Though obscured by the fog of war, the time has never been more right to double down on regenerative crypto-economics and decentralization – both in finance and corporate governance.
While the observation could have been made at upteen points along the path, the drumbeat of war now marks a crescendo in the trend toward societal collapse. Vladimir Putin is manifesting his catalog of intimations toward empirical dominance*. This, as far a human history can substantiate, is the high water mark in aspirational hubris. Assemble every conqueror throughout history and you will have a list of flameouts who, once they exhausted the limits of their dominance were squashed by the return swing of the pendulum. Instead of managing the ferment of aspiration, they serve to foment – by way of example – the mania that gives us would-be autocrats. No matter what their claim to greatness, the most prominent legacy is tragedy. The time is right to turn the beat around.
The most righteous amongst our developer class have always contended that crypto-economics, decentralization and trustless systems held the solution to all society’s ills. As highfalutin as that may sound (and may in fact be), there is a deep well of logic to support the claim. Note that I said “the most righteous” among them. While they breathe some rarified air atop Mt. Impeccable, the masses of us camped out on the rocky slopes and dark valley below have to contend with the foibles of human impulse. Not every opportunity is of common merit; not every shiny object holds the secret to a shared utopia. But we know that, and a truly decentralized autonomous organization can have built into its governance certain failsafes to ensure, if not perfection, the assurance that evil cannot manifest. To quote Dag Hammarskjold, the UN’s second Secretary-General, “The UN wasn’t created to take mankind into paradise, but rather, to save humanity from hell.” The same could be said of any DAO worth its existence. Each should be built with Hammarskjold’s admonition ringing the developers’ ears: “To build for a man [sic] a world without fear, we must be without fear. To build a world of justice, we must be just.”
Let us each align our moral compasses, calibrate continually, and get to work.
*It is a sad irony that the name “Vladimir” translates to “he who rules the world”. Surely his mother’s powers of precognition were not so well established. Equally curious is that President Zelenskyy of Ukraine is also named Volodydmyr. May the best man win?