Last week, I wrote about Vitalik and his obsession with DAOs. I concluded with the suggestion that "perhaps one day DAOs will replace governments and corporations, but there will first have to be countless numbers of experiments along the way in order to perfect the tooling necessary to achieve such a feat."
Today I'd like to describe one such experiment - a political action committee (PAC) of sorts that has been formed on the ethereum blockchain to benefit presidential candidate Andrew Yang.
What is a PAC?
A PAC is an organization formed to contribute funds to influence the outcome of political elections. It is a beast of an entity that is unique to American politics. There are limits that individuals can only contribute up to $5000 to any one candidate or any one PAC during an election cycle. It used to be even that presidential elections were entirely funded by the federal government. Seems fair! Really, it does.
But then at some point lawyers started to use the guarantee of free speech to allow the rich folk to contribute unlimited funds to each election cycle. And the Super PAC was born. Now half the money that funds PACs comes from just 50 people. No wonder the top 1% of Americans own more than 40% of American wealth. Yay for lawyers!
Why is it important that we recreate these kind of dodgy organizations on the blockchain?
A lot of the issues with Super PACs is they are too easy to get coopted by a single voice. In other words, they are made with the intention of promoting some valid goal, but in the end get coopted by some rich person to be the mouthpiece for all the things that they want to say. The Super PAC is just a loophole for a candidate's rich buddies to finance their campaign. There is legitimate fear that those vested interests will then want something in return once their money helps get a candidate elected. Why wouldn't they?
As Fred Wertheimer once described in a 2012 op-ed, "Super PACs are a game for millionaires and billionaires. They are a game for corporations and other wealthy interests. Meanwhile, citizens are pushed to the sidelines to watch the corruption of our democracy."
It's time the people fight fire with fire. It's time to figure out how, with just a few clicks, us regular 80-hour a week working folk can start our own collective fund scheme to support our own political interests. And now, with smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain, you can!
What is YangDAO?
YangDAO is a fork of MolochDAO that creates a political action DAO that guarantees the funds are not coopted for any other purpose than the purpose defined in the smart contract that created the DAO. In the case of YangDAO, the rules are simple:
- Pledge 40+ DAI (1 DAI ~ 1 USD).
- Get voted into DAO.
- DAO funds memes.
- Leave anytime with your share of money ("ragequit").
As a part of the DAO, you can submit proposals for the DAO to spend money on funding the creation of any meme you can think of. And since memes these days are an essential part of advertising in pretty much every industry in the world, the YangDAO functions just like a PAC on the blockchain.
It's a beautiful world, isn't it?
Now I'm not necessarily part of the #YangGang or anything. In fact, I spent the past election as part of the silent majority. I could not bring myself to vote for either Clinton or Trump. It was a pretty sad offering, in my opinion. It remains to be seen what I will do in 2020. Again, the candidates on offer, in my opinion, are all a bit meh.
But what I do know is that if entities like the YangDAO are going to start cropping up, then that gives me one legitimate avenue to start getting involved in politics again. I know memes might seem a little silly as a driving force. But hey, YangDAO has collected almost 5,000 DAI already. As a proof of concept, that's pretty impressive. What if there was a DAO created to fund a more unifying and impactful mission? I don't know exactly what that would be at this point. But I do know I will know what that is when I see it.