Thread by @RadiantChiron

#Tokens & #Belongingness
For the past month, I have been diving into #DAOs and crypto tokens and I wanted to share some thoughts and elicit responses from other #crypto-enthusiasts.

If you haven't heard of #DAO before, think of it as an online community run on top of Web3/Blockchain infrastructure. Typically a DAO has intentional governance protocols and a crypto token to facilitate inter- and intra- community economy.

My biggest takeaway was to think of a crypto token as a fluid representation for "#belongingness" to a #community.

It's apt here to take a moment to define "community". Borrowing from @DavidSpinks, "a #community is a group of people who are willing to make your problems, their problems".

It's a very broad definition. Every organization, nation-state, group of humans has the potential to be a "community"

The "community" has great importance in #Buddhism. One takes refuge in the Buddha (the enlightened being), the Dhamma (wisdom), and the #Sangha (community).

The #LamRimChenMo by Tibetan Buddhist trailblazer #JeTsongkhapa talks about how the negative karma accumulated from speech used to divide community is harder to amend than speech used to denigrate a Bodhisattva.

Thus far we have lived in a world where the representation of our "belongingness" to organizations, communities, states has a discrete value.

Usually, you belong or you don't belong.
You are a citizen of the US or not.
You are an employee of a corporation or not.

An intermediate state in this "discrete belonging structure" – eg. volunteering at a food bank, contracting at a company, immigrant visa in the US – often comes at a hefty exploitative price and is typically controlled by a centralized authority.

Those of us stuck in #GreenCard queues are intimately familiar with this and I'm sure most of you must have experienced the exploitation in some domain of your life.

The crypto "#token" brings fluid #belongingness to communities.

You gain full control over the "value" of your "#belongingness".

Imagine a poor farmer in West Virginia being able to leverage the financial value of their US citizenship and bartering parts of that with an aspiring immigrant to mutual benefit (caution: lots of unexplored nuance here)

The rigidity of #belongingness of the society we presently live in allows oppressive power structures (nation-states, corporations) to demand from the members in order to further their own exploitative interests viz. war (militaristic, profit).

"If you are a patriot, then you should <insert favorite sloganeering>".

The impact of such if-then statements diminishes in a society that lives by a fluid #belongingness paradigm.

I'll go so far as to argue that fluid #belongingness is the nature of the human being in modern day society and the #blockchain / #Web3 stack presents an avenue to represent that clearly in the technology that powers our life.

@threadreaderapp unroll por favor