Experiments in algorithmic governance : A history and ethnography of “The DAO,” a failed decentralized autonomous organization
By Quinn DuPont. 2017
270 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This chapter describes an emerging form of algorithmic governance, using the case study of “The DAO,” a short-lived attempt to create a decentralized autonomous organization on the Ethereum blockchain platform. In June, 2016, The DAO launched and raised an unprecedented $250m USD in investment. Within days of its launch, however, The DAO was exploited and drained of nearly 3.7m Ethereum tokens. This study traces the rise and fall of this emerging technology, and details the governance structures that were promised and hoped for, and those that were actually observed in its discourses. Through 2016-2017, these discourses were collected from online discussions and subsequently analysed. Using computer-assisted, qualitative analysis and coding, I traced the discursive strategies of the developers and the community of investors, identifying: 1) questions of legal authority, 2) tensions in practical governance, and 3) admissions of the inherent complexity of bringing to life an algorithmic and experimental organizational model. This chapter describes a short-lived experiment in organizational governance that attempted to utilize algorithmic authority through cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies to create a social and political world quite unlike anything we have seen before. According to the visionaries behind the project, by encoding the rules of governance for organizations and governments in a set of “smart contracts” running on an immutable, decentralized, and potentially unstoppable and public blockchain, new forms of social interactions and order would emerge. This experiment was an example of a new form of organization, called a “Decentralized Autonomous Organization
Subfields: Information Systems, Management Information Systems, Safety Research, Social Sciences & Humanities
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Citations in the corpus
- Artificial Intelligence, Values, and Alignment (2020, background): “On another view, powerful AI might function more like a corporation or decentralised autonomous organization (DuPont, 2017).”
- A Vademecum on Blockchain Technologies: When, Which, and How (2019, background): “, the Ethereum DAO fork [207]) or where the adversary thresholds are exceeded (see Appendix C-D).”