“[The future] is about a society that fosters more visibility and dignity for digital workers…We need to address the plumbing of the system to create fair digital workplaces.”

Trebor Scholz, Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy

I. INTRODUCTION

Labor practices within today’s digital work environment are broken.

While digital technology and platforms offer new markets for businesses and novel, flexible income-generating opportunities for workers, they remove critical infrastructure and replace business models that hire, invest in, and safeguard employees. This shift has generated gaps in social protection, undermined the benefits of permanent employment, diminished individual agency in favor of algorithms, and left workers unable to engage in collective bargaining that would traditionally allow them to address these issues.

As new organizational forms, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) represent an alternative way to manage capital and organize labor over the internet. Today, there are many varieties of DAOs, each with its own structure for decision making, organizing work, and rewarding members, the predominant type built to steward the open-source technology and protocols that underlie the cryptocurrency industry. But even though thousands of individuals already contribute—and are sometimes compensated for—their time, energy, and skills to support and grow these organizations, clear structures of contribution and compensation, as well as key worker rights and benefits, are severely lacking. By overlooking the essential needs of these individuals, DAOs have not proven capable of providing the type of working conditions, public goods, and social security mechanisms needed for people to contribute equitably and sustainably.

Long-lasting, blockchain-based infrastructure built for those working in DAOs is necessary to legitimize this ecosystem, as well as attract and retain the talent required to support its resilience and longevity. Rather than recreate existing unequal distributions of power and accelerate technology’s control over our lives, DAOs have an opportunity to change the trajectory of digital work by embedding natural rights that protect human agency and well-being into their technological DNA.

To address this often-neglected, yet critical topic, I propose a humanistic DAO labor movement—a labor movement that aims to make working for and getting paid by DAOs more transparent, accessible, and sustainable; a labor movement that transcends free-market ideology to acknowledge the human side of DAO labor and prioritize the quality of life of workers. As a collection of DAO practitioners and subject matter experts, I see a humanistic DAO labor movement working towards this mission by first defining the problems inherent in current practices—problems that I begin to outline in the following sections. The movement would ultimately seek formal recognition of the employment identity, status, and rights of DAO workers, as well as build new standards and infrastructure that empower individuals within this emergent space. A humanistic DAO labor movement isn’t just for people already working for DAOs, but for everyone involved in some form of digital work who wants to build a better system.

In this essay, I present a foundational argument for why a humanistic DAO labor movement is necessary and advance a vision of a new blockchain-based system of worker rights and protections. I begin by taking a step back to consider the current state, and end goals, of the innovation of digital work.

II. WHEN INNOVATION FAILS

“This shift in what we optimize for doesn't mean rejecting productivity gains. Rather, it means capturing those gains as genuine improvements to human flourishing.”

Tina He, Jevons Paradox: A personal perspective

Innovation creates value by solving problems.

The innovation of digital work has solved certain problems by disrupting traditional labor structures and allowing a globally-distributed workforce to access new, flexible income streams. But so far, it risks destroying more value—for more people—than it has created.

Many have identified the ongoing seismic shift altering both our perceptions and structures of labor—a technology-driven “innovation” marking the end of traditional salaried employment and transforming labor markets on a global scale. Trebor Scholz states in his book Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy:

“Casual work, part-time or freelance, is the new normal. Full-time jobs are fragmented into freelance positions, turning workers into ‘microentrepreneurs’ who are competing under conditions of infinite labor supply. Increasingly, companies retain a small number of core employees, making up the rest with temporary contract laborers.”

Rather than improving the quality of life of the increasingly large number of individuals relying on digital technology to procure work and compensation, the problematic new reality for these workers worldwide features around-the-clock on-demand labor, pay rates often below minimum wage, panopticon-like algorithmic accountability measures, compromised worker privacy, and employment agreements that change with a click of a button. At a high level, the application of digital technology has contributed to the decline of individuals with full employment rights, while those excluded individuals—Scholz’s “new normal”—are deemed second-class citizens and denied such rights within this innovative work environment.

By dissolving the institution of direct, full-time employment, the advent of digital work has thus eroded a century’s worth of hard-won worker protections.

While supporters of these new economies—such as gig, platform, and creator—espouse their benefits regarding an individual’s ability to choose when and where they work, this “labor flexibilization” is often just a mechanism for the underlying companies to lower wages, avoid offering benefits, and bypass existing regulations—thereby increasing productivity and gaining a competitive advantage in their market. This strategy reflects the perception that workers are commodities and labor is an economic good, completely disconnected from the human actors involved. As Karl Polanyi famously states in The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time:

“To separate labor from other activities of life and to subject it to the laws of the market was to annihilate all organic forms of existence and to replace them by a different type of organization, an atomistic and individualistic one.”

The commodification of labor subordinates human needs and values to the logic of market forces, providing little incentive to promote standards and infrastructure that improve outcomes for workers that are otherwise determined by supply and demand.

As a result, shielded by the myths of choice, autonomy, and flexibility regarding digital employment, technology has been allowed to progressively diminish working conditions and dominate human agency within its increasingly popular domains of modern labor. From the G20’s 2022 Policy Principles on Adapting Labour Protection for More Effective Protection and Increased Resilience for All Workers:

“In theory, platform workers have the freedom to choose the kind and the execution time of the work they want to do and when, although in practice the algorithm often leaves them with little autonomy, discretion and choice.”

And as Li Jin, Scott Duke Kominers, and Lila Shroff describe in Harvard Business Review:

“Platforms are fundamentally changing the contract between workers and companies — and the workers and creatives that create value for platform companies, and rely on platforms for their livelihoods, often have little power when it comes to getting the concerns addressed.”

By running on transparent blockchains, empowering members with rights to participate in governance, and facilitating collective ownership, DAOs have an opportunity to rethink and reshape the current state of digital work.

DAOs do not represent a single mode of work, but rather offer a vessel for a future plurality of new organizational structures. Despite the names we use for DAOs and their many iterations—such as onchain organizations, networked organisations, or cryptonetworks—supporters agree that most organizations and entities in the future should be run on a blockchain. While some participants currently view DAOs solely as a means of recreation, it becomes obvious that many individuals will end up working for them, directly or indirectly, with some already relying on DAOs as a primary source of income.

But just like Web2 platforms, DAOs are also shifting work environments away from permanent, full-time employment relationships towards nonstandard employment and self-employment. The majority of today’s full-time DAO workers are independent contractors who rely on informal agreements, considering themselves freelancers and open-source contributors. As such, DAOs run the same risk of destabilizing modern labor rights and undermining worker protections, while also introducing participants to an entirely new host of risks.

Even though DAOs have innovated the way people work, these innovations too will fail without distributing net positive value to the workers.

At this moment, it’s crucial to pause and consciously consider how our solutions—our innovations—integrate with real human values and needs. When innovation is solely targeted towards output maximization and growth, and solely shaped by market forces and ideals, we lose sight of what's actually worth doing. Conversely, creating an agenda—a movement—around present and future DAO workers must be based on a vision of what constitutes “good” for society. We need to redefine what DAOs optimize for and reaffirm their commitment to a human-centered future.

A humanistic DAO labor movement is thus an opportunity to align these novel organizational forms with those individuals who contribute value to them—a way of achieving meaningful labor standards, sustainable growth, ecosystem resilience, and collective success.

But first, any investigation into potential futures must first dispel existing myths and contradictions—that is, what we think we know for sure that just ain’t so.

III. THE IMAGINARIES OF DAO LABOR

“Humanistic technology is technology embedded with natural rights for its users, by design.”

Shady El Damaty, The Covenant of Humanistic Technology

Beyond their technical innovations, DAOs have been built on many social ideologies and imaginaries.

The foundational principle of DAOs—the professed key differentiator to today’s extractive Web2 platforms—is decentralized ownership and decision-making. Pointing to their distributed value accrual and bottom-up governance mechanisms, many claim DAOs improve global resource coordination by empowering members to make their voice heard and share in the resulting upside. As Nathan Schneider explained, “Socially, decentralization helps ensure that DAOs become vehicles for collective action more than feudal consolidation.”

Additionally, as they are built on public blockchain systems—open, distributed digital ledgers on which anyone can read, write, and own—many claim DAOs open the black box of organizational strategy and operations, making all decisions and all transactions fully transparent.

The “Exit, Voice and Loyalty” framework also plays a central role. If the two previous characteristics don’t entice individuals to stick around (“loyalty”), or allow them to effectively dissent (“voice”), many claim DAOs run as permissionless entities, meaning that you and your assets can come and go as you please (“exit”).

But when it comes to labor relations and employment rights, we quickly see that the ideological vision of DAOs—including the principles of decentralization, transparency, and permissionless participation—is far from realized.

In practice, today’s DAO labor environment is highly individualized, insecure, and unstructured. Despite technically transparent infrastructure, working in DAOs frequently features opaque contribution paths and unpredictable compensation schemes. And despite claims of decentralized, permissionless systems, participants often face embedded power structures and implicit gatekeeping that prevent them from effectively contributing, or safely exiting. Furthermore, considering the legal grey areas, token-based payment systems, and steep technical and cultural learning curves, individuals looking to work for and get paid by DAOs experience extremely elevated risks—financial, regulatory, and operational, just to name a few. Regrettably, the DAO and wider crypto industry has yet to leverage its revolutionary technology to build something that helps mitigate these risks.

As a result, while similar to freelancing and temporary contract labor, working for a DAO is even more precarious. Promised as a more equitable and collaborative alternative to the traditional workplace, DAO workers frequently face part-time, unreliable, highly competitive compensation structures—including a bounty system that further promotes exploitative employment practices—and lack access to communal benefits, such as public services and local support networks. Having to navigate these uncertain, unsustainable DAO work arrangements, where individuals often work over 60 hours a week and contribute to multiple DAOs, places them squarely into the existing class of digital workers characterized by chronic insecurity—what Guy Standing labels the “precariat.”

Reading about the precariat reveals the reality of what it’s like to work for DAOs today. Detached from old labor norms, the precariat experience a constant sense of transiency, must undertake unpaid labor, and are expected to be available for work at all times. To take time off for any of life’s other commitments is to risk missing opportunities and falling behind.

Being a member of the precariat means depending on the will of another, a reality that flies in the face of yet another imaginary of DAO labor: self-determinism. Despite the prevalence of the allegedly empowering “Exit, Voice and Loyalty” framework in many DAO design choices—democratic governance, non-hierarchical decision-making, ragequit tooling, and various reputation solutions included—in reality, DAO workers face ambiguous roles and responsibilities, hidden power struggles, and unclear work-life boundaries, all of which leave them prone to overworking and burnout, and undermine the control they have over their own lives.

What kind of innovation do DAOs represent when despite their open participation, distributed ownership, and flexible work structures, they end up diminishing human agency and entrenching existing power structures? This outcome is readily apparent in the inability of those without the requisite time and money to enter the DAO labor market, as well as the resulting lack of diversity in the space. DAOs ultimately serve vested interests rather than advance the average person’s well-being, thereby promoting the very centralizing forces these “decentralized” entities purport to oppose.

Just as today’s digital labor platforms falsely preach choice, autonomy, and flexibility, DAOs currently fulfill few of their promises. Considering the elevated risks and unrealized imaginaries of DAO labor, it is imperative that we build foundational infrastructure embedded with humanistic working arrangements to avoid replicating today’s platform-capitalistic systems of extraction. Instead of becoming just another means to dismantle the decent working conditions that many have fought for generations to uphold, DAOs should uplift human values and instill a sense of human agency into our digital work environment.

IV. OCCUPATIONAL CITIZENSHIP & HUMAN AGENCY

“A fundamental aspect is the right to belong to a community or a self-identifying set of communities. This is why freedom must be interpreted as associational freedom.”

Guy Standing, A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens

For many reasons—the nascency of the industry, alignment with neoliberal ideologies, and vulnerability to price volatility, among others—DAOs are either unwilling or incapable of considering standards for work beyond the ability for individuals to participate and quit at will. By treating workers more like commodities, the DAO labor market frequently fails to provide adequate safety and security measures, especially during periods of high unemployment (“bear markets”), making any type of long-term career in DAOs nearly impossible.

However, there is a straightforward moral argument that differentiates labor (one of Polanyi’s “fictitious commodities”) from real commodities that are produced for sale on the market: Labor is simply human activity, and humans aren’t objects.

Rejecting a laissez-faire employment structure for DAOs is to place a higher moral significance on the workplace and to assert the need for more democratic institutions that reinforce the fundamental identity and dignity of workers, recognizing that their needs cannot be fully satisfied by market forces. In its place, an alternative conceptualization of DAO employment—and the much broader world of digital work—should instead highlight the individuals involved, their belonging to communities and societies, and their deserving of basic rights and working conditions determined by human standards, not supply and demand.

The process of delivering transformative change to DAO labor practices thus begins by addressing a fundamental problem: the inability to formally acknowledge the identity and status of DAO workers.

While many have written about the legal status of DAOs, most of the discussion around DAO employment has focused on limited liability for members. Similar to the other groups within the precariat, there is no official classification or legal employment status associated with DAOs, making workers invisible to the institutions of the state, ineligible for public benefits and social protections, and preventing them from associating as a community of practice. Even the common practice of labelling DAO workers as “contributors” obfuscates the very real employment agreements created between DAOs and individuals, undermining the meaning of the work performed therein.

This problem leaves these individuals with little ability to identify themselves, associate with others, and benefit from the natural rights to agency and well-being that we possess as humans.

Decommodifying DAO workers—seeing them as individuals seeking personal fulfillment and elevating them above mere factors of production or abstract concepts—grants them what Standing calls “occupational citizenship.” The term occupational citizenship implies the right to practice a set of activities (“labor”) with designated titles (“occupations”), affirming the legitimacy of the work and establishing the associated rights to receive income, benefits, and status—universal rights often ignored by the market.

Through the concept of occupational citizenship, entitlement to rights is seen as a function of our identity as human citizens and belonging to certain occupational communities. Importantly, these individual and group identities engender codes of ethics and lifetime trajectories (“career paths”), generating meaningful forms of agency and self-determination in the workplace that go well beyond the freedom to quit, such as equity (e.g., fairness in the distribution of economic rewards and provision of employee security) and voice (e.g., participation in workplace decision-making and collective bargaining).

Formally certifying the occupational citizenship of the “DAO worker” or “DAO employee” is necessary to promote a decent work environment, productive employment relationships, and social cohesion. And yet, the absence of a generally-accepted identity or employment status for DAO workers—or even clear structures of DAO labor and compensation—combined with a globally-dispersed workforce, creates innumerable challenges. In addition, twentieth-century labor protections commonly associated with full-time employment (e.g., labor law, collective bargaining, social security, etc.) were constructed around the image of the firm, as well as fixed workplaces, working days, and work weeks—vestiges of old institutions that simply do not apply to today’s digital world and DAO employment.

As a result, instead of wading through traditional legal processes and relying on outdated state-based infrastructure, a humanistic DAO labor movement should establish the occupational citizenship of workers by redrawing employment boundaries according to the realities of “digital localism”—communities and organizations anchored by values, rather than geography—as well as building parallel blockchain-based infrastructure embedded with universal human rights. By leveraging this foundational technology to meet collective needs and improve upon incumbent digital work environments, DAOs will carve a new path towards human agency and digital labor sovereignty.

V. CONCLUSION: A CALL FOR DIGITAL LABOR SOVEREIGNTY

“Despite real differences in their jobs, both gig workers and content creators are reckoning with the fact that their livelihoods depend on the actions and algorithms of platforms that they have little to no ability to sway, and they have little recourse.”

Li Jin, Scott Duke Kominers, and Lila Shroff, A Labor Movement for the Platform Economy

Rooted in the discourse of the Enlightenment, the idea that human rights are self-evident forms the foundation of many modern-day institutions, including those that ensure decent working conditions and a high quality of life for working individuals. However, in today’s digital-first world—and as state protections become unsustainable due to demographic changes—these rights require new systems and mechanisms for enforcement.

I believe in the necessity of a humanistic DAO labor movement for two reasons.

First, I see the great potential of DAOs to deliver on the quality-of-life improvements promised by the innovation of digital work, and to solve many of the current system’s problems and injustices by facilitating the fundamental human rights that are frequently absent. By offering superior working conditions over alternative Web2 platforms, DAOs and other forms of onchain organizations can become the chosen vessel for digital work, and thus, the dominant form of organizing labor online.

However, I also see the large chasm between the imaginaries of DAO labor and the realities of what it’s like to work in DAOs today. Specifically, what is the purpose of individual financial sovereignty without the same standards of personal agency and control applied to the workplace? If we want to ensure that DAOs vouchsafe the very ideologies that underpin them, fulfill the potentialities of their underlying technology, and become an innovation that brings real value to people’s lives, we need to take steps towards protecting those individuals currently building them.

Digital labor sovereignty is the idea that individuals are the ultimate locus of power and authority over their working lives. Accordingly, a humanistic DAO labor movement is an opportunity for organizations that operate onchain to promote this concept and rethink digital work by building a parallel blockchain-based system of human rights and labor protections. The following are a few tangible examples of the ways such a movement could leverage these transformational technologies to create new standards and infrastructure that engender digital labor sovereignty:

• Digital wallets and proof-of-humanity → new forms of employment status & identity

• Open and transparent ledgers-of-record → transparent compensation structures & standards

• Zero-knowledge proofs → worker privacy protections

• Cryptographic private keys → real data ownership

• Smart contracts and digital signatures → binding work agreements, contracts of enforcement, and employment attestation frameworks

• Capital formation and allocation mechanisms → mutual infrastructure of social security & collective power

• Decentralized dispute resolution → employer / employee arbitration

As there will continue to be many types of organizations structured as a DAO—some relating to work and some not—the new system should be strictly opt-in, with processes for defining and identifying yourself as an “employment DAO” (i.e., a DAO seeking to compensate individuals for contributing work). From a game-theoretic standpoint, high-quality talent will naturally be drawn to those organizations communicating clear structures of contribution and compensation, as well as providing other worker benefits, thus providing an incentive to do so.

To succeed, a humanistic DAO labor movement should employ a bottom-up, community-driven approach that leverages frequent interactions between practitioners, subject matter experts, and technologists to effectively map ideological goals and human values within this digital environment, and to enforce them with technological guarantees. Through this process, the movement will look to build an entirely new decentralized substrate that aggregates capital and power for the purpose of ensuring digital labor sovereignty for all.