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Caretaker's Notes: Winter 22
January 3rd, 2023
In 2022, Cabin evolved from an experimental residency program into an organization actively building a network city.
November 1st, 2022
Modern politics, and its underlying post-Enlightenment political theory, is stuck in a rut. Since the French Revolution of 1789, when the nobles sat on the right side of parliament and the commoner delegates sat on the left side, we’ve used these terms to describe the political spectrum.
November 1st, 2022
I’ve been living on the road a lot this summer—jumping around between Texas, Minnesota, California, Colorado, and the East Coast. Dropping into different little pockets of the greater Cabin universe has given me a stronger sense of what it will be like for people to live across the Cabin network. For this update, I’ll share some of the slices of Cabin I was fortunate to be a part of during my recent travels.
November 1st, 2022
For all of our excitement about the ways that DAOs could usher in a revolution of collective action, we should remember: they wouldn’t be the first one, and they won’t be the last.
November 1st, 2022
Lauren and I spend the summers living in a cabin on a lake in Minnesota, something we’ve done together for at least part of every summer for a decade. In addition to her love of children, having flexible summers to come to the lake has always been a key fringe benefit of her career as a school counselor. We have developed a deep and abiding sense of place here. It is where we fell in love, where we got married, and where we tend to feel most relaxed and happy together.
November 1st, 2022
There are two types of DAOs that seem to be gaining traction: financial flash mobs and hyperstructures. Each taps into a unique quality of DAOs that isn’t feasible via traditional corporate structures. They represent different extremes of on-chain coordination: fast and hot, or slow and long. In both cases, they ultimately represent ways that memes can be merged with blockchains to create emergent structures of coordination. When combined, they could point towards how we bootstrap the public goods infrastructure of an abundant future.
November 1st, 2022
Out here at Neighborhood Zero, the last vestiges of the winter grasses are dying and the first sprouts of spring life are blooming forth. As if on queue with Cabin's transition of seasons, the bluebonnets, paintbrushes, buttercups, and coneflowers are bursting forth from the brown detritus of winter and declaring the arrival of spring. The timing is so perfect and the metaphor so clear that it feels like we should retire our seasonal numbering system and consider calling this next three months Spring instead of Season 3.
November 1st, 2022
Once in a while, in the long arc of civilization, a new set of coordination technologies come along and change everything. By allowing small groups of humans to better cooperate in the collective management of resources, these technologies redefine power structures and lay the bedrock of a new civilizational era.
November 1st, 2022
If you look at the social DAO landscape, you’ll see communities with different social token models. Some, like FWB, use a fungible social token to gate community access. Many emerging PFP-based communities like BAYC use NFTs as the primary community gating mechanism. Whether fungible or non-fungible, social tokens in DAOs usually represent three different but overlapping roles: