Ethereum Merge & the DAO Era
Ethereum moved to proof-of-stake. A new class of political-economic entity — the DAO — crossed $10B in treasury across dozens of organizations. Governance happens on-chain: proposals, votes, execution, all without a sovereign.
Most DAOs remain small experiments. But the precedent matters: for the first time since the medieval guilds, there are organizations governing real resources whose authority does not derive from any state. The next century of political theory will largely be about what to do with that.
06 · Code & Crowd
Legitimacy is now contested on two fronts at once. Above: populist movements and algorithmic media reshape what 'the people' means. Below: decentralized organizations run on code, voting on-chain, executing automatically, with no sovereign above them. The 20th-century assumption that states are the highest political unit is quietly breaking.
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