After the Experiment

Nick Houde argues that DAOs and the wider Web3 movement failed because they treated culture as peripheral to protocol design and tokenomics, when shared cultural practices were needed to make new institutions durable. He describes how the experiments were drawn into financial speculation, with token-weighted voting concentrating power and NFTs devolving into speculative "slop." In ethnographic research with Tara Merk and Laura Lotti as part of Other Internet, 38 DAO contributors across more than 50 DAOs in the Ethereum ecosystem described unstable, undercompensated, and unpredictable working conditions. Houde frames this as evidence that trust at scale is a cultural problem, not only a coordination puzzle to be engineered.