
ideas about collective purposes about the common good (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015). Blockchain
communities and the innovation of “Decentralized Autonomous Organization” is a truly
admirable vision of an information age which enabled self-governance via decentralized
technology. This vision is being actively pursued by communities that are designing, building,
and governing their own digital infrastructure with the aim of greater individual and collective
autonomy. Yet, the end goal of DAOs as truly autonomous systems remains a fuzzy, far-off,
and under-explored concept. In the articulated imaginaries of Decentralized Autonomous
Organizations, it is intelligent algorithms that are self-governing, autonomous and free, and the
role of people is reserved for labour, including some higher order managerial oversight,
presumably by tech-literate software engineers. The constant tension of algorithmic systems is
whether they should reflect an individualistic of collective ontology in terms of who they serve
and what they optimise for (Benthall & Goldenfein, 2021). In DAO interpretations of
autonomy, this is a tension between individual, collective, and machine, regarding who is being
governed, and who owns value in the system. Either humans are free, as in self-governing to
make their own choices, or they free through omission of responsibility by having AGI govern
for them. The latter describes the singularity, a posthuman society which has been engineered
and optimised beyond the limits of human fallibility (Bostrom, 2019). This vision of autonomy
in DAOs is a far-off vision of a future information society governed by AGIs, more so than a
present reality. Instead, there are inherent trade-offs on the spectrum between individual
autonomy, and the benefits of collective autonomy sought through participation in a group.
Rather than envisioning individuals that are autonomous from an organisation, organisations
that are autonomous from individuals, cybernetic projections of autonomy describe a complete
whole, that is autonomous from external forces of dependence or coercion that sets direction
and makes decisions in a self-contained way.

The narrative of what DAOs are, and what they will be is in flight. At present, DAOs are neither
optimistic and emancipatory, or deeply repressive. In some ways, they might be both. The idea
of “autonomy” is an imaginary perpetuated in DAOs, which both helps bind a community in
participating towards the objective of effective self-governance and creates risks of abuse of
power and exploitation. This piece has explored the concept of autonomy and autopoiesis in
decentralized organizations as a means to inform the subjective design and governance of these
systems. Some scholars warn that digital infrastructure, even if decentralized, will not provide
a techno-fix without deep consideration and work on the social and political institutions that
determine its ownership, governance, and systemic consequences (O’Dwyer, 2015; Walch,

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2021). In this view, technocratic solutions to organising society omit the inherently complex
nature of human behaviour in socio-technical systems, and the necessity of calculating and
continually measuring the social outcomes of technological interventions. For the most part,
these warnings of technological repression are not what I observe in DAO communities.

Many DAOs in the Ethereum community are not geographically concentrated around the
Venture Capital funding and socio-economic disparities of Silicon Valley but are
geographically diffuse, diverse communities bound by memes that may actually represent a
kind of “world computer”. Digital artisans are being celebrated and finding their place in
generating all kinds of hypermedia, including memes and “NFTs”, applying capitalist “DeFi
degeneracy” to spawn new ecosystems, and bridging the “Metaverse” between physical and
digital space in creative ways that enable individual ownership of digital assets and data for
individual and collective autonomy. The permissionless nature of the decentralized digital
economy does not just create pathways for digital artist engineers but also new categories of
roles, such as “dank meme lords”, and self-employment opportunities, such as “play-to-earn”
cryptocurrency games (Cryptojobs, 2021; Axie Infinity, n.d.). Whilst this still is a niche field
in many ways, a culture that welcomes curiosity and an ideology of permissionlessness mean
that participation is open to anyone that wants to engage in playing serious games.

In terms of autonomy, DAOs are still subject to external influences that influence decision
making. This includes nation-state law and enforcement, such as attraction to legal limitations
on where a DAO can be registered as a legal corporation, ensuring that token economics won’t
be considered Securities under United States Law, and fleeing from crypto regulatory
crackdowns and towards crypto-friendly regulatory jurisdictions. Although not emancipated
from the external or internal bindings of the politics and bureaucracy of the governance of
infrastructure, 1Hive demonstrates that other visions of decentralized autonomous
organizations which enact a state of synergy between people and algorithms are being explored.
These visions loop back to the original cybernetic conceptions by applying “control theory
principles to social and political systems, to optimize for a complex system of interactions to
gain new attributes at the group level that it didn’t have before” states Michael Zargham,
Founder and CEO of systems engineering design firm “Blockscience”. The cybernetic inspired
articulation of human-machine systems encompasses the quality of autonomy, while
maintaining wholeness and the individual and the group level. This instantiation of a
technological organization is closer to cybernetic conceptions of “decentralized autonomous
organizations” as living, autopoietic, organisms that are capable of reproducing and
maintaining themselves in an adaptable, evolutionary, and resilient manner. 1Hive
acknowledges the social components of its ecosystem and governance processes as critical to
its being (1Hive, n.d.). In this vision, autonomy is people shaping systems and systems shaping
people for collective benefit and without co-option. “Autonomy” refers to freedom from
external reliance or control, as well as computers augmented decision making for human-
machine hybrid decision making systems, rather than superseding humans.

It is crucial to clarify understandings and hopes to shape this digital future into a long-term
vision. To avoid a narrative and a future of technological advancement under the guise of
narcissistic pursuits and perpetuating social segregation between elite token holders and a
labour class that is subservient to owners and algorithms, concepts such as social organization,
governance, and democracy need to be engaged with, rather than just tweeted about as buzz
words to “meme” autonomy into existence. In fact, blockchain-based systems may provide an
approach to more distributed governance of AGI, with public blockchains offering a more

Electronic copy available at: [Link]

distributed, open, and secure infrastructure for governing Machine Learning and AGI
algorithms (Harris & Waggoner, 2019; Montes & Goertzel, 2019).

What is omitted from the concept of the Californian Ideology is what an alternative might be
“to make autonomous initiatives flower and make the new technology truly a tool for
liberation” (Barker, 2007). DAOs offer a perspective of what this alternative might be. Rather
than a Californian Ideology, DAOs could aim to be closer to the desire for self-determination
that is expressed in the Declaration for the Independence of Cyberspace of “a world where
anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being
coerced” (Perry Barlow, 1996). What people are trying to imagine is possible with the
information age is a future that is “actually democratic, meritocratic, decentralized, and
libertarian” (Rossetto, 1996).

Conclusion

The perpetuation of the Californian Ideology through blockchain communities is still

vulnerable to the same risks of technological repression expressed in the exploitative
algorithmic digital platforms of Web2.0. The social outcomes of governance both of and by
algorithms remains to be tested across the various instantiations of decentralized organizations.
It is worth questioning this imaginary before pursuing and integrating intelligent agents as peers
in the digital social structures that blockchain communities are building to coordinate society.
The realities of the question of who or what is being made autonomous in DAOs as they
experiment with algorithmic extremes, and potentially governance by intelligent algorithms, is
pertinent for enthusiastic onlookers and participants to consider. By articulating the visions and
imaginaries of blockchain-based DAOs, this piece draws on cybernetic conceptions of DAOs
to imagine a symbiotic relationship between algorithms and people.

In this piece, I have sought to draw attention to the opaque blockchain framing of DACs and
DAOs as organizations that achieve autonomy through governance by artificially intelligent
algorithms, with humans at the margins. Some visions of DAOs in blockchain communities
risk perpetuating the Californian Ideology of technological determinism and hopes of
advancements in AI but are underformed and not clearly articulated or deliberated among these
communities, although the capabilities don’t exist yet for this level of algorithmic governance.
I propose that this provides an opportunity to question, critically reflect on, and shape desired
futures for an information age that promotes harmony between people and algorithms by
emphasizing a state of autonomous individuals and wholes through Decentralized Autonomous
Organizations presented in original articulations of “decentralized autonomous organizations”
in the field of cybernetics. I explore the autopoietic properties of DAOs to self-generate, self-
sustain, and self-reproduce by drawing on the case study example of “1Hive”. I argue that the
field of cybernetics offers a more sophisticated articulation of autonomous organization in
human-machine systems, which requires engineers to consider the role of people in guiding
and shaping these socio-technical-political constructs towards autonomy. In the end, our
aspiration for autonomy, or “self-law” is as nuanced as people, in that it is both individual, and
collective, and certainly cannot be left up to others to articulate for us.

“Infinite players look forward, not to a victory…but towards ongoing play” (Carse, 2013). In
the case of DAOs, the ultimate goal is for people to keep on playing.

Electronic copy available at: [Link]

Acknowledgements:

With thanks to Michael Zargham, Burrrata, and the team at Blockscience for ongoing research
collaborations, my research supervisors Professor Ellie Rennie and Professor Chris Berg for
feedback, and Divya Siddarth for conversations about AI.

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