Hey folks. It's Gilad Edelman here, filling in for Steven this week. Go Giants!
The Plain View
Last month, I headed to Colorado to attend ETHDenver, a conference devoted to all things Web3: the movement to create a new, decentralized version of the web based on blockchain technology. While I was there, mingling with some 10,000 crypto enthusiasts (yes, I got Covid), I decided to dip into Web3 myself. So I created a DAO.
DAO, pronounced “dow,” stands for “decentralized autonomous organization,” and it’s one of the buzziest of Web3’s many buzzwords. The idea is that a group of people can band together in a form of cooperative enterprise. To join one, you have to buy, or be given, a custom crypto token. That token grants you membership in the DAO and the ability to vote on what the organization does.
What can a DAO do? Mostly, spend cryptocurrency. DAOs have been described as “an internet community with a shared bank account.” In theory, control is broadly distributed, with no individual or group in charge. Members can submit proposals for how to use the DAO resources in the form of “smart contracts” that automatically execute when enough members approve. It’s basically crowdfunding on the blockchain.
In practice, DAOs have not always worked so smoothly. The original DAO—named, simply, The DAO—had a vulnerability in its code that allowed someone to siphon off some $50 million from its treasury. More recently, a group called Constitution DAO raised more than $40 million in Ethereum to buy an original copy of the US Constitution at auction. After the DAO was outbid by a billionaire, members discovered a new problem: The “gas fee” that accompanies any transaction on the Ethereum network was so high that most donors would lose a big chunk of their money when collecting their refund.
Stories like that made me curious to learn more about the nitty-gritty of DAOs, so I asked my friend Jacksón Smith to help me. Jacksón was attending ETHDenver with his coworkers at the Learning Economy Foundation, a nonprofit that focuses on improving education infrastructure, including through the use of blockchains. They were archetypal Web3 engineers: bright, curious white guys in their 20s. They gamely agreed to help me hack together a DAO.
Most PopularBusinessThe End of Airbnb in New York
Amanda Hoover
BusinessThis Is the True Scale of New York’s Airbnb Apocalypse
Amanda Hoover
CultureStarfield Will Be the Meme Game for Decades to Come
Will Bedingfield
GearThe 15 Best Electric Bikes for Every Kind of Ride
Adrienne So
I gathered with the guys—and immediately started referring to them as “my core devs,” which seemed to impress other people at ETHDenver—on the second floor of a bar near the main conference space to knock around ideas. First, we had to decide what the DAO would do. Jacksón suggested it be devoted to humor, in which the funniest people get the most governing power. That led to an obvious name: lmaoDAO. Next we needed to figure out how the jokesters would prove themselves. I pulled a New Yorker out of my backpack. What if the goal of the DAO were to win the magazine’s weekly caption contest? Members could submit entries and vote on the funniest ones. Then we’d submit the winner each week on behalf of the DAO. The winner of our internal contest would be rewarded with some of our custom LMAO token so that, over time, people who win the contest repeatedly would get more voting power.
Now that we had an idea, we had to build it. This presented all sorts of questions. For starters, how would we get people to join? Nathan, one of the devs, came up with a clever idea. Everyone who registered at the conference was given meal tickets in the form of a custom crypto token. We could scrape the blockchain for every wallet that held those meal tokens, then send those wallets some LMAO, which would grant them access.
Access to what? By far the most popular tool for organizing a DAO is the discussion platform Discord. We set up a Discord with a bot that helped members connect their crypto wallets to verify that they held LMAO. Then they could access the caption contest and other channels. As the professional writer in the group with zero technical skills, I was in charge of drafting the copy inside the Discord, including instructions for how to join and the rules for the contest.
The guys kept working hard on the DAO as I drifted off to other parts of the conference. They even skipped the marquee Friday night event, a talk by Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin. By Saturday afternoon, we were ready to launch. We sent 100 LMAO to everyone with a meal token, and the conference organizers kindly promoted lmaoDAO on their Twitter account.
A month later, lmaoDAO is chugging along. As I write this, there are 70 members, though most aren’t very active. We get somewhere between five and a dozen caption submissions per cartoon. We have yet to win the official contest (or even come close, frankly). But every week, either Jacksón or I announce the launch of a new contest. Members submit their captions in Discord and then vote on them on a Web3 platform called Snapshot. Finally, after a winner is declared on Sunday night, I manually submit it to the New Yorker website.
Most PopularBusinessThe End of Airbnb in New York
Amanda Hoover
BusinessThis Is the True Scale of New York’s Airbnb Apocalypse
Amanda Hoover
CultureStarfield Will Be the Meme Game for Decades to Come
Will Bedingfield
GearThe 15 Best Electric Bikes for Every Kind of Ride
Adrienne So
How decentralized is this? How necessary is crypto to organizing a caption contest? The answer to both questions is: not at all. We have vague plans to build out more decentralized governance, but so far, my friends and I control everything. Blockchain is supposed to be “trustless” technology that removes the need for intermediaries, but the DAO members have to trust us to do what we say we’ll do because we’re the only ones with admin privileges in the Discord, access to the New Yorker account, and control over the LMAO treasury. Our DAO is nothing more than a club that conditions membership on the possession of a certain crypto token.
This is evidently quite common. Any DAO that tries to do something besides spend cryptocurrency must interact with meatspace, explains Spencer Graham, who works full-time building tools for people to create DAOs (and who, I’m pleased to note, is a member of lmaoDAO). That requires human beings to do stuff—which means everything can’t be decentralized on a blockchain, governed by code. “Six to nine months ago, there was an explosion of Web3 communities” that all had a custom token, a Discord, and a bunch of people voting on polls, Graham says. The creators’ pitch was that “We, the founders, are going to take what the polls say and enact that—or rather, people are going to trust us to do so.” That pretty much describes lmaoDAO to a T.
Graham points out that for a DAO like ours, where there is no money involved—we invented LMAO out of thin air and give it away for free—this kind of trust is low-risk. For DAOs that actually spend crypto, it’s much more important to set up real transparency and democratic governance.
So if we aren’t spending money, and I’m actively managing it, what’s the point of having a DAO? The best answer I can give is that it’s fun. Creating a DAO, or any Web3 application, is not unlike designing a game. You have to decide what the rules are, what incentives to create, and how to make sure people want to keep playing. The mix of game theory and novel tech helps explain why people like my friends at Learning Economy are willing to devote time to creating and running these things.
You, Plaintext reader, are welcome to join. All you need is a crypto wallet. The first hundred people to click here and submit their wallet addresses will receive 100 LMAO and access to the contest. Still think Web3 is a joke? Prove it.
Time Travel
They say time heals all wounds; can it even heal a broken Congress? On Tuesday, the Senate voted unanimously to make Daylight Savings Time permanent beginning in 2023. At first glance, it was a remarkable display of bipartisanship and whatever the opposite of gridlock is. On closer inspection, as Buzzfeed News reported, it appears that some ambitious Senate staffers basically snuck the bill through when no one was looking.
Good for them. Permanent daylight savings would mean we’d get to enjoy later sunsets all year round, at the modest expense of some Americans waking up more often in the dark. Supporters of the Senate bill, which has yet to be voted on in the House, argue that extending the hours of evening sunshine will cut down on traffic accidents, crime, and energy use.
Most PopularBusinessThe End of Airbnb in New York
Amanda Hoover
BusinessThis Is the True Scale of New York’s Airbnb Apocalypse
Amanda Hoover
CultureStarfield Will Be the Meme Game for Decades to Come
Will Bedingfield
GearThe 15 Best Electric Bikes for Every Kind of Ride
Adrienne So
The first person to make the connection between energy consumption and daylight hours is widely believed to be Benjamin Franklin. In 1794, a few years before Steven Levy began his journalism career, the polymath and founding father wrote a satirical letter to the Journal of Paris relaying his “discovery” that the sun illuminated his bedroom when a noise woke him up at 6 am, long before he meant to rise. Unlike candles, Franklin noted, sunlight was free. From there, he wrote, “my love of economy induced me to muster up what little arithmetic I was master of.” Franklin did some back-of-the-envelope math to estimate how much money could be saved if Parisians toned down their night-owl lifestyle:
I took for the basis of my calculation the supposition that there are one hundred thousand families in Paris, and that these families consume in the night half a pound of bougies, or candles, per hour.
Franklin estimated that the average Parisian woke up seven hours after sunrise, leaving “seven hours of course per night in which we burn candles.” (Apparently, waking up at noon was normal in Paris at the time.) Then he ran the numbers.
In the six months between the 20th of March and the 20th of September, there are
Nights: 183
Hours of each night in which we burn candles: 7
Multiplication gives for the total number of hours: 1,281
These 1,281 hours multiplied by 100,000, the number of inhabitants, give: 128,100,000
One hundred twenty-eight millions and one hundred thousand hours, spent at Paris by candle-light, which, at half a pound of wax and tallow per hour, gives the weight of: 64,050,000
Those 64,050,000 pounds of candles were costing Parisians, he wrote, about 96,075,000 livres tournois, the currency at the time.
An immense sum! that the city of Paris might save every year, by the economy of using sunshine instead of candles.
Imagine if Franklin had lived to see solar panels.
Ask Me One Thing
Steven asks, “Will Ukraine slow down antitrust/anti-tech fervor in DC?”
Big Tech certainly hopes so. The Washington Post’s Cristiano Lima reported on Wednesday that the industry’s lobbyists have latched on to a new argument against antitrust legislation. Two pending Senate bills would prevent dominant platforms from self-preferencing and force Apple and Google to put rival app stores on a playing field level with their own. The lobbyists argue that those measures would prevent platforms from banning the purveyors of Russian propaganda. But Lima notes a key weakness in that theory: “Both of the antitrust bills explicitly exclude organizations owned or controlled by foreign governments from using their protections as legal tools, as well as any groups that pose a national security risk.”
Most PopularBusinessThe End of Airbnb in New York
Amanda Hoover
BusinessThis Is the True Scale of New York’s Airbnb Apocalypse
Amanda Hoover
CultureStarfield Will Be the Meme Game for Decades to Come
Will Bedingfield
GearThe 15 Best Electric Bikes for Every Kind of Ride
Adrienne So
More generally, the tech companies might be praying that a version of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” takes hold in Washington. After all, Russia has banned Facebook and Instagram, along with Twitter. Doesn’t that make those companies the good guys?
Not in the eyes of US antitrust enforcers, I suspect. Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter, the leaders of the Federal Trade Commission and the antitrust division of the Department of Justice, respectively, have spent years waiting for the opportunity to beef up antitrust enforcement against Big Tech (and other industries). They know the big social media platforms are important vectors for free speech—which is one reason they want to keep the market competitive. And the Biden administration sees antitrust, broadly speaking, as one of very few tools available to crack down on inflation.
That said, Big Tech’s best hope right now might be for the war to keep occupying the attention of Congress and the White House, helping the industry run out the clock until November. The GOP is expected to sweep the midterm elections, leading to divided government and making any kind of substantive legislation even less likely than it already is.
But then again: the daylight savings thing!
You can submit questions to mail@wired.com. Write ASK LEVY in the subject line.
End Times Chronicle
Covid cases are on the rise again around the world. Go get your booster shot.
Last but Not Least
Using facial recognition to identify Russian soldiers. What could go wrong?
A new online course aims to teach tech workers how to not be evil. Better late than never.
Most PopularBusinessThe End of Airbnb in New York
Amanda Hoover
BusinessThis Is the True Scale of New York’s Airbnb Apocalypse
Amanda Hoover
CultureStarfield Will Be the Meme Game for Decades to Come
Will Bedingfield
GearThe 15 Best Electric Bikes for Every Kind of Ride
Adrienne So
Why heat pumps are so hot right now.
Russia’s invasion could spell disaster for Ukraine’s clinical drug trials—and for the patients who see them as a lifeline.
Don't miss future subscriber-only editions of this column. Subscribe to WIRED (50% off for Plaintext readers) today.
More Great WIRED Stories📩 The latest on tech, science, and more: Get our newsletters!How Telegram became the anti-FacebookWind turbines could mess with ships' radar signalsThe governor of Colorado is high on blockchainThe age of everything culture is hereAn internet troll targets nonalcoholic spirits startups👁️ Explore AI like never before with our new database📱 Torn between the latest phones? Never fear—check out our iPhone buying guide and favorite Android phones