DAOs Are Becoming Emergent
We all know how the story goes, and we’ve known it ever since Mary Shelly put ink to page. Dr. Frankenstein painstakingly pieces together bits and pieces of scrap and biological remains until finally, somewhere along the line, the final piece of the puzzle is fitted and the creature gains sentience: “It’s alive!” And so the story repeats, time and again. Tony Stark creating advanced robotics from parts in a cave. Star Trek’s Borg, a literal hive mind that creates world eating technologies from an amalgam of component parts. This concept is called emergence, and it is something that has apparently fascinated humanity for quite some time now.
Though impressive tomes have been written merely to define what, exactly, emergence means, the definition by Bankless should suffice here: “Emergent properties result from the combinations of interactions from the many components of a closed system.” Put another way, an emergent system is one that could not function away from the parts of its whole, wherein that function of the system is completely different from each individual part. Consciousness, cellular construction, neural networks, and bee hives might all be considered real examples of emergent systems. Additionally, we believe DAOs to also be an example of emergence in action and it is precisely that property that makes us here at GET Protocol stoked on the future.
We previously defined DAOs not as individual mesh networks, where each hub is equal, but rather as a meshed spoke-and-hub model, where a DAO looks a bit more like an atom, with lots of interconnected peers orbiting a single nucleus of governance. In turn, other DAOs may orbit this one as well, with peers interacting from time to time, coming and going, mixing and mingling, but the nucleus of either may eventually pull away. It’s a gentle soup of DAOs, really, and much more organic than traditional corporate structures. If you’d like to learn more in depth about this, we recommend reading our piece “What is a DAO?”
In traditional corporate structures, you don’t have this gentle coming and going, this tug and pull and discourse that comes with collaborative efforts. In the corporate world of top-down pyramid structures of governance, each entity is independent and competitive against one another. Power sharing is a foreign concept, collaboration difficult from within corporate silos, and contributors (the workers) are unable to move freely between opportunity. DAOs eschew this, and bring fluidity to the corporate world and it is that fluidity that gives rise to emergence.
As DAOs do not deplore collaboration and often build in public, the rise of emergence begins to form at the edges first, where DAOs collide through shared memberships. At this juncture, as each true DAO member has some form of say in how the governance process works, DAOs are able to form new collaborative ideas together to better their industry. In some distant future, you might imagine this working where to fix a street pothole, you might collaborate with your neighborhood DAO to team up with known members of a contractor’s collective DAO to find ways of quickly fixing your hyper localized issue, bypassing the entirety of job bidding and traditional government operations. DAOs are incentivized to work together on solutions to the biggest problems simply because they are literally run by those most impacted by the problem. People join DAOs and hold their governance options open because they believe in the idea of the DAO: In some way, it impacts their life and they see it, rightfully so, as a way of making an impact. This interconnectedness leads to new kinds of discovery, new kinds of structure, and new kinds of collaborative efforts between people, companies, and even entire industries and fields of study that before had been siloed due to regulation, red tape, or logistical difficulties. What if business partnerships could be as simple as content sharing across DAO discord channels?
At these fringes, emergence forms. At these edges, we see the DAO of DAOs, a meshwork of many people with many different ideas, coming together within their communities to tackle life changing ideas. We are no longer faced with individual problems that impact small segments of our world. Issues are now global and some of the problems humanity will face in the coming decades will be of the highest caliber. New structures are needed, and walled gardens competing for knowledge workers tasked with closely guarding secrets will not be the way forward. Only through deep collaboration across industry lines will emergence start to form and collectively new solutions will begin to rise up and take hold from this new consciousness.
At GET Protocol, we believe in shaping a small bit of this future, and while ticketing may not seem all that world changing, it does offer a unique proving ground for the idea of the DAO. First, ticketing is an actual real world utility that people can validate with their own senses. But perhaps more importantly, ticketing is an industry that caters to emergent systems and collective thought. All ticketed events are just exercises in collective ideation as people of all backgrounds, philosophies, spiritualities, and income brackets come together to enjoy a moment of shared interest. We all know that feeling: You’re at a concert, you may know no-one, but you also don’t care to. There’s a “vibe” in the air that you just can’t quite touch on, but you know it’s there. That sense of collective, that you’ve found your people in a way. That everyone around you is your friend, there to share at least one thing you all have in common. You can act a little silly, let loose a little bit. It’s ok, because these people are all family.
What happens when that same feeling is applied to the way we work? What happens when that feeling is extended beyond the concert and you have a home online to show up in? What happens when that feeling becomes real and you realize you can take hold of the future of your favorite events? What happens when ownership becomes a natural extension of that feeling that unlocks future utilities for you across other events and company projects? When we look at event ticketing not just as a backend number printing mechanism, but as a way to elegantly bring people together we just can’t help but realize it: That’s a DAO. And when you look at DAOs as a means of bringing together hyper atomized components in the form of individually unique human beings you realize that the future is going to be wild because that’s emergence.
The world is about to be connected like never before and we’re helping build those connections through human interaction. GET-Protocol is launching a DAO. Join our discord today and learn the power of emergent systems.
