Blockchain and authoritarianism: The evolution of decentralized autonomous organizations

Abstract

Though Blockchain technologies make traditional authoritarianism less likely, they make a new kind of authoritarianism, born of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), more likely. Created to liberate computational systems from any and all human interference, DAOs have quietly been growing, thriving, and evolving in their natural environment - decentralized networks like the Internet or Ethereum. By design and accident, DAOs will tend to develop into the computational equivalents of eusocial colony animals such as ants, bees, and termites. Once formed into such superorganisms, DAOs will exhibit emergent behaviors like swarming and collective intelligence. Humans venturing into the DAOs’ native habitat would then find themselves forced to live under the arbitrary will of not another human, but instead of a vast, mysterious hoard of nonhuman, and perhaps inhuman, entities. This is not an outcome that traditional sources of public law - treaties, statutes, regulations, and court rulings - have the tools to prevent. The distributed nature of DAOs makes them inherently resistant to centrally planned attacks. To prevent DAO's from running wild will instead require correspondingly distributed defenses, taken by many various parties alone and coordination, that together render the Blockchain environment less susceptible to infection by programs that threaten to evolve into digital autonomous authoritarians.