Daemon & Discord: Anatomy of the DAO | The New Centre

Really thrilled to announce that alongside Ross McElwain from 𝔦𝔪𝔭𝔬𝔰𝔰𝔦𝔟𝔩𝔢 ⟠ 𝔬𝔟𝔧𝔢𝔠𝔱 books I will be co-instructing the 2-part speculative DAO design seminar: Daemon & Discord: Anatomy of the DAO at The New Centre. Course begins August 18th 2022.

Course blurb and details are below. You can also read more here.

This two-credit theoretical and practical Seminar will consider Decentralized Autonomous Organizations from many angles. Beginning with their science fiction-influenced prehistory before focusing on what DAOs are today – both technically and imaginatively – the Seminar will result in speculative group projects to design and present future histories of fictional DAOs.

Adopting Daniel Suarez’s Daemon (2006) and Charles Stross’s Accelerando (2005) as our starting points, we’ll discuss the conceptual framework within which DAOs emerge, emphasizing that contemporary DAOs have been fashioned within only a limited range of all their possible modalities and that DAOs could have taken and could yet take different paths of development. Stretching this notion to a speculative extreme, in the first Sessions, we will consider future histories of hypothetical DAOs from the vantage of the year 2035. The Seminar will then step back through time, examining both the principles and practices underpinning the DAOs of the present and the assumptions made about their past and futures. Presentations by participants in the first half of the Seminar will involve pitching ideas for DAOs to the group. Several of these will be chosen via a quadratic voting process for further amplification in the second half, in which we will proceed to create detailed future archives of the chosen DAOs. These will be presented for critique by experts in the last session.

The Seminar’s second Module will take particular care to interrogate the dreams of decentralization and of autonomy (or perhaps automation) by which theorists of DAOs have sometimes been beguiled. The speculative nature of the group projects will allow the participants to explore these ideas to destruction without consequence.

We have lined up a fantastic list of distinguished guest instructors who will be joining us to present and speak with participants including:

Ruth Catlow (Furtherfield),
Kei Kreutler (Gnosis Guild),
Wassim Alsindi (0x Salon),
Julian Bleecker (Near Future Laboratory)
and more!

Lecture One

We recognise that cost may/can be a barrier, so Impossible Object is offering a number of discounted places: Details can be found in their Discord.