Are DAO's About to Be Centralized?

On Brantly Millegan, codes of conduct, and what might be about to happen to web3 and crypto.

In what I’m calling The Cancellening, a few major figures in the web3 ecosystem have recently been fired for some fairly ancient tweets. Nothing new in the culture war, but events that are going to have profound implications for the future of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO’s).

The Tweets

Brantly Millegan is the former Director of Operations for ENS, or the Ethereum Name Service. ENS is the organization behind all the .eth names you now see on Twitter and elsewhere. He tweeted something uncomplimentary, to say the least, of both gay/lesbian and transgender people back in 2016.

His response was less than apologetic and certainly not capitulatory.

The ‘first word’ Brantly refers to here is Catholic, and one of the narratives he’s espoused regarding the incident is that his statement is just repetition of Catholic dogma and his alleged persecution is on the basis of religion. His response is decidedly different than other individuals in the space who have had problematic tweets surface, such as Cooper Turley of the Friends With Benefits (FWB) social DAO.

This immediately set crypto twitter into a furor, Twitter spaces were convened, threads were posted, and governance votes were planned for. Coinbase’s recent announcement about removing politics from the workplace was feared to mean they would not vote to remove Brantly, so many put themselves up as new delegates and asked for people to reallocate their vote. The governance model of web3 was clearly about to undergo a very unique test.

That test took a very different form which more closely resembled the response of a web2 entity. True Names Limited, the non-profit corporate entity that backs ENS decided to terminate Brantly’s contract. This was a decidely non-web3 approach, as it was thought by some that his status would go to a vote within the DAO. Many cheered this (perhaps to some degree I did as well), but it has far ranging implications for the future of DAO’s. If an organization backing the DAO can take that kind of relatively unilateral action, is the promise of decentralized governance nothing but marketing?

Is Web3 Doomed To Repeat Web2’s Past?

Having listened to a lot of the discourse, much of what’s happening seems very familiar. Going all the way back to ‘The Battle of Yarvin’, in which Curtis Yarvin was banned from Lambdaconf for past comments made outside of the conference. It’s long been established as a norm that what you say on your personal time often has professional implications.

Some, including Brantly, are splitting the hair of target audience as far as claiming that the tweet refers to behaviour and gay/lesbian and trans individuals specifically. That’s an extremely fine bit of semantic gymnastics that I doubt True Names Limited would ever have been amenable to engaging in, and I don’t think they were really left with much choice but to terminate his contract.

On the basis of what’s actually in the Bible though, I think there’s some validity to that argument, if you take that piece of writing apart from other elements of Catholic governance such as the Vatican. I don’t think it’s written anywhere that I’m imaginary though, although I am by no means a Christian scholar. In any case, as with many other things in current year, it all comes down to optics.

I don’t think it would have ever been possible for them to ‘separate art from artist’, as it were. I think a reasonable person, the ever-present legal test, would have inferred that if they were part of the LGBTQ+ spectrum (or even a woman who was known to have had an abortion), they would be judged negatively compared to their peers. It’s not really this specific incident that concerns me, but some long-term implications for web3 and DAO’s based on what has been said and done in response.

It’s possible, and perhaps likely, that the same individuals who have built businesses and brands over things like codes of conduct in open source projects will now attempt to make them mandatory in DAO’s. I’ve heard discourse in the wake of Brantly’s tweet about how ENS ‘wasn’t properly structured to handle the concerns of marginalized groups’, so that may also be something that is insisted upon as mandatory. This is not all that different from people lobbying to make specific codes of conduct a mandatory element of open-source projects.

Who Decides Who Web3 Is For?

Discussions are also being had about who web3 is for. In a space hosted by ENS on the Brantly situation, someone from the ‘Web3 Baddies’ organization made some fairly pointed comments about who web3 is for, and also drew a division between ‘crypto’ and web3 (this does seem a bit nonsensical to me). Full disclosure in that I am not the biggest fan of W3B. Rejecting some women for not being diverse enough whilst thirsting after Reese Witherspoon is not what I envision inclusion to be in web3.

As fate would have it, in the course of starting this piece to publishing it, I came across a Twitter space in which plans for a code of conduct like apparatus were being hashed out. The name given was ‘Community Tenants’ (I believe this is meant to be tenets), and more discourse on gatekeeping who web3 was for and the alleged crypto/web3 divide were made. They reminded me a lot of the push by Coraline Ada Ehmke for open source projects to adopt the contributor covenant which were ultimately successful.

There are some things about what was said in this space that disturb me if they are representative of the wider web3 community at this point. Most immediately that it’s being proposed people not be allowed to refer to their as ‘web3’, or even the concept of there being ‘rules’. Many think centralization is going to be the end result of web3, but they refer to Big Tech eventually controlling the ecosystem. That is perhaps likely, but centralizing culture and language is more of first-order centralization that doesn’t belong in an ecosystem so heavily predicated on decentralization.

I had a feeling this would happen eventually in a bid for control, much like what happened on Clubhouse. This centralized approach should really concern those committed to the decentralized nature of web3, especially if you are public with heretical opinions which run the risk of someday being outside of the overton window.

Second is the type of language being used. The proposal was crafted in the broadest terms, centering on ‘identities’ without mentioning specific harms such as homophobia or transphobia. Ironically the reason for this is the same that I argued in my piece on being a TERF, in that it’s really impossible to specifically define these in the current state of the culture war. The problem with this is that the practical application of governance is going to turn into something very messy when definitions are this broad (it’s very easy to use rules lawyering to push out other people from projects and organizations).

There was also talk of quotas, which I don’t have all that much of a problem with other than who exactly is going to decide it and on what basis. There is then, of course, the ‘I don’t feel safe’ veto. Selfishly, this concerns me because it’s certainly feasible that someone would make an argument that my TERF piece makes them feel ‘unsafe’. There’s also been some comments made (elsewhere on Twitter) that ‘legacy identities’ don’t belong in web3, which is another case of a very fuzzy definition.

Who Will Follow The Rules?

It’s entirely possible that DAO’s of suffcient social or actual capital will be pressured to sign whatever these principles are, lest they be labelled as problematic (this is more or less what happened in open source). With recent bad behaviour, codes of conduct are probably necessary at this point. It’s not so much that I’m against having them at all but how they are often used as a grab for power and the reasons above really lead me to believe that’s what’s going to happen with these community tenets. It’s also kind of silly to gatekeep a term like web3 given how broadly it’s applied.

How successful will this push be? It’s really hard for me to say, given the nature of web3. Some of the Twitter spaces I’ve observed have given me cause for concern, and some offer fulsome discussion of the social issues. I do think even with some of the centralization precedents that have been set, it’s going to be harder to institutionalize codes of conduct than it was on GitHub.

When ConstitutionDAO came under fire for using $PEOPLE as its token on the basis of historical allusions to slavery, I thought that was going to be the great culture war test of DAO’s. I was fairly wrong (I did not expect so many central figures would have ancient tweets unearthed). It’s rather inevitable that now a concerted effort will be made to institute some of the norms described above that are likely to run against some of the ethos of crypto culture and DAOs.

There is also the issue of religious freedom to consider. His employment status as a contractor muddies the water a bit, but if he was a regular employee, could a valid argument be made for him being discriminated against for views supported by the dogma of his particular religion? My Twitter colleague Sonya has a fairly interesting thread on the topic.

There is also the case of Ashnichrist, former Senior Community Manager for SuperRare. Her case is a little bit different in her response was definitely apologetic, but similar in that old problematic tweets of hers were also unearthed, and she was shortly terminated by her employer. A fairly painful (in a cringe way) Twitter space was held during which she was questioned by the community, and some other controversy regarding some of her past business practices were also uncovered.

I mention her case mainly because a lot of the same discourse that was heard over Black creators on Clubhouse was also heard about Black artists in the NFT space. A norm is slowly emerging that if a platform is going to leverage art from a particular community, that members of that community should be the ones leading projects. From my knowledge that isn’t all Ashnichrist was doing, but part of her duties that were brought up during the space.

Tl;Dr For The Web2 Averse

For those who are not quite at the web3 curious point yet: Imagine if your workplace had a union, and something happened that some in the union thought should go to a vote. Next imagine that instead of that vote happening, a unilateral decision was made without that vote happening. That’s a vastly simplified, but brief version of the core issue with what’s happened and why it concerns me.

A very tangible weak point in web3’s ethos of decentralization has risen to prominence with Brantly’s firing. It’s ironic that the specific DAO affected is ENS, as DNS is one of the weak points in web2 that is often targeted when platforms don’t eject odious participants.

Beyond the tangible, web3’s social weak point of being young without a lot of currently institutionalized norms might be seized upon and DAO’s may be pressured to institutionalize a specific set of structures and rules, at which point I think many will question the point of a DAO if the governance is not truly decentralized and/or autonomous.