Surely, you have heard the recent story about the group of people who banded together to raise over $47,000,000 to bid on an original edition of the U.S. Constitution. Well, they nearly won it. Constitution DAO formed with a single goal: to crowdfund enough money to purchase the holy, historic document from auction at Sotheby’s. And while a literal “we the people” ironically lost out in a bidding war with a single billionaire – who at least will loan the document to a museum – the act demonstrates populist power ramifications that can extend to collections stewardship.

DAOs or Decentralized Autonomous Organizations made the experiment possible. Unlike other crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe or Kickstarter, however, DAOs do not exist solely to raise money in small quantities from many different sources for a single cause. Instead, DAOs exist to create a flat governing structure for a group in order to achieve whatever goal their group designates in their organizational structure (i.e. anything). Instead of consolidating power in a hierarchy that administers the plan according to the organization’s rules, smart contracts execute the intentions of the group via if/then statements determined by votes cast by DAO members. While Part 1 and Part 2 of the “Hope, Distributed” series discuss how blockchain affects our relationships to objects and their documentation, DAOs relate to the people and the governing structures behind those objects. I will not pretend to have expert knowledge of DAOs and predict the future, but my initial research into them brings me hope for what they could offer. I will speculate on some initial ideas.

In some ways, the Constitution DAO massively succeeded: it raised more than double the amount of money it aspired to raise and went head-to-head at auction with what is essentially infinite money. This will inspire others to follow suit. Unlike how Masterworks claims to democratize investment in art (and destroy the intention of the artist by removing the possibility of actually viewing it), DAOs can actually democratize investment through blockchain-based transparency that do not have to take high transaction fees or percentages of sales.

More radically even, DAOs could democratize institutional acquisitions and governance. Now, not only wealthy donors can contribute to the museum and acquisitions beyond simply purchasing a membership. Imagine the lobby or the new wing of a museum named after your DAO?

I want to stress again that DAOs do not exist to crowdfund, they exist to govern without hierarchy. For example, can a new acquisitions donor group comprised of members from around the world form around certain principles and automatically execute approvals based on their predefined criteria? Thus, the group will not comprise simply of a select group of cultivated donors pooling their money but perhaps thousands of patrons. The acquisitions committee selects options to acquire and the DAO approves the acquisition based on its governing criteria.

In a similar fashion, can the museum board of trustees have a seat dedicated to a DAO that represents the public? Again, the DAO establishes its principles and governance and automatically casts its votes on museum issues based on these criteria. For example, the board will vote on whether to raise funds for a new addition to the exhibition galleries. The DAO will automatically cast a vote according to the criteria it has established as its governing principles. The if/then statements that it addresses might include some of the following: if the proposed budget exceeds x% of the total operation budget, vote no. If the budget does not include x amount of staff to supervise and operate the wing, then no. If it does not permit the sale of x additional tickets, then no, etc. In other words a complex algorithm ostensibly espousing the values agreed upon by the DAO members.

Taking the idea a step further, what if the board devoted several seats to DAOS: one for the public, one for collections care concerns, one for curatorial concerns, one for developmental concerns, one for operational concerns, and one for educational concerns. Members of each department become part of the DAO and essentially get a vote on the direction and management of the institution. Given the recent controversies surrounding many members of museums’ board of trustees and the apparent chasm between the values of the board and those of the employees, this model of empowering staff by giving them a genuine stake in how an institution moves forward.

The implications, of course, multiply rapidly and take aim at the innate structures of all democracies. In this context, though, this also implies that each DAO would also have a say in the election criteria of the non-DAO voting trustees and significantly flattens the institutional hierarchy. This will eventually threaten the traditional hierarchy altogether. Will they replace unions? Will they make loan and acquisition decisions automatically? Will collecting institutions eventually run autonomously?

I do not find it purely ironic that the mainstreaming of the DAO in the art and artifact field came through the sale of the U.S. Constitution. I also find it incredibly serendipitous. That a founding governing document for a new nation brought to light the potential of new governing body embodies all the promise of democracy that the United States once had makes perfect sense to me. What is ironic, however, is that it was sold to an elite individual and not to the people.