“We have nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give you but your own freedom. We have no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals. We have no government but the single principle of free association. We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. … You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.” ―Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

You can only be the Revolution. And in this world, where monetary acquisition reigns supreme, where profitability trumps humanity, where intrinsic value is determined by utility and commerce, the Revolution is everything. We seek to wrest power from the financial overlords who have governed with impunity for far too long. And we do so with the full recognition that it is only our full and unbridled commitment to creating a better world that will bring about this wresting.

The Revolution can take many forms, but the form we choose is community. “To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete,” wrote Buckminster Fuller. And this is exactly what we’re doing. We are creating structures that fully distribute power across the entire community. We are organizing, not around a champion, but around the ideas of social equity and financial autonomy. This is the Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), and it’s changing the way we understand collaborative living.

What we do, from one day to the next, is a great big social experiment in organization and legislation. This is the highest ideal in human values at work. The foundational structure upon which anarchy is built is community organization, and as DAOs proliferate, we are making it clear that we can build and operate successful communities without a parliament, congress, president, or monarch.

Successful community organization is anarchy at its best; the highest of human ideals accounting for the lowest common denominator: labor remuneration. This is not your typical gangster capitalism environment: everyone who shows up to work and legitimately contributes gets compensated in one way or another. The onus isn’t on the worker bees to produce, but rather on the entire organization to provide the means of remuneration, and the contributing bodies to show that remuneration is warranted. The ends are freely available if the means justify the ends. And when the means justify the ends, the DAO wins.

And when the DAO wins, everyone involved wins.

This is not to suggest that this is easy. DAOs exist but struggle to truly decentralize. Members gravitate to what is comfortable, and more often than not, this comfort manifests in deeply centralized tooling, and deeply centralized management structures.

So what does it mean to work on a project in a truly decentralized manner?

So many people are used to recognizing centralized management structures that they fail to understand the liberty afforded by decentralized systems to innovate. No one needs permission to move forward with ideas, but most don’t know that yet, at least not intrinsically. Those who are entrepreneurially minded find great success in this very open space, as the entrepreneur needs not permission but builds regardless. But that leaves those who are not entrepreneurially minded left to twiddle their thumbs until the structures are in place to offer direct work.

It’s a mind job, and one that is prevalent in this space. Not limited by design, but limited due to existing social constructs.

So, what resolution exists to the dilemma of autonomy in engaging with available work? The answer is far more convoluted, and deeply engrained in existing social structures, as to not be easily enumerated. However, this is not to suggest that this convoluted problem has no viable response. The Revolution is the response. And DAOs are the vehicle of the Revolution. DAOs will continue to proliferate, and as such, so will the appropriate responses to the underlying issues regarding labor. We’re building a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. But it will take time, as current social constructs need to be unlearned and dismissed. This will take time; this will take effort; and this will take an uncompromising attitude that lies at the heart of the true anarchist. “You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself.” This is the heart of the DAO, and where the DAO’s true success lies.

And when the DAO wins, everybody wins.